Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(9)

“Thank you for meeting us,” I say. “I’m sorry about your wife.”

Levi nods. “Thank you,” he says. He puts his Kleenex back in his pocket and looks at me. “What do you need to know?”

“Well, Saul said you had some questions about Pessie’s death.”

“I have lots of questions. Although I seem to be the only one.”

“What do you mean?”

“My wife should not be dead,” he says. “She was twenty-two years old. She was a mother. Her family seems to think it was…” He shakes his head. “I do not understand them.”

I open my notebook. “Can you tell me how she died?”

“That is what I am trying to find out.”

I’m not making myself clear. “I mean…”

“Our son, Chaim, was scheduled to go to the doctor for a checkup. A woman from the office called me at work and said that they had missed the appointment. I called Pessie, but she did not answer her phone. I thought something had happened, perhaps with her father. He has diabetes and Pessie’s mother often calls her to help with his insulin. But when I got home…” He pauses. “I could hear Chaim crying from outside the front door. When I got inside I saw he was strapped into his car seat, just sitting there on the floor in his dirty diaper. Pessie would never have left him like that. I heard the water running in the bathroom. The door was closed. She was in the bathtub.”

Levi rubs his hand across his face. I look at Saul, who raises his eyebrows as if to say, your move. What’s my next question? To me, dying in a bathtub conjures up images of slit writs, or maybe an overdose. Should I ask if he saw blood? Or vomit? Or spilled pills? I decide to wait.

“I called 911,” he continues. “And Pessie’s mother. She called the chevra kadisha.” I must look like I don’t understand him, because he translates. “The burial society.” Ah. “The Roseville officer arrived first. He was very professional. He asked me if I had touched her, and when I said no he took some photographs. But when Pessie’s family and the chevra kadisha arrived…” Levi purses his lips, like he’s trying to press back whatever emotion is threatening to pop out. “There was an argument about who would take the body, and when Pessie’s mother learned the officer had taken photographs she became hysterical. She insisted Pessie be taken immediately to the funeral home.”

It’s a story I’ve heard before. The story that got me nearly killed in January was about a dead Hasidic woman whose body was never autopsied. Ultra-Orthodox Jews adhere, well, religiously, to a law that states the dead are to be buried within twenty-four hours of their death. Their bodies are not to be disturbed, and female bodies are definitely not to be disturbed by non-Jewish men like whoever this Roseville officer was. Women prepare the bodies of other women for burial in this world; men do the same for men. Their bodies are cleaned and prayed over and watched until their coffin is covered in dirt in a Jewish cemetery. Meaning, in some cases, no autopsy. No collection of DNA from fingernails or mouths or vaginas; no forensic examination of wounds or internal organs; no toxicology report. The last case I covered was an obvious murder: a woman found dumped in a scrap pile. The fact that her body wasn’t autopsied was completely outrageous. But her husband had enough money and power to pull strings most people couldn’t—or wouldn’t. I imagine that circumventing an autopsy is easier in a town like Roseville where the police department is probably small and poorly funded. And it occurs me that this practice is more insidious when a death like Pessie’s occurs. A body in a scrap pile is obviously a murder. No one gets like that without help. But a woman in her own bathtub? That’s when you really need someone asking questions.

“Why was her mother so insistent?” I ask.

“Fraidy is a very … conservative woman,” says Levi. It seems like he wanted to use a harsher word to describe his mother-in-law, but demurred. “They seem to believe that Pessie … well, I think they are afraid she committed suicide.”

The waiter comes and sets down Levi’s tea. He pushes it aside.

“What do you think made them think that?” I ask once the waiter is out of earshot.

“Pessie had a very hard time after Chaim was born. She felt very overwhelmed. Chaim did not take to her easily, and I believe she was ashamed, which drove her into despair. She went to the rebbe, of course, but I suggested she see a psychologist when speaking with the rebbe didn’t seem to help. I came to this country from Israel. We do not have so much of a stigma about these sorts of issues. Pessie was hesitant, but after a few weeks taking the medication, she felt much, much better. She insisted we keep the fact that she was taking antidepressants from her family. She said they would not understand.”

“But Pessie would never have taken her own life. I suppose you hear that a lot. But I have never been more certain of anything. She was very religious and she would never have sinned against Hashem in such a way. And she would not have left Chaim without his mother. I am certain.”

I look at Saul, who is looking at his coffee. His only son committed suicide last year. But Levi probably doesn’t know that.

“Truthfully, I do not believe her parents actually think Pessie … did this. But they are so afraid of the shame—the speculation and the gossip about their family, and how difficult it would make shidduch for her younger sisters and brothers—that they would rather not know what happened to her than risk the possibility of confirming it was suicide. Or related to drugs they would not want people knowing she had been taking. Now, they can say it was a tragic accident. That she fell in the shower.”