but eventually, when her husband retires, they’re planning to buy an RV and hit the road. I ask her how she likes Southern California, and she says the weather here is so much nicer than the Midwest, although both places have plenty of things you could recommend, don’t they…. After ten minutes of this, it turns out she doesn’t want to talk about what happened to her brother-in-law; it’s just too painful, she says. She tells me that she’s here to protect her sister. She hopes I understand.
Dov Boorstein and Alan Ross own a string of Israeli-style kosher doughnut shops, three or four in Hollywood and another dozen tucked away in strip malls in the San Fernando Valley. They’re called Van’s, and people line up for them at all hours of the day and night; don’t ask me why. Both men are on the Shir Emet Board, which is why I want to talk with them. I don’t mention on the phone that I never touch their doughnuts. Once was enough.
I take the 16 Bus on 3rd and hike a couple of blocks down to their temporary headquarters on Larchmont. It’s an upscale neighborhood; they’re working out of a building that used to be some kind of mental health facility, looks like. An arrow still up on the wall points you to Psychiatry, which is empty now except for a copying machine. Because it’s Larchmont, the rent is killing them, they tell me, and they’re just waiting, waiting and walking around on shpilkes until their new offices in North Hollywood are finally ready. They haven’t bothered to unpack much. There are cardboard boxes scattered around the beige carpet, and everything is bare except for a couple of cubicles in which young determined women are staring at screens and pounding away at computer keyboards.
My brain must be playing tricks on me. I somehow imagined that anyone in the business they’re in would naturally be older and well, okay, pudgy. But no. For doughnut mavens they’re both very slender and glowing, like they just stepped out of a shower. They’re also only in their late thirties or early forties. They’re both wearing identical black slacks and white dress shirts, and they both have small blue yarmulkes pinned to the top of their heads. There’s a seriousness in their eyes that seems to undercut the joy and levity I automatically associate with doughnuts. When we shake hands, the first thing I’m thinking is, gosh, they don’t eat their product, either.
We’re sitting at a large round Formica table in what was maybe a group therapy room a month ago. Now the walls are covered with posters—professional close-ups of gluten-free banana doughnuts, baked doughnuts, cottage cheese doughnuts, and the one that put them on the map, sufganiyah—a cranberry jelly doughnut, from a secret recipe smuggled out of Tel Aviv. Someone has set down a mixed platter of these things, and there’s a large blue coffee urn and a stack of Styrofoam cups. Please, they say. I shake my head, tell them I can’t, I’m on a diet. They are too, they say. We trade polite commiserations over the rabbi. Alan seems genuinely upset that he’s gone. “Such a brilliant man,” he says, “snatched away before his time.”
Dov nods. “It’s sad, yes, but I must tell you, I don’t believe I was ever quite as smitten with him as my partner here,” he says.
“He was a poet,” says Alan. “He thought like a poet. That was the problem. Admit it, you hate poetry.”
“Guilty as charged,” Dov says.
I pull out a mechanical pencil and my little spiral cardboard notebook. “So I was hired, I suppose, because someone on the Board thought there were—irregularities, I guess you might say—about his death. You wanted me to follow up on the police inquiry. Is that about right?”
“The police did nothing,” Alan says, “absolutely nothing. They wouldn’t have bothered to show up at all if we hadn’t gotten down on our knees and begged.”
“But I guess my question is, why did you think you needed a police investigation in the first place? Or an outside detective?”
Dov glances at Alan before he answers. “You’re a landsman, Mr. Parisman, a member of the tribe. So I’ll spell it out as best I can. Not everyone on our Board, and certainly not every person in the congregation, had such warm feelings for the rabbi.”
“He had enemies?”
“Enemies? That’s a word we could talk about. Let’s just say there were a few individuals who disagreed with him from time to time. I wouldn’t call them enemies. But you know what I mean.”
“Rabbi Ezra was a dynamic and forceful leader,” Alan chimes in. “You always knew when he was in the room. He took charge.”
“And some people in the temple resented that?”
“Not just the temple,” Dov says. “He was also a frequent guest speaker at interfaith gatherings. Jews and Muslims. Jews and Christians. He was on a panel to end homelessness in Hollywood. He even reached out to the Palestinian community here. There’ve been breakfasts and dinners. That kind of thing.”
I stop taking notes and look at them. “And why is that a problem? Isn’t that what rabbis do? Reach out? Try to build bridges? Keep faith with those who sleep in the dust?”
“Ah,” says Dov, “you remember your Torah, Mr. Parisman. That’s wonderful.”
“I try.”
“Torah’s important, but it isn’t the only thing. You should also remember your history. On the Board, you know, we believe we have a special obligation to do that. We try our best to think through all the scenarios. So when our very controversial rabbi—a man who goes everywhere, a man who makes headlines and churns up raw emotions every time he opens his mouth—when a man like that all of a sudden drops dead, well, it affects us. What can I tell you? We stop. We wonder why. Is that so hard to understand?”
I scratch my head in disbelief. “It’s not hard to understand that he’s gone. I get that. What I don’t get is why you guys on the Board are so skeptical. You read the obituary, I’m sure. People die all the time. There’s no rhyme or reason for that. God does what he wants, right? And my friends at the LAPD tell me he wasn’t healthy to begin with.”
“He smoked,” Alan concedes. “And he could have dropped a few pounds, it’s true.”
“So why all the tsimmis? Why are you upset? Was he threatened?”
“He made waves, sometimes,” Dov says. “People whispered things about him at the shul, and I have to assume, in other places, too. There was always a little gossip in the air.”
“What kind of gossip?”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you, really. I don’t listen to that kind of thing.”
“Okay, fine. I’m just trying to get my arms around the whole scope of this, and what I’m hearing is that you both believe that somebody—either in the shul or outside the shul—might have had a reason to kill the rabbi. That’s an enemy. You may not call him an enemy, but I’ll do it for you. So my question is simply, why?”
“Why is not a simple question,” Alan says, “I’m sorry.”
“Well, then are we leaning toward a personal vendetta? Did he upset someone in the congregation? Or could it be larger than that? Anti-Semitism? Anti-Semitism, right here in the middle of Los Angeles? Is that where you’re going? Because I have to tell you, from where I’m sitting, that’s crazy.”
Dov doesn’t respond immediately. He pours himself half a cup of coffee, warms
