The Case of the Angry Actress: A Masao Masuto Mystery Read Online Free PDF

am sorry to hear that. He was your friend.”
    â€œI think so. As much as anyone is a cop’s friend.”
    â€œBut why did they need the police?”
    â€œOne of the guests said that Mr. Greenberg was murdered.”
    â€œWas he?” she asked anxiously.
    â€œI don’t know. In the guise of being a philosophical Oriental type—which I am not—I would say that these people murder endlessly. Then there could be no death among them without the charge of murder being justified.”
    â€œI don’t understand you.”
    â€œI am not sure that I want you to. Let’s go to bed, and perhaps I will stop dreaming, because this is like a nasty and turgid dream, pointless and with neither dignity nor honor.”
    â€œHas it ever occured to you,” Rabbi Matthew Gitlen asked Masuto the following morning, “to ponder on the curious parable of the camel and the needle’s eye, and the rich man and the gates of heaven? A member of my congregation once coined a rather famous line to the effect that he had been rich and he had been poor and rich was better. The poor are too often maligned when they are accused of happiness, and the rich are maligned by the same accusation. As incredible as it may seem, I preach occasionally to my congregation—in my own words of course—that the Kingdom of God is within them. Which can be a dilly, you know. Are you a Christian? I ask in the most perfunctory professional sense, not to pry—simply to find a manner of discussing your inquiry. I trust the question does not embarrass you?”
    â€œNot at all,” Masuto replied, smiling. The rabbi was an enormous man, almost six-foot-four, Masuto would guess, very fat and apparently very civilized, but big enough in his frame to wear his weight with great dignity and to give the impression that a very large and hard-muscled man carried around another, a fat man, not out of indulgence but out of compassion. It had a curious effect on Masuto, who was put at his ease and who continued, “But I am not a Christian. I was never baptized. I am a Zen Buddhist—but that is not to be thought of as a religion in your sense.”
    â€œI reject the obvious comment, and I am utterly fascinated,” the rabbi rumbled, rising from behind his desk and going to one corner of his study, where there was a small refrigerator with a wood finish. He opened it and peered inside. “Will you join me in a yogurt, Detective Masuto? Supposedly, it reduces me, which is nonsense. A Zen Buddhist.”
    â€œIt would be my pleasure,” Masuto said.
    â€œPlain or orange or strawberry?”
    â€œPlain, if I may.”
    â€œOf course.” He handed Masuto a cup of yogurt and a spoon and sat on a corner of his desk as he opened his own. “Zen,” he said. “What do they say? ‘Those who know, speak not. Those who speak, know not.’ Do you subscribe to that?”
    â€œOh, no—not at all,” Masuto answered. “Everything can be spoken of, poorly perhaps, but English is a rich language. But a detective’s time is not his own.”
    â€œNaturally. I might even say that a rabbi’s time is not his own. This is the curse of a civilization that rushes so desperately. We must talk about Al Greenberg, may his soul rest in peace.”
    â€œHe was a member of your congregation.”
    â€œIn the most nominal sense. He was not a religious man—but pleasant and anxious to quiet his guilts with money. His contributions were generous, and when he married Phoebe three years ago, she decided to become Jewish. She was very grateful to him. Perhaps with reason. She was in the hospital, you know, with TB—in a ward, broke, two suicide attempts behind her. She had worked for him in what they call a ‘special’ some years before, and when he discovered she was in the hospital, he spared nothing to help her. The best doctors, the newest drugs—and then