The Passover Murder Read online

  I watched the girl go, continuing up the stairs with a prance. “She’s lovely,” I said.

  “She’s a handful,” Mrs. Garganus said. She had been sitting so she could look out the window on the garden below. Now she turned to face me. “We can take the elevator down, Miss Bennett, is it? I will show you out.”

  “If you could just give me a few minutes, Mrs. Garganus.”

  “I know nothing about that woman. There is nothing I can tell you. My late husband was interviewed by the police at the time it happened, and I’m sure he knew much more about it than I possibly could.” She started rolling her chair toward what I realized was an elevator.

  “Did you ever meet Miss Grodnik?” I asked.

  “Once or twice. Sometimes she had to bring things from the office for my husband. She was a nice woman. She worked for my husband for a long time. She was probably the best secretary he ever had.”

  “I’m told she quit a week before she was murdered.”

  Mrs. Garganus cocked her head to look at me. “I wouldn’t know. I left the business end of things to my husband.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “That’s really a very stupid question,” she said irritably. “If I hardly knew her, how could I like or dislike her?”

  The elevator was right there and I wanted to keep her talking so that she wouldn’t open the door and end the conversation forever. She was a very pretty woman, dressed as though she were on her way to lunch or tea, bracelets on her wrists, rings on her fingers, a gold pin with little diamonds on the wool dress she was wearing. Her tart tongue made her seem older than she looked. She might have been only seventy.

  “There seems to have been something strange about her leaving GAR,” I said.

  “There was nothing strange about it at all. She wanted to do some traveling, she wanted to have some fun while she was young enough and strong enough to do it. You never know what disagreeable problems age can bring with it.”

  “Where was she planning to go?” I asked.

  “Europe somewhere. I think Switzerland. Switzerland’s a beautiful country. We used to go there.”

  “She never mentioned this trip to her family.”

  “My dear young woman, I cannot be responsible for what someone does or does not tell her family. I’m sure when the appropriate time came, she would have told them.”

  She pulled the elevator door open, and I held it as she rolled into it. It was small but large enough to accommodate the two of us. She pushed the 1 button and the elevator lurched downward. On the main floor, I opened the door and got out, waiting for her to follow.

  “Your granddaughter looks just like you,” I said. It was true, but I was trying desperately to keep the conversation going, to say something that would make her open up.

  “Thank you. I take that as a compliment. She’s a very pretty girl and she looks exactly as I did when I was her age; not the way she dresses, of course. The charm of the ubiquitous blue denim of young people is lost on me.”

  “They’re comfortable,” I said as we moved toward the front door. “And she has such a lovely figure.”

  “With all the junk she eats it’s a wonder. What did you say your name was?”

  “Christine Bennett.” I dug in my bag for a slip of paper, wrote my name, address, and phone number on it and handed it to her. “If you think of anything else, Mrs. Garganus, please give me a call. The family really wants to know what happened to Iris. The police have been at a dead end for years. I believe she was killed by someone who knew her; I don’t think it was a random killing.”

  She looked up at me. “What makes you think that?”

  “We just found her handbag in a closet last Friday. When she went out that night, she went without her wallet, her keys, or her ID.”

  “That is curious. I’m sorry I can’t think of anything that will help you.”

  “Thank you for your time.”

  “Incidentally, where did you get my address from?”

  I was ready for that. “It was in Iris’s address book.”

  “Really,” she said.

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Garganus.”

  I walked the rest of the way to Second Avenue—the house had turned out to be a block farther west than the Grodniks’ apartment house—and hailed a cab to take me to my parking garage. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been in two taxis in one day, much less in one hour, and my extravagance was giving me second thoughts. I remembered the first time I parked a car in New York and wondered if the fee was actually a monthly rental. Marilyn had promised to pay my expenses “and then some,” and I had thanked her for the expenses and said the “then some” was quite unnecessary. I hoped she wouldn’t think I was reckless.

  The car was another small fortune, and as soon as I had paid it, I headed back to Oakwood. I felt I had learned a lot, more than I had hoped for.

  When I got home, I called my sister-in-law.

  “Oh, Chris, it’s nice to hear from you. Jack told me you made an incredibly generous offer. I can’t take it, but thanks so much.”

  “Think about it, Eileen. I have money just sitting in a bank account, doing no one any good. I’d like to see it do you some good.”

  “I really have to do this myself. I went to a couple of banks today and got the royal runaround. What I can’t accept is that Taffy would do something like this, and to me.”

  “Maybe something was going on in her life that you didn’t know about.”

  “Maybe so. She sure isn’t going to retire on twelve thousand dollars. I keep wondering if I did something to hurt her, if she was trying to get back at me for something.”

  “Eileen, I’m sure you didn’t. I don’t think you should waste one second of your life worrying about something like that. You’re an honest, generous person. Whatever caused Taffy to do this, it came from her.”

  “Thanks, Chris.” She sounded choked up.

  “And don’t forget my offer. Forget the banks. Whatever you need is right here.”

  She said she’d think about it.

  Jack got home at his usual late hour, having gone to his classes. I warmed up the stew I had planned for Friday night and sat with him in the kitchen as he ate.

  “How’s Greg Jarvis?” he asked.

  “I didn’t see him. But I had a good talk with Harris White. He’s very nice and very anxious to close the case. It was one of his first.”

  “Right. When you think you’re a super sleuth.”

  “That’s the way it sounded. I learned a lot, Jack, more than I ever expected.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Iris quit her job a week before she was murdered.”

  “And no one in the family told you?”

  “I’m sure they didn’t know. I called Marilyn when I came home and told her, and she said it must be a mistake. But it isn’t. I heard it from the detective, from someone who was working there at the time, and—” I paused dramatically “—from the wife of Iris’s boss, the CEO of the company.”

  “You do get around. How’d you find her?”

  “The woman at GAR gave me her address as long as I promised not to divulge my source. The house is three and a half blocks from where Iris was the night she disappeared. I taxied over, rang a bell, and her granddaughter answered. I gather from something Mrs. Garganus said that the maid would be along later. The granddaughter was a sweet kid who took me upstairs to see her grandmother.”

  “Not bad for a first try.”

  “You never told me about those town houses.”

  He grinned. “Nice, huh?”

  “So many of them look so bleak from the outside and they’re so narrow, I’ve often wondered how anyone could live there.”

  “Pretty nice when you get in.”

  “He must have been very rich. The furniture is fantastic, there’s artwork all over the place, rugs that must have been handwoven. It’s just that everywhere you go is upstairs or downstairs.”

  “That’s how they w
ere built, a room in the front, a room in the back. Did it have an elevator?”

  “It did. Mrs. Garganus is in a wheelchair, so I guess it’s the only way she could manage. And Jack, she said things that really show she knows a lot more about Iris than she said she did.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, we only talked a couple of minutes because she spent the whole time I was there showing me out, but she started out by saying that she didn’t know anything about Iris quitting her job, and a minute later she told me Iris was planning to travel, probably to Switzerland. I mean, it was as if she didn’t remember what she’d just said.”

  “So either she had a personal relationship with Iris—”

  “Which I don’t think she would have.”

  “Or her husband discussed Iris with her.”

  “In detail, Jack. Not just that Iris wanted to travel but that she was going to Europe, probably to Switzerland. That woman knows something I want to know.”

  “You know me. I wouldn’t bet against you.”

  “My problem is this. What I really want to know is whether Wilfred Garganus was having an affair with Iris, and I can’t ask Mrs. Garganus that. It’s a very insensitive thing to do, but I don’t know how else I can find out.”

  “You think they were having an affair, Mrs. G. found out, and an agreement was made for Iris to quit her job and leave the country, kind of to let the affair simmer down.”

  “I think it’s a possibility. But who would know except Mrs. G. at this point?”

  “How ‘bout her best friend?”

  “That’s another troublesome point.” I described the interview in the file at the Thirty-fourth Precinct. “No address, no phone number. She sure didn’t want to be contacted again.”

  “And the detective didn’t try to find her.”

  “Not from anything I saw in the file. I don’t exactly blame him. The way the body was beaten, it wasn’t done by a woman of almost sixty. What could she know that would help the police?”

  “Her secrets,” Jack said. “She was a best friend, wasn’t she?”

  13

  Tuesday morning I teach. I am still teaching “Poetry and the Contemporary American Woman” at a local college in Westchester, a job I truly enjoy. But on that Tuesday morning, I made a phone call before I left for the college. I dialed Harry Schiff’s number.

  A woman answered and made me jump through some hoops before she got him to the phone. But finally he picked up.

  “Mr. Schiff, my name is Christine Bennett and I’m a friend of the family of Iris Grodnik.”

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think I can.”

  “I can meet you wherever you want. I have a car. I could even pick you up.”

  “No, no, it’s all over. It’s gone. It’s too long.”

  “It’s really very important. I could see you this afternoon.”

  “Today? Oh, I don’t know.”

  “What would be good for you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, I really don’t.”

  It’s so easy on the telephone to turn someone down. “Please, Mr. Schiff. We’ve found something of Iris’s, something that was hidden away since she died. It would really help if I could talk to you.”

  “What did you find?”

  “The pocketbook she had that night. She didn’t have it with her when she left her brother’s apartment.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “If we could just get together for a little while and talk.”

  “This is terrible,” he said. “Look, all right, I’ll do it. I shouldn’t, but I will. I like to take a walk in the afternoon, but it’s too cold to meet outside. There’s a place, Vinny’s, on Seventy-second Street between West End and Broadway. You know the area?”

  “Very well.”

  “Vinny’s. On the south side of the street. I’ll be there at—when can you meet me?”

  “Two-thirty.”

  “Two-thirty is good. I’ll be there at two-thirty. What do you look like?”

  That’s a question I can never answer. I looked down at what I was wearing. “I’ll be wearing a black raincoat and carrying a briefcase.”

  “I’ll look for you. I’ll get a table for two. This afternoon, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Good-bye.”

  I had a light, tasty lunch in the college cafeteria when my class was over and then drove into the city. About halfway there it started to rain and I wondered if Harry Schiff would make it to Vinny’s. I knew the area because an elderly friend of mine had lived and been murdered in a building in the West Seventies and I had visited a number of apartments around there, about a year and a half ago, looking for leads. I drove down Riverside Drive and found a place to park not far from Seventy-second Street and then walked over the block and a half till I found Vinny’s. It was just two-thirty when I closed my umbrella and went inside.

  It had the look of a neighborhood hangout for the elderly. At one table four men were playing cards. Besides the cards there were four cups of coffee on the table and nothing else. At another table two men played chess, again with mugs of coffee beside them. I wondered how poor Vinny made a living. As I looked around, a man rose from a table for two and looked at me. I walked over.

  “Mr. Schiff?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Hi. I’m Christine Bennett.”

  “Sit down. What can I get you?”

  “Coffee would be fine.”

  “The cheesecake is good.”

  “OK.”

  “Mike,” he called to a nearby waiter, “two coffees, two cheesecakes.”

  “Comin’ up, Mr. Schiff.”

  “What do you have to do with Iris?” he asked.

  As Marilyn had said, he was a tall, nice-looking man, now completely gray and I guessed near eighty. He had dressed for our meeting, a white shirt, a blue silk tie. I wondered how often he put on clothes like these to take his afternoon walk.

  “I know her grandniece. I was invited to their seder this year and they told me about Iris.”

  “It was terrible, a tragedy. I never got over it.”

  “They asked me to try to find out who killed her.”

  “You think in a city like this you can find out who killed a woman sixteen years ago when the police couldn’t do it?”

  “I’m giving it a try. Tell me about yourself, Mr. Schiff.”

  He gave me a smile. “I’m a retired accountant. I met Iris so many years ago I can’t even remember; it must have been in the fifties. She was beautiful, she was sweet, she was a little angel.”

  “Everyone who knew her says nice things about her.”

  “You couldn’t say anything else. I was crazy about her. But back then, forty years ago, things were a lot different. I had kids at home, I was a professional man, you had to live a certain way. You know what I’m saying?”

  “I understand.”

  “Later on, when my children got older, I moved out for a while and lived by myself. We had a good time together, Iris and me. I’m sure you’re smart enough to figure out I don’t get along with my wife, but divorce is a big step, it’s not always easy. She made threats, she said she’d tie me up in court for years, and she could have done it. Finally Iris said, ‘Either we get married or it’s over.’ I couldn’t believe it would ever be over, but she meant it. I gave up my apartment and went back to my wife.”

  “How long before Iris died did you stop seeing her?”

  “It was a few years. I can’t tell you exactly.”

  “Did you keep in touch?”

  “Well, you know, a telephone call now and then, some flowers on her birthday. I didn’t forget her, if that’s what you mean, and I don’t think she ever forgot me.”

  “Did she keep you current on her life?”

  “We talked. She told me this one got married, that one had a baby.”

  “What about her job?
Did she talk about that?”

  “She had a wonderful job, worked for a wonderful man. She loved it.”

  “Did you ever meet her boss?”

  “Mr. Garganus? How would I ever meet him?”

  “I just thought—maybe when you were still going with her—you might have …” I let it dangle, hoping he would fill in something I could use.

  “I never saw the man in my life.”

  “Do you remember the last time you saw Iris?”

  “Like it was yesterday. I called and asked her if I could take her out for her birthday. That was in December. She was fifty-nine. I took her to a beautiful restaurant, I sent her flowers to her apartment. We had a wonderful time.”

  “So it was several months before she died.”

  “Yeah, it was a long time.”

  “Mr. Schiff, this is hard for me. I’d like to ask you—do you know if Iris was seeing anyone else after you and she stopped, uh, keeping company?”

  “Another man?”

  “Yes.”

  “She never told me. Who was he?”

  “I don’t know that she was seeing anyone. I just wondered if she was, if you knew whether she was.”

  “Nah, I don’t think so. You think she was?”

  I felt terrible discussing something so obviously painful to him, something that may never have happened. “I truly don’t know,” I said. “Uh, let me throw something kind of wild out and see what you think. Do you think she could have been seeing her boss?”

  “Iris going out with Mr. Garganus? Never.”

  “You never had a sense—when you broke up with her, you never thought it might be because there was another man? That she might be interested in Mr. Garganus?”

  “Never. We were in love. We had a thing going twenty-five years. That’s longer than most people stay married nowadays. No, I gotta tell you, we belonged together. I think when we broke up she was hoping maybe it wasn’t too late to find someone and settle down, but I don’t think she had the someone at that time. And I don’t think Mr. Garganus was ever a possibility.”

  “When you took her out for her birthday, did she mention that she was going out with anyone?”