The Passover Murder Read online

“Not a word.”

  “Mr. Schiff, can you think of anyone Iris knew whose name begins with M?”

  “First name or last name?”

  “Either one.”

  “Lemme see.”

  The coffee and cheesecake had come, and he sipped his coffee and rubbed his forehead. “I knew her niece, Marilyn. That’s one.”

  “Yes.”

  “You want another?”

  “If you can think of any.”

  “I can’t. Unless …”

  “Yes?”

  “I shouldn’t tell you. She wouldn’t like it. What do you need this for anyway?”

  “We found her little engagement book in her handbag. She had the seders written in, and under the second one was an M. Maybe she changed her mind and decided to see M during the first seder. When she left her brother’s apartment that night, she left her bag behind, which meant she intended to return. So it’s possible she went outside to meet someone.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. But if I could find the person she met, we might have her killer.”

  “I see. And the police never found this guy?”

  “The police never saw her pocketbook till yesterday morning when I gave it to them.”

  “You found it?”

  “Yes.” It was too complicated to bring Marilyn into the picture. It was hard enough to get this man to answer my questions without asking two or three of his own.

  “How do you like that?”

  “What is it you were going to tell me?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s OK. She’s gone a long time now.”

  “A very long time.”

  “Before I met her, when she was in her twenties maybe, she got married.”

  “I see.”

  “I didn’t know her then. She told me when we were going out. She could understand the trouble I was having with my wife because she’d had a pretty tough time of it herself. With her it didn’t last long. With me it was my whole life.”

  “Do you know the name of her husband?”

  “She must’ve told me. I don’t know. You hear something forty years ago, it’s not so easy to remember.”

  “Think about the M.”

  “Murray, Max, Manny, Milton. Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “I wonder if her sister knows.”

  “Sylvie? How’s Sylvie doing? She’s a sweet girl.”

  I smiled. That sweet girl was at least eighty. “She’s fine. She was at the seder I went to a few weeks ago. My feeling is they were very close.”

  “They were. Iris was everyone’s favorite.”

  “Did Iris have any children, Mr. Schiff?”

  “Nah. They weren’t married that long. He was a real no-goodnik. She went to Reno and got a divorce.”

  “Reno?”

  “In those days you couldn’t get a divorce in New York State. So if you had the money, you went to Reno for six weeks, said you were living there as a resident, and they’d give you a divorce. They had a whole industry there, people staying in cheap hotels, spending all the money they had saved, just to get a divorce. When the law changed here, that was the end of Reno.”

  “I guess I don’t know much about divorce law,” I said.

  “Better not to.”

  I took out a piece of paper and wrote my name, address, and phone number on it. “If you think of Iris’s husband’s name, would you call me?”

  “Sure. It’s just I gotta do it from a pay phone. Too many questions if my wife sees a long-distance call on the bill. I’m the one should’ve gone to Reno. I wasn’t as smart as Iris.”

  “I’m sure you did the right thing, Mr. Schiff. Your children must appreciate that they came from a home with two parents.”

  “It’s hard to tell sometimes what they appreciate, but my kids are pretty good to me. Anything else I can tell you?”

  “Who would have killed Iris?”

  “Nobody on the face of this earth.”

  I hadn’t expected much else. “Mr. Schiff, I learned something rather strange yesterday. Did you know that Iris had quit her job about a week before she disappeared?”

  “Quit her job? No. Why would she do that?”

  “She never told you she was planning to quit?”

  “That I would remember. She never told me.”

  “Did you talk to her after the birthday dinner?”

  “I’m sure I must’ve. I called her maybe once a month. That can’t be true. She would’ve told me.”

  I ate the last bite of cheesecake and finished my coffee. It had been a long conversation and I had the feeling I had told him more than he had told me, except that Iris had been married, which was certainly news. “I think that’s about it,” I said. “It’s been very nice meeting you. I hope you’ll call if you think of anything that could help.”

  “If I think of anything, you’ll hear from me.”

  “My car is parked on Riverside Drive. If you can walk a couple of blocks, I can take you home.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I like to walk in the rain. It reminds me of Iris.”

  I kind of smiled on the way home. It’s a cliché to say I’ll never understand people, but like most clichés, it’s true. My personal feelings on marriage and divorce aside, I could not see what could have bound this man so firmly to a wife he professed to dislike that he could not disengage himself for the woman he loved and who apparently loved him. People make strange concoctions of their lives, and Harry Schiff had to be a champion. He had spent twenty-five years loving one woman while married to another, and he surely would have spent the rest of his life the same way if she hadn’t stopped him. I wondered if something special had made her give him the ultimatum, whether it was, indeed, another man in her life (and she was too sweet to want to hurt Harry by telling him) or if it was just the power of the quarter-century mark, a woman asking herself whether it had all been worth it. I didn’t think I would ever find an answer.

  I got home a little before five and saw the answering machine blinking at me. I pressed the button while I took my wet coat off.

  “Hi, hon. Don’t bother making anything for me to eat tonight. There’s a party at the house and I’ll eat enough to keep me happy. A cup of coffee would be appreciated, though. See you later.” That, of course, had been my Jack. “Chris, this is Cathy Holloway. I was intrigued by some of the things we talked about yesterday and I did a little digging this morning and found something I think will interest you. Give me a call and I’ll tell you about it.”

  I looked at my watch, then scrambled to find Cathy’s phone number. The receptionist answered and said it was too late to put me through, but finally said she’d ring the number.

  “Mrs. Holloway.”

  “Cathy, this is Chris Bennett. I just got home and heard your message. Are you on your way out?”

  “No, that’s all right. I have a minute or two. It’s really very odd, what I found.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, you remember I mentioned that Iris was too young to get Social Security and too young for the company pension, so I didn’t know how she’d manage. This morning I went into the old payroll files. We’ve always paid every Monday, and a check was sent to Iris the Monday after the Friday she announced she was leaving.”

  “That was for the previous week,” I said.

  “That’s right. And that should have been her last check. If there was accumulated vacation, that would have gone out the same day. But there was no notation that I could find that she had left GAR. And sure enough, the following Monday, another paycheck went out to her.”

  “As though she was still working?”

  “Exactly as if she was still working. It was a couple of days later that she disappeared and died. The Monday after that, we sent her a final check and a notation was made in the record that she was deceased.”

  “So the records look as if she never quit.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you think of any reason why that wou
ld be?”

  “The only reason I can think of is that she didn’t quit at all. But for the life of me, I don’t know what she was doing for GAR if she wasn’t coming into the office.”

  “Thanks, Cathy. I don’t understand it either, but I’ll see if I can figure it out.”

  “If I find anything else, I’ll give you a call.”

  I thanked her, but she had already done more than I had hoped for.

  14

  “You make a good cup of coffee,” Jack said, leaning back on the sofa. “You didn’t learn that from me.”

  “Since I couldn’t do anything else at St. Stephen’s, they made me chief coffee maker—and taught me how to do it.”

  “Good enough. You make a damn good stew, too.”

  “Five nights a week.”

  He smiled. “Not quite. You know, I was thinking. We should put a family room on the house.”

  “Where?” I asked with some alarm.

  “Out back, behind the kitchen.”

  “But I’d lose my windows and my view of the garden.”

  “You’d still have windows on the side, and we’d put the windows on the back of the family room so we could sit there and look out. And the light would still come into the kitchen.”

  “Let’s think about it,” I said uneasily.

  “You worried about the cost?”

  “A little.” It was something I always worried about, and he knew it.

  “Well, don’t. The house’ll be worth a lot more with the addition. And we’ll love it.”

  “Let’s think about it.”

  “Eileen said you called yesterday.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She thinks you’re great.”

  “Well, I think she’s pretty great. Didn’t she give us the best wedding we could ever have had?”

  “She did.”

  “She’s a terrific person, and if I can help her, I want to.”

  “She’s thinking about your offer.”

  “Good. I’m glad she didn’t just reject it.”

  “What’ve you got for me tonight?”

  I told him about Cathy Holloway’s news.

  “That’s really interesting. So Iris quits, but she doesn’t quit. Looks like she’s on special assignment for her boss, doesn’t it?”

  “Like being his mistress?”

  “Why not? You said yesterday his wife said Iris was going to take a trip. Maybe Garganus concocted a story for his wife, to put her off the trail. If the wife thinks Iris has left her job and gone around the world, she can stop worrying.”

  “So then what happens?” I picked up. “She mentions to him she’ll be at her brother’s for Passover, and he says he wants to see her and he’ll walk over around eleven o’clock. She goes down to meet him and they have a fight.”

  “He couldn’t have walked over,” Jack said. “He would have had to drive over. I wonder if he had a driver.”

  “Even if he did, he could always drive the car himself if he felt like it.”

  “Possible,” Jack said. He got up and came back with a sheet of blank paper, folded it twice, and started to write notes on the short, folded edge. “Couple of things I don’t like. One, he’s not the kind of man who does the killing himself. I bet he was perfumed and manicured.”

  “His driver?”

  “Could be.” He made a note. “Chauffeurs know more about their bosses than wives do. Like partners on the job.” He gave me a smile and patted my thigh. “Number two, I’m no expert on adultery, but this was a guy in his sixties, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And a woman in her late fifties.”

  “Yes.”

  “When men get to be that age, don’t they start looking at women in their twenties and thirties?”

  “This was a very beautiful woman, petite and well dressed. She was charming and kind and a friend to everyone.”

  “OK, say I buy that. There’s one more thing that doesn’t fit. No way does Wilfred Garganus have an M in his name.”

  “But the M was on the day for the second seder. Whoever the M was that she was planning to meet, she died before she saw him.”

  “Or at the last minute he called and said he’d see her the first night. Well, we’ve got a lot more to work with now. You meet the old boyfriend today?”

  “This afternoon. He’s an awfully nice man, Jack, very tall for his age. You don’t see many men around eighty over six feet tall. He’s good looking and I think he got dressed up for me, shirt and tie. And it’s pretty clear Iris was the great love of his life. If he has a flaw, it’s that he could never bring himself to leave his wife. Even now he doesn’t enjoy living with her, but he does.”

  “It’s called inertia.”

  “Whatever it’s called, he knows it’s his failing. He told me one interesting thing that may develop. Iris was once married.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “A long time ago, like fifty years or more. She was divorced soon after she was married; at least that’s what she told him. He says that she was the smart one. It’s what he should have done. He thinks Iris told him the name of her husband, but he can’t remember it.”

  “So we have another nameless suspect. I don’t suppose you could narrow down when they were married.”

  “Late thirties or forties.”

  “Not my idea of narrow.”

  “I bet Marilyn doesn’t even know Iris was married, but I bet her father and Aunt Sylvie do.”

  “If they know, then they know a name.”

  “I really don’t want to talk to Marilyn’s father, but maybe Sylvie will tell me. She said she knew something no one else would tell, and this could be it.”

  “And they kept all this stuff to themselves when the police questioned them after Iris’s death.” I could hear the disappointment in his voice.

  “A divorce in the thirties or forties was a family catastrophe,” I said.

  “So was a murder.”

  It was a little too late to argue the point with the Grodniks.

  I called Marilyn early on Wednesday and said I had learned a lot and we should talk. She said she would be there in an hour. I spent the time cleaning up the kitchen and getting bags and bins ready for recycling. It’s amazing how much we accumulate that we used to throw away, and Oakwood keeps telling us how much they’re earning by collecting and selling all this material.

  Marilyn pulled up the driveway and came to the door, carrying a shopping bag.

  “Good morning,” I said, opening the door before she rang.

  “Chris, it’s nice to see you. I have a little something for you and Jack.”

  The “little something” was a chocolate cake that smelled so good I knew I would have to restrain myself to keep it whole until tonight. “I guess Mel comes by it naturally.”

  “Oh, Mel is a much better cook than I am. I just gave her the impetus and she took off on her own.” She took her coat off and hung it in the closet before I could take if from her. “Now, what’s all this you’ve got for me?”

  We sat in the living room, and for the first time I thought about what Jack had said last night, that it would be nice to build a family room behind the kitchen. I had to admit it would be a comfortable place to sit with a friend and chat, looking out over the garden with all that wonderful sunlight coming in.

  “Did you know Iris was married when she was quite young?”

  “Never heard a word. Are you sure about this?”

  “I found Harry Schiff, Iris’s old boyfriend, and had a long talk with him yesterday. She told him she’d been married, although I don’t believe he or anyone else told the police. I bet your father knows all about it.”

  “I agree with you, but I don’t think you should ask. Something’s happened that I have to tell you about.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “The same. It’s not his health. I was talking to him on the phone and I told him we’d been to the apartment on Seventy-first Street. He blew up at me, Chris.”<
br />
  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I certainly wouldn’t have suggested we go there if I’d known it would upset him.”

  “I truly don’t understand it. Maybe the illness is getting to him, although he said he was feeling all right. But he’s decided to leave my sister’s and go back to Seventy-first Street.”

  “Can he care for himself there?”

  “I don’t see how. I’ve been on the phone for the last twenty-four hours trying to get someone to live in. I think I’ve found a woman, someone from my town, who’ll agree to go to New York for as long as she’s needed. The whole thing is very upsetting. He’d be a lot better off at my sister’s or at my house.”

  “Do you think he’s doing this to keep us from snooping around?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Marilyn. The ripples are really spreading much wider than I ever expected. Why don’t you tell him I have no intention of going into his apartment again?”

  “I already promised him we’d keep away. He doesn’t care. He wants to be there and that’s it.” She picked up some notes of mine that were lying on the coffee table in front of us. “Let’s talk about Iris. Is that all Harry Schiff told you?”

  “All that matters. But I’ve learned some other things that may surprise you. I told you Iris quit her job at GAR more than a week before the Passover seder.”

  “And I still think that’s impossible. Why would she quit? And if she did, she would have told us.”

  “Maybe she was intending to. I’ve seen the police file and talked to the detective on the case. The police knew she had quit.”

  “And they didn’t tell us?”

  “They interviewed Mr. Garganus and he told them. The detective probably didn’t think there was anything unusual about it. People quit their jobs all the time and for one reason or another don’t tell their families.”

  “She loved that job, Chris. It was her life.”

  “There’s more to the story.” I told her of my conversations with Cathy Holloway.

  “So she quit and she didn’t quit.”

  “That’s the way it looks. I can’t tell you why, and maybe there’s no good reason, but I thought maybe she and Mr. Garganus had decided to take a little vacation together or get themelves a love nest somewhere.”