Yom Kippur Murder Page 11

  “It sounds to me as though Professor Black counted on that.”

  “I’m sure he did.”

  “But if Professor Black didn’t fulfill his part of the bargain, how did he end up with the book?”

  “As we climbed on the hay wagon, Black took the little bags we were carrying and pushed them in a corner. Sometime during the night, the book disappeared from my husband’s bag.”

  “You mean he stole it.”

  “You could say that. We felt that he did.”

  “If Nathan had pursued his lawsuit, he would have had a very strong case.”

  “Without my husband, it was one man’s word against the other. My husband had had a heart attack earlier that year. He died in 1976, fourteen years ago.”

  “Why didn’t you testify?” I asked. “You knew the story.”

  “I didn’t testify because I’m an honest person, and Nathan respected it. He couldn’t ask me to perjure myself, even to recover that book. I wasn’t there when the agreement was made. I actually never saw my husband put the Haggadah in his travel case, although he showed it to me when he came home. I never saw Black take it from the case. What would a lawyer have said? ‘Your husband came home with a book that he later gave to Professor Black.’ What could I say to that? Only that there are people I trust and believe and people I don’t.”

  “Bettina, something has been bothering me since I realized that the pictures in Nathan’s living room were of his first family.” Her eyes went up at that, but I continued. “He couldn’t have kept personal possessions through the war. How could he have had all those pictures?”

  Bettina Strauss smiled. “We took them for him. When my husband collected the forged papers, he offered to carry whatever Nathan wanted. It was understood that Nathan would follow us by a day or two, but he would travel light and alone. My husband said he scooped up the pictures in the living room, put them in a little sack, and said, ‘Please take these.’ Between us we distributed them in our bags, in my coat pockets, even in the lining. It was the least we could do. We owed him our lives.”

  “And then you gave them back to him when he showed up in New York.”

  “He asked for them.”

  “Did Hannah know about Renata?” I asked.

  You would have thought I had asked her something unanswerable. She looked uncomfortable, uneasy. “Of course she knew,” she said finally. “When the war was over, Nathan was a man of forty. Hannah was younger, but she would have assumed he had had a family. Why do you ask?”

  “Why did my question make you so uncomfortable?”

  “I cannot explain to you how terrible those times were. People did things then that they would never have done in normal times. That my husband could become violent, that I could rob a dead body …” She shivered, then became silent, and I regretted my question.

  “Please don’t tell me things you don’t want to talk about,” I said.

  “I want you to understand. Nathan had a wife that he loved. She died. He met Hannah. He loved Hannah, don’t think he didn’t. She was a fine and beautiful girl, very beautiful. Of course he told her. Half the people who survived were left widowed. Nathan didn’t talk about it, and I know he didn’t tell his children. Was that right or wrong?” she asked rhetorically. “Then was then and now is now. Today if you have a problem, you call a psychologist, and he spells out exactly what to do. Nowadays families tell their children everything. You don’t tell them, you ruin their lives. Parents are afraid, so they do what the psychologist says. In the forties and fifties, it was different.”

  “Did Nathan and Hannah have a happy marriage?”

  “Very. I knew them.” She said it with great certainty.

  “I know she committed suicide,” I said.

  “How do you know all these things?”

  “Nina told me. I don’t think she ever forgave her father for the way he treated Hannah.”

  “Ah.” Bettina slapped her palms on her thighs. “Nina doesn’t know anything. I told Nathan he should sit down with that girl, he should talk to her. She was so impressionable when Hannah died.”

  “Bettina, Nathan’s living room is filled with pictures of Renata and the first children. There isn’t a single picture of Hannah, Mitchell, or Nina.”

  “My God.” She seemed genuinely surprised. “I haven’t been in that place in I don’t know how long. The building was in such chaos, you took your life in your hands if you went in.”

  “I know,” I said, still sore from my recent adventure. “But why do you think Nathan abandoned Hannah in his thoughts?”

  She shook her head slowly. “He got old. He remembered the best times, the sweetest times. What else can I say?”

  I felt I had worn her out by taking her back so far. She worked her fingers, opening and shutting her hands. “Would you play something for me?” I asked.

  “You are a musician?”

  “Not at all. I teach English poetry at a college in Westchester.”

  “Then I will play for you.” She seated herself on the piano bench. “One movement of the Waldstein, a little slow, but you’ll recognize it.”

  I sat back and listened. If she was in pain, it didn’t show. Her face was shining. Her fingers moved nimbly. I listened to Beethoven’s wonderful melodic line with rapture. In fleeing Europe she might have left behind a lifetime of worldly possessions, but this was one they could not make her part with. I felt very glad that I had asked her to play.

  When she finished, she sat for a moment facing the keyboard.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She moved herself to the other side of the bench and faced me. “Thank you for asking. Playing is the best exercise.”

  I gave her my phone number and said I might be back. To my surprise, she kissed me as I left.

  I found a nice, and thankfully different, place to eat lunch on Seventy-second Street. I was glad to see a menu not dominated by hamburgers. There were a number of older men and women there, and I wondered how many of them might have known Nathan, might have been part of his “circle.”

  Lunch was a marvelous salad with feta cheese and Greek olives, and I felt sated and happy when I finished. There were still a few more names on my list of mourners, but I wondered whether the stories would change very much, would add any new details to what I already knew. It must be a dull job for the police, who go from door to door in an apartment house asking the same questions over and over about one tenant out of a hundred or more, hearing almost nothing of value from most of the people they interview, or “canvass,” as Jack calls it. Maybe it’s because I know Jack or maybe it’s just because I’ve given it some thought, but I feel sympathy for the members of the police department, especially because they take a lot of abuse and do a lot of necessary, unglamorous things that aren’t appreciated or understood.

  No one left on my list lived anywhere near Seventy-second Street. They were all farther uptown, some up near Columbia, which is roughly at 116th Street. If I drove, I would never find a place to park. It was Friday afternoon. Maybe I should give up for the weekend, drive back to Oakwood, drop in on my cousin Gene, who lives in a home for the retarded and whom I hadn’t seen all week. It really sounded more appealing than getting on a bus or going down into the subway and asking someone else a whole bunch of questions that wouldn’t get me anywhere.

  I pulled my wallet out of my bag to pay for lunch, and I must have dislodged something near it. (My bag is the most disorganized part of my life.) What caught my eye was an envelope flap. I tugged at it, and up came a fat, open envelope. I said, “Oh” aloud, remembering that I had taken an envelope of snapshots out of a desk drawer yesterday morning in Nathan’s apartment just as I heard the police arriving. After stowing it in my bag, I had promptly forgotten all about it. Fine investigator I’d make!

  I pulled out the pictures. There didn’t seem to be anyone I had met or previously seen a photo of. There were none of Hannah and none of Renata, none of any children at all. Several had been t
aken in what looked like a park or somewhere out in the country. There were trees, meadows, and benches. But the faces, men, women, and couples, were unfamiliar.

  Until I looked at one near the bottom of the pack. The picture had been taken twenty, possibly thirty years ago, but the subject was easily recognizable, and seeing it, I gasped.

  I took a ten out of my wallet, dropped a tip on the table, and went to pay the cashier. Now I knew what door Nathan’s keys would open.

  14

  I walked back to 603, telling myself the intruder would surely have left the area when the police came, and started climbing stairs, listening hard as I went. The snapshot had been of a young Mrs. Paterno, certainly a lot younger than she was now. She was very thin, and her dark hair was everywhere. She was wearing a summer dress in a country setting, and if she wasn’t laughing, at least she looked very happy.

  I got up to the sixth floor and stopped a moment to listen and catch my breath. All was quiet. Then I went down the hall to her apartment and rang the bell. There was no answer and no sound inside. I tried again. I knocked. I called her name.

  I found the two keys Nathan had given me before Yom Kippur, took a deep breath, and inserted the Segal in the upper lock. It went in and turned easily. I heard and felt the bolt snap open. My heart kind of pounded. I turned the key back and relocked the door.

  Nathan had given me the keys to Mrs. Paterno’s apartment. Nathan had known Mrs. Paterno a long time ago, long enough that an affair with her might have provoked his wife’s suicide.

  Had he given me the keys by mistake, because he always had them near at hand and they were the first ones he picked up? I must admit I had a hard time seeing Nathan—seeing anybody—involved in a relationship with Mrs. Paterno. I had been pleasant and courteous to her, and she had responded coldly, treating me like a lesser being, a messenger to do her bidding, never inviting me beyond her threshold except on the morning I could not reach Nathan. And from Gallagher’s infrequent comments, I could see he didn’t think much of her either, even though he had the key to her apartment, which I assume she had given him.

  What did I have besides a big disappointment? How could he have done it, abandoned the beautiful, young Hannah in favor of this cold, hard woman? I felt almost as slighted as if I had been Hannah myself.

  I turned toward the stairs, pulled open the heavy fire door, and started down, my heart aching. It was absurd to think she had killed him, and yet…

  I heard a sound and I froze. I had just reached the landing between six and five. There was no drumming, but someone was coming up the stairs. Not again, I thought, my fear returning. I moved quietly to the railing and looked down, but whoever it was was keeping toward the wall, and I couldn’t see him. I didn’t want to chance the roof—it’s too easy to be thrown off—but I had Paterno’s keys, so that was a possible sanctuary. I wasn’t sure where he was, but maybe I could get down to five and out of the stairwell to temporary safety—unless whoever it was wanted to get into Nathan’s apartment.

  I didn’t have time to ponder possibilities. I went down the remaining steps to five as quietly as I could. I was wearing low-heeled shoes, but I wished I had on my sneakers. At the door to five, I could hear the footsteps approach the next lower landing. I pulled the door open and heard it make its usual awful grating sound.

  “Who’s there?”

  My heart stopped until I put together whose voice I was hearing. “Mrs. Paterno?” I called. “It’s me, Chris Bennett.”

  “Oh, you. What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you.”

  I could see her now as she paused on the landing between four and five to catch her breath. “What is it?” she asked brusquely, and my feelings of dislike returned with a vengeance.

  “Can we talk in your apartment? Or Nathan’s if you still have the key.”

  “We’ll go to mine.”

  We went slowly back up to six. As we went down the hall, I pulled the keys Nathan had given me out of my bag. In front of her door, I put the Segal in and turned it. “Shall I try the other one?” I said.

  “I’m sure it’ll work,” she said coldly.

  It did. I pushed the door open and stood back to let her go inside first.

  She dropped her shopping bag in the kitchen, took her coat off, and hung it in the closet, but she didn’t offer to take mine. I wondered what it would take for her to be minimally civil.

  We went into her living room, and I took my coat off and tossed it on a chair, hoping she was watching. Her living room fascinated me as I saw it. The walls were covered with pen-and-ink drawings of the kind you see in newspaper ads for fashions at the department stores. I went over to look at them and saw that each was signed A.P., Amelia Paterno.

  “You’re an artist,” I said.

  “It’s something I do,” she said disparagingly. “It isn’t what I used to do.” She left it at that.

  “Did you know Nathan gave me the keys to your apartment?”

  “I made the assumption.”

  “I think he was trying to tell me that if something happened to him, you might be able to give me the answers.”

  “I don’t know why you would think such a thing.” She took a cigarette from a pack on an end table and lit it with a lighter that lay beside it. Then she sat down and crossed her long, slender legs.

  I took the envelope of pictures from my bag and showed her the one of herself. “I found this in his apartment,” I said.

  I saw her tremble. “So you want to add scandal to murder, is that it?”

  “I just want to know who killed him, and why.”

  “You think I did it?” Her eyes flashed.

  “No, I don’t. But you obviously knew him well. Maybe you have some idea who did.”

  “This is all nonsense,” she said, exhaling smoke and pushing it away with her free hand. “A man was killed. Another man was arrested for his murder. I feel safer with that—what’s his name?—Ramirez person off the streets. Why are you insinuating yourself where you have no business? Can’t you leave the dead in peace?”

  “Mrs. Paterno, Arnold Gold is convinced that Ramirez—”

  “Arnold Gold,” she interrupted, speaking the name with contempt. “What does he know? He’ll defend that man and make a name for himself, and all the rich criminals in New York will flock to him. He’s nothing to me.”

  “Nothing?” I said with a little of my own contempt. “He got you heat. He got you electricity. He got locks on the door downstairs.”

  She was quiet for a moment, and I saw the ash from her cigarette drop onto the carpet. I wondered how she had avoided killing herself all these years.

  “You’re right,” she said finally. “He’s been good to us.”

  “How did Nathan Herskovitz happen to have the keys to your apartment?” I asked quietly.

  “You know all that. We each had the other’s keys in case of trouble.”

  “That’s not what Gallagher told me. Gallagher said—”

  “Gallagher,” she said with more contempt. “Mr. Gallagher is a very common person.”

  “And Mr. Herskovitz?”

  Her mouth trembled again. “Mr. Herskovitz was a gentleman,” she said.

  “You had an affair with him.”

  “I am not going to discuss my personal life with you.”

  “Nathan’s wife committed suicide about thirty years ago,” I said. I looked down at the snapshot of a much younger Mrs. Paterno.

  “And you accuse me of that, too? I drove his wife to suicide and then thirty years later I killed him? I won’t dignify those insinuations with an answer.”

  Her reticence made me wary. She could have killed Nathan. She could have followed him into his apartment last Friday, gotten into an argument with him, grabbed something heavy, and taken it with her after she hit him with it and locked the door behind her. Even if she had been covered with his blood, she had only to walk up one flight of stairs, take off her clothes, and shower in her own apartment. The
object that had killed Nathan might have been picked up by the garbagemen days ago. As for witnesses, this was probably one of the safest buildings in New York to commit a crime in. The nearest person to Nathan’s apartment, Mrs. Paterno excepted, was Gallagher on three. And Gallagher had told me that Nathan left the bench on Broadway first. There was no one else in the whole building that Friday afternoon.

  I tried another tack, anxious that she not perceive my growing sense that she might be a viable suspect. “Talk to me, Mrs. Paterno,” I said in as warm a tone as I could muster. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “I cannot talk to people of your generation.”

  So that was it. I was too young to understand. I was one of those baby boomers, a yuppie who cared only for money and the expensive cars and clothes and vacations it could buy. I almost smiled. In June I had bought the first lipstick of my life, and I had to remind myself constantly to put it on when I went into the city.

  “I was a nun for most of the last fifteen years,” I said. “I left the convent last spring. I’ve been working with Mr. Gold because I care what happens to you.” I picked my bag up off the floor and took out my driver’s license. The photo on it was my face, all smiles, surrounded by the brown-and-white veil of the Franciscan order. I handed it to her, and she looked at it, then at me. She returned it, and her face nearly collapsed. I held my breath, hoping I had broken through.

  “I met him after his wife died,” she said.

  Well, OK, that’s what I’d say in her position.

  “At the mailbox downstairs. I was a dress designer in those days. I designed for young girls, juniors mostly. Amelia P. for Kleghorn. The Kleghorn family had been in the clothing business for years. They were old and respected.”

  I sensed that was important to her, that she work for an old and respected firm, not a bunch of upstarts or, heaven forbid, yuppies.

  “What an interesting profession,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

  “It was interesting. It was challenging. I was able to raise my daughter comfortably on what I earned.”

  I had never asked her about the elusive Mr. Paterno, but obviously he hadn’t been around very long.