Yom Kippur Murder Page 13

  I pulled out my list of mourners. Gallagher and Paterno were there, but I was pretty certain Nathan wouldn’t have put Paterno’s name and phone number in his book. And anyone who knew the slightest thing about names would recognize those two as not being part of the wider circle whom Nathan had helped to freedom.

  I didn’t want to call the remaining names on my mourners list, which were all further along in the alphabet than G, until I had met them. But there was Strauss. There was a chance, if I got to Bettina quickly, that she might not yet have gotten a call. I dialed her number.

  She sounded glad to hear from me. I told her quickly what I was after.

  “No one has called,” she said. “Of course, I’m not home the whole day. Today I went to the Museum of Modern Art.”

  “Bettina, if someone calls, tell him you have to ask your daughter, and ask for his phone number.”

  “And you’re my daughter?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I would love it,” she said.

  “If he won’t give you his number, and he probably won’t, tell him to call you back the next day. Then we can arrange to meet him and I’ll inform the police.”

  “You think this man killed Nathan?”

  “I don’t know. The man I spoke to at the auction house this morning said people are still calling about the Guadalaxara Haggadah. Maybe there’s a crazy collector out there who’s tired of waiting, and willing to kill for his collection.”

  “All right,” Bettina said. “I’ll do what I can. I suppose anyone who calls has my address, too.”

  “Nathan’s address book was stolen from his apartment this week. I think this person may be calling everyone listed.”

  “So we’re all in trouble, right?”

  “Let’s hope not. Bettina, I have one more thing to ask you. It’s a question that may trouble you, but I want you to be honest.”

  “You make it sound very mysterious.”

  “It isn’t mysterious. It’s just a little uncomfortable. I want to know if you know or heard or thought or felt that Nathan was having a relationship with someone besides his wife in the fifties.”

  “I can answer that very easily. I didn’t know, I never heard, and it never occurred to me. I think he was a faithful husband.”

  “I’m just looking for a reason why Hannah committed suicide.”

  “There are lots of reasons for suicide besides an unfaithful husband.”

  “I know that, but I’ve heard a bunch of conflicting stories. Nina says Nathan ignored her mother to the point of abuse. Mr. Greenspan says—”

  “You saw Hillel? How is he?”

  “He’s fine. He says Hannah was a sick woman. Someone else says Nathan treated her well and there was nothing wrong with her.”

  “Who said that?”

  “H. K. Granite.”

  “Ah, Henry.”

  “I wonder if he was even old enough to have a valid opinion,” I said, remembering what he had just told me about being quite young before the war and joining the circle when it met at his parents’ apartment.

  “He was old enough,” Bettina said.

  “OK. That’s it for tonight.”

  We concluded our conversation, and I started puttering around to make something to eat. I’m still not very adept in the kitchen, having left Aunt Meg’s home for St. Stephen’s when I was fifteen, an age when I might have just become interested in cooking. Also, I live pretty modestly, so things that I read about, like balsamic vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes, are beyond even my fantasies. My income comes from what remains of my dowry at St. Stephen’s, some of which was used to buy my car and maintain it, from what Aunt Meg left me when she died last spring, and from the pittance I get teaching. I’m very happy with the way I live, and my expenses are pretty low. The house is paid for, and except for the clothes I had to buy to replace my habit, I really need very little. This is all by way of explaining why I eat more tuna fish than steak.

  Anyway, I found some stew in a pot in the freezer, and I put it on the stove over a small flame, hoping it would thaw and heat before I died of malnutrition. Then I called Arnold.

  When he answered, I heard his music in the background and knew he was in his study. I told him what I’d learned about Paterno.

  “So our friend Nathan was a horny old bastard,” he said when I’d finished.

  People don’t usually talk to nuns—at least not to teaching nuns who live in a convent—that way, and no one had talked to me that way since I’d left, so I was a little taken aback. I also didn’t like to hear Nathan described so crudely. “Stop it, Arnold. It started thirty years ago when he was fifty-five. That’s not exactly old, is it?” Arnold’s about a dozen years older.

  “Not from where I’m sitting. She said it right to you, that they had an affair?”

  “She said, ‘We became lovers.’ Same thing, right?”

  “Right on the button. How’d you do it, Chrissie? She’s the tightest-lipped woman I’ve ever met.”

  I thought of my driver’s license. “Just a trick of the trade,” I said. “Arnold, do you suppose she could have killed Nathan?” I gave him a brief summary of my means-and-opportunity theory.

  “But why? You just told me she knew he was dying. What’s in it for her?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I’m reaching, but when I discovered there was a relationship there, a whole part of his life connected to her that had been a secret for thirty years, I started wondering. Anyway, it’s only one possibility. I went to the auction house this morning and inquired about the book.” I told him everything, although I hadn’t meant to. Planning to meet a possible murderer in an old woman’s apartment—or an old man’s—is not exactly everyday living.

  He warned me, as I knew he would, but he seemed to feel more certainly than I did that I was getting somewhere, that I knew more than the police (although anyone with brains would, he added gratuitously), and that if I kept at it, we might just find out who killed Nathan. In the meantime, he was trying to get Ramirez out on bail (“Do you have to?” I asked), and the rest of the world was hunky-dory.

  As we hung up, I started to smell my stew, and I grabbed a spoon and stirred it around. The chunks of meat were still hard as ice beneath the surface, but the smell indicated promise.

  While I was waiting, I called Nina Passman.

  “Have you learned anything?” she asked after I’d identified myself.

  “Quite a bit,” I said, not wanting to tell her about the Herskovitz-Paterno alliance. “I have a few questions if you have a minute.”

  “I have just about ten.”

  “When you were in grade school, did you know a girl named Paterno?”

  “Oh yes,” she said immediately. “Julie or Julianne, something like that. Juliana,” she said, remembering.

  “Were you friends?”

  “We knew each other. We lived in the same building, you know. Sometimes we would walk home from school together. But I wouldn’t call us friends.”

  “You never visited her in her apartment?”

  “Not that I remember. And then she left the school.”

  “When was that?”

  “Around junior high. Her mother put her into a Catholic school, and I really didn’t see her again. May I ask why this is important?”

  “One of the remaining tenants in the building is a Mrs. Paterno, and she mentioned that she had a daughter. I was just curious about whether you knew her. There’s something else that’s much more important,” I hurried on. “Do you know if your father’s apartment was ever robbed?”

  “Mitchell said something to me once. It was quite a while ago, ten or fifteen years. I think a neighbor found someone trying to break in and called the police.”

  “So they never got in.”

  “I don’t think so, but you ought to ask my brother.”

  I told her I would, and I got back to my stew. I had known that Mitchell was a better source of information about her father than she was, but I
wanted to ask her about the Paterno girl, and I didn’t want that to be the whole subject of our conversation.

  I put a fork in a chunk of stew and decided it wasn’t ready yet, so I called Atlanta. A woman answered, and I told her who I was and asked for her husband.

  “He hasn’t come home from work yet,” Mrs. Herskovitz said. “Would you like him to call you?”

  “I’d appreciate it,” I told her. I gave her my number again and finally sat down to dinner.

  Mitchell called back about eight-thirty. I told him that the crime scene tape was gone and then let him know about the break-in. The police had not informed him.

  “What on earth do they want?” he asked.

  “It could have been anything. Buildings that are almost empty are very insecure, and break-ins aren’t all that unusual. A friend of mine who’s a policeman tells me they may just have been after the brass and copper plumbing for its junk value. I wanted to ask you whether anything like that had ever happened before.”

  “You mean a robbery?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was one big one about fifteen years ago, I remember.”

  “Fifteen years ago?”

  “Around the time of the court case. Do you know about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we assumed someone in Professor Black’s family or employ came looking for Pop’s book. Frankly, I think our idea was a little farfetched. The Blacks had one child who lived in California, not exactly a second-story man. We heard through the grapevine that Mrs. Black had washed her hands of the whole thing.”

  “Was Zilman the grapevine?” I asked.

  “You know Zilman?” He sounded surprised.

  “I met him yesterday. He gave me his side of the story.”

  “No matter what happened, what good would it have done the Blacks to get the book back? My father could have gone back into court and prevented them again from selling it. All they wanted was the money.”

  “Maybe there was a collector out there who just wanted to own it, just wanted it in his possession. There are people like that.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that. You think it’s possible that someone’s still after the book, that they killed my father for it?”

  “I just don’t know, but it’s possible. Mitchell, how did your father explain the book to you?” I was treading on sensitive territory. Nathan’s first family had been Nathan’s secret.

  “He said he gave it to someone before the war, this Professor Black, to take to America for him. When the war was over, Black refused to give it back.”

  “That’s only partly true,” I said. “The book was to be payment for taking your father’s first wife and children to safety. The story I heard is that Black took the book and left the family behind.”

  “My God.” It was a whisper.

  “Do you think your father was capable of hounding that man Black for years until he finally died of a heart attack while he was carrying the book home?”

  “There was a very dark side to my father,” Mitchell said in a low voice. “I think he could have done that. I think he could have done worse.”

  “Do you know whether he ever had that book in his possession?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “And he didn’t give it to you to keep?”

  “Never. I don’t even know what it looks like.”

  “OK. Tell me, Mitchell, can you think of anything heavy, anything that could have been used as a weapon, that was missing from the apartment when you saw it on Monday?”

  “It’s just so long since I really visited that place. The living room was arranged differently. He must have moved furniture around. And those pictures. It just isn’t the place I remember.”

  I decided that was about all I could hope for tonight, and I finished the conversation. Then I did what I should have done days ago; I sat down with my notebook and read over my notes.

  It was right there on day number one of my investigation. I had sat in the coffee shop with Ian Gallagher and begun my questioning with him. And he had told me in so many words that Nathan had complained of annoying phone calls.

  I sat back and looked at what I had written. “It was a phone call now and then. They were bothering him. [Herskovitz] called them something in another language.”

  Phone calls, bothering him. Did somebody think he had a book or that he knew where it was? Maybe Bettina and I would find him.

  16

  I didn’t sleep very well. Sometime around two in the morning the sound of the town alarm awakened me. Seconds later I heard sirens approach, and almost immediately my doorbell started ringing and someone pounded on the door.

  The fire engines were turning in to Pine Brook Road as I got out of bed, calling, “I’m coming,” threw on my robe, and went downstairs. My bedroom faces the backyard, so I had not seen anything unusual, but as I came down the stairs, I could see light through the living room windows. Something was burning on my front lawn. I opened the front door to find my next-door neighbor, Don McGuire, standing there, hair tousled, a raincoat over his pajamas.

  “Come on out,” he said. “There’s a fire.”

  I got my raincoat and keys and went out with him. The flame was very bright, about halfway between the house and the street. I knew immediately it was no accident. Someone had set it.

  “Midge got up to go to the baby and she saw it.”

  “Thank you both.”

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Damn kids. Looks like Halloween’s a little early this year.”

  I didn’t think it was Halloween.

  The fire engines had arrived, and Oakwood’s raincoat-clad volunteers had hooked up a hose to the hydrant across the street. Neighbors were coming out of their front doors, clustering there or walking toward my house. Don and I joined Midge in front of theirs and watched as the firemen hosed down the fire. It didn’t take long. After a few minutes there was nothing but a smoldering spot in the middle of the lawn and a smell of gasoline. I would have to reseed in the spring.

  The fire chief came over and talked to me. He, too, was pretty sure it was a pre-Halloween prank.

  “Will you find them?” I asked.

  “Not unless we catch them in the act somewhere else. These kids are pretty slippery. I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “Chief,” I said, “it may not have been a prank.” I started to tell him about my being followed the other day.

  “This sounds like police business,” he said before I’d gone on very long. “Come over here.”

  Two police cars were parked in front of the McGuires’, lights rotating on their roofs. I gave a statement to both of the officers. (In Oakwood only one policeman rides a car. They don’t expect the kind of danger New York cops regularly encounter.) They took me very seriously and promised they would drive by my house frequently until the Herskovitz murder was solved. I felt a lot more confident hearing their promise than I had hearing a similar one in Manhattan after my attack.

  I thanked the McGuires again for their vigilance and went back to bed, to think more than to sleep. He had followed me after all, and he had sent a message. The only thing was, I didn’t know what the message was. Keep away from 603? Leave the Herskovitz murder alone? Stay out of the book business?

  I didn’t know, but I was pretty sure I’d find out. Eventually.

  I got my shopping done early on Saturday morning, stocking up for the coming week, which was starting to look pretty busy. Then I drove to Greenwillow, a group home for retarded adults where my cousin Gene lives. Whenever he sees me, he gives me the warmest smile of anyone I know and says, “Kix!” with great enthusiasm. Gene is responsible for my nickname, having come out with it at an early age when my mother tried to get him to say Chris. I’ve always liked it. I’ve met a lot of Chrises in my life, but not one other Kix. It sets me apart.

  I took Gene out for lunch, agreeing to McDonald’s becau
se it’s his favorite. By the time we got back to Greenwillow, his enchantment with me had faded and he was ready to join a group activity. I drove the ten miles back to Oakwood, looking forward to the new year when Greenwillow would move into town, and spent some time cleaning up the yard and chatting with neighbors who were outside doing the same thing.

  At three I lay down for a nap. My night had been badly broken up, and I get up pretty early in the morning without trying, the result of fifteen years of chapel at five-thirty, and that leaves me near collapse fairly early in the evening. It doesn’t bother me on weekdays, but it’s not too nice to conk out on a date who’s made a long trip just to see you.

  I was showered, dressed, ready, and eager to see him fifteen minutes before six, but he was late. I had known him about three and a half months at that point, and we’d been going out for most of that time. I keep hearing about the trouble women have finding datable, marriageable men, and I, who wasn’t looking for one, walked into a precinct house in Brooklyn three weeks after being released from my vows and found Jack. The relationship produced a few crises of conscience for me. I had made certain promises to myself, among them that I would not become involved with a man until a decent period of time had elapsed after leaving St. Stephen’s, and I didn’t think a month was very decent. Partly I needed to know that I had left for the reasons I had stated to my General Superior and later in a letter to the Pope. (St. Stephen’s is a pontifical community, and permission from the Pope is necessary before you can be released from your vows.) And partly I wanted the people at St. Stephen’s to know that I hadn’t rushed into the arms of a man as soon as I had left my habit behind.

  But none of these things could keep me from feeling the way I felt about Jack. I had gone out with Mark Brownstein last Saturday partly to keep myself away from Jack for one weekend and partly because I had reservations about committing myself too soon and too completely to the first man I had ever dated in my life.