The Passover Murder Read online

  “I wonder if she knows anything.”

  “She couldn’t. She’s a teenager, fifteen or sixteen years old. I’m a terrible judge of age, especially adolescents.”

  “Do you know her name, Chris?”

  “Erin Garganus. She told me. She must be the Garganuses’ son’s child. Maybe the parents are divorced.”

  “Maybe,” Joseph said thoughtfully. “You should check that. This is very interesting. Yes, very interesting indeed.”

  “I’m not sure I see where you’re going.”

  “I’m not entirely sure myself. She must be about the age you were when you came to St. Stephen’s.”

  “Chronologically, I suppose so, but we’re as different as two teenagers could be. She’s packed with self-confidence.”

  “A tribute to her grandmother, no doubt. I wonder sometimes how today’s children manage to reach adulthood whole; they have so many problems to overcome that aren’t of their making. Of course, you managed.”

  “With a little help.”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “And the oil yards. I keep coming back to them. There are vacant lots all over Manhattan, two large parks, many small ones, heaps of garbage lining the streets at night waiting to be collected, and a deep river a few blocks east or west of any point on the island. Why does he drive to the farthest point in Manhattan when so many accessible places are closer?”

  I had no answer. “Maybe Jack and I can drive down there tomorrow.”

  “Poor Jack,” Joseph said. “Two days off every week and he spends one of them visiting the scene of a crime.”

  “I’ll tell him you were concerned. Without him and Arnold, I’d never get anywhere. And you,” I added. “You always seem to know.”

  “I don’t know anything, but I have healthy suspicions. And here’s one of them. Everyone seems so certain that Iris went outside that fateful night to give something to someone, presumably something she had in her coat pocket since her handbag was left behind. But suppose you’re all wrong. Suppose she went downstairs to meet someone who was giving her something.”

  She was right; it was a possibility I had never entertained. “But what could it have been? Nothing was found on her body except her clothes.”

  “And that may be the real mystery. Iris went down without her purse because she was expecting something small enough to fit in her coat pocket or hold in her hand till she went back upstairs. Did the man she met have second thoughts and refuse to give her the thing she expected? Did he give it and take it back, prompting a fight to the death? Was it the wrong thing or too little of the right thing? Or did something else happen that we cannot even imagine at this moment?”

  19

  Friday is the day my husband comes home for dinner. There are no evening classes, and unless he gets caught up in a case, which happens occasionally, he’s home at a reasonable hour and we have a weekend to look forward to. It’s also a night that Jack isn’t dog-tired, which adds to the happy mixture.

  On that Friday he was home by seven and we had our arms around each other as he stepped inside the house.

  “Mm, must have been an inspiring trip,” he said, kissing me for the second time.

  “It was. It’s good to see you before the moon comes out.”

  “And I turn into a sleepwalker. Anything cooking?”

  “Not yet. Salmon steaks ready to go.”

  “Could they wait?”

  “I think so. You feeling single and sexy?”

  “Well, not single, but we could maybe go upstairs.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Definitely.”

  We went.

  I was feeling rosy and happy when I came back down and turned on the broiler. The salad was ready and I would let Jack mix his favorite dressing and do the honors with the salmon. I cut up a grapefruit while he changed his clothes, and when he came down, he got to work on the dressing.

  “Sister Joseph solve it for you?”

  “Not quite, but as usual, she’s full of ideas. One of her big ones is the oil yards. Why did he dump the body up there when there are so many other places in Manhattan he could have used?”

  “Let’s look at a map after we eat.”

  “The other thing is, she thinks Iris may have gone downstairs to meet someone who was giving her something, not the other way around.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And that some misunderstanding erupted into a fight that led to her murder.”

  “She have any idea what was given?”

  “If she did, she didn’t tell me.” I put the grapefruit halves on the table as he finished the dressing and turned the salmon. “OK?”

  “Yup.” He sat and we started eating. “You have any idea yet who this mysterious gift giver is?”

  “I keep thinking Mr. Garganus even though I never liked the idea that he was the killer. But his house is so close to the Grodniks’ apartment he could have walked there easily.”

  “That means Iris was in contact with him. She told him she was going to be there and approximately what time she could come downstairs to see him.”

  “So they had some kind of relationship outside of the job.”

  “Maybe it was a payoff,” Jack said. “He gives her some money, maybe a lot of money, and kisses her good-bye.”

  “Then why was she still on the payroll?”

  “Good question.”

  “But assuming he did give her some money that night, maybe someone saw the exchange, and when Garganus left, this stranger came over and robbed her.”

  “A crime of opportunity by a guy who just happened to have a car nearby so he could take her up to the oil yards and kill her?”

  “A little hard to believe,” I admitted.

  “But,” my husband said with a grin, “hard-to-believe things have been known to happen. Who knows? It could have been a crime of opportunity after all, someone getting out of his car at just the right moment. Or, going back to the old idea that she gave her killer something, maybe you’re right that Iris had had a child, and maybe that child caused her all kinds of trouble that she couldn’t afford to keep paying for. She goes downstairs with a bunch of bills in her pocket, meets the son, says this is the last payment ever, kid, and he takes it and kills her.”

  “I hate to think about a child killing his mother.”

  “You hate to think about anyone killing anyone, but it happens, it happens in families, and somebody killed Iris.”

  “If it was Garganus, why would he give her money?” I said to myself.

  “In payment for years of work well done, maybe more than that. Iris had decided to take some time off, enjoy life, have a good time. Maybe with M, who she’s seeing tomorrow. Remember M? Garganus gives her cash, of course, because he doesn’t want the company to know or even his wife. Cash, if you remember, is highly negotiable. Somebody’s watching, sees the exchange, takes the money, kills Iris, and disposes of her body.”

  “So there could have been a killer besides Mr. Garganus. Does he see what happens? Does he see the killer with Iris? Does he see her get into the killer’s car?”

  “Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t. It’s not unheard-of for witnesses to fail to come forward. His wife doesn’t know where he is that night, thinks he’s just gone out for his late evening walk, maybe walking the dog. If she finds out he’s involved with Iris—who turns up dead two days later, remember—there’ll be hell to pay at home.”

  “So he keeps quiet and dies ten or twelve years later, never having told the secret.”

  “It happens. Good salmon. We haven’t had it for a while.”

  “Quick and easy. And good for you.”

  “You’re good for me.”

  “Not as good as salmon.”

  “You don’t like my scenario.”

  “I don’t dislike it, Jack. It’s got some major problems. If it was a crime of opportunity, that’s random and I’m back at square one. If it was her son, I can’t find out if Iris ever had a child because her brother
won’t tell me.”

  “What about Aunt Sylvie?”

  “I’ll try, but I’m afraid she closed up last time I talked to her. I don’t know if she’ll open up again.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Mr. Garganus. It doesn’t fit. Mrs. Garganus knows something. Why didn’t she just tell me that her husband walked over there that night, gave Iris a bonus, and never saw Iris or the money again?”

  “Assuming she knows, she’s protecting his memory. He saw something he should have reported, but he kept it to himself. Even though he’s dead, she doesn’t want to admit her husband wasn’t forthcoming.”

  “She doesn’t have to tell me he saw anything. All she has to say is he took a walk, he gave her money, he never saw her again.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know he gave Iris money and maybe it wasn’t money he gave her. Maybe it was a piece of jewelry,” Jack said, scooping up the last of the salad.

  “Glittering diamonds that he wanted back or someone else saw and killed her for? No. You don’t hand out diamonds on a street corner.”

  “OK. You shoot that one down, I’ll give you another. Maybe the gift had no intrinsic value. Maybe he handed her the key to the love nest you mentioned the other day.”

  “Mm. So they were consummating a relationship. But a key doesn’t come with an address, and no one would kill her for a key except maybe Mr. Garganus to get it back.”

  “So you’ve got me. I’ll tell you what he met her for. He hadn’t seen her in days and he was aching for her. She was going to be at a seder a couple of blocks from his house, so they agreed to meet for one precious stolen moment. I think all he gave her was a kiss.”

  They say cops have no imagination, that they work by the book and find it hard to accept change. Maybe it’s true for some or even most of them, but my husband has one terrific imagination. He isn’t old enough to have seen everything, so I know it’s more than experience, but he really comes up with ideas that are beyond anything I can think of. And I’ve read a lot more than he has.

  There was something so touchingly sweet about Iris and her lover meeting for a kiss that I found myself accepting it just on Jack’s offhand remark. It gave me a new scenario to think about: Garganus was indeed having an affair with Iris, and he did, in fact, talk to his wife about her, but only to tell her that Iris had quit her job and was planning a trip to Switzerland. Ergo, the wife no longer has anything to worry about. When she calls her husband at work, a new voice will answer, and when she drops into the office or comes to the next Christmas party, she will see a new face, perhaps one not quite so attractive as Iris’s. And that would explain Wilfred Garganus’s meeting with Iris the night of Passover, if, indeed, he met her.

  But it didn’t give me a killer. After the dishes were done, Jack hauled out some of his maps. I seem to find myself among map collectors. Aunt Meg saved every one of them that ever crossed her hand, and one of them helped me find a town in central New York State that no longer exists. Jack keeps current maps partly because he feels he should know every nook and cranny in the five boroughs, and now in Westchester as well.

  “You see how the Bronx almost encloses Manhattan?” he said, pointing out the northern end of Manhattan and the western side of the Bronx. “The Bronx is the mainland, Manhattan is the island, and the Harlem River separates them. North of Manhattan, the Bronx juts out toward the west so that the west coastline of Manhattan runs right into the west coastline of the Bronx, with just the Spuyten Duyvil River between them. In effect, when the Harlem River turns west, it becomes the Spuyten Duyvil. It’s the same body of water.”

  “This must be where the oil yards are,” I said, touching the right side of the top of Manhattan.

  “Right next to the subway yards. Ever wonder where subway trains sleep at night?”

  “Never. But I guess that’s the place.”

  “You could dump a body there, too,” Jack said matter-of-factly. “But you’d have to be careful not to get it on a track or it’d be found in less than eight hours when the shift changes. OK, let’s see what’s in the neighborhood. You know about Baker Field.”

  “The Columbia football stadium. Marilyn told me about it.”

  “So maybe there’s a Columbia connection.” He had his folded piece of paper that he had started notes on the other day. Now he folded it to a clean side and wrote “Columbia” on it. “OK, here’s Broadway, and this red line is the IRT subway. It’s aboveground at that point and goes across the Spuyten Duyvil just north of the oil yards and ends up at Two Hundred Forty-second Street. That’s the end of the line.”

  “I remember seeing the el when I went to the precinct.”

  “Broadway crosses the Spuyten Duyvil right here, just beyond the oil yards. Then you’re in the Bronx, what’s called the West Bronx. To get to the East Bronx by car, you just make a right turn at Two Hundred Twenty-fifth Street and that becomes Kingsbridge Road and goes across Jerome Avenue and then the Concourse.”

  “The Concourse,” I said, finally recognizing a name. “The Grand Concourse?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “That looks like a very short drive.”

  “Five or ten minutes. Not far at all.”

  “Sylvie lives on the Grand Concourse right near Kingsbridge Road. We were there, Jack.”

  “So that’s another connection.” He wrote it down.

  “This is scary. Someone in Sylvie’s family. I can’t believe it.”

  “She have a husband?”

  “She did. I don’t know when he died. But she’s in her eighties. Sixteen years ago he would have been in his sixties or seventies.”

  “They have kids?”

  “A son and a daughter took her away from the table when she started to cry at the seder.”

  “So if the son’s sixty now, he could have been in his forties when Iris was killed.”

  “There’s no motive, Jack.”

  “You just haven’t found one.”

  “There’s another connection to the Grand Concourse, though. When Iris was married, they lived on the Concourse.”

  “OK. And the husband may have stayed on. He could have driven across Two Hundred Twenty-fifth Street to Broadway, crossed the bridge into Manhattan, and picked up the Harlem River Drive right here.”

  “That would take him into the East Seventies.”

  “There’s an exit in the Seventies. It’s an easy drive.”

  “How does he know about the oil yards?”

  “Maybe he went to Columbia and he wandered around the area before or after a football game. Maybe he uses a garage up there to service his car. Maybe he’s been on a train and looked out the window. Remember, it’s aboveground there.”

  “And maybe he lives in or grew up in the Inwood section at the northern end of Manhattan.”

  “All good possibilities.”

  “Could we go down and look at that oil yard, Jack? Like maybe tomorrow?”

  “Ah, sweetheart, a Saturday without a visit to an oil yard is a lost day. Let’s do it.”

  So we drove down there Saturday morning, passing Baker Field just before Jack turned, and a few seconds later we found ourselves as far from a city as one could be. There was the chain-link fence Marilyn had described, the oil tanks, the weeds, and the litter.

  “No one could walk here at night,” I said.

  “You’d have to be crazy to want to.”

  Jack pointed out where the chain-link fence was less than secure; a hard pull in the right place would lift it out of the ground far enough for a person to crawl under. There were also a couple of useless, abandoned cabs of oil trucks rusting away, one with the door closed, the other with it hanging open, half off its hinges.

  “Take a little longer to find her if you stuck her body in one of those,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “I don’t think that’s what the killer did. She was found pretty quickly.”

  We got out of the car. It was a sad-looking place, industrial, commercial, ugly,
uninviting.

  “Over that way,” Jack said, pointing, “right across the Harlem River, is the Bronx. That’s the Morris Heights section right there along the river. Then up this way the river is called the Spuyten Duyvil.”

  “Sounds Dutch.”

  “It is. They settled New York and left some of their names. Nice view.”

  “If you look in the right direction.”

  A loose dog was watching us from inside the fence. When we started to move, he started to bark. Where was he, I wondered, the night someone dumped the body of a little woman sixteen years ago?

  “Let’s look in on the security guard.”

  We walked to the shack near the truck entrance. This was where the oil trucks would leave with their cargo and return empty for a refilling. The guard saw us as we approached and opened his door. I could feel the heat of his little room pour out.

  “Help you?” he said.

  “We’ve got a couple of questions about an old homicide,” Jack said. “Got a minute?”

  “Sure. Come on in. I could use the company.”

  We went inside and sat on uncomfortable chairs that would keep anyone from staying very long. The guard sat on his chair, which looked like a much better bet.

  “I’m Jack Brooks. This is my wife, Chris.”

  “Pleased to meet you. Tommy Kennedy.” He shook our hands. He was a graying man with a little mustache and bright blue eyes, a little heavier than he should have been, but I guessed he didn’t get much exercise. He wore a regulation security uniform, dark blue pants, light blue shirt, dark blue tie, the blue jacket of which hung from a hook on an old-fashioned brown wooden coat tree. A rather fancy watch, with a lot of dials and numbers, sat on a hairy left wrist, and he looked at it often as we talked as though it was new or he was concerned about the time. “You talkin’ about that one where they found the lady’s body over near the fence?”

  “That’s the one,” I said. “Do you remember it?”

  “Nah. Wasn’t here then. I only been here about ten years. I’m retired from the job. You’re still on the job, ain’t ya?” he said to Jack.