Yom Kippur Murder Read online

  “That was last year,” I said.

  “Round about Christmas. The sweethearts thought they’d get us out by year’s end.”

  “But you must have known Nathan before then.”

  “Well, we’d been sittin’ on benches for a year or two,” he said with typical understatement.

  “And grousing about the weather and the landlord.”

  “And grousin’, yes. Sounds about right, darlin’.”

  “Did you ever know the rest of his family?”

  “Probably ran into ’em in the lobby from time to time, but I never knew one from another.”

  “You didn’t know his wife.”

  “Wouldn’t recognize her if I fell over her.”

  “Did you ever go to Nathan’s apartment?”

  “Not once.”

  That surprised me. “With just the three of you alone in that big building, you never went up to visit him?”

  “Too far up,” Gallagher said. “He was on five. He came to me. We’d be comin’ back from Broadway and hoistin’ ourselves up those stairs and I’d say, ‘Herskovitz, stop in and rest a minute,’ and he’d say, ‘Good idea.’ I was halfway between the lobby and his place, good for stoppin’ over.”

  “Did you ever eat together?”

  “Nah. We ate all different. He took his tea this way, I took mine that way. You can’t eat outside the family, darlin’. You should know that.”

  I started to understand how difficult it might be to form cross-cultural friendships among these old people so set in their ways. “Ian, a lot of people came to his funeral. Did he visit with people? Did he have friends?”

  “Oh, sure he did. I saw him take a taxi sometimes when he got an invite to dinner.”

  “Did he have enemies?” I had taken my time getting around to it, but I was glad, because now it paid off.

  “Every man has enemies,” Gallagher said in a low voice.

  “Tell me about Nathan’s.”

  He had finished his sandwich and was sipping a cup of hot chocolate to which he had added some cream. “There was something.” He sipped the chocolate again.

  “It could be important, Ian.”

  He shrugged. “He didn’t say much.”

  “Tell me what he did say.”

  “It was a phone call now and again. He’d sit down on the bench and mumble something.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “That they were bothering him. He called them something in another language. Herskovitz did that when he was sore.”

  “Ian, if you think of anything else, I’ll be around.”

  “Well, I hope so. What would we do without you?”

  We stopped at the supermarket and picked up a few necessities. Ian ate a lot of TV-type dinners. Sometimes when I saw the price of them, I thought how much better off he would be to cook up a stew with fresh meat and vegetables on his own stove. Surely he had the time. There was a weird irony in the similarity between the eating habits of Ian Gallagher and those of Mark Brownstein, one at the bottom of the economic scale, one at the top. Gallagher used his oven to heat up his TV dinners, and Mark popped gourmet frozen meals into his microwave, but the net result was probably pretty much the same.

  On the way back to 603, I dropped another quarter into the parking meter. When we got to the third floor, having taken the stairs slowly for Ian’s sake, I remembered the keys Nathan had given me.

  “Nathan had the keys to your apartment, didn’t he?” I asked.

  “That was the arrangement.”

  “Had he ever used them?”

  “Not unless he sneaked in when I wasn’t there.”

  “I think he gave me the keys to your place by accident last week.” I pulled them out of my bag. “Mind if I give them a try?”

  “Anything you fancy.”

  I tried the Segal first. It wouldn’t even go in.

  “Can’t be my keys,” Gallagher said. “I got three.” He took his out and used them, pushing the door open after turning the last one.

  “He must have made it for me and forgotten to try it first.” I dropped it back in my bag, feeling irritated that some local hardware store had ripped him off.

  I helped Ian put the groceries away and said I’d see him soon. Instead of going down, I went up to five to try the key once more. Maybe it had been my fault that a new key had failed to work properly.

  But try as I might, I couldn’t get the key to turn in the lock. In a way, I was glad. I didn’t want to relive the horror of walking into that living room on Saturday morning.

  I went back to the stairwell and opened the door. Although I’ve tried not to dwell on that stairwell, I can tell you that every time I entered it, it was with misgivings, and every time I left it, it was with relief. This time, as the door closed heavily behind me, I was aware of a sound. It was like a drummer tapping rapidly with his sticks on some surface, probably the cinder block wall of the stairwell. I stopped, feeling more than my usual amount of anxiety.

  The noise stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and I heard footsteps. “Mrs. Paterno?” I called.

  There was no answer, not that I expected one. The sound had come from above, and she was the only legitimate occupant of the sixth floor. Above that, of course, was the roof. I suppose if I’d been a hotshot, gun-toting detective, I would have bounded up the stairs, looking for whatever trouble was up there.

  But I was an unarmed female who’d never been trained in the martial arts, and I really wanted to live to see tomorrow. I started down the stairs, and the tapping began again. I moved faster. The tapping stopped, and heavy footsteps descended. Whoever it was was after me.

  I knew I could detour at any floor, but what would be the purpose? Four was completely empty—or should be. The locks on all the empty apartments had been removed, and the best I could do was try to hide behind a door in one while my pursuer looked behind the doors in another. And if he had some sort of a weapon, which was likely if he was an intruder, I’d lose in the end anyway. Big.

  By the time I decided to keep going, I had passed three, where Gallagher might have been my salvation, so I kept on, praying that I wouldn’t trip on a stair tread and kill myself before the guy upstairs got his chance.

  I reached the door to the lobby and threw myself into it, panting. But it was too soon to stop. I ran out the inner door and then the outer one, and then, at a slower run, up the street. The anonymity of a New York street has its advantages. A woman was wheeling a baby carriage. I passed her. Across the street some children carrying schoolbags were giggling together. I went over to their side and finally looked back. There were no men on the street, no one at all who looked threatening. I slowed down. I breathed deeply. I got to Broadway and found my car.

  I don’t remember exactly where I was when I got the uncomfortable feeling that I was being tailed. I was on one of the highways leading to Oakwood with cars fore and aft, left and right. I told myself I was getting paranoid, but the feeling persisted. From time to time I would glance in the rearview mirror, but it seemed there was a different car there each time. Still there was that feeling.

  When traffic thinned out some, I checked more frequently. An old tan falling-apart something-or-other was behind me. You know that company that says they rent wrecks? This was one they would give away. There was a man at the wheel, but he was too far back for me to get much of an impression of his looks.

  I turned off for Oakwood without signaling and saw him follow. He lagged behind as I stopped for a light at the end of the exit ramp, but he speeded up to make the green.

  This isn’t happening to me, I told myself. But it was. I couldn’t drive home and let him know where I lived. One nice thing about a small town is that the police are always friendly. When I got into Oakwood, I drove to the police station. They have a big parking lot at the rear of the building, and it’s always nearly empty. I pulled into the space nearest the building and got out. As I walked to the door, the old, beat-up car glided by without stoppin
g. I went inside. If they hurried, they might pick him up on his way back to the highway.

  I had every intention of reporting to the police what had happened. That is, until I saw who was on duty. Oakwood had hired a new policeman last summer, twenty-two years old and cherubic. I am not without pride, sinful as that may once have sounded. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell that adorable child in a blue uniform what had happened.

  He looked up and smiled.

  “I—uh—I think I left something on the stove,” I said, flustered.

  “See you later,” he called.

  Not over my dead body.

  I went out to my car. It was still the only one in the lot. I walked to the curb and looked up and down the quiet residential street. Nothing. I went back to my car and drove in and out of streets until I was satisfied the wreck was gone. Then I went home.

  That evening I called Nina Passman. It was the first time I had spoken to her since her brother had told her about the pictures in Nathan’s living room. She seemed reluctant to talk to me, and then, quite suddenly, changed.

  “I have to be in the city tomorrow. Could we meet at two?”

  “Two’s fine.”

  “Gordon and I have a little pied-à-terre in Manhattan.” She gave me the address. “Apartment 17C. I’ll see you then.”

  I suppressed a giggle as I hung up. A pied-à-terre, “foot on earth,” an apartment in the sky, a place the Passmans could stay at after the theater or a tiring day, when driving thirty miles was just too much for them or taking the Long Island Railroad was more than they could bear. Well, at least she would talk to me.

  8

  I started my day on Wednesday by calling the first name in the book from the funeral home, Hillel Greenspan. He said, sure, sure, I could come and talk to him whenever I got there. It was all the encouragement I needed.

  New York is a city with alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules that theoretically provide time for street cleaning and generate some much-needed revenue, but in reality they are designed to drive people crazy. On one side of the street you can’t park from 8:00 A.M. to 11:00 A.M. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On the other side you can’t park during those hours on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. On some streets the hours are eleven to two, and sometimes the restrictions are two days a week instead of three. And in areas where the buildings are old, like the West Side of Manhattan, there are virtually no places to park except for the street. Buildings erected before the Second World War never provided off-street parking, probably because no one could imagine so many people owning so many cars. Sometimes I can’t quite imagine it myself.

  So finding a spot is a game. What many people do is simply double-park on today’s “good side” for the three street-cleaning hours and then rush to get a spot that’s good the next day. It’s a lifelong battle. And if you have a good spot today and you want to take your car out only to find a solid line of cars double-parked next to you, there’s virtually nothing you can do. In most cases, the police won’t even ticket the double-parker. If they do, the ticket adds to the litter.

  What I do is try to arrive half an hour before the parking restrictions end so that I can park on either side (since I won’t be staying overnight) during the half hour when everyone rushes for cover. Or I look for a meter on Broadway, which means I have an hour before I have to run back and drop in more quarter.

  On that Wednesday morning, luck was with me. Someone actually pulled out of a good space as I coasted down Riverside Drive. It was a small car, but that’s what I drive, and I backed in easily. If you believe in good omens, that surely signaled an auspicious start to the day.

  Hillel Greenspan’s apartment had large rooms overlooking the Hudson River in the Seventies. From the eighth floor the view was beautiful. The strip of green that was Riverside Park stretched as far as you could see to the right and a few blocks to the left across the street, right down to the river. The river itself is quite magnificent, and the George Washington Bridge off to the right was spectacular.

  I saw all this from the windows of his living room.

  “You like the view?” he asked from his chair where he could probably see no more than the sky.

  “It’s beautiful. Have you lived here long?”

  “Forever.” He smiled.

  “That’s a long time. Mitchell told me you helped Nathan find his apartment.”

  “I did, I did. I knew someone who was moving. We paid a little here, a little there, we got the apartment for the Herskovitzes.”

  “How did you know him, Mr. Greenspan?”

  “How do you know people?” he asked back. “You grow up with them, you work with them.”

  “You knew him in Europe, then, before the war.”

  “Exactly.”

  Hillel Greenspan spoke English fluently with the smallest of accents, much as Nathan had. Until Mitchell had told me otherwise, I had assumed that Nathan had come to New York as a young man, long before the war. Knowing how old he was when he immigrated, I appreciated how well he spoke the language.

  “What did Nathan do in Europe?”

  “In Europe he was a lawyer.”

  “Nathan was a lawyer? He told me he’d been in business.”

  “Here he was in business, there he was a lawyer. Law doesn’t move around so easy. If you’re an accountant, the numbers stay the same. Laws are different. He came here, he had to work. He worked.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He sold blankets.”

  I felt a small pang of what might have been Nathan’s pain. This was what the war had done, taken a man educated in the law, a respected professional, and turned him into a small businessman.

  “A beautiful store,” Mr. Greenspan said, filling the silence. “Blankets, quilts, pillows, quality goods.”

  “Did his wife work in the store with him?”

  He eyed me curiously before he answered. “His wife? No. She had little children. She stayed home.”

  “She died a long time ago, didn’t she?”

  “Could be thirty years already. Maybe longer.”

  “Was she sick?”

  Mr. Greenspan pursed his lips. Then he nodded his head. “From the very beginning,” he said. “The war made a lot of people sick.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Sure I knew her. We were all friends.”

  “When did you come to this country, Mr. Greenspan?”

  “You see,” he said, “there are two kinds of people. There are those that have luck and those that need luck. Or you could say there are those that think of themselves and those that think of others. Or you could look at it this way: There are people who do what is required of them and people who can never do enough.”

  I wondered where this was leading. It had been a simple question. I had expected a short answer.

  “You wonder why I answer your question this way.”

  “I’m sure you have a good reason,” I said with a smile.

  “What I am telling you is that I was the man with the luck, I was the man who thought of myself, I was the man who did what was required. I came to this country in 1939. Nathan could have come. But Nathan was a man who could never give up. He stayed. If he stayed one day more, he saved another person, maybe another family. One day becomes two, two becomes three, and pretty soon he finds himself in a camp, his family torn apart, his whole life reduced to a number on his arm. And I, the man with luck, find myself on Riverside Drive, where every night I see the sun set and I know I have lived another day.”

  “You’re saying that Nathan stayed on in Europe to help other people get out.”

  “Exactly. He had friends, connections, clients, people who owed him something. He used it. He used everything. In the whole world, there wasn’t a better man than Nathan Herskovitz.”

  For the first time since Sunday, I felt there was someone else in the world who had liked and respected Nathan. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Mr. Greenspan. I knew him only a couple
of months, but I thought he was a fine man.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear it. He said nice things about you, too.”

  “Is it possible that he had any enemies?”

  “Everyone has enemies. A man who collects what is owed him can be hated.”

  “But those were people in Europe.”

  “Some came here.”

  His words gave me a chill. “Is there someone who might have wanted to kill him?”

  The old man smiled. “It’s too late for that now, don’t you think so? You kill an old man because he has money, or because he lives in an apartment you want for yourself, not because he collected a debt fifty years ago. You think someone from Nathan’s past beat him to death?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Such things don’t happen.”

  I decided to say what I was thinking. “I think Nathan was sorry for something he did.”

  “We’re all sorry,” the little man in the big chair said. “All of us. You get old, you get sorry. We don’t get killed for it.”

  “Would you mind if I came back to ask you some more questions?” I asked.

  “Sure, come. Come at five o’clock and see the sun go down. Already I’ve seen more than eighteen thousand sunsets from my window. God willing, I could live to see twenty. Just call before you come. I’m a busy man. Lately I go to a lot of funerals.”

  I had a few hours till my appointment with Nina Passman. Since my parking space was good all day, I decided to leave the car and take the crosstown bus that goes along Seventy-ninth Street and then through Central Park. If I got off at Park Avenue, I would have only a few blocks to walk, and somewhere in between, I could have lunch.

  I took the bus another stop to Lexington Avenue, which gave me more choices for lunch. After I had eaten in a nice little coffee shop, I tried Arnold Gold from a pay phone. He was there.