Yom Kippur Murder Read online

  “Give me the picture,” he said when he got on the phone. “Are you trying to prove me right or wrong?”

  “I know better than to try to prove you wrong, Arnold. I’m just looking for truth with a capital T.”

  “Good luck. I’ve been looking all my life.”

  “Did you get the autopsy report on Nathan yet?”

  “This very day. He was killed late Friday afternoon or early evening. If they’d just waited awhile, he would have died of natural causes. His arteries were blocked, and it looks like he had a tumor that probably would have gotten him before next Yom Kippur.”

  Inscribe me for blessing in the Book of Life.

  “Do they know what killed him?”

  “Sure. Multiple blows to the head with a hard object, hard enough to dent his skull. Nothing like it was found in the apartment.”

  “So the killer took it with him.”

  “Looks that way. Did you notice anything missing?”

  “No, but I’ll give it some thought. I wasn’t in there very long.”

  “Maybe Gallagher would know.”

  “I talked to Gallagher yesterday. He was never in Nathan’s apartment.”

  “Strange old guys, those two. What about the woman?”

  “She’s so reclusive, I can’t imagine she had anything to do with either of the men. The first time she let me in to her apartment was Saturday when I was looking for the key.”

  “Well, Chrissie, someone got in and did a job on him, and we can’t expect any help from the police. They think they’ve got their man, and that gives them a cleared case. Nice and easy for them.”

  “Well, my case is just opening. For what it’s worth, I’m talking to some people. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  I did some window-shopping—you can hardly avoid it in that part of the city—then walked over to the Passmans’ pied-à-terre. Having a foot on the ground on the seventeenth floor is really stretching a metaphor, I thought as I zoomed upstairs in the elevator after being announced. But whatever you called it, it was a lovely place, parquet floors covered with a thick Chinese rug with a lot of blues, a small round marble table with two chairs in the eating area, and comfortable furniture for sitting near a wall of windows that looked east. If Mr. Greenspan saw the sun set from his living room, the Passmans could see it rise from theirs.

  I thanked Nina Passman for seeing me and told her to call me Chris. She showed me to the sofa and asked me how I wanted my coffee, but she didn’t reciprocate on the first-name offer.

  “The lawyer representing the tenants in your father’s building doesn’t think the police have arrested the right man,” I began while she was pouring coffee from a brightly colored flowered coffeepot that matched the cups and cake plates.

  “Is that why you’re talking to me?”

  “There’s an answer somewhere, and maybe it’s in your father’s life. I want to find out everything I can about him. If someone else killed him, it was probably someone who knew him. Nothing was stolen from the apartment.”

  “I haven’t seen or spoken to my father in many years.”

  “But you wrote to him after you were married. You wanted to renew your relationship with him, didn’t you?”

  She looked thoughtful. I had already told her that only a scrap of the envelope remained. With the letter gone, she could concoct any story she wanted, and I wondered if her thoughtfulness was devoted to that.

  “I wanted to talk to him,” she said finally. “I wanted to meet with him and have him explain certain things. I thought it might be possible to pick up some kind of relationship with him. He never answered the letter.”

  “I don’t suppose you want to tell me what those things were that you wanted to talk to him about.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it with you or anyone else.”

  “This is wonderful coffee,” I said, thinking I was wasting an afternoon.

  “This is a great neighborhood to live in. You can buy coffee beans and spices and fine pastry. Every time we come here, even if it’s just an overnight, it feels like a vacation.”

  “Nina,” I said, presuming the right to call her by her first name, “were you well off when you were growing up?”

  “We never wanted for anything, if that’s what you mean. I have no idea how much my father earned. We had nice furniture, enough clothes, we went to good schools. It wasn’t something I worried about.”

  “Who took care of you after your mother died?”

  She paused again. That was it, of course, the mother. She knew now from her brother that there had been another family before the war, and it had made her sensitive.

  “We took care of ourselves. I had an aunt and uncle up near Columbia who helped out sometimes, invited us to dinner, helped me buy special clothes, that kind of thing. But Mitchell and I managed on our own.”

  “When did she die?”

  Another pause. “When I was ten—1959.”

  “Mitchell indicated she hadn’t been well.”

  “Really?”

  “He said he used to think it was the war, but maybe she was just sick. And I saw Mr. Greenspan this morning, and he told me she was sick.”

  She gave me one of those smiles that had nothing to do with pleasure. She was a tough lady who had adapted to a tough world she had not made for herself. I felt sorry for her, but I couldn’t quite like her.

  “Did he answer all your questions with questions and treat you to the philosophy of life à la Hillel Greenspan?”

  “I guess he did, but I kind of enjoyed it. What I don’t quite understand is how, if your mother was sick, she managed to take her children to conceits and walks in the park and all the things Mitchell remembers.”

  “My mother wasn’t sick, Miss Bennett. My mother was abused by a man who didn’t love her.”

  “Do you mean he hurt her?”

  “Not physically. My father wasn’t violent. He just ignored her. He lived inside himself. Life was a disappointment to him. His wife disappointed him, his children disappointed him. No one lived up to his expectations. So he was content to sit with his dreams. Of course, they weren’t dreams. When Mitchell told me on Monday about the pictures, it all became clear. He sat with memories. The wife who was everything, the children who would have grown up to be stars. All we ever did was intrude on those dreams.”

  “Do you think your mother knew about his first family?”

  “It’s possible. Mitchell and I certainly didn’t.”

  “How did she die, Nina?” I asked.

  “How do you think she died? She killed herself.”

  I knew that was what she had been trying not to tell me. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “And if you want the rest of it, I’m the one who came home from school and found her with her head in the oven and the whole apartment stinking of gas. A scared ten-year-old having to cope with that. And then …”

  I waited while she decided whether or not to go on.

  “My father didn’t go to the funeral,” she said finally. “He told us he was too upset.”

  “Maybe he was.” I had read that Mary Todd Lincoln had been too distraught to attend Lincoln’s funeral, and the thought of that touched me.

  “Anything is possible.” She sat back against the cushions for the first time, no longer able to hold her back properly erect.

  I found this new Nina easier to like than the old perfectionist who had seemed to be playing a part. Suddenly I could see that little ten-year-old in her face, the one who had opened the door and smelled the gas, who had run into the kitchen and seen what was left of her mother.

  “Well, you know it all now,” she said. “I don’t know what you’ll do with it. It isn’t likely to help find my father’s killer.”

  “Is that what you wrote to him about after you were married? That you wanted to talk to him about your mother’s death?”

  “I wanted reasons from him. I wanted explanations. I wanted to hear him say, ‘I hurt your mother an
d I’m sorry for it.’ But my father wasn’t the kind of person who could say that. He was never sorry for anything. By the time I was married, we could hardly look at each other. And I suppose Mitchell told you about their falling-out.”

  “He did.”

  “So that left him with nothing, no children, no grandchildren. What did he do with himself?”

  “He spent a lot of time alone in that apartment, perhaps with his memories.”

  “Was there anything else you wanted?” She had transformed herself back into the perfect matron, and I understood it was time to go.

  “You’ve been very generous,” I said, standing. “I appreciate it.”

  We said our good-byes and I went down the carpeted, lighted hall to the swift, silent elevator that worked without a hitch and kept me under surveillance with a camera over my head.

  I had gotten more than I had bargained for.

  9

  I took the crosstown bus back to the West Side. My car was still where I’d left it, apparently intact. In New York that often ranks as a happy surprise. When I first saw them, I was amused at the signs, in English and Spanish, hand-lettered and professionally printed, proclaiming that there was “no radio” in car after car parked on city streets. I no longer find anything funny about them, but my car is so old and so cheap, I can’t quite believe anyone would think there was something of value inside.

  I was about to unlock the door when I changed my mind, crossed the street to where the apartment houses formed an impregnable wall, almost like the face of a cliff, across from the park, and went back to Mr. Greenspan’s address. I announced myself and was buzzed in. A hefty, middle-aged woman in an apron opened the door for me. A smell of food cooking in an unseen kitchen gave the apartment a warm, homey atmosphere.

  “You’re too early for the sun,” the little man in the chair said as I entered the living room.

  “I had another question.”

  “Make yourself comfortable.”

  I sat near the windows. “Did you know about Nathan’s first family in Europe?” I asked.

  “Why would you want to know such a thing?”

  “Because I think it may have something to do with his death.”

  “Believe me, it didn’t. And yes, sure I knew. I knew Renata. I knew the babies. They were part of Nathan Herskovitz’s first life.”

  “Did the second Mrs. Herskovitz know about the first Mrs. Herskovitz?”

  “You see, young lady, you look at it all wrong. When you say the first Mrs. Herskovitz and the second Mrs. Herskovitz, that’s American, that’s divorce. It wasn’t like that for Nathan. Nathan had a first life and a second life. This, here—” he jabbed his index finger toward the floor “—was his second life. Did Hannah know about the first life? Maybe. Probably. Maybe she had one, too. That’s between husband and wife.”

  “His children never knew until the day of his funeral. Mitchell walked into the apartment Monday morning and saw the pictures.”

  “You want me to blame Nathan that his son didn’t visit him more? If the son had visited, he would have known a long time ago what he just found out. Nathan needed company in his old age. He didn’t have his children, so he found it in his pictures.”

  I thanked Mr. Greenspan and went down to my car. Driving home, I wondered whether Nathan had found company earlier in his life, when Hannah was still alive, and with whom.

  Jack called that evening and we had a nice, long talk. I told him about Mrs. Herskovitz’s suicide.

  “You asking for a file?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I don’t think it’ll tell me anything I’ll need. The daughter says Nathan neglected his wife to the point of abuse.”

  “Happens.”

  “I spent a lot of time talking to him, Jack. It’s true he didn’t ooze sweetness, but I didn’t sense the kind of nastiness I hear from his family.”

  “You’re hearing one side. They have their gripes, but he may have had good reasons for what he did. Or he may have just been a mean bastard who drove his wife to suicide and his children out of his life. Is Gold pretty sure Ramirez didn’t do it, or is he just playing the devil’s advocate in all this?”

  I frequently sensed an antagonism between these two men, who had never met but who had heard of each other through me. To Jack, Arnold was that lawyer type who hated cops and would rather free a hundred killers than let the system make one little mistake. To Arnold, Jack was my cop boyfriend who had to defend a corrupt system because he was part of it. I sensed, however, that Arnold tried to rein his feelings, knowing that I cared for Jack and respecting my ability to choose wisely.

  “I think he’s sure,” I said. “I don’t think this is a legal quibble.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Jack,” I said, feeling uncertain about what I was going to say, “if I thought I was being followed, what would I do?”

  When you say something like that to Jack, he’s suddenly all business. “You tell me about it and I come over and take care of the guy. What’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re looking into a homicide, Chris. If the owners of that building hired a guy to do a job and you find out something they don’t want you to know, you’re in for a pile of trouble.”

  “Maybe it was my imagination.” I’d seen Jack once before when my life was in danger, something I could live nicely without seeing again.

  “You want to tell me?”

  “It was just paranoia.”

  “You call if you need help. And don’t forget 911.”

  “OK.”

  “We on for Saturday?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s make it early. I have to spend Sunday with my books.”

  We set a time and said good night. I went to my study, took a sheet of paper, and wrote down a few things. First life, second life, first family, second family, Hannah commits suicide, Nina finds her, Nina hates Nathan for driving Hannah to suicide.

  On another sheet I wrote different things: Nathan Herskovitz, lawyer, connections, calls in debts, waits too long to save himself and his family.

  Then I wrote some questions: Did people pay him for saving them? (Where’s the money?) Did he deny help to someone? To many people? To the wrong people? Was he involved in some kind of illicit trade?

  I had no answers. The more time I spent thinking, the more questions I had. I left the desk with the sheets lying as I had left them, hoping for a flash of insight, of illumination, to lead me along the right trail. From where I stood, it looked pretty murky.

  I went downstairs to check that the doors were locked and to turn off lights. The phone rang as I was leaving the kitchen. It was Mitchell Herskovitz. He had finally reached Sergeant Franciotti, who said the apartment would be available to him on Friday. He and his wife would not be able to come up this weekend, but they had paid a month’s rent and would fly to New York next Friday night and start the job of cleaning up the apartment Saturday morning. If I wanted to drop by and say hello, I was welcome.

  I said I would and I looked forward to seeing them next week.

  Thursday morning I drove into the city and went to 603. I wanted to see whether the police were back today for a last look at Nathan’s apartment. Before going into the stairwell, I took out my flashlight and psyched myself up, repeating what I had told Jack, that it was all paranoia, that I was too sensible and well adjusted to be affected by a little noise and a beat-up old car that may have had a legitimate reason to drive to Oakwood.

  It didn’t work very well. I pulled open the door and flashed the light around. It was perfectly quiet, and nothing was visible besides the stairs. I started up.

  It was quiet all the way to five except for my pounding heart and the labored breathing that the climb always brought on. I stepped out into the hallway on five and stopped to listen. I have to tell you that it was never completely silent on those floors. If you walked into a vacant apartment, you could see armies of roaches that had taken u
p habitation. It’s not the sort of thing I like to talk about, but that’s what that building was like. Just walking through an empty apartment, you stepped on a few, and you could feel and hear it happen. I know because I ventured into one or two of those apartments once—and then never again.

  And the roaches were the least of it. I knew the basement was a breeding ground for rats. Gallagher had said something once about a telephone installer coming up from the basement white as a sheet—and that had been in the good old days.

  Anyway, the floor seemed empty of human beings, so I went down the hall to apartment D. The door was ajar, the crime scene tape cut neatly. I pushed the door, calling, “Hello. Anyone here?” as I went in. I figured the police were in there, doing whatever last-minute things they do before turning over the premises to the family.

  But it was perfectly quiet inside, and I found myself getting angry that the police could have been so careless as to walk out without closing and locking the door. I passed the study, the master bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. All seemed just as I had last seen it on Monday morning.

  I turned in to the living room, steeling myself, and got the shock of my life. From a point a foot or so above the floor to a couple of feet above that, a large hole had been gouged in the wall between the living room and the apartment next door, a hole easily large enough for a person to pass through. Someone had gained access to the building, gone into the abandoned, unlocked apartment that was a mirror image of this one, and drilled through the common wall. Whoever did it could have worked at a leisurely pace through the night. No one would have heard the noise except just possibly Mrs. Paterno, who lived upstairs, but her apartment was at the other end of the building—and she minded her business.

  I had no particular fear that the intruder was still in the apartment. He had left through the front door, probably hours ago. But just to make sure, I moved quietly from room to room.

  The apartment was not tossed in the usual sense of having all the contents strewn around, furniture slashed, everything displaced. Instead, an effort had been made to leave things much as they had been, or perhaps the intruder had known exactly what he was looking for, and tossing had not been necessary.