The Passover Murder Read online

  11

  102 Park Avenue was right near Forty-second Street, the wrong part of New York to find an inexpensive garage, so I left the car a bit uptown and a bit east and walked back, stopping for lunch on the way. I had still not gotten over my surprise that Iris had left her job a week before the murder. Why hadn’t she told the family? If she was planning to retire, or to take a kind of sabbatical, why would she keep that a secret? I wondered if that was the secret Sylvie had mentioned, the one no one else in the family would tell me. It didn’t make sense. But the very fact that there were unexplained quirks in Iris’s life made her interesting and gave me cause to look into her murder.

  The building was old, but the elevators were new and arranged in banks, each going to a different set of floors. GAR was on seven, and the first bank serviced the first ten floors. The elevator went up so quickly and so smoothly that I didn’t know it had stopped till the door opened. The GAR suite was just down the carpeted hall, and I went inside to a quiet, softly lighted reception area that was empty except for an attractive young woman at a desk with a telephone and little else, and some guest chairs.

  “May I help you?”

  “I have kind of a strange reason for being here. A woman who worked in this office for many years was murdered about sixteen years ago, and I wondered if anyone from that time might still be around.”

  “Are you a relative of hers?”

  “My name is Christine Bennett and I’m a friend of the family.”

  “Uh, what exactly do you want?”

  A question not easy to answer. “I think I’d just like to talk to anyone who knew her.”

  She frowned a very pretty frown. “Let me get Mrs. Holloway, our office manager. Maybe she can help.” She used the telephone, then told me to have a seat.

  The chairs were grouped like benches. I had hardly had time to get comfortable when a woman appeared soundlessly.

  “Miss Bennett?”

  “Yes. Hi.”

  “I’m Mrs. Holloway. How may I help you?”

  “I’m looking for anyone in this office who might remember Iris Grodnik. She worked here about—”

  “I knew Iris.” She was all smiles. “I knew Iris very well. Who are you?”

  “I’m a friend of the family and I’m trying to find out whatever I can about Iris’s death.”

  She turned to the receptionist and said, “Hold my calls.” Then, to me, “Come with me. There’s an empty conference room and I’ll get us some coffee.”

  A few minutes later we were seated in one of those rooms with a long table and a lot of chairs on little wheels. A pitcher of coffee and some doughnuts were on a tray, and I felt relaxed and welcome.

  “I haven’t thought about Iris for a long time,” Mrs. Holloway said. She was a nice-looking young woman, perhaps in her late thirties, wearing glasses and a black suit with a large silver pin on the lapel. “But I loved her when she was here. She was Mr. Garganus’s secretary, the kind he couldn’t have run the company without, but she was very down-to-earth. You know how some executive secretaries are; they think they’re chief executive and they won’t give you the time of day. Iris was a real person.”

  “How long did you know her?”

  “About three years. She’d been here much longer than that, of course, ten or fifteen years anyway, but I was here for three when she died.”

  “Do you know anyone who worked here at that time who was getting married and could have had a bridal shower, someone whose name started with C?”

  Her face lit up. “That’s me,” she said excitedly. “That was my shower. I’m Cathy. Iris was invited—the whole office was invited. How did you know about that?”

  “It was in her engagement book. Believe it or not, the book just turned up last Friday.”

  “Oh my goodness. After all these years. Yes, I’ve been married a long time. We just had our sixteenth anniversary. We have two kids now. But Iris died before the shower.”

  “That’s what I thought. Cathy, I have to ask you something that’s been bothering me. According to the police, Iris left her job here a week or so before she died. Did you know that?”

  “I knew it, yes.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “That’s not an easy question. The short answer is no, I don’t know why Iris left.”

  “But there’s a longer answer.”

  “There is, yes. The trouble is, I don’t really know the whole story, and pretty much everything I could tell you would be secondhand.”

  “Tell me what you know, what you think, what you heard, anything you can dig up in your memory. I know that Mr. Garganus is dead and I’m not likely to find many more people—maybe not any more people—who remember her. The case is at a dead end and her family really wants to know what happened to her.”

  “She had a wonderful job here, the best job she could have had without being involved in the core work of the company. As far as I knew, she was a crack secretary. She’d been Mr. Garganus’s private secretary for years, and he relied on her for everything. I think he replaced her with two people and was never happy with them even though they were good.”

  “Did she seem happy in her job?”

  “She was a happy person. She didn’t complain, unless it was on Mr. Garganus’s behalf. Then she was a killer. If someone promised to mail him something and it didn’t arrive, she was on the phone threatening them the minute she finished going through the mail. But she was a sweet, generous, friendly person. When my wallet was stolen one morning on my way to work, Iris handed me ten dollars and asked if that would be enough. That’s the way she was.”

  “I can see why she was so well liked. Did everyone feel that way?”

  “People are people. There were women who envied her her job, who thought she was overpaid, who thought she was snooty, but what can you do? Some people are just born jealous. I think Iris earned whatever she was paid, and that includes bonuses. She worked very hard and she put the company first.”

  “All of this sounds as though she had a job for life. Did something happen to change all that?”

  “If anything happened, I didn’t see or hear it. All I know for sure is that one Friday afternoon a notice came around that Iris Grodnik was leaving GAR for what they called an extended sabbatical.”

  “Did that mean she was coming back?”

  “It was very vague. Personally, I thought she was retiring and Mr. Garganus was trying to get her to reconsider. But as well paid as she was, I don’t see how she could have afforded to retire at that point. She was too young for Social Security, she was too young to pick up the company pension.”

  “Maybe she was thinking of getting married.”

  “I thought of that myself. But I had no way of knowing. Iris was very private about her personal life. She kept pictures on her desk of nieces and nephews, grand-nieces and grandnephews, but you never knew if she had a boyfriend, if she lived a lonely single life, if she had been married—it was all a mystery.”

  “What was the office scuttlebut?”

  Cathy Holloway looked unhappy. She took a breath and poured herself more coffee. “The vixens in the office said she’d been having an affair with Mr. Garganus for years, that his wife had finally found out about it and had given him an ultimatum.”

  “Do you think she was?”

  “You have to remember that what I thought of Iris was colored by my feelings about her. She was nice to me. I liked her. I was young and kind of innocent. I thought Iris was a very moral person and I couldn’t believe she’d have something going with her married boss.”

  “Now that a lot of time has passed and you’re less innocent, do you think it may have happened?”

  “I still think she was a moral person.”

  It was interesting to me that she felt that way. The story about Iris and Harry was that she didn’t want to live with him if he didn’t divorce his wife. That she had surely committed adultery said that Iris was a somewhat less moral person than Cathy gave
her credit for, but ultimately she hadn’t wanted a permanent relationship with a married man.

  “I take it you never caught them in what might be considered an intimate moment?”

  “Never. And no one else did either, I can assure you, or they would have splashed it all over the office. It’s just that a couple of the women talked.”

  “So there was no prior notice to her leaving, no big party to say good-bye.”

  “Nothing like that, which was kind of unusual. Iris said she didn’t want it. She told us she’d see us all at my shower and she left that Friday afternoon as if she were coming back the next Monday morning. Except, of course, that she didn’t.”

  “And she died a violent death about a week later.”

  “I can’t tell you how shocked we were when we heard it. It touched us all. It sounded like she went out for a walk or was on her way home and somebody grabbed her.”

  “I know that’s the way it sounded, but it didn’t hap pen that way,” I said. “She left her brother’s apartment without her pocketbook.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Nobody did. We just found her pocketbook last Friday, stuck in a corner of the closet where she put it to get it out of the way. It had her wallet and keys in it. You don’t go home without your wallet and keys.”

  “So that means—”

  “It means either that she went out to meet someone briefly or that she stepped out for a breath of fresh air, planning to return. Do you have any idea who she might have met that night?”

  Cathy shrugged. “Not the slightest. As I said, I knew very little about her personal life.”

  “Do you know where Mr. Garganus lived at that time?”

  She looked at me with eyes that showed surprise and fear. “I—I’m not sure.”

  “Could you find out?”

  “I don’t know. I … He lived on the East Side, somewhere in the East Seventies, I think. I seem to remember that he had lived in a big apartment, and when I was still fairly new here, he and his wife bought a town house.”

  “I see.”

  “In fact, I think Iris may have gone there once or twice to deliver something. It’s a long time ago and I don’t really remember very clearly, but I think she said it was very beautiful and Mrs. Garganus was decorating it magnificently.”

  “Do you know if Mrs. Garganus is still alive?”

  “I haven’t heard that she died. I think I would have.”

  “Do you know about how old Mr. Garganus was when Iris died, or how old he would be now if he had lived?”

  “He was a very good-looking man,” Cathy said. “Kind of the classic CEO with silver hair and a trim body. He was probably older than he looked, and I would guess he was a little older than Iris. I think she was in her late fifties, although she could easily have passed for less, and he was probably in his early sixties.”

  “So he was close to retirement.”

  “He was, yes. In fact, he did retire a few years after she died.”

  “Did they keep the town house?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Could you get me the address, Cathy?”

  She smiled sadly. “How did I know that question was coming? I could. I know where to find it. I’m just not sure—”

  “There was a murder,” I said solemnly. “That case has been open for sixteen years. I really want to know who killed that poor woman. If Mrs. Garganus could tell me something that could lead in the right direction, it would really be very helpful.”

  She sat staring at the blank wall as though making a life-and-death decision. “I’ll do it,” she said finally, “but you must promise that my name will never be associated with the information I’m going to give you.”

  “You have my word.”

  “Anything else before I go to the file?”

  “Iris had a lifelong friend named Shirley Finster. I haven’t been able to find any reference to her anywhere, not in the engagement book, not on any notes in the pocketbook. No one seems to know where she lived, if she’s married, anything. Does the name ring a bell for you?”

  “I do remember that Iris had a friend, a woman friend, that she talked about. Maybe the name was Shirley, but I couldn’t swear to it. I don’t know anything else about her.”

  “Are any other people from that group still around?”

  “The older women have all retired, and one or two of them have died. One of the younger women moved out to Long Island when the company bought a headquarters building out there several years ago. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember her last name. I’d say I’m your best source, and it’s very lucky that the receptionist called me. I don’t think there’s another person in this building who remembers Iris.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Stay here. It’ll just take a minute.”

  She left the room, closing the door behind her. I leaned back luxuriously in my chair, wondering if its comfort spelled a reason why so many conferences were held in large corporations. It certainly felt good. Maybe all those legendary meetings were groups of people needing a short nap and good back support.

  It took about five minutes for Cathy Holloway to return. She gave me a smile as she came in, sat beside me, and handed me an address on a piece of plain white paper.

  “It’s Seventy-fourth Street,” she said. “I don’t know if they’ll let you in and I couldn’t find a telephone number either in the file or in the phone book. I’m not surprised that it’s unlisted.”

  I wasn’t either. I looked at the address. The number appeared to be in approximately the same block as Abraham Grodnik’s apartment house, and three blocks north. A man could walk those three blocks easily in five minutes, six or seven if he chose to take his time.

  “Will you go there to see her?” Cathy asked.

  “I think I have to.”

  “Well, good luck.”

  I thanked her and said I was sure I would need it.

  12

  Since my car was already parked, I went out on Park Avenue and hailed a cab. I looked out the window as we drove north. Park is one of the most elegant streets in New York, divided with a green strip in the center that is decorated for Christmas with lights and planted with colorful flowers in the spring and summer. The apartment houses are quietly genteel and speak of the finest things that money and good taste can buy. Uniformed doormen mark the entry of each one, well-dressed men and women—and dogs—parade up and down in front of them, limousines load and unload the wealthiest and most well-known people in the country.

  At Seventy-fourth Street the taxi turned right. “You goin’ to an embassy or somethin’?” the driver asked.

  “It’s a private home.”

  He whistled “Pretty nice place to live.”

  I thought so myself. The New York town house was a style made for the wealthy who chose not to live in a Park Avenue apartment. Narrow and four or five stories tall, they stood shoulder to shoulder along the cross streets of the city, some with fancy wrought-iron gates and entrances, others almost quietly retiring. I had never been in one and had no idea what to expect, but I occasionally hear of one being sold for millions of dollars, a far cry from anything in little Oakwood.

  “This the one?” the driver asked.

  I checked the address in my hand. “Yes it is.” I paid him and got out, suddenly feeling a little nervous. I knew I had little chance of being admitted, less of being welcomed. But I kept thinking of how close this house was to the site of that fateful seder, a pleasant walk. And then what? Come to my car, I want to show you something?

  I went up to the door and rang the bell. I heard the sound of the chimes inside, but nothing else. I waited. What kind of a car would he have had? A big black Mercedes with almost enough power to fly to the tip of Manhattan? I rang the bell again, thinking I had surely made this little trip in vain.

  “I’m on my way,” a voice called, a young, female voice. It wasn’t what I expected.

  Then the door opened and she st
ood before me, a pretty girl in her teens, blue jeans, an enormous sweater, and a peaches-and-cream complexion with very blue eyes. “Hi,” she said with a smile. “Are you lost?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m looking for Mildred Garganus.”

  “She’s my grandmother. Come on in. She expecting you?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, so surprised at being inside without a long explanation that I truly wasn’t sure.

  “She’s upstairs. Come on, we can walk.”

  As though I had expected to fly. “I’m Christine Bennett.” We started up a beautiful staircase with a dark, polished banister. There were paintings along the wall as we climbed, above them lights that had gone on when the girl flicked a switch.

  “I’m Erin Garganus. Gram?” she called. “Christine Bennett is here. I’m bringing her up.”

  “Who?” a woman’s voice called back.

  “Christine Bennett.”

  I followed her into a room at the back of the house, a beautiful second-story living room with almost floor-to-ceiling glass at the rear wall. Sitting near the window was a woman in a wheelchair. As I saw her, I knew I didn’t want to do what I had come for.

  “Who exactly did you say you were?”

  “My name is Christine Bennett, Mrs. Garganus. I’m a friend of the family of Iris Grodnik.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes. Erin, don’t you ask people what they’re here for before you let them in?”

  The girl shrugged. “She looked OK to me.”

  “Go to your room and lie down, Erin. When Elena comes, she’ll make you a cup of cocoa. Erin thought she had a cold this morning, so she stayed home from school,” she explained to me. “Go on, Erin. I can take care of this.”