Father's Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  Finally, having put it off long enough, I called Bruce Kaplan. Arlene answered, and I thanked her for the book, of which I had already read three-quarters. We chatted for a few minutes as though I had called merely to exchange literary opinions. Finally I asked to speak to her husband.

  “Yes,” he said when he came to the phone. “Got some more questions?”

  “Mr. Kaplan, I’m feeling very uneasy asking you this, but I’ve heard that you were convicted of a crime. Would you tell me about it?”

  He let his breath out as though he had to prepare himself for an ordeal, which he probably did. “It was a very simple thing. I took money that didn’t belong to me, money I intended to pay back to the company, and it was discovered before I had a chance to repay it. I went to trial and ended up serving what you might consider a short sentence but that was the longest sentence of my life.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “It’s over twenty years, twenty-five. I’ve put it behind me. I did something I shouldn’t have, I paid the price, and I’ve moved on.”

  Twenty-five years. It seemed a long time to carry a grudge, if that was what it was. “I’ve heard someone else actually took the money and you paid the price for it.”

  “There are people who find it hard to believe that someone they’ve known since childhood could commit a felony, and they spin tales to make the situation look better. I was solely responsible for what happened.”

  That seemed as definitive a confession as one could find. “Did you lend any part of that money to Arthur Wien?” I asked.

  There was total silence. “Did I—” In the background, I could hear his wife’s voice. “No, I didn’t. What would make you—”

  “I heard he borrowed from friends.”

  “He may have.”

  “Did he borrow from you?”

  “An inconsequential amount.”

  “Did he pay you back?”

  “I believe so.”

  “When did he borrow from you?”

  “I couldn’t tell you within a ten-year period. It was very casual and it wasn’t a lot of money.”

  “Did you ever borrow from him?”

  After a pause he laughed. “From Artie? You were lucky if he’d pick up his half of a dinner check. Artie was a classic cheapskate. Doesn’t mean I didn’t like and admire him, but he’d be the last man in the world I’d go to if I needed money.”

  I was about to finish the conversation when I decided to ask one more embarrassing question. “The money you took, can you tell me what you used it for?”

  “I used it for something personal. I didn’t gamble it away; I didn’t drink it or shoot it up my arm. I used it for something that meant a lot to me.”

  I knew there was nothing more I could ask.

  * * *

  Jack had walked outside for a breath of fresh air while I was on the phone. I followed him through the door in the family room. It was dark now, a week after the longest day of the year. Jack had turned on the outdoor lights that theoretically allowed us to give parties and entertain in our backyard on summer nights but in practice we had never used. The lawn looked very green and healthy in the glow, our plantings stronger and taller than a year ago. I had fought myself for every dollar we had spent, worrying that we were overdoing it, that some catastrophe would render us impoverished. Jack had known that we could afford both the addition to the house and the landscaping that followed, that we, and especially I, would enjoy both the extra rooms and the shrubs and flowers that beautified our property and enhanced our life. The great thing about marriage is that our individual strengths and weaknesses lie in different areas, and we had learned to support each other and to accept that support.

  “I called him,” I said, moving to his side and putting an arm around his waist.

  “I know. That’s why I came outside. How’d it go?”

  “He didn’t do it, Jack. He was my first suspect, because he was convicted of a felony and I was ready to accept that a thief could be a murderer. He’s a good man. They’re all good men. I don’t think any of them did it, and if one did, I don’t even want to know who.”

  “And the wives?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t want to think about it. “These are nice people, good people. I don’t have a motive and everyone at the party had opportunity. I looked over the photographs taken at the Father’s Day dinner. The women’s purses are lying on the table. Most of them are small evening bags. Any one of them could have carried an ice pick in her purse.”

  “With a cork to keep it from sticking through the fabric.”

  “Right.”

  “And no motive.”

  “Mrs. Beller is lying to me. She said at first that Wien had canceled their meeting because he had so much to do. When I pressed her, she said she would talk to her husband.”

  “So there is something there.”

  “There’s something. I can’t make her tell me, Jack.”

  “You know something about them they don’t know you know.”

  “I really hate this.”

  He wrapped me up in his arms and held me tight. He was starting a new job on Monday and he was nervous. I had to call people and ask them the kinds of things polite people don’t talk about, and I didn’t want to. But here we were in our own backyard, under our own lights, with our own little boy upstairs in his crib. It was almost enough to make me forget everything else.

  22

  I read The Lost Boulevard before I turned off the lights. I fell asleep pretty quickly, and then something woke me, a noise or a feeling, I wasn’t sure. I put my slippers on and went into Eddie’s room. He was sleeping soundly in his little blue pajamas, the light cotton blanket kicked to the bottom end of the crib.

  I watched him for a moment, then left the room. I didn’t feel sleepy so I tiptoed back into our bedroom and got The Lost Boulevard from my night table. My bookmark was near the end, and I really wanted to see how it all came out, whether the Koches married each other, whether the musicians married each other, whether the doctor made of two separate human beings would work out the problems he had with his family and marry the woman he loved.

  I took the book downstairs, turned a light on in the family room, and snuggled into my favorite chair. It was the fifties and the lives were moving forward, the blind dates yielding relationships that became marriages and families. It was interesting that the George Fried character had been combined with the Fred Beller character, the distinctive characteristic about the two men that they disliked New York and wanted to get away. It didn’t seem very distinctive to me; half the people I knew disliked the city enough that they refused to go there alone. I had always liked it myself, going back to when my wonderful father took me in to meet the people at the small company he worked for in downtown Manhattan.

  I looked hard for some indication of a temptation, two people meeting accidentally or clandestinely, or almost. There was none. The young man who wanted to get out of New York was perceived as a misfit while the doctor who had fallen in love with a non-Jewish woman was seen as admirable, as though disappointing his parents gave him a certain panache in the eyes of the narrator. It was hard, really, to put the name of a real person on a character. Wien had done a good job of fictionalizing them. With a sure hand, he had made them go the way he wanted them to go.

  When I finally became too tired to read, I had only a chapter left to go and I was still without a motive for murder.

  I never heard Jack get out of bed in the morning and when I finally opened my eyes, I couldn’t believe I had slept till almost nine. I dashed into Eddie’s room, but he was gone, probably eating a better breakfast than his mother would have made for him.

  “That’s a first,” Jack said as I walked into the kitchen. “You get up in the middle of the night?”

  “Something woke me, and I decided to sit downstairs and read Arthur Wien’s book.”

  “Well, we’ve been having a good time here fixing breakfast and eating. Care
to join us?”

  I did. Eddie pointed out the glass, the cup, and the muffin. “Not bad,” I said. “You’re a regular vocabulary builder, Daddy.”

  “You bet. Need a good vocabulary if you’re going to communicate.”

  Jack joined me for another cup of coffee. Coffee seems to be the lifeblood of police officers; they can never get enough of it. Eddie was tired of sitting at his feeding table and Jack had sprung him loose. At the moment he was in the family room and I had my eye on him.

  “That information you got on Robin Horowitz,” I said. “Do you have any idea when she made those visits to Arthur Wien’s apartment?”

  “Got the dates.” He got up from the table and came back with a piece of paper. “No one kept a record, you understand. This was just the doorman’s recollection. He was able to place the time because he filled in for several months for the daytime doorman who had some surgery and it happened during that period. It was only weekdays because he didn’t work weekends and the weekend guys didn’t pick up on the picture. He’s sure there were three visits but there could have been four or five. They were made more than two years ago and less than two and a half. He thinks about two and a quarter.”

  “Was Cindy Wien living in the apartment?”

  “There was no Cindy Wien. They hadn’t gotten married yet. Miss Porter wasn’t there. She didn’t always accompany her boyfriend to New York.”

  “That’s why they met in the apartment,” I said. “If Cindy had been there, they probably would have met somewhere else and we’d never have known about it.”

  “That’s why we ask, because sometimes we get lucky.”

  “So these meetings were a few months before the Wiens married.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “I talked to Cindy last night. She said they’d just had their second anniversary.”

  “OK.” Jack nodded, got up from the table and came back with a sheet of blank paper, which he folded twice in his usual way and started to write on. “So Mrs. Horowitz and Mr. Wien could have been involved in last-ditch negotiations on their future together.”

  “Or apart.”

  “Which is the way it turned out. You gotta press her, Chris. If she doesn’t have a better story to tell than what it looks like, either she or her husband is in big trouble.”

  “She follows Wien out and kills him and then her husband goes to the men’s room and finds the body—an unfortunate coincidence.”

  “It’s certainly the closest thing you have to a motive.”

  “I’ll give her a call,” I said, feeling very unhappy.

  I reached her later the same morning.

  “I have nothing further to say to you,” she said. “Please consider the matter closed.”

  “It isn’t closed, Mrs. Horowitz. It’s very open. The person who saw you go into Mr. Wien’s building is an employee there. He has been talking to the police.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’m telling you the truth. You were seen going to Mr. Wien’s apartment at least three times about twenty-seven months ago.”

  She said nothing.

  “Can we talk about this?” I asked.

  “Not now.”

  “I think the sooner we talk about it the better off you will be.”

  “Just a moment.”

  She put the phone down, and I waited, wondering if she was looking through an appointment book and assigning me a time next week when her husband might already be in jail.

  “Two o’clock,” she said, startling me.

  “Today?”

  “If you can make it. Do you know where Neiman Marcus is in White Plains?”

  I gulped. The very idea of Neiman Marcus made me tremble. “Approximately,” I said.

  “I’ll be on the third floor, in the gift department. It’s a small store. We’ll find each other.”

  Before I could say anything else, she hung up.

  “Why don’t you treat yourself to something special?” Jack said when I told him.

  “Please,” I said. “I’m already a nervous wreck just thinking about walking through an expensive store. Remember ‘Lead me not into temptation’?”

  “Chris, maybe it’s time you let yourself be tempted.”

  “I can’t afford it.”

  “Sure you can. Buy yourself a lipstick. How much can that be? I bet they put it in a nice bag.”

  I shooed him away. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. If Eddie gets up—”

  “I know, I know. Calm down. You’re more nervous about where you’re going than what you’re going to do.”

  It was true. I looked at my watch, grabbed my bag, and started for the door.

  “Open a charge account,” Jack called after me.

  The store had told me on the phone how to get there, and I made only one wrong turn that led me astray. I was in their parking garage by a quarter to two and on the escalator to the first floor a few minutes later. I didn’t want to be early so I got off and walked through the men’s department. There were beautiful ties on a table in an array of colors. That would make a great gift for Jack, a tie that would tell the world he was an attorney-at-law. I picked one up that had mostly blues in a neat pattern and turned it over. The tag said sixty dollars. I swallowed, the tie still aloft in my frozen hand. Did I live in a world where men’s ties cost sixty dollars?

  Carefully, because I knew how valuable it was, I put it back where it came from and moved slightly away from the table. I had never bought Jack a tie in the nearly three years we were married although we had shopped together several times and I had helped him select some.

  “May I help you?”

  I looked toward the voice, a youngish man in a dark suit with a beautiful tie against his white shirt. I shook my head. “No thanks,” I managed to say. “I have to be upstairs in three minutes.”

  “Come back when you have time.”

  I wondered if I would ever have time for a sixty-dollar tie.

  I rode the escalator up to three and found myself looking at what I supposed was the gift department. There were large hand-painted plates in wonderful colors, shimmering crystal vases and plates that looked almost too heavy to lift, place settings of china framed by shiny silverware, and beautiful table linens. Most of what Jack and I used had belonged to Aunt Meg and I had never thought of replacing it. If ties were sixty dollars, what must these household articles cost and how could anyone afford to get married nowadays?

  I shook my head to clear it of these irrelevant and expensive thoughts and walked around till I spotted Robin Horowitz. She looked up from a table of pottery and saw me. I walked over.

  “Where’s the baby?” she asked.

  “He’s home with his father. It’s his nap time.”

  “Oh.” She seemed disappointed, as though she had made the appointment just to see Eddie.

  “Please tell me why you visited Arthur Wien in his apartment.”

  “It was a personal matter that concerned only Arthur and myself.”

  “And someone else?” I asked.

  She looked very concerned, her forehead lined, her mouth set. “Perhaps.”

  “The wife of one of the Morris Avenue Boys?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Have the police questioned you about this yet?”

  “No.”

  “It isn’t worth getting into trouble with the police over this,” I said.

  “A confidence is a confidence. And what makes you think that everything I do concerns my husband’s friends? I know plenty of people outside that group, many more than I know inside it.”

  “People who also know Arthur Wien?”

  “I am a member of a library support group. What makes you think I wasn’t asking him to speak to our group?”

  “Then what’s the secret?” I asked. “And why several visits to his home? Don’t you make arrangements like that on the phone?”

  She picked up a piece of pottery and held it in f
ront of her, as though appraising it. “It’s a room with a lot of beige and pale yellow. How would that be on the wall?”

  “Lovely,” I said. “It’s a beautiful piece.”

  “I think so too.”

  “Mrs. Horowitz.”

  She laid the large plate on the table. “I served as a mediator,” she said. “There was a problem between Arthur and another person. It was impossible for them to talk about it face to face or any other way. I helped arrange a settlement.”

  “Was it a woman he had had an affair with?”

  “I’ve said all I’m going to say. You know as much about it as I’m going to tell you. Arthur is dead but the other party is still alive. That’s it.”

  “Why you?”

  “Why not me? I’ve done counseling for years; I suppose you didn’t know that. I knew the parties involved, I liked them, I wanted to save their feelings for each other as much as was possible. When I was asked, I stepped in.” She picked up the plate and looked around, signaling a saleswoman who was nearby. “I’ll take this,” she said. “I’ll need it gift wrapped.” She took out a credit card as the woman took the plate from her.

  “That’s it, Chris. I’m done here and we’ve spoken for the last time.”

  “What will you tell the police when they ask?”

  “I haven’t thought about that yet. Probably nothing. I know nothing that can help them.” She looked at her watch. “Kiss the baby for me.”

  On my way out, I avoided the men’s shop.

  23

  “What do you pay for your ties?” I asked Jack later that afternoon when the three of us were outside, Jack rolling a ball to Eddie across the grass and Eddie attempting to return it, giving Jack most of the exercise.

  “I don’t know. Depends what I’m going to wear it for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I spent a lot for the tie I wore to our wedding. I spend a lot less for ties that I wear around the squad room.”

  “I saw a tie for sixty dollars at Neiman Marcus.”

  He grinned at me. “Well, it’s a pretty pricey place. I’ve never spent that. You feel better?”