by Lee Harris
Mitchell smiled. “So many things, I’d have trouble remembering them all.”
We dropped the conversation briefly while we ate, and I tried to talk about other things. He showed me pictures of his family and said how much more he enjoyed living in Atlanta than in New York.
“Is 603 the building you grew up in?” I asked after a while. “The one your father lived in?”
“That’s the only home he ever had in this country, except for some little place we stayed in when we first came over. I don’t remember it at all. My earliest memories are Riverside Park and Broadway. My mother and I used to walk there. On a nice day everyone you knew would be out. Sometimes she’d take me to children’s concerts on a Saturday, and every year we’d go to the circus together. She was a lovely person, a wonderful mother.”
“I lost my mother, too, when I was quite young. In some ways I never stopped missing her.”
“I try to do for my children what she did for me. Except my wife and I do it together.”
“You said your father regarded most of the world as his enemy. Could someone out there have been a real enemy with a reason to kill him?”
“How could I know that? I haven’t seen him in years. I don’t know anything about him anymore. It’s a surprise to me that someone like you knows more about him today than I do.”
“How long has it been since you last saw him?” I asked it quietly, knowing it was none of my business but wanting to know. In the months I had known Nathan Herskovitz, we had talked a great deal, but never once had he mentioned a son, a daughter, a wife, or a life in another country.
“In 1979 my company offered me a promotion if I transferred to Atlanta. My wife and I were ready for a move. We had two small children and an apartment that was bursting at the seams. We were young. We thought this move was just what we needed. I told Pop, and he said …” He drank from his water glass. “He said, ‘A son doesn’t desert his father.’ Just that. ‘A son doesn’t desert his father.’ ”
“Your mother had died by then.”
“Long before that.”
“So you did what was best for your family, and he blamed you for deserting.”
“That’s about the way it was.” He drank more water. He was more emotional at that moment than he had been at any other time.
I gave him time to recover and then asked, “Had you been friends with him up to that time?”
“I wouldn’t say we were friends. It was hard to be friends with my father. But we got along. We saw each other. We weren’t—estranged.”
We were drinking coffee by then, and I wanted to start for home. I had declined alcohol because of the drive I had ahead of me, but I am by nature a morning person, and I fade after dark.
“I’ll call the other two tenants in your father’s building. I’m sure they’d like to be at the funeral. Ian Gallagher and Mrs. Paterno,” I added.
“I think I remember Gallagher,” he said.
“They spent a lot of time together. If they weren’t friends, they were at least very good acquaintances.”
“I was able to get an obituary notice in the Times and the Daily News for tomorrow. It’ll be interesting to see who turns up. Knowing my father’s cronies of years ago, that’s the page they turn to first.”
“Will your sister be there?” I asked.
“She will. And probably Gordon as well.”
I looked at my watch. “Be sure to call if you need anything at all.”
“I will. This has really been very illuminating. And pleasant. We’ll meet at ten tomorrow then.”
I promised him I would be there. Then I drove him back to his hotel and returned to Oakwood.
5
After fifteen years of waking up at 5:00 A.M. for chapel, I am an early riser. I manage to sleep a little longer than that nowadays, and it gets easier as the days grow shorter and the sun rises later, but I was up by six Monday morning. I started the day with a brisk walk, something I will have to give up when the weather gets cold. My neighbor, Melanie, who introduced me to Mark, was not around, but I had no doubt I’d hear from her soon for a report on our Saturday night date. I had intended to call her, but I had come home too late last night.
Jack knows he can reach me in the morning. Just this month he had started his first of what would be four long years of law school at night, so there wasn’t much opportunity for evening talk. When the phone rang at eight-thirty, I guessed it might be him, and I was pleased. We hadn’t spoken for a while; he was kind of put out when I said I wanted to slow down our fast-moving relationship. Now, having neither seen nor spoken to him for over a week, I was having second thoughts.
“You mind my calling?” he asked with more hesitancy than I had ever heard before.
“Uh-uh. I miss you.”
“Well, that’s good news.”
“How are you?”
“I’m OK. Tired. The reading for my course is unbelievable. You don’t do that to your students, do you?”
“No, but I don’t equip them for the bar either.”
“Chris, I want to see you. Are we playing games or is it all over or what?”
“I want to see you, too,” I said, ignoring his questions.
“Like when?”
“Like whenever you want.”
I swear he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Maybe this weekend,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You doing OK?”
“I’m fine. I really do miss you.”
“We’ll do something Saturday.” After he said that, I heard his voice and manner change. “I saw something in the paper yesterday, a murder over on the West Side of Manhattan. Was that one of your guys?”
“Yes. One of the other tenants and I found the body.” I explained briefly what I was doing there.
“I told you that wasn’t a nice place to spend your free time. Those landlords are brutal when they want to renovate and they have holdouts.”
“You think it was the landlord?”
“Looks like it. I just talked to a friend of mine at that precinct. They made an arrest overnight, guy named Ramirez, has a sheet a mile long. He’s been connected to Metropolitan Properties in the past.”
“It’s hard for me to believe people can be that cruel.”
“They can. They are. I know you don’t like to listen to well-meant warnings, but I wish you’d be careful. Like don’t go back there. There are other Ramirezes in Metropolitan’s stable.”
“I have to go, Jack. Gallagher really counts on me, the way Nathan Herskovitz did. Mrs. Paterno is another story, but I’d like to try to convince them both to get out, even if it means accepting a moral defeat.”
“There’s more at stake here than a moral defeat.”
“The sergeant said they’d have the police cars drive around the block for a while. It should be safe.”
“Why do I even talk to you? When I hear myself, I sound so damned reasonable. You know, next time you get yourself mixed up in something, I may not be around with an army to bail you out.” A reference to the last time, when I had thought I would end up dead.
“I’ll be as careful as I can. I’m going into the city in a little while. Arnold Gold arranged for the police to open the apartment for Mr. Herskovitz’s son. I want to be there.”
“It won’t be pretty, Chris, and it won’t smell too good. Cops don’t clean up. My friend said it was pretty bloody.”
“It was. But Nathan’s son wants to get in before he goes home to Atlanta, and I want to look around, too. I’m not convinced your guy Ramirez did it. I talked to Nathan’s son yesterday, and Nathan wasn’t the sweet old man he seemed tobe.”
“Sounds like you’re off and running.” He didn’t sound entirely happy.
“I don’t know, but maybe.”
We agreed to keep in touch and hung up. It was nearly nine now, and although it was less than an hour to Manhattan, I needed extra time to find a place to park. I put on my new raincoat and set off.
Mitchell Herskovitz was waiting outside the building when I arrived. A minute or two before ten, a car pulled up at the curb. I could see Franciotti inside and another man wearing a suit in the front, but it was a young, uniformed policeman who got out of the backseat. He introduced himself as Officer Schuyler, and we entered the building together.
“I understand an arrest has been made,” I said as we walked through the lobby.
“No kiddin’,” Officer Schuyler said. “I didn’t hear nothin’ so far. You know who it was?”
“Someone named Ramirez.”
“Oh yeah?” he said, his voice tipping up. “They got HeyZeus for this?” That’s exactly how he pronounced it, slightly stressing the Zeus part.
I must admit to a feeling of depression whenever I hear of someone with that name being arrested for a crime. I think of the man’s mother naming her baby son after the Lord himself only to see him end up like this. “You know who he is?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. Real dirtbag. Been around for a long time. We thought he started some fires here a while ago, but we didn’t have enough to nail him for it. Maybe now we got him good.”
“I hope so,” I said without enthusiasm.
Schuyler pulled open the door to the stairs and started up.
“I don’t believe this,” Mitchell said. “This is how my father lived?”
“The elevators stopped running a long time ago, and even Arnold Gold couldn’t get them going again. He was able to get the lights back on and the water running.”
“My God,” Mitchell breathed.
“Can you make it up to five?”
“I’m in very good shape,” he said, although he seemed to be laboring.
The policeman had been holding a flashlight down and behind him to light our way. Since coming to see my tenants, I carried one in my bag, too.
“My God,” Mitchell said again. “How do people live here?”
“There are three oases where life goes on more or less as usual. It’s just getting to and from them that’s a bit unpleasant.”
“A bit unpleasant,” he echoed softly.
We had reached the Herskovitz apartment. The door was sealed shut with yellow tape a couple of inches wide. I could see where it had been signed, dated, and timed. The name may have been “Sgt. Franciotti,” but it wasn’t written for easy legibility. The date was September 29, and the time looked like 1835, probably military time for 6:35 P.M. The cops had been there for a good long time on Saturday.
“Listen, folks, I hafta warn you,” Office Schuyler said, “you’re entering a crime scene. Please try to avoid touching anything, OK? The crime scene guys or the detectives may need to come back, and they don’t want any evidence tampered with.” He said it all as though he were reading it from a prompt card. He took a key chain out of his pocket, found a small pocket razor knife, and cut the tape. Then he inserted first the Segal key and then the key to the lower lock, pushed the door hard, and pulled the tape away as the door opened.
I followed him in. Mitchell stopped at the study, the first room on the right. “That was my room once,” he said. He paused again at the second bedroom, where his parents had slept, but he said nothing. We continued down the hall. I had a terrible feeling of déjà vu, of following Mrs. Paterno on Saturday morning, of hearing her scream.
When we were near the living room, which was slightly around a corner and not visible from the hall, Officer Schuyler said, “I gotta warn you, Mr. Herskovitz, it’s not a pretty sight in there.”
I followed him in, knowing what I would see but unprepared nevertheless. The beautiful Oriental carpet that covered the floor had been soaked with Nathan’s blood. The chalk mark that had been drawn around his body was remarkably small. His body had crumpled, not fallen flat. Hardly anything in the room had been spared the splattering of his blood. The walls, the furniture, the precious objects he kept on the tables, all were marked. His hat still lay where it had rolled when he fell dead.
I turned to look at Mitchell, who had been only a few steps behind me. His face was ashen, and he had started to weep.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the policeman said, and I felt myself warm to him.
I touched Mitchell’s arm. “Would you like to sit down in the kitchen?”
“No. I’m fine.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. “What’s all that white stuff?” he asked.
“That?” Schuyler said, pointing. “Fingerprint powder. You’ll find it all over, light powder for the dark surfaces and dark powder for the light ones. See, it’s the way the fingerprints show up. They dusted the whole apartment.”
“It’s the pictures I want.”
“I guess that’s OK. I’ll make an inventory list. You sign in my book and I’ll have Ms.—uh—Bennett witness it and sign, too. Then I’ll get Sergeant Franciotti to sign later.”
Mitchell went to a round table that stood beside an arm-chair. The surface was covered with a mass of framed black-and-white photos dating way back. Some were that sepia tone you see in old pictures sometimes. He picked one up and stared at it, then another, then another. His head was shaking slowly as though something incomprehensible had happened to him.
“This isn’t my mother,” he said. “This isn’t Nina. This isn’t New York. Who the hell are these people?”
I walked over and looked at the photos he was holding. The woman was young and wearing an out-of-date dress and a hat. “I assumed—” I started to say.
He turned the oval frame over, opened the clasps on the back, and pulled out the photo of the woman. In a very European hand, the kind of writing Nathan used, was written: “Renata, Leipzig, 1933.” He put the photo and frame down and opened a frame with a picture of a boy and girl. The same handwriting labeled it, “Heinz, 4 Jahre, Karolla, 2 Jahre, 1939.”
“I don’t believe this,” Mitchell said. He walked to another table, scanned the pictures there, picked one up, and looked at it closely. The man in it was a young Nathan, bespectacled, in a double-breasted suit. Beside him was the young woman of the other pictures. She was wearing a suit, a hat, and a fur piece over her shoulders. The head of one little mink could be clearly seen fastened to another piece of fur. In her hands she held a small bouquet of white flowers. If anything looked like a wedding picture, that did. Mitchell turned it over. It was dated March 10, 1933. “He had another family,” Mitchell said, his voice ringing with misery. “He had a wife and two children that he never told us about.”
“They must have died during the war,” I said.
“But to keep it a secret. To drag out these pictures when I was no longer welcome in his home— How the hell did he get them through the war anyway? And my mother. There isn’t a single picture of her here. It’s as if we were the ones that died and they were the ones that lived.” He looked dangerously pale.
“Come sit in the kitchen, and I’ll give you a glass of water.”
“I need something stronger than that.” He followed me into the kitchen. “Over the refrigerator. There should be something there.”
There was—several bottles of whiskey. I took one down and poured some into a glass. Mitchell drank it in two gulps. As he sat at the old table where Nathan and I had spent many pleasant hours talking, his color returned. “He had two separate lives,” he said reflectively, “a good one and a bad one. And I was part of the bad one.”
“Don’t look at it that way. There was a war, and there was a time before and a time after.”
“What my mother had to live through,” he went on. “That bastard. That damned bastard. He treated her like dirt when she was alive, and he threw her memory away when she was dead.”
“Do you want to look for pictures of your mother? They might be put away in a closet.”
“Not now. I don’t think I can take any more of my father right now. I’ll have to come back anyway when they open up the apartment. I don’t think Nina wants to set foot in here. My wife and I’ll have to take care of it. Let’s go.”
&nb
sp; Office Schuyler was standing just outside the doorway to the kitchen. “Had enough?” he asked.
“I think we’re ready to go,” I said. “Tell me, Officer, this Ramirez, how would he have gotten in?”
“Not too hard. He could’ve hid in one of the apartments on the floor and waited for the victim to come home.”
“But the door is locked downstairs.”
Schuyler smiled at my naïveté. “You wanna get in, you get in. Jesus coulda got the key from the landlord. You can be sure he didn’t do this on his own.”
We walked back to the door and waited while Schuyler locked it and, after filling in all the lines and captions, re-taped it with fresh tape. As we went down the hall to the stairs, Mitchell shivered, although it wasn’t particularly cold. At the stairwell I told him I would meet him downstairs in a little while, and I went up to tell Mrs. Paterno where the funeral was. Then I went down and did the same for Gallagher.
When I reached the ground floor, I saw Mitchell Herskovitz through the window in the door. He was looking down the street toward Riverside Park as though wondering how all of this had come to pass.
6
Mitchell and I arrived at the funeral home at one-thirty, half an hour before the funeral was due to start.
“You’d better wear one of these,” he said, taking a black lacy circle from the top of a pile and handing it to me. “To cover your head,” he explained.
I found a dish of hat pins and fastened the veil to my hair.
“And please sign the book. I want the family to know you were here.”
Someone named Hillel Greenspan with an address on Riverside Drive had signed the first line. After I filled in my name and address, I joined Mitchell in a comfortable lounge room with sofas and chairs. An old man was sitting on one of the sofas, his cane held upright between his legs, talking to Mitchell. During lunch, Mitchell had recovered sufficiently that he felt able to put aside what he had learned that morning about his father and converse with the mourners. He told me that he still felt numb and he didn’t look forward to enlightening his sister later that day, but he would get through this.