Yom Kippur Murder

by Lee Harris

  Sofa cushions had been lifted and not put back precisely in place; bedding was somewhat awry; dresser drawers had been opened and not completely closed. I pulled open one drawer and saw that the contents had been pushed around—but, of course, I had no idea how neat Nathan had been.

  Since closets seemed the likeliest place to keep valuables, I went around opening them and looking inside. They, too, showed a kind of mild disarray, but nothing pointing to a thorough search.

  I tried to think why the killer would not have searched the apartment immediately after the murder. If he had wanted something from Nathan, that would have been the time to look for it. If he had found out later that Nathan had something of value, why kill him in the first place? It didn’t make sense.

  I knew I should be calling the police instead of looking around a crime scene, but it seemed an opportune time to go through the apartment without police or family observing me. Before starting, I went to the kitchen, where a pair of yellow rubber gloves hung over the side of a plastic bucket under the sink. Nathan had done whatever cleaning up he did while wearing them, and they would keep my fingerprints from being found on his possessions, assuming the police intended to dust the apartment or its contents a second time.

  I started in the living room. Except for the bloodstains and the disfiguring hole in the wall, it looked exactly as I had seen it on the several occasions that I had visited the apartment. If something was missing, it certainly wasn’t obvious. The kitchen, too, looked intact. The ever-present bottle of Lysol stood beside the sink, testimony to Nathan’s belief that it would prevent almost anything contagious if squirted generously. The dishes were all stacked in the cabinets. One water glass with fingerprint powder still clinging to it stood on the drain board. There were stains and dust, but no fingerprints.

  The bathroom was also in order. A second bottle of Lysol was on the floor under that sink. Toothbrushes and toothpaste lay in their usual places. The medicine chest was ajar, but I could not remember seeing it after the police were here, and it was always possible they had looked inside and not closed the mirrored door.

  The master bedroom was in some disarray. The bed was no longer neatly made. Drawers were not flush. I pulled one drawer after another open and moved my hands around inside. I felt nothing but the softness of underwear, socks, and ties. All of Nathan’s shirts were sent to be laundered, and now they lay in their plastic wrappings, folded around their cardboards, occupying one whole drawer. I closed it.

  An old wind-up alarm clock stood on one night table, frozen at 4:37—A.M. or P.M., it didn’t matter anymore for its owner. On his last day of life, Nathan had not wound it. In the drawer, held together with a rubber band, were many months’ worth of bank statements. Nathan maintained a rather large balance in his checking account, more than twenty-three thousand dollars on the most recent statement. I had learned only in the last months how to handle a checking account myself, never having had any money at my disposal. I put the statements back and looked in the drawer in the other night table. There were several softcover books there, probably nocturnal reading. One, I noticed, was a collection of poetry that we had talked about early in September. I felt touched that he had bought it at my recommendation.

  I pulled one of the cartons out of the closet. A cord fell from it. It must have been tied before the police or the intruder had opened it. Inside, like the contents of a personal time capsule, were a lifetime’s worth of photographs and snapshots. I looked in the top album. There were the pictures of Nathan’s second family, his second life. A young woman held a baby, and a little boy, almost certainly Mitchell at about three, stood next to her, clutching her coat. Although the background was not very clear, I guessed it was Riverside Park.

  I flipped through the pages, watching the children grow. Under the album was a group of Playbills from long-ago plays, and under them, the kinds of awards children get in school. Mitchell had gotten a math prize; Nina had been awarded a poetry prize.

  He could hardly have hated them, I thought, if he kept all these things.

  A second carton had binders of papers, the kinds of things people hold on to so they’ll have warranties if an appliance breaks down or whatever it is you need to fill out your tax forms. (I had that pleasure ahead of me, a first I wasn’t especially looking forward to.)

  The second carton hadn’t been tied, or if it had, there was no sign of the cord on it or on the closet floor. I pushed both cartons back, took a look through the clothes on the rack and the things on the shelf, and left the room.

  The study, as Mitchell had told me when we came in together on Monday morning, had once been his bedroom, so there was a closet there, too. A few clothes hung in it, but mostly it was used to store old papers. Each of these cartons had been untied. I looked in the nearest one and saw that it contained records for Nathan’s business, which had been called Sleep House and had an address on Broadway. I wrote down the address, pushed the carton back in, and looked through the others. It was all very dull.

  There were several unmatched bookcases in the study, one with glass doors that locked. The key was in the lock and I turned it, opened the doors, and looked at the books. A man who leaves a key in a glass-fronted bookcase is not hiding anything, but I looked anyway. Most of the books were in English, but some were in French, German, and what looked like a Slavic language that I did not recognize.

  The other bookcases had books that were probably less costly. Volumes were crowded on the shelves, many stacked horizontally over the ones standing vertically. Even the tops of the bookcases had been called into service. There Nathan’s paperbacks lay, piled one on top of the other in rows. They indicated an interest in philosophy, archaeology, logic, and politics. Like the educated man he had been, Nathan had never stopped learning.

  I had been in this room only on the day we had discovered Nathan’s body. Usually Nathan and I had sat in the kitchen over lunch or in the living room with tea. Had I been in this room previously, I surely would have asked him a lot of questions I did not think of asking without seeing his choice of books.

  The last thing in the room was the desk. I sat at it and pulled open the top center drawer. There seemed nothing of interest there, no keys, no notes. I went through the three left-hand drawers, starting at the top. In the bottom drawer I found an envelope of snapshots. I wondered why they had been kept separate from the ones in the carton in the closet, but I didn’t want to spend too much time looking. I was getting a little nervous about being there. So I put the envelope in my handbag and started on the right-hand drawers.

  The top drawer gave me a start. When I had opened it last Saturday, the leather address book had been the first thing I saw. Today it was noticeably absent. I ran my rubber-gloved hand around the drawer, pulling bits of paper forward, but there was no book. What I did find was the triangular scrap of envelope with Nina Passman’s address and telephone number on it. Someone had removed the book, and the little scrap of paper had fallen out.

  I was about to pull out the second drawer when I heard voices. They were low and indistinct, but definitely two different ones. That was all I needed, to be found here by the police. If they arrested me, Arnold would kill me, but he would defend me. And Jack—I really wasn’t sure what he would do, and I was perfectly content not to find out. I leaped out of the chair and ran for the kitchen, dropped the rubber gloves in the bucket, and walked into the hallway. I was still wearing my coat, so it would look as though I had just walked in—I hoped.

  “Hey, Dick, lookee here,” a man’s voice said, and it came to me that if these were cops, they would not push a door open and call politely to see who was inside. They might well come in with guns drawn and nerves taut, ready to fire at anything that set them off.

  I ducked back into the kitchen to stay out of the line of fire—just in case.

  The door opened very quietly, and the men moved down the hallway as though they wanted to surprise whoever might be inside. There was no talk now, just a sligh
t scraping sound. I wasn’t going to be surprised, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t get myself shot either.

  “Hello,” I called. I waited to make sure my voice had registered before venturing out of the kitchen to face two plainclothes cops with guns drawn. “Hi,” I said.

  “Bennett,” Franciotti said without concealing his annoyance.

  “That’s me.”

  He holstered his gun. “What the hell are you doing in a crime scene? You got the key to this place?”

  “No. The door was ajar when I got here, and I thought you might be inside. Someone broke in.” I walked to the living room, and they followed me.

  “Shit,” the other one said.

  “Musta come over the roof from the next building,” Franciotti said, and I realized he was right. Nathan’s fire escape was on the street, where someone climbing would be visible night or day.

  The second cop had left us and was looking through the rooms. Now he returned. “Maybe he wanted a warm place to stay, Dick. Don’t look like he did much.”

  “Would you know if anything’s missing?” Franciotti asked.

  “I’m not sure. It looks pretty much the same as it did on Saturday.”

  I could see he wasn’t altogether happy with my presence there. “OK. Can I ask you to leave now and not come back until we’ve finished our investigation?”

  “I’m on my way.” I gave what I hoped was a winning smile and left the apartment.

  This time I felt safe going downstairs. Two of New York’s finest were on the premises.

  10

  The thing I didn’t know was whether the police had taken the address book or the intruder had. If the intruder had it, there was a good chance that his name and address were listed in it. That would certainly explain why the apartment had not been tossed. If someone who knew Nathan had killed him, the killer wouldn’t expect the address book to be hidden in a carton of photographs or sewn into a sofa cushion.

  I couldn’t ask Franciotti without letting him know I had been snooping. But Jack might be able to find out what the police had taken from the apartment last Saturday. I thought of going down to Gallagher’s and calling from there, but Gallagher worried about the price of everything, and a call to Brooklyn was more message units than he would want to squander. Nor could I offer to pay for the call without hurting his feelings.

  I walked over to Broadway and called from the phone booth in the coffee shop. Jack wasn’t there, and no one knew when he’d be back. I didn’t bother leaving a message.

  I pulled out my list of mourners and called the next one down after Hillel Greenspan, a couple named Zilman. A woman answered. I told her I was looking into the death of Nathan Herskovitz and could I come over and talk to her.

  “It’s my husband you want,” she said, “and he’s out for his walk.”

  “May I come over and wait?”

  “No. I don’t let anyone in if my husband isn’t here.”

  “I’ll call later,” I said, and hung up, wondering how dangerous I sounded over the phone. I pulled another quarter out of my purse and called the next number on my list.

  The man who answered, H. K. Granite, according to the book, wanted nothing to do with me. When I said I wanted to ask him some questions and could I come over, he said, “Ask them now over the phone.”

  “I’m calling from a pay phone, Mr. Granite. I could be at your apartment in ten minutes.”

  “I don’t know anything. Didn’t I hear they arrested someone?”

  “I think it’s the wrong man.”

  “Look, Miss—”

  “I won’t take much of your time. Ten minutes, OK?”

  He said, “Ahh,” in disgust, and hung up.

  I didn’t know whether that was a yes or no, but I decided to give it a try. He lived in the Nineties, and I was in the Seventies, so I flagged a cab and rode up. I could have taken the subway, but sometimes you wait ten minutes for a train, and when you travel off rush hour, it can get a little spooky. I mean, I look at those able-bodied men and I wonder why they aren’t at work somewhere.

  The taxi dropped me in front of an apartment house between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. There was a Granite listed at apartment 4E. I rang.

  A voice came over the intercom, and I identified myself. He buzzed me in, and I took the elevator up to four.

  The apartment could easily have doubled as an art gallery. Every possible space on the walls was covered with a painting, and sculptures stood on pedestals and tables everywhere.

  I thanked him for letting me in, and he grudgingly pointed to a chair in the living room. What distinguished him from all the other people at the funeral was his comparative youth. I didn’t think he was more than seventy, considerably younger than Nathan’s other cronies.

  He lit his pipe with the kind of care pipe smokers take and said, “I don’t know the first thing about Nathan’s death. I opened the Times on Monday, I saw the obituary, I went to the funeral. If you came up here just to hear that, you could have heard it over the phone.”

  “How long did you know Nathan?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Forty, forty-five years.”

  “You met him in New York?”

  “In the late forties. We were all part of a group.”

  “What kind of group?”

  “Old countrymen. We shared a language and a background. We had dinner together at this one’s apartment, that one’s apartment. We talked, we laughed, we made new lives.”

  “Who was in the group?”

  He rattled off names, most of which I had on my list. After some he added, “He’s gone now,” or “She died years ago.”

  “Did you know Mrs. Herskovitz?”

  “Of course I knew her. He came to dinner, she came to dinner.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She was a nice woman.”

  “I’ve heard she was sick.”

  His lips pursed, his shoulders moved. “I never heard that.”

  “She committed suicide.”

  “Some people couldn’t adjust.”

  He sounded very offhand, as if he couldn’t care less. If you couldn’t adjust, you committed suicide. Simple as that.

  “Did you know Nathan had a wife and children in Europe who didn’t survive the war?”

  “Miss Bennett, I’m not a gossip, and I don’t enjoy dredging up people’s old sorrows. A lot of people lost families during the war. They did the best they could to repair their lives. If Nathan had a family that didn’t make it, well, he did what he could.”

  “Was he a good husband, Mr. Granite?”

  “A good husband,” he repeated. “What do you know about Nathan Herskovitz? Yes, he was a good husband. He was nice to her, he took her places, they had a good time. Anything else?”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill him?”

  “Hah!” It was a loud, mirthless laugh. “Go see Zilman. He’ll tell you.”

  Zilman was the name of the man I had tried this morning, whose wife would not allow me in. I told Granite what had happened.

  “I’ll call him myself. He’ll open his arms to you. It’s his favorite story.” He got up and went into the kitchen, and I heard him making the call. There were a lot of pleasantries, inquiries about health, finally an introduction to my visit. When he got off the phone, Granite was all smiles. “Go,” he said. “He’s waiting.”

  I thanked him, gave him my phone number, and left, wondering whether he had done this just to get rid of me. Whether he had or not, the Zilman story was the most interesting one I had heard to date.

  Mordechai Zilman was a short man with a white beard that covered the knot of his tie. It didn’t cover the gold chain across his vest from which dangled what I took to be a Phi Beta Kappa key. When we were seated in his living room, he instructed his wife to bring fruit, which proved to be a godsend. It was two o’clock and I hadn’t had lunch yet.

  “So you want to hear about Herskovitz and the sacred text,” Mr.
Zilman said when the fruit bowl had been placed in front of me with napkins, a glass plate, and a little knife.

  “I want to hear anything that might suggest a reason why he was killed.”

  “I can’t tell you why he was killed. I can tell you why he was hated.”

  “Please,” I said, reaching for an apple.

  “In the last months before Nathan Herskovitz went the way of his brethren in Europe, he became a broker of human life. If you could pay for it, he could get you a document so perfect, it would make the real one look fake. He could make a German into a Frenchman, a young man into an older one, a clerk into a supervisor. So people got to freedom, and Nathan Herskovitz got rich.”

  There was a pompous ring to what he said, and I found myself resenting his tone. I liked Nathan, and I sensed I wasn’t hearing the most unbiased report of his prewar activities.

  “What happened to all the money?” I asked.

  “I’m not his banker,” Zilman snapped. “Maybe it’s in Switzerland. Maybe he left it with someone he considered a friend only to find in 1945 that the Jews had no friends.”

  “How was he able to accomplish these miracles, Mr. Zilman?”

  “As I said, he was a broker. He did nothing himself. He found people to do the work. There are forgers who are very good at their trade. As it turns out, Herskovitz had defended one once and got him off with a light sentence. That was the man who made the documents.”

  “That’s probably where the money went then,” I said.

  Zilman stared at me for a good half minute. It was clear he wasn’t used to being contradicted. He turned to his wife, who sat timidly on a dining chair just outside the living room. “Some water,” he said, and she stood and disappeared into the kitchen.

  I wondered how many decades this little woman had put up with this diminutive tyrant.

  “Like other people whose main interest in life is money,” Zilman continued as his wife brought a tray with two glasses and a blue glass bottle that produced fizzy water when she squeezed a gadget on top, “Herskovitz took better care of his possessions than he did of his family. He was a collector of rare editions. How many he had, I don’t know, but surely a substantial number. To lose them would be a catastrophe for the literate world, and to leave them behind was to lose them. So he gave them away.”