Yom Kippur Murder

by Lee Harris

  “I remember when Mrs. Herskovitz died. Everyone in the building knew what had happened. She was one of many people I knew by sight.” She stubbed out her cigarette, reached for the pack, but didn’t light another. “I don’t think we ever said anything to each other.” Now she paused and lit a new cigarette, took a few puffs, and set it in an ashtray.

  “I had come home early that day, the day we met,” she continued. “Mr. Herskovitz was standing at the mailboxes, just standing, looking down. He wore a hat and an overcoat. It was as if he didn’t know where he was or what was happening. I felt afraid. I thought he was ill. I said something to him: ‘Are you all right?’ Then I recognized him. He was the man whose wife had died. I said, ‘You’re Mr. Herskovitz, aren’t you?’ He nodded his head. He was a good-looking man in those days. I am not an impetuous person, but I put my hand on his arm and I said, ‘Come up to my apartment. I’ll make you some coffee.’ He shook his head, but he didn’t look as though he meant it. He didn’t look as though he had any purpose at all. I said something else to him, ‘Come for a little while,’ or something like that, and he came. I unlocked the door downstairs, we took the elevator, we went up to my apartment.

  “I made coffee and we sat in the living room—” she looked around “—right here, and we talked. He said how nice it was that I had invited him. He had come home early to be home when his daughter got home from school. Since his wife died, he had had problems with the little girl. He was worried about her. I think she had found her mother dead.”

  “She did,” I said, remembering Nina’s story.

  “Such a terrible thing.” She puffed thoughtfully on her cigarette. “We talked. Finally he looked at his watch and said he had to go. He put his coat and hat back on, as though he had just come in from outside. I felt so sorry for him, a man in his fifties, a wife who had committed suicide, all the responsibilities of the home now on his shoulders. I said if he ever wanted to talk to somebody, he should give me a call, come up, bring his daughter. After all, we both had daughters about the same age. I had no thought beyond a little friendly conversation, a cup of coffee.”

  She stopped, and I thought of the circle Nathan had been part of, all those people from Seventy-second Street up to Columbia who surely opened their hearts and their hospitality to him when he needed it. He didn’t lack for company. What he needed was a woman in his life, and there were no available women in the circle.

  “What happened?” I asked quietly.

  She closed her eyes and shook her head very slightly. “It happened differently,” she said with her eyes closed. “He never came with his daughter, he never came when my daughter was home. We would arrange to meet in the afternoon, here.” She closed her eyes again briefly. “We became lovers.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?” She looked at me with her very dark eyes.

  “Is that when he gave you the key to his apartment?”

  “He gave me a key so that someone in the building would have it in case of trouble. I don’t think he ever told his children I had it.”

  “How long did it last, Mrs. Paterno?”

  “We have had a relationship of sorts since that time.”

  “I think he must have been a wonderful man to be close to,” I said.

  “He was. I only wish …”

  I looked at her, willing her to go on.

  “My daughter came home one day and found us—together,” she said in a voice so low, I could barely hear her. “It was one of those days when the school closed early. I had forgotten. Perhaps I had stopped thinking about things like that.” As she spoke, she started idly to pull pins from her hair, hairpins, I supposed; I couldn’t really see them, but I could hear them as they dropped on a glass plate beside her. “She never forgave me.”

  I heard the tick, tick, tick as the pins fell. What an odd and interesting coincidence that was. Both Nathan and Mrs. Paterno had managed to destroy their relationships with their daughters irretrievably, and I wondered if the same reason wasn’t at the bottom of both situations. If Paterno was lying and she and Nathan had begun an affair when Hannah was still alive, that might well have been who Nathan thought about as he sat in his chair during those evenings when Nina felt he had neglected her mother.

  Or—and here I began to have a chilly feeling along my back—perhaps Paterno had been the second affair in Nathan’s life, and the first had been during his marriage. A little while ago I had reflected that there were no available women in the circle. Perhaps he had had an affair with an unavailable woman. That kind of secret would be hard to keep. Hannah would have been sure to find out.…

  As I watched, Mrs. Paterno pulled off the last of the turban and shook out her hair. A surprisingly large mass of black hair streaked with gray fell to her shoulders. I smiled.

  She smiled back. “You like my hair?”

  “It’s magnificent. I don’t know why you keep it wrapped up.”

  “It’s a style,” she said offhandedly, as though that was what we did this year; next year we’ll think of something else.

  “Did you visit Nathan in his apartment?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “You knew the apartment.”

  “I knew it, yes.”

  “The police don’t know what was used to kill him. Do you think if we went downstairs and looked around, you might be able to figure out what’s missing?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You still have the key?”

  She gave me a hard look. “I have it.”

  “Would you mind coming down there with me now?”

  In answer, she stood, gathered her hair in one hand, and left the room. When she returned, her hair was tied girlishly with a purple ribbon. She had her handbag with her. I followed her out to the hall, where we stopped while she locked her locks.

  In Nathan’s apartment she braced herself before entering the living room. Once she was through the archway, tears formed in her eyes. She took an embroidered cloth handkerchief out of her bag and patted her eyes with it.

  “It was something heavy,” I said when she had put the handkerchief away. “It actually dented his skull.”

  “Please,” she said angrily.

  But I had said it for a reason. I wanted to see if she could be tripped up, if her sorrow was an act to persuade me of her innocence.

  She looked around the room. The photographs were all in place. On one wall there was a mantel over a closed-up fireplace that had surely worked when the building was erected in the twenties but that, along with all the others, had been boarded up when it became too expensive to maintain them. There were several fairly lightweight objects spread out on the mantel, which I assumed the police had already examined for blood and whatever else might remain on them if they had been used as a weapon.

  She shook her head as she looked, then went out to the kitchen. “It’s very hard,” she said, looking around. “He could have had a heavy frying pan, a trivet. There are many things in a kitchen that could be used for—violence. I don’t know what he had here.” She walked out into the hall and turned toward the bedroom. I followed her.

  “It looks”—she shook her head—“the same.”

  We went to the study. “I don’t know,” she said, clearly tired of the whole thing. “There could be a hundred things missing and I wouldn’t know.”

  “Thank you anyway,” I said, disappointed.

  “There was no need to kill him,” she said, her voice hollow. “He was sick. He probably had less than a year to live.”

  So he knew and he had told her. Arnold Gold had told me that the autopsy had shown a tumor. Otherwise I would not have known.

  “Mrs. Paterno, can you think of any reason that Nathan would have wanted to confess his sins last week?” I was aware that I was using a Catholic locution, but in this case, I thought it was appropriate.

  Her eyes flared. “After all I’ve told you, you still think that my relationship with him was—”

  “No, I do
n’t,” I interrupted her. “I don’t think it was sinful, and I don’t think Nathan thought it was sinful. I’m looking for something else. He wanted to go to temple on Yom Kippur, and his son told me he had never gone since the war.”

  “He was sorry for what happened between him and his daughter,” she said. “Very sorry. I’m sure he loved her.” Her voice broke as she said it, and I was sure she was thinking of her own daughter.

  “Did he ever give you a book to look after for him?” I asked.

  “What kind of book?”

  “A very old one, hundreds of years old. It was very valuable.”

  “He never gave me anything.”

  I looked at my watch. It had been a long day, and I wanted to get on the road before the northbound traffic built up.

  We walked to the door, and she locked it carefully. As we went to the stairs, I said, “If I can find you a place to live, will you leave this building?”

  “I have no reason to stay anymore,” she said. “I would leave tomorrow.”

  “You have my phone number, don’t you?” I had given it to all three of them when I met them a couple of months ago. Gallagher kept it taped to his refrigerator.

  She pulled a little book out of her bag. “Give it to me again.”

  I tried not to show my irritation as I dictated it. She had obviously tossed it out the first time, sure she would have no use for it.

  We said good-bye on the stairwell and went in opposite directions. My descent was uneventful, and I took a good breath of air as I got out into the street, happy to be safely out of that place. Then I found my car, drove up to Seventy-ninth Street, over to the West Side Highway, and north.

  15

  The beat-up tan wreck didn’t turn up anywhere as I drove. I kept enough of my mind on the road to look for it and insure my safe arrival home, but I was deep in thought all the way. Nathan Herskovitz had had a lover, a woman many years younger than he, a woman who had probably once come across as being quite beautiful, quite exotic, quite desirable. In the most romantic of ways they had met for secret afternoon trysts and thirty years later had still cared enough for each other that they remained in that terrible building, still secretly together.

  A poem by Leigh Hunt that I had run across recently came to mind:

  Jenny kissed me when we met,

  Jumping from the chair she sat in;

  Time, you thief, who love to get

  Sweets into your list, put that in:

  Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

  Say that health and wealth have missed me,

  Say I’m growing old, but add,

  Jenny kissed me.

  Was it that, then? Amelia Paterno as Nathan’s Jenny. I was bothered by the idea, and I was very troubled by Amelia Paterno’s story.

  By changing one small but very important detail, the time they met, I had a motivation for Hannah Herskovitz’s suicide. She could have discovered her husband’s infidelity, felt she could not deal with it, and taken her life. And Nathan, who sat apart from his wife on all those evenings in the fifties, may have been thinking of his lover one flight up whom he could not be with without causing disruption in his family and hers. It fit, but it troubled me.

  Actually, two things troubled me. The first was something that tells you more about me than about the situation I was working on. When someone looks me in the eye and says, “I didn’t do it,” I am strongly inclined to believe him. When a defendant takes the witness stand and speaks in his own defense, I am moved. There is something very powerful about hearing a person declare his innocence. When Mrs. Paterno told me her story, I was strongly inclined to believe it.

  But then there was the other thing. Jack had told me several times that when you work on a murder—he says homicide—you look for means, motive, and opportunity. Mrs. Paterno had a better opportunity than anyone else I could think of—including Jesus Ramirez—to kill Nathan. She had the key to his apartment. She could have been waiting inside when he came home from his bench in the sun. As for means, she could have picked up the weapon, whatever it was, used it, and disposed of it. Why hadn’t she noticed something missing? She must have visited that apartment hundreds of times over the years. I racked my brain to think of some heavy object, a piece of crystal, a lamp that was no longer there, that could have dealt the death blow. But where was the motive? She already knew Nathan would not live out the next year. And if she loved him, if she stayed in that awful building to be near him, why would she kill him?

  “Think, Kix,” I said aloud, but nothing came together.

  When I walked into my house, ready for half an hour with feet up and a look at today’s paper, I opened the door to incipient chaos. The phone was ringing, and I dashed to the kitchen to answer it.

  “Is this Miss Bennett?” a man asked in a less-than-friendly tone.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “This is H. K. Granite.” I had to think a minute. Granite was the “youngster” I had interviewed, the man I judged to be no more than seventy, the one who lived in the apartment crowded with art. “Are you behind these calls I’m getting?” He sounded downright accusatory.

  “What phone calls?” I asked, pulling off my shoes and stretching my toes.

  “You don’t know anything about them?” He was still angry and sounded incredulous.

  “I don’t know what phone calls you’re talking about, and no, I had nothing to do with them, whatever they are.”

  “I see.”

  I didn’t. “You want to tell me about it, Mr. Granite?”

  “I came in this afternoon and there was a message on my machine. A man said, ‘I want the book.’ That was it. About an hour later, he called back. He said he wanted the book and if I didn’t have it, who did?”

  “And you think he was talking about the book Zilman told me about yesterday.”

  “How do I know what book he’s talking about? All I know is you ask who would want to kill Herskovitz, I send you to Zilman to tell you about the Haggadah, and suddenly I’m getting anonymous calls about a book that sound threatening.”

  “Did Nathan give you one of his books to take to the States?”

  “He gave one to my parents.”

  “Your parents,” I repeated.

  “I was fairly young when we emigrated. By the time the circle was established in the late forties, I was old enough to participate, which I did when it met at our apartment.”

  “What happened to your parents’ book?”

  “I have it.”

  “Maybe that’s the book he wants.”

  “I don’t know what he wants. I just don’t want to be bothered. You’re sure you didn’t give my number to anyone?”

  “I’m sure. Did the man say he’d call back?”

  “It wasn’t clear.”

  “Would you tell me if he does?”

  “I’ll tell you and I’ll tell the police.”

  “Fine. As long as you keep me posted.”

  He hung up.

  I hung up, too, irritated by his tone and manner, and walked in stockinged feet to the living room. I pulled off my ruined panty hose and sat down with the paper, but I was not to have my rest. The phone rang again and I went to answer it.

  “Is this Christine Bennett?” a rather odd, tight voice, a little high-pitched but surely male, asked.

  “It is. Is this Mr. Greenspan?”

  “You know me already?” he asked in answer to my question.

  “Sure I do. How are you today? I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “The dinner is cooking and I’m getting ready for the sunset.”

  “That sounds nice.” I waited. Surely he hadn’t called to invite me to dinner or a sunset.

  “You remember we talked about a man named Zilman?”

  “I remember.”

  “And about books?”

  “I remember that, too.”

  “Today I got a phone call.”

  A little heartbeat skipping. “Yes?”

  “About
a book.”

  “Tell me about it, Mr. Greenspan.”

  “What’s to tell? A man calls, he says, ‘I want the book,’ I ask him what book, he says, ‘You know what book. Where is it?’ I say, ‘First you tell me what book, then I tell you where you can find it.’ ”

  “And what did he say?” I prompted.

  “He hung up.”

  “No.”

  “Sure. He wants it, I don’t have it, he hangs up. That shouldn’t happen?”

  “Mr. Greenspan, if he calls back, would you tell him you’ve thought about it and you’d like to meet him and talk to him?”

  “I should talk to a stranger about a book I don’t have?”

  “It’s possible Nathan was murdered for that book he had.”

  “You mean the book he didn’t have.”

  “Yes, that’s the one I mean. If you make an appointment to meet this man, I’ll come along.”

  “Should I make an appointment with this murderer in my own apartment or you think it’s better I should meet him in a street somewhere when it’s dark?”

  I really loved this old man. There was nothing wrong with his mind. At this moment, I had the feeling it was functioning a little better than mine. “I don’t want you placing yourself in jeopardy,” I said, trying not to laugh. “If you make an appointment for him to come to your apartment, I’ll have the police there. How’s that?”

  “That could be OK if they have the time and they remember to come.”

  “They’ll come. Make it anytime except Tuesday morning.” I had to teach my class, murderer or no. “Is that all right with you?”

  “With me it’s all right. We’ll have to see how the murderer likes it.”

  I made him promise he’d call if he heard from the man again, and then I got off the phone. Was someone else going through the list of mourners as I was? It had to be someone who had been at the funeral. Zilman? No, Zilman knew them all, if not personally, then at least by name through his contact with Black and Granite. And I had a strong feeling that just about everyone at the funeral knew everyone else.

  But Granite and Greenspan were almost certainly in Nathan’s address book. Granite and Greenspan. Maybe someone was going through the book page by page, looking for the book or looking for any of the books in Nathan’s original collection. Maybe Nathan had been murdered over the book after all.