by Lee Harris
“How was Washington?” she called, joining me.
“Wonderful. Relaxing, interesting, beautiful. I’ll show you the pictures when I get them developed. It was a great vacation. You should take the family down there.”
“We will. We just want to wait till the kids are big enough so that they won’t demand to be picked up when they get tired. Maybe next year.”
“We’re going to have nice green leaves soon, Mel. I can’t wait.”
“And nice black earth to turn over. I can almost smell it. You working today?”
“I have stuff for Arnold, but I’m doing it at home. I’ll get started as soon as Jack leaves, and I should be done by early afternoon.”
“How about a little kaffeeklatsching at three?”
“Sounds good. Anything up?”
“I just feel like talking.”
“Me, too. I’ll see you at three.”
* * *
I wrapped up my work before one, had some soup for lunch, and drove to the post office to get the material in the mail for Arnold. That gave me a little time to shop at the supermarket and get to Mel’s house by three. I could smell the coffee as I stepped inside, and a coffee cake on her kitchen counter assured me she had been busy and I was in for a treat. Mel does all these things with the ease of a professional. Before I bake, I make lists, check my pantry, and figure out how much time is needed and how much time I have. I keep hoping that her self-assurance will rub off on me, but I don’t think I’ll ever achieve her complete offhandedness when it comes to baking.
“Get your work done?” she asked as we carried things into the family room.
“Everything. Printed, posted, on its way.”
“Arnold’s lucky to have you.”
“And vice versa. For a man with a very cynical view of a large part of life, he’s the kindest, most thoughtful employer in the world.”
“I have some terrible news, Chris,” Mel said.
“Mel, what happened?”
“What you said about my grandfather, it’s true. I asked Mom after the seder, and she had a heart-to-heart with Grandpa. He has a malignancy and they’re not going to treat it, partly because of his age and condition and partly because he put his foot down and said he didn’t want it.”
“I’m so sorry. Your Passover seder will never be the same again.”
“Nothing will ever be the same. I can’t imagine the family without that man at the head. I just heard the news over the weekend and I can’t stop thinking about it. He’s always been there. I keep wondering if we’ll still be a family without him.”
“You will. You have a very solid family. Everyone there that night wanted to be there. They weren’t just doing it to please your grandfather.”
“You’re right. We all get along. There’s some backbiting, but down deep, we all pull together.”
“Your mother must be very upset.”
“She is. She spoke to his doctor yesterday and confirmed everything. She was really hoping—” Mel stopped. “But there isn’t anything they can do. It’s just a matter of time.”
I decided not to utter a platitude. She knew far better than I what a great man her grandfather was, how he would be missed, how strong he had been and how strong he continued to be. Saying it would neither help nor comfort her. “I’m glad I had the chance to meet him,” I said. “Even more, I’m glad I had a chance to sit next to him during the seder.”
“Yes.” She smiled. “So am I. You’re another person who’ll remember him.” She drank some coffee and looked as sad as I knew she felt. “Chris, Mom and I did a lot of talking over the weekend. I told her you and I had discussed Aunt Iris. We want you to do something for us.”
I knew what was coming as though I had written the script myself. “No, Mel,” I said firmly. “I can’t. I would do anything for you, you know that. I will help you nurse your grandfather if you need me. I’ll watch your kids while you go to see him. But I can’t do what you’re about to ask me to do.”
“But you’re the perfect person. You’re not part of the family, but you’ve met us all. You can keep a secret so if someone tells you something, it won’t go any further. And you have the background and the common sense to know where to look and what questions to ask. Grandpa deserves to know what happened to his youngest sister. There isn’t much time left and the police have failed. If there’s an answer, Mom and I think you can find it.”
“Did it ever occur to you that your grandfather might not want to know what happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean suppose it’s something sordid and ugly. Shouldn’t something like that stay unknown?”
“Aunt Iris? Sordid and ugly? It’s not possible.”
“Mel, you’re talking like the seventeen-year-old you were when it happened. You’re in your thirties now. Think about it. She was a single woman in her fifties. She dated, she was a natural flirt—these are all things you told me that night. She wasn’t a mousy little girl who clung to her parents and never left home. She lived by herself, she had a private life she may not have shared with her family. You were a kid, Mel. You had no idea what kind of life she led when she wasn’t being your adoring aunt. You don’t know who her friends were, how she spent her free time, who she spent it with.”
“You’re right. I don’t know.”
“And you don’t want to know. Why don’t you just leave it as it is? Your beloved aunt went out for a breath of fresh air, and someone trying to rob her ended up killing her. That’s probably what the truth is, and if it is, I can’t do anything the police haven’t already done.”
“I never thought of it that way,” Mel said, “about her having a life outside the family, but you’re right. The only time I saw her was in a family setting except maybe if she took me to the zoo when I was little. But I was never part of a group that included her friends. I only met one of them in my whole life, but there must have been others. What you’re suggesting—”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” I said. “I’m saying that as a child, as a teenager, there’s so much about the older members of the family that you didn’t know.” I was speaking from a fairly new experience of my own. “One generation keeps secrets from the next generation. So you see why I can’t investigate and why it’s really better to leave it alone.”
Mel got up and went to a shelf in the bookcase that filled one wall of the family room. She took down an album, opened it, and flipped several pages. “I can’t leave it alone,” she said. “This is a picture of Aunt Iris and me when I graduated from high school.”
There was Mel’s familiar sweet face with her marvelous, encompassing smile. Beside her was a shorter, slim woman with a strong family resemblance. She was dressed beautifully for the occasion in a pale peach suit that could have been linen, a strand of pearls sitting at her throat, an elegant bag in one hand. Her grandniece looked almost tall by comparison in her white academic robe and mortarboard.
“She’s very pretty,” I said. “You look like that side of the family, don’t you?”
“Except I’ll never be as slim as Iris. I think she had magic hormones or got all the good genes. Look at that waist. I wasn’t that thin when I was ten.”
“She’s lovely. What kind of work did she do?”
“She was a secretary, the kind a boss couldn’t live without. She used to get terrific bonuses at the end of the year. She probably spent all of it on my cousins and me.”
“You have such wonderful memories,” I said.
“Chris, I have got to know.” She took the album, looked at the picture, turned a page and looked at some more before closing it. “If she went out for fresh air and was killed by one of those nameless monsters that commit random violence, so be it, but I think there’s another explanation. I think she went out to help someone she knew, maybe someone who lived near my grandparents, and something happened—maybe an argument—and he killed her.”
“Why do you think that?” I asked.
&nb
sp; “Because she was a good person and she was generous. Maybe someone at work asked her for a loan, a hundred dollars, and Iris said, ‘Meet me tonight at eleven o’clock in front of my brother’s apartment house and I’ll give it to you.’ I think that’s what happened.”
“Then why did this person kill her?”
“He wanted more,” Mel said with fervor. “A lot more. He looked at how she was dressed and he guessed she had a lot of money. He made demands and she turned him down and he—or she—I don’t know. These things happen. People have tempers and the wrong word sets them off. The other is too easy, that someone walked down the block at the exact moment she went outside, that he robbed her and then killed her. Why did he kill her if he had her money? And how can you explain how he got her body half a dozen miles away from Grandpa’s? How many muggers do you know that come equipped with their own cars?”
“OK, I agree it wasn’t a simple mugging.”
“Chris, once you agree with that, I’ve got you.”
I laughed. “Is all this about tripping me up?”
Mel smiled and relaxed. “You bet, and now I’ve done it and you owe me. Look. Mom and I put our heads together over the weekend and we came up with all the names and addresses you need to begin. Not only that, but my car and I are available to bring people to your doorstep so you don’t have to run around yourself. Am I making it appealing?” she asked in an almost plaintive voice.
It was appealing. If Mel had been a stranger, I would have been sorely tempted. I didn’t believe any more than she did that her great-aunt had gone out for a walk and been robbed and murdered. It was even possible that some member of the family knew things about Iris that he had not admitted to the police for the reason I had brought up a little while ago, that there was a sordid, ugly side to her life. I didn’t want to be the person to uncover such information. I thought Abraham Grodnik, in particular, would die a happier man if he didn’t know the details of his youngest sister’s life and death. But here, on my lap, were sheets of paper with names and addresses on them, Mr. Grodnik’s at the top, Marilyn Margulies’s next, Aunt Sylvie’s near the bottom. There was a list of people who had been at the Passover seder the night Aunt Iris walked out the door, never to be seen again alive. There was even a sketch of the apartment showing how impossible it would have been for anyone to have seen Aunt Iris after she left the table.
“You’ve done a lot of work,” I said.
“Because we care. Nobody cares as much as a family does. All due respect to Jack and the police department, but when they’ve looked in the usual places and talked to the usual suspects, there isn’t much motivation for them to continue. I think someone killed Aunt Iris intentionally or because he became enraged with her, someone who knew her, someone she trusted, someone she made an appointment to see that night. Even after all these years, he shouldn’t get away with it.”
I agreed with everything she said, but I still didn’t want to be the one to ask the difficult questions and come up with the awful answers. And yet it tugged at me, the memory of the snapshot, the beautiful smiling woman who was so good to those who loved her.
“Did she drive?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Mel looked distressed. “It’s terrible, Chris. You ask these perfectly reasonable, simple questions about a woman I knew from the day I was born, and I can’t answer them. I never saw her drive. When we went somewhere together, we always took the subway or a bus or sometimes a taxi. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t know how to drive. I just don’t know.”
“Where did she live?”
“When I was young, she had an apartment in the Bronx on the Grand Concourse, but a few years before she died, she decided it wasn’t a safe place to live anymore, especially if she came home at night by herself, and she went out a lot to concerts and the theater and lectures. So she moved to Manhattan. It was a small apartment in a good building and it was very nice and she furnished it beautifully. I used to love to go there.”
“Did she leave a will?”
“Yes. My cousins and I inherited her money. My parents put it away for me.”
“Mel, I really think—”
“Don’t say it.” Mel stood and came over to my chair. “Take the papers with you. Think about it. Think about the seder, about someone saying it was time to open the door for Elijah and this eager voice pipes up, ‘I’ll get the door.’ Listen to it in your head. ‘I’ll get the door.’ And then watch this small, lovely woman leave the table, walk out of the room, and never look back.”
I told her I would think about it and I went home.
4
Eventually it was too intriguing and too easy to begin for me to turn it down. The fact that the murder had occurred so long ago also made it easier to accept. The family knew that Iris Grodnik was dead; they knew how she had been murdered. Nothing would bring her back. All they could possibly hope to gain from an investigation was answers.
I called Mel the next morning and said, “I need some information before I can seriously look into your aunt’s murder.”
“Anything, Chris. Mom and I will find out whatever you want.”
“I want the name of Iris’s friend, the one you said you met. And I’d like the name of the company she worked for and also the man.”
“He’s dead. I saw his obituary in the Times several years ago.”
“Well, see if you can come up with his name anyway. It’s so long ago, I expect no one’s left that remembers her. Did this friend of hers work at the same place?”
“I don’t think so. I think they were friends from childhood or high school. They went way back.”
“Was the friend married?”
“I couldn’t tell you. It’s possible.”
“I guess you wouldn’t know if she’s alive,” I said hopefully.
“No idea. But if she was Iris’s age, which she should have been, she’d be about seventy-five now, give or take.”
“Well, lots of people live to seventy-five these days, so let’s hope.” I looked down at the notes I had made last night while waiting for Jack to get home from law school. “The friend is the one I really want to talk to. She knew Iris well and she’s not part of the family. Her perceptions will be different; her interests won’t be the same as the family’s.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“The other one I want to talk to is your aunt Sylvie. Is she in good health?”
“Well, she’s old, in her eighties, but I don’t know that she’s in poor health.”
“Because I don’t want to bring on heart attacks when I ask questions. It isn’t worth it. The living have top priority.”
“I agree. If I hear of anything, I’ll let you know.”
“If it’s all right with both of you, I’d like to start with your mother, because you and she are the moving force here.”
“Sure it’s all right with me. I’ll call Mom as soon as I get off the phone and see what I can arrange. If she’s not tied up, I’ll get her out here this afternoon.”
“Whatever’s convenient for her, Mel. There’s no rush. All we’re trying to do here is lay some ghosts to rest.”
“OK. Anything else?”
“Yes, something very important. Someone will have to give me the address where the body was found. That’s the precinct that handled the homicide, and it’s just possible that the detectives on the case are still around.”
“Mom may remember. I went back to school before she was found, and almost everything I know after the seder is what my mother told me.”
“OK. I have straightening up to do. Give me a call when you’ve got something.”
“You bet.”
It goes without saying that Jack thought I was crazy. But like the good detective he is, his interest was piqued by the story, especially since it was an NYPD case. There would be a file on it that would tell me who had been interviewed, what the medical findings were, what suspects, if any, had been questioned. While the family’s recollections may have c
hanged over the years, the documents in the file would not. Cross-checking would let me know who was most believable, if stories varied from one family member to another.
But I wanted to start with Marilyn Margulies because she was willing and eager and because I liked and trusted her. I didn’t have long to wait. Mel called back so soon after our conversation that I had scarcely begun my cleanup.
“Chris? You available for lunch? Mom’s ready.”
“Lunch sounds great. Give me a time and I’ll be there.”
“Let’s say twelve-thirty. I have to run out and shop and throw something together.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Don’t dress. I know Mom is a bit intimidating, but keep your jeans on.”
I laughed. “I don’t think of her as intimidating, but she does always look as though she’s on her way to somewhere special.”
“She is. Anywhere she goes is special. That’s how she looks at life.”
I thought it was a pretty good way to look at life, but I agreed to keep my jeans on. But just because I thought Marilyn Margulies was pretty special, I put on a new cotton knit sweater from my favorite catalog before locking up the house and walking down the street.
“How did you like our seder?” Mrs. Margulies said after we had kissed.
“It was wonderful, especially since Jack was mistaken for Elijah.”
“Well, we’re not likely to forget that very soon. Come, let’s have lunch so we can start our conversation.”
We went into the kitchen, where Mel had made the table look festive. She had platters with salads, slices of smoked salmon, and some wonderful breads. Linen napkins and crystal wineglasses made it look like the feast I knew it would be.
“Wine, Mel?” I said. “I’ll fall asleep taking notes.”
“You always threaten, but you never do. A glass won’t hurt, and Hal just bought a case of this. It’s a burgundy and he thinks it’s wonderful. Sit down.”
We did and she poured. “Marvelous,” her mother said. “Oh, Mel, this is wonderful. Tell Hal to get a case for us. Daddy will love it.”