The Passover Murder

by Lee Harris

Marilyn shook her head. “You’re off base on that. I know it’s easy to misjudge people we love, but I don’t believe Iris ever thought of Mr. Garganus as anything but a wonderful man to work for.”

  “Be that as it may, I spoke to his wife.”

  “You did.”

  “I persuaded someone at GAR to give me the address, and his granddaughter opened the door and let me in. It was a stroke of luck. If the maid had been there, I would have been sent on my way.”

  “Well, thank goodness for small favors. What did you find out?”

  “That she knows more than she will admit to. She started out by saying she knew nothing about Iris and then she went on to tell me things no one in the family knew.”

  “Like what?” She was suddenly very interested.

  “Like she said she didn’t know Iris had quit her job and a minute later she was telling me that Iris wanted to travel to Europe—she mentioned Switzerland specifically—while she was still young enough to enjoy it.”

  “She told you that Iris was planning to go to Switzerland?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Iris didn’t say a word. I wonder if she told my mother. She spent the whole afternoon cooking with her for Passover.”

  “Then your father would know.”

  “I’ll have to ask him, if he’s cooled down.”

  “Marilyn, it seems to me that after the kind of tragedy that happened to Iris, a family does a lot of second-guessing. If we had only known this, if we had only done that.”

  “We did it, Chris. After we knew she was dead, we sat shiva for a week.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “After a death, the family mourns. In the old days the mourners actually sat on wooden crates, and I think we went out and found one for Pop. Nowadays they make special cartons with a design on the outside that makes it look like a wooden crate, like the old orange crates that you’re too young to remember. When you mourn, you’re not supposed to be comfortable. And each member of the immediate family tears a piece of clothing or wears a black ribbon that’s been symbolically torn. Anyway, during that time, people visit the family—and plenty of people did—and the family comes together. I came in every day to be with-Pop and Mom; my sister was there, my brothers came. And we went over and over what happened that night at the seder. We talked about Iris’s life, her job, her apartment, her clothes, for heaven’s sake. What could have happened that would make her end up a dead body in an oil yard? We took apart her life and her death. We got nowhere.”

  “And in all of that no one mentioned that she had been married?”

  “Believe me, that’s something I would remember. I told you, my parents’ generation kept its secrets. Maybe when I wasn’t there, maybe when only Sylvie was there, they talked about it. But you see, they never told the police. If they knew about it, and you’re right, they probably did, they didn’t think it was anyone’s business, even the police investigating her murder.”

  “Marilyn, think about what happened after Iris’s death. Did your father do anything unusual that you might be able to explain now that you know there was once a husband?”

  “My father didn’t do anything; my mother did. My mother and Sylvie cleaned out Iris’s apartment. Pop wouldn’t get involved in anything like that. Mom and Iris were close. They were sisters-in-law, but they were close. Pop loved her and she visited them a lot. He was the oldest and she the youngest, and he watched over her, all her life, I think.”

  “What did your mother do?” I prompted.

  “She spent so much time at Iris’s apartment we started to worry about her.”

  “It must have been a big job to clean it up.”

  “Well, it was, but it seemed more than that. I had the feeling—how can I put it?—that she was fixing things up, arranging things, taking care of things.”

  “You said Iris didn’t leave much money.”

  “Not enough to make someone want to kill her, and remember, what there was went to Melanie’s generation. They were kids, young people. No one got rich on Iris’s money, and no one would kill for her fur coat or gold necklace.”

  “This is very tough, Marilyn. We’ve got to find out who Iris’s ex-husband was. If he’s still alive, I want to talk to him. If he’s dead, I want to know whether he died before or after Iris.”

  “I think we just have to ask Sylvie.”

  15

  I sat across the kitchen table from Marilyn as she telephoned her aunt. With her usual warmth and manners, she started out asking how Sylvie was, inquiring about her health with attention to specific problems, the arthritis, the blood pressure, the difficulty walking. Gradually she shifted to a mention of me, to what a nice visit we had had last Friday. A couple of minutes went by in polite chitchat and then she said we had some other questions that had just come up that Sylvie could surely fill us in on.

  I had my notebook open in front of me as Marilyn steered her aunt in the right direction.

  “Sylvie, we’ve just heard something about Iris. Did you know she was once married?”

  The answer was long and Marilyn said a lot of uh-huhs before she was able to repeat anything of value. “Nineteen thirty-nine? Really? She must have been very young.” Slowly it emerged, a story buried in the older generation for half a century. Iris had married in the spring, in March, on the ninth or tenth, Sylvie thought, and brought her new husband home to her parents, who were so shocked and upset that they hardly knew what to say.

  “Where did they live after they were married?” Marilyn asked innocently, and listened again for a long time. “Then she wasn’t far from Grandma if she lived on the Concourse.” The conversation went on as I waited. “What a shame,” Marilyn said finally. “Then they weren’t even married a year.”

  So Harry Schiff’s information had been accurate. It had been a young, quick marriage that had not lasted. I tuned out most of the rest of the conversation, which got pretty boring as it drifted on to other things. Finally Marilyn said good-bye three times over a period of as many minutes and got off the phone.

  “Poor thing,” she said. “She’s so alone. She’s so happy to have someone call her. I was surprised she wasn’t more hospitable Friday morning when we visited. I had the feeling she was almost throwing us out.”

  “Maybe it was too painful to talk about. She told me there was something she knew that no one else would tell me, but she wasn’t ready to talk about it on Friday. I gave her my phone number, but she hasn’t called yet. I expect this was it.”

  “Well, his name was Martin Handleman if that’s any help.”

  “Martin,” I said. “Iris had an M written on the page for the second seder in her book.”

  “I remember that. As though she were meeting someone whose name started with M. Maybe he called and said he’d see her the first night instead. Chris, this could be it.”

  “Maybe it is. Imagine harboring a grudge, a hatred, for forty years. It hardly seems possible.”

  “Anything’s possible. For all we know, she was supporting him. Maybe that’s how she got out of the marriage so quickly, by promising him money.”

  “That turns everything upside down, doesn’t it?” I said. “Back then men were expected to support women during marriage and after marriage. Honestly, Marilyn, no woman would support a man for forty years on the basis of a marriage that lasted a few months.”

  “Then we’ll find another theory. Where do we go from here?”

  “Jack keeps a good supply of telephone books in the house. I’ll go through all of them, the five boroughs, Westchester, and whatever else I can lay my hands on, and see how many Martin Handlemans I can find.”

  “There may be a lot. It’s not an uncommon name.”

  “Then there are some other things. I’d like to see the marriage license; it’ll give me some information on Martin Handleman. And there’s one other thing.” I stopped, feeling uneasy. “I don’t mean to offend you, Marilyn, but it’s possible Iris married to legitimize a child.”
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  “No.”

  “I know it’s hard to accept, and maybe I’m way off, but I don’t believe people were that much different in 1939 from the way they are today. They may have kept their lives more private, but I doubt that sex was invented in the sixties.”

  Marilyn smiled. “You’re right. It should be checked. I imagine that’s going to be a massive job.”

  “I imagine so, too.” I looked at my watch. “Let me call Arnold Gold. I think I could benefit from a nice chat with him.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll be on my way. This is all turning out much more interesting and much more complicated than I ever expected.” She opened her bag and pulled out a wallet. “I know this is costing you a lot of money. Here’s a down payment.” She laid a hundred-dollar bill on the kitchen table.

  I still palpitate a little when I see one of them. “Thank you. I’ll keep a good accounting.”

  “Be generous to yourself. Have a good lunch on me. You deserve it.”

  I promised I would.

  Arnold walked in as the secretary picked up my call.

  “Chris?” he said, taking the phone from her. “How’s things?”

  “Interesting.”

  “What could be better? You want to come in and have some lunch with me? I just got an adjournment, so my day’s not booked.”

  “I’d love it. It’ll take me a little time to get there.”

  “I’m not in any rush. The restaurants I go to don’t ask for a reservation.”

  “See you soon.”

  Arnold Gold rounds out my life. I live in a town that is a mixture of rich, middle class, and less than middle class, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, well educated and not so well educated, Democrats and Republicans and a few little parties that I hear of only around election day, but the town tends toward the more well-to-do, the more educated, and the somewhat more conservative. Arnold Gold is a liberal. He defends people in every way you can imagine, and he does it with the enthusiasm of a person for whom there is nothing more exalted than the United States Constitution. He believes in it with his whole heart and soul and he defends it with fervor. Aside from the fact that he has become almost a second father to me, I admire and love him.

  “Well, Chrissie,” he said as I stepped inside the cluttered office that is his home base in downtown New York. “I’ve been so busy I haven’t noticed whether you’ve been here or not.”

  “I finished up some work last week and got hooked into investigating an old homicide.”

  “How’d I guess? Don’t sit down. We’re on our way before that damn phone rings and ties me up for half an hour.” He grabbed his coat and ushered me quickly out of the office before anyone could command his attention.

  “It happened at a Passover seder,” I said, and told him the story as we rode down the elevator and walked to the restaurant.

  “So they found the body,” he said as we sat down at a table. It was a pasta restaurant and we had been here before. “Remind me where these oil yards are.”

  “The northern tip of Manhattan. Jack says it’s a great view if you’re looking out, not so great if you’re looking in.”

  “I suppose they cheat on the landscaping. Looks like she had a date with someone with a car.”

  “That’s what we think.”

  “Although she could have taken a subway and gotten lost.”

  “She left her pocketbook behind.”

  “But you don’t know what she had in her coat pocket. But OK, I grant you, if she left her bag behind, she probably got picked up by someone with a car.”

  “Right now I’m wondering if it might have been an ex-husband.”

  “Aha.”

  I filled him in on the rest. “When I get home, I’ll start looking for Martin Handlemans in all the phone books in the metropolitan area.”

  “Good luck. I hope you can keep it down to twenty. You really think a man in his sixties did something like that to a woman?”

  “Why not? You’re in your sixties, aren’t you? She was tiny. You could hold your own with a woman who weighed less than a hundred pounds, couldn’t you?”

  “I hope I could hold my own with a woman who weighed a lot more. I just don’t know if I could kill her.”

  “Does age make it less likely that you’ll kill?”

  “Statistically, yes. Most of your killers are half my age. Which doesn’t mean anything in the particular case we’re talking about. Statistics only tell the big picture. Each crime is a very small part of that. What’ve you got on him?”

  “Nothing except a name and the fact that they were married in March of 1939, probably the ninth. And divorced in Reno, but I’m not sure when.”

  “I tell you what. We’re doing some digging of our own on an interesting case. If I throw in another marriage license, it won’t make much of a difference to the guy who’s doing the looking.”

  “That’s great, Arnold. Let me tell you what I’m thinking. Suppose Iris got married because she was pregnant. She stays married long enough to make the baby legitimate and then decides she doesn’t want to keep it—or keeping it would be too tough on her family. She gives the baby up, goes to Reno, and gets a divorce.”

  “Sounds plausible.”

  “Can we find out if she gave birth?”

  “Not easy if we don’t have a date. You have any idea how many babies are born every day in New York, even during the Depression?”

  “I guess it’s a lot.”

  “We don’t know what hospital, what borough even. I’ll do what I can, but it’ll take time and I may not find anything. You have a birth date for this Iris Grodnik?”

  “I do.” I wrote it down for him.

  “She born in this country?”

  “In New York. She was the youngest. The oldest ones were born in Europe and came over as children.”

  “Sounds like my father’s family. If we have to get out to check any records at the Board of Health, I’ll have them look her up, too, but I can’t promise.”

  “You feel something because your family was like her family.”

  “Can’t help it. All our families shared the sorrows and joys of the twentieth century. There’ll never be another one like it.”

  “This case, and the last one I worked on, have made me very aware of the pull of the family. You move across the country and you lose a lot of friends, but you never lose your family. For better or worse, they’re all still there.”

  “Sounds like you’re thinking of starting one of your own.”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Well, you’re talking to the wrong man. Talk to that fine husband of yours. I’m sure he’s on the same wavelength as you. I expect Harriet would set aside a little time in her busy life and knit you an heirloom if she got the news.”

  “Oh, Arnold, what a lovely thought.”

  “Lovely thought for a lovely person.”

  “Tell me why you think Iris’s birth certificate is important.”

  “Everything’s important. The cops probably didn’t look it up because it’s a trip out to Brooklyn and they don’t feel like making it and they don’t think it’ll help. Maybe they’re right, but it might yield something. You’ve got a person here who was probably killed by someone who knew her, someone she was going out to say hello to and instead he killed her. You’ve talked to the cops, her family, the people she worked with, and you’ve got nothing. Maybe there’s something in her life that’ll lead us to the killer. If you want to know all there is about a person, you don’t look only at today. You look backward. Where did they start from to get here and now? Some of the nicest people I know have what you might call a past. Maybe she was adopted at birth, the child of a friend or relative of the people who raised her. There are lots of possibilities. You find any friends of hers?”

  “She had a best friend named Shirley Finster.” I told him what I had learned from the police file.

  “Sounds like she didn’t want a face-to-face interview. Maybe she knows something and doesn�
��t want to tell.”

  “I don’t know how to find her, Arnold. She could be anywhere in the country and her last name could be anything.”

  “So we keep trying. How’s the pasta?”

  “Terrific.”

  “Just leave room for dessert. I won’t have any if you don’t, and I have a yen for something sweet.”

  “I’ll join you.” I glanced at the dessert menu with all its tantalizing offerings. “It’s her boss I can’t quite picture in all this.”

  “Garganus?”

  “Yes. Why was he paying her if she wasn’t working? Why did his wife know she was going to Europe and no one in the family knew? Is it possible he drove over or had his chauffeur drive him over to see Iris that night? Could a chauffeur have kept quiet about what he must have seen?”

  “I think you’re taking too many giant steps. Let’s see what we can find out about the ex-husband.”

  “OK. And I’ll have the cheesecake.”

  There were a slew of Handlemans in the metropolitan area, several of them Ms and Martins. I made a list but didn’t call any. Instead, I sat at my desk and did the work for my class so that I wouldn’t have to think about it till next Tuesday. It’s always nice to have that behind me.

  Then I just sat back and thought. I tried to incorporate all the small details I had learned, that Marilyn’s mother had spent so much time at Iris’s apartment that her family had begun to worry about her, that Shirley Finster refused a face-to-face interview with the police, that Iris was unofficially working for GAR, but no one knew what was going on. An ex-husband. A child … Maybe it was the child she had been supporting, although by the time she was murdered, the child would have been in his late thirties.

  I had no more answers when Jack came home than I had had when he left in the morning, but I did have a tentative theory. “Aunt Sylvie and Marilyn’s mother cleaned out Iris’s apartment,” I told him at the kitchen table. “They’re Iris’s sister and sister-in-law. That was sixteen years ago. Last weekend Marilyn’s father became very angry when he heard we’d been in his apartment and had found Iris’s handbag.”

  “Why not?” Jack said. “It’s his place. Why should he relinquish his privacy and authority just because he’s old?”