The Bar Mitzvah Murder

by Lee Harris

  I agreed. “Let’s give her a call at home when it’s afternoon there.”

  “She’ll be sitting shiva this afternoon, I would think.”

  “Sitting shiva,” I repeated. “That’s staying at home and accepting condolences after someone dies. I remember when your grandfather died and the family did that.”

  “Right. They do it for seven days. Shiva means ‘seven.’ It isn’t always seven days anymore and they don’t sit on wooden crates the way my grandfather used to.”

  “You can’t get wooden crates,” Hal put in. “They don’t make them.”

  “Right. So sometimes they print cartons to look like wooden crates on the theory that it’s the thought that counts.”

  “Are you telling me they’re supposed to be uncomfortable?”

  “That’s the point,” Hal said. “To remind you it’s a sad time. There are other things, too. You cover the mirrors in the house—”

  “The mirrors?” I asked.

  Mel smiled. “I remember when you told me about the mirrors in your aunt’s house.”

  “How interesting,” I said. “I had no idea.” I had visited my aunt once a month while I was a nun and she arranged to cover the mirrors while I was there, as we were not allowed to look at our reflections. And now I was hearing of something similar in the Jewish religion.

  “Chris, you should let Jack know about this. He can find the Israeli cops that are working on Gabe’s homicide.”

  “I think my telephone card’s at the hotel.” I sighed.

  “Go up to our room and use our phone,” Hal said.

  “Take the kids?” Mel asked hesitantly.

  Hal gave her a big grin. “Of course I’ll take the kids. Come on, guys. Let’s see if we can find a Herald Tribune somewhere in this hotel.”

  “Daddy, would you buy me the hat we saw in the store with the newspapers?” Sari said.

  Hal laughed and led them away.

  “He’s good,” Mel said as we walked toward the elevators. I agreed.

  It was a pretty long conversation, because Jack wanted to get everything right. “This is a good one,” he said finally, after he’d checked names and addresses and times and events. “We’ve got police departments five thousand miles apart working on the same case.”

  “I’m not sure we’ll ever get everything coordinated,” I said.

  “We’ve really got to find out what, if anything, was taken or disturbed in Marnie’s house.”

  “Mel and I are going to call her, Jack. Mel says she’ll be home accepting visitors, so we shouldn’t have too much trouble finding her.”

  “Ask if she has a home safe. And know what? She might just call the office where Gabe worked and find out if anyone broke in there, especially if they have a safe.”

  “I’ll ask.”

  “Tell her to call the local police and ask them to look for prints on the safe, if she has one. There shouldn’t be any except his and hers. She mustn’t touch it till they’ve been there. And I’ll let Joshua know. I doubt whether the police in the States have been in touch with the cops here.”

  “Interestingly complicated.”

  “See you later.”

  I wrote down the things he was interested in and looked at my watch. It was too early on the East Coast to call. We went downstairs and Mel rescued her husband and took over their children. Hal had made arrangements to spend some time with a couple of his cousins and he took off. I rather wished I had my own son with me so he could have the pleasure of being with friends for a few hours, but that wasn’t possible. So I decided to hook up with Mel and her kids till this afternoon.

  What we did was take a taxi to the Old City to visit the Citadel. The taxi turned out to be a problem. Mel gave our destination and we had gone about a block when I realized the driver hadn’t turned on the meter. I leaned forward and asked politely that he do it.

  “It’s too late,” he said. “I have to charge you five shekels from where I picked you up.”

  “Five shekels!” Mel said with feeling. “It’s a block or two. Just turn it on.”

  “I make you a special price,” he said.

  “I don’t want a special price,” she countered. “I want the meter.”

  He said something neither of us could understand. Then he repeated that he would give us a special price. We looked at each other. There seemed to be nothing we could do. When we reached the Citadel, we argued—or rather, Mel argued—that his price was too much and he dropped it two shekels. I felt very uncomfortable about the whole thing. I wasn’t used to haggling over prices and I was used to having taxi drivers turn on their meters the minute you sat down in the cab. I was sure Mel and I had overpaid, but I couldn’t determine how much.

  “Let’s forget about it,” I said when we were walking toward the ticket window at the Citadel.

  “Hal warned me.” She sounded angry.

  “Officer Davidson warned me, too. I see what he meant.”

  But the tour around the Citadel was wonderful and made up for the trouble we had getting there. An American man who had lived in Jerusalem for twenty years was our guide, and he took us through the ins and outs and ups and downs of the ruins, stopping frequently to give us a piece of history. The kids enjoyed the beginning and got bored as we went along, but they hung in till the very end. We stopped and bought postcards, and I got a beautiful book full of pictures of the ruins. If Jack couldn’t enjoy them with me, at least he would be able to look at what he’d missed.

  Near the Jaffa Gate, where we had entered the Old City, we found some taxis waiting for customers.

  “I’ll handle this,” Mel said sternly as we got inside one of them with a big, hefty driver encouraging us to enter. Inside, she said, “Please turn on the meter.”

  “What you want the meter for?” he said, pulling away toward the gate.

  “Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “I give you a good price.”

  “Turn on the meter!” There was no mistaking Mel’s fury.

  “So who are you,” the driver asked with annoyance, “a colonel in the Israeli army?”

  “A general,” she retorted. “Turn on the meter.”

  He turned it on.

  The trip back to the hotel ended up costing considerably less than the “good price” we had paid without the meter in the other direction. The driver grumbled as he drove; traffic was against him and the lights weren’t working right. Mel and I stifled giggles.

  “Glad I teach third graders,” Mel said when we had both gotten out of the taxi. “It prepares you for the tough times in life.”

  I laughed. “You were wonderful, Mel. I couldn’t have done it myself.”

  I went up to her room and we placed the call to Marnie. Someone who wasn’t Marnie apparently answered and called her to the telephone. Mel talked to her for a few minutes, asking about the funeral and a few other things. Then Mel brought up the break-in, or whatever it was. “My friend Chris is here,” she said finally. “Do you have the energy to talk to her? . . . OK then. We’ll talk again. Here’s Chris.”

  I took the phone and said a few polite words to Marnie. Then I asked about the security system.

  “Chris, I was so depressed and confused, it didn’t even register that something was wrong. I went inside, pushed the buttons, and hung up my coat. It took a while before I realized something was wrong.”

  “What exactly was wrong?” I asked.

  “The whole system wasn’t working. I mean you could lock and unlock the door and the system didn’t do anything. I suddenly saw that there weren’t any lights flashing on the panel. I called the company and they said they’d noticed something was wrong but hadn’t had a chance to send anyone out here. But they did. He looked it over and said someone with a lot of knowledge about that system had disengaged it.”

  “I suppose he didn’t know how long ago that had happened.”

  “Actually, he thought it was sometime on the Sunday Gabe was kidnapped.”
She sighed. “I told Gabe I didn’t like them. We should have gone with another company.” She spoke as though what had happened was a mere annoyance.

  “Marnie, do you keep a safe in the house?”

  “Yes. No one could find it without a thorough search.”

  “Have you checked to see if it’s been disturbed?”

  There was silence.

  “Marnie?”

  “You think someone came in to steal something?”

  “I’d like you to do a couple of things if you can. First, without touching the safe, see if the dial is on the last digit you turn to to open it.”

  “OK. I’m on my way to it now. Just a minute.”

  “Remember, don’t touch it.”

  She made a sound as though she was pushing something, perhaps moving a piece of furniture out of the way. “The safe’s locked,” she said. “I just pulled it with a napkin and it didn’t yield. And it’s not set on the last number in the combination. It’s a different number.”

  So the last person to open the safe had rotated the wheel after closing it. “OK. Leave it alone for now.”

  “What now?”

  I could tell she was walking away from it. I could hear the sound of voices somewhere, people visiting to comfort the widow. “Have you notified the police?” I asked.

  “No. Why should I?”

  “Because your security system was tampered with. Somebody may have gotten into your house. Ask the police to come out and check the safe for prints.”

  “This is unbelievable.”

  “And call your husband’s office and see if they’ve had a break-in recently.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Very. If we’re going to find out who’s behind this tragedy, we’ve got to look into everything.”

  “Yes. All right.”

  “After the police leave, you should open the safe and see if anything is missing.”

  “Chris, do you honestly believe this has something to do with Gabe’s murder?”

  “It’s a coincidence, and it’s good to be skeptical of coincidences.”

  “I suppose so. When is this going to end?”

  I felt sorry for her. To have all these burdens at the same time must be shattering. “Who has the combination?”

  “No one except Gabe and me.”

  “What do you have in there?”

  “Jewelry, papers.”

  “Expensive jewelry?”

  “Yes. Very.”

  “What kind of papers?”

  “I really don’t know. Our wills, I suppose. Life insurance. Maybe the deed to the house.”

  “Let us know what happens. Please check with Gabe’s office. And call the police as soon as possible.”

  Mel and I hung around, hoping Marnie would call back. We weren’t disappointed. About an hour later Mel’s phone rang. She handed it to me right away.

  “I called the police as you suggested, Chris,” Marnie said. “They dusted the safe, put tape all over the door, then pulled it off and opened it. Then they took my fingerprints to compare with whatever they find. I assume someone in Israel has Gabe’s.”

  “Probably,” I said, hoping the medical examiner had done a thorough job.

  “I won’t get an answer on that till tomorrow at the earliest. But after they left, I opened the safe and looked inside. Chris, if anyone got in there, they must have just looked. I swear, nothing’s been touched; nothing’s been moved.”

  “Do you keep a list of what’s in there?”

  “I do. The insurance company said I should. I didn’t have a chance to check everything, but I’m sure it’s all accounted for. I would have opened the safe myself if you hadn’t gotten to me first. I need all those papers when I see the lawyer.”

  “I’m sure you do. Did you reach anyone at Gabe’s office?”

  “Yes. I called them before the police came. There hasn’t been any break-in. They seemed surprised that I asked.”

  I noticed Mel was writing something on a piece of hotel notepaper. When she finished, she passed it to me. I looked at the note and asked, “Does anyone live in the house besides you, Marnie? Like a housekeeper or gardener or caretaker?”

  “Yes, I have a housekeeper. But I told her to take as much time off as she wanted while we were gone. Honestly, I didn’t expect trouble.”

  “So it’s possible no one was in the house for a number of days.”

  “Very possible.”

  “Marnie, ask the housekeeper when she was away. Try to get exact days and times. This may help the police and the alarm company determine what happened and when. And I’ll call you or Mel or somebody when I know what’s going on.”

  I hung up and shook my head.

  “You think Gabe was killed so someone could steal Marnie’s jewelry?” Mel asked.

  “It’s possible. The men who kidnapped him may have beaten him for the safe combination. It was a great time to rob their house. No one was home.”

  “I’m sure they must have lights that go on and off and people who are paid to look out for the house.”

  “They can’t do it every minute of the day,” I said. “If you’re an expert on security systems, you probably know how to disable them. Then all you need is a key.”

  Mel looked at me. “Which they could have stolen from Gabe after they kidnapped him. And flown back to the States with. My God, this could really have happened.”

  “You take the key off his key ring,” I said, working out the details. “You get on a plane—you’ve made the reservation a long time in advance—and fly to New York. It doesn’t really matter whether Gabe’s alive or dead. Marnie isn’t thinking about protecting their house five thousand miles away. Everyone’s so concerned about what’s happened right here. There was something in that safe, Mel. I bet they got the combination out of poor Gabe. What could they have been after?” I said it more to myself than to Mel, but she said, “Just what I’m thinking.”

  “Well, we had a nice day. I’m really glad we got to see the Citadel.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “I have to find out more about Gabe. Somewhere in his life or his marriages or his work there’s something that should set off an alarm. When it rings, I’ll hear it.”

  15

  I drove back to the hotel thinking about the possibility of looking into people’s pasts from a distance of five thousand miles. I wished desperately that Joseph were here, but it would be futile to imagine she could make the trip. She had a convent to run and a college to oversee, not to mention a budget that was scarcely enough to take care of the nuns and the buildings.

  I had about half an hour or a little more before I had to pick up Jack, and I decided to look into the lovely shop across from the hotel within the compound. It was run by a tall dark-haired Arab who greeted me graciously as I entered. He sat behind his counter, a pair of tiny white ceramic cups on a small matching tray before him. The cups were empty but stained with recent coffee. I supposed he had a friend, perhaps in a nearby store, who came and joined him for coffee and talk.

  The shop, which also had a downstairs filled with rugs, was almost overflowing with interesting Middle Eastern goods, most of them handmade. There were things made of brass, glass, leather, wood, and combinations of all four. I could have bought a little table inset with mother-of-pearl or necklaces with appealing beads or a rug to put beside our bed at home in Oakwood.

  The owner remained unobtrusive, which pleased me. I don’t react well to hard sells, and I really enjoyed looking at all the things he had accumulated. What attracted my attention the most was a mirror with mother-of-pearl designs inset in the wood frame. Telling myself I was absolutely not buying anything, I asked the owner what the price was.

  He came over, looked at it, and said, “That’s a Druse mirror made of lemonwood.”

  “Really?” I ran my fingers on the smooth wood.

  “It’s sixty-five dollars.”

  “Thank you,” I said, rather glad that it was more tha
n I was willing to pay. “When my husband is free, I’ll ask him to come in and look around. I think he’ll enjoy it.”

  The owner smiled and said he would be happy to have my husband visit the store.

  I went back to the hotel to read the paper for a while before picking up Jack.

  “You think Marnie could be lying to you?” Jack asked as he drove back to the hotel to freshen up before dinner.

  “Why would she lie if something was stolen? Wouldn’t she want it back?”

  “Sometimes the reasons why people lie are elusive. Maybe she had stolen goods in the safe and she can’t report them stolen because she’d end up being arrested for theft.”

  “Come on, Jack. Marnie didn’t steal anything. She’s a wealthy woman.”

  “Just giving you a for instance.”

  “I just can’t believe the security company didn’t take it seriously when the system went off.”

  “Let me tell you about security companies,” Jack said, and I knew I would now get a lesson. “When a client’s system goes off-line temporarily and they pick it up on their screen, it’s a very low-level priority of theirs. It could be weather. Maybe a rat gnawed a wire.” I felt my skin crawl. “All the security company has to go on is the screen indication, which could say ‘line trouble.’ That could be a downed telephone line but no real alarm. They give the local cops a call when they get around to it. Eventually, a cop’ll drive out to the house, rattle the doors, give the place a walk-around, see that nothing’s wrong, and he’ll get back in his car and continue his rounds. The only way he’s going to react is if he finds evidence of a break-in or an unlocked door.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that neither the cops nor the security company is very interested in following up on something like this.”

  “Remember, no one called in that there was a problem. The cops may or may not know that the owner of the house is away.”

  “They might not,” I agreed. “Marnie has a housekeeper that lives in the house, but Marnie told her to take as much time off as she wanted. The Grosses didn’t really know when someone would be in the house and when they wouldn’t.”

  “So the Grosses probably didn’t bother mentioning that they would be five thousand miles away for a week or so.”