The Bar Mitzvah Murder

by Lee Harris

  The master bedroom was exceptionally large, with a closet she would have trouble filling. The apartment was expensive but worth it. The new job would pay just enough more than this one paid to cover what it would cost. It was the kind of job she had occasionally dreamed about, an office of her own with a door that closed, a full-time assistant, an hour every day for lunch, not when you found a minute to stuff a sandwich or a piece of cold pizza in your mouth. That elusive quality called dignity.

  She stepped into the bathroom. This was where you sensed the age of the apartment. The floor was a mass of white hexagonal tiles, the door on the medicine chest painted over so many times that it no longer closed. She wrote notes on a pad to leave for the workmen. The mirror was slightly wavy, making her look as though she had just stepped through the glass and hadn’t completely re-formed on the other side. She smiled and her mouth smiled back in two sections. Time to go home.

  The old apartment was little more than comfortable. In a big old building on Broadway in the West Eighties, it was of a comparable vintage to the “new” one but without its charm. It was simply old, with dripping faucets that were beyond repair, a four-burner stove with only three working burners, a floor that creaked, a stain along one bedroom wall that worsened occasionally. And then there was the elevator. She was glad when it worked.

  Jane had continued to live with her parents in the Bronx while she worked at the Two-Six and put away her money. The apartment was a gift to herself when she moved on. Like other new officers, she had been reviewed monthly by her regularly assigned sergeant. She made good progress and a few good arrests, but nothing outstanding—drugs, purse snatches, stolen cars. She wrote tickets for parked cars and moving violations. The Two-Six was an “A” house, a high-crime area. As she became more familiar with the territory, she found it easy to determine where to make quality arrests, the kind that looked good on your personnel record. She began thinking about a career path. Did she want to be a boss or did she want to be a detective? It didn’t take her long to realize that it was the gold shield she wanted. The street didn’t scare her, and she focused on drug arrests in areas where they affected the lives of the working people. She came to be known as a heads-up cop, respected and liked by most of the people in the precinct. Two and a half years into her career, she applied for a change of assignment.

  About six months later, when she was twenty-four, she was transferred to Chinatown, the Fighting Fifth. The station house was a hundred years old and crime was rising in the precinct. There were drugs on the streets, and the Chinese gangs were out of control. In their level of violence, the Chinese gangs made the old Mafia types look like amateurs.

  That was when she moved out of her parents’ apartment and into this one in Manhattan.

  In the living room two cartons were already packed and pushed against the wall, more of a symbolic gesture than a real beginning of the packing job. That would get done, as most of the things in her life got done, in a flurry of work, a twenty-hour day with no time off for anything but coffee and a couple of snacks.

  There was only one message on the machine, telling her about Dad. The hospital had been thorough, for which she was grateful, calling and leaving messages at both numbers. She dropped into a chair with her mail and closed her eyes for a minute before starting through the envelopes. There was nothing of importance, and she closed her eyes again.

  She had been angrier than she would ever have admitted to her father when her boss took her off the City Hall Park case and dumped her into a group of losers to satisfy the mayor’s latest whim: raise the percent of cleared cases. Make the commissioner look good. Make the mayor look better, raise the status of the department, but keep the overtime down. Right.

  It wasn’t entirely a hopeless pursuit, but nearly so. The cases were cold. Besides the routine annual check—the Detective Division 5 reports, always called DD5s—to update the file and keep the squad commander happy, many of the cases had lain dormant for many years. A few of them were famous, and the best detectives on the job hadn’t cleared them when they were fresh. Most of the cases never had a chance. The victims were old men and women who lived alone, whose bodies were found when the smell of decomposition awoke their neighbors. They were people whose histories were permanently buried in the past, people too poor to have heirs waiting to benefit from their deaths. They had long since ceased to be thought of as human beings and were now a collection of various colored forms, facts, and reports, or at best a memory in the mind of some retired detective. Science could learn a lot from dead bodies but it couldn’t tell you what language was first on the tongue, whether it had been married, if it had living children, if it had a smile for everyone it met or found fault even with people who tried to help. Science couldn’t tell you whether the body had nearly starved itself to death out of penury or hopelessness or just plain laziness. And the chances of finding answers five or ten years after death were slim.

  The park murder had been, in its morbid way, a thing of beauty. The photograph alone was hypnotic. The eye traced the beams of sunlight, the shadows threatened, the metal side of the wheelchair flashed light. The little woman, almost invisible in the photo, had died of a stab wound, a knife in the stomach, inserted under the blanket that covered the lower half of her body. The killer must have stood in front of her, leaned over her, stuck the knife into her gut, forced it up toward the heart, and left. She must have seen him. Had she known him? Had she spoken to him? Joe, what are you doing here? Nice day for a concert in the park, don’t you think? And then sudden death.

  Or had it been random? Had some crazy acted on impulse or challenge, proving to himself or his gang that he could kill someone and get away with it?

  No purse had been found at or near the crime scene. Either the killer took it with him or she left it home. But what home? She was without identification, but she had a few dollars in bills and coins in her jacket pocket. The team was unable to determine her identity. Her prints were not on file. No one fitting her description had been reported missing since the homicide. The wheelchair, they learned, had been stolen from a hospital. Someone’s hard work failed to obliterate the number etched into one of the vertical steel supports, and it was traced. The hospital’s property-marking system yielded one small bit of information: it had been missing from Bellevue for almost five years, not the only one, the clerk admitted. They were pretty pricey, and chances were it wasn’t stolen by a person who needed it but by someone who could turn it into cash. The victim might have been the one who bought it from the thief, might even have commissioned him to steal it for her, meaning that the Bellevue connection was a dead end.

  Jane started to get up from the chair, annoyed that she had let herself become involved in the case that was no longer hers. Forgetting that today’s mail lay in her lap, she saw it spill to the floor as she rose. She gathered it up swiftly, noticing that a small envelope had freed itself from behind another.

  It was handwritten on thin, crinkly pale blue paper in blue ink. The sealed flap provided an address halfway across the country, but no name. Something made her shiver, the flicker of a remote possibility. The address meant nothing to her, but that didn’t calm her. What was remote was not always impossible. This was the wrong moment for the long arm of the past to reach into the present. I can’t deal with this, she thought, at least, not now. Too much was happening, too much going on. There was Dad and the move and the new assignment. She knew those were just excuses, but she needed something to allay the panic. She carried the mail to the kitchen and put the small letter at the bottom of the pile on the counter. Along with the City Hall Park Murder, it could wait.

  Ballantine Books

  proudly presents

  The Christine Bennett Novels

  by

  LEE HARRIS

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Available at bookstores everywhere

  LEE HARRIS

  THE GOOD FRIDAY MURDER

  The First Christine Bennett My
stery

  THE YOM KIPPUR MURDER

  THE CHRISTENING DAY MURDER

  THE ST. PATRICK’S DAY MURDER

  THE CHRISTMAS NIGHT MURDER

  THE THANKSGIVING DAY MURDER

  THE PASSOVER MURDER

  THE VALENTINE’S DAY MURDER

  THE NEW YEAR’S EVE MURDER

  THE LABOR DAY MURDER

  THE FATHER’S DAY MURDER

  THE MOTHER’S DAY MURDER