Yom Kippur Murder (22 page)

I thought about my delightful friend, Hillel Greenspan. He had said Hannah was sick. That’s how you protect someone, isn’t it? I thought. Say they’re sick. You can even believe it. Anyone who would cheat on Nathan Herskovitz is sick. Anyone who would commit suicide is sick.

He knew, but he wouldn’t tell me, and I couldn’t ask him, not with his health so precarious. Besides, it was unlikely that he was the man. He was as old as Nathan, give or take a couple of years. Hannah was younger, much younger.

I took my notebook and pencil out of my bag. Suppose she was fifteen to twenty years younger than Nathan. In 1945,
when they met, she would have been twenty-two or twenty-three to his forty. Fourteen years later when she committed suicide, she would have been about thirty-six.

I thought momentarily of Zilman and rejected him. He was too disgusting a man for a young, lovely woman to have had an affair with, whatever his age. In the circle no one else would have been the right age at that time. The only other person I knew, H. K. Granite, had told me he had been “fairly young” before the war. It had been his parents whom Nathan had had a friendship with, his parents who had been given one of the Herskovitz books. Granite, still living at home with his folks, had participated in the circle only when it met at his parents’ apartment. Hannah was not likely to have had an affair with a kid.

So that was it. Unless I twisted Bettina’s arm or provoked a heart attack in Hillel Greenspan, I had come to the end of my search.

There was a knock on my car window, and I jumped, startled. A blue uniform stood next to my car, and in my side-view mirror I could see a blue-and-white car double-parked just behind me. I rolled the window down.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to move your car. You’re parked next to a hydrant,” the policeman said.

“I’m sorry, Officer. I was just thinking.”

I could feel him judging my sanity. “Somewhere else, please,” he said.

“OK.” I rolled the window back up and started the motor. After a long block, I came to a cross street and turned left. One more block and I was on Riverside Drive. I drove north, toward home. Up ahead was Grant’s Tomb.

I went slowly, still trying to figure it out. Nathan was eighty-five, Granite was seventy, Hannah … Granite was seventy. If he was seventy, he was fifteen years younger than Nathan. But Hannah was fifteen to twenty years younger than Nathan. That meant they were the same age or Hannah was a little younger than he.

Then what had he meant about being a youngster before the war? I thought suddenly about my students, eighteen
and nineteen-year-olds who yesterday morning had seemed so young compared to me, and I was only thirty. Of course he was a youngster before the war. He was eighteen or nineteen years old!

At the north end of Grant’s Tomb, which sits on an island in the middle of Riverside Drive, you can elect to continue north or swing around the island and go back south. I made the swing, drove back to 116th Street, my heart beating crazily, and over to Broadway. I found a pay phone right on that corner, double-parked, and ran out. As I dialed, I kept an eye on the car.

It rang a few times, and then Granite’s voice came on. “This is H. K. Granite. If you leave your name and number—”

I hung up, went back to the car, and turned onto Broadway, going south. At 106th Street, Broadway bends east, to your left. If you continue straight, you enter West End Avenue. That’s what I did. I drove until I found a place to park, then walked to Granite’s address. I rang, but there was no answer. I found a corner where I would be out of the way and I waited.

It was nearly an hour before he arrived. He entered the outer foyer without seeing me and went straight to the locked door with his key.

“Mr. Granite.”

He turned abruptly. It took a moment before he recognized me. “What do you want?” he asked brusquely.

“I need to talk to you,” I said. “I have a few questions.”

“Ask them here. I have things to do upstairs.”

“I don’t think this is the place.”

“I’m a busy man.”

“It’s about Hannah.”

He controlled himself well, but I think he knew that I had found out. In fact, I was the nervous one. All I had was a little arithmetic and a wild guess whose proof was in the past.

He unlocked the door and held it for me without saying anything. During the elevator ride, he was quiet. When we got to his apartment, he dropped his hat and coat on a chair
in the foyer but didn’t offer to take mine. Again. We went into the living room.

“What do you want to know?”

“I have some questions about Hannah Herskovitz.”

“What makes you think I could answer them? I told you, I wasn’t even a member of the circle. It was my parents who were.”

I took my best shot first. “You were her lover.”

He sat down. “Who told you that?” He still sounded belligerent. I wondered what Hannah had seen in him. He was a handsome man, but he had a repelling manner.

I sat down, too. “No one told me. No one would tell me. I figured it out. I want you to confirm it for me. I don’t intend to tell anyone.”

“We were lovers,” he said.

I felt a surge of elation. “When? How long?”

“Long.” He turned to look at a piece of sculpture, and his eyes glazed. “The circle started in the late forties, after the Herskovitzes arrived. During the war it had been less formal, more like individual friendships. Nathan seemed to bring them all together. I was in my mid-twenties, but I was still living at home. There weren’t any apartments in New York, not for what I could pay, and I was still going to school part-time, working a little, trying to open a gallery. Even after I moved out, I would come home to see my parents once a week and come to the circle when it was at their place. It was fun. I knew them all. And Hannah was there.”

I watched him get himself together. He was so impatient, so brusque, I had not imagined anything could affect him this way.

“We met when the circle started. I suppose even then I thought about her in relation to me, not as his wife, but it was a long time before anything happened. They looked like father and daughter to me, not like husband and wife. He was in his forties, she was in her twenties. She was so beautiful, so—light. I finally moved out when I was about thirty. That wasn’t unusual then. I had a lot of friends who were working on degrees and living at home in those days. I had
a little place downtown in the Village for a while and I used to think about having her down, but she’d had a baby around forty-nine, and I didn’t see how it could work. We were friends by then. We’d sit and talk together when the circle met. I knew she felt something. I remember when she was pregnant with the girl, I couldn’t believe …

“Eventually it happened, that’s all. She found somebody to watch the children and she went downtown and we met.”

“Why didn’t she leave him?” I asked.

“She was afraid of losing the children, and she was afraid … Did you know Nathan?”

“A little.”

“I thought he’d kill me.”

“Literally?”

“Literally. We all knew what was going on between him and Black.”

“What was going on?”

“He hounded him, followed him, waited for him outside his house or at the university. Plagued him. Badgered him. Threatened him, I suppose. The guy was eventually found dead in the street of a heart attack. I certainly thought Nathan provoked it.”

“Maybe his conscience provoked it, Mr. Granite. Do you have any idea why Nathan didn’t try to get the book back through the courts when he got to this country?”

“They used to talk about it at the circle,” he said. “They were all willing to testify for him. But he said, ‘Here’s what Black’s lawyer will do. He’ll put each of you on the stand and ask, “Did Nathan Herskovitz give you a book?” And you’ll say, “Yes.” And he’ll say, “To keep or as payment for services rendered?” And you’ll say, “To keep.” And that’ll be their defense.’ ”

“There’s certainly a kind of logic in that,” I said.

“There was one guy, Aaron Strauss, who could have testified differently for Nathan, but he was never very well, and Nathan didn’t want to subject him to being a witness. Or so the story goes.”

“So Hannah stayed with Nathan, and you lived by yourself, and you had an affair for a long time.”

“That’s what happened.”

“Why did she kill herself?”

“You know it’s none of your damned business.”

“I do know that, Mr. Granite. But someone murdered Nathan, and everything that happened to him leads me toward his killer.”

“You think I killed him?”

I wanted to say that I thought he was too weak to have done it, but I restrained myself. “Not really. What happened to Hannah?”

“What happened to Hannah is that she got pregnant.”

I closed my eyes, feeling pity for her.

“Yes,” he said. “That was no picnic in the nineteen fifties. She couldn’t have it, although I—There were plenty of reasons why she couldn’t go through with it. I got her an abortion, the best you could get.”

“Did she want the baby?” I asked.

He thought about it. “I’m not sure.”

“But she agreed to the abortion.”

“She agreed. And then”—his voice thinned—“she just went into a terrible depression.”

“How awful.”

“And one day”—he shook his head as though he still didn’t understand it—“she did it. It very nearly destroyed me,” he said, his voice catching.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know if anyone knew,” he said, his voice a little stronger. “There must have been suspicions. We were very discreet. She was so lovely.” He sat with his head down. When he looked up, his face was wet. “The bastard didn’t even go to her funeral.”

I got up. It was growing dusky in the room. He had not put any lights on when we came in, and some of the sculptures had begun to look like lurking shadows. I put my bag over my shoulder and went to the foyer. He stood and followed me.

“Why did you go to Nathan’s funeral?” I asked, my hand on the doorknob.

He looked at me as though I had missed the point of everything. “Without him, I wouldn’t be alive today,” he said.

When I got home, I called Franciotti. He was actually there and he talked to me.

“Glad you called,” he said. “I took a clue from something you said yesterday and checked out the keys in Finch’s pocket. One of them opens the downstairs door at the building Herskovitz lived in.”

It was the best news I had heard all day. “So he could easily have gotten in without breaking in or going over the roof.”

“That’s probably how he did it. We picked up Angel Ramirez and found a gold tie clip in his pocket with Herskovitz’s initials on the back. While Finch was looking for that address book, Angel must’ve been shopping the place for souvenirs, although Finch obviously didn’t want him to.”

“How’s your case against Jesus holding up?”

There was a pause. “We’ve got a few loose ends.”

So Arnold was right. “What about Angel? Could he have killed Nathan?”

“Also shaky. But he had one hell of a lump on his head when we picked him up.”

“I figured he was my man. By the way, did you find any keys belonging to Nathan Herskovitz that might open a safe-deposit box or vault in a bank?”

“Oh yeah, we found that.”

“Any old books in the box?” I asked hopefully.

“Nothing but paper and an old wedding ring. He owned some municipals, had some certificates, that kind of thing. No life insurance, in case you care. But I found out some
thing you’ll be interested in. I checked back to 1975. Herskovitz’s apartment was burglarized—the detective squad file says it was really torn up—but nothing seemed to be missing.

“They were looking for the book.”

“Looks that way. And there’s something else. About that time a warrant was issued on a complaint by a Mrs. Mildred Black to search Herskovitz’s apartment.”

“She thought he’d stolen the book.”

“But it wasn’t there.”

“Thanks for the information, Sergeant. I’ll keep you posted if I find out anything,” I said, wanting to keep our relations cordial.

“I appreciate that, Miss Bennett.”

A little after six, Arnold called. From the sounds in the background, I was pretty sure he was still at his office.

“Got a call from Bert Finch today,” he said. “Sounds like you’ve been twisting arms.”

“I got tired of being nice and getting nowhere. It seemed to me that Paterno and Nathan stayed in that building to be near each other. If they moved, they had no guarantee they’d get apartments in the same building. Gallagher stayed because they did and because he wouldn’t pay an extra dollar if he moved. Once Nathan was gone, Mrs. Paterno wanted to be gone, too, at least from 603. I let Gallagher hear my conversation with Finch so he’d know what I was bargaining for. I think he loved it.”

“He should have. It sounds as though he won’t have to pay much more than what he’s paying now, if what Finch told me is accurate.”

“I said ten dollars more a month. Believe me, Arnold, Gallagher can afford it. He’s got a pension from the city, Social Security, and savings. He probably gets more a month than I do. He just likes to complain.”

“What the hell, he’s a New Yorker. That’s half the fun.”

I was starting to think he was right. “Is Finch going to cooperate?”

“Looks that way. I’ll hear from him in the next day or two. But I’ve got some news for you.”

“About what?”

“I got a look at Nathan’s will today.”

“He wrote a will?” I had never thought about that.

“He was a lawyer, wasn’t he? Lawyers write wills.”

“Did he have anything to leave?”

“Cash and a bunch of CDs. He left everything to his children.”

“His children,” I said in amazement.

“Who else do you leave your money to?”

“His daughter considered him dead for twenty years, and he barely spoke to his son.”

“Probably all a misunderstanding.”

“Probably,” I agreed. And then it hit me. “Arnold, what did he leave Amelia Paterno?”

“Not mentioned.”

I think it struck us both at the same moment, because we started talking together.

“You think she found out?” he said when I had relinquished the floor.