Yom Kippur Murder (9 page)

“He said he used to think it was the war, but maybe she was just sick. And I saw Mr. Greenspan this morning, and he told me she was sick.”

She gave me one of those smiles that had nothing to do with pleasure. She was a tough lady who had adapted to a tough world she had not made for herself. I felt sorry for her, but I couldn’t quite like her.

“Did he answer all your questions with questions and treat you to the philosophy of life à la Hillel Greenspan?”

“I guess he did, but I kind of enjoyed it. What I don’t quite understand is how, if your mother was sick, she managed to take her children to conceits and walks in the park and all the things Mitchell remembers.”

“My mother wasn’t sick, Miss Bennett. My mother was abused by a man who didn’t love her.”

“Do you mean he hurt her?”

“Not physically. My father wasn’t violent. He just ignored her. He lived inside himself. Life was a disappointment to him. His wife disappointed him, his children disappointed him. No one lived up to his expectations. So he was content to sit with his dreams. Of course, they weren’t dreams. When Mitchell told me on Monday about the pictures, it all became clear. He sat with memories. The wife who was everything, the children who would have grown up to be stars. All we ever did was intrude on those dreams.”

“Do you think your mother knew about his first family?”

“It’s possible. Mitchell and I certainly didn’t.”

“How did she die, Nina?” I asked.

“How do you think she died? She killed herself.”

I knew that was what she had been trying not to tell me. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“And if you want the rest of it, I’m the one who came
home from school and found her with her head in the oven and the whole apartment stinking of gas. A scared ten-year-old having to cope with that. And then …”

I waited while she decided whether or not to go on.

“My father didn’t go to the funeral,” she said finally. “He told us he was too upset.”

“Maybe he was.” I had read that Mary Todd Lincoln had been too distraught to attend Lincoln’s funeral, and the thought of that touched me.

“Anything is possible.” She sat back against the cushions for the first time, no longer able to hold her back properly erect.

I found this new Nina easier to like than the old perfectionist who had seemed to be playing a part. Suddenly I could see that little ten-year-old in her face, the one who had opened the door and smelled the gas, who had run into the kitchen and seen what was left of her mother.

“Well, you know it all now,” she said. “I don’t know what you’ll do with it. It isn’t likely to help find my father’s killer.”

“Is that what you wrote to him about after you were married? That you wanted to talk to him about your mother’s death?”

“I wanted reasons from him. I wanted explanations. I wanted to hear him say, ‘I hurt your mother and I’m sorry for it.’ But my father wasn’t the kind of person who could say that. He was never sorry for anything. By the time I was married, we could hardly look at each other. And I suppose Mitchell told you about their falling-out.”

“He did.”

“So that left him with nothing, no children, no grandchildren. What did he do with himself?”

“He spent a lot of time alone in that apartment, perhaps with his memories.”

“Was there anything else you wanted?” She had transformed herself back into the perfect matron, and I understood it was time to go.

“You’ve been very generous,” I said, standing. “I appreciate it.”

We said our good-byes and I went down the carpeted, lighted hall to the swift, silent elevator that worked without a hitch and kept me under surveillance with a camera over my head.

I had gotten more than I had bargained for.

I took the crosstown bus back to the West Side. My car was still where I’d left it, apparently intact. In New York that often ranks as a happy surprise. When I first saw them, I was amused at the signs, in English and Spanish, hand-lettered and professionally printed, proclaiming that there was “no radio” in car after car parked on city streets. I no longer find anything funny about them, but my car is so old and so cheap, I can’t quite believe anyone would think there was something of value inside.

I was about to unlock the door when I changed my mind, crossed the street to where the apartment houses formed an impregnable wall, almost like the face of a cliff, across from the park, and went back to Mr. Greenspan’s address. I announced myself and was buzzed in. A hefty, middle-aged woman in an apron opened the door for me. A smell of food cooking in an unseen kitchen gave the apartment a warm, homey atmosphere.

“You’re too early for the sun,” the little man in the chair said as I entered the living room.

“I had another question.”

“Make yourself comfortable.”

I sat near the windows. “Did you know about Nathan’s first family in Europe?” I asked.

“Why would you want to know such a thing?”

“Because I think it may have something to do with his death.”

“Believe me, it didn’t. And yes, sure I knew. I knew Renata.
I knew the babies. They were part of Nathan Herskovitz’s first life.”

“Did the second Mrs. Herskovitz know about the first Mrs. Herskovitz?”

“You see, young lady, you look at it all wrong. When you say the first Mrs. Herskovitz and the second Mrs. Herskovitz, that’s American, that’s divorce. It wasn’t like that for Nathan. Nathan had a first life and a second life. This, here—” he jabbed his index finger toward the floor “—was his second life. Did Hannah know about the first life? Maybe. Probably. Maybe she had one, too. That’s between husband and wife.”

“His children never knew until the day of his funeral. Mitchell walked into the apartment Monday morning and saw the pictures.”

“You want me to blame Nathan that his son didn’t visit him more? If the son had visited, he would have known a long time ago what he just found out. Nathan needed company in his old age. He didn’t have his children, so he found it in his pictures.”

I thanked Mr. Greenspan and went down to my car. Driving home, I wondered whether Nathan had found company earlier in his life, when Hannah was still alive, and with whom.

Jack called that evening and we had a nice, long talk. I told him about Mrs. Herskovitz’s suicide.

“You asking for a file?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I don’t think it’ll tell me anything I’ll need. The daughter says Nathan neglected his wife to the point of abuse.”

“Happens.”

“I spent a lot of time talking to him, Jack. It’s true he didn’t ooze sweetness, but I didn’t sense the kind of nastiness I hear from his family.”

“You’re hearing one side. They have their gripes, but he may have had good reasons for what he did. Or he may have just been a mean bastard who drove his wife to suicide and
his children out of his life. Is Gold pretty sure Ramirez didn’t do it, or is he just playing the devil’s advocate in all this?”

I frequently sensed an antagonism between these two men, who had never met but who had heard of each other through me. To Jack, Arnold was that lawyer type who hated cops and would rather free a hundred killers than let the system make one little mistake. To Arnold, Jack was my cop boyfriend who had to defend a corrupt system because he was part of it. I sensed, however, that Arnold tried to rein his feelings, knowing that I cared for Jack and respecting my ability to choose wisely.

“I think he’s sure,” I said. “I don’t think this is a legal quibble.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Jack,” I said, feeling uncertain about what I was going to say, “if I thought I was being followed, what would I do?”

When you say something like that to Jack, he’s suddenly all business. “You tell me about it and I come over and take care of the guy. What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re looking into a homicide, Chris. If the owners of that building hired a guy to do a job and you find out something they don’t want you to know, you’re in for a pile of trouble.”

“Maybe it was my imagination.” I’d seen Jack once before when my life was in danger, something I could live nicely without seeing again.

“You want to tell me?”

“It was just paranoia.”

“You call if you need help. And don’t forget 911.”

“OK.”

“We on for Saturday?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s make it early. I have to spend Sunday with my books.”

We set a time and said good night. I went to my study, took a sheet of paper, and wrote down a few things. First
life, second life, first family, second family, Hannah commits suicide, Nina finds her, Nina hates Nathan for driving Hannah to suicide.

On another sheet I wrote different things: Nathan Herskovitz, lawyer, connections, calls in debts, waits too long to save himself and his family.

Then I wrote some questions: Did people pay him for saving them? (Where’s the money?) Did he deny help to someone? To many people? To the wrong people? Was he involved in some kind of illicit trade?

I had no answers. The more time I spent thinking, the more questions I had. I left the desk with the sheets lying as I had left them, hoping for a flash of insight, of illumination, to lead me along the right trail. From where I stood, it looked pretty murky.

I went downstairs to check that the doors were locked and to turn off lights. The phone rang as I was leaving the kitchen. It was Mitchell Herskovitz. He had finally reached Sergeant Franciotti, who said the apartment would be available to him on Friday. He and his wife would not be able to come up this weekend, but they had paid a month’s rent and would fly to New York next Friday night and start the job of cleaning up the apartment Saturday morning. If I wanted to drop by and say hello, I was welcome.

I said I would and I looked forward to seeing them next week.

Thursday morning I drove into the city and went to 603. I wanted to see whether the police were back today for a last look at Nathan’s apartment. Before going into the stairwell, I took out my flashlight and psyched myself up, repeating what I had told Jack, that it was all paranoia, that I was too sensible and well adjusted to be affected by a little noise and a beat-up old car that may have had a legitimate reason to drive to Oakwood.

It didn’t work very well. I pulled open the door and flashed the light around. It was perfectly quiet, and nothing was visible besides the stairs. I started up.

It was quiet all the way to five except for my pounding heart and the labored breathing that the climb always brought on. I stepped out into the hallway on five and stopped to listen. I have to tell you that it was never completely silent on those floors. If you walked into a vacant apartment, you could see armies of roaches that had taken up habitation. It’s not the sort of thing I like to talk about, but that’s what that building was like. Just walking through an empty apartment, you stepped on a few, and you could feel and hear it happen. I know because I ventured into one or two of those apartments once—and then never again.

And the roaches were the least of it. I knew the basement was a breeding ground for rats. Gallagher had said something once about a telephone installer coming up from the basement white as a sheet—and that had been in the good old days.

Anyway, the floor seemed empty of human beings, so I went down the hall to apartment D. The door was ajar, the crime scene tape cut neatly. I pushed the door, calling, “Hello. Anyone here?” as I went in. I figured the police were in there, doing whatever last-minute things they do before turning over the premises to the family.

But it was perfectly quiet inside, and I found myself getting angry that the police could have been so careless as to walk out without closing and locking the door. I passed the study, the master bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. All seemed just as I had last seen it on Monday morning.

I turned in to the living room, steeling myself, and got the shock of my life. From a point a foot or so above the floor to a couple of feet above that, a large hole had been gouged in the wall between the living room and the apartment next door, a hole easily large enough for a person to pass through. Someone had gained access to the building, gone into the abandoned, unlocked apartment that was a mirror image of this one, and drilled through the common wall. Whoever did it could have worked at a leisurely pace through the night. No one would have heard the noise except just possibly Mrs.
Paterno, who lived upstairs, but her apartment was at the other end of the building—and she minded her business.

I had no particular fear that the intruder was still in the apartment. He had left through the front door, probably hours ago. But just to make sure, I moved quietly from room to room.

The apartment was not tossed in the usual sense of having all the contents strewn around, furniture slashed, everything displaced. Instead, an effort had been made to leave things much as they had been, or perhaps the intruder had known exactly what he was looking for, and tossing had not been necessary.

Sofa cushions had been lifted and not put back precisely in place; bedding was somewhat awry; dresser drawers had been opened and not completely closed. I pulled open one drawer and saw that the contents had been pushed around—but, of course, I had no idea how neat Nathan had been.

Since closets seemed the likeliest place to keep valuables, I went around opening them and looking inside. They, too, showed a kind of mild disarray, but nothing pointing to a thorough search.

I tried to think why the killer would not have searched the apartment immediately after the murder. If he had wanted something from Nathan, that would have been the time to look for it. If he had found out later that Nathan had something of value, why kill him in the first place? It didn’t make sense.

I knew I should be calling the police instead of looking around a crime scene, but it seemed an opportune time to go through the apartment without police or family observing me. Before starting, I went to the kitchen, where a pair of yellow rubber gloves hung over the side of a plastic bucket under the sink. Nathan had done whatever cleaning up he did while wearing them, and they would keep my fingerprints from being found on his possessions, assuming the police intended to dust the apartment or its contents a second time.