Yom Kippur Murder (2 page)

I told her and she dialed. She stood there with the phone, a long black column, with her chin tilted upward. Finally she hung up. “There’s no answer.”

“I know.”

“Perhaps he’s gone for a walk.”

“I don’t think so, Mrs. Paterno. I was to come for him at nine, and I was a few minutes early. If you don’t have the key, I’ll call the police and have them break the door down.” I turned to leave.

“Wait.” She opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out a key ring with two keys on it. They looked just like the ones Mr. Herskovitz had given me. “I need them back,” she said. “In fact, I’ll go down with you.” She put them in her jumpsuit pocket and took her own keys from a handsome snake-skin bag on a kitchen chair.

Outside she locked her own two locks, and we started for the stairs.

“I have Herskovitz’s, Herskovitz has Gallagher’s, and Gallagher has mine,” she explained as we went. “We agreed on that when everyone else moved out.”

“Sounds like an interesting arrangement.”

“A practical arrangement. Better than everybody having the keys to everybody else’s apartment.” She said it as though she were talking about a great number of apartments and keys. “This way, if someone’s been inside, you know who.”

We had reached five and were halfway to Nathan Herskovitz’s door.

“I’ve never used it,” Mrs. Paterno said. She stopped in front of D and inserted the Segal key in the Segal lock. It
turned easily. Then she used the key to the landlord’s lock. That, too, turned and the door opened.

“Mr. Herskovitz?” I called, pushing the door closed behind me. “Nathan, are you here?”

Mrs. Paterno had entered before me and was peering into rooms as she went. This apartment, like the other two I had seen in this building, was, from my perspective, backward. You passed the bedrooms first on your way to the kitchen and living room. Mrs. Paterno disappeared down the long, dark hall as I checked out the two bedrooms, the first set up as a study, the second with Nathan Herskovitz’s old-fashioned double bed and bedroom furniture, both empty. As I regained the hall, I saw Mrs. Paterno turn in to the living room. Then I heard a scream of such horror, such agony, that I froze.

Mrs. Paterno had found Nathan Herskovitz.

There are moments in life that are so hideous, you would agree to pay a stiff penance to eradicate the memory. That’s the way it was when I entered Nathan Herskovitz’s living room that Yom Kippur morning and saw his body. In a glance, which was all I could stomach before dragging Mrs. Paterno out of the room and leaning against the wall to try to recover my equilibrium, I could see he had been badly beaten. I assumed it was Nathan, although the face … Even now I cannot think of it.

Mrs. Paterno stumbled to the bathroom, and I pressed my palms against my ears to block out the sounds of her agony. When she came out, finally, into the hall, she looked older and gaunter. The turban on her head suddenly looked like a foolish, heavy impertinence, not a regal fashion statement.

We left the apartment and returned to hers, where I called the police. I wanted to call Arnold Gold as well, but today was Yom Kippur and I knew he and his wife were going to synagogue. If I was early enough to find him at home, I would ruin his day. I decided to wait and call after nightfall.

I waited downstairs for the police to arrive, which they did very quickly. They were very kind (with the slight exception of a muttered “Christ, why can’t they die on two for a change?” as we mounted the stairs) and treated the three of us—Mr. Gallagher came up as soon as I told him—with respect. For most of the time that we were in 5D, we sat in the Herskovitz study, I at the desk, the other two on a very old sofa of cracking brown leather. Mrs. Paterno seemed nearly catatonic. The shock of seeing the body, the bloody carpet,
the splattered furniture, draperies, and walls had left her speechless and occasionally trembling, although it was warm in the room. Metropolitan Properties had managed to heat the three occupied apartments, probably at a cost equaling a whole new system, and the heat was abundant.

“You’d think they’d stop short of murder,” Mr. Gallagher said with a sigh.

“Who?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Our friendly landlord, of course.”

“You think Metropolitan killed Mr. Herskovitz?”

“They tried everything else, didn’t they? Turned off the lights, sent in the addicts, fed the rats a better diet than I eat, tried to burn us out. It didn’t work. Gold took them to court and made them spend money they’ll never get back. We could live another ten years. Fifteen if we work at it. So you send the goons in and kill a poor old man, and then the others get cold feet.”

“I can’t live here anymore,” Mrs. Paterno said, although I was sure she hadn’t heard a word of Gallagher’s lament.

“See what I mean? Then there’s just me. What should I do? Take a blanket and stake my claim to a piece of floor at Grand Central?”

“I can’t believe they would stoop to murder,” I said.

“Read the papers, girl.” Gallagher sounded exasperated. “It’s been done before. Maybe they were just supposed to give him a friendly beating and it got out of hand. You know how it is. You love what you’re doing so much, you just can’t stop.”

I didn’t answer. Something was tickling my brain, a question I had to ask Mrs. Paterno. I opened my bag and pulled out a tissue, touching my keys as I searched. Then I remembered.

“Mrs. Paterno, when you turned the key in the Segal lock, was it locked? Did you feel the lock turn?”

She shook her head ambiguously, her eyes vague. I didn’t know whether she was answering no or just conveying a lack of knowledge. She had aged a decade since I rang her bell
this morning. I had thought she was a well-preserved late fifties. Now she looked a hopeless seventy.

“It was locked,” she said in a monotone. “The bottom one, I don’t know. The top one was locked.”

“Then someone had the key.”

She looked fearful for a moment. “I have never used that key before today,” she said with fervor.

“I don’t mean you, Mrs. Paterno. Maybe someone carried groceries home for him and took the key after killing him.”

“A push-in? Not likely,” Gallagher said. “Herskovitz carried his own.”

“I don’t see how. He had his cane. Going up all those steps must have been difficult. If he was carrying something—”

“I thought you got him his stuff.”

It was true that I had shopped for Mr. Herskovitz for the last month and a half, and I had carried a rather heavy bag from the supermarket only two days earlier. “He might have needed milk and bread,” I said.

“You’re reachin’, darlin’. You don’t want to face the facts.”

I truly didn’t. The thought of a building owner resorting to murder to empty his building represented the kind of moral low I found difficult to comprehend. Still, I could not ignore what I read in the papers. Such things had been attempted.

“He had children, didn’t he?” I said, changing the subject.

Mrs. Paterno raised her eyes and lowered them.

“A girl and a boy,” Gallagher said. “Nina, I think she is, and the boy, maybe Mitchell. He didn’t talk too much about them.”

“Didn’t they grow up in this building?”

“Didn’t know him then. There were kids by the dozens back in the fifties. Herskovitz and me, we got to know each other when the place started goin’ to the dogs.”

“Where am I going to go?” Mrs. Paterno said, looking at no one.

“Do you have family?” I asked. Of the three, she had said
the least to me in the two months I had been coming around. Most of what I heard from her was complaints; this isn’t working right, that isn’t the way it should be. Even when I came to help her or to deliver a message, she never asked me in. She stood on her side of the door, frequently with the chain in place, and I stood in the dark hall like some lesser mortal.

“A daughter,” she said, as though that ended the discussion.

“Maybe she can—”

“Impossible.”

“Would you like to stay with me for a little while?” For a hundred reasons, I didn’t want company, but the poor woman was terrified, and I didn’t know what else to do.

“Where do you live?”

“In Oakwood. It’s in Westchester County near—”

“I cannot be out of the city.” She looked away, dismissing any other offer of help.

“Someone will have to notify his children,” I said.

“Look in the drawer,” Gallagher said. “He told me once where he kept the addresses. In case anything happened, someone should know.”

I opened the center desk drawer, conscious that the police were just down the hall doing their grisly tasks and would probably not appreciate my snooping. They had asked us not to touch anything. There were scissors, pencils, pens, a large rubber eraser, and a bottle of ink. I closed the drawer and tried the top right one. An old leather book with
ADDRESSES
stamped in gold on the cover met my eyes. I took it out and opened it on the desktop. Under H I found “Mitchell (Carolyn)” as though he had written in his daughter-in-law’s name at a time when she was so new to the family that he might forget her name. I copied down the address and telephone number. Mitchell and Carolyn lived in Atlanta, Georgia. There was no Nina in the H’s, so I leafed through the book, starting with A, looking for her. When I reached the XYZ page, I realized she wasn’t listed.

“His daughter’s not here,” I said, looking at Gallagher.

“Oh, she’s there, all right. Preston, something like that.”

I went back to the P’s, but the only listings were for an “H. Plotkin” and for “Pharmacy (close).” I was about to give up when I saw something ragged sticking out of the back cover. I flipped over to it and found a piece of paper in the shape of a long triangle, obviously a flap torn off an envelope. Printed on it in raised blue script was “Mrs. Gordon Passman” at an address on Long Island. Under it in ink was a phone number.

“Passman,” I said.

“Passman, that’s it.” Gallagher smiled. “I knew he had it.”

I copied down the information, reinserted the envelope flap, and put the book back.

Just as I did, one of the policemen who had climbed the stairs with us came into the room. “Mr. Gallagher? Want to come with me? Detective Sloan would like to talk to you.”

Gallagher lifted himself from the couch, gave me a quick smile, and left the room. A moment later, the policeman was back.

“Mrs. Paterno? This way, please.”

Mrs. Paterno stood and walked out without looking at me. She had regained her bearing, although her color was still poor.

The policeman returned a moment later. “So how ya doing?” he asked as if we were old friends.

“OK.”

He made himself comfortable on the sofa, or as comfortable as he could be with the big leather belt and the holster carrying his gun. “What a way to start the day, huh? Walk in on somethin’ like that.”

“It was pretty awful,” I agreed.

“Poor old guy. You gotta wonder about New York sometimes.”

“Yes.” I didn’t feel chatty, but he went on, and I responded to keep from seeming impolite. Finally a man in civilian clothes popped his head in the door.

“You Christine Bennett?”

“Yes.”

“We can talk in here.” He motioned to the uniformed officer, who vacated his comfortable perch.

“Would you like the desk?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I carried my bag to the sofa and sat. As it happened, I was dressed for an evening dinner date, not having wanted to return home and then drive back into the city. I was wearing a suit of a rather beautiful shade of blue, and black sheer stockings. I could feel the detective’s eyes as I walked across the room.

“I’m Sergeant Franciotti. Can you tell me what you were doing here this morning?”

I told the story in abbreviated fashion. For some reason, I didn’t mention that Mr. Herskovitz had given me his keys and that they hadn’t worked. I think at that point I had pretty much forgotten that part, and later, when I thought about it, I couldn’t see that it could mean very much. I told him about coming down to five with Mrs. Paterno, how she preceded me down the long apartment hall, how I heard her scream. I had introduced my story with an explanation of who I was and how I was connected to the three holdouts in the building. The detective had heard of Arnold Gold and made a note of his name when I mentioned it.

I found it amusingly ironic to be questioned in this manner by a police detective. I have what is called in the common parlance a boyfriend, a word I find very distasteful and more suited to high school romances than adult relationships. Jack is not a boy, and he’s much more than a friend. He’s also a police detective sergeant, working out of the Sixty-fifth Precinct in Brooklyn. I met him in June when I was only a few weeks out of the convent. We clicked, probably too soon and too firmly, and I asked for some time apart, a brief hiatus, if only to convince myself that I’d been right the first time. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of weeks, and that night, under pressure from my neighbor in Oakwood, I was meeting her cousin for dinner in Manhattan. We had spoken on the phone and he sounded very nice, although he must have
wondered what he was getting into, taking out a woman who’d spent half her life in a convent. I hoped he would be surprised.

Looking at Sergeant Franciotti, I could imagine Jack at work. As he asked his questions, I kept trying to guess where he was leading me. But as it turned out, he wasn’t leading me anywhere. He was just getting times and places and relationships straightened out. The only time he was anything but neutral was when I told him about the key arrangement. His forehead creased and his face curled into something that looked half-skeptical and half-disbelieving.

“Never understand these people who stay,” he said. “But they got their rights.”

“Has anyone called Mr. Herskovitz’s children?” I asked.

“Haven’t found anything on them yet.”

“I’ve got their names and addresses. Would you like them?” I handed him my notes.

He wrote it all down.

“Would you mind if I called them?”

“Be my guest. Use the phone in the kitchen. The crime scene guys are done with it.”