Authors: Lee Harris
He looked up and smiled.
“I—uh—I think I left something on the stove,” I said, flustered.
“See you later,” he called.
Not over my dead body.
I went out to my car. It was still the only one in the lot. I walked to the curb and looked up and down the quiet residential street. Nothing. I went back to my car and drove in and out of streets until I was satisfied the wreck was gone. Then I went home.
That evening I called Nina Passman. It was the first time I had spoken to her since her brother had told her about the pictures in Nathan’s living room. She seemed reluctant to talk to me, and then, quite suddenly, changed.
“I have to be in the city tomorrow. Could we meet at two?”
“Two’s fine.”
“Gordon and I have a little pied-à-terre in Manhattan.” She gave me the address. “Apartment 17C. I’ll see you then.”
I suppressed a giggle as I hung up. A pied-à-terre, “foot on earth,” an apartment in the sky, a place the Passmans
could stay at after the theater or a tiring day, when driving thirty miles was just too much for them or taking the Long Island Railroad was more than they could bear. Well, at least she would talk to me.
I started my day on Wednesday by calling the first name in the book from the funeral home, Hillel Greenspan. He said, sure, sure, I could come and talk to him whenever I got there. It was all the encouragement I needed.
New York is a city with alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules that theoretically provide time for street cleaning and generate some much-needed revenue, but in reality they are designed to drive people crazy. On one side of the street you can’t park from 8:00
A.M
. to 11:00
A.M
. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On the other side you can’t park during those hours on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. On some streets the hours are eleven to two, and sometimes the restrictions are two days a week instead of three. And in areas where the buildings are old, like the West Side of Manhattan, there are virtually no places to park except for the street. Buildings erected before the Second World War never provided off-street parking, probably because no one could imagine so many people owning so many cars. Sometimes I can’t quite imagine it myself.
So finding a spot is a game. What many people do is simply double-park on today’s “good side” for the three street-cleaning hours and then rush to get a spot that’s good the next day. It’s a lifelong battle. And if you have a good spot today and you want to take your car out only to find a solid line of cars double-parked next to you, there’s virtually nothing you can do. In most cases, the police won’t even ticket the double-parker. If they do, the ticket adds to the litter.
What I do is try to arrive half an hour before the parking restrictions end so that I can park on either side (since I won’t be staying overnight) during the half hour when everyone rushes for cover. Or I look for a meter on Broadway, which means I have an hour before I have to run back and drop in more quarter.
On that Wednesday morning, luck was with me. Someone actually pulled out of a good space as I coasted down Riverside Drive. It was a small car, but that’s what I drive, and I backed in easily. If you believe in good omens, that surely signaled an auspicious start to the day.
Hillel Greenspan’s apartment had large rooms overlooking the Hudson River in the Seventies. From the eighth floor the view was beautiful. The strip of green that was Riverside Park stretched as far as you could see to the right and a few blocks to the left across the street, right down to the river. The river itself is quite magnificent, and the George Washington Bridge off to the right was spectacular.
I saw all this from the windows of his living room.
“You like the view?” he asked from his chair where he could probably see no more than the sky.
“It’s beautiful. Have you lived here long?”
“Forever.” He smiled.
“That’s a long time. Mitchell told me you helped Nathan find his apartment.”
“I did, I did. I knew someone who was moving. We paid a little here, a little there, we got the apartment for the Herskovitzes.”
“How did you know him, Mr. Greenspan?”
“How do you know people?” he asked back. “You grow up with them, you work with them.”
“You knew him in Europe, then, before the war.”
“Exactly.”
Hillel Greenspan spoke English fluently with the smallest of accents, much as Nathan had. Until Mitchell had told me otherwise, I had assumed that Nathan had come to New York as a young man, long before the war. Knowing how old he
was when he immigrated, I appreciated how well he spoke the language.
“What did Nathan do in Europe?”
“In Europe he was a lawyer.”
“Nathan was a lawyer? He told me he’d been in business.”
“Here he was in business, there he was a lawyer. Law doesn’t move around so easy. If you’re an accountant, the numbers stay the same. Laws are different. He came here, he had to work. He worked.”
“What did he do?”
“He sold blankets.”
I felt a small pang of what might have been Nathan’s pain. This was what the war had done, taken a man educated in the law, a respected professional, and turned him into a small businessman.
“A beautiful store,” Mr. Greenspan said, filling the silence. “Blankets, quilts, pillows, quality goods.”
“Did his wife work in the store with him?”
He eyed me curiously before he answered. “His wife? No. She had little children. She stayed home.”
“She died a long time ago, didn’t she?”
“Could be thirty years already. Maybe longer.”
“Was she sick?”
Mr. Greenspan pursed his lips. Then he nodded his head. “From the very beginning,” he said. “The war made a lot of people sick.”
“Did you know her?”
“Sure I knew her. We were all friends.”
“When did you come to this country, Mr. Greenspan?”
“You see,” he said, “there are two kinds of people. There are those that have luck and those that need luck. Or you could say there are those that think of themselves and those that think of others. Or you could look at it this way: There are people who do what is required of them and people who can never do enough.”
I wondered where this was leading. It had been a simple question. I had expected a short answer.
“You wonder why I answer your question this way.”
“I’m sure you have a good reason,” I said with a smile.
“What I am telling you is that I was the man with the luck, I was the man who thought of myself, I was the man who did what was required. I came to this country in 1939. Nathan could have come. But Nathan was a man who could never give up. He stayed. If he stayed one day more, he saved another person, maybe another family. One day becomes two, two becomes three, and pretty soon he finds himself in a camp, his family torn apart, his whole life reduced to a number on his arm. And I, the man with luck, find myself on Riverside Drive, where every night I see the sun set and I know I have lived another day.”
“You’re saying that Nathan stayed on in Europe to help other people get out.”
“Exactly. He had friends, connections, clients, people who owed him something. He used it. He used everything. In the whole world, there wasn’t a better man than Nathan Herskovitz.”
For the first time since Sunday, I felt there was someone else in the world who had liked and respected Nathan. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Mr. Greenspan. I knew him only a couple of months, but I thought he was a fine man.”
“I’m not surprised to hear it. He said nice things about you, too.”
“Is it possible that he had any enemies?”
“Everyone has enemies. A man who collects what is owed him can be hated.”
“But those were people in Europe.”
“Some came here.”
His words gave me a chill. “Is there someone who might have wanted to kill him?”
The old man smiled. “It’s too late for that now, don’t you think so? You kill an old man because he has money, or because he lives in an apartment you want for yourself, not because he collected a debt fifty years ago. You think someone from Nathan’s past beat him to death?”
“I don’t know.”
“Such things don’t happen.”
I decided to say what I was thinking. “I think Nathan was sorry for something he did.”
“We’re all sorry,” the little man in the big chair said. “All of us. You get old, you get sorry. We don’t get killed for it.”
“Would you mind if I came back to ask you some more questions?” I asked.
“Sure, come. Come at five o’clock and see the sun go down. Already I’ve seen more than eighteen thousand sunsets from my window. God willing, I could live to see twenty. Just call before you come. I’m a busy man. Lately I go to a lot of funerals.”
I had a few hours till my appointment with Nina Passman. Since my parking space was good all day, I decided to leave the car and take the crosstown bus that goes along Seventy-ninth Street and then through Central Park. If I got off at Park Avenue, I would have only a few blocks to walk, and somewhere in between, I could have lunch.
I took the bus another stop to Lexington Avenue, which gave me more choices for lunch. After I had eaten in a nice little coffee shop, I tried Arnold Gold from a pay phone. He was there.
“Give me the picture,” he said when he got on the phone. “Are you trying to prove me right or wrong?”
“I know better than to try to prove you wrong, Arnold. I’m just looking for truth with a capital T.”
“Good luck. I’ve been looking all my life.”
“Did you get the autopsy report on Nathan yet?”
“This very day. He was killed late Friday afternoon or early evening. If they’d just waited awhile, he would have died of natural causes. His arteries were blocked, and it looks like he had a tumor that probably would have gotten him before next Yom Kippur.”
Inscribe me for blessing in the Book of Life
.
“Do they know what killed him?”
“Sure. Multiple blows to the head with a hard object, hard
enough to dent his skull. Nothing like it was found in the apartment.”
“So the killer took it with him.”
“Looks that way. Did you notice anything missing?”
“No, but I’ll give it some thought. I wasn’t in there very long.”
“Maybe Gallagher would know.”
“I talked to Gallagher yesterday. He was never in Nathan’s apartment.”
“Strange old guys, those two. What about the woman?”
“She’s so reclusive, I can’t imagine she had anything to do with either of the men. The first time she let me in to her apartment was Saturday when I was looking for the key.”
“Well, Chrissie, someone got in and did a job on him, and we can’t expect any help from the police. They think they’ve got their man, and that gives them a cleared case. Nice and easy for them.”
“Well, my case is just opening. For what it’s worth, I’m talking to some people. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
I did some window-shopping—you can hardly avoid it in that part of the city—then walked over to the Passmans’ pied-à-terre. Having a foot on the ground on the seventeenth floor is really stretching a metaphor, I thought as I zoomed upstairs in the elevator after being announced. But whatever you called it, it was a lovely place, parquet floors covered with a thick Chinese rug with a lot of blues, a small round marble table with two chairs in the eating area, and comfortable furniture for sitting near a wall of windows that looked east. If Mr. Greenspan saw the sun set from his living room, the Passmans could see it rise from theirs.
I thanked Nina Passman for seeing me and told her to call me Chris. She showed me to the sofa and asked me how I wanted my coffee, but she didn’t reciprocate on the first-name offer.
“The lawyer representing the tenants in your father’s building doesn’t think the police have arrested the right man,” I began while she was pouring coffee from a brightly
colored flowered coffeepot that matched the cups and cake plates.
“Is that why you’re talking to me?”
“There’s an answer somewhere, and maybe it’s in your father’s life. I want to find out everything I can about him. If someone else killed him, it was probably someone who knew him. Nothing was stolen from the apartment.”
“I haven’t seen or spoken to my father in many years.”
“But you wrote to him after you were married. You wanted to renew your relationship with him, didn’t you?”
She looked thoughtful. I had already told her that only a scrap of the envelope remained. With the letter gone, she could concoct any story she wanted, and I wondered if her thoughtfulness was devoted to that.
“I wanted to talk to him,” she said finally. “I wanted to meet with him and have him explain certain things. I thought it might be possible to pick up some kind of relationship with him. He never answered the letter.”
“I don’t suppose you want to tell me what those things were that you wanted to talk to him about.”
“I don’t want to talk about it with you or anyone else.”
“This is wonderful coffee,” I said, thinking I was wasting an afternoon.
“This is a great neighborhood to live in. You can buy coffee beans and spices and fine pastry. Every time we come here, even if it’s just an overnight, it feels like a vacation.”
“Nina,” I said, presuming the right to call her by her first name, “were you well off when you were growing up?”
“We never wanted for anything, if that’s what you mean. I have no idea how much my father earned. We had nice furniture, enough clothes, we went to good schools. It wasn’t something I worried about.”
“Who took care of you after your mother died?”
She paused again. That was it, of course, the mother. She knew now from her brother that there had been another family before the war, and it had made her sensitive.
“We took care of ourselves. I had an aunt and uncle up near Columbia who helped out sometimes, invited us to dinner,
helped me buy special clothes, that kind of thing. But Mitchell and I managed on our own.”
“When did she die?”
Another pause. “When I was ten—1959.”
“Mitchell indicated she hadn’t been well.”
“Really?”