The Passover Murder (10 page)

13

Tuesday morning I teach. I am still teaching “Poetry and the Contemporary American Woman” at a local college in Westchester, a job I truly enjoy. But on that Tuesday morning, I made a phone call before I left for the college. I dialed Harry Schiff’s number.

A woman answered and made me jump through some hoops before she got him to the phone. But finally he picked up.

“Mr. Schiff, my name is Christine Bennett and I’m a friend of the family of Iris Grodnik.”

“Oh my God,” he said.

“I’d like to talk to you.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I can.”

“I can meet you wherever you want. I have a car. I could even pick you up.”

“No, no, it’s all over. It’s gone. It’s too long.”

“It’s really very important. I could see you this afternoon.”

“Today? Oh, I don’t know.”

“What would be good for you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, I really don’t.”

It’s so easy on the telephone to turn someone down. “Please, Mr. Schiff. We’ve found something of Iris’s, something that was hidden away since she died. It would really help if I could talk to you.”

“What did you find?”

“The pocketbook she had that night. She didn’t have it with her when she left her brother’s apartment.”

“Oh my God.”

“If we could just get together for a little while and talk.”

“This is terrible,” he said. “Look, all right, I’ll do it. I shouldn’t, but I will. I like to take a walk in the afternoon, but it’s too cold to meet outside. There’s a place, Vinny’s, on Seventy-second Street between West End and Broadway. You know the area?”

“Very well.”

“Vinny’s. On the south side of the street. I’ll be there at—when can you meet me?”

“Two-thirty.”

“Two-thirty is good. I’ll be there at two-thirty. What do you look like?”

That’s a question I can never answer. I looked down at what I was wearing. “I’ll be wearing a black raincoat and carrying a briefcase.”

“I’ll look for you. I’ll get a table for two. This afternoon, right?”

“Right.”

“Good-bye.”

I had a light, tasty lunch in the college cafeteria when my class was over and then drove into the city. About halfway there it started to rain and I wondered if Harry Schiff would make it to Vinny’s. I knew the area because an elderly friend of mine had lived and been murdered in a building in the West Seventies and I had visited a number of apartments around there, about a year and a half ago, looking for leads. I drove down Riverside Drive and found a place to park not far from Seventy-second Street and then walked over the block and a half till I found Vinny’s. It was just two-thirty when I closed my umbrella and went inside.

It had the look of a neighborhood hangout for the elderly. At one table four men were playing cards. Besides the cards there were four cups of coffee on the table and nothing else. At another table two men played chess, again with mugs of coffee beside them. I wondered how poor Vinny made a living. As I looked around, a man rose from a table for two and looked at me. I walked over.

“Mr. Schiff?”

“That’s me.”

“Hi. I’m Christine Bennett.”

“Sit down. What can I get you?”

“Coffee would be fine.”

“The cheesecake is good.”

“OK.”

“Mike,” he called to a nearby waiter, “two coffees, two cheesecakes.”

“Comin’ up, Mr. Schiff.”

“What do you have to do with Iris?” he asked.

As Marilyn had said, he was a tall, nice-looking man, now completely gray and I guessed near eighty. He had dressed for our meeting, a white shirt, a blue silk tie. I wondered how often he put on clothes like these to take his afternoon walk.

“I know her grandniece. I was invited to their seder this year and they told me about Iris.”

“It was terrible, a tragedy. I never got over it.”

“They asked me to try to find out who killed her.”

“You think in a city like this you can find out who killed a woman sixteen years ago when the police couldn’t do it?”

“I’m giving it a try. Tell me about yourself, Mr. Schiff.”

He gave me a smile. “I’m a retired accountant. I met Iris so many years ago I can’t even remember; it must have been in the fifties. She was beautiful, she was sweet, she was a little angel.”

“Everyone who knew her says nice things about her.”

“You couldn’t say anything else. I was crazy about her. But back then, forty years ago, things were a lot different. I had kids at home, I was a professional man, you had to live a certain way. You know what I’m saying?”

“I understand.”

“Later on, when my children got older, I moved out for a while and lived by myself. We had a good time together, Iris and me. I’m sure you’re smart enough to figure out I don’t get along with my wife, but divorce is a big step, it’s not always easy. She made threats, she said she’d tie me up in court for years, and she could have done it. Finally Iris said, ‘Either we get married or it’s over.’ I couldn’t believe it would ever be over, but she meant it. I gave up my apartment and went back to my wife.”

“How long before Iris died did you stop seeing her?”

“It was a few years. I can’t tell you exactly.”

“Did you keep in touch?”

“Well, you know, a telephone call now and then, some flowers on her birthday. I didn’t forget her, if that’s what you mean, and I don’t think she ever forgot me.”

“Did she keep you current on her life?”

“We talked. She told me this one got married, that one had a baby.”

“What about her job? Did she talk about that?”

“She had a wonderful job, worked for a wonderful man. She loved it.”

“Did you ever meet her boss?”

“Mr. Garganus? How would I ever meet him?”

“I just thought—maybe when you were still going with her—you might have …” I let it dangle, hoping he would fill in something I could use.

“I never saw the man in my life.”

“Do you remember the last time you saw Iris?”

“Like it was yesterday. I called and asked her if I could take her out for her birthday. That was in December. She was fifty-nine. I took her to a beautiful restaurant, I sent her flowers to her apartment. We had a wonderful time.”

“So it was several months before she died.”

“Yeah, it was a long time.”

“Mr. Schiff, this is hard for me. I’d like to ask you—do you know if Iris was seeing anyone else after you and she stopped, uh, keeping company?”

“Another man?”

“Yes.”

“She never told me. Who was he?”

“I don’t know that she was seeing anyone. I just wondered if she was, if you knew whether she was.”

“Nah, I don’t think so. You think she was?”

I felt terrible discussing something so obviously painful to him, something that may never have happened. “I truly don’t know,” I said. “Uh, let me throw something kind of wild out and see what you think. Do you think she could have been seeing her boss?”

“Iris going out with Mr. Garganus? Never.”

“You never had a sense—when you broke up with her, you never thought it might be because there was another man? That she might be interested in Mr. Garganus?”

“Never. We were in love. We had a thing going twenty-five years. That’s longer than most people stay married nowadays. No, I gotta tell you, we belonged together. I think when we broke up she was hoping maybe it wasn’t too late to find someone and settle down, but I don’t think she had the someone at that time. And I don’t think Mr. Garganus was ever a possibility.”

“When you took her out for her birthday, did she mention that she was going out with anyone?”

“Not a word.”

“Mr. Schiff, can you think of anyone Iris knew whose name begins with M?”

“First name or last name?”

“Either one.”

“Lemme see.”

The coffee and cheesecake had come, and he sipped his coffee and rubbed his forehead. “I knew her niece, Marilyn. That’s one.”

“Yes.”

“You want another?”

“If you can think of any.”

“I can’t. Unless …”

“Yes?”

“I shouldn’t tell you. She wouldn’t like it. What do you need this for anyway?”

“We found her little engagement book in her handbag. She had the seders written in, and under the second one was an M. Maybe she changed her mind and decided to see
M
during the first seder. When she left her brother’s apartment that night, she left her bag behind, which meant she intended to return. So it’s possible she went outside to meet someone.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. But if I could find the person she met, we might have her killer.”

“I see. And the police never found this guy?”

“The police never saw her pocketbook till yesterday morning when I gave it to them.”

“You found it?”

“Yes.” It was too complicated to bring Marilyn into the picture. It was hard enough to get this man to answer my questions without asking two or three of his own.

“How do you like that?”

“What is it you were going to tell me?”

“Well, I suppose it’s OK. She’s gone a long time now.”

“A very long time.”

“Before I met her, when she was in her twenties maybe, she got married.”

“I see.”

“I didn’t know her then. She told me when we were going out. She could understand the trouble I was having with my wife because she’d had a pretty tough time of it herself. With her it didn’t last long. With me it was my whole life.”

“Do you know the name of her husband?”

“She must’ve told me. I don’t know. You hear something forty years ago, it’s not so easy to remember.”

“Think about the M.”

“Murray, Max, Manny, Milton. Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“I wonder if her sister knows.”

“Sylvie? How’s Sylvie doing? She’s a sweet girl.”

I smiled. That sweet girl was at least eighty. “She’s fine. She was at the seder I went to a few weeks ago. My feeling is they were very close.”

“They were. Iris was everyone’s favorite.”

“Did Iris have any children, Mr. Schiff?”

“Nah. They weren’t married that long. He was a real no-goodnik. She went to Reno and got a divorce.”

“Reno?”

“In those days you couldn’t get a divorce in New York State. So if you had the money, you went to Reno for six weeks, said you were living there as a resident, and they’d give you a divorce. They had a whole industry there, people staying in cheap hotels, spending all the money they had saved, just to get a divorce. When the law changed here, that was the end of Reno.”

“I guess I don’t know much about divorce law,” I said.

“Better not to.”

I took out a piece of paper and wrote my name, address, and phone number on it. “If you think of Iris’s husband’s name, would you call me?”

“Sure. It’s just I gotta do it from a pay phone. Too many questions if my wife sees a long-distance call on the bill. I’m the one should’ve gone to Reno. I wasn’t as smart as Iris.”

“I’m sure you did the right thing, Mr. Schiff. Your children must appreciate that they came from a home with two parents.”

“It’s hard to tell sometimes what they appreciate, but my kids are pretty good to me. Anything else I can tell you?”

“Who would have killed Iris?”

“Nobody on the face of this earth.”

I hadn’t expected much else. “Mr. Schiff, I learned something rather strange yesterday. Did you know that Iris had quit her job about a week before she disappeared?”

“Quit her job? No. Why would she do that?”

“She never told you she was planning to quit?”

“That I would remember. She never told me.”

“Did you talk to her after the birthday dinner?”

“I’m sure I must’ve. I called her maybe once a month. That can’t be true. She would’ve told me.”

I ate the last bite of cheesecake and finished my coffee. It had been a long conversation and I had the feeling I had told him more than he had told me, except that Iris had been married, which was certainly news. “I think that’s about it,” I said. “It’s been very nice meeting you. I hope you’ll call if you think of anything that could help.”

“If I think of anything, you’ll hear from me.”

“My car is parked on Riverside Drive. If you can walk a couple of blocks, I can take you home.”

“Nah,” he said. “I like to walk in the rain. It reminds me of Iris.”

I kind of smiled on the way home. It’s a cliché to say I’ll never understand people, but like most clichés, it’s true. My personal feelings on marriage and divorce aside, I could not see what could have bound this man so firmly to a wife he professed to dislike that he could not disengage himself for the woman he loved and who apparently loved him. People make strange concoctions of their lives, and Harry Schiff had to be a champion. He had spent twenty-five years loving one woman while married to another, and he surely would have spent the rest of his life the same way if she hadn’t stopped him. I wondered if something special had made her give him the ultimatum, whether it was, indeed, another man in her life (and she was too sweet to want to hurt Harry by telling him) or if it was just the power of the quarter-century mark, a woman asking herself whether it had all been worth it. I didn’t think I would ever find an answer.

I got home a little before five and saw the answering machine blinking at me. I pressed the button while I took my wet coat off.

“Hi, hon. Don’t bother making anything for me to eat tonight. There’s a party at the house and I’ll eat enough to keep me happy. A cup of coffee would be appreciated, though. See you later.” That, of course, had been my Jack. “Chris, this is Cathy Holloway. I was intrigued by some of the things we talked about yesterday and I did a little digging this morning and found something I think will interest you. Give me a call and I’ll tell you about it.”

I looked at my watch, then scrambled to find Cathy’s phone number. The receptionist answered and said it was too late to put me through, but finally said she’d ring the number.

“Mrs. Holloway.”

“Cathy, this is Chris Bennett. I just got home and heard your message. Are you on your way out?”

“No, that’s all right. I have a minute or two. It’s really very odd, what I found.”