An Eye for Murder (12 page)

“What’s that?”

“I came across the name of a woman that I think Ben Skulnick was trying to find, and I wondered if by any chance you’d ever heard of her.”

“I thought you were going to forget about him.” He slathered his bagel with cream cheese.

“I got curious. Anyway…” I kept going. “Does the name

Lisle Gottlieb mean anything to you?” Dad’s hands froze. “What did you say?”

“Lisle Gottlieb. Skull was trying to find a woman named

Lisle Gottlieb.”

His face turned a pale shade of parchment, and he gripped the knife so hard that veins protruded from his arm.

“Dad?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Are you all right? Shall I call someone?” He shook his head.

I ran into the kitchen and filled a glass with water. “Drink.” I set it down in front of him.

He waved the glass away, then carefully put the knife back on his plate.

“Daddy, what…”

He slowly pushed himself up from the table, held up a finger, and shuffled into his bedroom. I heard the bureau drawer slide open. It closed a minute later. He came back out, holding a picture.

“What’s that?”

Sitting down, he cleared his throat. “This happened a long time ago.” He studied the picture. “Frankly, it’s not the kind of thing I ever thought I’d tell my daughter.” He took a sip of water, looked at me. “But…” He passed me the picture.

It was an old black-and-white snapshot. Two young men in army uniforms sat at a small table in what looked like a coffee shop. Grinning at the camera, they both had an arm draped around a young woman. One of the soldiers was my father. The other was a young Barney Teitelman, Uncle Barney to me. I didn’t recognize the girl, but her smile was so dazzling it made me want to smile back. She had a delicately boned face, a small straight nose, and Clara Bow lips. Her hair was a mass of curly blond ringlets. She was beautiful.

“That’s me and Barney. After we enlisted,” he said softly.

“And the woman?”

He hesitated. “I want you to know that this happened before I ever met your mother. I never gave your mother anything to worry about, you know what I mean?” His eyes moved to the picture. “Lisle Gottlieb was my girlfriend back in Lawndale.”

I laid the picture on the table.

“She was a German refugee. Came over in the fall of thirtyeight. She was sixteen. She had blond hair and blue eyes. Like an angel.” He poured us both a cup of coffee. “She was living at the Jewish Orphans Home, but she cleaned houses for a living. She hardly spoke a word of English.”

I curled my fingers around my coffee cup, remembering the string of cleaning ladies that had come through my house when I was married. How one of them, an immigrant from

Latvia, sat down at our piano and played a Beethoven sonata from memory. Flawlessly.

“Lisle was from Freiburg,” Dad went on, “in the Black Forest. She was the oldest of three children. Her parents managed to get her out. A distant cousin here sponsored her. I got the impression they paid him a lot of money, but it didn’t work out. Lisle never said much about him.”

He picked up the picture. “When I met her, she’d managed to convince the Home in Lawndale to take her in temporarily, but she worked over in Hyde Park. I used to walk her to the Cottage Grove streetcar after school. Then I’d see her on weekends when I went over to Barney’s.” He chuckled. “I remember she never wanted to talk in German, even though I could manage. She’d point to things, and I’d tell her what they were in English.

“A few months after the war started she got a letter from her brother in Germany. Her father had been killed. Her mother and sister had been taken away in a truck. Her brother was hiding out at a friend’s. He said he was going to try and pass. She never heard from him again.”

I winced.

“After that I was her closest friend. I helped her move into a room at Mrs. T’s. Helped her learn to read and write in English. Took her places.”

“You dated?”

Dad nodded, looking past me. “I remember one night we went to see Benny Goodman at the Blackhawk. Gene Krupa was on drums, Teddy Wilson on piano. It was the tops. So full of magic neither Lisle nor I wanted it to end.” His expression was dreamy. “We stopped for a drink on the way home; it was past midnight when we got back to Barney’s.

“‘I’m going to run away from home and join the Benny

Goodman Trio,’ I remember saying.”

“‘Yes? But what will you play?’ She had this light, musical voice, you know? Like bells tinkling.” He smiled. “I told her

I could cover a comb with tissue paper pretty well. She giggled. But then she grew serious. ‘So Jacob’—she was the only person who ever called me that—‘what are you going to do when you grow up?’

“‘Marry you,’ I said. ‘And take care of you forever.’”

He blinked. “After Pearl Harbor, Barney and I enlisted. Lisle was scared. She said I should run away with the Benny Goodman trio.” He put down the snapshot. “But then, one night, a few weeks before we left for basic, I took her to dinner. She was beaming. She’d gotten a job. ‘A real job,’ she said. She had read about it in the newspaper. I still don’t know what she was prouder of—the fact that she got a job or that she could now read in English,” he said. “The job was at Iverson Steel.”

“Iverson?” I cut in. “As in Marian Iverson, the candidate?”

“Her father.”

“That’s a coincidence.”

“They needed women. They trained her to be a riveter.” He smiled at some private memory. “She loved it. I remember picking her up at the plant one day. There was some kind of war rally going on. Iverson himself led a procession of workers through the plant. They were all holding flags, blowing horns, singing songs. I’ll never forget it; the man looked like a king with his entourage. Everyone treated him like one, too. When he passed us, Lisle waved her flag and curtsied.

“I was shipped off to California soon after that.” He shifted. “Her letters stopped after a few months. I figured she was just insecure about writing in English. But when she didn’t return my calls, I knew something was wrong. I finally finagled a pass, borrowed a car, and drove straight through to Chicago. Got to Mrs. T’s at two in the morning. Joe, the head waiter, was closing up.

“‘Jake, what are you doing here?’ he said. ‘Is she up there?’

I asked. ‘Don’t go up there,’ I remember he said.”

“‘What are you, dizzy?’ I didn’t listen. I still had her key, you see. Wore it around my neck with my dogtags.”

I closed my eyes. I knew what was coming.

“Lisle was in bed with another man.” He looked over. “You know, the thing is…the thing I’ll always remember… when she finally realized who had unlocked her door, there was no guilt. No shame. She didn’t even flinch. All she said was, ‘Hello, Jake.’ In that light, breathy voice.”

I watched the dust motes swirl in the air.

“His name was Kurt Weiss,” Dad went on. “He was a German refugee, like she was. From Frankfurt. The SS shot his family, but he escaped. Somehow he made it over here and got a job as a delivery boy.” Dad paused. “He and Lisle fell for each other like a ton of bricks. I suppose it wasn’t surprising. They shared a language, a history, and a suffering too horrible for words. How could I compete?”

I pushed my coffee cup away, my heart breaking for my father.

“I got a letter from her a few months later. It was full of apologies. She knew she had caused me pain, and she prayed I would forgive her. I was the only one she could turn to. Kurt, it seemed, had been drafted.”

“But he was an immigrant. How could that happen?”

“The government did what it had to back then. Remember, he spoke perfect German, and he knew the lay of the land. He was recruited into a clandestine operation, she said.”

I took a sip of coffee. It was cold. “What clandestine operation?”

“The OSS.”

The Organization of Secret Services. Forerunner of the CIA. Formed during the war.

“Apparently, Lisle hadn’t heard from him in months, and she was afraid he’d been sent back to Europe. Behind enemy lines. She was frantic. She wanted me to do something, anything.” He got up and started to pace. “Of course there was nothing I could do.”

“What happened?”

He stopped pacing. “Kurt survived. He came back. What he did during the war I don’t know. He never said.”

“You actually talked to him?”

He slipped back into his chair. “Naturally, he wouldn’t speak to me until he knew I wasn’t a threat. But I was a gentleman about the whole thing, and eventually, we did share a few beers. He turned out to be a pleasant guy.” He folded his hands together. “Lisle stayed on at the steel mill. At one point, Kurt talked to someone down there too, and I thought he might start working there, but nothing ever came of it.

“A few weeks after Kurt got back, Barney and I—he was home by then—went to a concert in Douglas Park with them. The Blue Notes, I remember.” He sat back in his chair. “It was still hot, and we were lounging on a blanket when I heard a couple of pops. I thought the drummer was starting his own riff until Lisle screamed. When I twisted around, Kurt was slumped over, blood pouring out of him. He died a minute later.”

I gasped.

“The police got there quickly, but in the dark and confusion, the killer got away. Lisle was hysterical; Barney and I took her home as soon as we could.” He fell silent. Then, “It was a small funeral. Aside from Lisle, Barney, and me, the only other mourners were two of Lisle’s friends from the mill and the detective working the case.” He stirred his coffee with a spoon. “The case was never solved.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. But I do remember thinking the cops weren’t working too hard on it.”

“Why not?”

“Some things you don’t ask; you might not like the answers.” He gathered up both coffee cups. “A week or so later, Lisle paid me one last visit.”

“What did she want this time?”

“She was pregnant.”

“Pregnant?”

He nodded. “She wanted to know what she should do. I got the feeling she wanted me to fix it for her. Marry her, find a doctor to take care of it, whatever I thought.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.” He shrugged. “
Gnugch ist gnugch
. I told her I couldn’t help her. I went east to law school. A couple of weeks later, she left Chicago.”

Chapter Seventeen

The apartment was silent except for the whoosh of cold air streaming through the vents. Dad took the coffee cups into the kitchen.

I followed with the plates. “So you have no idea why Kurt was killed?”

He shook his head.

“Did it have something to do with the OSS?”

“Who knows? I don’t even know if that’s who he was working for.” He bent over the dishwasher. Kurt had— potentially—worked for the OSS; Skull had a library book about the OSS. Years later, Skull was E-mailing the CIA. “Did Skull and Kurt know each other?”

Dad shook his head. “Skull was long gone by the time

Kurt arrived.”

“But he had to know Lisle.” We walked back into the living room.

“I don’t know about that, either. Skull disappeared in

August of thirty-eight. Lisle didn’t get here until October.”

“Then why was he looking for her on the web site?”

“What web site?”

I realized I hadn’t told Dad about my research. I explained, leaving out the part about the break-in. When I finished, he stroked his chin with his hand. “Don’t you have better things to do with your time? The man was a gangster, Ellie.”

I looked at the floor. “Not recently.”

He bristled. “So now you’re an expert on Ben Skulnick?”

“No. I just meant…he seemed to have some …” My voice trailed off. I wasn’t sure what I meant. I picked up the snapshot from the table. Dad and Barney looked young and confident, convinced they would come home wearing the laurels of victory. Barney almost didn’t; he was seriously wounded on Omaha Beach. “Did he know about you and Lisle?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Skull.”

“If he did, it was only through hearsay.” Always the lawyer. “Hearsay?”

“Well, I did see him once or twice after the war. Before they arrested him. I might have mentioned her name. But it would have only been in passing.”

A flimsy connection at best. But it was all I had. “I think that’s why he had my name.”

Dad turned a puzzled face to me.

“I think that when Skull watched
Celebrate Chicago
and saw my name on the credits, he connected me to you.”

“Me?”

“Foreman. The name. He saw the name Foreman and figured we might be related.”

“But that’s crazy. There’s gotta be hundreds of Foremans.”

“Think about it. There was a segment about Lawndale on the show. You were there. So was he. So was Lisle. Suppose the show triggered all those memories in him and when he saw my name, he wondered if you and I were related. Maybe he figured he could contact me and, through me, track you down. And find out what happened to Lisle.”

Dad sighed. “I guess anything’s possible. But why? What motive would he have? There’s nothing to indicate that he knew her.”

I flipped up my palms. “I’m out of ideas. How about you?”

A stern look came into his eyes. “One. I don’t want you getting too curious about Ben Skulnick, Ellie. He’s nothing but trouble.”

“But he’s dead.”

Dad’s eyebrows shot up. “He should rest in peace.”

The late-day sun washed everything with a rosy warmth, but I shivered as I pulled into the driveway. Inside the house a quick inspection assured me that everything was in its place, including the bagel I’d left in the toaster. Even so, I made sure the doors were double-locked before heading upstairs.

In my office I picked up the print-out of DGL’s message.

Now that I knew who Lisle was, I was even more curious. Why was Skull looking for my father’s girlfriend? According to Dad, they’d never met. The only connection between them, in fact, and that was tenuous at best, seemed to be through my father. Nevertheless, Skull was clearly trying to find this woman. And DGL, whoever he or she was, knew something about her.

Long dusky shadows crept across the lawn. I’d begun looking into Skull’s background hoping it would help me figure out who had broken into my house. Now that I knew about Dad’s relationship with Lisle Gottlieb, it seemed I had more of a stake. I studied the message again. If DGL had a piece of the puzzle, I wanted to know what it was.