Father's Day Murder (14 page)

“Art? With one of the men’s wives? I think you’re misinformed. I’m the oldest woman Art ever went out with. He wanted young, not middle-aged or old.”

It sounded reasonable. I thanked her and told her I would call if I wanted to read the original manuscript. It was still early afternoon when I started for home.

12

With much of the afternoon still left, I felt it had been a very successful day. I knew that Fred Beller and his wife had been at the restaurant the night of the murder. I knew that Dr. Greene, and possibly others in the group, had lent Arthur Wien money, and in at least one of those cases, he hadn’t paid it back. I knew that one person had been so concerned about being repaid that he had held the original manuscripts of
The Lost Boulevard
as collateral. And now I knew that both Fred Beller and Arthur Wien had known Alice and loved her. It was a tantalizing triangle, the young man with the wounded psyche and the confident, possibly even arrogant man with great optimism, great drive, and I thought, probably great sex appeal. I would have liked to see what Alice looked like all those years ago. Her face had aged and softened; there were light wrinkles where smile lines had once been, but she was a good-looking woman now and she must have been very beautiful when those two young men wanted to claim her for their own.

I claimed my little son when I got to Elsie’s, arriving as he was waking, warm with red cheeks and a few sleepy tears. Elsie had her usual treat for Eddie, milk and an incredible cookie. Eddie is truly blessed where cookies are
concerned. Both Elsie and Mel see to it that he gets the best, and I occasionally manage to benefit from their generosity as well.

When Eddie and I got home, we walked a little, stopping to talk to neighbors. Then we sat behind the house while Eddie played in his sandbox with occasional assistance from me.

I had
The Lost Boulevard
on my lap and was determined to get to the end of it as soon as I could. Unless something had happened quite early in the relationships of these men, I didn’t expect to find a clue in the book to who had killed Arthur Wien. But I wanted to see how he painted his friends and his friends’ wives, whether I could detect the scent of a deadly sin in his prose, some envy, anger over an old hurt, somebody’s lust. There was plenty of lust, but it never seemed to interfere with the men’s relationships with each other. These were people who got along with each other, who supported each other.

The theme of convincing his parents to move out of their old apartment ran through the book like a drop of water making its way across a sloped plane. The Arthur Wien character seemed to sense that the old neighborhood would decline before his parents would. What he wanted was not so much that they leave the Bronx but that they find an apartment on the Grand Concourse. There the buildings were more refined, the men went to better paying jobs, the women dressed better, the children went to expensive colleges, colleges with reputations that extended beyond the five boroughs and the Hudson River.

But his father felt he would get less for the rent he would pay and his mother said it would be a longer walk to the stores she shopped at. They liked where they were.

For the Wien character the Concourse was a dream. It
had elegance and class, neither of which was apparent in his neighborhood. But for himself, the Village became the center of his life. He made friends with poets and writers who lived there or who, like him, spent their time there. He met girls who admired him and who, eventually, had sexual relationships with him although finding a place was always a problem. He lived at home, and most of the girls that he met also lived at home, although occasionally one lived in a dormitory at Barnard or New York University. They became adept at finding people who were going away, friends with an extra room they would not need till after midnight, at which time they would drag themselves out of bed and sleepily find the nearest subway. He would take her home and then work his way over to a D train stop and go home himself.

I had the sense that everyone lived in a permanent state of exhaustion. As a person who throughout her twenties got up daily at five in the morning, I could not imagine surviving the kind of affairs Arthur Wien described. But his character thrived on that life, even did well in school, got raises at work, and seemed to hold together in his personal life.

I became aware, as I was reading, that Eddie was crying. He had gotten tangled in a toy and I went over to extricate him and sit on the grass beside the sandbox and help him play. I had made a good dent in the book, but besides enjoying it, I had learned nothing that would lead to Arthur Wien’s murderer. I wondered if it was worthwhile sitting in Alice’s apartment and turning the pages of the original to see if something had been excised that might be telling. But before I did anything else, I thought it was time to call Dr. Horowitz and confront him with what I knew about Fred Beller.

* * *

When Eddie was down for the night, I called Morton Horowitz. He must have known when he came to the phone what my first question would be because he preempted it.

“I understand you’ve met with Fred Beller,” he said.

“I had lunch with him and his wife on Saturday. From what he said, I gather you saw him last week.”

“I did. We all got together. I know you think I should have mentioned it to you when we spoke the other day.”

“Is there a reason why you didn’t?”

“It didn’t seem relevant.”

“Dr. Horowitz, the Bellers were at the same restaurant that your group was at on Father’s Day.”

There was a silence. As his friends had been shocked to hear that Fred had been in town, he was shocked to find out Fred had been at the restaurant.

“He was there at the same time that we were?” he asked.

“Approximately. I’ve confirmed it with the restaurant. He used his credit card to pay for his dinner.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well.” I started feeling guilty about confronting him with this information. “That’s one of the surprises I’ve had since we’ve spoken. I’ve seen all the men now except Mr. Reskin. He hasn’t been home when I called. I hope to reach him tonight.”

“He’ll be there eventually. Chris, about Fred Beller, if he used his credit card at the restaurant, that would tend to clear him if you were thinking he might have killed Artie.”

“That’s true, but it took a lot of digging to find out he was even there. He used another name to make the reservation. I only found out because his wife gave me a picture of the two of them and I was so surprised they were in
town that I went back to the restaurant this morning and made them check.”

“I can’t fault you. It sounds like you’re doing a very thorough job. Have you learned anything else?”

“Nothing that points me toward a killer. All the men have been very cooperative except Dr. Greene. When I called, he refused to talk to me, but I went to his lab this morning and he came down and was very pleasant once we got together. He told me he’d lent money to Arthur Wien a long time ago.”

“I believe it. Ernie’s very generous.”

“He also said many of the men in your group lent money to Mr. Wien, but no one else has admitted it.”

“Maybe because they felt it wasn’t significant. I once gave him fifty dollars and I don’t think he ever repaid me, but until this moment, I haven’t thought about it for years. People forget these things. They don’t kill over them.”

“What do they kill over?” I asked.

“I wish I knew.”

“Someone told me Arthur Wien had had an affair with the wife of someone in your group. Do you have any idea who that might be?”

“With one of our wives? I don’t think so. Artie liked them young.”

That was what Mrs. Wien had said. “I talked to Alice Wien this afternoon.”

“I hope you’re not going to tell me she was at the restaurant too,” he said lightly.

“I didn’t ask. She told me she had dated Fred Beller before she met Arthur Wien.”

“Well, that was a famous switcheroo, I can tell you, one of those unlikely crossings of paths. It happens. Fred was very unhappy at the time, but he met Marge and Marge
was the right woman for him. They’ve been married for over forty years.”

Too long to carry a grudge, I thought. “Well, I’m going to talk to Mr. Reskin as soon as I can arrange it, and I may look at the original manuscript of
The Lost Boulevard
. Alice Wien has it, and she’ll let me see it if I read it in her apartment.”

“Alice has it,” he said with surprise. “Interesting. He dedicated it to her, you know.”

“It was very important to her. She requested it as part of the divorce settlement.”

“I don’t blame her. It’s probably worth a fortune.”

“Dr. Horowitz, I’m having a difficult time finding a motive for this murder. Everyone says nice things about Arthur Wien, but underneath the surface I find that he cheated his friends and his wife. It sounds to me as though he made a practice of borrowing money and not returning it. He was unfaithful to Alice. He met Alice when she was practically engaged to Fred Beller and he destroyed that relationship. And there’s a possibility that he had an affair with the wife of one of the men in the group.”

“Chris, you’re painting a very dark picture of a man who wasn’t as bad as you make him seem. Half the people I know met their wives or girlfriends when they were going out with other men. That’s not a calamity; it’s life. So he borrowed money and forgot to return it. Forty years later you don’t kill over fifty dollars. There has to be something else and it has to involve someone outside the group.”

“I’m still looking,” I said.

I didn’t feel very satisfied after talking to him. I had made a report, which I felt was due at this time, but I was
left with the sense that everyone I had spoken to, with the possible exception of Alice Wien, had been holding back. Was a man who lent the victim fifty dollars forty years ago afraid the finger of justice would point at him if he admitted the loan? I had asked all of them or nearly all of them whether some event had happened when they were young, something they would all want covered up, and all of them had assured me there was nothing. In fact, as I thought about it, sitting in the family room with my notes and my recollections, even Alice Wien had said such a thing was not possible, although she would know only from hearsay if she met her husband while in college.

I went back to the kitchen and dialed the number for Bernie Reskin. This time a woman answered on the second ring.

“You must be Chris,” she said when I started to explain why I was calling.

“That’s right, Chris Bennett.”

“Mort said you’d be calling. We’ve been out a lot the last few days. When would you like to talk to us?” She sounded almost eager.

“Anytime starting tomorrow. Whatever’s convenient for you.”

“Let me check with Bernie.”

The conversation with her husband took only a minute and then she was back. “Bernie gets home at one tomorrow. Anytime after that.”

I asked if after dinner would be all right. Then Jack would be home to baby-sit. She said it was fine.

I wrote down her directions and hung up. If the Reskins didn’t come up with something new, I wasn’t sure what my next step would be. Everyone wanted the killer to be someone outside the group, but I didn’t see how that was
possible. I wondered if the police, when they responded to the call on Father’s Day, had questioned everyone in the restaurant. I wondered, too, whether Fred Beller had been there when the murder occurred. He had had a fairly early dinner reservation. How many hours could two people sit at a table after they had finished eating? For a moment I thought that might clear him. The party in the back had lasted hours but Fred Beller had arrived at six-thirty. Even with lingering over dessert and an after-dinner drink, they should have been ready to leave by nine.

I thought about it. Say he gave them his credit card, signed the receipt, and disappeared into the men’s room while his wife went outside. That would make her an accomplice. He could have waited in a stall with the door locked till Arthur Wien came in. Not that it was a sure thing that Wien would visit the men’s room, but it was a pretty good bet. If Fred were waiting in the first stall, he could see through the crack who was there. He could have come out, plunged the ice pick into Arthur Wien’s heart, and walked out of the men’s room and on out of the restaurant to join his wife, who would, of course, swear they had left together much earlier if she were asked, which was unlikely.

But I needed a motive, and if Fred had killed his old friend and had had the cooperation of his wife, the motive could not have been that Arthur Wien broke up an almost engagement to another woman forty years ago.

I knew I would have to call Fred Beller at home in Minnesota before I was done, and I didn’t look forward to it. I now knew something he had gone to some lengths to keep secret, and even if I didn’t threaten to tell the police, he was smart enough to know the threat existed.

This was a part of the job I found distasteful. It isn’t fun
to threaten people, especially when you know that of all the suspects, only one is guilty. And at this moment, I had no idea who that one might be. I had started out thinking that the embezzler was my man, but nothing pointed to him any more than to anyone else. He had been friendly and open, his wife had given me a signed copy of
The Lost Boulevard
—which certainly made it seem that they were friends with Arthur Wien—and he had added very little to what I already knew.

I pulled out the snapshot of the nine little boys and looked at them again. Dave Koch who had taken me to the old neighborhood was a successful lawyer, an apparently very nice person, best friend to Morton Horowitz. Bernie Reskin was still unknown. Ernie Greene, a research doctor, didn’t want to talk to me but was gracious when I forced the issue. He had lent Arthur Wien five hundred dollars when that was a small fortune. Morton Horowitz, successful, hard-working doctor, discovered the body of his friend and lent him fifty dollars forty years ago. Bruce Kaplan, convicted of embezzlement, friendly, had been friends with Arthur. Fred Beller was a tough one—lots of questions. George Fried was dead. Joe Meyer, ill and with a life of music, successes, and honors, admired Arthur Wien. Someone in that group or one of their wives had made an issue of sitting next to Arthur Wien at the reunion.