Father's Day Murder (2 page)

I called Janet back, and she gave me the name of a restaurant I had heard of but had never visited in one of the towns along the Sound, the kind of restaurant that would require my putting on a dress and looking like a lady. I
didn’t mind. My usual life was so casual, it was a treat to dress up once in a while.

Eddie was happy enough to be going to Elsie’s. Her lunches were far more appealing than anything I put together. My lunches emphasized tuna fish, but Elsie is inventive and always manages to have cookies for good little boys. He took along some toys, and I managed to get him in and out of the car without ripping my stockings. Elsie was impressed with the restaurant I was being taken to and assured me I was dressed appropriately.

I kissed them both and left.

The restaurant was on a busy street with elegant shops up and down the block, a movie theater featuring four current films, and people window-shopping as well as carrying the kind of small, pretty shopping bags that indicated expensive purchases. I parked around the corner at a meter I was lucky to find and put in enough coins for two hours. Then, since I was a few minutes early, I did my own window-shopping, looking at handbags too expensive even to consider and handmade jewelry that spoke of a designer with real talent.

The restaurant, Maurice’s, had a heavy oak door with a small, cloudy window at about eye level. I pulled it open and went inside, a cool darkness greeting me. Tables were set with white linen and candles burned on the occupied ones.

“Yes, madam.”

I am not often addressed with such formality and I attempted to take it in stride. Where I live, I’m Chris unless I see an old friend and then I’m more likely to be Kix, a childhood name that has stuck. “I’m meeting Miss Stern,” I said.

“Oh yes. They’re here. Come this way, please.”

The
they
surprised me. Janet hadn’t said anything about anyone else joining us, but as we approached the table, I could see it was her mother who was with her. The two faces were as alike as such a relationship could produce, but the mother’s face was clouded with worry.

She looked up as she saw me and stood to greet me. “Ms. Bennett, thank you so much for coming. I’m Lila Stern. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

“Thank you.” The place reserved for me was to her left with Janet sitting directly opposite me which I liked. I would be able to look at both of them easily. “Please call me Chris. I’ve just been called madam and I’m a little startled by it.”

Lila Stern gave me a quick smile that faded immediately. “I’m Lila. I somehow thought you would be older.”

“I’m thirty-four,” I said.

“Well, I’m past forty so that sounds pretty young to me. Why don’t you have a look at the menu before we start to talk? They do a wonderful cioppino here.”

My taste in food is rather simple, and I looked through the menu a couple of times before deciding on a pasta dish with all sorts of good things added. Janet chose the same thing but Lila ordered a plain fish dish and a green salad. No wonder she was pencil slim.

She then asked for the wine list, and I told her I would not be drinking. I like wine although I’m not much of a connoisseur, but I don’t hold it well and I wanted to fall asleep neither while we were discussing something very important to these two people nor while I was at the wheel of my car driving home. She ordered a glass of wine for herself and then turned to me.

“Janet told you what happened?”

“Not really. Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

“Well.” She smiled, more to herself than to me. “The beginning goes way back, long before I was born. My grandparents were immigrants. They came to this country separately and met and married in New York. They started with nothing, as you can imagine, but they did well enough by working hard. After my uncle was born, they moved into an apartment in the Bronx. It was a residential neighborhood near Morris Avenue.” She paused as though she expected me to acknowledge the name.

“I don’t know much about the Bronx,” I said.

“Well, it was a place where people grew up in the thirties and forties. There were parks and schools and stores and lots of apartment houses. It was a safe place to live, with children playing in the street and women schmoozing. It was a few blocks from the Grand Concourse—”

“I know the Concourse,” I said, finally recognizing a name.

“Yes, a magnificent street, a boulevard, almost like Paris if you think about it; the subway runs just underneath it. It was a wonderful place to bring up children.”

She paused, as though to consider when to begin the substance of her story. “That’s where my father, Morton Horowitz, grew up. He went to school there, and he became friends with a group of other little boys who were just like him in many ways, children of immigrants or even immigrants themselves, with families that placed tremendous importance on education and hard work. Some of them became friends when they were in kindergarten, others when they were a little older. But altogether there were nine of them by the time they were eleven years old and thinking about high school. They called themselves the Morris Avenue Boys.” She smiled wistfully, as though
she were talking about her own friends and their childhood. I could imagine that her father had regaled her with tales of his youth, his friends, their practical jokes.

“Are they still friends?” I asked.

“Most of them, yes. Not all. And those that are are as close as brothers. They’ve scattered, of course. Nobody lives in the Bronx any more, and a couple of them don’t even live in the East. But they have reunions every so many years, the ones who keep in touch. The last reunion was last Sunday, Father’s Day.”

“Did they pick that day for any special reason?”

“It was spring and it was a good time to travel. I think they felt it was a good day to be in the New York area. Many of their children and grandchildren live around here, and they could spend the day with their families and then have their celebration at night.”

“I gather from what Janet told me that something terrible happened that night.”

“It did.”

Our first courses were just arriving, and we said nothing while the waiter placed them artfully in front of us. Before beginning to eat her salad, Lila opened her bag and pulled out a small black-and-white snapshot. She put it on the table between us, and I picked it up and looked at it.

Two rows of young boys grinned impishly at me, boys with pudgy cheeks and unruly hair, sparkling eyes and smudged shirts. There were five in the back row, four in the front, and the background appeared to be brick with a window frame at the left end, probably an apartment house they lived in or near. It was hard not to smile back at them.

Above the heads of the ones in the back row and on the
shirts of the ones in the front, someone had lettered in black ink the first name of each boy.

“This one’s Dad,” Lila said, pointing to Morty, who stood between Ernie and Bruce in the back row.

Morty was taller than either of the boys around him, and although he was smiling, he wasn’t mugging for the camera the way some of the others were.

“George Fried died several years ago,” she said, pointing to the boy in the front row second from the right. “He lived out west somewhere. Here, let me go through them in order. In the back row is Dave Koch. He’s a lawyer now. Bernie Reskin was a schoolteacher till he retired but he still works part-time. Ernie Greene—they always used to laugh about Bernie and Ernie—Ernie went into medicine but never practiced. He’s been in research his whole life. There are rumors he’s been considered for a Nobel Prize.”

“That’s amazing.”

“They’re an amazing group of men. Then there’s Dad; he’s also a doctor but he’s been cutting back for a few years. Bruce had a hard life. He went into his father-in-law’s business and got mixed up in an embezzling scandal. He wasn’t the embezzler, but I think he covered up for someone to save the other man’s skin. In the front row, Fred Beller hasn’t shown up at the reunions for years, and I don’t know if anyone knows what’s become of him. Art Wien is a writer and has a lovely sense of humor. George is the one who died. And the last one on the right is Joe Meyer. Joe has had a long career as a concert violinist but I hear he’s thinking of retiring.” She had been careful not to let on which of them had been murdered.

“I can hardly believe that a group of children connected only by the place they lived could have turned out to be such astounding people.”

“They were motivated and they were smart.”

“I gather one of them was murdered last Sunday.”

“Yes.” She looked at the picture as though she had the power of life and death over them, as though they were all alive until her finger came down on one little smiling face. “It was Art who was murdered, Arthur Wien, the writer. I have something to show you.” She took an envelope out of her bag and pulled a color photo out of it. This one was about four by six and showed gray and graying men, several with paunches, all wearing suits and ties, all smiling. They were also standing in two rows with gaps in the front row.

“They arranged themselves the way they were in the old snap. The space on the left here in the front is for Fred, the one who never comes to reunions, and the space between Art and Joe is for George, the one who died. It was taken before the murder, and we just got the pictures back yesterday.”

“Mom,” Janet said, speaking for the first time, “will you let her eat?”

“Oh I’m so sorry, Chris. Please. Your soup is getting cold.”

I lined the pictures up with the new one above the old one and looked at them as I ate. I kept trying to describe for myself what I was feeling. It was startling, astounding, confounding, and amazing. A motley group of boys had become men of stature and importance in a variety of respected fields. I found myself wondering whether there was something in the water they drank or the air they breathed. Had they all had parents who drove them relentlessly or had they simply been instilled with such desire to achieve that they made wonderful things happen?

When we finished, our plates were whisked away by
waiters obviously anxious to deliver our main course. Lila apologized again, and I assured her I was interested in hearing everything.

“I wasn’t at the reunion,” she said. “It was just the men and their wives. Dad said they had an oval table so they could all sit together. He said everyone was in a good mood; they all gave speeches, short ones, and had a good time.”

“Who took the pictures?” I asked.

“A waiter. There are other pictures besides this one. They took a bunch, some of them with their wives. I have all of them.”

“Tell me about the murder.”

“As near as they can determine, it took place about nine-thirty. They had all gathered at the restaurant at seven. They were in a private room, but they had to use the men’s and women’s rooms for the regular restaurant. Dad said he didn’t take particular notice of who got up and left the room, but he was aware that people did as the evening went on. By nine they had finished eating and were making toasts and doing their usual telling of tales, which always got them laughing and sometimes a little teary eyed. There was music piped in and some of the couples were dancing. Dad went to the men’s room about nine-thirty and he found Art’s body on the floor. He had been stabbed with an ice pick. Dad thought it had just happened. His body was still warm. No one else was in the men’s room.”

“Was it a room for one or were there several stalls?”

“I never asked.”

“I assume your father called the police immediately.”

“He did. And they came very fast; he told me that.”

“And everyone was questioned.”

“And questioned and questioned. They’re all suspects,
and unfortunately, my father is suspect number one because he found the body only minutes after the murder. It puts him on the spot. I can’t tell you what this has done to my family.”

I could imagine. “When you say that your father is the main suspect, have the police let you know that?”

“Not in so many words, but they’ve been back to ask him questions several times, and my mother too. My folks have hired a lawyer.”

“Does your father have a feeling about who may have done it?”

“Not at all. Quite the contrary, he’s ready to vouch for the character of any one of the boys. Men.” She smiled. “He’s never called them anything but boys when he’s talked about them, and I’ve never known them as anything but men.”

“Lila, this is not only an ongoing police investigation but a very new one. I’m not sure how I can help you without getting in the way of the police, and I won’t do that.”

“I know. I knew you would say that.” She had been picking at her fish. Now she laid her fork down.

“Mom,” Janet said, “you promised.”

That’s when I realized Lila was holding back tears. “I’m so worried about him,” she said unsteadily. “I don’t really expect you to figure out who did this terrible thing. I hoped you might be able to clear my father, to find something that would prove he couldn’t have done it. He’s not a young man any more and this is taking its toll. Janet was so impressed with you, both as a teacher and as a person.”

I let it all rush through my head. Her family was surely in turmoil. If her father were innocent, this burden would affect his life every day until the police decided he was not
their man. If he had committed the murder, and he might have, I would hate to be the one to dig up the evidence that pointed to him. I wasn’t sure how much I could accomplish toward either end. From what Lila had said, some of the men at the dinner lived far from the New York area, and I had a young child whom I couldn’t just drop off for days with a sitter while I went flying around the country, not to mention Jack’s precarious situation with a new job and the bar exams not far down the road.

“It’s all right,” Lila said, sounding recovered. “I was asking too much. Why don’t we just have a nice lunch and not talk about it any more?”

“Let me talk to your father,” I said. I could see Janet’s eyes widen across the table. She broke into a smile, and I remembered what a pretty girl she was, how much more forthcoming she was in class.