Yom Kippur Murder (12 page)

“Sure he wanted it back. It was his. But you got to prove these things when you go to court.”

“And he couldn’t?”

“There was someone who knew the whole story, but he was sick. The doctor said he couldn’t testify. Nathan withdrew the case. The witness died.”

It was all hearsay. I was inclined to believe Mr. Greenspan and disbelieve Zilman, but that was because I liked one and disliked the other; also because I wanted to believe good things about Nathan.

But hearsay or not, there was certainly a motive for Nathan to have hounded Black and for Black’s heirs to want to retrieve the book.

“How much do you think the book is worth?” I asked.

“Who knows? Ten, maybe twenty thousand.”

“Mr. Zilman said half a million.”

“Zilman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is one book, not a collection. People don’t pay that kind of money for books.”

“Do you think Nathan had the book?”

“Somebody had it.”

I smiled, and he smiled back.

“You think someone killed Nathan for the book?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“Anything is possible. Especially when you got people in New York who think a book is worm fifty times its value. So what else can I tell you, young lady?”

I said, nothing else today, thank you, and I took my leave. It was still too early for sunset.

* * *

I called Arnold Gold from home. I had changed into a stiff new pair of jeans and a plaid flannel shirt that I had bought from one of the mail-order catalogs Melanie Gross had thrown my way. Believe it or not, one of the big negatives in being a former nun from an order where a habit was required is that you have no old clothes. Every time I put on something to relax in, I felt as though I were modeling for the company. I look forward to the day when my fun clothes are soft and faded and losing buttons.

Arnold had just gotten home, and in the background I could hear his favorite music station, WQXR, playing what sounded like Mozart.

“So what do you got for me, Chrissie?” he asked.

“Plenty.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“A lot of people may have loved Nathan, but there may have been some who hated him enough to kill.”

“Don’t give me conclusions. Give me facts.”

I regaled him for the next fifteen minutes, admitting my once-over of the apartment this morning, including my discovery that the address book was missing.

“Cops probably took it.”

“I’ll ask Jack to check on it for me.”

“So this guy Zilman thinks Herskovitz hounded the professor to death.”

“That’s the impression I got. It sounds like a real case of revenge.”

“And we have a missing Jewish prayer book that could be worth ten or twenty thousand and could be worth half a mil.”

“Depending on whom you ask. Maybe I’ll go over to the auction house tomorrow and see if they have any record of an appraisal from fifteen years ago.”

“Won’t mean much,” Arnold said. “Prices have escalated a lot since the seventies. But it’s a place to start.”

“Are you surprised to hear Nathan was a lawyer?” I asked.

“Can’t say that I am. When we talked, I was impressed with the way he thought. He had a logical, disciplined mind.
He also had a lot of good ideas about how to handle Metropolitan. He would have made his mark in revenge law.”

I laughed. “Is that the newest brand of law?”

“The oldest, Chrissie. The goddamned oldest kind of law anyone ever practiced.”

Jack called before I had a chance to call him.

“They told me a woman called, and I tracked down all the old girlfriends.”

“Before you thought of me.”

“How are you?”

“How are all the old girlfriends?”

“Changing diapers, if you want to know the truth. How’s things?”

“Complicated.” I explained about my little adventure this morning and the missing address book.

“First off, you can get your head shot off doing what you did this morning. Second, I’ll check on the address book first thing tomorrow. So you think Herskovitz was killed over a book?”

“I think he may have been a tough guy to love, Jack. He may have angered a lot of people, not just his family.”

“Well then, where the hell have they been all these years? Why’d it take till now for someone to kill him?”

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t sound right.”

“I just have to take it where it goes.”

The case of the five-hundred-year-old prayer book that was withdrawn from auction had made the kind of mark that left people with sharp recollections. The man who had headed the book division of the auction house fifteen years earlier, Jonathan McCandless, had since advanced to a position high in the administration, and he accepted my unannounced visit on Friday morning with a frown and a meaningful glance at his watch. But when I mentioned Karl Henry Black and the prayer book, his face relaxed into a smile.

“That was one I’ll remember for a long time without going to the files,” he said. “Do you know what book that was?”

“I was told it was a Jewish prayer book.”

McCandless leaned back in his swivel chair, smiled to himself, then returned to an upright position. “At the end of the fifteenth century, for about thirty years after the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, a small group of books were printed that have come to be known as the incunabula. One of those was a Haggadah. Do you know what a Haggadah is?”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s the prayer book used at the Passover seder. One in-cunabulum was the Guadalaxara Haggadah—that’s with an X,” he added. “It consists of only six sheets, that’s twelve pages front and back, and it’s printed in Hebrew letters. The cover is leather mounted on wood with raised bands and rich blind tooling of geometric designs. It was printed circa 1483. In other words, Miss Bennett, we are not talking about a
book; we are talking about the rarest of books, the kind of thing that sets your teeth chattering when you’re near it.”

“I can see why,” I said. “Did you ever doubt Professor Black’s ownership of the Guadalaxara Haggadah?”

“Not till we were slapped with an injunction.”

“What precautions do you ordinarily take to assure that something so valuable put up for auction really belongs to the person selling it?”

“When you’re dealing with antiques, you have limited resources in that area. Of course, if an owner has purchased the object himself and has a receipt, that’s the best proof. But many people come in with Aunt Jane’s pearls or a piece of furniture that’s been in the family for generations, and there’s really no proof it belongs to them except their word. If they carry it in, it’s probably theirs.”

“But the Haggadah was a famous book. Did you do any checking on it?”

“Many people keep the ownership of priceless objects a secret to protect themselves from theft, so it often isn’t known who owns them. Professor Black said he had acquired it in Europe before the war. He was able to document a continuous chain of ownership that satisfied us, dating from his entry into the United States. He had no bill of sale, but then he had fled the continent at a difficult time. We were confident the book was his.”

“So he brought it in and then what?”

“My staff and I looked at it to determine its value. We thought it would fetch close to fifty thousand, as I recall.”

“That’s a lot of money. Was Professor Black satisfied with your appraisal?”

“To tell the truth, he wasn’t. I think he expected a sum that would enable him to retire. But that’s not unusual. People often have an inflated idea of what their possessions are worth. He argued with me, but it was pointless. My appraisal is only an opinion. If you follow auctions, you may have observed that many items are sold far above their estimated value. I prefer a conservative evaluation. It leaves fewer people disappointed.”

“So in spite of what he considered to be a low appraisal, he chose to go on with the auction.”

“That’s right. He consigned the Guadalaxara to us, and we placed it in the next rare book auction, which was a couple of months later. Since this was a very special book, we displayed it quite prominently in the catalog that went out to the collectors on our mailing list. And I must say that since it was such a prized specimen, there was quite a bit of talk about it even before the catalog was mailed.”

“Did you hear any rumors that worried you?” I asked.

“Nothing until the day after the catalogs went out, when I got a call from our legal department. When I spoke to Professor Black a little later, I got the impression he expected us to defend his position. We don’t do that, of course.” McCandless smiled. “If there was a question of ownership, that was his legal problem, not ours as long as we hadn’t sold the book. We told him that until he could establish clear title, we were simply unable to handle the sale.”

“And that finished it.”

“More or less. Lawyers never do things quickly and cleanly. It took a little while. To be honest, I expected the case to be much more conclusive than it was. The man who challenged Professor Black’s ownership never pursued the case further, which surprised me, I must say, and eventually we were cleared to return the book to Professor Black.”

“I’ve heard there was a witness who was too ill to testify for Mr. Herskovitz.”

“Yes,” McCandless agreed, “I think I heard something to that effect myself. As you can probably imagine, the whole world of rare books was buzzing over the incident. Both sellers and buyers got very nervous, anticipating challenges to their ownership. But it all died down. These things are not as unusual as all that.”

“Tell me about how you returned the Guadalaxara to the professor.”

“Yes, the return of the book.” McCandless pursed his lips before continuing. “I urged him to allow us to send it
by our special messenger service, but he would have none of it. He was a strange, distrustful sort of man. He said he would pick it up himself, and we made an appointment. He came, checked the book, signed for it, and took it. That was the last I saw of him. I heard on the news that night that he had been found dead in the street near his home. There was absolutely no evidence of foul play, and, of course, the Guadalaxara was gone.”

“Had it been wrapped?”

“Oh, quite. There was a box made specially to fit it.”

“And he came for it alone.”

“As far as I could see.”

“Mr. McCandless, during the time when the rare book people were buzzing about the Guadalaxara, before the court prevented you from auctioning it, did you have inquiries from interested buyers?”

“Oh my, yes. There was tremendous interest. It was a very rare specimen, you know. As a matter of fact, privately I revised my estimate of what it would fetch. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had brought seventy thousand at auction.”

“What do you think it might be worth today?”

“Ah.” McCandless smiled. “Substantially more. It might go as high as four hundred thousand.”

The number shocked me. Zilman had had a far more accurate idea of its value than Mr. Greenspan. “I wonder if you could give me the names of the people who were most interested in the book fifteen years ago.”

“I most certainly could not. Both buyers and sellers are accorded complete privacy here, Miss Bennett. Those are the kinds of secrets that will die with me.”

He sounded as though he meant it, and telling him that I thought someone might have murdered Nathan Herskovitz over the book wasn’t likely to make him change his mind. “Over the years,” I said, “have you had any inquiries about the Guadalaxara?”

“I have had inquiries,” he said with a little smile.

“Then interest hasn’t dried up.”

“I would say it hasn’t. Do you have any idea of where the book is now?”

“I wish I did,” I said. But I didn’t have the faintest.

I went back to the West Side, where I had left my car, and went up to see whether the police had finished with the Herskovitz apartment. Sure enough, the crime scene tape was gone, and the door to the apartment next door had been sealed with plywood. So much for security. It wouldn’t take much to break in, but I supposed that was all Metropolitan Properties was prepared to do. I made a mental note to call Mitchell this evening and tell him what had happened.

I went down and said hello to Gallagher. He said he had seen two handymen from Metropolitan the previous afternoon and he had watched them fixing up the broken wall to Nathan’s apartment and sealing up the door next to it. We chatted briefly and then I left.

On my first try, I didn’t get very far. As Ian locked his three locks behind me, I heard the drumming I had heard on Wednesday. It was coming from one of the empty apartments that I would have to pass to get to the stairway. I stopped dead. I was on the third floor, two flights up from the lobby. I could probably make it if I tried. And if I went back to Ian’s and asked him to call the police, whoever was waiting for me would be long gone by the time they came, even if they were nearby.

I decided to chance it. I pressed my left arm tightly over my bag and held my flashlight in my right hand. If worst came to worst, I had a weapon. Then I lit out for the stairs.

I didn’t make it. He darted out of an open door, looking like a dark shadow in the unlit hall, and grabbed me. I took a deep breath and screamed as loudly as I could, hoping Gallagher would hear me. Then I pulled and tugged against my assailant, who was behind me and who slapped a hand over and into my mouth, nearly choking me. A dirty, smelly
hand in or near your mouth is one of the more disgusting things you can experience. I came down hard with my teeth, hoping I wouldn’t throw up. I heard an “Ow!” and then he moved the hand down the front of my body and squeezed my breast.

God forgive me, I was ready to kill. I screamed again, “Ian! Ian!” and pushed backward fast, hoping to force his body away from me. Then I raised my foot and kicked backward as hard as I could.

I don’t know whether I hit anything vital or not, but at that moment Gallagher opened his door, said, “Oh, dear God, I’ll get the police,” in that wonderful brogue of his, and went back inside.

My assailant pushed me down and fled down into the stairwell.