by Lee Harris
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.
I looked at the list of addresses and phone numbers that Dr. Horowitz had made up for me. I had checked off all but Bernie Reskin, whom I would see tomorrow, and Pamela Fried, George’s widow. I looked at my watch. The address was San Diego, which made the time difference three hours. If it was four-thirty in San Diego, Mrs. Fried might be home now. I didn’t know what I could learn from her. She was George’s second wife so she knew nothing about the group of men firsthand, but she was a source and I knew better than to leave anyone unquestioned.
The phone rang three times and then a man with a deep voice answered. That put me in a tizzy; if Mrs. Fried had remarried, I had no idea how to refer to her.
“I’d like to talk to Pamela Fried,” I said, “if that’s her correct name.”
“That’s her name. She’s not here now and I’m not sure when she’s coming back.”
“Well, maybe I’d better call again. This is long distance and I don’t want to put her to any expense. Who am I talking to, please?”
“This is George,” he said, “her husband.”
13
For the first time, my voice refused to operate. I swallowed while he asked if I was still there. “You’re George Fried?” I said finally.
“The one and only. Who are you?”
“My name is Christine Bennett. I’m calling from a town near New York. Mr. Fried, I was told you were dead.”
“I’m what? Oh, you’re in New York. Listen, Chris or whatever your name is, in New York I am dead. You’re talking to a ghost. Do me a big favor and don’t blow my cover. I don’t want those guys in my life. It’s easier if they think I’m dead.”
“You mean this was all a big ruse?”
“If you want to call it that. I have a nice life here, I have no interest in the people I grew up with, and we’re all better off if they don’t know the truth.”
A hundred questions were racing through my head. I pulled one out and asked it. “Were you in New York last week? The weekend before last?”
“Weekend before last in New York? Yeah, I was there. We were on a trip, and we landed at JFK and spent two days in the city just to rest up. I hate New York. It’s filthy and I can’t stand the people. Except for that, it’s a great place.”
“What days were you there?”
“Saturday and Sunday a week ago.”
Father’s Day. I had another suspect. “Did you see any of your old friends?”
“They think I’m dead, honey. Why would I see them? Pam and I went to a hotel, we slept late, we ate a couple of good meals, and we went home. What’s the purpose of these questions?”
“I’m looking into something for Morton Horowitz.”
“Morty. How is he?”
“He’s fine and working hard. I would like to talk to you for a while if I could. I’d like to ask you about the group, the Morris Avenue Boys.”
“I can do that but not now. My wife is coming home soon and we’ll be going out. Maybe tomorrow morning? I’ll be here until about eleven.”
I did some figuring. “I’ll call you at ten.”
“Ten it is. California time, right?”
“Right.”
“I’ll sharpen my memory.”
I couldn’t believe I had had the conversation.
“The guy they told you was dead is alive?” It was only five minutes since I had spoken to George Fried. Jack had just set down a carton full of stuff from his desk at the Six-Five. His move was imminent and he had begun clearing out his locker.
“They didn’t just tell me he was dead. They believe it. His wife called them years ago and said he had died ten days before, the funeral was over, and that was it.”
“So the whole thing was a cover-up.” He looked the way I had felt when the voice on the telephone had identified himself.
“I think he just wanted to be rid of them. If they thought he was dead, they wouldn’t bother him to come to reunions and they wouldn’t call if they were in town.”
“But he answered the phone.”
“He’s supposed to have died years ago. By now he probably feels it’s safe to answer. I’ll ask him when we talk tomorrow. Come in the kitchen and let’s get started on dinner.”
I had put some hamburgers on the grill when his car drove up the driveway. He went out and flipped them, putting a slice of cheese on top of each and opening the buns onto a shelf to warm them. On the table I had quarters of a fragrant cantaloupe and we started eating as soon as he came back inside.
“This is really good,” he said. “Where’d you find it?”
“I went to the farm. They didn’t grow it, but they knew where to find good ones. When I smelled it, I was almost overcome.”
“That’s the way to do it. Can we get back to this dead man who’s turned up alive?”
“That’s really all I know at this point. I made an appointment to call him tomorrow afternoon at one our time. But he hasn’t seen any of these people for a long time so I don’t know what he can tell me.”
“He can tell you about when they were kids.”
“That’s about it. And maybe if he doesn’t like these men, he’ll be more apt to tell me things they’ve been keeping to themselves.”
“That’s the way to do it, find someone who doesn’t like them to spill the beans. He may exaggerate a little too, so you’ve got to be careful.”
“I can always talk to one of the others and check up on what he tells me, but this is so amazing. I’ve really learned something the others don’t know.”
“A guy playing dead and living in the open. It’ll be interesting to see what he says.”
“And after we eat tomorrow night, I’m off to the Reskins’. They’re the only couple I haven’t met yet, and I’ve been told he loves to talk.”
“Let me check on the burgers.” Jack went outside and I cleared the cantaloupe rinds from the table.
I took the potato salad, coleslaw, and pickles out of the refrigerator and put them on the table. I had become something of a regular at Melanie’s delicatessen, a cross-cultural jump for me but a very pleasant one. I had to agree with her that the potato salad was the best I’d ever eaten although Jack has occasionally made coleslaw and it’s as good as it gets. The sour pickles were a new experience for me. My eyes had watered the first time I’d tried them, but I had persisted and come to like them very much.
Jack came in with the cheeseburgers and rolls, his eyes lighting up when he saw the salads. He’s as cross-cultural as they come, having lived in Brooklyn for his entire life and having sampled just about every kind of food you can find in New York. I’m still learning that you don’t ask for a corned beef sandwich on white bread if you don�
�t want to be laughed out of the deli.
“What’s in the carton?” I asked when we were doctoring up our cheeseburgers with relish and other things Jack finds indispensable.
“You wouldn’t believe what I’ve saved all these years. I have letters thanking me for this and that from people in the precinct, snapshots that I must’ve just tossed into the locker and forgotten about, a pair of the filthiest sneakers I’ve ever seen in my life, and a lot of notes on cases that I can’t bring myself to toss.”
“You and every detective I’ve interviewed over the last few years. As far as I’m concerned, it’s great that you all keep them. When someone like me comes along, years after a homicide, you’ve got the information I need right at your fingertips, even if you’re long retired.”
“You say that now, but when you start stumbling over these cartons, you’ll get grouchy. On second thought, you don’t get grouchy.”
I laughed. I always enjoy Jack’s opinion of me, which is usually a much better picture than the truth. “I’ll look before I stumble,” I promised.
“You know, I’m nervous as hell about this change of jobs.”
I knew he meant it because I remembered his problems early on in law school, when he was sure he didn’t have what it took to make the grade. I also knew I was likely to be the only person in the world he would confide his fears to. And it always amazed me that a man who carried a gun, who occasionally had to draw it in a dangerous situation, could be nervous about taking on a new job. “You know you’ll work into it,” I said.
“I know. It’s just those first few days, that first week, when the phone rings and somebody has to know something and I have to find it and it has to be right.”
“It won’t be as hard as the first semester of law school.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think of that. You’re probably right, as usual. Should that make me grouchy?”
“Not tonight. At least you’ll be dealing with the living. I have a dead man to talk to tomorrow. This group of sweet, innocent boys from the Bronx has turned into something else.”
“Don’t they usually? One of them’s a killer. Why should you expect them to be telling you the truth?”
Because I expect it of people, I thought. I tell the truth and so should they. “I’ve worked out a scenario where Fred Beller could have murdered Arthur Wien even after he paid his bill and his wife left the restaurant. I just don’t have a motive.”
“That means any one of them could have done it.”
“There’s even a possibility that the dead man, George Fried, could have done it. He and his wife were in a New York hotel on the night of Father’s Day.”
“I like that.”
“But he would have had no way of knowing where the group was meeting. Since he’s dead, they don’t send him announcements.”
“Right. You have to keep remembering that he’s dead.”
“I’m going to read as much as I can of The Lost Boulevard tonight and tomorrow, but as far as I’ve gone, I don’t see anything promising.”
“How about Arnold? Have you asked him if he knows the lawyer in the group?”
I looked at my watch. “I haven’t, but you’re right; that’s a good idea. I’ll call him before we have our coffee.”
“I made a call today, Chris, to a guy I know in the Nineteenth Squad, the one that has jurisdiction and is handling the homicide. The autopsy didn’t tell them much they didn’t know, but they’ve interviewed several of the people at the reunion a couple of times. And they talked to everyone who was in the restaurant when the body was found. No one named Beller on the list. And Wien’s kids seem to be in the clear. They’ve got detectives in California asking questions too, but so far nothing’s developed out there. But he told me something.” He looked troubled.
“This doctor you’re working for? Morton Horowitz? They really like Horowitz for the killer.”
I felt as though I’d been knocked down. “Can you tell me why?”
“Something about his wife and Arthur Wien.”
That left me almost gasping for breath.
“Must be time for Jack to start acting like a lawyer,” Arnold said when I greeted him. Arnold has been a defense lawyer for most of his long life. He met Jack not long after I did, and he has been a real mentor to Jack through his law school years.
“It’s happening in a couple of days. It’s nail-biting time around here.”
“He’ll do fine. He’s as conscientious a man as I’ve ever met. He’ll find it’s easier than he thinks it’ll be, and he’s smarter than most of the people he’ll be dealing with. Believe me.”
“I’ll tell him you said so. I’m actually calling to see if you know someone I’ve met recently in the noble profession.”
“Give me a name.”
“David Koch.”
“Dave Koch. I know him. Smart guy. Got a good head on his shoulders; thinks right. You can put your trust in him. The difference between Dave Koch and me is that he’s rich and I’m not.”
“You’re rich in spirit, Arnold.”
“Doesn’t pay the bills. And there’s something else.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s a Bronx boy; I’m from Brooklyn. You have to take a lot of guff from him about the Yankees. It’s that Bronx arrogance. I know where the best baseball in the world was played.”
“Where’s that?”
“Ebbets Field, long departed, a pox on Walter O’Malley. What brings you and Dave Koch together, Chris?”
“A friend of his, the writer Arthur Wien, was murdered a week ago yesterday—”
“And you’re in on it?”
“Through a student of mine. A doctor friend of Dave Koch is her grandfather and he’s asked me to look around for a killer. The police think he may have done it because he found the body.”
“Sounds like the way the cops would think. You report finding a body, you have to have killed it.” Arnold has never had much of a love affair with the NYPD.
“There are some other things too. I’ve talked with the doctor and also with the Koches. Mr. Koch drove me up to the Bronx yesterday to show me the old neighborhood where all these men grew up and went to school. They’re a group of originally nine boys who still get together for reunions.”
“Sounds like my wife’s cousins club. I read about the Wien homicide. He was pretty well known, wrote a lot of books.”
“Someone put an ice pick in his heart on the evening of Father’s Day.”
“You check his kids out?”
“The police did. As far as I know, they weren’t in the restaurant where the party was. But it’s an interesting case. I’ll tell you about it next time we get together.”
“Can’t wait. Your cases are much more interesting than mine. I wish I could tell you more about Dave Koch. We’re not what you’d call friends, but he strikes me as an honorable man.”
So were they all, I thought, all honorable men.
14
After we’d had our coffee, Jack spent some time going through his carton of treasure and trash and I pulled out my copy of The Lost Boulevard and resumed reading. As I began a new chapter, I realized I was approaching the suicide of Fred Beller’s mother/father. Even knowing the outcome, I felt my insides tighten up as the boy left school and started for home with his friends. The father in the story was a baker. He awoke early in the morning and left the apartment before anyone else was up. When the son came home from school, it was the father who greeted him, who sat at the kitchen table with him and talked to him. The mother had a job that kept her away till after five.
The boy pressed the buzzer at the side of the door to the apartment and pressed it again when no one answered. He had his own key and he used it to get inside. The boy called and there was no answer. There was the kind of silence that means emptiness and loneliness. The boy felt frightened. His father was always home when he got there. He looked in the kitchen for a note but there was none. He looked in the living room, then walked to his
parents’ bedroom. My heart tightened with every step he took. The father hung from a thick rope looped through the heavy metal ring attached to the ceiling lighting fixture. The double bed had been moved to the side so that his feet would not reach it.
I wondered how much of the description was true and how much Arthur Wien had made up. Not that it mattered. It was a terrible scene, a terrible episode in the lives of the boys. The family was religious and the funeral was the next afternoon. They were spared an autopsy. Except for the son himself, none of the other boys attended the funeral. Funerals were not for children, their mothers told them, although they were technically all men by this time, having reached their thirteenth birthdays and been bar mitzvahed. But being a man in the eyes of God was one thing; being a man in the eyes of your mother was quite another. Several of the mothers went, however, and even a couple of fathers took time off from work to go. The narrator’s father was one of them. That night was one no one would ever forget.
The bereaved family, the boy and his mother and several aunts and uncles who lived in the city, sat shiva for the rest of the week. Each of the boys in the group put on his best suit and went to the apartment with his mother to pay their respects.
It was a turning point in all their lives. This wasn’t war; it was peace. This wasn’t Germany; it was the Bronx. This wasn’t a sick man or an old one; it was a man with his health and with enough of his youth that he could have expected to live for decades. And he was gone.
I had lost my father when I was younger than Fred Beller, and my mother when I was slightly older. Perhaps it was those twin events in my life, those two catastrophes from which I had never completely recovered, that made me feel so deeply for the child in the book. I read on, how the boys were embarrassed when their friend returned to school after the mourning period, how long it took for things to creep back to a kind of normality.
I pressed on in the story. The death weighed heavily on the narrator but life continued. A semester ended, a season changed, a holiday was celebrated. They were getting ready for high school, applying to the special high schools that required high marks and entrance exams, doing things that occupied their time and their thoughts. Even so, death had entered their lives and had affected them. They had changed.
