Father's Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  “I don’t do much comparison shopping. If I need something, I go and get it. I didn’t know men’s clothes were so expensive.”

  “I guess you pay for a tie now what you used to pay for a suit.”

  “I see.”

  “My dad always says you pay for a car what you used to pay for a house.”

  “It’s scary. I realized that when we shop together, you never let me see the price tags.”

  “I hate to shake you up. I remember when you told me you used to leave the convent with fifty cents in your pocket.”

  I thought about it. “I bet they need a dollar now.”

  He came over and gave me a kiss. “I told you to stick with lipsticks.”

  I wanted to call Ellen Koch and press her about Robin Horowitz and her relationship to Arthur Wien, but I didn’t. She had been pretty definitive the last time we spoke that she knew nothing about such a relationship and she had nothing further to tell me. I had managed to alienate the two women who seemed to know more than anyone else in the group, which meant I had to come up with new information or I was finished. But aside from Marge Beller, I just didn’t know where to look.

  Since I had nothing scheduled, I called Greenwillow and arranged to pick up my cousin Gene tomorrow morning for mass and to bring him home with us for dinner. Jack gave up playing ball and went out to shop for tomorrow’s dinner since he’s the weekend cook by mutual agreement.

  While Jack was gone, I took Eddie for a walk, stopping to talk to neighbors, lingering for a while at Mel’s, where I updated her on the case. Sometimes Mel has very good ideas about where to go next or even where to go first, but today she agreed that I had hit a wall. I promised to keep her posted and we toddled home to wait for Jack.

  On Sunday morning we drove to Greenwillow and picked up Gene who scrambled into the back to talk with his friend Eddie. They giggled together while we drove to church. Gene and I sat halfway down the pew while Jack sat at the edge next to Eddie. If Eddie became rambunctious, they would go outside and wait for Gene and me. For a while Eddie squirmed, but a few minutes later, I looked down at him and he had fallen asleep, his head on Jack’s lap. When mass was over, we all got in the car and drove home.

  The answering machine was beeping and flashing. Jack pushed the play button as Gene and Eddie went into the family room.

  “Hello Chris,” a man’s voice called, as though I were faraway. In the background were the noises of a place with a lot of people. “I made a mistake. It wasn’t Horowitz; it was Koch.”

  Jack looked at me. “That’s my dead man,” I said. “He must have called from the airport.”

  “But what did he mean?”

  “I have no idea.” I got my notebook and read through our conversation. He had met his first wife, Iris, on a blind date. He didn’t think she had dated anyone else in the group. There were some notes on why he “died.” Arthur Wien had never asked his permission to publish anything personal. He had never heard of any of the wives having an affair with Wien. Ernie Greene was mentioned, Joe and Judy Meyer, and no one else unless it had been something apparently so unimportant that I had not written it down.

  “He never talked about either Dr. Horowitz or Dave Koch. There’s nothing in my notes.”

  “It’ll come to you. Some favor he asked one of them or they asked him, something like that.”

  “ ‘I made a mistake,’ ” I repeated from memory. “ ‘It wasn’t Horowitz; it was Koch.’ Who did what?” I asked rhetorically.

  “Don’t think about it. Your brain’ll worry it up.”

  I knew I couldn’t reach George Fried today if he was on an airplane, and since I didn’t know where he was going, I didn’t know when he would be home. I went to the family room where Gene and Eddie were sitting on the floor, playing with Eddie’s toys. Gene reached over and patted Eddie’s curls. I smiled and backed out to the kitchen, hoping my brain would do its duty.

  It was while we were having dessert that something came back to me. “He said Wien was friendly with the Meyers,” I said to Jack.

  “Your dead man?”

  “Mm-hmm. And then he said something about Mrs. Horowitz, that she was a very beautiful girl.”

  “So Wien could have had an affair with her thirty, forty years ago.”

  “But he’s wrong and I knew it when he said it. Mrs. Horowitz isn’t beautiful and I don’t think she ever was. She’s kind of a plain woman with a good figure who dresses well and loves babies.”

  “OK.” I could hear the expectancy in his voice.

  “Mrs. Koch is beautiful. She has short gray hair, thick, beautiful hair, and the face of a girl, a beautiful girl.”

  “Then that’s what Fried meant; it wasn’t Horowitz who was beautiful; it was Koch.”

  “Ellen Koch is the wife who had the affair with Arthur Wien.” I felt a rush of excitement. Suddenly an impossible case had become less impossible. My head was whirling with ideas. “She was talking about herself when she told me a wife had had an affair with Arthur Wien.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got something.”

  “I have to talk to her.” I took another taste of ice cream. “Excuse me, everybody. I have to make a phone call.”

  * * *

  “Yes, Chris. Hello.”

  “We have to talk, Mrs. Koch.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know, and so has Dave.”

  “I don’t want to talk to your husband. I want to talk to you, alone. I know who had an affair with Arthur Wien.”

  “Really? Who was it?”

  “We both know, Mrs. Koch. That’s why I’m calling you. There are some other things we have to talk about too, things that Alice Wien has an interest in.”

  “My husband is out till seven,” she said.

  “I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  Jack said it would be fine; he would take Gene back to Greenwillow and get Eddie ready for bed later in the day if I wasn’t back. I worried about his not studying for the bar, but he said he was sure he’d have time every day on his new assignment to do that, that this was more important. I didn’t argue. I kissed everybody and ran.

  I pulled into the underground garage and ran for the elevator. Ellen Koch was waiting for me at the open door, my first impression of her confirmed. She was an exceptionally beautiful woman with firm skin and a girl’s fine features. She was wearing a black skirt and a short-sleeved pink shirt with a necklace of black beads. We walked into the beautiful living room and I stopped to take in the view.

  “Make yourself comfortable. We don’t have a lot of time. Dave may be early.”

  “You’re the wife who had the affair with Arthur Wien,” I said.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “The sum of all I’ve learned in the last ten days.”

  “That doesn’t sound like convincing evidence.”

  “You have a piece of Arthur Wien’s pencil manuscript of The Lost Boulevard in your possession.”

  “What if I have?”

  “It belongs to Alice Wien.”

  “Not if he gave it to me it doesn’t.”

  “You held it for ransom, Mrs. Koch.”

  “I don’t think anything you know can prove that.”

  “You’re the one who lent him the money and took the manuscript as collateral.”

  “That sounds like a story Alice told you.”

  “Alice told it to me because Arthur told it to her.”

  “Art didn’t always tell her the truth, you know.”

  “Why don’t you tell me the truth?”

  She crossed one slim leg over the other and fingered the black beads. “Art and I fell in love sometime in the fifties. He was already married to Alice, and I think I had just married Dave. I told myself there was nothing we could do. If we both divorced and remarried, there would be more than hell to pay. There were four sets of parents that would never understand. Divorce wasn’t common and wasn’t easily accepted. What we’d done would have been perceived as adultery.
Getting a divorce in New York State was almost impossible, and besides all that, I didn’t really want a divorce and I think Art didn’t either. I love Dave very much.”

  “Does he know?”

  “No.”

  “Alice doesn’t either.”

  “I didn’t think she did.” She looked troubled now. I could imagine she might never have talked about this affair with anyone except her lover, that there was no one alive now who even knew. “It was as crazy a relationship as I could ever have imagined. It just went on and on. We were always there for each other. I don’t know what else I can tell you about it.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “I suppose it must be forty years by now. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  “Tell me about the manuscript.”

  “The book was dedicated to me. I know you don’t believe that. I’m sure Alice has shown you her framed dedication. The one I have isn’t framed, but it’s written in his hand and it says more and it means it. I told him I wanted the manuscript. It was the only thing I ever asked for in all those years and he gave it to me.”

  “When?”

  “I can’t give you a time because I don’t remember. It was after the book was published, I know that. I put it away where it was safe, where it was mine to treasure. And then, a long time later, Art and Alice separated and Alice demanded the manuscript as part of the divorce settlement.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I said I wouldn’t give it up. It was mine. It was a book my lover had written, dedicated to me, and given to me. Why should I give it to the woman who was going to be his ex-wife?”

  “So he paid you for it.”

  She gave me the kind of stare that was surely meant to inflict bodily harm. “How dare you even suggest such a thing,” she said calmly.

  “Then you tell me what happened.”

  “What happened is that we quarreled over it, for months. I didn’t want to give it up. I knew he would never tell Alice who had it. It would have enraged her. She would have been driven to ask for much more than she was asking. Eventually, I just caved in, I guess. I gave it to him.”

  “Minus several pages.”

  “I knew he wouldn’t go through it to check. It was in the same box it had been in when he gave it to me twenty years earlier. He took it and gave it to the court, which gave it to Alice. I gather she never looked through it either.”

  “She didn’t, or I think she would have gone after him for the missing pages. Why did you keep them?”

  “I took what was mine, the parts that were about me. He had asked me before the book was published how I felt about those sections. He had disguised our relationship, pretended it happened between two other people. I told him either he wrote the truth, which I knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t without getting an awful lot of flak from my husband and his wife, or he had to take it out altogether. So he took it out.”

  “But he only pulled the pages out of the typewritten version,” I said. “He left it in the original.”

  “And that’s what I kept.”

  “Forgive me for harping on this, Mrs. Koch, but no money passed between you for the return of the manuscript?”

  “Not a cent. I did lend Art some money once, but that was much later.”

  “And there was no collateral?”

  “Love is the best collateral there is.”

  “I see.”

  “Are we finished now?”

  “There are still a lot of unanswered questions. When did your affair end?”

  She looked toward the windowed wall and fingered the beads again with her left hand. She didn’t want to answer that one. “Around the time he married Cindy.”

  “Two years ago?”

  “About that.”

  “Can you tell me why it ended? It had survived one long marriage, and you must have known he was unfaithful to Alice.”

  “Of course I knew. I knew everything.” She looked as though she might cry. Her face had lost its natural brightness; her eyes were full. “And he’d had Cindy around for years at that point. I guess I just didn’t want to live through another marriage of his, another time of his being exclusively someone else’s. While they were seeing each other, they were often at opposite ends of the country. Art would come east and stay in his apartment, and Cindy would stay in California. It gave us time together.”

  “Did you meet him at his apartment?”

  “Never. I know about doormen. I didn’t want to walk in one day with my husband and have the doorman greet me like an old friend. We met in other places.”

  “How did it end?” I asked, my voice a shade lower.

  Her eyes could not hold the tears any more. “We’re civilized people,” she said. “We had loved each other longer than most people are married, longer than some lives are lived. We didn’t hate each other or dislike each other. We just knew we couldn’t continue our relationship any more. We didn’t part enemies and we didn’t part friends. I suppose we parted lovers. We just saw each other one last day, one evening.” She drew in a shaky breath, “One night.”

  “Did anyone—” I hesitated, “did anyone act as an intermediary?”

  Her face broke into a sad smile. “Do you mean did we arbitrate the end of our relationship like labor and management in two separate rooms? The answer is we didn’t need to. Our feelings for each other were very deep and very real, and they helped us through to the end.”

  I had only one question left and I knew I had to ask it. “Did you kill him, Mrs. Koch?”

  She shook her head, the stains of tears marking her cheeks. “How can you ask me that after what I’ve told you?”

  “I need an answer. You’re the only one with a motive.”

  “What motive?” she asked plaintively. “I’ve just told you that I loved him.”

  “And that he essentially left you for another woman.”

  “I did not kill Art,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “I did not ever think of killing him. I loved him.”

  “Thank you.” I stood and put my notebook in my bag. I wasn’t sure I believed her but I couldn’t think where to go.

  “I hope you won’t make this public,” she said, standing and smoothing her skirt.

  “I won’t, unless I find you’re lying.”

  “Then you won’t make it public.”

  “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. Why did you tell me last week that you had heard that one of the wives had had an affair with Arthur Wien?”

  “I can’t explain it. Maybe something inside me wanted to confess. I knew as soon as the words were out of my mouth that I had made a terrible mistake, but there was no taking it back. It was done.”

  “I would never have guessed,” I said.

  “Well, now you know.”

  I shook her hand and went out to the elevator, feeling the weight of her confession throughout my body. I could not imagine such a deep and pervasive relationship’s being kept a secret for so many years. I could not imagine a woman filling the roles of wife and lover with two different men and feeling happy in both roles. I had not asked her about guilt, but how could she have avoided it?

  There was so much I could not understand, and yet I knew that human beings were more complex than most of them appeared to be on the surface. Today I had broken through that surface in a woman I liked, a woman I would never completely understand.

  This time when I picked up my car, they handed me a bill.

  24

  “That’s some confession,” Jack said when we were sipping coffee later in the evening. “Forty years with two men. Hard to believe.”

  “I think she killed him,” I said. “She looked me in the eye and said she didn’t, but there’s a motive now. She wanted him for herself. And I’ll bet it bothered her that his new wife was half her age.”

  “So how do we prove it?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know. Mrs. Horowitz has to be involved in this somehow. Her meetings with Arthur Wien mus
t have something to do with the breakup. But I don’t think she’ll tell me or anyone else.”

  “How do you figure it?”

  “I bet there was a lot of less-than-loving discussion between Ellen and Arthur for a long time. She was jealous of this younger woman. She didn’t want him marrying again. Maybe she threatened to talk about their relationship and he asked Robin Horowitz to try to prevent that. I’m sure Cindy Porter wouldn’t have been any too happy to find out that her lover of seven years, soon to be her husband, had been fooling around with another woman.”

  “But if you can’t crack Horowitz—”

  “I know. It’s hopeless.”

  I got up and found the envelope of pictures Lila Stern had given me ten days ago. I went through them again, looking carefully at the faces of the people, at the evening purses on the table, at the seating arrangement. There was a beautiful picture of the Koches, his arm around her, both smiling. The other couples also had pictures of themselves and everyone looked happy, even the Meyers who must have known this was the last reunion they would attend together. No one looked like a killer. Cindy Wien glittered both literally and figuratively. Arthur looked like a man who had a few more books yet to be written. If there was anything to be learned from these pictures, I was unable to see what it was.

  I looked at my notes again. Joseph’s suggestion that I find out when events had happened had been a good one. Two years ago Cindy and Arthur had married. Two years ago Ellen Koch and Arthur Wien had dissolved their decades-long relationship. That was a nice fit. But two years ago or a few months more, Robin Horowitz had visited the Wien apartment at least three times when Cindy wasn’t there. What was the connection?

  If I was right and Ellen Koch had lied to me, she had harbored a grudge so deep and hurtful that she had planned to kill her former lover at the next reunion, which was Father’s Day. She had gotten nothing tangible from the murder, no money, no memorabilia. But she had the satisfaction of knowing that Cindy was Arthur’s last wife and last woman. If I could only figure out what Robin Horowitz’s role had been. The pictures yielded nothing, but my time line fit all the facts.