by Lee Harris
The hearing was very brief. Joe pled not guilty, bail was set, and a date chosen for the next court appearance. Joe was released a few minutes later. I went to the nearest ladies room and found Judy Meyer there.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault. You were doing something honorable.”
“At the reunion dinner, you asked Robin Horowitz to change places with you so you wouldn’t have to sit next to Arthur Wien.”
“She saw Arthur come in. I was sitting next to the last two empty chairs and she realized I wouldn’t get through an evening rubbing shoulders with him. She got up and said she wanted to sit next to him. We traded places. Thank God,” she added.
“You’re the one, aren’t you? You did it.”
She paled. “You heard Joe yesterday.”
“I heard him.”
“They’ll never try him.”
“I know.”
“And I’ll take good care of him for as long as I have him.”
I picked up Eddie and took him home. We had a nice conversation over lunch. He had had a good time at Elsie’s.
“Maybe we’ll swim this afternoon,” I said.
“Wim,” Eddie said with a breathy W.
“You have a new bathing suit and we can go to the pool after your nap.”
“Pool.”
“Yes. Remember we looked at the pool last week?”
“Pool.”
I leaned over and kissed him.
After my own lunch I took The Lost Boulevard outside and sat in my chair under an old tree and read the last chapter. As I had thought, it was a wrapping up kind of chapter. The narrator took the subway to the Bronx to see his mother. It was a New York summer day, hot and very humid. By the time he got up to the street level, his shirt was sticking to his back. He walked from the Concourse to Morris Avenue and up to the apartment he had grown up in. He was in his late twenties now and had a wife and a nice little apartment in the Village. I remembered Alice’s description of that first home they shared.
Inside his mother’s apartment every window was open, but the air was as still as the grains of sand in the egg timer on the kitchen stove. He unbuttoned another button on his shirt, but it did no good. Even the fan in the living room seemed to have stalled.
For the first time he looked at the apartment appraisingly. It seemed very rundown. Paint was chipping in almost every room, and he wondered how long it had been since the landlord had put a fresh coat of paint on any of the walls.
The kitchen in particular looked old and grimy. The linoleum on the floor was cracked and dirt was ingrained, never to be removed. The stove looked like something from a junkyard. He remembered it from twenty years ago, the nineteen-thirties, when he was a boy. The refrigerator, one of the old gas ones, was short by modern standards and had that metal thing on top that housed the fan. If it wasn’t an antique, it was surely close. The table wobbled. One of the chairs was missing.
In his shirt pocket he had a damp list of available apartments, some on the Concourse, some in Manhattan. He wondered if the Concourse buildings had become as rundown as this one or had retained the status that went back to prewar days. He showed the list to his mother. She sighed and made him a sandwich.
He told her the city was building a highway that would cut through the heart of 174th Street, that the noise of drilling through the rocks would be unbearable, that the dust and dirt that the drilling created would float into this apartment and sit on every surface, that when the highway was done there would be filthy trucks driving back and forth night and day. This was the time to leave it all behind.
She talked about the mothers of his friends. She told him how things were going with his father at work. She fanned her face with a Jewish newspaper. She couldn’t think of any reason to move.
After an hour or so, he kissed her good-bye and walked back to the Concourse. It was a long trip to the Village, but the D train would take him to West Fourth Street and his apartment was an easy walk from there. He looked up and down the Concourse, accepting finally that his parents would never live there. It was too late for them as it was too late for him. His life was elsewhere, not in the Bronx.
He went down the dark stairs to the subway and waited on the almost empty platform on the downtown side, inhaling the heat. About twenty feet away, a young pretty girl in a sleeveless cotton dress and black patent shoes stood waiting for the same train. She turned and saw him. He smiled and she smiled back. He started down the platform toward her, and the train came noisily into the station, blowing hot air. She got in one car and he got in another. He sat back on the old laquered straw seat and closed his eyes. The D train would take him to a better world.
26
There’s never anything clean about finishing a case. Someone is brought to what we call justice, but I am always left with a tremendous weight on my shoulders. Not only do I often feel sorry for the killer, as I did in this case, but I am left with information that puts me in a very awkward position. I do not like to lie and yet, who am I to dispense facts that are private?
I called George Fried and told him he had helped me a great deal and I would not disclose the fact that he was alive. I called Marge Beller and told her she had given me the precise piece of information that I needed to find Arthur Wien’s killer. And I promised not to disclose what she had told me.
I never asked Ellen Koch whether the money she lent to Arthur Wien to pay Marsha Meyer had been paid back because I didn’t think it was my business, but I did tell her her long affair with him would remain her secret.
And then there was Alice Wien, an innocent who had suffered because of her husband’s behavior. Only Ellen Koch and I knew where the missing pages of the manuscript were, but I did not tell Alice. Maybe some day Ellen would give them back to Alice, with or without an explanation, and make the manuscript whole and valuable. People rise to unexpected heights sometimes; I hoped Ellen would. She would still have the dedication that Arthur Wien had written to her in his own hand. I will never know.
A couple of weeks after the arraignment of Joe Meyer, a large, heavy box was delivered to my house. I smiled at the store name on the address label, Neiman Marcus. I could tell the contents were larger than either a lipstick or a tie, and probably more expensive.
Inside were a dozen crystal wine glasses that took my breath away and a note thanking me from Robin and Mort Horowitz. I wondered if she had guessed who had killed Arthur Wien on Father’s Day. I wondered if Ellen had.
For myself, I wondered whether Joe had done it or if his wife had. Or if they had worked together. I don’t think I’ll ever know.
A CONVERSATION WITH LEE HARRIS
Q. Lee, your heroine, Christine Bennett, first appeared in 1992. But you have been a published novelist since 1975. Can you fill us in on your life before Chris?
A. Under another name I wrote mainstream novels, the last of which came out in 1989. About that time I felt I needed a change in my life. Since I was a devoted reader of mysteries, I decided to write one of my own. I used an idea I’d had for about ten years, made it the first book in a series, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Q. We liked the author bio that appeared in your first novel—indicating that you were “at work on another book, and another book, and another book …” Indeed, that did happen. How many novels did you publish under your own name?
A. Six. And I still feel I’d like to go on writing forever.
Q. Readers, and especially fans, are always curious about an established writer’s decision to adopt a pseudonym. Why, when you created Chris Bennett, did you?
A. The mysteries were so different from my other books that my agent, the late Claire Smith, whom I loved and admired enormously, felt I should keep the two genres very separate, that the readers of my mainstream novels might be thrown for a loop by picking up a mystery. In fact, in many cases that hasn’t happened, but I still keep them separate.
Q. Who or what was the inspiration for Chris?
And when you introduced her in The Good Friday Murder, did you envision a series? Or was The Good Friday Murder intended as a stand-alone novel?
A. Chris is completely fictional, inspired by no single person. I wanted a female amateur sleuth, about thirty, a type of person who hadn’t been done. Nuns have been done. Nurses have been done. Teachers have been done. An ex-nun seemed to give me a lot of opportunities for character development. I knew from the start that I was doing a series. In fact, as soon as I finished Good Friday, I started The Yom Kippur Murder.
Q. We know that you are not a former Catholic nun, but that aside, how much of the Chris Bennett series is based on your own experience? What about background research—how vital is that for you?
A. Only a little of my experience, like my education, the kinds of work I’ve done, and where I’ve lived, goes into my books. However, I’ve had to incorporate some of Chris’s experiences into my own life. For The Father’s Day Murder, besides picking the brains of my cousins who grew up in the Bronx, I drove over to where the Morris Avenue Boys came from and went through the streets taking notes. And for The Labor Day Murder, I spent a weekend on Fire Island. What sacrifices we writers endure!
I can’t do a book without research. I have an expert on Catholicism and nuns who helps me in that area, and a retired NYPD detective who gives me hours of his expertise. They’re the first two people I acknowledge in every book.
Q. When did you settle on the title “hook”—the notion of holiday-themed mysteries?
A. Okay, here’s the truth. I was sitting at my typewriter in 1989, thinking about a murder that happened in 1950. I decided (quite by accident) that it happened on April 7. So I opened my trusty World Almanac and checked the calendar for 1950. April 7 was a Friday. It then occurred to me that Easter might have occurred around that time so I checked for movable feasts. Sure enough, Easter was on April 9 that year. And it hit me. The murder had taken place on Good Friday! The Good Friday Murder! Wow! And that, as I like to say, is how careful planning gave me a theme in my series.
Q. The Good Friday Murder was nominated for an Edgar Award as Best Paperback Original. Did that have any impact, immediate and/or long-term, on you?
A. The immediate impact was incredible. When I hung up from getting the news from my editor, I started to wonder if she had really called or if I had imagined it. I couldn’t believe it had happened. I didn’t even know that Edgars were given for that category. The longer-term effect was mixed. My next advance was no more than my last one. But suddenly, bookstores all over the country were aware of my books, were putting Good Friday on tables of nominated books, and my sales were up. So long-term it was all good.
Q. Of all your novels—mystery and mainstream—which was the most fun to write? The most difficult?
A. I can tell you this is the hardest question to answer. Maybe the answer to both parts is the same: My very first book back in the seventies. I wrote it in number 2 pencil on lined pads. I started in the middle, wrote an episode here, an episode there, then went to the beginning and started from scratch, incorporating—or tossing—the pieces I’d written before. But I loved the work; I loved seeing the characters and story grow. It took twenty-two months from day one to the end, months during which I wrote while my little child was napping, while my husband was teaching at night. And when it was sold ten days after my then-brand-new agent sent it off, it was pure bliss.
Q. We have four words for you: “Nuns, Mothers, and Others.” Please tell us about that phenomenon.
A. Am I glad you asked! Valerie Wolzien, a well-known Fawcett author, turned out to be a neighbor of mine when Good Friday was published. We got to know each other through a mutual acquaintance and started promoting our books together, doing signings and even overnight trips. Then, at the Malice Domestic convention in 1994, we met Lora Roberts, another great Fawcett mystery writer, from California. Lora had a mystery writer friend, Jonnie Jacobs, whose short story is now part of a Ballantine collection, and they planned a trip that Valerie and I joined to visit bookstores throughout the Midwest in July 1995. While trying to decide what to call ourselves for that trip, something snappy and memorable, Jonnie, in a late-night silly mood, came up with “Nuns, Mothers, and Others”—after our sleuths. And that’s who we are now. We put out an irregular newsletter, we have special T-shirts we wear when we’re together, and we even have a Web site (http://www.NMOMysteries.com) with all our pictures on it and lots of other good stuff. Also, we have attended mystery conventions all over the country, visited bookstores from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to San Diego, California, and are planning more for the future. We even found we like each other more the more we see each other!
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