Silent Mercy

by Linda Fairstein

  “Daniel, you’ve got to be candid with us. We’re at square one on Naomi’s case. If there’s something about her lifestyle we need to know, if that’s evidence you’re trying to destroy or conceal—”

  “I know what you people are going to do.” He was staring at the torn bits of paper. “You’re going to rip every inch of her private life apart and hang her out in public, like she asked for this.”

  “Nobody asks for this. We’re in here because we’re looking for something that might connect her to the man—to the people—who did this to her,” I said. “What did you try to hide?”

  Daniel turned to the sink and put out the butt of his cigarette under the kitchen faucet. “She’s got nobody, man. You understand that? Even I let her down.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She wanted me to help her. When things happened.”

  “What things?”

  “Trouble. Not big trouble, but—I don’t want to go there.”

  “Like her arrests?” Mike asked.

  Daniel reached into the cupboard over the sink for a glass and filled it with water. “You already know about that?”

  “Yeah. That’s how she was identified, and that’s the reason we got to you as next of kin. She listed you on the arrest papers.”

  “Naomi called me from jail,” he said with a half laugh, not intended to be funny. “I was the only family she had. She needed me to go to the bank and get some money, and agree to be her contact in the city, even though I’d been here only a few weeks less than she had.”

  “But you’d spoken to her not long before that?”

  “E-mailed. That’s mostly how we stayed in touch.” Daniel twisted his long hair into a knot at his neck, working his spindly fingers around one another while Mike wrote down both their e-mail addresses.

  “Is her mother still in Israel?” I asked.

  “Rachel?” Daniel put the glass down and looked at me. “She was blown to bits by a suicide bomber on a bus in East Jerusalem. Two, maybe three years ago.”

  I’d never thought of a possible terrorist angle to Naomi’s murder. When Daniel said that she had no one close to her, he wasn’t exaggerating.

  “Did Rachel live in one of the settlements?”

  “Yeah. Naomi gets all her activist energy from her mother. Lucky she was in London that time when the bomb went off.”

  “What do you know about your sister’s religious beliefs, Daniel ?” I asked. Now I wondered if there could be any kind of connection between her mother’s violent death and her own.

  “Very little.”

  “Your father—was he Jewish?” I asked.

  “Raised as a Jew. But my mother’s agnostic and so was he. That’s why Naomi and I didn’t talk about it much.”

  “But the arrests, Daniel, were they because of her religious beliefs?”

  He thought for a few seconds and reached into his back pocket for another cigarette. “Less religion than over her feminist views. That’s what all her preaching was about. Always rubbing certain people the wrong way.”

  Certain people. “Like your mother, for one?”

  “Yeah. You could say that.”

  “So why was she arrested?” I asked. “Do you know?”

  “I had to sit through the arraignment, so I heard most of the facts, and then Naomi told me more of it when they let her out.”

  “What’s the organization?”

  “It’s called Women of the Wall,” Daniel said. “It’s a group that Rachel helped start up twenty years ago, in Israel.”

  “For what?” Mike asked, moving the tiny bits of paper around like figures on a chessboard, trying to form words from the letters written on them.

  “Naomi said that ultra-Orthodox Jews didn’t allow women to pray at the Wailing Wall, didn’t allow them to dress in traditional prayer shawls. Stuff like that.”

  “You know anything about this, Coop?” Mike asked.

  Daniel walked across the room to take a matchbook from the pocket of a jacket he had thrown on one of the chairs.

  “A bit. Tallith—that’s the ritual prayer shawl. I know that some of the extreme factions of Judaism consider it wrong—arrogant, and against biblical commands—for women to wear these garments and pray publicly at places like the wall.”

  “Hear that, Daniel? We’ve come to the right place. Coop’s got all her feminist ducks in a row.”

  I turned my back as Daniel lit up and whispered to Mike, “Wrong time to make fun of it, Mike. You’ve got to look into this,” I said. “Discrimination against women sheltered under the wings of religion—every religion—is a really serious problem. It’s been that way for centuries. It’s excluded us from education and social opportunities, from positions of authority. You want me to go on?”

  “Later for that,” Mike said, cocking a finger at me like he was pointing a pistol. “After I calm you down with some Dewar’s.”

  “What else do you know about the demonstration?” I asked Daniel as he rejoined us.

  “That it was supposed to be a day of solidarity with the women in Jerusalem. Naomi said the first protest brought out some real animals. Guys who spit at her and threw things. Then their women actually joined in, too, doing the same.”

  That fact didn’t surprise me. Sadly, women often were the worst jurors in cases of sexual assault and domestic violence, far too judgmental about the conduct of their peers. The sisterhood wasn’t always the friendliest group in town.

  “I take it Naomi resisted arrest,” Mike said.

  “That was the whole point, Detective. She figured the only way to get press about the issue was to be a little outrageous. She wasn’t exactly a novice.”

  “Sure, kick a cop. Spit at him like the bad guys did at her,” Mike said.

  Daniel held up both hands like he was surrendering to Mike Chapman. “Hey, I’m not defending what she did. My mother didn’t want me to have anything to do with her. Naomi might as well have been a leper, the way she lived.”

  “What do you mean—a leper?” I asked.

  “She’d been an outcast for so long, it made it easy for her to embrace that over-the-top conduct, whatever the cause of the day. Fling herself down on the ground, refuse to move on when the cops broke things up. Yeah, I’m sure she did some fine kicking and spitting. She’s had lots of experience with it.”

  “Not just once, here,” I said. “In December and then again in January. She must have believed deeply in this cause.”

  “Or maybe she just liked the attitude,” Mike said, playing with his paper chips.

  “A pariah, Ms. Cooper. That’s what my mother liked to call Naomi. She was the perfect pariah.”

  ELEVEN

  “YOU want to make sense of this alphabet soup for me?” Mike asked Daniel. “These are the bits that were clinging to the inside rim of the toilet bowl. Didn’t go down with the rest. You mind telling me what you were trying to get rid of?”

  I walked to the countertop and looked at the scraps of paper. Daniel’s expression was glum, but he didn’t respond.

  “Is this Naomi’s handwriting?” I asked, nudging a few pieces toward him.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can’t you understand how important it is that we learn everything there is to know about her?”

  Mike’s displeasure was palpable. “So far there’s not a whit of evidence to connect a killer to Naomi’s body. I just came from the autopsy and there’s nothing. No seminal fluid, so no DNA inside her—”

  “I said I don’t want to hear about it,” Daniel said, closing his eyes and waving Mike away with one hand.

  “Listen up, buddy. Hearing about it might be the only way to reach you. Whoever did this to Naomi had the time and place to slaughter her like an animal. It didn’t happen here, obviously. And it likely didn’t happen on the street, or someone would have found a whole mess of blood by now.”

  Daniel clapped his hands to his ears and Mike pulled them away just as fast.

  “Could be she was
abducted by a stranger, but my money’s on somebody who knew her well enough to hate what she stood for. Hate everything about her. You don’t get this personal with your violence—you don’t sever the head of a woman—unless you’re so full of vitriol that swinging the ax is what gets you off.”

  Daniel tried to keep his eyes squeezed shut so the tears that had formed wouldn’t be visible to us.

  “Who did she know, Daniel?” I asked, softening the tone to get him to talk to me. “Who were her friends?”

  “I told you, she didn’t have friends,” he said, turning to face me.

  “We’ll get the names of the people who demonstrated with her. At least the ones who were also arrested. Did she talk about them?”

  “Maybe so. But I didn’t listen. There were antiwar groups and pro-choice marches. Save the whales. Protect the rain forests.” He was mocking her now, ticking off a list of issues, just like Mike had done, only this list was for real. “Anti-smoking, pro-mammograms, anti-handgun, pro-opening the borders, free Tibet.”

  “And most recently a full-on involvement with a religious organization,” I said.

  “Not up my alley, Ms. Cooper. I was the get-out-of-jail-free card. I was there when she needed me. That’s all.”

  “How much time did you spend with her after she was released the first time?”

  “Hardly any. We had lunch together once when I was between jobs. And she came to a Christmas party with me, when the first show I worked on was breaking up.”

  “A party?”

  “Yeah. Naomi said she wanted to meet new people. She was living in an ivory tower.”

  “I don’t get it,” Mike said. “She was on the barricades, Daniel. She was on the street for all these causes. It doesn’t get more common ground than that.”

  “No, I meant her intellectual life. She was taking courses and everyone was so serious. She said she wanted to hang with me ’cause I made friends easily and I didn’t have the emotional baggage that she did.”

  “Where was she taking courses? The ivory tower?” I asked.

  Daniel looked sullen again. “I don’t know, Ms. Cooper. Some religious school, I guess.”

  “Did she actually meet any of your friends?” Mike asked.

  Daniel squirmed and looked away. “Like, I knew they weren’t her type anyway. She came ’cause she thought there’d be actors and people she could talk to. By the time Naomi got to the party, it was mostly a bunch of inebriated stagehands and prop guys.”

  “Did she stay? Did she hook up with anyone?”

  Daniel gave Mike his best what-are-you-crazy expression. “I think she stayed long enough to insult a couple of the crew. I mean, just talking her usual way to them—stuff nobody really cared about.”

  “Did she leave with you?”

  “Nah. Naomi left before I did. I wasn’t in the mood to get stuck taking her home, getting a lecture about how we should be family and all that. It was her new kick, and quite frankly it didn’t interest me a bit.”

  “So what have we got here?” Mike asked, pointing to the scraps of paper.

  “Junk. I was just trying to clean up. Gonna have to start packing and sorting out Naomi’s things.”

  “Clean up? If this place was any neater,” Mike said, “I wouldn’t think anyone lived here. Who put you in charge?”

  “Like I said, I’m the next of kin.”

  “Let me guess. Your sister inherited some money when Rachel was killed.”

  “I—I, uh, don’t really know. I don’t know much about that.”

  “You went to her bank to withdraw money when she was arrested, didn’t you?” I asked. “Any idea how much was in her account?”

  “Oh, no. This isn’t about money,” Daniel said, shaking his head.

  “Did Naomi have a will? You know who her lawyer is?” Mike had a laundry list of questions ready to pop.

  “Sure she had a will. Ever since her mother—since Rachel was killed so suddenly—Naomi was always spooked about being … well, like, ready to die.”

  “Who’s the lawyer?” Mike asked, opening dresser and night-table drawers with his vinyl-gloved hand.

  “How the hell would I know?” If I’d thought Daniel Gersh was jumpy ten minutes earlier, he was bouncing off the walls by now.

  Mike turned back to the small rolling bag he had removed from the closet earlier and hoisted it onto the couch.

  “You’ve got no business touching that,” Daniel shouted, circling the kitchen counter and moving to the middle of the room.

  “I think I’ve got a better claim to it than you have at the moment,” Mike said, bending over to unzip it. “The luggage tag says it belonged to Naomi. Did she keep it loaded or was that you, planning how to take some of her things away while I waited at the front door?”

  Mike threw back the lid. The suitcase was practically full. I could see a checkbook on top of a stack of other papers. He picked it up and lifted the cover. “Well, well. It’s Naomi’s. Three thousand, seven hundred, ninety-six dollars and change in her checking account, packed and ready to go.”

  Daniel’s hands were flailing. “It’s not what you think, Detective. I didn’t want anybody stealing anything from here.”

  Mike laid the checks on the arm of the sofa and started to dig through the rest of the things. I didn’t see any items of clothing, but there were spiral notebooks, manila file folders, and, crammed among them, what looked like the kind of ritual prayer shawl that had started the brouhaha at the Wailing Wall.

  Mike opened one of the pads and began to read aloud. It was a diary that Naomi had written in the period after her mother’s death. The language was full of despair, appropriate to the dreadful circumstances of the bombing.

  He set it aside and picked up several volumes, flipping through two or three of them before coming to a more recent period that documented her stay in New York. He held up the pages to reveal that strips had been torn out of the journal—paper that matched the scraps on the kitchen countertop.

  “What’s with this, Daniel? What have you got to hide?” Mike asked, circling back to the sink with the notebook.

  Daniel had no intention of answering. Before Mike or I could get anywhere near to stop him, Naomi’s brother turned and bolted out the door of the apartment.

  TWELVE

  “HEY, Loo,” Mike said, wasting no time calling to let the lieutenant know that Gersh had skipped out on us. “I guess Daniel thought I was getting ready to throw him into the lion’s den. Make sure somebody runs background on him and gets to his crib before he makes it home.”

  “Have you got extra gloves?” I asked.

  Mike pulled a pair out of his rear pants pocket and handed them to me so I could begin to do an informal inventory of the items in the suitcase, looking for leads to move the investigation forward.

  The notebooks were in no particular order, but each one had Naomi’s name and a date—month and year—printed on the first page. They seemed to cover the last five or six years of her life and were a mixture of scribbled recollections of a day’s events, paragraphs filled with serious reflections, and collages of news stories or photographs pasted into the pages.

  “What do you think, blondie? Can you tell if Naomi was packing up, or do you think Daniel was sniffing around for something?”

  I was holding three of the notebooks but put them down to look around the apartment, starting in the bathroom. The toothbrush was still in the small plastic stand on the sink, and all the daily hygiene products were in place. In the medicine chest behind the mirror, a cosmetics bag—lipstick, blush, eyeliner, and mascara—was nestled between a box of condoms and a vial of pills: a mild tranquilizer packaged by a pharmacy in London. A nightshirt and robe still hung on the hook behind the door.

  “The don’t-leave-home-without-them things of a young woman’s life seem to be accounted for,” I said. “I found this piece on the bathroom floor, at the base of the toilet bowl.”

  “I feel like we’ve signed up for a high-stakes
game of Scrabble.” Mike took the paper from me—it had portions of letters torn in half, written in the same boldface as the notes in Naomi’s books—and set it next to the others he had dried out. “What the hell was Daniel doing?”

  “Let me take a stab.”

  He moved aside and I tried to align the snippets to make any kind of sense, but it seemed too much of the paper was missing to tell a story. “What have you got?” he asked.

  “An L ripped off alone, and another one with a T and an R on it. Here’s an S. This one is clipped at the edge, but it’s a U.”

  “Trial. Maybe she was worried about her case.”

  “Trial, trail, traffic, truck, train, tryst, triangle.”

  “Lust,” Mike said.

  “Rust. Struck. This is a task for another time. Max can do this in her sleep.” My brilliant paralegal, Maxine Fetter, could probably have cracked the World War II Enigma encryptions over a slow lunch period.

  Mike started to put the dried scraps in envelopes while I went back to the suitcase. I carefully removed the prayer shawl and checked for stains like blood, knowing that the lab would do a proper search when it was delivered to them. I saw nothing unusual.

  Beneath the notebooks were tracts on feminist theory in a range of theologies. I took a folder out of my tote and listed the volumes and authors, looking inside for any margin notes or dog-eared pages Naomi might have made.

  Under the religious tracts were scads of photographs—old ones of Naomi as a child, posed between young adults I guessed were her parents. There were more recent shots of her with Daniel. The background was distinctly suburban, the yard of a home and an SUV with Illinois plates in the driveway.

  Interior scenes showed both of them smiling at the camera across the table with a Thanksgiving turkey in the foreground. Daniel’s mother probably took the photograph—there was no other sign of her—and the handsome man leaning in behind Naomi and her brother, flashing a big smile, must have been the stepfather. Then in Daniel’s room, with Naomi standing at his shoulder while he was hunched over his computer, someone had snapped another remembrance.