Yom Kippur Murder Read Free

locked.”
    “Then someone had the key.”
    She looked fearful for a moment. “I have never used that key before today,” she said with fervor.
    “I don’t mean you, Mrs. Paterno. Maybe someone carried groceries home for him and took the key after killing him.”
    “A push-in? Not likely,” Gallagher said. “Herskovitz carried his own.”
    “I don’t see how. He had his cane. Going up all those steps must have been difficult. If he was carrying something—”
    “I thought you got him his stuff.”
    It was true that I had shopped for Mr. Herskovitz for the last month and a half, and I had carried a rather heavy bag from the supermarket only two days earlier. “He might have needed milk and bread,” I said.
    “You’re reachin’, darlin’. You don’t want to face the facts.”
    I truly didn’t. The thought of a building owner resorting to murder to empty his building represented the kind of moral low I found difficult to comprehend. Still, I could not ignore what I read in the papers. Such things had been attempted.
    “He had children, didn’t he?” I said, changing the subject.
    Mrs. Paterno raised her eyes and lowered them.
    “A girl and a boy,” Gallagher said. “Nina, I think she is, and the boy, maybe Mitchell. He didn’t talk too much about them.”
    “Didn’t they grow up in this building?”
    “Didn’t know him then. There were kids by the dozens back in the fifties. Herskovitz and me, we got to know each other when the place started goin’ to the dogs.”
    “Where am I going to go?” Mrs. Paterno said, looking at no one.
    “Do you have family?” I asked. Of the three, she had saidthe least to me in the two months I had been coming around. Most of what I heard from her was complaints; this isn’t working right, that isn’t the way it should be. Even when I came to help her or to deliver a message, she never asked me in. She stood on her side of the door, frequently with the chain in place, and I stood in the dark hall like some lesser mortal.
    “A daughter,” she said, as though that ended the discussion.
    “Maybe she can—”
    “Impossible.”
    “Would you like to stay with me for a little while?” For a hundred reasons, I didn’t want company, but the poor woman was terrified, and I didn’t know what else to do.
    “Where do you live?”
    “In Oakwood. It’s in Westchester County near—”
    “I cannot be out of the city.” She looked away, dismissing any other offer of help.
    “Someone will have to notify his children,” I said.
    “Look in the drawer,” Gallagher said. “He told me once where he kept the addresses. In case anything happened, someone should know.”
    I opened the center desk drawer, conscious that the police were just down the hall doing their grisly tasks and would probably not appreciate my snooping. They had asked us not to touch anything. There were scissors, pencils, pens, a large rubber eraser, and a bottle of ink. I closed the drawer and tried the top right one. An old leather book with ADDRESSES stamped in gold on the cover met my eyes. I took it out and opened it on the desktop. Under H I found “Mitchell (Carolyn)” as though he had written in his daughter-in-law’s name at a time when she was so new to the family that he might forget her name. I copied down the address and telephone number. Mitchell and Carolyn lived in Atlanta, Georgia. There was no Nina in the H’s, so I leafed through the book, starting with A, looking for her. When I reached the XYZ page, I realized she wasn’t listed.
    “His daughter’s not here,” I said, looking at Gallagher.
    “Oh, she’s there, all right. Preston, something like that.”
    I went back to the P’s, but the only listings were for an “H. Plotkin” and for “Pharmacy (close).” I was about to give up when I saw something ragged sticking out of the back cover. I flipped over to it and found a piece of paper in the shape of a long triangle, obviously a flap torn off an envelope. Printed