Read Online The Passover Murder by Lee Harris - Free Book Online Page A

three cents, a letter from one part of New York to another was only two, and penny postcards were guess how much. The rent on this apartment was under a hundred dollars.”
    I shook my head. “It sounds like the way I used to think of money when I was at the convent. You spent only what you needed to, and if you could save a nickel or a dime, you were ahead of the game—or you bought yourself an ice cream cone.”
    “It’s not a bad way to grow up,” Marilyn said. “Sometimes I wish I’d been able to instill a little of my mother’s thriftiness in my children. Anyway, here we are. It’s probably a little dusty—we don’t have it cleaned every week anymore—but you’re welcome to look around, open drawers, whatever you’d like.”
    “I don’t know what good opening drawers would be. Iris didn’t live here.” I looked around at the furniture and the pictures on the walls. “Your mother must have been a great collector. Everything looks very special.”
    “She loved antiques. She loved china. Sometimes I’d walk into a room and catch her standing and looking at a shelf of her treasures with a smile on her face. It gave her pleasure just to look at them.”
    “I can see why.” We were next to a cabinet that contained a collection of dishes, each one different, each beautiful. “Show me where the seder was that night.”
    We walked into the dining room, turning a corner that obscured the front door. The furniture was mahogany, dark and heavy and very traditional.
    “We had to open up the table to get everyone seated. Iris was somewhere over here, close to the doorway. Pop was at the head of the table, over at that end.” She pointed to the farthest place from the doorway. “You can see that wherever you sat, you couldn’t see the front door without getting up and actually leaving the room.”
    “Where was your mother sitting?”
    “Opposite my father, down at this end. This is closest to the kitchen.”
    “And not far from where Iris sat.”
    “That’s right.”
    I took my notebook and made a very rough sketch of the apartment. Then, on another page, I drew in the dining room in more detail. “You said the children sat separately. Where were they?”
    “They were in the kitchen that night. And they couldn’t see the front door any more than we could.”
    “I think you told me the women left their pocket-books on a table somewhere.”
    “Out here.”
    I followed her into the foyer, where a chair, a table, and a mirror were the only furniture.
    “They left things on the floor, on the table, on the chair. I’m sure some people must have come with shopping bags, and those might have ended up out here, too.”
    “This must be the coat closet you mentioned,” I said, opening a door near the door to the apartment.
    “That’s it. It’s very deep, and Mom used to joke that it was the attic for the apartment. In the winter the winter coats were on the front rack and the summer things on the back one. There’s also room for suitcases back there, and I think that’s where Mom kept them.”
    “Did the guests hang their coats in this closet at the seder or were they put on a bed in one of the bedrooms?”
    “Probably both. If you came early, there was room in the closet. Later on you probably had to toss your coat on a bed. But Aunt Iris came early that day, I’m sure of that, so she would have hung her coat in the closet. And you know, if she’d put it on a bed, Mom would have found it the next day.”
    “Right. Marilyn, why don’t we just look at what’s hanging here? The question of whether Iris was wearing her coat is still a little unclear.”
    “That’s what we’re here for.” She leaned inside and item by item, she pulled the hangers across the bar and we looked at each one. “Pop’s raincoat, his old winter coat I told him to throw out years ago, his old raincoat that’s falling apart. I wish he’d put a light in this closet like we told him to when we were kids, but he