The Passover Murder Read Online Free PDF

Iris intentionally or because he became enraged with her, someone who knew her, someone she trusted, someone she made an appointment to see that night. Even after all these years, he shouldn’t get away with it.”
    I agreed with everything she said, but I still didn’t want to be the one to ask the difficult questions and come up with the awful answers. And yet it tugged at me, the memory of the snapshot, the beautiful smiling woman who was so good to those who loved her.
    “Did she drive?” I asked.
    “I don’t know.” Mel looked distressed. “It’s terrible, Chris. You ask these perfectly reasonable, simple questions about a woman I knew from the day I was born, and I can’t answer them. I never saw her drive. When we went somewhere together, we always took the subway or a bus or sometimes a taxi. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t know how to drive. I just don’t know.”
    “Where did she live?”
    “When I was young, she had an apartment in the Bronx on the Grand Concourse, but a few years before she died, she decided it wasn’t a safe place to live anymore, especially if she came home at night by herself, and she went out a lot to concerts and the theater and lectures. So she moved to Manhattan. It was a small apartment in a good building and it was very nice and she furnished it beautifully. I used to love to go there.”
    “Did she leave a will?”
    “Yes. My cousins and I inherited her money. My parents put it away for me.”
    “Mel, I really think—”
    “Don’t say it.” Mel stood and came over to my chair. “Take the papers with you. Think about it. Think about the seder, about someone saying it was time to open the door for Elijah and this eager voice pipes up, ‘I’ll get the door.’ Listen to it in your head. ‘I’ll get the door.’ And then watch this small, lovely woman leave the table, walk out of the room, and never look back.”
    I told her I would think about it and I went home.

4
    Eventually it was too intriguing and too easy to begin for me to turn it down. The fact that the murder had occurred so long ago also made it easier to accept. The family knew that Iris Grodnik was dead; they knew how she had been murdered. Nothing would bring her back. All they could possibly hope to gain from an investigation was answers.
    I called Mel the next morning and said, “I need some information before I can seriously look into your aunt’s murder.”
    “Anything, Chris. Mom and I will find out whatever you want.”
    “I want the name of Iris’s friend, the one you said you met. And I’d like the name of the company she worked for and also the man.”
    “He’s dead. I saw his obituary in the Times several years ago.”
    “Well, see if you can come up with his name anyway. It’s so long ago, I expect no one’s left that remembers her. Did this friend of hers work at the same place?”
    “I don’t think so. I think they were friends from childhood or high school. They went way back.”
    “Was the friend married?”
    “I couldn’t tell you. It’s possible.”
    “I guess you wouldn’t know if she’s alive,” I said hopefully.
    “No idea. But if she was Iris’s age, which she should have been, she’d be about seventy-five now, give or take.”
    “Well, lots of people live to seventy-five these days, so let’s hope.” I looked down at the notes I had made last night while waiting for Jack to get home from law school. “The friend is the one I really want to talk to. She knew Iris well and she’s not part of the family. Her perceptions will be different; her interests won’t be the same as the family’s.”
    “I’ll do my best.”
    “The other one I want to talk to is your aunt Sylvie. Is she in good health?”
    “Well, she’s old, in her eighties, but I don’t know that she’s in poor health.”
    “Because I don’t want to bring on heart attacks when I ask questions. It isn’t worth it. The living have top priority.”
    “I agree. If I hear of