An Eye for Murder (22 page)

I winced.

“Since I had no relatives in the area—at least none anyone could find—I went into the foster care system. For ten years.” The waitress took our orders, repeated them out loud, then disappeared. I looked at David, not sure which question to ask first. “How…how…?”

“There’s this look that foster care kids have. I’d know it a mile away. You kind of look at someone under your lids, hoping they won’t notice you looking at them. You don’t want to be noticed, see. You just want to get by. Not make waves. Dory has that look. I guess I do, too.”

Was that why he wore shades so often? “But you’ve come so far from…from that.” I hoped I didn’t sound patronizing. “There was never any question that I would. My mother always told me that I could—no—
would
do anything I wanted. I was special, she said.” He let out a sound, more an exhalation of breath than an exclamation. “I believed her. Though I’ve come to realize she was saying it more for herself than for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was the proof that the bad guys didn’t win. A Jewish boy born after Hitler nearly killed us all…I was her victory. The tangible evidence that she, not the Nazis, won. She treated me like a crown prince. Not with material things, of course, because technically, we were poor. But I had unconditional love, and I never wanted for anything.” He looked down. “Until she died.”

Our meals came. He dug into a roast beef sandwich. I picked at my salad. “I was shuttled to homes all over Pennsylvania for the next ten years,” he said after a bite. “Some were good. Some weren’t.” A muscle in his jaw pulsed. “But I was lucky. I got a full scholarship to Penn State. After a year there, I transferred to U of P. I’ve been in Philly ever since.”

The waitress came over with a pot of coffee. I clamped a hand over my cup, but David nodded, and she filled his cup. He opened two packs of sugar, dumped them in, and stirred. Whatever else Lisle Gottlieb was, I thought, she had been a good mother. Her belief in her son had sustained him through what had to be a lonely, pain-filled adolescence. He had survived. He and Dory.

I pushed my plate away. “So. Tell me what your plans are.”

He sipped his coffee. “I thought I’d go to the police and see if I can get the case file on my father. Then maybe see if the detective who worked on it is still alive.”

I chewed my lip.

“I know it’s a long shot,” he said. “But he might have a son or daughter who remembers something.”

I shook my head. “What’s wrong?”

“You won’t have much luck with the cops.”

“Why not?”

“They won’t release any information. Especially since the case is technically still open.”

“But it’s been sixty years.” I shrugged.

“How do you know?”

“A few years ago, I tried to get the file of an unsolved murder for a video I was working on. I went through channels, wrote letters, even pulled a few strings, but I got nowhere. Their rationale was, ‘How do we know you’re not the perpetrator, or a friend of the perpetrator?’ I wasn’t, but it didn’t make any difference.”

David frowned. “Why not?”

“Think about it. What if the file contains a note that the detectives think Mr. Smith killed Mr. Brown, but they don’t have the evidence to charge him? If that ever got out, Mr. Smith could sue the police department for defamation. Or his heirs could. Whether or not he was guilty. And these days, you can bet someone would.”

“But I don’t want to make the information public.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “But hey. Give it a try. Just don’t be disappointed.”

The waitress hovered nearby. David shook his head, and she disappeared. “I’d also like to track down someone who knew my mother or father,” he said. “Aside from your father, that is. Is that friend of your father’s—Barney—still alive?”

“He died ten years ago.”

“Oh.” He sipped his coffee. “Well, maybe I’ll try to find someone who worked with my mother at the mill.”

I thought about Linda Jorgenson. I should give him her name. I thought about the newsreel with Lisle and Iverson together. I kept my mouth shut.

“I can also try to track down the people my father worked for. Your father said he worked as a delivery boy?”

“That’s right,” I said.

The lines around his eyes deepened in an unexpected smile. “You know, the picture of my mother is the first thing anyone’s ever given me of her. I hope your father knows how much I appreciate it.”

“He just might.”

“My parents traveled light, you understand, so light I could pack everything they left in one box. In fact, the only thing of my father’s I have is a clock.”

“A clock?”

“It’s a model of a famous clock tower in Prague. The Astronomical Clock. He brought it back from the war.” He took another sip of coffee. “It’s supposed to be one of the oldest mechanical clocks in Europe, built in the 1400s. The dial shows the revolutions of the sun, the moon, and some stars, and stonemasons added other medallions and figures over the centuries. The Nazis destroyed it during the war, but I understand it’s been restored. What I’ve got is just a cheap copy, of course….” His voice trailed off.

I wondered how I’d memorialize my father when the time came. Somehow a Big Band anthology or box of Havanas didn’t quite measure up.

“It’s odd, though,” he went on. “Mother always told me it was valuable. But it’s not. I had it appraised; turns out they made hundreds of them during the Twenties.” He shrugged. “But that doesn’t matter.”

“I understand.”

“Do you really?” He pushed his coffee cup to the edge of his place setting. “We are different, you and me. You know your father. You have his photos, his things. You can prove he existed. I can’t. I’ve been to Germany. I traced my mother’s family, even tracked down one of her neighbors. But I never found out anything about my father. It’s as if he and his family never were. I don’t even have a picture. The only thing I have is that clock.”

The waitress left the check on a little brown tray. I reached for it, and he did, too, and in the process his hand accidentally grazed mine.

“I asked you, remember?” he said, his hand resting on mine for a beat. A flash of heat tore through me. He took the check.

“That’s why I want to find out what happened to my father,” he went on, as if nothing had happened. “He’s part of me. Part of my heritage. I need to know who he was. And what he could possibly have done that would make someone want to kill him. You understand, don’t you?”

I was about to say that I did, but then I stopped. Kurt Weiss wasn’t his father. Paul Iverson was. What kind of a heritage did that make?

Chapter Thirty

Marian had left by the time I got back, and the atmosphere was more relaxed. The phones had quieted, the pit bulls lounged at their desks, and even Roger came out to chat. As I went into the empty office to gather my things, Dory broke off from a conversation and headed toward me, a conspiratorial smile on her face.

It struck me that wasn’t the attitude that someone with a crush on my lunch date would have. Wouldn’t she be more taciturn? Looking at me with narrowed eyes? Hoping I’d shrivel up and melt like the wicked witch? Then again, I’ve been away from the dating game for a long time; I may not know the cues.

“You have a nice lunch?” she asked.

I eyed her warily. “Very nice, thanks.”

“He’s absolutely gorgeous.”

I shrugged.

“Oh, come on Ellie, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.” I hoped my face didn’t show my pique. “Even I could feel the sparks between you two.”

“Sparks?”

“Major sparks. You couldn’t keep your eyes off each other. You make a good couple.”

I looked up. Maybe I was wrong about her.

“How did you meet him, anyway?”

I leaned against the wall. All was forgiven. I felt a silly smile on my lips. “Oh…It’s one of those long stories.”

She pushed the door closed and hoisted herself up on the desk. “I’ve got time.”

I filled her in, starting with the letter from Ruth Fleishman. I told her about Ben Skulnick, his boxes, and his E-mail account. I told her how I met David, how his mother worked for Iverson Steel, how she knew my father. But I left out the break-in and my suspicions about David’s parentage. She nodded and smiled, but when I finished, her face grew serious. “What was the name of that man again?”

“Which man?”

“The one whose E-mail you hacked into.”

“I didn’t hack into his E-mail. I had his password.”

“Right.” She paused. “So what was his name?”

“Ben Skulnick.”

Her brow furrowed.

“He went by Sinclair, too.”

“Skulnick. Sinclair…” Her voice trailed off. “Sorry.” She pushed off the desk and shot me a sidelong glance. “Who did you say David’s father was?”

“His name was Kurt Weiss.”

“And he died right after the war?”

“In forty-five. He was gunned down at a concert in Douglas Park.”

“And his mother worked for Iverson Steel?” I nodded.

She started for the door. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

“Dory, I have to get back north. It’s getting late.”

“It’ll only take a minute.” She opened the door and walked over to Marian’s office. The door was shut. She put her hand on the doorknob.

“What are you doing? You can’t just—”

“It’s okay. She knows we have to get in there sometimes to enter things on her calendar. See—” She twisted the knob, and the door opened. “Roger locks up at night.”

I followed her in. She went behind Marian’s desk to a set of shelves filled with books and several framed photographs. Dory reached for one of them and handed it to me. It was a black-and-white photograph of a man astride a horse on what looked to be a polo field. He wore a white shirt, jodhpurs and shiny leather boots and held a polo mallet in one hand. The sun gleamed on his white hair, lighting it up like spun silver. “This is Marian’s father,” she said. “Paul Iverson.”

The man in the photo was David’s double. I looked up.

Dory was watching me.

The afternoon rush slowed traffic on the Kennedy. Sandwiched between a moving van and a yellow school bus, I nudged the Volvo forward, thinking about Dory. She knew how much David and Paul Iverson looked alike, and she wanted me to know it.

But why? What was her stake in all of this? She’d only just met David, and you couldn’t really call
our
relationship a friendship. In fact, I’d considered her the type of person who tries to assert control by knowing what everyone else is up to. Now I wasn’t so sure.

I turned on the radio, uneasily punching the buttons on the console. Random bits of noise spilled out: the twang of a country tune, a man barking in Spanish, two beats of a bass guitar. I settled on one of the all-news stations.

“—latest poll by the
Chicago Sun-Times
ranks Marian Iverson eight percentage points in front of her challenger, downstate Democrat Frank Clayton…”

Marian. Her reaction to David had been just as peculiar. Unnatural, now that I thought about it. I was certain she noticed the similarity between David and her father, but, unlike Dory, she didn’t say a word about it. That was strange. If a man showed up looking as much like my father as David, I’d be curious. At the very least, I’d say something, maybe show him the picture of my father. I might even quiz him about his family, in the remote chance he was a long-lost cousin.

But Marian didn’t do any of those things. After a brief, awkward moment, she proceeded to ignore the situation. Pretended it wasn’t happening. Exactly what she did when we screened the Movietone newsreel. I flashed back to the newsreel of Iverson and Lisle. Their casual intimacy, the way their bodies almost touched. David Linden had to be the son of Paul Iverson and Lisle Gottlieb, and Marian knew it. Why did she pretend otherwise?

I went over the chronology. Germany surrendered in the spring of ’45, and American soldiers started trickling back to the States by June. Kurt Weiss came back in July, Dad said. At which point he and Lisle picked up where they’d left off. By all accounts, whatever was between Lisle and Paul Iverson ended. A few scant weeks later, Kurt was murdered. Then a week or so after that, Lisle showed up at my father’s, claiming to be pregnant with Kurt’s child.

I braked sharply, narrowing missing the van in front of me. The timing was the proof. Today, with home pregnancy tests, you know if you’re pregnant within a few days of conception, but back then it took longer—at least six or eight weeks. Lisle announced her pregnancy less than two weeks after Kurt died. But he’d only been home a few weeks at most. Which meant she was already pregnant when he came home. Lisle had lied.

In a way, it was understandable. Abortions were expensive then, difficult to obtain, and dangerous. She may have felt she didn’t have any options. Paul Iverson wouldn’t be the type to drop everything simply because his mistress—his Jewish mistress—became pregnant. He probably slipped a few C-notes off his roll of bills and told her to take care of the problem herself. Don’t call me, sweetheart; I’ll call you.

I edged into the left lane and came abreast of the moving van. The heat had glued my clothes to the seat and my skirt was hiked high on my thighs. The van driver ogled me as we inched up the Edens. Not much has changed, I thought darkly.

Chapter Thirty-one

The next day dawned bright and clear. A fresh breeze swept away the sultry air, and the sun threw shafts of gold across the floor. I brewed a perfect pot of coffee, watered the flowers, and went for a walk with Susan. We hiked over to the bike path, a ribbon of narrow asphalt that wound through the forest preserve. Dappled sun flickered through the dense shade, and the cushion of leaves under our feet was spongy.

I’d already told Dory Sanchez about David, so I filled Susan in, figuring she’d be thrilled that after four years I was finally showing an interest in the opposite sex. I giggled as I related our meeting at The Ritz.

“So we like him, do we?” She smiled enigmatically.

“Yes. But there’s a problem.”