Kling waited in the hallway. He could hear the sounds of an apartment building everywhere around him, the sounds of life. And, beyond the closed door to apartment 4-A, the stillness of death.
A young man came up the steps, carrying a book under his arm. He nodded solemnly at Kling, stopped just beside him, and asked, “This is Wechsler?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
He knocked on the door. While he waited for someone to answer his knock, he touched his fingers to the mezuzah fastened to the jamb. They waited together silently in the hallway. From somewhere upstairs a woman shouted to her son in the street. “Martin! Come upstairs and put on a sweater!” Inside the apartment, there was silence. The young man knocked again. They could hear footsteps beyond the door. Joseph Wechsler’s sister opened the door, looked first at Kling and then at the newcomer. “Are you the rabbi?” she asked.
“Yes,” the man answered.
“Will you come in, please, rov?” she said. She turned to Kling. “Ruth says she will talk to you, Mr. — what is your name?”
“Kling.”
“Yes, Mr. Kling. Mr. Kling, she’s just lost her husband. Would you please... could you kindly...?”
“I understand,” Kling said.
“Come in then. Please.”
They were sitting in the living room. There was a basket of fruit on the coffee table. The pictures, the mirrors were draped in black. The mourners sat on wooden crates. The men wore black yarmulkes, the women wore shawls. The young rabbi had entered the room and was beginning to lead a prayer. Ruth Wechsler broke away from the mourners and came to Kling.
“How do you do?” she said. “I am glad to know you.” She spoke with a thick Yiddish accent, which surprised Kling at first because she seemed like such a young woman and an unfamiliarity with English did not seem to go with youth. And then, looking at her more closely in the dimness of the room, he realized that she was well into her forties, perhaps even in her early fifties, one of those rare Semitic types who never truly age, with jet-black hair and luminous brown eyes, more luminous because they were wet with tears. She took his hand briefly, and he fumblingly shook hands, not knowing what to say, his own grief suddenly swallowed in the eyes of this beautiful pale woman who was ageless.
“Would you come with me, please?” she said. Her accent was really atrocious, almost a burlesque of the Sammy and Abie vaudeville routines, stripped of all amusement by the woman’s utter sadness. Kling automatically made an aural adjustment, discounting the thick dialect, translating mentally, hearing still the curious structure of her sentences but cutting through the accent to arrive at the meaning of her words.
She led him to a small room behind the living room. There was a couch and a television set in the room. The screen was blank. Two windows faced the street and the sounds of a city in turbulence. From the living room came the sound of the rabbi’s voice raised in the ancient Herbraic mourning prayers. In the small room with the television set, Kling sat beside Ruth Wechsler and felt a oneness with the woman. He wanted to take her hands in his own. He wanted to weep with her.
“Mrs. Wechsler, I know this is difficult—”
“No, I would like to talk to you,” she said. She pronounced the word “vould.” She nodded and said, “I want to help the police. We can’t catch the killer unless I help the police.” He looked into the luminous brown eyes and heard the words exactly that way, even though she had actually said, “Ve ken’t ketch d’killuh onless I halp d’police.”
“Then... that’s very kind of you, Mrs. Wechsler. I’ll try not to ask too many questions. I’ll try to be as brief as possible.”
“Take what time you need,” she said.
“Mrs. Wechsler, would you happen to know what your husband was doing in Isola at that particular bookshop?”
“Nearby there, he has a store.”
“Where is that, Mrs. Wechsler?”
“On the Stem and North Forty-seventh.”
“What kind of a store?”
“Hardware.”
“I see, and his store is close to the bookshop. Did he go to the bookshop often?”
“Yes. He was a big reader, Joseph. He doesn’t speak too well, Joseph. He has, like me, a terrible accent. But he enjoyed reading. He said this helped him with words, to read it out loud. He would read to me out loud in bed. I think... I think he went there to get a book I mentioned last week — that I said it would be nice if we read it.”
“What book was that, Mrs. Wechsler?”
“By Herman Wouk, he’s a fine man. Joseph read to me out loud The Caine Mutiny and This Is My God, and I said to him we should get this book, Marjorie Morningstar, because when it came out there was some fuss, some Jewish people took offense. I said to Joseph, how could such a fine man like Herman Wouk write a book would offend Jews? I said to Joseph there must be a mistake. There must be too many people, they’re too sensitive. I said it must be that Mr. Wouk is the offended party, that this man is being misunderstood, that his love is being misunderstood for something else. That’s what I said to Joseph. So I asked him to get the book, we should find out for ourselves.”
“I see. And you think he went there to get that book?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Was this a habit of his? Buying books in that particular store?”
“Buying there, and also using the rental library.”
“I see. But at that store? Not at a store in your own neighborhood, for example?”
“No. Joseph spent a lot of time with his business, you see, and so he would do little errands on his lunch hour, or maybe before he came home, but always in the neighborhood where he has his business.”
“What sort of errands do you mean, Mrs. Wechsler?”
“Oh, like little things. Let me see. Well, like a few weeks ago, there was a portable radio we have, it needed fixing. So Joseph took it with him to work and had it fixed in a neighborhood store there.”
“I see.”
“Or his automobile, it got a scratch in the fender. Just parked on the street, someone hit him and scraped paint from the fender — isn’t there something we can do about that?”
“Well... have you contacted your insurance company?”
“Yes, but we have fifty-dollar deductible — you know what that is?”
“Yes.”
“And this was just a small paint job, twenty-five, thirty dollars, I forget. I still have to pay the bill. The car painter sent me his bill last week.”
“I see,” Kling said. “In other words, your husband made a habit of dealing with businessmen in the neighborhood where his own business was located. And someone could have known that he went to that bookshop often.”
“Yes. Someone could have known.”
“Is there anyone who... who might have had a reason for wanting to kill your husband, Mrs. Wechsler?”
Quite suddenly, Ruth Wechsler said, “You know, I can’t get used to he’s dead.” She said the words conversationally, as if she were commenting about a puzzling aspect on the weather. Kling fell silent and listened. “I can’t get used to he won’t read to me any more out loud. In bed.” She shook her head. “I can’t get used to it.”
The room was silent. In the living room, the litany of the dead rose and fell in melodic, somber tones.
“Did... did he have any enemies, Mrs. Wechsler?” Kling asked softly.
Ruth Wechsler shook her head.
“Had he received any threatening notes or telephone calls?”
“No.”
“Had he had any arguments with anyone? Heated words? Anything like that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Mrs. Wechsler... when your husband died... at the hospital, the detective who was with him heard him say the word ‘carpenter.’ Is that the name of anyone you know?”