Silent Mercy

TEN

MIKE extended a hand to help me out of the yellow cab in front of a recently renovated tenement building on Avenue B at four the same afternoon.

“What happened to Daniel?” I asked.

“Strike one. Manhattan South sent a team to his old job, ’cause the commish was afraid he’d hear about Naomi on the news. But he hasn’t worked there lately.”

“Someone told him?”

“Yeah. Yeah. One of the guys he used to hang with told him. Good way to piss me off.”

“So he’s crushed. Give him a break. And let’s get out of the drizzle,” I said, pushing open the vestibule door.

“Not so broken up as you’d think. He hasn’t seen much of Naomi in almost six years. His buddies at the theater didn’t even know he had a sister.”

“But this is her apartment.” I knew the address from the court papers. “How did Daniel get in? If he didn’t have much of a relationship, you wouldn’t think he’d have a key.”

“Nope. The super opened up for him. Now he’s stonewalling me.”

Mike pressed the buzzer with the paper marker labeled Gersh next to the mailbox for 2D. It took almost three minutes for a voice to respond through the intercom.

“Yes?”

“I’m still here, Daniel. I’d like to talk to you.”

“What about that warrant, Detective?”

“I got one right here. A living, breathing warrant. Meet Assistant DA Alex Cooper. Open up, Daniel. This is a condolence call, not a strip search.”

There was another short hesitation before the buzzer sounded. Mike entered, climbing the steps in front of me. When we reached 2D, the door was ajar and the chain was bolted across the opening.

“Let me see your papers.”

“I realize this is a difficult day,” I said, “but we don’t need a warrant. You have no legal standing to keep us out of your sister’s apartment. We’re simply here to talk to you.”

“Me, I’m the battering-ram type, Daniel. Works every time and it gets the neighbors’ attention. Coop here favors the more polite approach.” Mike pressed his arm against the door to test its give.

Daniel pushed it closed and removed the chain.

“May we come in?” I asked.

He shrugged and stepped back to let us enter.

Mike scoped the room — a large studio apartment lined with brick and board bookshelves, with little more in it than a double bed against the wall, a pair of beanbag chairs, a couple of crates that served as a living area, and a tiny kitchenette. Two doors were opened in the back, revealing a bathroom and a closet. I introduced myself to Daniel, trying to figure whether his reserve was grief or a natural shyness as I expressed my sympathy for his sister’s brutal death.

“May I sit down?”

“Yeah, sure.” He motioned to the chairs, but I chose the side of the bed. I knew I would sink into the shape-shifting beans and end up below eye level with him. Daniel wasn’t ready to sit, answering me but keeping a watch on Mike.

“I’ve got a lot of questions about Naomi that I’d like to ask you,” I said. “Is there anything you want to know before we begin?”

“Nah. The cops told me the stuff about her body,” he said. “I really don’t want to hear any more of that.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“What do you do?”

“Right now I’m a prop guy. Move scenery and equipment at a theater. I’m supposed to start acting classes in the summer.”

“Have you worked at the show very long?”

“It’s a temp job,” he said, scratching his sandy brown hair, which hung below the collar of his sweatshirt in a long, tangled snarl. “I only moved to New York in the fall.”

“From?. .”

“Chicago. I lived near Chicago with my mother.”

“Does she know about Naomi yet?” I asked, hoping to distract Daniel while Mike lifted a suitcase out of the closet.

“She’s my mother. Not Naomi’s,” Daniel said. “You mind leaving her luggage alone, Detective?”

“All packed up and ready to go,” Mike said. “Your sister do that, or you?”

“Just don’t touch it, okay?” Daniel Gersh walked toward Mike. He was tall and well built, with a jangly kind of energy that made him appear skittish and nervous.

“Ms. Cooper’s talking to you.” Mike backed off the suitcase and walked over to the windowed wall that housed the sink and small oak dining table.

The apartment was neat and clean. I knew it would be gone over by crime-scene detectives and was confident — as Mike was— that Daniel wasn’t leaving with the suitcase or any other property of his late sister’s, if that was what he had come here to do. Nothing appeared to be out of place. It didn’t look like the young woman had been butchered in her home.

“Can I just get you to focus on some questions that would help us try to figure out what happened to Naomi?” I said.

“Then stop asking about me, okay? What do you want to know about her?”

“Why don’t you start with the family background?”

Daniel had planted himself in the middle of the room. “Naomi’s a lot older than I am. Seven years. My father — our father, I mean — he met her mother in college. Got her pregnant and her family put a lot of pressure on them to get married. So they did. But it didn’t last very long. Like a year after Naomi was born, it was over.”

I could hear the rustling noise as Mike pulled back the shower curtain in the bathroom, and Daniel hurried over to look at what he was doing.

“The toilet’s still running,” Mike said. “What’d you flush before you let us in?”

Daniel held up his arms as if puzzled. “Like, what are you talking about? Maybe it’s just broken.”

“Drugs? Pills? Why’re you so jumpy, Daniel?”

“I’m not jumpy, man. I’m still, like, shocked about this.”

“Then answer Ms. Cooper’s questions.”

“I take it your father remarried,” I said. “Did you and Naomi grow up near each other?”

“At first, yeah.” Daniel settled himself in, leaning against the refrigerator and lighting a cigarette. “My mom and dad lived in a suburb of Chicago. Naomi’s mother taught at the university for a while — they lived in Hyde Park. Then, like my dad said, she was always trying to find herself.”

“Naomi’s mother?”

“Yeah. Her name was Rachel. My dad used to joke that he was glad she did eventually find herself — and that it was as far away from him as possible.” Daniel inhaled and smiled, his affect as inappropriate to the situation as his remarks.

“Where did they go?” I asked.

“They made aliyah, Ms. Cooper. You know what that is?”

“They immigrated to Israel.” I knew the Hebrew word that was a basic tenet of Zionism and would explain the Israeli Law of Return to Mike later on. It allowed anyone of Jewish descent the right to settle in Israel, to return to the Promised Land.

“Rachel took Naomi away with her? There wasn’t a custody battle?”

“Not from what my mom says. By that time my father was already — um, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease when I was pretty young. He died when I was twelve, and no, he wasn’t really interested in Naomi. Or me, for that matter. He was too sick to do much of anything.”

“Did you stay in touch with your sister?” I asked.

Daniel didn’t seem to object to my calling her that, as separate as he tried to paint their lives. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Sometimes. She came back to the States when our dad died. Stayed with my mother and me for a few months, but they didn’t have much to say to each other. Naomi went off to college after that, in London.”

“Do you know what she studied?”

“Yeah. Philosophy. Philosophy and religion. I think she wanted to — tried to — have some kind of relationship with me. She used to send me things all the time.”

“What kind of things?”

“Letters. Souvenirs and shit like that whenever she traveled.”

“Tell me about the letters, Daniel.”

“I don’t remember much. Naomi was trying to be all grown up and intellectual, and me, I was just a goofy kid. Just read them and threw them out.”

“Shhhhhhh,” Mike said, placing his forefinger against his lips. “Hear it?”

“Hear what?” I asked.

“The quiet.” Mike was getting right up in Daniel’s face. “Think of the money you’ll save, Daniel. Plumbers charge almost as much an hour as good defense lawyers.”

“So what?”

“So the toilet stopped running. Not a long-standing problem in the pipes, I wouldn’t think. Why won’t you tell me what you flushed?”

“Maybe I just had to use the john, Detective. Ever think of that?”

“I did, actually. ’Cause if you’ve got these tiny pieces of paper coming out your ass, you ought to see a doctor.”

Something had been ripped into shreds and it looked like Mike had picked up a few damp remains and spread them on the countertop, on paper towels, to dry.

“Daniel, you’ve got to be candid with us. We’re at square one on Naomi’s case. If there’s something about her lifestyle we need to know, if that’s evidence you’re trying to destroy or conceal—”

“I know what you people are going to do.” He was staring at the torn bits of paper. “You’re going to rip every inch of her private life apart and hang her out in public, like she asked for this.”

“Nobody asks for this. We’re in here because we’re looking for something that might connect her to the man — to the people — who did this to her,” I said. “What did you try to hide?”

Daniel turned to the sink and put out the butt of his cigarette under the kitchen faucet. “She’s got nobody, man. You understand that? Even I let her down.”

“How do you mean?”

“She wanted me to help her. When things happened.”

“What things?”

“Trouble. Not big trouble, but — I don’t want to go there.”

“Like her arrests?” Mike asked.

Daniel reached into the cupboard over the sink for a glass and filled it with water. “You already know about that?”

“Yeah. That’s how she was identified, and that’s the reason we got to you as next of kin. She listed you on the arrest papers.”

“Naomi called me from jail,” he said with a half laugh, not intended to be funny. “I was the only family she had. She needed me to go to the bank and get some money, and agree to be her contact in the city, even though I’d been here only a few weeks less than she had.”

“But you’d spoken to her not long before that?”

“E-mailed. That’s mostly how we stayed in touch.” Daniel twisted his long hair into a knot at his neck, working his spindly fingers around one another while Mike wrote down both their e-mail addresses.

“Is her mother still in Israel?” I asked.

“Rachel?” Daniel put the glass down and looked at me. “She was blown to bits by a suicide bomber on a bus in East Jerusalem. Two, maybe three years ago.”

I’d never thought of a possible terrorist angle to Naomi’s murder. When Daniel said that she had no one close to her, he wasn’t exaggerating.

“Did Rachel live in one of the settlements?”

“Yeah. Naomi gets all her activist energy from her mother. Lucky she was in London that time when the bomb went off.”

“What do you know about your sister’s religious beliefs, Daniel?” I asked. Now I wondered if there could be any kind of connection between her mother’s violent death and her own.

“Very little.”

“Your father — was he Jewish?” I asked.

“Raised as a Jew. But my mother’s agnostic and so was he. That’s why Naomi and I didn’t talk about it much.”

“But the arrests, Daniel, were they because of her religious beliefs?”

He thought for a few seconds and reached into his back pocket for another cigarette. “Less religion than over her feminist views. That’s what all her preaching was about. Always rubbing certain people the wrong way.”

Certain people. “Like your mother, for one?”

“Yeah. You could say that.”

“So why was she arrested?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“I had to sit through the arraignment, so I heard most of the facts, and then Naomi told me more of it when they let her out.”

“What’s the organization?”

“It’s called Women of the Wall,” Daniel said. “It’s a group that Rachel helped start up twenty years ago, in Israel.”

“For what?” Mike asked, moving the tiny bits of paper around like figures on a chessboard, trying to form words from the letters written on them.

“Naomi said that ultra-Orthodox Jews didn’t allow women to pray at the Wailing Wall, didn’t allow them to dress in traditional prayer shawls. Stuff like that.”

“You know anything about this, Coop?” Mike asked.

Daniel walked across the room to take a matchbook from the pocket of a jacket he had thrown on one of the chairs.

“A bit. Tallith — that’s the ritual prayer shawl. I know that some of the extreme factions of Judaism consider it wrong — arrogant, and against biblical commands — for women to wear these garments and pray publicly at places like the wall.”

“Hear that, Daniel? We’ve come to the right place. Coop’s got all her feminist ducks in a row.”

I turned my back as Daniel lit up and whispered to Mike, “Wrong time to make fun of it, Mike. You’ve got to look into this,” I said. “Discrimination against women sheltered under the wings of religion — every religion — is a really serious problem. It’s been that way for centuries. It’s excluded us from education and social opportunities, from positions of authority. You want me to go on?”

“Later for that,” Mike said, cocking a finger at me like he was pointing a pistol. “After I calm you down with some Dewar’s.”

“What else do you know about the demonstration?” I asked Daniel as he rejoined us.

“That it was supposed to be a day of solidarity with the women in Jerusalem. Naomi said the first protest brought out some real animals. Guys who spit at her and threw things. Then their women actually joined in, too, doing the same.”

That fact didn’t surprise me. Sadly, women often were the worst jurors in cases of sexual assault and domestic violence, far too judgmental about the conduct of their peers. The sisterhood wasn’t always the friendliest group in town.

“I take it Naomi resisted arrest,” Mike said.

“That was the whole point, Detective. She figured the only way to get press about the issue was to be a little outrageous. She wasn’t exactly a novice.”

“Sure, kick a cop. Spit at him like the bad guys did at her,” Mike said.

Daniel held up both hands like he was surrendering to Mike Chapman. “Hey, I’m not defending what she did. My mother didn’t want me to have anything to do with her. Naomi might as well have been a leper, the way she lived.”

“What do you mean — a leper?” I asked.

“She’d been an outcast for so long, it made it easy for her to embrace that over-the-top conduct, whatever the cause of the day. Fling herself down on the ground, refuse to move on when the cops broke things up. Yeah, I’m sure she did some fine kicking and spitting. She’s had lots of experience with it.”

“Not just once, here,” I said. “In December and then again in January. She must have believed deeply in this cause.”

“Or maybe she just liked the attitude,” Mike said, playing with his paper chips.

“A pariah, Ms. Cooper. That’s what my mother liked to call Naomi. She was the perfect pariah.”