The secretary's face turned sad. She was eighteen or nineteen, had been a child when Esther died, younger even than what Willie Ackerland would have been today had he lived. She told me Alex Fishman had died fighting in Jerusalem against the Jordanians, and that Itamar Levine no longer worked for the firm.
"I never met either of them," she added. "I've only been working here for six months. The girl I replaced in this job told me about Fishman. I read about Levine in the files."
"Was her name Leah Benowitz? The girl you replaced, I mean." Leah Benowitz had worked as a secretary for Becker & Strauss, alongside Esther, and had claimed to have been her best friend when interviewed by Rivlin.
"No. Leah Benowitz hasn't worked here for a few years. I never met her either. I think she left when she got married."
"Can you give me her current address? Or the last one you have on file?"
She hesitated. "I'm not sure I'm supposed to."
I explained who I was and that I was investigating the murder of a former employee of the firm. "Ever heard of Esther Kantor?"
She shook her head, now looking not just sad but frightened. She absently fingered a fine silver bracelet that hung on her slender right wrist, still hesitant. She gave me a searching look, apparently decided I was trustworthy, and told me to wait a minute. She rose from her chair, went over to a filing cabinet, and began leafing through a row of folders. She tugged one out, opened it, and read off an address on Ibn Gabirol Street.
I scribbled the address in my notebook. "How about Itamar Levine's address?"
She consulted another folder. "He doesn't live in Tel Aviv anymore. He got a job with a firm in Haifa. Modai, Danzinger & Knobel. I don't have a residential address for him, but I got a phone number for the firm."
I wrote down the number and thanked her and left.
Twenty minutes later, a block north of the city zoo on Ibn Gabirol, I mounted the stairs to the second floor of a nondescript residential building and knocked on the door to apartment four.
A woman in her early twenties answered the door. She wasn't Leah Benowitz and had never met her. "Ask the landlady downstairs. Maybe she knows where this Benowitz woman is."
The landlady was sixty and rail thin and had a reedy voice. "Why're you looking for Leah?" she said, eying me with suspicion.
I produced a smile and told her I was a private investigator working for a law firm. "I am required to notify Miss Benowitz that her mother's cousin died and left her a sizable inheritance."
That got the desired reaction. The landlady invited me in and asked me to sit while she rifled through a chest of papers and found a forwarding address on Borochov Street. "Her name is Goldin now."
At the door the landlady asked me how big the inheritance was. I winked and said, "It's confidential. I'm sure you understand."
Leah Goldin—née Benowitz—was absolutely charmed to learn of my profession.
"A detective? Like Philip Marlowe?"
My bewilderment must have shown, because she explained, "From the movie The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Don't tell me you haven't seen it."
I confessed that I hadn't.
"Oh," Leah said, laying a hand on my arm, "you definitely should. Lauren Bacall is so beautiful, and the two of them together on the screen—it's pure magic." She looked me up and down. "You don't look like Humphrey Bogart." It was unclear whether she meant this as a compliment or a criticism, so I said nothing. "People have told me I could be in the movies. What do you think?"
She still had not invited me in. I was standing on the third-floor landing; she was still holding the front door to her apartment with her left hand. Now she let go of the door to strike a pose. She planted her left hand on her hip, the right she bunched to a fist, except for an extended index finger, the tip of which she'd placed on the underside of her chin. Tilting her head slightly to the back and left, she cocked her right hip. Finally, she parted and puffed out her lips, as if about to give a kiss, while her eyes narrowed in a feeble attempt at sultriness. All in all, it was a weird combination of gestures and affectations, none of which looked natural or appealing, all of which I assumed she'd copied from movies.
After five seconds of increasingly awkward silence, I realized she was waiting for me to answer. Estimating that a compliment was likelier to get me in the door than the truth, I lied. "You have star quality. No doubt about it."
Leah beamed.
She had a face made for beaming, youthful and smooth and innocent, framed by a shower of brown curls. The smile dug dimples in her plump rosy cheeks and made her light brown eyes sparkle. She had a pert nose and a small pink mouth set in the middle of a round face. She reminded me of pictures of fairies in one of the children's books I had read for my daughters. She was five two and bosomy in a blue housedress with red dots. She was barefoot. Her feet were tiny. If not for the onset of laugh lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, she might have been mistaken for a buxom fifteen-year-old. Her age, I knew from the police report, was thirty.
Truth was, she was pretty, but hardly on the level of movie actresses.
She looked so utterly happy with my lie that I hated having to ruin her mood.
I told her what I was there to talk to her about. Her face fell. She pressed one hand to her cheek and shook her head.
"What an awful thing. I must have cried for a week straight when I heard the news. Well, come in, come in. I'd be happy to help."
I followed her down a hall that opened onto a narrow kitchen on the left and a larger living room on the right. Children's toys lay scattered on the rug and coffee table.
"Forgive the mess," she said. "The children…they just throw their things everywhere. No matter how often I tell them to tidy up after themselves, they never listen. You have children, Adam? I can call you Adam, can't I?"
"No and yes. No, I don't have children, and, yes, you can call me Adam. How old are your children?"
"Four and two. Boy and girl. Can you believe that I have two children? Most people think I'm too young." She flashed a coquettish smile. Her breath smelled faintly of sugar. "They're at my mother-in-law's now. Which is the only good thing about having her live nearby. I do love the two monsters so, but they can be draining. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't look so worn out." She let out a theatrical sigh of desperation, then peered at me expectantly. It took me a moment to realize that she was waiting for some response from me.
"You don't look tired," I offered lamely, but it appeared to satisfy her. She took my arm and steered me toward a two-seater. She sat next to me, curling her feet under her. Then she shook her head playfully and let out a chuckle.
"Where are my manners? I haven't offered you anything to drink."
"I'm fine," I said.
"Sure? I can make some coffee, or do you feel like some red wine? I know they say drinking alcohol before dinner is bad for you, but I've read that in America lots of people do. Have you been to America, Adam?"
"No."
"I so desperately want to go," she said, her hand still on my arm. "When I see movies, I picture myself in those huge cities with the buildings so high they pierce the clouds. Or when I listen to big band music on the radio, I imagine those nightclubs with all the glamorous people dancing and drinking champagne. I sometimes can't help but feel angry that when my parents chose to leave Poland, they came here instead of America. What were they thinking? Can you imagine how glorious my life could have been?"
I nodded slowly, though inside I was burning with indignation. Leah Goldin, I realized, was the sort of self-centered person who believed she deserved far more than what life had given her, the sort who invariably blames others for her perceived misfortune.