Free The Passover Murder by Lee Harris

Grodnik’s. Her French purse, full of money, was inside, along with her credit cards, a pen and pencil, a lipstick, an elegant mirror, and a compact with face powder.
    “She must have put it in the closet when she came, just pushed it over to the side where it would be out of the way,” Marilyn said. “No one would have noticed it if they weren’t actually looking for it, and I certainly thought all the purses were in the foyer.”
    “It means she intended to come back,” I said. “She didn’t just decide to go home, she didn’t go out to buy anything because her money is here, and she wasn’t grabbed when she opened the door as Sylvie thinks she was because she had her coat on.”
    “She went to meet someone,” Marilyn said.
    “Or out for a breath of fresh air.”
    “Don’t believe it. She wouldn’t have done that. This is what you’ve been looking for, Chris. This is proof that Iris was killed by someone she met, and she must have met him outside the building or she would have left her coat behind.”
    “Marilyn, Sylvie said the man that Iris went with for many years, Harry, lived not far from this apartment. I think we have to find out what his last name is and cross our fingers that he’s still alive so we can talk to him.”
    “Sylvie said that? That Harry lived near Pop and Mom?”
    “That’s what she told me.”
    “I’m not sure I ever knew where he lived. Whenever I saw him it was with Iris, and that would have been here or at Iris’s apartment. Why can’t I think what his last name was?”
    I took out my notebook. “I need to fill in some geography. Where did Iris live at the time of her death?”
    “Kips Bay. She had a beautiful apartment.”
    “I’ve heard of that, but I don’t really know where it is.”
    “On the east side in the Thirties, just south of the UN.”
    “So she was on the East Side, too.”
    “Yes. And one of the reasons she picked that location was that it was easy to get up to Pop’s. She liked to keep close to the family.”
    “I’d like to look at the place she lived if we have time today. Not that I can learn anything, but it gives me a feel for Iris’s life.”
    “We can drive there after lunch. Anything else?”
    “You’ve never told me where Iris’s body was found.”
    “Yes, of course.” Marilyn stopped as though the thought of the location was a painful memory. “It was a terrible place, Chris. Up at the northern tip of Manhattan there are oil yards. They’re about a block from Broadway and quite near Baker Field, the stadium where Columbia plays its football games. It’s a place where oil comes in on big barges and is stored until it’s taken away by truck to be delivered. I never knew this place even existed, but that’s where they found poor Iris’s body two days after she disappeared.”
    “How awful,” I said. I jotted down as much as I could of what Marilyn had just described. “That means that whoever killed her must have had a car.”
    “I certainly think so. My husband and I drove up there about a week after they found Iris, just to see what kind of a place it was. There’s a chain-link fence around it—with enough holes that you could probably push a body through if you tried, or squeeze inside yourself if you were crazy enough to want to do it. The fence was all overgrown with weeds, and there’s litter around. It’s an awful place.” She stopped for a moment.
    “What’s inside the fence?”
    “Mostly oil tanks, a little shack where a guard probably dozes all night, the cabs of old oil trucks. I suppose you want to see it.” She sounded unhappy at the prospect.
    “Not if it’s too painful for you.”
    “Death is painful. Iris’s death was very painful. Who would take her to such a place, Chris?”
    “Someone who didn’t want her found, someone vicious enough to kill her, someone, I’m sure, with a car.”
    “Yes, he must have had a car. He couldn’t very well have taken her there by cab.”
    I glanced at my