Free The Bar Mitzvah Murder by Lee Harris Page A

murder?
    I wished I had thought to look out her window. First thing in the morning I would dash over to her hotel and ask to see her room or at least a floor plan. While I could not imagine a young woman killing her own father with her own hand, I could see her organizing his murder, perhaps giving a signal from her window to someone on the patio.
    It irked me that Judy had taken off after I left. She had said she had phone calls to make, and I had assumed she meant to her mother and brother, perhaps to her husband as well. But I saw now that the call or calls had been to an airline, or several airlines, until she got herself on the first plane out of the country. She knew the police would be right behind me and she didn’t want to be questioned officially. I hadn’t handled this well at all.
    In the morning I drove Jack to work and then went from there to the hotel where the party had been. The manager Mel and I had spoken to on Monday was there and remembered me. I asked to see the suite Judy Silverman had stayed in. He checked the register, then took me upstairs. The suite was empty and looked exactly as I remembered it.
    â€œI just want to look out the windows,” I said.
    The look of distaste seemed permanently fixed on his face, but he said nothing. Probably he thought it was better to indulge me than to talk to the police. I walked from window to window in the living room and then did the same in the bedroom. Every window overlooked the patio where Gabe had been found unconscious. Judy could have stood or sat at any one of them and watched the band off to the right and seen her father attacked farther back and to the left. If she hadn’t taken part in his killing, she might well know who had.
    Before I left, I asked the manager where I could buy a phone card. They were available at the hotel desk and also, he told me, at any post office. With one in my purse, I would be prepared if I needed to use a pay phone again.
    Mel arrived a little before ten and we waited downstairs till Raouf arrived. He was just as Joshua had described him, a man in his thirties, dressed casually and wearing an officiallooking badge that identified him as a professional guide. We all introduced ourselves and went outside to his car.
    I didn’t make much progress on the murder of Gabriel Gross that day, but I would not have traded the day for anything in the world. The Old City was simply wonderful. Raouf gave us lots of historical, geographical, and religious information as we walked, and I made notes on the map I carried to remind me where various sites were. For Mel I’m sure visiting the Western Wall was the highlight of the day. Men and women were separated there, as was customary among the Orthodox. She had already prepared a message, written on a small scrap of paper, which she stuck in a crack in the wall along with many others. The contents of the message were supposed to reach God. She suggested I write one myself, and I decided to do so, asking for God’s blessings on my family. Mel never told me what she wrote in hers.
    The wall is at one end of a huge open area where people walk or congregate. There were several tour groups there, and we could hear German and Japanese as we walked by. It’s a stunning sight, the wall, the people praying, and above and beyond it the gold dome of the Dome of the Rock. But for me the great moment was standing on the site in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where Jesus was buried. The site is enclosed in a small building within the great church. Raouf had told us in advance that hanging on the rear wall of the inner room was a painting of Mary. If the resident priest was not there, Raouf said, we could quickly pull the hinged picture away from the wall and touch the rock on the wall behind that was the last piece of the tomb of Jesus and then shut it immediately. We did this and were apparently the only ones there at that time who knew about it.
    There were candles