Free Yom Kippur Murder by Lee Harris

two, and sometimes the restrictions are two days a week instead of three. And in areas where the buildings are old, like the West Side of Manhattan, there are virtually no places to park except for the street. Buildings erected before the Second World War never provided off-street parking, probably because no one could imagine so many people owning so many cars. Sometimes I can’t quite imagine it myself.
    So finding a spot is a game. What many people do is simply double-park on today’s “good side” for the three street-cleaning hours and then rush to get a spot that’s good the next day. It’s a lifelong battle. And if you have a good spot today and you want to take your car out only to find a solid line of cars double-parked next to you, there’s virtually nothing you can do. In most cases, the police won’t even ticket the double-parker. If they do, the ticket adds to the litter.
    What I do is try to arrive half an hour before the parking restrictions end so that I can park on either side (since I won’t be staying overnight) during the half hour when everyone rushes for cover. Or I look for a meter on Broadway, which means I have an hour before I have to run back and drop in more quarter.
    On that Wednesday morning, luck was with me. Someone actually pulled out of a good space as I coasted down Riverside Drive. It was a small car, but that’s what I drive, and I backed in easily. If you believe in good omens, that surely signaled an auspicious start to the day.
    Hillel Greenspan’s apartment had large rooms overlooking the Hudson River in the Seventies. From the eighth floor the view was beautiful. The strip of green that was Riverside Park stretched as far as you could see to the right and a few blocks to the left across the street, right down to the river. The river itself is quite magnificent, and the George Washington Bridge off to the right was spectacular.
    I saw all this from the windows of his living room.
    “You like the view?” he asked from his chair where he could probably see no more than the sky.
    “It’s beautiful. Have you lived here long?”
    “Forever.” He smiled.
    “That’s a long time. Mitchell told me you helped Nathan find his apartment.”
    “I did, I did. I knew someone who was moving. We paid a little here, a little there, we got the apartment for the Herskovitzes.”
    “How did you know him, Mr. Greenspan?”
    “How do you know people?” he asked back. “You grow up with them, you work with them.”
    “You knew him in Europe, then, before the war.”
    “Exactly.”
    Hillel Greenspan spoke English fluently with the smallest of accents, much as Nathan had. Until Mitchell had told me otherwise, I had assumed that Nathan had come to New York as a young man, long before the war. Knowing how old hewas when he immigrated, I appreciated how well he spoke the language.
    “What did Nathan do in Europe?”
    “In Europe he was a lawyer.”
    “Nathan was a lawyer? He told me he’d been in business.”
    “Here he was in business, there he was a lawyer. Law doesn’t move around so easy. If you’re an accountant, the numbers stay the same. Laws are different. He came here, he had to work. He worked.”
    “What did he do?”
    “He sold blankets.”
    I felt a small pang of what might have been Nathan’s pain. This was what the war had done, taken a man educated in the law, a respected professional, and turned him into a small businessman.
    “A beautiful store,” Mr. Greenspan said, filling the silence. “Blankets, quilts, pillows, quality goods.”
    “Did his wife work in the store with him?”
    He eyed me curiously before he answered. “His wife? No. She had little children. She stayed home.”
    “She died a long time ago, didn’t she?”
    “Could be thirty years already. Maybe longer.”
    “Was she sick?”
    Mr. Greenspan pursed his lips. Then he nodded his head. “From the very beginning,” he said. “The war made a lot of people sick.”
    “Did you know