Free The Good Friday Murder by Lee Harris Page B

around Queens, you still have a challenging experience ahead of you. Roads, drives, avenues, and courts all have the same name, and to make matters worse, the names are numbers. Just because you’ve come to Sixty-ninth Drive, don’t be deluded into thinking that Seventieth Drive is at the next intersection. You may not reach it for hours, or so it seemed to me. But I found the Zygowskys’ two-family house with time to spare.
    I managed to cross from Brooklyn into Queens without requiring a bridge or a tunnel or even the Long Island Expressway, and then I worked my way toward the area on the map that was labeled Maspeth. I had never heard of it, but it was near Forest Hills, which I had heard of. Then I drove through streets and roads and avenues until I reached the Zygowskys’ address. Parking, as usual, was a near impossible feat, but I just kept circling the area till someone piled his family into a car and pulled out for a Saturday afternoon excursion.
    Magda Zygowsky came down from the second-floor apartment calling, “Hello,” as she descended.
    “Mrs. Zygowsky?” I said as the door opened.
    She smiled, her face bright and open. “Please come in.”
    “Hi. Glad to meet you. I’m Christine Bennett.”
    We went up the stairs into a comfortable living room where the wood gleamed and I was sure I smelled furniture polish.
    “Make yourself comfortable. The tea is almost ready. You drink tea?”
    “Yes, thank you.”
    She still spoke with that slight Slavic flavor that indicated her origin. “Tell me,” she said, leaning forward eagerly. “Tell me about the boys.”
    She had fair skin and light hair and eyes. The hair was graying the way it does sometimes with blondes; it just seems to creep over from gold to gray by degrees so that you’re never sure when it has crossed the line. She had it cut short, and of course, she was a woman in her late fifties, but she was clearly Magda.
    “James is in a group home now,” I began. I went on totell her what little I knew of his past. “He’s very quiet now,” I said at the end. “He asks for his brother.”
    “And the brother? Where is Robert?”
    “I don’t know that.”
    “They kept them apart.” I felt sure she wanted to add, “the bastards,” but she couldn’t. “They only had each other, you know?”
    “I know.”
    “And you think they didn’t do it?”
    “I don’t know, but I hope so. I’m trying to find as many people as I can to question. Infant of Prague in Brooklyn found you for me. On Monday I’m going to talk to a psychiatrist at the institution where they kept James until recently.”
    “Wait. I bring you the tea.”
    The tea was accompanied by a tray of rich pastries. I waited till the tea had been poured and Magda had encouraged me to select and dig into something from the tray. Then I went on.
    “Mrs. Zygowsky, you were the one who found Mrs. Talley. Can you go over it with me, tell me exactly what happened? You still remember it, don’t you?”
    “Like it happened this morning, I remember it.” Her face clouded. Then she leaned forward again and put her hand over mine. “You call me Magda, okay? I am Magda, you are Christine.”
    “Thank you, Magda.” I was glad she had suggested it since it was the way I thought of her.
    She sat back in her chair and went through it all again, starting with the morning of Good Friday, skipping Saturday, and then, after a deep breath, how she pushed the doorbell and let herself in. She remembered everything in wonderful detail, the color of the living room rug, where the furniture was placed—she got up and showed me in her own living room: “The sofa was just so against the wall, and here, by the window, she had one of those big plants you find in the desert.” I felt myself walking through the apartment with her in her fear of finding Mrs. Talley fallen in the bathroomor sick in her bedroom. My stomach did funny things as we came, finally, to the kitchen.
    She stopped, pulled a tissue