Father's Day Murder by Lee Harris Read Free Book Online

readthem all. I used to see them in the house when I was growing up. I read the obit the other day. I had no idea you were connected.”
    “You know what they say about degrees of separation. My student’s grandfather is a boyhood friend of Arthur Wien.”
    “Amazing. So I guess the police haven’t charged anyone yet.”
    “Doesn’t look like it. If they have any suspects besides my student’s grandfather, they aren’t saying. I can tell you I don’t have any. But I’ll talk to the remaining boys—men—and see if anything turns up. I’ve already had a look at the crime scene, not that I could tell anything from that.”
    “You went into the men’s room?”
    “It occurred to me as I was driving home that that was a first in my life.”
    “Well, you’ve never been a schoolteacher for little boys. Not a spectacular first, Chris.”
    There was a screech from upstairs, and we put our cups down and started running.
    Eddie was already asleep when Jack came home. He had been called out on a case that had dragged on so he was late and very hungry. He made a quick stop in Eddie’s room, changed his clothes, and came down to the kitchen.
    “So tell me. You’ve seen the doctor who you can’t believe is a suspect. What else?”
    “I can’t believe any of them are suspects. Who could imagine that a lawyer, a research doctor who’s been thought of for a Nobel Prize, or a concert violinist would murder a lifelong friend?”
    “An NYPD detective.”
    “I know. It’s called keeping an open mind. Why does mine close when I sit face to face with a suspect?”
    “Because they’re real people and, at the time you meet them, you don’t know what motivates them.”
    “True. And it seems very unlikely that someone walked in off the street and did this.”
    “I agree.”
    “I visited the restaurant and the maitre d’ stands guard near the door. The window in the men’s room is kept locked because the restaurant is air-conditioned, so no one got in that way—or out. And I can’t believe that a stranger in the restaurant walked into the men’s room while Arthur Wien was there, happened to have an ice pick with him, and got mad enough at him that he killed him.”
    “So you’ve got six men and seven wives.”
    “And the wives are less likely to have gone into a men’s room.”
    “But less likely doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
    I agreed. I told Jack about my conversation with Dr. Horowitz as we ate. When I’d gone through my notes, I said, “I think I’ll start making phone calls tonight. I don’t know how many of these men will agree to talk to me but I’ll try to set something up with all of them. If there’s a motive, maybe one of them will know it. It seems to me the two men who might have the best motives are the one who died some time ago and the one who never comes to the reunions.”
    “Why the one who died?”
    “Because he also kind of separated himself from the group a long time ago. And he obviously didn’t tell his wife to let his friends know that he was ill. By the time she told them he had died, it was a week or so after the funeral.”
    “So maybe she’s a suspect.”
    “Jack, I can’t go flying all over the country. Let the police look into that.”
    “Not likely they will. They’ll concentrate on the men who are still alive and their wives. Something dramatic would have to happen for them to go looking into the past the way you do. If they don’t make an arrest in the next few days, you’ll have a better shot at closing the case than they will.”
    “Except the victim is someone well known.”
    “Right. That’ll keep them going a little longer.”
    We finished our dinner talking about other things. I told him how Mel and I had dashed up the stairs that afternoon to see who was dismembering whom in her daughter’s room, only to find that Eddie had fallen off a little chair and wounded his ego. There had been lots of tears until I picked him up, at which point they