I stepped up to the desk, introduced myself, and asked if I could see Mr. Strauss, Esther's boss. The secretary told me he was out and wouldn't be in before noon. "But if it's a legal issue, maybe one of the associates can help you."
Maybe they could, I told her, and asked if either of the two associates who had worked in the firm ten years ago were around—Itamar Levine and Alex Fishman.
The secretary's face turned sad. She was eighteen or nineteen, had been a child when Esther died, younger even than what Willie Ackerland would have been today had he lived. She told me Alex Fishman had died fighting in Jerusalem against the Jordanians, and that Itamar Levine no longer worked for the firm.
"I never met either of them," she added. "I've only been working here for six months. The girl I replaced in this job told me about Fishman. I read about Levine in the files."
"Was her name Leah Benowitz? The girl you replaced, I mean." Leah Benowitz had worked as a secretary for Becker & Strauss, alongside Esther, and had claimed to have been her best friend when interviewed by Rivlin.
"No. Leah Benowitz hasn't worked here for a few years. I never met her either. I think she left when she got married."
"Can you give me her current address? Or the last one you have on file?"
She hesitated. "I'm not sure I'm supposed to."
I explained who I was and that I was investigating the murder of a former employee of the firm. "Ever heard of Esther Kantor?"
She shook her head, now looking not just sad but frightened. She absently fingered a fine silver bracelet that hung on her slender right wrist, still hesitant. She gave me a searching look, apparently decided I was trustworthy, and told me to wait a minute. She rose from her chair, went over to a filing cabinet, and began leafing through a row of folders. She tugged one out, opened it, and read off an address on Ibn Gabirol Street.
I scribbled the address in my notebook. "How about Itamar Levine's address?"
She consulted another folder. "He doesn't live in Tel Aviv anymore. He got a job with a firm in Haifa. Modai, Danzinger & Knobel. I don't have a residential address for him, but I got a phone number for the firm."
I wrote down the number and thanked her and left.
Twenty minutes later, a block north of the city zoo on Ibn Gabirol, I mounted the stairs to the second floor of a nondescript residential building and knocked on the door to apartment four.
A woman in her early twenties answered the door. She wasn't Leah Benowitz and had never met her. "Ask the landlady downstairs. Maybe she knows where this Benowitz woman is."
The landlady was sixty and rail thin and had a reedy voice. "Why're you looking for Leah?" she said, eying me with suspicion.
I produced a smile and told her I was a private investigator working for a law firm. "I am required to notify Miss Benowitz that her mother's cousin died and left her a sizable inheritance."
That got the desired reaction. The landlady invited me in and asked me to sit while she rifled through a chest of papers and found a forwarding address on Borochov Street. "Her name is Goldin now."
At the door the landlady asked me how big the inheritance was. I winked and said, "It's confidential. I'm sure you understand."
Leah Goldin—née Benowitz—was absolutely charmed to learn of my profession.
"A detective? Like Philip Marlowe?"
My bewilderment must have shown, because she explained, "From the movie
I confessed that I hadn't.
"Oh," Leah said, laying a hand on my arm, "you definitely should. Lauren Bacall is so beautiful, and the two of them together on the screen—it's pure magic." She looked me up and down. "You don't look like Humphrey Bogart." It was unclear whether she meant this as a compliment or a criticism, so I said nothing. "People have told me I could be in the movies. What do you think?"
She still had not invited me in. I was standing on the third-floor landing; she was still holding the front door to her apartment with her left hand. Now she let go of the door to strike a pose. She planted her left hand on her hip, the right she bunched to a fist, except for an extended index finger, the tip of which she'd placed on the underside of her chin. Tilting her head slightly to the back and left, she cocked her right hip. Finally, she parted and puffed out her lips, as if about to give a kiss, while her eyes narrowed in a feeble attempt at sultriness. All in all, it was a weird combination of gestures and affectations, none of which looked natural or appealing, all of which I assumed she'd copied from movies.
After five seconds of increasingly awkward silence, I realized she was waiting for me to answer. Estimating that a compliment was likelier to get me in the door than the truth, I lied. "You have star quality. No doubt about it."
Leah beamed.
