father was already—um, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease when I was pretty young. He died when I was twelve, and no, he wasn’t really interested in Naomi. Or me, for that matter. He was too sick to do much of anything.”
“Did you stay in touch with your sister?” I asked.
Daniel didn’t seem to object to my calling her that, as separate as he tried to paint their lives. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Sometimes. She came back to the States when our dad died. Stayed with my mother and me for a few months, but they didn’t have much to say to each other. Naomi went off to college after that, in London.”
“Do you know what she studied?”
“Yeah. Philosophy. Philosophy and religion. I think she wanted to—tried to—have some kind of relationship with me. She used to send me things all the time.”
“What kind of things?”
“Letters. Souvenirs and shit like that whenever she traveled.”
“Tell me about the letters, Daniel.”
“I don’t remember much. Naomi was trying to be all grown up and intellectual, and me, I was just a goofy kid. Just read them and threw them out.”
“Shhhhhhh,” Mike said, placing his forefinger against his lips. “Hear it?”
“Hear what?” I asked.
“The quiet.” Mike was getting right up in Daniel’s face. “Think of the money you’ll save, Daniel. Plumbers charge almost as much an hour as good defense lawyers.”
“So what?”
“So the toilet stopped running. Not a long-standing problem in the pipes, I wouldn’t think. Why won’t you tell me what you flushed?”
“Maybe I just had to use the john, Detective. Ever think of that?”
“I did, actually. ’Cause if you’ve got these tiny pieces of paper coming out your ass, you ought to see a doctor.”
Something had been ripped into shreds and it looked like Mike had picked up a few damp remains and spread them on the countertop, on paper towels, to dry.
“Daniel, you’ve got to be candid with us. We’re at square one on Naomi’s case. If there’s something about her lifestyle we need to know, if that’s evidence you’re trying to destroy or conceal—”
“I know what you people are going to do.” He was staring at the torn bits of paper. “You’re going to rip every inch of her private life apart and hang her out in public, like she asked for this.”
“Nobody asks for this. We’re in here because we’re looking for something that might connect her to the man—to the people—who did this to her,” I said. “What did you try to hide?”
Daniel turned to the sink and put out the butt of his cigarette under the kitchen faucet. “She’s got nobody, man. You understand that? Even I let her down.”
“How do you mean?”
“She wanted me to help her. When things happened.”
“What things?”
“Trouble. Not big trouble, but—I don’t want to go there.”
“Like her arrests?” Mike asked.
Daniel reached into the cupboard over the sink for a glass and filled it with water. “You already know about that?”
“Yeah. That’s how she was identified, and that’s the reason we got to you as next of kin. She listed you on the arrest papers.”
“Naomi called me from jail,” he said with a half laugh, not intended to be funny. “I was the only family she had. She needed me to go to the bank and get some money, and agree to be her contact in the city, even though I’d been here only a few weeks less than she had.”
“But you’d spoken to her not long before that?”
“E-mailed. That’s mostly how we stayed in touch.” Daniel twisted his long hair into a knot at his neck, working his spindly fingers around one another while Mike wrote down both their e-mail addresses.
“Is her mother still in Israel?” I asked.
“Rachel?” Daniel put the glass down and looked at me. “She was blown to bits by a suicide bomber on a bus in East Jerusalem. Two, maybe three years ago.”
I’d never thought of a possible terrorist angle to Naomi’s murder. When Daniel said that she had no one close to her, he wasn’t exaggerating.
“Did Rachel live in one of the settlements?”
“Yeah. Naomi gets all her activist energy from her mother. Lucky she was in London that time when the bomb went off.”
“What do you know about your sister’s religious beliefs, Daniel ?” I asked. Now I wondered if there could be any kind of connection between her mother’s violent death and her own.
“Very little.”
“Your father—was he Jewish?” I asked.
“Raised as a Jew. But my mother’s agnostic and so was he.