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 Ms. 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."