“Esther has to have known about it, don’t you think?” George mused. “If it happened. Maybe she had words with Jacobs. Maybe Jacobs knew that she knew.”

“She would have been the first person to know about anything like that,” Rebecca agreed. “They were so close. Well, crap. Did Lipman talk to Jacobs?’

“No, Jacobs died in 1956, and Lipman was just starting his interviews at that time. I can find no interviews with Jacobs at all. The historical record is silent after his trial testimony. A tragedy, really, that he died when he did.”

“Maybe the tragedy is that he lived as long as he did,” Rebecca said.

“Not from the scholar’s point of view, but I understand your animus and take your point,” Ruth said. “In any case, the little bit of information I have gathered on him indicates that he had some sort of degenerative illness for several years before he died. Perhaps multiple sclerosis. It’s hard to say. And as you know from that obituary, he died in a fire.”

“The karma police took care of him,” George said.

“Who?” Ruth asked, pen poised over her notebook.

“A joke. Nothing. So I guess maybe now we know why Esther had his obituary saved. So what do you think happened?” George asked. “Did Lipman get specifics from these survivors?”

“Not really. One of them, Tessie Sapirstein, was a finisher who also worked for Jacobs. She worked at a machine in the same row on the ninth floor as the Auerbach sisters. She told Lipman that she had seen Pauline crying on the street one night after work, with her clothing disarranged, and said that she knew Jacobs had been ‘pestering’ Pauline for several weeks, so she was very worried about this. She said, wait, I have it here—yes, she said Pauline was ‘very attractive and innocent, very young, very pretty,’ and on this occasion on the street, ‘her hair was coming down, she was holding her cloak around herself, she was crying, and her mouth was bleeding as if someone had hit her. She wouldn’t say what was wrong.’”

“When was this?” Rebecca asked.

“It’s not clear,” Ruth said, “because the questioning was really about the fire. This would have been all for Lipman’s understanding of the atmosphere and relationships, so that he could grasp the background socioeconomic sensibilities of the workplace. As thorough as Lou Lipman was, I can only wish he had been even more thorough and less of a patronizing sexist.”

“Do you think that’s fair?” George asked. “Consider the period.”

“So what’s your guess?” mused Rebecca. “Do you think something horrible happened to Pauline?”

“Presumably, this data would have been concerning the atmosphere in the weeks and months preceding the fire, as I said,” said Ruth. “But there is no way to know the precise date of this occurrence, as Lipman didn’t ask. That information is irretrievably lost. But listen to this one, the most incriminating. Another of the women Lipman interviewed—and in his notes he only called her by the initials A.S.—said that Jacobs raped her in the cloakroom one night after almost everyone had left. She told Lipman that Jacobs asked her to stay late to work out a discrepancy in her credit slip numbers, and it turned out to be a trap, and he attacked her. According to the notes, right after it happened, the elevator man—that would be Joey Zito—heard her crying and came to check to see if there was a problem. Apparently Jacobs never bothered her after that, and she didn’t know why, but she wondered if Joey Zito had something to do with it.”