The Valentine's Day Murder (24 page)

“If he didn’t drown, he probably left the country after he killed Matty.”

“His passport’s in his drawer.”

That seemed to surprise her. “So what, if Matty didn’t keep his mother’s address?”

“Val didn’t keep his mother’s, either.”

She frowned. “So that’s what they had in common. They hated their mothers. What else is new?”

“I wondered if you had any pictures I could look at,” I said. “The three men and the three wives. I’d like to see them.”

“Tons of them. I look at them every night now.” She got up and went to a drawer in a built-in cabinet, pulled out a couple of thick albums, and brought them over. “How far back do you want to go?”

“Just the last year.” It was something Joseph had said.

“Start at the end of this one and go backwards.”

“Thanks, Annie.” I opened it at the end, where there were several blank pages, and flipped back to the last pictures ever taken of the three families before they were destroyed. In the very first group, I saw something that jolted me, but I kept my eyes on the page and then turned back to the preceding one.

“Where were these taken?” I asked conversationally, although I didn’t care.

“We went on a skiing weekend in January. It was the last time we were all there together.”

“You all look very happy.”

“We were.” She sat across from me.

“No kids?” I asked.

“We left them home. It was a grown-up weekend.”

I turned another page and there was Christmas morning. The tree was tall and beautifully decorated. Annie was there in an elegant negligee, the children in pajamas, Matty already dressed in a plaid shirt as though he were about to go hunting in the winter woods.

“Anything special you’re looking for?” Annie asked.

“I just wanted to see what everyone looked like. And everyone looked so happy.”

“We were happy.”

“Are you going to stay here, Annie?”

“In the house? Sure. My kids go to school here. The house is paid for.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“Matty had mortgage insurance. It was expensive, but it was worth it. I have the house free and clear now. All I pay is the taxes.”

But she would never have the million dollars of insurance to add to her bank account. Did she know about it? It had become a crucial question, and I couldn’t ask her. She would never admit it if she did, so whatever she answered would be irrelevant.

I turned another few pages and then closed the book. “This is really heart-wrenching,” I said. “Three beautiful families.”

She nodded, her eyes filling as Bambi’s had. These were two wounded women, and their pain was real, as was their children’s.

“Where did you come from before you married Matty?” I asked, finally getting to what I needed to know.

“Greenwich.”

“Connecticut?”

“Yes. My father is a lawyer there. I grew up there.”

“I’ve heard it’s a lovely town.” I could feel my heart pounding.

“It is.”

“Thank you for showing me the pictures, Annie.”

“Have you figured anything out yet?”

“A few things. I’ll let you know when it all comes together.”

Carlotta was waiting for me, watching out the window as I drove up the driveway.

“Anything new?” she asked.

“A couple of things. Can we have dinner and then drive to Canada? I think we may be able to settle things tonight.”

“Are you serious? What have you learned?”

“I think I know what happened on the ice. I even think I know why. The Winkels can fill in the holes in the story.”

She stared at me. “Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“I’ll tell you in Canada. Sister Joseph was right. The red scarf was the key. Let’s go. I’m starving.”

You didn’t have to be particularly astute to sense that Carlotta was angry with me. She wanted to know everything that I knew, but now I knew better than to tell her. So much depended on how the Winkels reacted when we confronted them. I would have preferred to see them alone, but that was out of the question. Carlotta was not about to let me out of her sight.

It was dark when we got to Canada—Carlotta explained at the border that we were visiting relatives, which wasn’t so far from the truth—but we found the house on Rosegarden Lane with no difficulty. We parked around the corner where the car couldn’t be seen and walked to the little house, which was alive with light, upstairs and downstairs. I rang the doorbell and I stood in front of the door, Carlotta at my side.

The door opened almost immediately, and a grandmotherly-looking woman with steel-gray hair pulled back in a bun and steel-rimmed glasses on her lined face stood before us. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Winkel, my name is Christine Bennett. I want to talk to you about the three men who were in the accident on the lake on Valentine’s Day.”

“Why should I know about that?” she said, and now
that she spoke a whole sentence, her German accent was obvious.

“Because those three men who fell through the ice were your grandsons.” I hadn’t been sure till I saw her, but she was in her late seventies at least, too old to be the mother of a thirty-five-year-old.

“You have the wrong house,” she said, trying to shut the door.

“I have the right house. Please let us come in and talk to you.”

“There is nothing to say.”

“I know what happened in the hospital in Connecticut thirty years ago.”

That got to her. She opened the door all the way and we walked in. The living room was furnished in a comfortable, old-fashioned style: chairs you could sink into, an Oriental rug that was worn but still attractive. I found the one hard chair in the room and took it for myself.

“You talk. When you’re finished, maybe I say something, maybe I don’t.”

There were a lot of holes in what I knew, and I wanted to impress her with what I knew, not with what was missing, so I chose my words carefully, neglecting details when I wasn’t certain of them. “You brought three grandsons into Canada when they were young. Your daughter went to Connecticut and became a nurse’s aide. She worked in a hospital where she had access to the records of children who had died. She used their names to get American birth certificates for your grandsons.”

The woman kept her face as immobile as a block of granite, but her eyes reflected the anguish she was feeling, and the surprise. I had no doubt that this was the first time anyone had presented her with this set of facts.

“There is evidence,” I said, “that she killed the last of the three boys to hurry along the process.”

“Is this what you came here to tell me?”

“I came here to find out if Val is still alive. His body has not been found.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But she did know, and I had to get it out of her. “Is Mr. Winkel at home?”

“Mr. Winkel died three years ago.”

So there was a Mr. Winkel. And maybe that could explain something that had confused me. “Did Clark live with Mr. Winkel?” I asked. “I know that you and the other two boys lived in Stanley Kazmarek’s house in Buffalo, over near Statin.”

“Where do you get these things? Where do you get this nonsense from?”

“Bennett High School had the address, and then I met Mr. Kazmarek and he told me. And I talked to a neighbor’s son who was friends with Matty. Did you call the boys Matty and Val or did you call them by their birth names?”

“Get out of my house.”

“I can’t go. I have to know about Val.”

“Why? Are you his wife?”

“I’m his wife.” Carlotta stood and faced the old woman. “And I love him. I don’t care if his mother was a killer. He’s my husband, and I want to spend the rest of my life with him.”

I think I suspected that he was alive and in the house when we walked down the street and I saw all the lights on. I became more certain when I saw the old, worn furniture and heard that Mr. Winkel was not alive. Like the nuns at St. Stephen’s who counted every penny, this was
not a woman who would leave lights on if she weren’t in a room. The girl who had been cat-sitting had left the house dark when she locked the door. If lights were on upstairs, someone was there.

I turned to Carlotta. “I think he’s upstairs.”

“Val? You think Val’s up there?”

“I do.”

She lost her color, and for a moment I thought she might faint. But she steadied herself on a chair, then turned and looked for the stairs, which were against the left wall. She walked over and stood looking up. “Val?” she called shakily. “Val, it’s me, Carlotta.” There wasn’t a sound. “Please come down and talk to me. I love you. I don’t care what happened on the ice. I don’t care who killed Matty. I don’t care if your mother killed someone. I’m your wife, and I can’t live without you.” There were tears on her cheeks, and my own eyes were misting over.

I was standing beside her now, and she looked at me as though I could make it happen, make him be alive, make him come down the stairs. I touched her shoulder and nodded.

“Please, Val,” she called. “Whatever has to be done, we can do it together. You have to come down.”

There was a sound then, the squeak of a spring, a heavy footstep. My heart was beating as fast as I was sure Carlotta’s was. She gasped as whoever it was began to descend the stairs.

When Val reached the bottom step, he and his wife wrapped their arms around each other, crying. I turned away, my own tears spilling over. In the little living room, Mrs. Winkel had stood and was looking out the window, her back to the emotional scene at the foot of the stairs. All the secrets she had kept so diligently for so
many years were out in the open now. I wondered how she would handle it.

I went over and stood beside her. “It’s for the best,” I said.

“No,” she said, “it’s all over. Where are my boys? Where are my beautiful boys? Dead in that cold lake, and I am dead with them.”

“I killed Matty,” the big, bearded man at the kitchen table said. The beard was new and vaguely red, hinting at a deep rusty color. He looked thinner than in his pictures and older than thirty-five. But there was no doubt that seeing his wife had revived his spirits. He held her to him, looked at her face again and again as though to renew its image in his mind. “It was an accident, but I did it.”

“Whose gun was it?” I asked. We had all been introduced, and the grandmother had made coffee and cut a cake but would not join us at the table.

“Matty’s. He stopped at home after we had dinner at Giordano’s. He must have picked it up then.”

“Who was he going to shoot?” Carlotta asked.

Val shook his head. “It’s complicated. There’s a lot I never told you. I got the gun away from him and it went off. The ice was thin and he went down. Clark tried to help, but he went in, too.”

“Where’s the gun now?” I asked.

“I got rid of it.”

“When did you leave your watch in the car?” I asked.

“After the accident. I wanted people to think I’d gone down with the other two. The back of the car was open. I climbed in just far enough to drop it on the backseat.
Then I got a bus to Buffalo and changed for a bus to Canada. I’ve been here ever since.”

“If only you had let me know,” Carlotta said.

“I couldn’t. They might have checked the phone for incoming and outgoing calls. I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”

“Did you call Jake?” I asked.

He gave me a long, sad look. “I called him, but I didn’t say anything. I hoped he would understand. I don’t know if he did.”

“I don’t know either. He never said anything.”

“How did you trace me here?”

“I found this number on last year’s phone bills. Jake stalled for a while—he didn’t want me to see them—but eventually he gave them to me. My husband’s an NYPD detective and he was able to get the location.”

“But we disconnected the phone on February fifteenth.”

“It’s still listed in this year’s
Cole’s
directory. Once a record of information has been made, it doesn’t just disappear.”

He shook his head. “It’s not so easy to lose yourself.”

It was the opposite of what I had said to Jack over the weekend. “Val, I’d like to hear the story, the whole story.”

“I told you. I killed Matty by accident. There isn’t anything else.”

“Were Matty and Clark your brothers?”

“So you know that, too. They were my cousins. They were brothers.”

“When did you come to Canada for the first time?”

“When I was a kid. I’m not sure of the year. We’d
been learning English for a long time. I have very vague memories of the sea voyage. My clearest recollections begin in Canada, and then in the States when we moved.”

It didn’t sound unreasonable. “How did your family tell you about your new name?”

“It was like a game at first. Then they explained it was very serious, that I was really Val Krassky, that my original name had been the game. When I got older, they told me the truth, but by then there wasn’t much I could do about it. I understood that we had had to leave East Germany for our own good, that everyone in my family had made tremendous sacrifices so that we could come here. I knew I was named for someone who was about my age and who had died, and that the same was true of my cousins. No one except for the three of us, our grandparents, and my mother knew the real truth. We made up stories to tell our wives, but that’s all they were, stories.”

“Jake said you seemed to fall off the world when you left school for holidays.”

“I did. I went to Canada to visit my grandparents. Jake never had a phone number for me or an address until I was on my own.”

“Val,” I said, “you’re leaving out a lot that you know. I’m sure you know why that gun was on the ice in February.”

“I told you; it’s complicated. And it doesn’t matter. I ended up causing the death of my closest friends, who happened to be my cousins.”

“Did it have something to do with the insurance policy Carlotta found in your safe deposit box?”

“It was a personal thing,” he said. “That’s all I can say.”

“Tell me about the three bankbooks in your desk drawer.”

“One was for Carlotta, one was for Clark, and one was for my grandmother. It’s all designated in my will.”