The Altar Girl (13 page)

Then the image took on a new dimension. Mrs. Chimchak entered the picture.

“You saw this Dr. Washington?” I said. “If you saw him, it means you were there. It means you were one of the DPs loaded onto the train. It means you were repatriated.”

She looked at me with her signature expression—sheer and utter inscrutability. I sat waiting for a segue to more personal revelations, but instead she smiled again. “I was very young, and very naïve.” She reached across the table and took my hand in both of hers. Donned an earnest expression, the kind I’d never seen her wear before. “Now . . . Your godfather was murdered. Let’s talk about how you’re going to find the killer.”

CHAPTER 20

I
FIRED A
series of questions at Mrs. Chimchak about my godfather and her belief that he’d been murdered. The queries came streaming from my mouth in no particular order. Why was she sure he’d been murdered? Did she have any suspicions about who might have killed him? Did my godfather have any enemies? When I paused for a breath, she cut me off with a raised hand, and said she wanted to get some more tea before we talked further.

“Don’t be too eager, dear.” She patted me on the shoulder as she stood up from the table. “There’s an old Ukrainian proverb: He who licks knives will soon cut his tongue.”

While she went into the kitchen, I savored a most pleasant adrenaline rush. My former father-in-law was certain his brother had been murdered, and now Mrs. Chimchak had revealed that she thought he’d been killed, too. Not only that, she’d volunteered her belief. My childhood mentor, the woman I respected more than anyone else in the world, had come to the same conclusion.
Sweet validation!
I wasn’t imagining a crime to keep myself occupied because I’d lost my job and hadn’t found another after six months of searching. I wasn’t suffering from delusions and fantasies. My instincts had been spot-on.

Mrs. Chimchak’s revelation, however, wasn’t the only reason for the uptick in my spirits. She’d expressed no disappointment over my absence, showed no evidence of harboring a grudge for my failure to communicate with her for more than twenty years, and hadn’t hidden her joy in seeing me. She was, as she’d always been, inscrutable yet real and true. She was the complete opposite of my mother. For the first time since I’d returned to Hartford, I had an urge to linger in someone’s home.

She returned with more tea and cookies. As she refreshed the table, I decided to lob a grenade, the kind I threw at company executives to keep them on their toes. In this case, I wanted a spontaneous reaction to a question that bothered me.

“Was my godfather a good man?”

She lifted her eyebrows a smidge, enough to reveal the question surprised her. She thought about it for a moment.

“To my knowledge, he had no family. And there are no friends in business. Solitary people can become a bit self-absorbed. ‘The church is near but the road is icy. The tavern is far but I’ll walk carefully.’ That was your godfather. His life was about him and his pleasures. Not an evil bone in his body but if I had to pick three people to share my foxhole, he wouldn’t have been one of them.”

Her depiction was consistent with my brother’s revelations, except for the part about no evil in his body. I considered his plan to buy my mother’s heirloom for a fraction of its worth to be pretty darn evil.

“Something changed fifteen months ago,” Mrs. Chimchak said. “I knew from his lifestyle. I knew from doing the accounting for his business. I did his books, you know. Of course you know. That’s why you’re here. I once had twenty-one clients, small Ukrainian businesses, but most of them have died. Three of the children who inherited their father’s trade kept me. A plumber, an appliance repairman, and a beekeeper. I have three clients left. One of them was your godfather. Did you know he was my client?”

An awkward silence followed. I didn’t know what to say. It was the first time Mrs. Chimchak had shown a momentary memory lapse, repeated herself, or digressed. Although they were minor observations, they reminded me of her true age.

“How did his lifestyle change?” I said.

The question snapped her out of her stupor. She rubbed her thumb and forefingers together. “The fancy televisions, the Cadillac—”

“But he bought it used, didn’t he?”

“He may have bought it used, but it was new to him. It was still a Cadillac. That wasn’t all. He took several trips out of the country. And he had a table at Fleming’s in West Hartford. He had a whole new wardrobe, too. I told him some of the clothes made him look like Liberace but he didn’t care.”

Fleming’s was the area’s top steakhouse. It was notoriously expensive, frequented by those with expense accounts, deep wallets, and a taste for the finest. I tried to picture him at his own table, dressed like Liberace, being served by an elegant waitress intent on emptying his wallet.

“Godfather had a table at Fleming’s? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Mrs. Chimchak’s expression didn’t change. “I know this only because he mistakenly included a month’s worth of receipts with his business receipts. I say it was a mistake because he was very upset when I asked him about it. He paid cash for his meals and didn’t want anyone to know about it.”

“Why the secrecy?” I said.

“And where did the money come from?”

“I thought his business might have taken off.”

“He made between twenty-one and thirty-six thousand dollars during each of the last three years. He owned his house so there was no mortgage, but still . . .”

“Thus the secrecy,” I said. Donnie Angel’s words rang in my ears yet again.
Tell me what you know about your godfather’s business.
“He had an alternative source of income.”

“I should say so.”

Perhaps that explained why he paid my brother, Marko, to watch his back during a midnight delivery to Avon.

“Any ideas?” I said.

“He knew only one business. He had to be selling something old. Something precious. Something people wanted that only he could get them. But I don’t have a clue exactly what it was.”

“And you never saw any receipts for anything unusual?”

“No. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that profitable. The one thing I can tell you is that it all started after he took a trip to Crimea.”

Crimea was an autonomous republic in the south of Ukraine surrounded by the Black Sea.

“Why Crimea?” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. When he first told me he was going on vacation to Sevastopol he looked tense and anxious. He didn’t act like someone going on vacation. But when he returned six days later he was a bit more relaxed. And within a month, I’d say, he turned downright cheerful.”

Sevastopol was a port city in Crimea. It was a tourist attraction, and the home of the Ukrainian and Russian Black Sea naval fleets.

“Then it seems logical to assume that whatever he sold,” I said, “the arrangements were made there and then. Which suggests he was selling something from Ukraine, if not Crimea itself. I didn’t see anything extraordinary in his house. Though there was all that furniture . . .”

“That had been around forever. They’re nice pieces but not enough to stop renting the attached house, buy a Cadillac, travel to Europe, and eat steak four times a week.”

“Four times a week?” I shook my head. “So we don’t know what he was selling, whether he was accumulating inventory, or selling these pieces one by one.”

I thought of the heist of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and recent suggestions that a Hartford-based mob had done the job. That was the type of inventory that could change a middleman’s life. Perhaps my godfather had been selling stolen decorative arts or furnishings from Ukraine. It was a natural deduction given his line of business, Donnie Angel’s interest in what I knew, and the job my brother had done for him.

“We also don’t know what he did with his cash,” Mrs. Chimchak said. “He didn’t trust banks. He kept a minimum balance in his checkbook for expenses, tax payments, and the like. For appe
arance’s sake. But you can bet he kept the majority of his profits in cash in his house. Did you check under the mattresses when you visited his home with Roxanne?”

Someone who didn’t know the Ukrainian immigrant community might have been surprised, but I wasn’t. Most people, like my parents, managed their funds like every other citizen. But some didn’t. A friend of my deceased father’s had kept his life’s savings under the floorboards of a closet. When a fire broke out in his apartment building, he ran inside to rescue his money and burned to death.

“No,” I said, and to my own surprise added, “but we should have. I should have thought of that.”

Mrs. Chimchak nodded and I knew she was thinking of the same incident involving my father’s friend. “Yes. You and Roxanne probably should give the house a thorough once-over.”

“Would you come with us?”

“No. It’s not my place. This is a family matter. Roxanne was his niece. You were his goddaughter. That’s not a place for an old spinster. Besides, my back and my knees . . . I can’t move around as well as I used to. I have a hard time with stairs, you know.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You guys had that in common, too.”

“Indeed.”

We stared at each other with blank faces. I knew we were thinking the same thing.

“No way he went down those stairs on a rainy night,” I said.

Mrs. Chimchak shrugged. “Rainy night, silent night. I don’t care if the Stalin moon was shining the path down his stairs. There is no way he went down them of his own accord. Someone pushed him. Someone killed him.”

I marveled at her conviction. “You’re so certain.”

“Of course I am.”

“Because he suffered from bathmophobia?” I pronounced the affliction in English but with a Ukrainian accent, as though that would somehow make it a Ukrainian word. I did that when my Uke vocabulary failed me, which was inevitable when the discussion included technical terms.

Mrs. Chimchak, thankfully, understood what I meant. “No. I’m not sure he was killed because of his fear of stairs. I’m sure he was killed, because the only reason he went down them was to get a bottle of wine. And he didn’t need to do that the night he died.”

“Why not?”

“Because I brought it up for him.”

Her words echoed in my ears. “You were in his house the day he died?”

“I came by to discuss his invoices for March. We met once a month to go over the books. And before I left, he asked me to bring him up a bottle of French wine. There were many cases of wine. They looked expensive. I forgot to mention it. That’s another place he parked some money.”

“What time of day was this?”

She considered the question. “Midafternoon. About three o’clock. Right before your brother showed up.”

A lump formed in my throat. I had to clear it to speak. “Marko?”

She nodded, not a hint of emotion about her.

“Marko was at my godfather’s house that day?”

“He was walking up the sidewalk as I was leaving. He said hello, he was very polite. He never smiles, your brother. I feel sad for him because I wonder if he’s ever experienced joy. But he does speak beautiful Ukrainian.”

“Yes,” I said, my head reeling from the revelation. Why hadn’t Marko told me he’d been there? “He’s a fanatic. He’s obsessed with his Ukrainian heritage. His fluency is a point of great pride.”

Mrs. Chimchak slid a folded piece of paper toward me. “That is a copy of a receipt for your godfather’s airplane tickets for his first trip. Notice that he didn’t pay for the tickets. A third party was billed.”

I studied the receipt. Round-trip from New York to Crimea via Frankfurt and Kyiv. The cost of the tickets had been billed to the Black Sea Trading Company. The address given was in Sevastopol. There was also a phone number.

I pocketed the receipt, thanked Mrs. Chimchak, and got up to leave. She stopped at an alcove on the way and pulled a box out of a desk drawer. She turned and handed me a tin of Altoids. It was the same white box she’d given me during my survival test more than twenty years ago, with the teal piping around the edge. I smiled and tried to say no, but she insisted.

“Take them. Keep them close to you. When a person doesn’t feel well, a mint will always improve her spirits.”

I’d heard that line before. The Altoids helped save my life back then. The circumstances were different now, and there was no way they’d save me this time. Still, I changed my mind and took them. It was a spontaneous decision rooted in the knowledge that Mrs. Chimchak was giving them to me for a reason. She was reminding me that I was going to have to be as resilient as I’d been when she’d given a similar box to me last time. With this small gesture, she was also telling me to expect the unexpected, and to remain diligent at all times.

She asked me about my plan of action and I told her.

“You’ll keep me informed?” she said.

“Better than that. I’ll be back tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. Until we’ve solved the murder. Until we’ve solved it together.”

She gave a slight nod of satisfaction and hustled me out the door.

I got back on the highway and headed toward Brasilia. Once I was safe in the left lane cruising at a comfortable seventy-nine-mile-per-hour pace, I flipped open the box of Altoids. I remembered the unexpected taste I’d experienced the last time I’d popped one of her mints into my mouth. This time I licked it first.

It really was a mint this time.