The Valentine's Day Murder (22 page)

“Definitely.”

“No problem. Just tell the truth—if they ask you.”

The Americans didn’t much care who we were, but the Canadians asked a few questions. Carlotta said we’d be
back after having dinner in Canada, and we scooted through. I looked at the map and directed her toward the town where the disconnected telephone had been.

“How often do you travel on your job?” I asked.

“Once every couple of weeks.”

“Overnight?”

“Usually over one or two nights.”

“Then Val could have driven to Canada while you were gone and visited someone on this side.”

“I talked to him every night, Chris.”

“Was he always home when you called?”

She was silent, her lips set. Finally she said, “Did you ever call your husband and find him not at home?”

“Many times.”

“Well, it happened to me, too.”

“Would you have any way of knowing whether he entered Canada?”

“No way I can think of. We keep books of bridge tickets in our cars, but I don’t count his and he doesn’t count mine. And he could have paid cash. He could as easily have driven to Rochester or Jamestown.”

Neither of us said anything for a few minutes while I watched the road and the map alternately. Then Carlotta said, “The other direction is Niagara Falls. Maybe someday we’ll be able to drive that way. It’s a sight worth seeing.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“I’m very nervous.”

“Would you like me to drive?”

She shook her head. I had the feeling she was sure we were about to knock on a door and find Val. I thought it was possible, but I wasn’t as certain as she was.

“This is the town,” I said as we passed a sign. “Slow
down. We’re looking for Erie Street. That should take us to Rosegarden Lane.”

She braked suddenly. “I can’t do this.”

“I’ll drive,” I said. I got out and walked around the car as Carlotta slid into the passenger seat. When I opened the car door, she was sitting with her head in her hands and her shoulders were shaking. “I can do this myself,” I offered.

“No. I’m up to it. Thank God I didn’t eat anything before we left the house. I’m sorry I’m falling apart. All the things I haven’t wanted to think about are flooding my brain right now. And it’s all hitting me right in the stomach.”

“It’ll all be over in a few minutes.” I started down Erie, looking for the turn that would take me to the Winkel house.

“There it is,” she said.

I turned left and we both looked at numbers.

“Keep going. We’re in the sixties and the numbers are getting smaller.”

Thirty-one was on the left side of the street. I parked across from it. “Let’s give it a try. It’s the next house.”

We got out and crossed the street. The houses were all different, one a small frame with a front porch, one a larger brick with a double door. Number twenty-seven was smaller and made of wood, a single garage standing at the end of a narrow driveway. There were a few shrubs but no trees. Although the day had been mild, there was a stiff breeze, and I realized it must come in off the lake. Maybe trees didn’t take to it, especially in winter.

“Let me go first,” Carlotta said, as though she had recovered from her fright or thought it best to impress me with her newfound courage.

“Don’t ask about Val,” I warned. “We don’t want to alert him that he’s been found. He may decide to ‘unfind’ himself.”

“OK.” We went up the steps to the porch, and she pushed the bell. We could hear it clearly inside the house, but there was no other sound. Carlotta rang again. From somewhere inside a voice called something.

“Someone’s there,” Carlotta whispered. “It sounded like a girl.”

“Let me do the talking.”

“No. This is my husband. I’ll handle it.”

The door opened, and a sleepy girl about sixteen years old stood looking at us.

“I’m looking for Mr. or Ms. Winkel,” Carlotta said. “Are they home?”

“No one’s home except me.”

“When do you expect them?”

The girl looked slightly dazed. “I don’t know. Maybe tonight. Maybe after the weekend. What’s this about? Who are you?” She looked from Carlotta to me.

“I’m Chris Bennett,” I said, interrupting Carlotta before she could say her name or anything else that might compromise us. “Are you the Winkels’ daughter?”

“Me? Gosh, no. I’m cat-sitting while they’re away.”

“I need to talk to them. You think they’ll be home tonight?”

“I don’t know when they’ll be home.”

“Maybe I could call them. Could you give me the telephone number?”

“They don’t have a phone anymore, and I’m not allowed to give out that kind of information.” She was looking more awake now and seemed to be sizing us up.
“Maybe you’d better come back next week. I don’t think I can help you.”

“Thank you very much,” I said before Carlotta could prolong the conversation. The girl shut the door, snapping the lock audibly, and I took Carlotta’s arm firmly and led her down the stairs.

“We could have asked—”

“No. That’s it. Ask anything else and she’ll tell a long story when these people get back, and maybe they’ll run away again. She has my name, which is meaningless to them. I hope she’s not good at remembering faces.” I wanted to look back at the house to see if she was looking out the window, but I didn’t dare.

“What now?”

“Now I think we get in the car and drive away and hope she hasn’t looked at what we’re driving.”

“We can’t leave, Chris. They may come back tonight. We have to be here when they do.”

“Then we’ll drive around the corner and park where she can’t see us from the house and wait for a while. How’s that?”

“That’s good.”

No one that I could see was watching us as we drove down the block and around the corner. We took three right turns and parked where someone coming from the center of town would have to pass us to reach the house.

Then she turned off the motor, and we waited.

We sat in silence, each of us with her own thoughts. Whatever Carlotta’s were, I preferred not to know. My own were troublesome enough. I had let this case get completely out of hand, and I was to blame for the mess. I should never have allowed Carlotta to accompany me to this house. She had shown her face and could be described to whoever the residents of the house were. If this place were a kind of “safe house” for Val, he would recognize the description and might move on. I had gone too far in what I told Carlotta. I should have kept this address to myself, should have made some excuse to her and driven here alone.

It was too late now. It was also getting late in the evening, and my discomfort was growing. I didn’t want to spend the night here, didn’t want to spend one additional minute. I was hungry and uncomfortable, and with only one car between us, there was no way one of us could get into town while the other stood on the street, visible from every living room, and continued the vigil.

It was such a quiet and out-of-the-way area that almost no cars went by. We were sitting just close enough to the corner that we could see a piece of the Winkel house. Whoever the girl was, she used lights sparingly. One
went on downstairs, and that was it. As far as I could see, no one went in or out of the front door.

Suddenly the light that was barely visible through the front windows went out, and I wondered if the girl was ready for bed at this early hour. A moment later the front door opened and she came out, turning toward the door to lock it. Then she bounced down the front steps, turned to her left, which was away from us, and started down the street.

Carlotta quickly opened the car door and got out, leaving the door ajar. She walked to the corner and looked down Rosegarden Lane. I could no longer see the girl from my seat.

Then Carlotta came back, got into the car, and closed the door. “She went to the end of the block and turned the corner. Maybe she’s fed the cat, taken her nap, and she’s gone home for the night.”

“Sounds reasonable.” I was starting to feel that I could not spend one more minute sitting in that car.

“I’m sorry. This is very cruel of me. If I’m hungry, you must be starving. The girl’s gone, and we need a bathroom and a restaurant.”

“That sounds good to me.”

She started the motor and turned the headlights on. In a few minutes, we were in a pleasant, homey restaurant and I was stuffing bread into my mouth as though I hadn’t eaten in ages.

“Here’s what I think we should do,” I said, when we had eaten enough that the pangs had been quieted. “You and I fly to New York tomorrow and you stay with me over the weekend.”

“But—”

“I know. You want to come back here. The girl said they might not come back till after the weekend. Let’s give them a couple of days. In the meantime, we’ll go up to Connecticut and check out that cemetery. I want to see if a Matthew Franklin is buried there.”

“You think that nurse’s aide in Connecticut was running some sort of service for bringing children into the country?”

“It’s possible. Maybe she came over, got herself trained, and took the job in the hospital. She could have access to their records at a time when few people were around. It’s a strange way to make a living, but maybe she sold this information to people in eastern Europe who wanted to get their children to America.”

“And then, when she couldn’t find a dead child to suit a client, she killed one,” Carlotta said.

“And left the country before they could arrest her.”

“So who are the Winkels?”

“I have no idea. But they’re obviously connected with Val. He phoned them regularly.”

“Could they be blackmailing him?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. If they were on bad terms, he would try to lose himself. He kept in touch with them. That has to mean there’s some affection, some feeling.”

“Chris, you don’t think that girl is his child, do you?”

So that’s what was bothering her. “I don’t think so,” I said, although I wasn’t sure of anything at that point.

“If she’s fifteen or sixteen, he could have been nineteen or twenty when—”

“Let’s not speculate too much. Will you fly to New York with me tomorrow?”

“I want to come back here.”

“We need two people and two cars so we can relieve
each other. The girl said they might come back tonight and might come back after the weekend. Let’s give it till after the weekend.”

She relented finally, and when we got back to her house, she made reservations for a flight the next day. I just hoped the girl at the Winkels’ house had forgotten all about us after we left. Only one thing continued to trouble me: What if Val had been in the house all the time we were standing on the porch talking to the girl? If that had happened, we had lost him for good. And we might never find out about it.

Carlotta decided to spend the weekend with Amy Grant, whom she hadn’t seen since February. I felt happy just to have a few hours on Saturday and Sunday in Jack’s company and to eat his home-cooked food, which is the best I’ve ever had. The framing of the addition had moved along remarkably. There were solid walls of plywood now with neat rectangles where windows would be. I was fascinated with the progress and somewhat envious of the builders. They could see their accomplishment grow, board by board. In contrast, working on a case often seemed like a collection of so much litter until that lucky moment when the litter rearranged itself into the kind of structure that would yield a solution.

You’re mixing metaphors, Kix, I told myself. But I really needed something to get that structure started. Was I any closer to finding Matty’s killer? Was I closer to finding Val? I didn’t know.

“So this girl told you there was no phone in the house anymore,” Jack said, when we were talking about it.

“That’s what she said. But I was wondering, could they have a cellular phone?”

“Sure, why not? Just carry it with you. Keep it in the car during the day and bring it home at night.”

“Suppose they didn’t want it identified with their home address?”

“Maybe they have a mailbox somewhere, or a business address to have it billed to.”

“Then we have no way of finding that number. It might not even be in the name of Winkel.”

“Could be a business name.”

“It’s amazing,” I said, “how easy it is nowadays to lose yourself and still keep in touch. I rent a mailbox somewhere, call myself ABC Associates, and get a telephone that goes where I go. And you can’t tie it to the Brooks family on Pine Brook Road.”

“Lots of people do it.”

On Sunday afternoon Carlotta and I drove to Connecticut. Jack, as usual, had plenty of studying to keep him busy. His finals were coming up and, assuming he did well, which I was sure he would, the end of his second year of evening law school, the halfway point. He promised another good meal when I got back, not that I needed an incentive. I drank another glass of skim milk and picked Carlotta up at Amy Grant’s house.

“You’re looking more relaxed,” I said when we were on the way.

“Amy and I have a good time together. Most of our memories are happy ones.”

“Have you booked a flight to Buffalo?”

“Two seats. You’ll have to decide whether to come back with me tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t see how, Carlotta. I’m teaching Tuesday.”

“We’ll talk about it later. How’s your morning sickness?”

“Still with me. But it only lasts about an hour. Then I feel pretty good.”

“I hope this case comes to a satisfying end since it’s going to be your last one.”

“I hope so, too.”

“Won’t you miss doing this?”

“A little, maybe. I’ll have plenty to keep me busy and happy.”

We kept up the chatter till we were a few miles from the cemetery. Carlotta had the map open on her lap, and she guided me as though she had done it all before. Suddenly there was the iron fence that enclosed the grounds, the white stones beyond on the well cared-for grass. I turned into the lane between a pair of open gates.

At the main building we got out and went inside. A woman sat at a desk with a telephone and looked up as we approached.

“I’m looking for the grave of Valentine Krassky,” I said without glancing at Carlotta.