The Valentine's Day Murder (25 page)

“And the insurance policy was for Matty.”

“Right.”

“That’s ten times as much as you were leaving to the others.”

“Matty needed it.”

“But why, Val?” Carlotta said. “A million dollars is a lot of money.”

“He’s dead. I can’t discuss his problems.”

“The bankbooks had a lot of withdrawals,” I said. “You weren’t just saving money. You were spending it.”

“I was sending it to my grandmother. I’m her main means of support. She has a small pension. I wanted her to live well.”

“There are some strange things about the shooting,” I said. “There was a red scarf lying on the ice when the police helicopter went over the spot the next day.”

“I don’t know anything about a red scarf.”

“It’s the scarf you and Carlotta gave Matty for Christmas. If you shot him, why didn’t it go down with him? Why didn’t it have blood on it?” I was desperate to break his story, to get him to tell me the truth.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It must have fallen on the ice. I just don’t remember. And it was dark.”

“I wish you would tell us the truth,” I said.

“I will tell you the truth,” the strong voice of Grandmother Winkel declared. “This boy, he never shot anyone. I know him his whole life. Matty? Maybe he could shoot someone, but not this one. This is a good
boy. You want to know what happened from the beginning? I tell you the story.” She pulled a kitchen chair out and sat heavily. Then she began speaking.

“In the beginning we lived in the east, what was called the German Democratic Republic. I had two daughters and a son. My son was a sailor on a merchant ship. He never married. My daughters married. One had two sons, the other had one. The first daughter, Beate, she died when her sons were young. The second daughter, Petra, she took her sister’s boys and raised them like her own. I helped. Petra was a nurse in Germany. It was a hard life, and we wanted to get out. We wanted the boys to have a good life. In those days you could pay the ship’s master, and he would take you on board and get you to Canada. My son arranged it. My daughter went as a cook, and the boys dressed like little sailors. My husband and I, we also worked on the ship. The trip cost us everything we had in the world.

“We got into Canada, and first we lived in one place and then we lived in another. But what we wanted for the boys was to be citizens of the United States, and we had no papers. But we heard you could get them if you used the name of a dead person, and my daughter decided she would try to find three good names across the border.

“She left the boys with us and went to the States. She was a nurse in Germany, so it was easy to become a
nurse’s aid in the U.S. She thought she would get a job, she would earn a living, she would bring us all over. Somebody told her, you go to a cemetery, you walk around, you find a dead person the right age and you get his papers. But she didn’t have to do that. She got herself a job in a hospital in Connecticut, and then she could look at the records. She worked at night when it was quiet. She said she was going for lunch, but really she was looking at the records.”

I noticed that Carlotta’s eyes were fixed on the old woman, but Val hardly looked at her. His arm was around his wife, but his eyes were everywhere except on his grandmother.

“First she found Clark, the little one,” Mrs. Winkel continued. “She went to the town hall, she filled out the papers, and they sent her the birth certificate, as if she was the little boy’s mother. What did they know? She had the mother’s name, she had the boy’s name, she had the boy’s birthday. It was like a miracle. Suddenly her little nephew was an American citizen. Then she found a record for Matty. It was a baby who died a day after he was born. It was a different town, so nobody there knew her. In a little while, she had another birth certificate.” She paused, knowing she was coming to the most painful episode of all.

“And then there was Val,” she said. “In the files she couldn’t find a boy the right age. She looked and looked but there was nothing. But one night when she came to the hospital, there was a sick boy just as old as Val. He was very sick, he couldn’t breathe, he needed—” She stopped and turned to Val.
“Was ist Sauerstoff?”

“Oxygen,” he said without looking at her.

“He needed oxygen. His lungs were no good. My
daughter looked at the medical record when she went into his room. This boy, he had been in the hospital before, always the same thing.” She patted her chest.

I found myself tensing in anticipation of what I knew was coming, almost hoping the story would change and the little boy in the hospital bed would survive.

“That night,” Mrs. Winkel said, “the boy died. The next morning, my daughter came back to Canada. I wrote for the birth certificate later, and we had it sent to an address in Buffalo.”

“Where was your daughter?” I asked, although I knew.

“She went back to Germany.”

“Why is that?”

“There was some funny business in the hospital. It was better she should go back.”

“What was the funny business?” I asked. I was sure now that the grandmother knew something about the death of the child in the hospital.

“It was nothing, really. She wanted to live in Germany.”

“Without her son?”

“It was better that way. He was safe with me.”

“In that hospital,” I said, “they think your daughter killed that little boy.”

“My daughter was a nurse. She didn’t kill anyone. When the boy was dead, she wrote down his name and address. That’s all.”

I could sense the strength of this woman. Her face had showed no emotion as she spoke, as she related this tale of adventure and crime. She was a woman who could handle adversity, who could take on the raising of three young boys whose parents were not there. It was just another thing she had to do, and she would do it well.
With her strength came power. The boys were devoted to her. In his worst moment, Val had gone to her, and she had taken him in and protected him.

“Many people connected with that hospital think the boy was killed. He was getting better the night he died. The last person in his room was your daughter. People saw her there.”

“You are telling me my daughter is a killer? What do you know of killing? What do you know of the kind of life we lived over there? Have you ever lived in fear?” Her eyes pierced mine. “We had to get these boys away from that. We had to give them a good life. If a weak boy died, a strong one lived.”

The audible gasp came from Carlotta, although it could have been mine. We had just heard a justification for the murder of an innocent child. Val mumbled something in German to his grandmother.

“When did the boys come to the States?” I asked, suppressing my urge to argue the point. “In high school?”

“Maybe a little before.”

“But they lived in different places, didn’t they?”

“My husband took the youngest. The two oldest ones came with me. They were too much for my husband. And we didn’t want three boys with three different last names living in the same house. Maybe people would ask questions.”

“So Clark lied about going to Bennett,” I said.

“Clark lied,” Val said. “Who would check something like that? Bambi?”

“What happened on weekends, Mrs. Winkel?”

“We went to Canada. Maybe we would visit my husband in his house.”

“When did you buy this house?”

“My grandson bought it for us when he started to make some money. My grandson is a good boy.” It was clear which grandson she was talking about.

“And he called you every week, every few days.”

“Something is wrong with that?”

“I was just asking.” She was the embodiment of the legendary feared sadistic nun who was said to rule every convent school, but I had never met the likes of this one. “What did you do when the boys finished high school?”

“We came back to Canada. We felt safer here. We never got our papers over there. I don’t like to cross the bridge anymore. It makes me nervous.”

I was rather glad something did. “Can you tell me what happened on the ice last February?”

She shrugged. “It was an accident. The boys thought it would be good fun to come over and visit their grandma. There was an accident, and two of them died.”

“One of them was shot,” I reminded her.

“It was an accident. Two of my boys are gone. But there are great-grandchildren now. Maybe I get to see them one day.”

I turned to Val. “It wasn’t as simple as that, was it? You know that the accident was that the wrong man was killed.”

“What do you mean?” Carlotta said. “Who was supposed to get killed out there?”

I waited for Val to say it. Just as I thought he would not answer, he said softly, “I was.”

“Don’t say anything more,” his grandmother cautioned. “We’ve said enough.”

“It’s too late to keep secrets, Mrs. Winkel,” I said. “I know what happened that night.”

“You can’t know,” Carlotta said. “How can you possibly know?”

“Because of the red scarf. The red scarf was lying on the ice.”

“So what? It was Matty’s. Why shouldn’t it have been lying on the ice?”

“Because Matty wasn’t wearing it,” I said.

They all looked at me, and Val said, “She’s right. Matty wasn’t wearing it. If he’d been wearing it, it would’ve gone down with him.”

“Val, what happened?” Carlotta asked.

He took his arm from around her and clapped his hands together quietly. Then he looked down at his hands for a moment before speaking. “Annie was wearing the scarf.”

“Annie! What was she doing on the ice?”

“She came to kill me. That’s what she was doing.”

“How did she know—?”

“We stopped at the house so Matty could change his shoes. He told her what we were doing. After we left, she followed us with the other car.”

“But the children,” Carlotta said.

“She must have figured they were asleep.”

At least one of them hadn’t been, the boy who told me his father had come in to say good night to him. “When did you know she was following you?” I asked.

“Not for hours. We were most of the way across the lake. Matty was leading, I was bringing up the rear. All of a sudden there was a shot, and something skittered along the ice next to my leg. We turned around and flashed the light over the ice.”

“You had a flashlight with you?”

“Matty had picked it up when he went home. It was a
good one, very bright with a wide sweep. He turned it toward the direction we’d come from, and there she was. Matty said, ‘Shit, I think it’s Annie,’ and we turned back to find her. He thought something had happened at home, maybe the kids. So back we went. And when we got to where we could see her clearly, we saw the gun in her hand.”

“My God,” Carlotta said.

“That’s how I felt. I knew who the gun was meant for.”

“But why?”

“Because she knew I was a ghost. She came from Connecticut, not where my mother had worked but close enough, and she was a cousin of the Krassky family. She knew about the kid who died in the hospital, and when she came to Buffalo for a job, she met me and she put everything together.”

“Was she blackmailing you?” I asked.

“Yeah, but not very actively. I gave her money from time to time, but not a lot. She wanted a big lump sum, and I said I couldn’t do it. So we agreed I’d take out a life insurance policy with Matty as the beneficiary. This was around the time they were getting married. I gave her proof of the policy and proof that I kept the premiums paid. But then Matty lost his job last year, and she wanted a big sum to get him started on something new.”

“I assume the threat was that she’d tell what she knew about your mother.”

“Exactly. Her father’s a hotshot lawyer. She threatened an international search for my mother. And that would embarrass me, and through me, Carlotta. She would also blow my cover and possibly get me in trouble with Immigration. She was holding all these things over
my head and becoming more and more demanding. I didn’t want Carlotta to know, and the longer I kept it from her, the less I wanted her to find out. I should have told you,” he said, looking at her.

“So she decided to kill you to inherit the million dollars,” I said.

“That must have been her plan. She must have been following us, and thought she could get off one shot and then turn back while the guys were looking after me. But she missed, and then she started to go nuts. She ranted about a relationship between us. It was crazy, but I figured it was for Clark’s benefit, maybe for Matty’s, too. She would shoot me because I’d done something terrible to her. Therefore I deserved to die.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“We all saw it coming. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Matty started moving towards her and Clark did, too, but she kept that gun right on me. I zigged and zagged a little, and then, just as I sensed she was about to shoot, Matty lunged at her, grabbing for the gun. When it went off, it hit him instead of me.”

“How terrible.”

“He got a handful of the scarf. I can still see it flying. The force of the bullet threw him way back, and when he went down on the ice, it cracked and he dropped into the water. But the scarf fell near Annie and ended up on the ice.”

“And the gun?”

“I’m not sure, but I think it may have gone down with Matty.”

“How did Clark drown?”

“He was right near where Matty hit the ice. I think he was just drawn into the water with Matty.”

“Which left you and Annie on the ice together.”

“On dangerously thin ice. It was dark. The flashlight was gone. Matty had tried to use it to deflect the gun, and I don’t know what happened to it. Matty and Clark were gone. I called, but there wasn’t even a splash after they went down. Annie screamed Matty’s name once, and then she just whimpered a lot. Then she was gone. It was snowing by then. I knew it was hopeless to try to find Matty and Clark. I’d end up dead, too. So I turned and went back, trying to follow our trail before it got snowed over. I didn’t know if Annie still had the gun, so I had to be careful to stay out of her way. She must have been ahead of me the whole time, because I never caught up with her. By the time I got back to the beach, it was really snowing. I could see Annie’s car parked next to Matty’s, but I took a long detour so it wouldn’t look as if I’d had anything to do with Matty’s car. And then I thought I’d like to be considered dead to give me some time to think. So I circled back to the car—Annie was gone by then—and tried all the doors. The hatchback was open, and I climbed in and dropped my watch in the backseat as if I’d left it there to keep it safe while we crossed the lake. Then I backed out and found a bus to Buffalo. I think you know the rest.”