The Valentine's Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  “What are you thinking?”

  We walked toward the car. “I think there was a blood relationship. I think they seemed as close as brothers because they were brothers.”

  “Is that why Val kept that life insurance policy? Because Matty was his brother, and he wasn’t doing well and Val wanted to look after him?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “And maybe it was more than that. But I think we have a good chance of finding out now.”

  “Do you think Val’s alive?”

  “I still can’t tell you that. But if he’s alive, I think the Winkels know. And we may be able to persuade them to tell us. Now that we’re armed with information.”

  “You don’t think Tuesday’s too late?”

  “I think they’ll come back to that house,” I said. “We’ll talk to them. Right on Rosegarden Lane.”

  22

  I knew that Monday was a hard day for Carlotta, but it was a very pleasant day for me. I got to walk with Melanie early in the morning, got to watch the builders as they worked on the addition, got to see my husband when he came home late in the evening after his class. Of such simple things is pleasure made.

  When I had a minute I called information in Ontario for a number for Winkel at the Rosegarden Lane address, but there was none, not even an unlisted one. I asked for a number in the name of Krassky but that, too, yielded nothing.

  I had little preparation for my class; tomorrow was the last one of the semester. Next Tuesday I would give my final, and all that remained was a thorough review of the poems and poets we had covered. It was the sort of thing I could do with my eyes closed.

  The class went well, but several students lingered when it was over, trying to get me to disclose the exact questions that would be on the final. It never failed, and I never failed to keep it all to myself. When the last of them gave up, I dashed to my car and drove home, picked up my suitcase, called Jack to say good-bye, and went to Amy Grant’s house to get Carlotta. She came out wearing pants and a blouse with a kind of jacket-shirt over all, as the day was cool and breezy. She put her bag in the backseat, and we started for La Guardia.

  “That’s a beautiful shirt,” I said. “It’s just right on a day like this.”

  “It’s Val’s. He got it last year and I’ve worn it more than he ever did.” She rubbed a sleeve, feeling the fineness of the fabric.

  I started to say something, but my mind did a little jig, and those pieces of litter that were really unconnected scraps of information started to move toward that elusive structure.

  “Did you say something?” Carlotta asked.

  “No. Sorry, I was just thinking.”

  She laughed. “You don’t have to apologize for that. It’s neither immoral nor fattening.”

  But this time it had been productive. Finally.

  I persuaded Carlotta to stay home, and I took Val’s Mercedes and drove to Bambi Thayer’s house. A little girl who looked very much like Bambi was standing on the driveway talking to another little girl. I parked at the curb and walked over to the children. “Are you Mrs. Thayer’s daughter?” I asked the obvious look-alike.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is she home?”

  “She’s in the back. Who are you?”

  “Chris Bennett.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was sorry to hear about your daddy,” I said.

  She said, “Thank you,” as though she had been told how to respond.

  “I didn’t know him but I heard he was a wonderful person.”

  “He was.”

  “I’m sure you’ll always remember him. When was the last time you saw him?”

  “He came home from the store before he went out to dinner with Uncle Val and Uncle Matty. It was Uncle Val’s birthday.”

  “Yes, I remember. Can I go in the back and find your mom?”

  “Sure.”

  I walked along a path at the side of the house and came to a splendid backyard. Bambi was sitting on a deck watching a small television set. I called, “Hi.”

  “Oh. It’s you.” She leaned over and shut off the TV. “Come on up.”

  I went up and sat in the second chair. “It’s beautiful back here.”

  “I love it. Clark and I used to sit here all the time.”

  “Bambi, is it possible that Clark went to some other high school besides Bennett?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because Bennett has no record of his being a student there.”

  She looked confused. “Why would you even ask them?”

  “Because I’ve learned some funny things about Val and Matty. It seems they lived in the same house during high school.”

  “Maybe that’s how they got to be friends.”

  “Maybe.” I didn’t want to tell her any more than I had to. “But Clark doesn’t seem to have gone to Bennett.”

  “Well, he said he did. They probably just lost the records. It’s a stupid thing to lie about. If he said he went there, he went there.”

  “Did he ever mention a family named Winkel?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You dated Val at one time, didn’t you?”

  Her look turned to disgust. “Please go away,” she said. “My husband is dead. All our husbands are dead. Where is this taking you? Why do you have to dredge up the past? It’s gone. Can’t you let it be gone?” She looked away, composing herself. “It doesn’t mean anything. Didn’t you ever have a boyfriend before you got married?”

  It was one of those moments when I saw myself as different. “I didn’t,” I said. “I was a nun for almost fifteen years.”

  “A nun.” Her eyebrows went up and her face softened. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything that would offend you.”

  “You didn’t. I left the convent when I was thirty and met my husband soon after. We were married about a year later. I’m afraid dating is something I never did in my life.”

  “That’s weird.” Of the three wives, she seemed the youngest, the sweetest, and the most innocent. Now she seemed a little nonplussed.

  “Will you tell me about you and Val?”

  “It was nothing. I met him at a party and we went out for a while. He was in college, and I went out there to visit him. That’s how I met Jake. Jake told you about it, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think he had the feeling it was hot and heavy, and maybe it was, but Val wasn’t for me and I sure wasn’t for Val. A couple of years later, Val told Clark to give me a call. It didn’t work out right away but when it did, it was right.”

  “That was nice of Val.”

  “He was a nice guy. They were all nice guys.” Her eyes filled.

  “Did Clark know you had gone out with Val?”

  She pressed her lips together. “He knew Val knew me. Clark was a very old-fashioned kind of man. It might have upset him if he’d known I’d had a—relationship with his friend.”

  “So you don’t think Clark ever found out that it was more than a date or two?”

  “He didn’t hear it from me. Carlotta wasn’t around when it happened, and neither was Annie.”

  “But Jake was,” I said.

  “Why would Jake say anything?”

  “Did Jake ever hang out with the three men?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Bambi, you told me last time we talked that Annie came from New York City or New Jersey. Are you sure of that?”

  “Somewhere around there,” she said. “One place is as good as another. She’s not from around here.”

  I stood and thanked her for talking to me. Then I went down the stairs to the lawn and around the house to the street. The little girls were gone, but a few toys had been left carelessly on the driveway. I picked them up and put them on the edge of the grass.

  So much came back to Jake. Jake knew about the mysterious phone calls to Canada. Jake knew about the brief but torrid relationship Val had had with Bambi. Jake knew that Val had known Annie before
she met Matty.

  But Jake hadn’t given up anything willingly. I had had to pry information out of him, make far-fetched guesses that he then confirmed. If he knew things that Val wanted kept secret, he had certainly appeared to be trying to keep them from me.

  I worked my way over to Annie Franklin’s house. Here, too, children were playing in the street and on driveways. I thought of the little being that was growing inside me. Would I ever be relaxed enough as a mother to let my child play on Pine Brook Road? Would I be able to let my child out of my sight? At this time, they were unanswerable questions.

  I parked a couple of houses away from Annie’s and walked to her driveway where some boys were shooting baskets. I tried to pick out the one who was Matty and Annie’s son, but this time I failed. As I stood watching, a boy about eight or nine grabbed the ball and turned to me.

  “You lookin’ for my mom?”

  “Yes. Is she inside?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “I’m Chris Bennett. What’s your name?”

  “Matt.”

  “Hi, Matt. I’m sorry about your dad.”

  “Yeah.” He looked pained.

  “I didn’t know him but I heard he was a very nice person.”

  “Yeah, he was.”

  “When did you see him for the last time?”

  “The night it happened. I was in bed already, and he came home to put his other boots on. He came in my room and said good night.”

  I tried to keep my excitement to myself. Matty had come home that night. “It’s nice that you saw him.”

  “Yeah. I remember it. You wanna go inside and look for my mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go in the front door. It’s open.” He turned to his pals and tossed the ball.

  I didn’t want to let on that I knew. Annie had lied to me. If her son had seen Matty, she had seen him, too. I rang the doorbell, putting it together. Matty had owned a handgun, whether Annie knew about it or not, and he had picked it up when he went home to change his boots. Somehow, as he held the gun on one of the other two men on the ice, one of them had managed to turn it back on Matty.

  It had to be Val, I thought. From everyone’s description of Clark, he didn’t seem like the one to shoot at his oldest friend.

  “Hi, Chris. Come in.” Annie had opened the door.

  “It’s lovely out this evening.”

  “Yes. I should be out there instead of in here.” She was wearing black jeans and a shirt of faded blue. She took me through the house to the room at the back. “Sit anywhere. I can’t believe you still have questions.”

  My big question had now been answered, and I had to be careful how I phrased the smaller questions so she wouldn’t guess that I knew about Matty coming home. “I’ve been thinking about Matty’s mother,” I said, coming in from left field. “I think you said she lived in England.”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “Did you look for an address for her after the accident?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to look. I keep the family address book.”

  “Maybe he kept it at work.”

  “Why would he do that? And why do you care? I don’t see what difference this makes.”

  “I’m looking for anything that will explain who killed Matty and why. And if Val is still alive, I want to find him.”

  “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.”

  23

  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 lig
ht, 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.