A Skeleton in the Closet (Kate Lawrence Mysteries)

by Judith K Ivie

  “They are becoming little beggars, are they not?” Armando, too, looked sad. “I do not like to see them so dependent on, how do you say it, handouts? Especially when this food is not good for them.” He opened the door on his side of the car. “Give me the camera, Cara. Your ankle needs a rest. Perhaps I will have more luck from outside the car.”

  Although my ankle wasn’t bothering me, I was happy to turn over photography duty to Armando. As he tried to get a better angle, a jogger with a large, golden retriever on a leash ran by the group of spectators. Predictably, the excited dog began to bark, and the water fowl on the bank immediately dispersed.

  The large cob went into defense mode, raising his wings and back feathers while lowering his head. An ugly hiss was directed at the retriever, regardless of the fact that he and his master had passed by without incident, while the pen herded their young ones back into the water. The little flotilla was soon foraging peacefully by the far bank, and Armando snapped two pictures for Emma’s weekly swan report. “Did you see how the littlest one tips up like a teapot when he feeds underwater instead of just dipping his neck down like the others?” I commented as he got back into the car.

  Armando smiled. “I thought you would notice that. Yes, he has to do things a little differently than the rest of them. Perhaps his neck is not yet as long as theirs are, but he will catch up. In the meantime, he will do what he must to survive.”

  As we watched, the mother swan and three of the cygnets dipped their heads below the surface, where a particularly lush growth must be. The fourth youngster dunked his head, as well, but in order to reach the greens, he went from horizontal to vertical, tail feathers waggling. His parents seemed entirely unconcerned by his unconventional approach to dining, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Among water fowl, as among human beings, adaptability and compromise seemed to be important keys to survival, I told myself and grinned at my mate.

  “Italian cookies or cannoli for lunch?” I asked, and we were soon on our way to the famous

  Franklin Avenue bakery, where we enjoyed fresh coffee and delicious pastry. As always, we shared space at the homey, old-fashioned counter with a cross-section of the neighborhood, including a young couple and their infant son, who kept us entertained with his cheerful gurglings. After a pleasant half hour or so of coffee and conversation, we paid our ridiculously reasonable check and made our farewells to the other patrons. “Do you suppose Emma or Joey will ever make us grandparents?” I wondered aloud as we got back into the car for the trip home.

  “Unless we are married, you are the only one who will become an abuela,” Armando responded, ever the stickler for accuracy. “But should that day ever come, at least I will know where to order the wedding cake.”

  The ride home passed in companionable silence. Our satellite radio was tuned to the symphony channel, and I was thrilled to be treated to one of my all-time favorite pieces, the “Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” The transcription for large orchestra had its charms, but nothing gave me goose bumps like the original composition for the organ.

  We pulled into the driveway, lost in the final, thundering chords. Armando pushed the remote garage door opener and pulled the Altima inside. “Just worry about getting yourself safely up the stairs, and leave the groceries for me to unload. I will go and check the mail.” So saying, he let himself out of the car and headed back down the driveway to the mailbox.

  Still glowing from the music, I gathered my purse and pushed myself out of the passenger seat, awkward in my aircast. From out of nowhere, Van Man materialized in front of me. I was minimally aware that it must be he from the way he was dressed. He wore the same windbreaker and jeans as he had the day before, although the knitted cap was noticeably missing. He also seemed to be much older than the Henstocks had estimated.

  The majority of my brain cells failed to make the switch from contentment to alarm. It seemed so improbable to be confronted by my assailant in my own garage in the middle of such a lovely afternoon. And where was the van? I frowned at him vaguely.

  “Please,” he said. His face, haggard and unshaven in the daylight, was ashen, and his left arm hung limply at his side. He made no move toward me, but his eyes sought mine. “Please,” he said again.

  On his way back to the garage to get the groceries, Armando saw the stranger and stopped dead, the mail unheeded in his hand. It took him two seconds to replay the events of the past twenty-four hours in his head, conclude that this must be my attacker, and charge to my rescue. He dropped the mail and tackled Van Man from behind, wrapping both arms around his throat.

  Still cushioned by disbelief, I watched the scene unfold. Somehow, I had the presence of mind to fumble for my cell phone in my purse. If one of us was about to get shot, it seemed prudent to call 911; but Van Man made no move to produce a weapon. In fact, he put up no struggle whatsoever and began to totter in Armando’s unwilling embrace. Before I could decide whether to call the cops or try to help Armando bring him down, the intruder made the decision for me. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell backward in a dead faint, bringing Armando down with him on the garage floor.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” commented our neighbor Mary. She stood in the open doorway holding our dropped mail in one bony hand. “It’s always something with you two. Who’s this guy now?”

  “We’re not positive, but we think it’s the same man who tried to break in here last weekend,” I responded automatically. “Do us a favor and call 911, would you, Mary? I need to help Armando.” I handed her my phone and crouched down next to him. “Are you all right?”

  “Ouch,” he said succinctly.

  * * *

  “Hey, hombre, how’s it going?” The young Latino EMT who had checked me out earlier in the week greeted Armando on the way into our condo twenty minutes later. Sitting in the overstuffed armchair with an icebag held against the impressive lump that had bloomed on the back of his head, Armando lifted a hand briefly in acknowledgment. As I stood in the front hall surveying the group assembled in my living room, I wondered sourly how many other people in town were on a first-name basis with fully half of the police force and several of the volunteer paramedics. As grateful as I was for their help, it wasn’t a distinction I relished.

  Once again, our driveway was crowded with emergency vehicles, red lights strobing. I could only imagine the entertainment we were providing the neighbors. Based on Armando’s Colombian ethnicity, some of them probably assumed we were running a drug cartel out of our kitchen. A few of the more intrepid spectators were gathered across the street with Mary, who obviously delighted in her role as first-on-the-scene. Well, I sighed inwardly, at least she could set them straight on the drug thing.

  I turned away from the front door and backed into the kitchen to make way for the EMTs, who were negotiating the hallway with Van Man strapped onto a gurney. He had recovered consciousness only briefly after Armando had thrashed his way out from under him in the garage. In perhaps the most surreal sequence of the afternoon, we had found ourselves helping the assailant up the stairs into our house, where he sagged into unconsciousness once again on the living room sofa. Whatever his actions had been earlier in the week, he was clearly unarmed and on his last legs this afternoon. Simple humanity required us to offer him minimal assistance until the professionals arrived. Although I had acted purely to defend myself, I couldn’t help having a twinge of conscience when I realized how badly the man’s arm was hurt and how great a toll the pain had taken on him.

  At least it hadn’t taken long to give the police my statement this time. After turning over the suspect to them, what was there to say? He had appeared from nowhere, said “please” twice, and passed out, taking Armando down with him. “Please what?” asked the young officer taking careful notes.

  “I have no idea,” I replied honestly. “That was the extent of his conversation. When he came to, we got him into the house and onto the couch, and he passed out again. He offered no resistance and absolutely no in
formation.”

  “And he didn’t threaten you or Mr. Velasquez?”

  “Not me, certainly, and I don’t think you can count passing out on top of Armando as a threatening move. Of course, Armando may feel differently about it.”

  The look Armando threw me might have qualified as life-threatening, but he kept silent. I missed John Harkness and Rick Fletcher, whose senses of humor had humanized former such sessions. This fellow was as buttoned-up as they come. He finished writing and slapped his notebook shut. “Thank you, Ma’am. We’ll need you to come down to the station to sign your statement and formalize the charges against this man.”

  Strangely, considering the events of the past week, a reluctance to file charges overcame me. What had this man actually done to me, besides frighten me half to death? Now that I had seen his face and witnessed him lying unconscious on my sofa, he had become more of a person to me than an assailant. My fear of him had been replaced by curiosity about what had made him behave so menacingly. For the moment, however, I kept my misgivings to myself, not at all sure that this officious youngster would understand them. John would, I thought sadly. Rick would. And then, affectionately, Armando will.

  “What will happen to him now?” I asked the officer.

  “The perp? He’ll receive medical attention at Hartford Hospital and probably go into a secure infirmary. When he’s compos mentis, he’ll be informed of the charges against him, arrested, and have an opportunity to contact an attorney.” He got to his feet. “We’ll be in touch.”

  The officer and his partner, who had been across the street taking Mary’s statement before the interested crowd, followed the emergency medical van out of the driveway in the gathering dusk. I gave Mary a thumbs up and closed the front door firmly. I had had all the visitors I could stand for one afternoon. I trailed back down the hall to where Armando still sat in the living room. “So?” he said conversationally.

  “So what?” I responded forlornly.

  “So what is going on in that head of yours? I know it is something. Spit it out.” He punched up the icepack and returned it to the back of his head.

  I couldn’t help smiling at how well he knew me. “Muy macho, eh hombre?” I twitted him. “It’s not every man who can take having a two-hundred-pound assailant pass out on top of him. You are definitely my hero.”

  “Fine. You will tell me when you are ready. In the meantime, where is the remote control?” He made himself more comfortable in the chair.

  I handed him the remote and his cell phone. “Enjoy yourself, and order a pizza for dinner. I’ll bring you a glass of wine in a few minutes. I just need to use the land line to make a phone call first.”

  He nodded, already busy surfing through the channels. “Margo or Strutter?”

  “I’ll call them later, but first …”

  “Tell Emma I said hello,” he said.

  Fifteen

  The following morning, Margo, Strutter and I were lingering in our favorite booth at the Town Line Diner, where Sherrie refilled our coffee cups yet again. John Harkness had joined us, but Armando had opted to stay at home, nursing a headache.

  Breakfast had long since come and gone. We had a lot to talk about. I had brought my partners up to speed by telephone the previous evening on Saturday’s events, but John had news to share about the results of Van Man’s interrogation. This time, he didn’t need to refer to any notes to remember the details.

  “The man who assaulted Kate is named Michael Armentano,” he began. The rest of us exchanged puzzled looks. The name meant nothing to us. “No, you wouldn’t recognize it. He’s a complete stranger to you, as well as to the Henstock sisters. And as you may have already guessed, he’s not really a plumber, which explains why we couldn’t find him or his company. Throughout this caper, he was operating under an alias.”

  “Caper? So he did intend to commit a crime,” I observed as John sipped his cooling coffee.

  “Hard to call it a crime, really, in anything but the strictest technical sense. He didn’t even break into the Henstocks’ house, if you recall. The door was always open, and Henry was pretty easily dissuaded from his watchdog duties with a handful of raw sirloin. Armentano didn’t actually hurt anyone. Kate did far more damage to him than he did to her,” he grinned at me.

  “That was self-defense,” I protested, feeling a bit guilty as I remembered my violent attack on what had turned out to be a senior citizen. “He was holding a gun on me!”

  Margo and Strutter nodded in vigorous agreement, but John shook his head. “Sorry, Slugger, but what you thought was a gun turned out to be nothing more than a plastic water pistol that he brandished to get you to cooperate. Guess he didn’t know who he was tangling with.” He smiled to soften the effect of his words. “Good thing he didn’t pull that trick on Margo. She would have ripped off one of her shoes and killed him with a spike heel.” Margo and Strutter giggled, and I subsided.

  “So what was the crime that this Michael Armentano, not really a plumber, intended to commit but didn’t actually?” Strutter brought us back to the business at hand.

  “Michael Armentano is the son of one Adrian Armentano, a very elderly man now in his final days at the hospice in Branford,” John continued. Back in the nineteen-forties, Adrian was a mason. Judge Henstock hired him to build his document lock-up in the basement in nineteen-forty-five. During the course of the construction work, Adrian asked the Judge to represent his wife, Marianna, in the settlement of a dispute with a local tradesman, which he did a little too assiduously, if you get my drift.”

  Strutter and I exchanged puzzled looks. “You’d best spell it out, Darlin’,” Margo prompted. This time, I noted, John didn’t object to the term.

  “As you know, Kate, Lavinia Henstock suspected that her father had been inappropriately involved with a local woman. Turns out she was right. The woman was Marianna Armentano, Adrian’s wife and Michael’s mother. They were having an affair,” John stated bluntly.

  “Huh! Lavinia’s intuition was right on the money,” I commented. “So then what happened?”

  “Michael Armentano was an infant when all this happened, but way back then, Adrian was a hot-blooded Italian in his mid-twenties. He found out about his wife’s affair with the Judge, as Marianna feared he had. That was the conversation Lavinia overheard in the Judge’s study that night when she found the door locked. Adrian told Michael a few weeks ago on his deathbed that he had confronted his wife. When she attempted to deny it, he struck her so forcefully that he snapped her neck. She died almost instantly.”

  We sat, coffee untouched, mesmerized by the tale that was unfolding.

  “Adrian was overcome with remorse. He wanted to kill himself, he told Michael, but he had his infant, and now motherless, son to consider. So he did what he felt he had to do at the time. He wrapped his wife’s body in a tarpaulin. Then he waited for the Judge to shut himself up in his study the following evening and Ada to go out with her friends. He let himself in the side door of the Henstock house using the key he knew the Judge left under a planter on the porch. He made his way quietly to the basement, carrying his wife’s concealed body, and bricked her up behind a false rear wall he created in the closet using leftover materials that were still stacked down there. Then he let himself out the same way. He was betting that if the body was ever found, the authorities would assume it had been the Judge, not he, who had killed her. In a way, it sort of was,” John opined.

  By this time, I was on the edge of my seat, but John still hadn’t answered my most burning questions. “That doesn’t explain what Michael Armentano was searching for so desperately that he would break into the house and then pretend to hold a gun on me for information.”

  John sighed heavily. “You’re right. There’s more. For over sixty years, Adrian kept his secret, but on his deathbed, he confessed to his son.”

  “But why?” Strutter vocalized the question on the tip of my tongue.

  “Originally, Adrian told Michael that his mot
her had been having an affair with the Judge, and he had had a terrible fight with Marianna over it. But he told the child Michael that Marianna had returned to the old country in fear for her life, not that he had killed her. In the intervening years, it had occurred to him that the Judge might have kept something, love letters from Marianna or at least papers relating to Henstock’s representation of her, that might lead the police to Adrian, if her body were ever found. He didn’t want Michael to have to bear that shame. So he made a dying confession to his son and asked him to get back into the Henstock house and look for those documents. He assumed they would be in the basement closet. But when Michael got in, posing as a plumber, there was nothing in the closet. Then something about the back wall of the closet looked wrongto him. He took a hammer to it, and out fell …”

  “Oh my God,” I said loudly, imagining the horror. Strutter got the picture at the same time and covered her face, groaning. The patrons at nearby booths looked over curiously. Margo shushed us.

  “You’ve got it,” John agreed. From behind the bricks fell the skeleton of dear old Mom. Naturally, Michael freaked, but when he pulled himself together a little while later, he realized that he would be questioned by the police, and DNA testing would link the remains to him, thereby directly implicating his father. So he came back with an empty gunny sack and disposed of Mom in the Spring Street Pond. More bad luck for him, though. The skeleton snagged on the reeds, and along came Kate with her camera.”

  I sagged back against the back of the booth, my head whirling. “But he couldn’t have known about that,” I said, still confused.

  “Newspaper story,” said Margo and Strutter together. “And then there you were, runnin’ in and out of the Henstocks’ house with the police on a regular basis over the next few days,” Margo continued, patting me sympathetically. “In his half-crazy state of mind, he figured you had to have the documents his father had sent him to get, or at least know where in the house the Henstocks had them hidden.”