The Valentine's Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  I found Jack wandering around the ground floor. “Hopeless,” I said more cheerfully than I felt.

  “She can’t get them on the weekend in the first place, and you’re not entitled to medical records in the second place. Or vice versa.”

  “Were you eavesdropping?”

  “Just telling it like it is, sweetheart. Getting information from a hospital without a shield or a court order does not qualify as easy duty.”

  “What I need is someone who worked there thirty years ago,” I said, thinking out loud, as we walked to the parking lot.

  “You are a digger, honey. If I’d hooked up with you ten years ago, I’d be a captain by now.”

  “You’re too young to be a captain.”

  “Some guys make it young.”

  “Besides, I like you better as a law student.”

  “You don’t have much choice. So what’ll it be—dinner in Connecticut or dinner in New York State?”

  “Hmm. The unknown verses the known. Tough decision. We’re not in a hurry. Let’s take a leisurely drive back and see what throws itself in our path.”

  “If you say so.”

  We drove out of the parking lot and turned toward home.

  13

  We found a restaurant in Connecticut around six o’clock that had just opened for dinner and had a free table, and we had a truly good meal. When we left a couple of hours later, people were driving up in Mercedes and Jaguars, the women wearing glitter in their hair and on their hands, for dinner at a more fashionable hour. For my part, I was happy to have eaten early, even happier to get home at a reasonable hour. I called Green-willow, the home for retarded adults where my cousin Gene lives, and said I would pick him up the next morning in time for ten o’clock mass. I didn’t invite him to Sunday dinner because the cupboard was bare. I had shopping to do, and Jack had the studying he had put off to accompany me to Connecticut.

  At home there was a message from the builder that if the weather was good, he would like to get started on our addition on Monday morning. A few days before Carlotta had called with the news that the two bodies had surfaced, the foundation had been dug three feet deep in our backyard and the concrete slab on which the addition would sit had been poured. Now we were ready for the framing.

  While we were both very anxious to get it done, it meant we would have to vacate our present bedroom, onto which the addition would be attached, and that meant moving furniture. The bed could be disassembled and reassembled fairly easily, but the dresser and chest were heavy pieces. Our friend and neighbor Hal Gross had offered to help when the time came, and it looked as if this was it. I suffered a recurring attack of “do-I-really-want-to-do-this-it is,” but the concrete slab was there and the next step was upon me. I called the Grosses.

  Sunday after mass I ducked out of the house at Jack’s request and went down the block to the Grosses’, as Hal came in the other direction to help Jack. Mel was alone, her mother having swooped up the grandchildren and disappeared with them.

  “So how are you feeling?” Mel asked as we sat in the family room.

  “Had my first morning sickness’s the last three days.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “Just enough that I know something’s cooking.”

  “Something’s definitely cooking.” She smiled her great smile. “Do you think you’ll keep teaching after you give birth?”

  “I’d like to. It’s only one morning a week, and I can do all the rest of the work at home. I need to do something with my mind.”

  “I know. That’s the hardest part of being a mother, especially when they’re so little. I’ve been thinking about going back to teaching next fall. There may be an opening in the little school.” “Little school” was the common name of the local K-through-four that all our children would eventually attend. “It’s just finding someone I trust that’s the problem.”

  “I know,” I said, understanding firsthand for the first time in my life. “Well, I’m not going to think about it for a while. There’s a pregnant teacher who’s giving birth after the semester starts. She said she’ll finish the fall semester for me. I’ll have the final ready for her.”

  “Good planning,” Mel said. “Everything’s under control and you’ll be covered. Jack said you were out of town. What’s new?”

  “My favorite question.” I leaned forward and told her the whole story.

  “You think that poor little child never died?” Mel said when I had finished telling her about yesterday in Connecticut.

  “I don’t know. Nothing holds water at this point. If Val really remembered where he was born and who his parents were, I have to believe he would have gone back to them.”

  “At least when he got older.”

  “Or called them. Six-year-olds know their phone numbers.”

  “Among other things.”

  “Carlotta knows what high school her husband went to. We’ll have to try to find out where he lived during those years. If the school can dig up the records, I can talk to neighbors. But I have this eerie feeling that no one will remember him. He seems to have been invisible or transparent.”

  “Until Carlotta met him.”

  “Or a few years before that, when he went into business with Jake Halpern.”

  “Didn’t you say he had two friends who died with him on the lake?”

  “They’re weird, too, Mel. The parents of one are dead, and the other’s father is dead and his mother lives in England and he had nothing to do with her.”

  “This is a crazy story.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” she said breezily. “You always do.”

  Just because I “always do” doesn’t mean I will this time, I thought as I meandered back down the street to our house after Hal’s return home. There seemed to be so many barricades in my way on this one. I had never dealt with a hospital before and had never considered that medical information was private, and rightly so. That meant that trying again tomorrow would be as futile as yesterday’s attempt. Well, I had the care and feeding of the Brooks family to think of, and maybe emptying my head of the mysterious life and death of Valentine Krassky would help in the long run.

  What I eventually came to think of as the turning point in the case came that evening in the form of a phone call from Ivan Krassky’s wife.

  “Chris?” she said when I answered. “This is Evelyn Krassky, Ivan’s wife. Did the hospital tell you anything yesterday?”

  “Nothing at all. The woman in the business office said the records weren’t accessible on Saturday, and they were private besides. The message I got was that it was useless for me to come back.”

  “That’s what we thought would happen. We’ve been talking about nothing but that whole dreadful affair since you left.”

  “I’m sorry to have stirred it all up again.”

  “But I think we may be able to help you.”

  “That would be great,” I said.

  “We can’t go to my in-laws.”

  “I understand that.”

  “It’s too painful for them to talk about it, and I wouldn’t want them to think that we were interested in the money or thought that little Val might be alive. But we have a friend who’s a retired surgeon who practiced in that hospital. Ivan called him a little while ago. He said he’ll talk to you.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “He’ll be playing golf tomorrow morning, but if you can be here at eleven, I’ll drive you over to his house.”

  “Thank you, Evelyn. I’ll be there.”

  I hung up, totally forgetting that builders would appear tomorrow morning to start their work, that they might have questions to ask me, that I might regret not being around. I was all caught up in the great chase.

  I’m not quite sure how I got out the door on Monday morning. The builders were as good as their word, arriving before eight while I was out for my daily walk, which Dr. Campbell highly approved of. I had bought some crackers like Car
lotta’s to stabilize my queasy morning stomach, and having nibbled at one I left the house with a second one. Down the block Mel joined me.

  “I’m terrified all over again,” I said as we got in step. “It’s really happening.”

  “You talking about the baby or the addition?”

  “The addition. It’s more imminent and may take a bigger toll on me. My life won’t be my own anymore. My bedroom is disappearing, my kitchen won’t be the same, and my life is going to be full of strangers.”

  “And boy, are you going to be happy when it’s all done.”

  “I know.”

  “Have they given you a date?”

  “Yes, but everyone says not to believe it. I’m hoping it’s all done by Labor Day.”

  “That seems like adequate time. Is that their truck?”

  I looked up the block and sure enough, there was a maroon truck heading for my house. “That’s it,” I said. “I should go back.”

  “Calm down. You’ve got a competent husband back there who knows how to cope. Finish your walk. It’ll help you deal with your day.”

  I took a quick look back and saw the truck pull into our driveway. Then I did what my friend had suggested. I finished my walk.

  I arrived at Evelyn Krassky’s house a little before eleven, and she greeted me like an old friend. I had kept a box of crackers on the seat next to me as I drove, and from time to time I would eat half of one. By the time I got there, I was thirsty and the morning discomfort had passed completely.

  “The man we’re going to meet is Dr. Lyle Windham. He’s a real dear and I know you’ll love him. Lyle retired several years ago; he’s well into his seventies now. He told us he remembers the case of our nephew very well.”

  “Then he’s just the person I want to talk to.”

  “We can go on along now. He just wanted time to get home from the golf course. Come. We’ll take my car.”

  Dr. Windham’s house was almost hidden from the road behind a row of shrubs taller than I. We drove up a private drive that was more like a road to a large stone house that you could have put several of ours in. Evelyn left the car on a circle in front of the double doors, and we got out and rang the bell.

  There were effusive hellos and kisses when Mrs. Windham opened the door, then a more discreet shaking of hands when I was introduced.

  “Lyle’s out back,” our hostess said. “Would you ladies mind sitting on the terrace?”

  We both said we would prefer that to being inside, and Mrs. Windham led us through several rooms to French doors that opened onto a beautiful brick terrace where the silver-haired doctor sat reading the paper. He rose as we joined him, kissing Evelyn and shaking my hand with a firm grip. He was a tall, handsome man still wearing a green golfing shirt and looking about as fit and trim as a man half his age.

  We sat in patio chairs, and Mrs. Windham left us and returned a minute later with iced tea in tall glasses with fresh mint leaves and a platter of the kind of assorted cookies that are my downfall. I could see I was going to do no better at home than I had done in western New York with Carlotta.

  “Tell me how you’ve come to be interested in the death of Evelyn’s nephew,” the doctor said when we were settled.

  I sketched it out for him, the Valentine’s Day accident on Lake Erie, the surfacing of the two bodies, the questions about Val’s involvement in the murder of Matty and about Val’s disappearance. Then I told him about the birth certificate.

  “Well, I’ll do what I can to help. I wasn’t involved in the hospital’s financial settlement with Evelyn’s in-laws, and everything I know is hearsay, so I feel pretty free about telling you what I know.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. The hospital itself won’t tell me a thing.”

  “Which is right and proper. Now let me tell you what I know and how I know it.”

  I had my notebook open and I uncapped my pen. The doctor had bright blue eyes, and he kept them on me as though no one else were present. But Evelyn sat forward in her seat as he began to talk, and Mrs. Windham smiled as though she knew a secret and was way ahead of us.

  “I heard about the case because my best friend was a pediatrician at the hospital, and the Krassky boy had been his patient since birth. If my friend were alive, he could tell you chapter and verse—if he were free to—but I’m afraid we lost him a couple of years ago. The child, as I remember the story, had had several bouts with upper respiratory infections and had been brought into the emergency room on a couple of prior occasions, but this incident seemed worse than the others. Chuck—the pediatrician—decided to hospitalize him when the parents brought him in that afternoon. Chuck dashed over from his office to see him, got him going on antibiotics, put him in an oxygen tent—they don’t use masks with children—and got him stabilized in a couple of hours. His temperature went down, his breathing improved, he woke up and talked to his parents, who had been pretty panicky when they brought him in. But everyone calmed down, and Chuck told them to go home for the night; there was nothing to be gained by being there. They could come back first thing in the morning. So they left.”

  “Was there any private care for the child?” I asked.

  “There was, a registered nurse who did a lot of private nursing at the hospital. Don’t ask me for her name, because thirty years is a long time. She’s the person who discovered the child had died.”

  “What do you mean, ‘discovered’?”

  “He wasn’t being monitored—remember, this happened almost thirty years ago, and he had improved after being admitted—and when a nurse sits in a hospital room, she doesn’t keep her eyes on her patient every minute that she’s there. She also leaves the room from time to time to use the bathroom or stretch her legs, and she takes a break for a meal. Eight hours is a long time to sit.”

  “What happens when she leaves the room for lunch?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s an interesting thing,” Lyle Windham said, his voice becoming more conversational. “When a patient has no private nurse, the floor nurses stop in from time to time to check up on him. But when a private nurse is there, the floor nurses tend to ignore the patient completely. The private nurses know this, and when they leave the room for any period, they let the floor nurses know that they’re going down to the cafeteria and can be called if anything comes up.”

  “Then someone might look in on him once or twice while the private nurse is gone.”

  “Depending on how long she takes, half an hour or so, maybe less.”

  “So the story is, she left the room, and when she returned the boy was dead.”

  “That’s about it.”

  “She didn’t see him die.”

  “She said she wasn’t there when it happened.”

  “Was there anything suspicious about his death?”

  “Didn’t appear to be. He’d been admitted with pneumonia. That’s presumably what he died of.”

  “Presumably?”

  “There were some stories that surfaced later.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “The kindest version was that the boy received less than adequate care.”

  “And that means?”

  “That something was overlooked, that he should have been in intensive care.” The doctor sipped his iced tea and put the glass back on the little round table beside him.

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Frankly, no. Chuck was as careful a doctor as I have ever met. Still, everyone makes mistakes.”

  I wondered whether he was talking about himself when he said “everyone.” “You said that was the kindest version. Was there another one?”

  “Indeed there was. The poor nurse came in for a lot of flak. The family, of course, blamed her for leaving him, which she had a right to do, for not noticing that the boy wasn’t breathing easily. She said he was or she wouldn’t have left the room.”

  “Was she known in the hospital?”

  “Known and respected. She did duty there almost every night of
the week. If I’d needed a private nurse, I would have hired her myself. But, as I said, everyone makes mistakes.”

  I had the feeling he was trying to tell me something without saying it aloud, but I couldn’t proceed on innuendo. “Do you think she told the truth?”

  “I think so,” he said easily. “I don’t think she would have left the room if the boy had become agitated, if his breathing was labored. My best guess is that she would have called a doctor.”

  “I suppose nurses fall asleep on the job,” I suggested.

  “I suppose they do. It’s pretty boring work when you come down to it, and sitting in the half dark is pretty conducive to sleep.”

  “Are you suggesting there was a more sinister explanation for the boy’s death?”

  “There was, and I heard it.”

  Beside me, Evelyn Krassky drew in her breath. “Lyle, you don’t mean to say that someone killed that poor child?”

  “Evelyn, I’m just reporting on what I heard. I wasn’t there, Chuck wasn’t there; rumors circulated and I heard them. That doesn’t happen every time a patient dies. It happened that time.”

  “What was the rumor?” I asked.

  “It was said that someone on the floor provoked the child’s death.”

  It was a rather gentle way of saying that the boy had been murdered. A chill ran across my shoulders. “Did the parents get wind of that rumor?”

  “My gut tells me they didn’t or there would have been much more of a hullaballoo. They blamed Chuck, they blamed the hospital, and they blamed the private nurse. The medical record absolved Chuck, at least that’s the way the hospital saw it, and the nurse was adamant that there was nothing wrong with the boy the last time she saw him. My guess is that the hospital paid off because they wanted to stop the parents before they launched a thorough investigation.”

  “And did it stop them?”

  “It must have. The rumors died down or were replaced by others, perhaps a little spicier, a little more fun to talk about.”

  “Dr. Windham, was there a particular person who was rumored to have ‘provoked’ the child’s death?” I echoed his euphemism so as not to use the harsher word it implied.