The Valentine's Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  “Sure. Maybe you could bring me a piece of chocolate.”

  “I’d love to. See you Thursday.”

  “Don’t forget the chocolate.”

  I promised I wouldn’t. I hoped he wouldn’t forget our appointment.

  16

  Joseph and I go way back. I was fifteen, orphaned and frightened, when Aunt Meg took me to St. Stephen’s on a rainy night that I will never forget, to live and eventually to become a nun. My cousin Gene, her only child, retarded from birth and suffering a number of health problems, had become too much of a burden for her and Uncle Will to cope with, along with the added problem of my presence. I had known for some time I wanted to be a nun, but I was too young to enter a convent. However, St. Stephen’s understood my aunt’s and uncle’s terrible dilemma and accepted me, giving me a sanctuary I didn’t really want at that moment, but which I came to appreciate. And a large part of the reason was Sister Joseph, who took me under her wing and eventually became my spiritual director. I still consider her my closest friend, although we no longer see each other on a daily or even monthly basis.

  So it was with great eagerness that I dressed on Wednesday morning for my afternoon meeting with Joseph and Sister Cecelia. I had known Cecelia during my years at the convent, and I admired her. She was in nurses’ training now, preparing to bring her skills back to the convent when she graduated. It was a long time since I had seen her, before my marriage, when I had been living in Oakwood only a few months.

  I greeted the workmen, got the house in order, and put my suitcase out on my bed to prepare for the next trip to Buffalo. I wasn’t feeling very optimistic about Stanley Kazmarek. If his memory failed, the only other source would be the tenants who had moved out, but the likelihood that they would have any clear recollection of people they might have met only once—and, it occurred to me, might not have met at all if the apartment were vacant when they first saw it—was very small. But you take what you can, and certainly, that birth certificate for Val had yielded much more information than I could have imagined when we first looked at it.

  With my suitcase mostly packed, I went downstairs and had a light lunch, topping it off with milk. I had to buy some chocolate before I left for Buffalo tomorrow, and I wouldn’t know till tonight when I was leaving, so today was the day to do it. I said good-bye to the builders, who seemed to be making enormous progress in framing the addition, and drove off, stopping at a pretty little shop that carried all kinds of candy that they made in their own kitchen in the back. I indulged in a pound of their milk chocolate chunks, which I thought should satisfy any craving. As soon as I was on my way, I began to have second thoughts. Maybe Mr. Kazmarek suffered from a disease that prevented him from eating sweets, and he asked people who didn’t know about it to help him break the rules. Well, I would just have to make inquiries before I presented him with my gift, and if he couldn’t eat it safely, Carlotta would have to help me out.

  Sister Cecelia lived in a small apartment, over on the east side of Manhattan near the hospital where she was studying. I parked in a garage and walked around the block to make sure I wouldn’t be early and disturb their conversation. At two I announced myself at the door and took the elevator up.

  “Chris,” Joseph said happily, standing in the hall and waiting for me as I stepped off the elevator. “You look wonderful. We’ve been waiting for you to have some tea and hear your story.”

  “It’s quite a story. Cecelia, it’s good to see you after so long. How’s nursing coming along?”

  “Cecelia is getting an A average,” Joseph said with pride. “We couldn’t ask for more. I’m afraid someone will steal her away when she’s through.”

  “No chance of that,” Cecelia said. “I really can’t wait to get back to St. Stephen’s. I miss it terribly.”

  We sat at her kitchen table while they had tea, and we all talked about old times and mutual friends. When the tea and talk were done, Cecelia excused herself.

  “Now that Joseph knows I’m getting straight A’s, I have an image to protect. If you don’t mind, as much as I’d like to hear about your fascinating murder, I’m going to my room and hit the books.”

  When she was gone, Joseph said, “She’s doing wonderfully. I think this is something she’s wanted to do all her life, and now that it’s happening, she couldn’t be happier. But she does miss the community.”

  “I’ll drop by when I’m in the city,” I said. “I’ll enjoy seeing her.”

  “That would be very nice, Chris. Now, I’ve got my pen and paper handy, and I’m ready.”

  I began with my first meeting with Carlotta French in February, about a week and a half after the Valentine’s Day accident. I had my notebook open, my chronology in front of me, all the questions, all the answers, all the things that just didn’t make sense. I went through it all, conscious that Joseph was taking notes. She stopped me a few times to ask a question and then told me to continue before I lost the flow of the narrative.

  Finally, I turned my last page and looked up. “Tomorrow, I’m flying back to Buffalo, and the first thing I’ll do is interview the man who owned the house where Val lived as a high-school student. I have no idea where I’ll be going after that.”

  “Nor do I,” Joseph said, “but you were right. This is certainly fascinating. An apparent drowning after what seems like a reckless trek across a frozen lake, and you’ve uncovered a possible thirty-year-old murder. Amazing.”

  “Why was that child killed, Joseph?” I asked.

  “Something is tickling my brain. Let it stew awhile and I’ll come back to it. Tell me again about the red scarf that was found on the ice.”

  “Carlotta said she and Val had given it to Matty for Christmas because he was a hunter, and I gather hunters have to wear red so they’re not mistaken for deer.”

  “So the scarf belonged to the man who was shot.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Next thing. You said that one of the wives—one of the widows, as it turns out—had a funeral for her husband before the bodies surfaced.”

  “That was Bambi Thayer, Clark’s wife. I asked her about it. She said she knew he had drowned, and she wanted to go through the service at the time of his death.”

  “But Carlotta was sure that her husband was still alive?”

  “She felt that Val was too smart to walk across the ice, that he wouldn’t have taken that kind of chance.”

  “And the other one, Annie Franklin, what did she think?”

  “She thought Matty had drowned with the others, but she waited till his body appeared to have a funeral. I gather Matty was the kind of guy who loved a challenge, and it sounded as though Clark could have been talked into doing almost anything that Matty wanted him to.”

  “But not Val.”

  “Not if you believe Carlotta.” I looked at her. “Joseph, how much do we really know about what another person thinks?”

  “Very little, when we see how wrong people can be about each other.”

  “I’ve known you more than half my life and there are many things I anticipate in how you act, how you respond, what your concerns are, but you continue to surprise me. You’re not completely predictable any more than anyone else is. Sometimes, just when I expect you to utter a certain phrase, something entirely different comes out of your mouth. Carlotta believes that her husband didn’t walk across the lake because that’s what she wants to believe about him. It fits her image of the man she married, the man she wants him to be.”

  Joseph put her pen down, clasped her hands, and rested her chin on them for a moment. Then she looked across the small table at me. “What if Jack were having dinner with two old friends on a winter’s night near Lake Erie, and one of the others suggested walking across the lake? Would he go? Could he be persuaded to go?”

  That stopped me because I saw myself in Carlotta’s position. “Not today,” I said. “Ten years ago, I think he would have taken the dare. Maybe even five years ago. But not now.”

>   “You mean he’s grown up.”

  “He’s grown up, he has me to come home to, he’s in law school. He sees himself differently from five or ten years ago.”

  “But you can’t be sure.”

  “Of course I can’t be sure. And if I were out of town and they were very persuasive—” I didn’t like to think about it. Here I was admitting it was possible, while Carlotta was absolutely sure. Val could not have joined them. Val wasn’t crazy. “But I take your point. No matter how sure Carlotta is that Val didn’t go, she could be wrong. His body may turn up tomorrow.”

  “With or without a bullet hole,” Joseph said.

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “And if it’s without, we still don’t know who killed Matty.” She wrote something that she finished with a question mark. “Let’s see what we have and then let me ask you some questions. Two or three men took a walk across Lake Erie and two or three had an accident, probably during a shooting incident, and fell into the lake and drowned. A red scarf belonging to Matty Franklin was found on the ice the next day. One wife immediately had a funeral for her husband, the other didn’t. Nothing happened for three months, when two bodies surfaced, Matty’s with a bullet. Am I right that no weapon was found?”

  “Right.”

  “This is the point that you entered the picture. You learned that the men discussed the trek over dinner, but that neither Matty nor Clark returned home, presumably to give either an opportunity to get a gun. Meaning that one of them had it with him, or that Val was the man with the gun.

  “Looking at other things, you discovered three bank accounts with over ninety thousand dollars in each one, all of them in Val’s name alone. You learned that Val had secretly written a will, but the lawyer will disclose none of its provisions because there is no proof that Val is dead. In following up on Carlotta’s theory that Val has gone off to hide with old friends, you checked a year’s worth of telephone bills and found only business calls made by him. In other words, if there were people outside his milieu whom he kept in contact with, he didn’t do it by telephone.”

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  “He seems to have had a good relationship with his business partner, and I gather no one has come calling for the repayment of old debts.”

  “No one that Carlotta has told me about.”

  “But you’ve uncovered two rather mysterious facts: a million-dollar life insurance policy with Matty Franklin as the beneficiary, and a birth certificate in Val’s name that records the birth of a child who seems to have died almost thirty years ago at the age of six or seven. We still don’t know any more about that policy, do we?”

  “No,” I said. “I can tell you it was a shock to Carlotta and she’s really angry about it. But no one will ever collect unless there’s proof that Val died before Matty.”

  Joseph smiled. “Carlotta probably considers it money thrown away, and I would imagine the premiums were rather a lot of money every year. A million dollars may not be what it used to be, but it’s still a hefty sum. All right. The other mystery is Val’s birth certificate and everything you’ve dug up in Connecticut. It would seem that we don’t really know whether Val is the person whose birth is recorded on the certificate. If he is, it appears that he didn’t die of pneumonia at age six, but was somehow hustled out of the hospital by a devious woman who kept him as her son, eventually moving to Buffalo—why Buffalo?—where he went to school. And if that child did die, as seems likely from what the surgeon told you, then what?”

  “That’s what I’m here for, Joseph. A few good answers to a few good questions.”

  “I don’t have any answers, Chris, good or bad. What I do have is some work for you, besides what you’ll do tomorrow in Buffalo when you interview the owner of that house. Let me tell you what’s been tickling my brain since you brought up the birth certificate.

  “I have heard—and if I have, I’m sure many knowledgeable people have—that people trying to change their identity for whatever reason have been known to go to a cemetery and find the name of a person of the same sex and a similar age and assume that person’s identity.”

  “I’ve heard about that, too,” I said. “I gather if you write for a birth certificate, there’s a good chance you’ll get it because there’s no cross-referencing of births and deaths.”

  “Which is not surprising. A person born in New York may die in Hawaii. Birth certificates aren’t issued by the federal government but by local governments. I suppose one day all this will be computerized, along with everything else, and all the great mysteries of life will disappear, but until that time this kind of deception is available to anyone with a stamp.

  “Now let’s look at this woman who was seen in the little boy’s hospital room about the time he died. She was not American-born. Several people noticed an accent. Whether it was German or French or Russian may be important later, but for the moment what strikes me as important is that she was not native-born. Let us suppose she has a son, a little boy about four or five or six years old. Maybe she left him behind in the old country; maybe she had him with her, perhaps illegally. She goes to work in a hospital, taking a night job when there are fewer people around to observe her when she takes a break or goes to lunch. What she’s looking for is a record of the death of a boy about the age of her own child.”

  “Joseph, this is very disturbing.”

  “Disturbing, but is it outrageous from the point of view of reasonableness?”

  I shook my head. “Go on.”

  “Maybe she can’t find exactly the documentation she wants; maybe the records are locked up at night. Maybe she finds something but it isn’t quite right. And then there’s another possibility—no, let me leave that. One night while she’s on duty, the perfect child is brought onto her floor with a medical problem that is potentially fatal. Perhaps the child even looks like hers.”

  “Joseph, this is terrible.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s dark and ugly, but from what you’ve told me, I think something dark and ugly may have happened in the life of Valentine Krassky who did or did not cross Lake Erie on Valentine’s Day.”

  “So you think this nurse’s aide murdered the Krassky boy and transformed her son into Valentine Krassky.”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “Then really all she needed was the fact that the boy was dead and the information on his medical chart.”

  “Which probably contained his parents’ names, their address, maybe even the hospital the boy was born in if he was born in that same hospital.”

  “He probably was,” I said. “They were living in the same house. They didn’t move until after the hospital settled with them.”

  “So instead of waiting for the perfect child, this woman produced one.”

  “I think I will have a cup of tea,” I said, somewhat defiantly. I poured for both of us, squeezed a little lemon in mine, and sipped it. “She had to get away from Connecticut, didn’t she?”

  “I would think so. She couldn’t chance putting the boy into a local school where someone would recognize the name.”

  “If this is true, I wonder whether Val had any inkling of it.”

  “We’ll never know if he doesn’t turn up alive. And even if he did, Chris, he’s in no way to blame for what his mother may have done.”

  “What a terrible secret,” I said.

  “If true,” Joseph reminded me.

  “And if it’s true, does it connect with what happened on the lake that night almost thirty years later?”

  “That may be the harder question. But I have some suggestions which will mean some additional work.” She looked down at the pages she had filled during our talk. “I know that the hospital records are closed to you, but I think you might go back to Connecticut and walk through the cemetery where the original Val Krassky is buried.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “I’m not sure, but I would take a look at the names and dates on the tombston
es.”

  “OK.” I made a note, wondering when I would have time to get back there.

  “And then you should think about the wife who made the funeral and the wife who didn’t make the funeral. In fact, find out what you can about both wives.”

  “All right.”

  “And now I’m going to ask a question that I think nobody has asked so far because it sounds almost foolish. You know the old children’s riddle: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ And the answer is always: ‘To get to the other side.’ I think the assumption, and very likely the correct assumption, about why those three men walked across the ice to Canada is reflected in the old joke. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe you could ask the question: ‘Why did they cross the lake to Canada?’ ”

  “It was a narrow strip,” I said, giving her an answer she didn’t want, “the shortest distance between two points. They could cross the border without going through customs. It was a lark.”

  “Perhaps it was.” Joseph moved a page and looked at another. “Those phone bills you checked. Carlotta was able to identify all the people Val called, is that right?”

  “Yes, and none were likely ‘safe houses’ for him. They were business associates. He didn’t spend a lot of time on the phone with old buddies, and he had no relatives that she knew of. Also, there were no calls attributable to him after Valentine’s Day.”

  “We wouldn’t expect his mother to stay around if she had killed a child.”

  “Hardly.”

  “But in any case, Carlotta checked out people across the country.”

  “She did,” I said. “Mostly her friends, but she checked after he disappeared.”

  “Chris, there are other ways to make phone calls if you don’t want your wife to know you’re making them.”

  I stared at her. People put calls on the same credit cards they use to buy clothes and meals with. As a person who has been unrelenting in not wanting to possess a credit card, I sometimes forget that most of the world is not like me. “I’ll check that,” I said.