by Lee Harris
“There is evidence,” I said, “that she killed the last of the three boys to hurry along the process.”
“Is this what you came here to tell me?”
“I came here to find out if Val is still alive. His body has not been found.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But she did know, and I had to get it out of her. “Is Mr. Winkel at home?”
“Mr. Winkel died three years ago.”
So there was a Mr. Winkel. And maybe that could explain something that had confused me. “Did Clark live with Mr. Winkel?” I asked. “I know that you and the other two boys lived in Stanley Kazmarek’s house in Buffalo, over near Statin.”
“Where do you get these things? Where do you get this nonsense from?”
“Bennett High School had the address, and then I met Mr. Kazmarek and he told me. And I talked to a neighbor’s son who was friends with Matty. Did you call the boys Matty and Val or did you call them by their birth names?”
“Get out of my house.”
“I can’t go. I have to know about Val.”
“Why? Are you his wife?”
“I’m his wife.” Carlotta stood and faced the old woman. “And I love him. I don’t care if his mother was a killer. He’s my husband, and I want to spend the rest of my life with him.”
I think I suspected that he was alive and in the house when we walked down the street and I saw all the lights on. I became more certain when I saw the old, worn furniture and heard that Mr. Winkel was not alive. Like the nuns at St. Stephen’s who counted every penny, this was not a woman who would leave lights on if she weren’t in a room. The girl who had been cat-sitting had left the house dark when she locked the door. If lights were on upstairs, someone was there.
I turned to Carlotta. “I think he’s upstairs.”
“Val? You think Val’s up there?”
“I do.”
She lost her color, and for a moment I thought she might faint. But she steadied herself on a chair, then turned and looked for the stairs, which were against the left wall. She walked over and stood looking up. “Val?” she called shakily. “Val, it’s me, Carlotta.” There wasn’t a sound. “Please come down and talk to me. I love you. I don’t care what happened on the ice. I don’t care who killed Matty. I don’t care if your mother killed someone. I’m your wife, and I can’t live without you.” There were tears on her cheeks, and my own eyes were misting over.
I was standing beside her now, and she looked at me as though I could make it happen, make him be alive, make him come down the stairs. I touched her shoulder and nodded.
“Please, Val,” she called. “Whatever has to be done, we can do it together. You have to come down.”
There was a sound then, the squeak of a spring, a heavy footstep. My heart was beating as fast as I was sure Carlotta’s was. She gasped as whoever it was began to descend the stairs.
When Val reached the bottom step, he and his wife wrapped their arms around each other, crying. I turned away, my own tears spilling over. In the little living room, Mrs. Winkel had stood and was looking out the window, her back to the emotional scene at the foot of the stairs. All the secrets she had kept so diligently for so many years were out in the open now. I wondered how she would handle it.
I went over and stood beside her. “It’s for the best,” I said.
“No,” she said, “it’s all over. Where are my boys? Where are my beautiful boys? Dead in that cold lake, and I am dead with them.”
24
“I killed Matty,” the big, bearded man at the kitchen table said. The beard was new and vaguely red, hinting at a deep rusty color. He looked thinner than in his pictures and older than thirty-five. But there was no doubt that seeing his wife had revived his spirits. He held her to him, looked at her face again and again as though to renew its image in his mind. “It was an accident, but I did it.”
“Whose gun was it?” I asked. We had all been introduced, and the grandmother had made coffee and cut a cake but would not join us at the table.
“Matty’s. He stopped at home after we had dinner at Giordano’s. He must have picked it up then.”
“Who was he going to shoot?” Carlotta asked.
Val shook his head. “It’s complicated. There’s a lot I never told you. I got the gun away from him and it went off. The ice was thin and he went down. Clark tried to help, but he went in, too.”
“Where’s the gun now?” I asked.
“I got rid of it.”
“When did you leave your watch in the car?” I asked.
“After the accident. I wanted people to think I’d gone down with the other two. The back of the car was open. I climbed in just far enough to drop it on the backseat. Then I got a bus to Buffalo and changed for a bus to Canada. I’ve been here ever since.”
“If only you had let me know,” Carlotta said.
“I couldn’t. They might have checked the phone for incoming and outgoing calls. I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Did you call Jake?” I asked.
He gave me a long, sad look. “I called him, but I didn’t say anything. I hoped he would understand. I don’t know if he did.”
“I don’t know either. He never said anything.”
“How did you trace me here?”
“I found this number on last year’s phone bills. Jake stalled for a while—he didn’t want me to see them—but eventually he gave them to me. My husband’s an NYPD detective and he was able to get the location.”
“But we disconnected the phone on February fifteenth.”
“It’s still listed in this year’s Cole’s directory. Once a record of information has been made, it doesn’t just disappear.”
He shook his head. “It’s not so easy to lose yourself.”
It was the opposite of what I had said to Jack over the weekend. “Val, I’d like to hear the story, the whole story.”
“I told you. I killed Matty by accident. There isn’t anything else.”
“Were Matty and Clark your brothers?”
“So you know that, too. They were my cousins. They were brothers.”
“When did you come to Canada for the first time?”
“When I was a kid. I’m not sure of the year. We’d been learning English for a long time. I have very vague memories of the sea voyage. My clearest recollections begin in Canada, and then in the States when we moved.”
It didn’t sound unreasonable. “How did your family tell you about your new name?”
“It was like a game at first. Then they explained it was very serious, that I was really Val Krassky, that my original name had been the game. When I got older, they told me the truth, but by then there wasn’t much I could do about it. I understood that we had had to leave East Germany for our own good, that everyone in my family had made tremendous sacrifices so that we could come here. I knew I was named for someone who was about my age and who had died, and that the same was true of my cousins. No one except for the three of us, our grandparents, and my mother knew the real truth. We made up stories to tell our wives, but that’s all they were, stories.”
“Jake said you seemed to fall off the world when you left school for holidays.”
“I did. I went to Canada to visit my grandparents. Jake never had a phone number for me or an address until I was on my own.”
“Val,” I said, “you’re leaving out a lot that you know. I’m sure you know why that gun was on the ice in February.”
“I told you; it’s complicated. And it doesn’t matter. I ended up causing the death of my closest friends, who happened to be my cousins.”
“Did it have something to do with the insurance policy Carlotta found in your safe deposit box?”
“It was a personal thing,” he said. “That’s all I can say.”
“Tell me about the three bankbooks in your desk drawer.”
“One was for Carlotta, one was for Clark, and one was for my grandmother. It’s all d
esignated in my will.”
“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.
25
“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.”