The Valentine's Day Murder

by Lee Harris

“But the children,” Carlotta said.

  “She must have figured they were asleep.”

  At least one of them hadn’t been, the boy who told me his father had come in to say good night to him. “When did you know she was following you?” I asked.

  “Not for hours. We were most of the way across the lake. Matty was leading, I was bringing up the rear. All of a sudden there was a shot, and something skittered along the ice next to my leg. We turned around and flashed the light over the ice.”

  “You had a flashlight with you?”

  “Matty had picked it up when he went home. It was a good one, very bright with a wide sweep. He turned it toward the direction we’d come from, and there she was. Matty said, ‘Shit, I think it’s Annie,’ and we turned back to find her. He thought something had happened at home, maybe the kids. So back we went. And when we got to where we could see her clearly, we saw the gun in her hand.”

  “My God,” Carlotta said.

  “That’s how I felt. I knew who the gun was meant for.”

  “But why?”

  “Because she knew I was a ghost. She came from Connecticut, not where my mother had worked but close enough, and she was a cousin of the Krassky family. She knew about the kid who died in the hospital, and when she came to Buffalo for a job, she met me and she put everything together.”

  “Was she blackmailing you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but not very actively. I gave her money from time to time, but not a lot. She wanted a big lump sum, and I said I couldn’t do it. So we agreed I’d take out a life insurance policy with Matty as the beneficiary. This was around the time they were getting married. I gave her proof of the policy and proof that I kept the premiums paid. But then Matty lost his job last year, and she wanted a big sum to get him started on something new.”

  “I assume the threat was that she’d tell what she knew about your mother.”

  “Exactly. Her father’s a hotshot lawyer. She threatened an international search for my mother. And that would embarrass me, and through me, Carlotta. She would also blow my cover and possibly get me in trouble with Immigration. She was holding all these things over my head and becoming more and more demanding. I didn’t want Carlotta to know, and the longer I kept it from her, the less I wanted her to find out. I should have told you,” he said, looking at her.

  “So she decided to kill you to inherit the million dollars,” I said.

  “That must have been her plan. She must have been following us, and thought she could get off one shot and then turn back while the guys were looking after me. But she missed, and then she started to go nuts. She ranted about a relationship between us. It was crazy, but I figured it was for Clark’s benefit, maybe for Matty’s, too. She would shoot me because I’d done something terrible to her. Therefore I deserved to die.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We all saw it coming. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Matty started moving towards her and Clark did, too, but she kept that gun right on me. I zigged and zagged a little, and then, just as I sensed she was about to shoot, Matty lunged at her, grabbing for the gun. When it went off, it hit him instead of me.”

  “How terrible.”

  “He got a handful of the scarf. I can still see it flying. The force of the bullet threw him way back, and when he went down on the ice, it cracked and he dropped into the water. But the scarf fell near Annie and ended up on the ice.”

  “And the gun?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think it may have gone down with Matty.”

  “How did Clark drown?”

  “He was right near where Matty hit the ice. I think he was just drawn into the water with Matty.”

  “Which left you and Annie on the ice together.”

  “On dangerously thin ice. It was dark. The flashlight was gone. Matty had tried to use it to deflect the gun, and I don’t know what happened to it. Matty and Clark were gone. I called, but there wasn’t even a splash after they went down. Annie screamed Matty’s name once, and then she just whimpered a lot. Then she was gone. It was snowing by then. I knew it was hopeless to try to find Matty and Clark. I’d end up dead, too. So I turned and went back, trying to follow our trail before it got snowed over. I didn’t know if Annie still had the gun, so I had to be careful to stay out of her way. She must have been ahead of me the whole time, because I never caught up with her. By the time I got back to the beach, it was really snowing. I could see Annie’s car parked next to Matty’s, but I took a long detour so it wouldn’t look as if I’d had anything to do with Matty’s car. And then I thought I’d like to be considered dead to give me some time to think. So I circled back to the car—Annie was gone by then—and tried all the doors. The hatchback was open, and I climbed in and dropped my watch in the backseat as if I’d left it there to keep it safe while we crossed the lake. Then I backed out and found a bus to Buffalo. I think you know the rest.”

  I did. Most of it. “Did you talk to Annie?”

  “I called her from here before I had the phone disconnected. She answered, but I didn’t say anything. She sounded pretty agitated, so I hung on till she hung up. I never said a word, but I sensed she knew who was calling. I wanted her to know I was still out there, even if she had her story put together for that night.”

  “Val,” I said, “something is troubling me. You said Annie knew you were a ‘ghost.’ But Matty and Clark were ‘ghosts,’ too. How could she disclose what she knew about you without the same thing coming out about her very own husband?”

  “She didn’t know about her very own husband. She didn’t know about Clark. All she knew about was me.”

  “You never told her about the other two?”

  “Why should I? It was their secret as much as mine was my secret. I’m not a blackmailer. And now that the Wall is down in Germany, my mother’s probably pretty easy to find if anyone wants to put a little effort into it.”

  I found I was filled with admiration for this man. What had happened had been imposed upon him by a ruthless mother and backed up by a ruthless grandmother. He had tried to live with fictions and restrictions his family had saddled him with, and yet he remained honorable, loyal, and loving to his cousins and to the grandmother who was the architect of his shadowy life.

  “When did you learn about your identity?” I asked.

  “We knew about it as we grew up. We never used our real names, even when we were alone. We only spoke English. We knew we were different, but we learned how to be real Americans and blend in.”

  “When did you find out about what happened in the hospital in Connecticut?”

  His eyes flicked over to his grandmother. “I was in my twenties. I was single. Annie walked into my life and hit me with the story. I knew I hadn’t been born Valentine Krassky, that it was the name of someone my age who had died as a child. Suddenly she seemed to know more about it than I did. I didn’t know what to say. I knew the birth certificate I used came from Connecticut, but I never imagined there was a scandal attached to it. I drove across the border and asked my grandparents.”

  “And that was the first you knew?” Carlotta said.

  “That was it. My grandmother had said my mother went back because she had problems living here. I told her what Annie said. She said she knew—”

  “I told him I knew about the story in the hospital,” Mrs. Winkel interjected. She would put the right face on the narrative. “The story didn’t matter. Nobody could prove a thing. But it was too bad this girl came along that guessed some of it. And then she married Matty.”

  “And never knew her husband was also a ghost,” I said. It seemed almost unbelievable, but Annie had surely not wandered through cemeteries, looking for names to match with living men. “Have you seen your mother since, Val?”

  “Once. I took a trip abroad after Annie told me. I asked my mother for the truth because I wanted to know it for myself. What she said didn’t convince me. I never saw her again.”

  “Did Matty know what Ann
ie had found out about you?”

  “I never told him. I didn’t think Annie’d ever talk to him about it, and I thought the less said, the better off we all were.”

  “So Matty never knew you had a life insurance policy for a million dollars with him as the beneficiary.”

  “He never knew. That was between Annie and me.”

  I looked down at my notebook. There were a few unanswered questions, but I didn’t think Val or his grandmother could help me with them. “I think that’s about it,” I said. “What are you planning to do now?”

  “I think I’ll have to turn myself in. I’ve been wrestling with this for three months. I owe it to Jake, and I owe it to Carlotta.”

  “You owe it to yourself, Val,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll be vindicated.”

  He didn’t look very sure himself, and his grandmother started to put up an argument against his returning to the States. But he went upstairs, packed the small number of clothes he had bought since his arrival in February, and came back down. He was ready to do it.

  26

  The departure from the little house in Canada left all of us in tears. Despite my harsh feelings about Val’s grandmother, I recognized that the woman had devoted her life to her three grandsons, that she had accepted them in their times of need, ministered to them, and asked for nothing in return. I could scarcely imagine the pain she felt at the death of the other two grandsons.

  She was tough till the last second, the first tears materializing as Val let her go at the front door. A big woman, she seemed almost small in his arms. We walked down the path to the street, then around the corner to the car. Carlotta drove and I sat in the back, thinking it all over.

  On the trip home, Val said he had taken his grandmother to Toronto the previous week. He had looked for a job there, feeling the time had come to venture out of the house and make a new life for himself. The young girl who had opened the door for us had been exactly what she claimed to be, a neighbor who was cat-sitting. She had never seen Val and had been evasive because she thought our questions were strange.

  It was much too late that night to call Detective Murdock, but I reached him first thing in the morning.

  “Anything interesting to tell me?” he asked.

  “A number of things. One, I have a witness you will want to talk to, and two, I know who killed Matty Franklin.”

  “OK, Ms. Bennett,” he said in a humoring tone of voice. “When can I see your witness?”

  “As soon as you come to Mrs. Krassky’s house. We’ll be waiting for you.”

  He promised to be there within the hour, and he was as good as his word. The look on his face when I introduced Valentine Krassky was worth the wait.

  Carlotta and I sat in the adjoining family room where we could hear the interrogation, such as it was, but we couldn’t see the men’s faces. Carlotta looked spellbound, her face toward the open door to the living room, while I sat with my back to it. All the questions had to do with the events of February fourteenth and the weeks that had followed. Val said he had stayed with “friends” in Canada, and Murdock didn’t challenge that or ask for any elaboration. He was interested in finding a killer, and the peripheral facts, the ones that had led me to Val, were of no interest to him.

  Finally it sounded as though the interview was coming to an end. Murdock came into the family room and nodded rather gallantly at both of us. “Ms. Bennett, I owe you a very big thank-you.”

  “You’re more than welcome, Detective. I’d like to make a suggestion before you leave. Val isn’t sure what happened to the murder weapon. On the chance that Mrs. Franklin may have carried it home with her, I’d like to suggest you get a warrant and search her house. I also think it might be useful to take some photos she has in her album. You’ll see that she’s wearing the red scarf, not her husband.”

  “It was my understanding that the scarf was his.”

  “It was given to him as a Christmas present, but when did that ever stop a wife from ‘borrowing’ something of her husband’s?”

  He smiled. “You mean like my favorite black cashmere sweater that I haven’t worn since two days after my birthday because my wife preempted it?”

  “Just like that.”

  “What was it about the scarf that got you digging?”

  “Several things. The fact that it just lay on the ice, that it wasn’t soaked or scrunched up. If Matty or Clark had been using it to hoist themselves out of the water and failed, the scarf would most likely have gone down with them. If that’s your lifeline, you hang onto it forever. But it wasn’t. It was just pulled off someone, accidentally. When Val described what had happened out there, I understood how. But I was already curious about that scarf. It just didn’t seem right that it was lying so pristinely on the ice. Then, when I picked Mrs. Krassky up yesterday to take her to the airport, she was wearing a beautiful wool shirt of her husband’s. That stuck with me. Mrs. Franklin showed me some photos yesterday afternoon, and then I saw who wore the scarf, and I guessed she had been there that night.” I didn’t add what I’d learned about where Annie came from and what she knew.

  “I’ll get that warrant.”

  “Detective Murdock, I’d really like to be there when you talk to Annie Franklin.”

  He thought a moment. “I think that can be arranged. I owe you one for your help. Stay by the phone.”

  I promised I would.

  * * *

  I went back upstairs and stuffed back in my bag the few things I had unpacked. It was winding down, my last case, and I could feel the letdown settle in. When I went back downstairs I could hear the muffled voices of my hosts, unintelligible questions and answers, an occasional laugh, as they worked their way through the three months they had lived separately.

  “Chris? Come join us for a cup of tea.”

  I walked into the breakfast room where they sat at the round table, tea and newspapers scattered between them. “Maybe a glass of milk,” I said, passing into the kitchen to find it for myself. I poured myself a glass and carried it to the table. “Have you talked to Jake yet?”

  “First thing this morning.”

  “I bet he’s happy.”

  “Almost as happy as I am.”

  “Tell me, you must have thought a lot about Carlotta. Did you have any idea what you would do?”

  “I knew I’d contact her, but I wasn’t sure when. I felt I should be working before I got in touch. I spent the first few weeks in a kind of haze. I had all these assets, but they were all in my name only. If I tried to use them, I’d blow my cover. I didn’t know what to do. Finally I decided I just had to start over. It left Jake in a difficult position, but I was afraid if I came forward I’d face a murder charge and no one would believe Annie was guilty. I just spent every day trying to work out a way of getting free of what had happened.”

  “I know you were helping out your grandmother and paying Annie when she demanded it. Did you ever give money to Clark and his family?”

  “He wouldn’t take it; I tried. I felt I was the senior member of the group and I had to look out for the others.

  I made enough that I could afford to. Annie came to me a lot for handouts, but when I tried to even things out and give something to Clark, he wouldn’t hear of it. Clark was a very straight arrow, younger than his official age, a guy who just wanted to do his thing and be with his family. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time on Valentine’s Day. I guess we all were.”

  “And his mother and Matty’s was long dead.”

  “As long as I can remember.”

  About one o’clock Detective Murdock called. He and a sheriff’s deputy were on their way to the Franklin house. I could meet them there.

  I went alone. Annie wasn’t home. Murdock found a key in a potted plant near the side door, and I followed them into the house. I kept my hands to myself, but showed Murdock where the photo albums were. He collected several pictures that showed Annie wearing the red scarf, then he and the deputy systematically loo
ked for the missing gun while I watched them work. I wanted them to find that gun. Val’s story was believable, and the pictures with the red scarf were nice to look at, but there’s nothing like a weapon to seal the fate of a shooter.

  It wasn’t mixed in with Matty’s hunting guns. It wasn’t in the basement where Matty kept his tools and garden equipment. It wasn’t in the garage or in the car or in any of the drawers in the large family room.

  Finally I followed the men up to the second floor to Annie’s beautiful bedroom. There was no gun in either of the night tables, or in any of her dresser drawers. It wasn’t in the closet, and there was no obvious place in the bathroom that it could have been hidden.

  I looked around the room. “Did you try Matty’s chest?” I asked.

  “Just about to,” the deputy said. “You’d think if she kept a gun, she’d have it next to the bed where she could reach for it.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t for protection,” I said.

  They looked at me, but I added nothing. Maybe Annie had planned this for years, or at least thought about it. Maybe she had a gun so she could kill Val when the time was right, and for no other reason.

  They started with the top of the chest of drawers. Matty’s clothes were still in there, as though he might return tonight and need a fresh pair of socks and a clean set of underwear. They went slowly down, drawer by drawer. I looked at my watch, knowing that Annie would have to return soon, that her children were getting out of school, that an arrest could hardly stick if it were her word against his.

  “Got something.” It was Murdock’s voice. He was down on his knees at the lowest drawer. He pulled at something, then brought out an object covered with a man’s old shirt. Carefully unwrapping it, he held it out for us to see. It was a handgun.

  Annie was like a mad cat. She stormed into the house just as we were about to go outside and wait for her. The warrant made no difference; Murdock’s courtesy counted for nothing.

  “How dare you!” she shouted. “What are you doing in my house?”

  “We’re executing a legal search warrant, Mrs. Franklin,” Murdock said.