“Yeah.” I hammered the throttle. The engine sang and the car flew. “This morning when I called you. I didn’t tell you everything.”
I had told Roxy I was coming back to Hartford and that I needed to meet her. I hadn’t given her any details because I didn’t want to listen to her try to stop me. I also didn’t like the idea of speaking to anyone on the phone about what had happened to me or about my godfather’s death. If I were asking any questions about either subject, I wanted to be able to shine a flashlight in the other person’s eyes so I could see what was going on behind them.
I gave her an abbreviated version of the previous night’s events. She interrupted with a series of mild exclamations but otherwise listened until I was done.
“And that’s it?” Roxy said. “That’s everything?”
She asked the question in a tone that suggested I’d failed to mention something obvious. I quickly replayed what I’d told her in my mind.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s everything.”
“No. It’s not everything. What you haven’t told me yet is that you called the cops. If not last night then this morning. Tell me you called the cops, Diana.”
Diana was an anagram for Nadia. Roxy had figured it out during PLAST camp and decided it would be my nickname. I secretly loved it at the time. It made me feel popular and glamorous. It made me feel that I was more assimilated and American, which I wanted above everything else.
Now I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it was a sweet reminder of the times Roxy had been nice to me when we were kids. On the other hand, I felt hopelessly unworthy of sharing the name of an immortal princess. The thing with nicknames, though, is that once they stick, there’s nothing you can do about them.
“No,” I said. “I did not go to the cops.”
“Why not?’
“That would be the wrong thing to do. Come on, Rox. You know that.”
“If you report it, they’ll arrest Donnie. They’ll get him off the street. Otherwise, that sick bastard is coming after you. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know that. I also know that it’s not only Donnie I need to worry about. I doubt he’s in this alone.”
“Have you talked to your mother or brother about this?”
“No.”
“Did you at least call them?”
I tried to look cool, but I swallowed before I could form a single word. “Of course I called. The question isn’t whether I called them, the question is whether they picked up or called back.”
“And did they?”
It was my turn to fire Roxy a disapproving glare for even asking. Of course they hadn’t called back. They both hated me.
Roxy shook her head. “You’ve got to go to the police. You’ve got to go now.”
“The number one rule is to stay inside the community,” I said. “You know that. The minute I go outside the community for help all bets are off.”
“But what if all bets are off already?”
“If Donnie wanted to kill me, he would have done it in the van. All he was doing was scaring me.”
“Yeah. By breaking your leg. Except now you broke his. And what exactly do you think he’s going to do next time?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t matter? Do you want to die?”
“I didn’t mean it doesn’t matter in the sense that I don’t care if I get hurt. I meant it doesn’t matter what Donnie’s planning. It’s better than if I go to the cops. Then I’m threatening his entire organization. Then there’s not even a debate my life is in danger.”
Roxy stared out the windshield and took a few audible breaths. I waited for her to calm herself down before lobbing the questions I’d been waiting to ask.
“Did you see Donnie at the memorial service or the funeral?”
“God no,” Roxy said. “Why would he be there?” Roxy was implying that he wasn’t a relative or a close friend of the family.
“Exactly. That means someone must have told him I was asking questions. That I may have appeared suspicious about the circumstances of my godfather’s death.”
“Yeah. Obviously. I did.”
I assumed she was joking until I glanced in her direction and saw her striking a defiant pose, looking straight ahead at the windshield, lips pressed tight, jaw elevated a few haughty inches. Then all my insides seemed to slide up into my throat. “You did what?”
Roxy turned toward me, tilted her head and widened her eyes. “You’re kidding me, right?”
I took a deep breath and exhaled. I felt horrible for even contemplating my best friend had ratted me out. I waved my hand as though surrendering. “I wasn’t suggesting that you talked to him—”
“Yeah you were. But that’s okay. I understand. You’ve always been a cold psycho-bitch. I still love you. In fact, that’s probably the reason I love you . . .”
“I’m just asking. How did he know what I was thinking? Did you mention our discussion to anyone?”
Roxy laughed. “You’re officially on the verge of pissing me off. Yes. After you left the memorial service, I walked to the front, stood by the casket, and made an announcement to the general public. ‘My psycho-bitch former sister-in-law thinks my uncle was murdered!’”
I shook my head and muttered a few Ukrainian obscenities under my breath, the kind that used to sneak past my father’s gritted teeth whenever his family disappointed him, which was pretty much all the time. Roxy knew the same obscenities, I was sure. It was the order and cadence of delivery that distinguished one frustrated parent from another.
“There had to be two hundred people at the memorial service,” Roxy said.
I nodded. “Anyone could have overheard me.”
“Just because Donnie wasn’t there, doesn’t mean he didn’t know half the people who were.”
“True that,” I said.
“Why are you doing this, Diana?”
“Because I loved my godfather and someone killed him. I want to find out who and why.”
“Oh yeah? Diana the noble warrior, since when?”
I shrugged. “Since now.”
“Come on. What’s this really all about?”
I saw the logic in her question, but I didn’t have the time or desire to contemplate it. “This is just something I have to do. That’s all I know.”
Roxy sat quietly for a moment. “So what’s the plan?” She infused her voice with a note of determination.
“There’s obviously a link between my godfather’s business and Donnie Angel. I’m going to start there and see what I can figure out.”
An incredulous laugh burst from Roxy’s mouth. It sounded more like a bark. “Sure. Of course you are. Piece of cake. And you’re going to do this all alone?”
“That’s right. I do all my best work alone.”
“It’s good you’re driving around in an old Porsche. You’ll blend right in wherever you go.”
“It is what it is.” The truth was I had no choice. I couldn’t afford a rental.
“Don’t you think he might be waiting for you? At my uncle’s house? Right now?”
“Highly unlikely. He expects me to stay in New York or go somewhere else to hide. The last place he expects me to go is to his turf in the Hartford area. And the absolute last place he expects me to go is the scene of the crime. That’s why, for now, this is as safe a place as any for me to be.”
“Yeah. For now.”
“And by the way . . . After tonight, I don’t want you involved. I don’t want you in harm’s way.”
I needed Roxy tonight to get access to my godfather’s house. As his niece, she had been his emergency contact and had a copy of the front door key.
“Yeah, yeah. Poor Diana. Doesn’t want to be beholden to no one. Always the loner. Didn’t have any friends growing up. Doesn’t have any
friends now. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Spare me your martyr complex. I brought you potato pancakes, you know.”
She lifted the paper from the plate. I caught another whiff of fried potatoes and onions. Under less urgent circumstances, it would have dissolved my morning willpower.
“Smells like heaven. You didn’t tell me you were moonlighting at the Uke National Home.”
“Money’s getting tight. Our savings are tied up in a condo complex and my husband the real estate mogul can’t move the units. He built them high-end in a middle-class neighborhood in New Britain, genius that he is. But that’s not what irks me. One day he tells me to stop spending, and the next day he comes home with four hundred dollars worth of parts for his vintage Mustang.”
“Ouch.”
“You make your own money. You don’t have to depend on a man. Don’t ever give that up.”
I thanked God it was dark in the car so Roxy couldn’t see me blushing. This was a perfect moment for me to tell her I’d been fired six months ago during the latest round of job eliminations and that I was unemployed, but I nodded instead. I told myself I didn’t want to distract her from the topic at hand but in truth I was too embarrassed to be honest with her. Roxy looked up to me because I had a career. Other than my job, I had nothing else. I knew it, and she knew it, too. I couldn’t stand the thought of her thinking I was a failure.
We enjoyed some silence until we got to East Hartford. My godfather’s house was an old multifamily home off Burnside Avenue. When he’d bought it in the seventies, it was probably a purely residential neighborhood. Now it was a mishmash of body shops, ethnic restaurants, and housing projects. I circled around the block and passed two tricked-out Honda Civics idling by the curb. The windows were tinted, but I could see smoke pouring out the driver’s side of one car and the passenger side of the other.
“We were so worried about Donnie’s crew,” Roxy said, “we forgot about the natives. Not the best time to come here, when the sun goes down.”
A flash of indecision washed over me, and I wondered if I was an idiot for being here. I took a deep breath and waited for the sensation to pass. “Look at the bright side.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s dark out. It’s an iffy neighborhood. Skulking around, we’ll fit right in.”
Roxy chuckled. “True that, Diana.” She took a deep breath, fixed her jaw, and set her eyes on the house. “True that.”
CHAPTER 12
WE PARKED ALONG the side of the road and walked up the steps. I hadn’t been in my godfather’s home since my early teens, when my father would come over occasionally to visit and bring me along. My godfather would mix me a non-alcoholic drink with a coconut flavor, and I’d sit in his parlor drinking it, thinking I’d died and gone to heaven.
There were two front doors, one for each of the attached houses. I waited beside Roxy on the stoop as she fished a key from her bag. There were no lights on in either house. Roxy gave me a penlight and asked me to shine it in her purse.
“Who are the tenants next door?” I said.
“There are none. He was using it as storage for the furniture he bought up.”
“You’re kidding me. Since when?”
“About six months ago.”
That surprised me because my godfather had relied on the rental income to help pay his bills. His earnings from his antique business were modest and unreliable, or so I had always been told. This news suggested his profits had grown recently. I could hear Donnie Angel’s voice in my ears.
Tell me what you know about your godfather’s business.
The house was a hoarder’s dream. Stacks of magazines and newspapers were piled four feet high on the floor, and on every seat in the living room. I saw an old copy of Look magazine from 1961 with a picture of an African-American girl walking among four uniformed white men. He appeared to have kept every issue ever printed of the Ukrainian-language newspaper Svoboda.
The kitchen resembled a storage closet for tableware and cutlery. Boxes upon boxes occupied every nook and cranny. Dirty dishes and glasses filled the sink. The two bedrooms on the second floor were no different. Every horizontal surface was covered with pottery or knickknacks. Dust clung to everything but the most frequently used surfaces.
I had no idea if any of the items I was looking at were valuable, but the state-of-the-art televisions in the kitchen, sitting room, and bedroom appeared expensive, as did the big daddy Cadillac in the garage.
After touring the house, we returned to the kitchen. I stood staring at the door to the basement.
“It’s creepy,” Roxy said. “I keep thinking, this man is gone forever. I’ll never see him again and that’s so sad. He was a good guy. A good uncle. He never preached or asked me for anything. He was just nice. And then you walk around looking at the stuff wondering what it’s all worth. Makes you feel cheap. You think somebody would actually pay for these old cutlery sets?”
“Yeah,” I said, eyes still glued to the basement entrance, wondering how my godfather had died, whether someone had pushed him down the stairs or walked him to the bottom and smashed his head in there.
“Really? You really think they’re worth something?”
“Yeah.” I was barely listening to Roxy’s questions. “It is creepy.” I took a deep breath. “Let’s go downstairs.”
A steep descent of narrow steps greeted us. To make matters worse, the center of the steps was covered with carpet so worn and weathered it had turned slippery. I found myself grasping the side railing out of fear I would slip and tumble.
“I can’t believe he didn’t replace these stupid steps given he was afraid of stairs,” I said.
Roxy slid effortlessly down the stairs like a ninja, unperturbed by their slope or width. “Tell me about it. He used to send me to get a bottle of wine when I visited. Said it saved him the risk of falling and breaking his neck. Drove me nuts. But he refused to fix them. That would have cost money, and he said he didn’t need luxuries at this point in his life.”
The new televisions and car suggested otherwise, but I kept my deductions to myself. I held my breath as I got to the bottom of the stairs, fearful I’d see visible signs of how my godfather had died, but there weren’t any. No chalk outline or tape, no garish bloodstain on the gray concrete floor or the strip of blue carpet at the bottom.
“The cops don’t outline bodies anymore,” Roxy said, after I told her of my surprise. “Our neighbor is a state trooper. He said they rely on digital photography. There was a small bloodstain on the floor. I got most of it out with grout cleaner. I couldn’t leave it there. It felt disrespectful. You can still see where his head landed if you look close.”
I saw what she was talking about. It looked like a coffee stain that had been washed a hundred times and had almost come out. The rest of the basement contained shelving with twenty or so cases of wine, a work area with tools, and a mountain of giant plastic containers filled with expensive-looking Christmas decorations, all in original boxes. The presence of plastic and absence of larger antiques made sense given the basement flooded during heavy rains.
We found his inventory of furniture next door in his former rental home. I’m not knowledgeable on the subject, but there was a ton of old and simple-looking stuff. Tables, cabinets, and chests. The utilitarian style of most of the pieces made me think it was early American. That made more sense than people might have guessed. Ukrainian immigrants owed their lives to America, and I could see my godfather specializing in its vintage furniture. I also remembered reading somewhere that prices had gone through the roof, and given my godfather had possessed a savvy eye, that also made sense.
I didn’t see anything in either house that suggested my godfather had been anyone other than a retired antique dealer who didn’t like to part with his acquisitions, not even an old newspaper. After we finished looking through the second house, we returned to the
main house to turn off the lights.
“I knew you wouldn’t find anything,” Roxy said.
“Give me a minute to go through his study one more time,” I said.
Leather-bound books, Dutch-looking paintings, and old maps in equally ancient frames packed my godfather’s office. I had to walk sideways to get behind his desk. I sat down in a high-backed green leather chair. A banker’s lamp with ornate gold hardware occupied one corner. Across from it stood two pictures in elegant black lacquer frames with Asian lettering on the side. Roxy and her family posed in one picture. The other one was a photograph of my godfather and me when I was still a child.
The sight of myself knocked the wind right out of me and brought memories flooding back. He was holding me over his head in the picture. I remembered my father screaming at him to put me down, and my brother snapping the picture with my father’s old box camera. To those who didn’t know me, my expression would have conveyed giddy joy. After all, what kid wouldn’t have enjoyed getting twirled around in the air? I wouldn’t have. To those who knew me, they would have spied the lie in my eyes and realized I was putting on the face that was expected of me, all the while praying I would wake up the next day an adult and on my own.
But as Roxy said, my godfather meant well, and overhead twirling aside, his arrival had always been a welcome sight. My father and he were friends in Ukraine, and he was one of the few people with whom my father socialized. Once I got my job and moved to New York, I’d let our relationship drift. I hadn’t even sent him a Christmas card in as long as I could remember. I was always too busy. I never made the time to tell him that I appreciated his kindness and that he was an important person to me. Now I had all the time in the world, but he was gone. There was nothing I could do to bring him back, but perhaps I could find out exactly how and why he’d left this world.
I forced myself to lift my eyes off the picture, and they fell upon another striking image hanging on the wall directly in front of me. It was a framed poster depicting two exhausted prisoners in gray uniforms wearing a yoke made out of an enormous block of lumber. One held a hammer in his hand, the other a sickle. A uniformed guard brandished a gun behind them, the Cyrillic version of USSR splattered on the concrete floor beneath their feet. The caption read This Was Soviet Freedom!
The Altar Girl: A Prequel Page 6