The Valentine's Day Murder (8 page)

“He always did in the winter,” Carlotta said. “He would have to go outside with a customer to pick something up or put it in the car.” Her voice was low. Only her husband had no one to vouch for him.

* * *

I sat in the living room and looked at the local paper. There’s nothing stranger than reading the problems of a community about which you know nothing. The names make no sense, the problems, while often similar to hometown problems, have their own peculiar spins. Carlotta had said the
New York Times
would not be available till about noon; they were flown in from New York and then had to be driven from the airport. You forget sometimes how much you get used to living in the New York metropolitan area.

I had walked out of the study to leave her alone. She had invited me here to try to find her husband, and everything I had learned made it seem that he was the man with the gun. I put the paper down and thought about who else I needed to find and talk to. Jake, Val’s business partner, was at the top of the list, and every time I had mentioned him, Carlotta had rather deftly turned the conversation away from him. It might not hurt to talk to the detective in charge of the case, too. He would know whether any taxi drivers remembered driving Val away from the beach that night, and maybe he would have tried to find the bus drivers, too, although that was surely a slim possibility. So there was Jake and there was the detective. And after that, there was the inevitable question: Then, what? It’s the question I hate most.

I put my forehead in my hand, closed my eyes, and tried to see where all this was leading. Val had no family to turn to, so where would he go? But he did have a family, parents who lived somewhere in Germany. Could he have left the country?

“Sorry I fell apart, Chris.” Carlotta’s voice came from behind.

“Carlotta, did Val have a passport?” I stood, suddenly filled with renewed energy.

“Yes, we both did.”

“Where did he keep it? It wasn’t in the safe deposit box.”

“You’re right. Let me think. He kept both our passports. We went to England and France last year, so they’re new. They must be in his chest of drawers. You didn’t find them in the desk, did you?”

“No. I would have looked at his.”

“You think he left the country?”

“I don’t know what to think. But he has parents over there. Even if they weren’t on good terms, when you’re in trouble, you go home.”

“Come upstairs with me. I’ll look in the chest.”

I followed her up to her bedroom, a large room with an adjoining sitting room and bath, the kind of luxury that takes my breath away. She went directly to a large chest of drawers and opened the top drawer.

“He keeps certain personal papers here,” she said. “I’ve never looked before, but I remember he took the passports out of this drawer before we went away. Let’s see, I think they’re dark blue.”

I stood away from her, not wanting to interfere. If nothing turned up pretty soon, I would have to ask her permission to go through the contents myself.

“Here they are, two passports, his and hers.” She handed them to me.

I opened Val’s and looked at the first few pages, at the picture, then at the stamps from English and French immigration, and finally from the U.S. at the end of their trip. “I guess he didn’t leave the country,” I said, some-what
disappointed. Not that I could have located his parents even if I could prove he had flown to Germany.

“And everything here is pretty neat,” she said. “It doesn’t look disrupted, as if he were looking for something in a hurry.”

“Were there ever any calls to Germany on your phone bill?”

“Never. I would remember that.”

“Any other foreign country?”

“We don’t have friends there. I don’t even know how to dial Europe.”

“Then that pretty much leaves that out. There are two people I want to see, Carlotta, Jake and the detective in charge of the case. Do you think you can get me to see one of them this afternoon?”

“I’ll call the sheriff’s office and see if Detective Murdock is there. He might come down to our local police station, and we can go over after lunch.”

“And Jake?”

“I’ll call him later.” She looked at her watch. “It’s time for lunch. We have a nice little coffee shop in the center of town, and I haven’t been there since they renovated. Want to give it a try?”

I said I did, but I really wanted to know why she wouldn’t call her husband’s partner and set up a meeting.

The coffee shop had been transformed into a tearoom in the time since Carlotta had last visited, and it was very pretty, with flowered wallpaper, little round tables with fussy cloths, and a scalloped menu offering appealing things to eat. Before leaving the house Carlotta had set up an appointment with Detective Murdock, and when we finished our dainty lunch we walked down the street to the police station. It was the kind of homey place that Oakwood’s police station is, where people are greeted in a friendly way and treated like neighbors. I remembered with some amusement the first time I went to the Brooklyn station house where I met Jack and talked to a desk sergeant, a woman who begrudged me the thirty seconds it took to tell me she couldn’t help me because the case was too old. I had the feeling this was a place where, even if the message were the same, the delivery would be a lot more pleasant.

Detective Murdock came down a hall and shook hands with Carlotta. He was tall and had a deep voice, a thick mustache, and a trimmer body than a lot of Jack’s fellow cops.

“Detective, this is Chris Bennett, a friend from near New York City. She’s trying to help me find Val.”

“Good to meet you,” he said, extending a large hand, which I shook. “You want to know what I know?”

“If you’ll tell me.”

“Sure. Want to come this way?”

“I’ll see you later,” Carlotta said, and I walked along beside Murdock, entering a small office with a desk and two chairs.

“Take your coat off and make yourself comfortable. I know what you’re here for. Mrs. Krassky told me about it. She thinks her husband’s still alive, doesn’t she?”

“She hopes he is.”

“Well, we all hope he is, we just don’t think it’s possible.”

“May I sketch out a couple of ways I think he might be alive?”

“It’s all yours. I’d love to hear them.”

“One is that he never went to the lake with his friends on the night of Valentine’s Day.”

“You mean he went home after they all had dinner together?”

“Yes. That’s what Carlotta thinks happened. She thinks her husband wouldn’t have gone to the lake with the others because he wasn’t the kind of person who would walk across the frozen lake.”

“Are you aware his watch was found in Mr. Franklin’s vehicle?”

I was and it troubled me. “Maybe he changed his mind after he took the watch off.”

The detective smiled. “A little far out, but stranger things have happened. If he didn’t go, I’ll grant you he may be alive. The question is, where is he. And another important question is why he’s in hiding.”

“I don’t know where, Detective. But I think the why is
fairly obvious. He goes home, he goes to sleep, he gets up in the morning expecting to go to work, and he hears the news of his friends’ disappearance.”

“That news didn’t break early in the morning.”

That was exactly what I had told Carlotta. “Maybe he’d had a tough night, and he decided to sleep in. He didn’t report to anyone at work; he was a principal. His wife wasn’t home; he didn’t have to get up for breakfast. By the time he got up, the news may have broken.”

“What about the two other wives? They told me they called Mr. Krassky’s home to see if he’d come in.”

“Were there messages on the answering machine?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Mrs. Thayer left a message. Mrs. Franklin said she hung up before the machine picked up. Said she knew it would kick in after the fourth ring.”

“He may have been home and wasn’t answering the phone. Lots of people do that.”

“With his wife away? Would he chance missing a call from her?”

“If he heard her voice, he could always pick up.”

He smiled again. “OK, you got me. Keep going.”

“Here’s the second possibility. He followed his two friends across the lake. Maybe he was the laggard. From a distance he could have seen the argument between the other two men, or heard the shot, and retreated to save his own life.”

“I’ll give you points for that. He gets tired, he thinks maybe he shouldn’t have come this far, and then the argument happens and he runs for his life.”

“If that’s what happened,” I said, “he probably saw and heard them go down. And he had a long way to go
back to the beach, from where I’ve heard the break in the ice was.”

“Seven or eight miles,” he agreed. “Couple hours at a good pace. Now you’re going to tell me he was distraught and confused and could think of nothing else but getting the hell out of town, hiding from reality, all that good stuff.”

“I think it could have happened.”

“What could also have happened is that he was the man with the gun, he pulled the trigger, one man went down, the other went to help, both went through the ice, and Valentine Krassky is a fugitive from justice.”

“But if he carried the gun, Detective Murdock, with the intention of shooting Matty Franklin, why would he leave his watch in the car?” Watching his face, I felt rather triumphant.

“Good point,” the detective said, picking up a pen and making a note for the first time.

“And even if what you suggested is true, he could be alive. And that would be a good reason why he didn’t let anyone know where he was.”

“We’re working on that angle. He’s on our wanted list. Just in case his body doesn’t turn up hooked to the branch of an underwater tree.”

“Did you check the taxi companies?” I asked.

“You have to understand, when this tragedy happened, we assumed all three men were together—we had no reason to assume otherwise—so we didn’t look elsewhere for any of them. That left us kinda behind when only two bodies surfaced and we realized there’d been a shoot-out. But yes, I’ve checked the taxi companies in the area, and no one remembers picking anyone up that night that could have been Mr. Krassky. And this tragedy
has been in the news, Ms. Bennett. If a driver had picked up one of those missing men, you can bet he would have come forward on his own.”

“Unless he’d been paid to keep quiet.”

“But then we’ve got a fugitive, and that’s not what Mrs. Krassky is hoping for.”

“What about buses?” I asked, not wanting to get off on a tangent.

“I talked to the bus company myself. If anyone fitting Mr. Krassky’s description took a bus that night, none of the drivers remembers it.”

“Which doesn’t mean he didn’t.”

“Doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

“Could he have walked home from the beach?”

“Sure. Take awhile, but it’s easier going than on ice.”

We had driven it in fifteen minutes and clocked it at five miles. I can walk three miles in an hour without pushing myself. “The question really is, where would he go? He didn’t leave the country because we found his passport this morning.”

The detective smiled. “And he didn’t take any money out of the bank. At least not that we know of. Don’t forget, he may have had an account somewhere else, like in another state, that we don’t know about. And for all we know, he hopped on a bus to that place, where he’s stashed a bundle and started a new life right there. Or anywhere else you can think of.”

“If that’s true, he might have gone to a place where he has friends his wife doesn’t know about.”

Murdock gave me a sly smile. “Now you’re thinking the way cops think.”

“I’ll have to look at Carlotta’s phone bills and see who he called.”

“That’s a start.” The way he spoke, it was clear he didn’t think there was a chance in a million that Val was alive. He was just gone, and everything I was doing was a waste of time.

“There were no sightings that you’ve heard about?” I said.

“Not a one. Of course, as I said before, we didn’t start looking till last week because we thought they all died together in February. It leaves us with a pretty cold trail.”

No sightings, no taxis, no buses, no wife at home. “Neighbors?” I asked.

“The neighbors said they were a nice couple. Some of them were very friendly with the Krasskys, had dinner with them, visited each others’ homes. If he came home the morning of the fifteenth or left his home that day, no one saw him.”

“Which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but there’s been nothing, Ms. Bennett. You’re trying to convince me that this man is alive, that he left his watch behind but didn’t walk across the lake, that he’s living somewhere without benefit of his life savings, that he’s never called the wife he loves, and even that he had no hand in the shooting. Do you see where I’m going?”

“Pretty low probability,” I said, feeling the weight of all that negative evidence.

“Probability zero. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I think you’re wasting your time. Even more so, because if he’s alive, he’s a killer. And that’s not what Mrs. Krassky wants.”

“No, it’s the last thing she wants.” I stood. There didn’t seem to be much else we could talk about.

Detective Murdock took a card out of his pocket and
handed it to me. “If you get a lead out of state or anywhere else, will you let me know?”

“Of course.”

“You look kinda down. I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK. It’s what I’ve thought all along, but I wanted to believe there was some hope.”

“There isn’t any. Believe me.”

I had to admit I believed him.

I walked outside the police station and stood in the bright sunlight, shading my eyes and looking up and down the street for Carlotta. She wasn’t around, and I walked tentatively down the street and looked in shop windows. There was a lovely store that sold cooking equipment. My friend Melanie Gross would have to restrain herself here. Gleaming stainless steel pots and pans were the least of it. There were gadgets that looked as though they would accomplish every drudgery-filled task of cooking and baking, barbecue utensils that would make my life—and Jack’s—a lot easier, spices and mustards, and serving platters that looked hand-painted. I decided this was not the place to wait for Carlotta, and I must not go inside under any conditions. Fortunately, I have refused firmly to carry a credit card, much to Jack’s displeasure. He is a man who always thinks of emergencies, and although I know he is right, I don’t ever want to succumb to temptation.