The Valentine's Day Murder (14 page)

“We can go on along now. He just wanted time to get home from the golf course. Come. We’ll take my car.”

Dr. Windham’s house was almost hidden from the road behind a row of shrubs taller than I. We drove up a private drive that was more like a road to a large stone
house that you could have put several of ours in. Evelyn left the car on a circle in front of the double doors, and we got out and rang the bell.

There were effusive hellos and kisses when Mrs. Windham opened the door, then a more discreet shaking of hands when I was introduced.

“Lyle’s out back,” our hostess said. “Would you ladies mind sitting on the terrace?”

We both said we would prefer that to being inside, and Mrs. Windham led us through several rooms to French doors that opened onto a beautiful brick terrace where the silver-haired doctor sat reading the paper. He rose as we joined him, kissing Evelyn and shaking my hand with a firm grip. He was a tall, handsome man still wearing a green golfing shirt and looking about as fit and trim as a man half his age.

We sat in patio chairs, and Mrs. Windham left us and returned a minute later with iced tea in tall glasses with fresh mint leaves and a platter of the kind of assorted cookies that are my downfall. I could see I was going to do no better at home than I had done in western New York with Carlotta.

“Tell me how you’ve come to be interested in the death of Evelyn’s nephew,” the doctor said when we were settled.

I sketched it out for him, the Valentine’s Day accident on Lake Erie, the surfacing of the two bodies, the questions about Val’s involvement in the murder of Matty and about Val’s disappearance. Then I told him about the birth certificate.

“Well, I’ll do what I can to help. I wasn’t involved in the hospital’s financial settlement with Evelyn’s in-laws,
and everything I know is hearsay, so I feel pretty free about telling you what I know.”

“I’m glad to hear it. The hospital itself won’t tell me a thing.”

“Which is right and proper. Now let me tell you what I know and how I know it.”

I had my notebook open and I uncapped my pen. The doctor had bright blue eyes, and he kept them on me as though no one else were present. But Evelyn sat forward in her seat as he began to talk, and Mrs. Windham smiled as though she knew a secret and was way ahead of us.

“I heard about the case because my best friend was a pediatrician at the hospital, and the Krassky boy had been his patient since birth. If my friend were alive, he could tell you chapter and verse—if he were free to—but I’m afraid we lost him a couple of years ago. The child, as I remember the story, had had several bouts with upper respiratory infections and had been brought into the emergency room on a couple of prior occasions, but this incident seemed worse than the others. Chuck—the pediatrician—decided to hospitalize him when the parents brought him in that afternoon. Chuck dashed over from his office to see him, got him going on antibiotics, put him in an oxygen tent—they don’t use masks with children—and got him stabilized in a couple of hours. His temperature went down, his breathing improved, he woke up and talked to his parents, who had been pretty panicky when they brought him in. But everyone calmed down, and Chuck told them to go home for the night; there was nothing to be gained by being there. They could come back first thing in the morning. So they left.”

“Was there any private care for the child?” I asked.

“There was, a registered nurse who did a lot of private
nursing at the hospital. Don’t ask me for her name, because thirty years is a long time. She’s the person who discovered the child had died.”

“What do you mean, ‘discovered’?”

“He wasn’t being monitored—remember, this happened almost thirty years ago, and he had improved after being admitted—and when a nurse sits in a hospital room, she doesn’t keep her eyes on her patient every minute that she’s there. She also leaves the room from time to time to use the bathroom or stretch her legs, and she takes a break for a meal. Eight hours is a long time to sit.”

“What happens when she leaves the room for lunch?” I asked.

“Well, that’s an interesting thing,” Lyle Windham said, his voice becoming more conversational. “When a patient has no private nurse, the floor nurses stop in from time to time to check up on him. But when a private nurse is there, the floor nurses tend to ignore the patient completely. The private nurses know this, and when they leave the room for any period, they let the floor nurses know that they’re going down to the cafeteria and can be called if anything comes up.”

“Then someone might look in on him once or twice while the private nurse is gone.”

“Depending on how long she takes, half an hour or so, maybe less.”

“So the story is, she left the room, and when she returned the boy was dead.”

“That’s about it.”

“She didn’t see him die.”

“She said she wasn’t there when it happened.”

“Was there anything suspicious about his death?”

“Didn’t appear to be. He’d been admitted with pneumonia. That’s presumably what he died of.”

“Presumably?”

“There were some stories that surfaced later.”

“What kind of stories?”

“The kindest version was that the boy received less than adequate care.”

“And that means?”

“That something was overlooked, that he should have been in intensive care.” The doctor sipped his iced tea and put the glass back on the little round table beside him.

“Do you believe that?”

“Frankly, no. Chuck was as careful a doctor as I have ever met. Still, everyone makes mistakes.”

I wondered whether he was talking about himself when he said “everyone.” “You said that was the kindest version. Was there another one?”

“Indeed there was. The poor nurse came in for a lot of flak. The family, of course, blamed her for leaving him, which she had a right to do, for not noticing that the boy wasn’t breathing easily. She said he was or she wouldn’t have left the room.”

“Was she known in the hospital?”

“Known and respected. She did duty there almost every night of the week. If I’d needed a private nurse, I would have hired her myself. But, as I said, everyone makes mistakes.”

I had the feeling he was trying to tell me something without saying it aloud, but I couldn’t proceed on innuendo. “Do you think she told the truth?”

“I think so,” he said easily. “I don’t think she would have left the room if the boy had become agitated, if his
breathing was labored. My best guess is that she would have called a doctor.”

“I suppose nurses fall asleep on the job,” I suggested.

“I suppose they do. It’s pretty boring work when you come down to it, and sitting in the half dark is pretty conducive to sleep.”

“Are you suggesting there was a more sinister explanation for the boy’s death?”

“There was, and I heard it.”

Beside me, Evelyn Krassky drew in her breath. “Lyle, you don’t mean to say that someone killed that poor child?”

“Evelyn, I’m just reporting on what I heard. I wasn’t there, Chuck wasn’t there; rumors circulated and I heard them. That doesn’t happen every time a patient dies. It happened that time.”

“What was the rumor?” I asked.

“It was said that someone on the floor provoked the child’s death.”

It was a rather gentle way of saying that the boy had been murdered. A chill ran across my shoulders. “Did the parents get wind of that rumor?”

“My gut tells me they didn’t or there would have been much more of a hullaballoo. They blamed Chuck, they blamed the hospital, and they blamed the private nurse. The medical record absolved Chuck, at least that’s the way the hospital saw it, and the nurse was adamant that there was nothing wrong with the boy the last time she saw him. My guess is that the hospital paid off because they wanted to stop the parents before they launched a thorough investigation.”

“And did it stop them?”

“It must have. The rumors died down or were replaced
by others, perhaps a little spicier, a little more fun to talk about.”

“Dr. Windham, was there a particular person who was rumored to have ‘provoked’ the child’s death?” I echoed his euphemism so as not to use the harsher word it implied.

“I believe there was, and I’ll come back to that in a minute. Do you have any other questions?”

“I’ve heard that some organs were donated.”

“Well, organ transplants were in their infancy thirty years ago. I think it was only the boy’s eyes, which were donated to an eye bank.”

“Do you have any idea whether the parents saw the boy’s body after he died?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. With the eyes removed, they may not have wanted to.”

“Do you think there was any way that someone might have switched that boy with a dead child?”

His handsome face clouded. “You mean the nurse found a different child dead in the Krassky boy’s bed?”

“Could that have been possible?”

“I don’t see how. She’d been with him for several hours. She knew what he looked like.”

“My goodness,” Mrs. Windham said, “this is certainly taking a morbid turn.”

“I’m just trying to consider every possibility,” I said. “Was there an autopsy, do you know?”

“My recollection is that the parents didn’t want one, and it wasn’t required since his death was explainable medically.”

“How certain are you that his eyes were actually removed?” I asked.

“Very certain. I’m the surgeon who removed them.”

That certainly seemed to end the possibility that Val had survived and been kidnapped, although for the life of me I could not imagine what motive anyone would have for “provoking” the death of a six-year-old. “So you know for sure that the eyes were removed, you’re pretty sure there was no autopsy, and you don’t know whether the parents ever saw the body of their son.”

“Right on all three counts.”

“Then that leaves the matter you said you would come back to, the person who was suspected—or rumored—to have ‘provoked’ the death of the child.”

“I don’t mean to use a pun, but I’m on very thin ice here,” the doctor said. “No charges were ever brought, and the police were never called in. There was scuttlebutt and one observable fact.”

“Which was?”

“The rumored person left the hospital and never returned.”

“I see.” I wrote in my notebook, feeling a prickle of excitement. “Will you tell me more?”

“It was a nurse’s aide. She’d been there for a while—I can’t really tell you how long. After awhile you start to recognize faces. I did most of my work during the day,
but I was told she’d been working on that floor for a year, give or take.”

“What can you tell me about her?”

“Since I never knew her myself, it’s all secondhand. She was probably around thirty, a nurse’s aide, no complaints about her that I ever heard. Spoke with an accent.”

“One of the Spanish aides?” Evelyn said. “There are so many now from South America.”

“This was almost thirty years ago,” Dr. Windham said. “She wasn’t Spanish as far as I know. More like German is what I heard.”

“German,” I repeated. “Val told his wife his parents were German and had gone back to Germany.”

The doctor’s lips formed a small smile. “I leave it to you to make the connections. That’s out of my league. All I can tell you is what I know and what I heard.”

“Tell me, Doctor, if someone—whoever it was—had murdered that child, how could it have been done?”

“A number of ways,” he said easily. “Smother him. Turn off the oxygen and let him suffocate in the tent. He was on an IV; add poison to the drip. If he’d been diagnosed with pneumonia, no one would bother checking the solution. It would be assumed he died of heart failure, one of the consequences of pneumonia.”

As he spoke my stomach turned in what was surely not an episode of morning sickness. I felt a fierce protectiveness for the tiny thing inside me that was my child. How could anyone have done to a child any of the things the doctor had just described? “And a nurse or nurse’s aide would be aware of those methods?”

“As aware as I am.”

“I just can’t see a motive,” I said, thinking out loud.

“To be honest, I can’t either. Maybe Evelyn can enlighten us. Did your in-laws have a dispute with a nurse’s aide, or perhaps with the husband of a nurse’s aide?”

Evelyn looked completely at sea. “As far as I know they never knew a nurse’s aide personally in their lives. If the wife of one of Greg’s friends or business associates was a nurse’s aide, they never mentioned it. This all seems very surreal. I feel as though we’re talking about a science fiction movie.”

I felt the same way, but the fact that there was this suspicion concerning the death of the child Val Krassky made a connection with the missing adult Val Krassky somehow more likely. “Do you know how soon after the death of the child the aide left the hospital?”

“Not with any certainty, but fairly soon,” the doctor said. “Probably what fueled the speculation that she had something to do with the death.”

“Who would know?” I asked.

“It’s a long time ago, but I may know someone who can help.” He looked over at his wife. “You have that name, dear?”

Mrs. Windham took a slip of paper out of her skirt pocket and passed it to her husband.

“I did a little phoning around after Evelyn called yesterday. This is a very fine lady who was a nurse at the hospital for many years and is long retired. She’s in her eighties now, but there’s nothing wrong with her memory.” He smiled. “It’s probably better than mine.” He looked at the slip of paper, then passed it to me. “I spoke to her last night. She’ll tell you what she remembers.”

“I’m very grateful.”

“She’s about twenty miles from here. I can tell you how to get there.”

“I can’t thank you enough.”

“If you put two and two together and they come out to four, I’d appreciate a phone call.”

“I’ll see that you get one,” I said with the enthusiasm I was suddenly feeling. I had no idea where this new information was going to take me, but I had the strong feeling that for the first time since I had spoken to Carlotta back in February, something was starting to open up.