The Valentine's Day Murder (19 page)

“My house?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mean John?”

“No, not John.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. You think they had company living with them or something?”

“Do you remember that?”

Suddenly his face brightened. “I know what you mean. You mean that crazy bunch who lived in the attic.”

“There were people living in the attic?”

“We fixed it up. We thought maybe we could use the space. Put a bathroom up there and everything.”

Carlotta, who had not said a word since we sat down, put her hand over mine.

“Do you remember who lived there?” I asked.

“A woman and a coupla boys. It wasn’t legal, that apartment. You’re not gonna get me in trouble, are you?”

“Not at all. I’m not interested in the apartment. I’m
interested in the woman and the boys. Do you remember their names?”

“Nah. My wife could tell you. She handled all that. I kept out of the way.”

“What did the woman look like?” I asked.

“Stout, gray hair pulled back in a bun. Heavy accent. I couldn’t make head or tail of what she said. Mary took care of it. Mary took care of everything,” he said sadly.

From chocolate to tenants, I thought. “Do you remember the boys’ names?”

“Never knew ’em. Sometimes they were there, sometimes they weren’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“They would go away somewheres. Don’t ask me where. They just picked up and left on Friday, came back on Monday. They were a crazy bunch. No father, no mother.”

“I thought you said there was—”

“An old woman. Leastways she looked old, too old to be their mother. I don’t know. How old do I look to you?”

“You look like you’re in good health, Mr. Kazmarek,” I said, not wanting to get into a guessing game. “I wouldn’t think you’re as old as you said.”

“What did I say? Eighty-three?”

“That’s what you said.”

He looked inside the bag again and broke off another piece of chocolate. I started to get nervous. “Good stuff,” he said. “My wife used to get me chocolate all the time. She used to bake chocolate cakes for me. Nobody does that anymore.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I hope you save some for later.”

“Oh, sure. Save a little for later.”

“Would you remember the name of that old woman if you heard it?” I asked.

“I might.”

“Was it Krassky?”

“Krassky?”

“Yes.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Do you know what country she was from?”

He shrugged.

“How long did she live there?”

“Coupla years. My wife could tell you exactly. She kept the records.”

I wanted to ask if they had left a forwarding address, but I knew it was hopeless. “Were they good tenants?” I asked instead, just to see if I could get him to talk about them.

“They paid on time. That’s all I cared about. The boys made some noise running around. The Lipchinskis complained, but the Lipchinskis made their own noise. Ain’t much you can do about noise.”

I turned to Carlotta. “I guess that’s it. Anything you want to ask?”

“What did the boys look like?”

“Big,” he said. “Like football players. Polite, too. Always nice to me and my wife.”

“Do you think one of them could have been named Val?”

“Could be,” he said. “But I couldn’t swear to it.”

Even if he had sworn to it, I would have been skeptical. We shook his hand and left.

“Val really lived there,” Carlotta said, as we walked out to the car. “We’ve really found a place in the past that we can tie to him.”

“But we don’t have a name, and since the apartment was illegal, there’s no record anywhere that they ever lived there. And the nurse I spoke to in Connecticut said the aide who was suspected of killing the child was thirty or thirty-five. Even if she was off by five or six years, a sixty-year old man wouldn’t call her old ten years later.”

“Maybe she just gained weight, dressed like a frump, and had graying hair.”

“I suppose so,” I said without conviction.

“I wish his wife were still alive. She’d probably remember everything that ever happened.”

“It looked that way, didn’t it? It’s funny how dependent he was on her. He probably thinks his clothes wear out because she died.”

“They probably do. Val and I have always been very independent. He goes out and buys his shirts and ties without help. It’s one reason I can’t tell you if anything’s missing.”

“Carlotta, there are a few things I want to check that my friend suggested to me yesterday. She thinks it’s odd
that Bambi had a funeral before Clark’s body was found.”

“So do I. But the police were sure all three men were dead. They said as much.”

“I also find it hard to believe that Matty didn’t leave any address for his mother. Annie said she lived in England and they weren’t in contact with each other. Even if they’d had a falling out, wouldn’t he have some way of reaching his own mother?”

“Val didn’t,” Carlotta said shortly.

“He must have known, then. Somehow he must have found out that his mother was a killer, and he severed his relationship with her. It’s too weird. We’re still missing a lot of pieces. Tell me, who paid the credit card bills in your family?”

“Val did. He had software on his computer where he could tick off the deductibles, so I just turned everything over to him.”

“Then you never saw his bills?”

“There wasn’t any need to.”

“Let’s take a look when we get home. He may have made phone calls and charged them to credit cards. If he knew you never looked at his charges, it was a safe way to keep them secret from you.”

“I hate the idea of his keeping secrets.”

“You want to find him, don’t you?”

She nodded. “I know where the records are. We’ll look when we get home.”

By the time we got there it was late afternoon. Carlotta went directly to Val’s office and opened a drawer in his filing cabinet. She pulled out a folder marked
TAXES
and gave it to me.

“This is how he did it,” she said. “When a bill was
paid, he chucked it into the folder. At the end of the year, when it was complete, he went through it if he had to. Things may be grouped into categories like mortgage payments, utilities, gasoline, and that kind of thing. I really don’t know. I took the file for last year and gave it to our accountant without looking at it. It was just too painful. The telephone bills that you looked through are all there. After Val disappeared, nothing was added to the computer records, but this is all the raw data.”

I took it and sat down with the folder on my lap. I took a quick look at this year’s pre-Valentine’s Day bills. There was almost nothing. January bills would have come in February. One telephone bill went through the beginning of February, and I had looked at that on my last visit. But there was also an American Express bill and a couple of other credit card bills. I went over every item and found no phone calls.

Then I started looking at last December and earlier. Month after month, bill after bill listed no phone calls. If he charged calls, he made them with a telephone credit card and they all appeared on his monthly statement. There was nothing here to help me.

I suddenly felt frustration that bordered on anger. I needed a name. Mr. Kazmarek had given me nothing except an indication that Val could have lived at his address twenty years ago. If the people in the attic had a telephone, and I assumed they did, it could have been in any name in the book. If the woman had moved, she was untraceable without a name. For all I knew, she might still live in Buffalo, and Val might have called her daily without a toll charge. He might have visited her on his lunch hour. She and I might have brushed shoulders on the street, and how would I know?

I found Carlotta sitting in her family room. “Maybe Mr. Kazmarek’s neighbors lived there twenty years ago and would remember the woman and her sons who lived in that attic.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” She looked at her watch. “Do you want to go now?”

“It’s too late. People don’t like to open their doors after dark. Let’s do it in the morning.”

“First thing,” she said with determination.

“How’s the morning sickness?” Carlotta asked as I stepped into the breakfast room the next morning.

“Manageable,” I said. “Being vertical helps. Getting something inside me helps, too.”

“How shall we do it this morning? You take one side of the street, I’ll take the other?”

I paused just long enough that she caught my hesitation.

“You don’t want me?”

I laughed. “Don’t put it that way, Carlotta. I just think having two people canvassing a block is not the cleverest way to go. I’ll do it myself and come right back here as soon as I know something.”

“I’ll drop you off,” she said. “It’s too long a drive to go back and forth. But I promise I’ll stay out of your way.”

We drove into Buffalo, and Carlotta worked her way through the city to a commercial street called Hertel Avenue. She turned a corner, and we were in a totally residential area. Everything was low, as though high-rise apartment houses were unheard of. There were one-family and two-family houses on quiet streets, narrow driveways hinting at the size of cars when these houses
had been built. It was quiet and pleasant, a nice place to raise a family, a place where you could literally walk to the grocery and pick up a container of milk. I was in a big city with a very small-town atmosphere, and it made me feel comfortable and at home.

“The house is halfway down this street on the right,” Carlotta said, stopping at a corner. “Shall I come by for you in an hour? Half an hour?”

“It’s hard to judge. It depends on how many people are home and how many of them remember twenty years ago. Why don’t you come back at thirty-minute intervals?”

“OK. And if you don’t see me, look for me at this corner.”

“See you later.”

I got out of the car and walked down the street where the Kazmareks had lived for the largest part of their lives. I stayed on the far side of the street so I could look across and get a picture of the house. Once I saw it, I could see the larger windows on the third level, different from the other similar houses on the block. I knew that many homeowners in New York built illegal apartments in their basements or behind the unmoving doors of a built-in garage for extra income that was also tax free, often providing the difference between getting by and having to give up the house.

I crossed the street and rang the downstairs doorbell of the house to the right. No one answered. I rang the upstairs bell.

“Who is it?” an older female voice called from the second floor.

“My name is Chris Bennett. I wanted to ask you about the people who lived next door to you.”

“I haven’t seen them in ten years,” she called back.

“Did you know the Kazmareks?” My voice was getting a little worn out, but she would not come downstairs and I didn’t blame her.

“Yes, but they moved out a long time ago.”

“Mrs. Martone,” I called, reading her name off the mailbox, “I want to ask you about some people that lived in the Kazmareks’ house about twenty years ago.”

There was a silence. Then, “Oh, all right. Just a minute and I’ll come down.”

I waited at the top of the five steps in the entry hall. A few minutes passed. Then, through the curtain on the small window in the door, I could see a figure descending the stairs. The door opened and a gray-haired woman in a loose housedress came out.

“What was your name?”

“Christine Bennett. Chris.”

“I’m Betty Martone.” She closed the door to her flat. “Why don’t we just talk down here? I don’t like to have strangers upstairs.”

“Here is fine. Did you know the Kazmareks?”

“For years and years. She’s dead now. He lives out Main Street somewhere in an old folks’ home. I’m not sure he’s all there anymore.”

“Mrs. Martone, I’m trying to find someone who lived in their house about twenty years ago, more or less. He would have been a teenager then, and I think he lived in the attic apartment.”

“Oh, that attic!” She gathered her skirt together and sat on the top step. Following her example, I sat a foot or so away so that we could look at each other. “Let me tell you about that attic. They were nice people, Stanley and Mary, but they went too far with that attic. You know, if
you’re going to make a three-family house, you’ve got to go downtown and file the papers. The neighbors can have their say, too. Who wants a street full of three-families? I didn’t. Most of the other folks on the block didn’t. So they just plain bypassed us. They said they were building another bedroom up there that they could use as a den. But who lives on the first floor and has a den on the third? It was ridiculous from the start.” She sounded as though she were fighting the battle all over again. “And then, as soon as the last nail was hammered in, what do you suppose they did?”

“They rented it out,” I said, hoping the lesson in real estate would not continue much longer.

“That’s just what they did, they rented it out to a woman that had no husband and a couple of boys that were in and out all day long.”

“Did you know them?”

“Said hello to her in the street once or twice. She wasn’t the friendliest person I ever met.”

“Was she the mother of the boys?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”

“And there were two boys?”

“It looked like twenty sometimes. But I think there were two.”

“Did they have a lot of company?”

“Didn’t have any. I don’t think anyone ever went up there. But they were in and out all the time. They’d go away on Friday and come back on Sunday night. Holidays, they’d go away.”

“Did she speak English?” I asked.

Mrs. Martone looked at me. “Well, now that you mention it, I think she had an accent.”

“Did you happen to know her name?”

“Never knew it.”

“The Kazmareks never mentioned it?”

She laughed. “We weren’t on the best terms with Stanley and Mary during those years. My husband just wanted them out. Imagine people living in an attic. It gave the street a bad name.”

“I know just what you mean,” I said, agreeing with her to keep our relationship friendly. “How long did they live there?”