“How about that.”
“What about the blessing of the Easter baskets?”
He glared at me. “What about it?”
“The reason you couldn’t make it. You said you were meeting someone at the airport. Someone who was coming from LA related to your business. But the bouncer told me that woman wasn’t coming in until next week. Why did you lie?”
He looked incredulous. “I didn’t. She’s not appearing at the club until next Saturday, but she’s touring the other clubs in the area during the week. Hartford, Vernon, Springfield, and the like. I’m coordinating her gigs, showing her some hospitality, if you know what I mean.”
Not only had I deluded myself into believing a murder had been committed, I’d made simplistic assumptions, too. An effective forensic analyst did not necessarily make an effective investigator.
“Why did you go to the cemetery alone?” Marko said. “What were you thinking?”
“I thought you were meeting Donnie’s crew there. I thought they were going to kill you.” A sense of pride washed over me. I’d gone to the cemetery to protect him, and now Marko knew the truth.
Marko leaned toward me, face etched in fury. If he hadn’t rescued me, I would have thought it was sheer hatred. And maybe it was. Maybe I was still deluding myself.
“Get this through your thick skull,” he said, spittle flying from his lips. “You don’t protect me. I protect you. You understand? It was that way, is that way, and always will be that way. Now once and for all, will you please fuck off?”
He climbed into his truck and left. I stood there, eating his exhaust.
Nothing had changed. My brother still cared.
Nothing had changed. He never wanted to see me again.
CHAPTER 36
I drove back to Rocky Hill and ate another short stack of pancakes for breakfast. It was Easter Sunday, but my mother wasn’t planning a family meal. She’d stopped doing that after the incident with Marko. Instead, she was having a traditional Easter breakfast with one of her boyfriends. She’d told me his sons were in town, and she was eager to charm them into not minding if their father added her to his will. That’s why I asked the waitress to sprinkle some chocolate chips into the pancake batter. In the absence of familial bliss, we always have chocolate. I washed the pancakes down with a cup of tea and waited another half hour until it was 8:00 a.m. Then I called Mrs. Chimchak and told her I was coming over to give her an update. I analyzed her words, delivery, and comportment. She sounded perfectly normal to me.
Still, I dreaded my arrival even more than the first time. Would she be lucid when I got there? Had she been in control of her faculties when she’d encouraged my delusion that my godfather had been murdered? Did she know she was suffering from dementia? How, in the name of all that was decent, could I even broach the subject with her? If the topic of her dementia didn’t come up, I had no idea how I would explain that we’d been wrong about my godfather. I’d fostered suspicions for my own emotional needs. Evidently she’d done the same.
The first time I’d shown up at her house, she’d been waiting for me as though I were her long-lost daughter. This time was only slightly different. Once again the door opened and her smiling face appeared before I climbed to the top of the stoop. But instead of calling me by my name, she spoke someone else’s.
“Stefan,” she said. “Is it really you, my love? Oh my God. It is you.”
She let me into her home and then reached out with her arms to welcome my embrace. I hugged and held her for a long three count, and then tacked on another three count for good measure. Afterward, I pulled back but kept my hands on her small, narrow shoulders. They were hard as stone.
“It’s not Stefan, Mrs. Chimchak,” I said. “It’s Nadia. It’s your favorite Plastunka, Nadia Tesla.”
She stared at me with a vacant expression, her eyes glazed over as though she were looking right through me onto a celluloid screen. I wondered if she actually saw her childhood love in my place, or if she was watching a movie in which they were the stars. And then, the glaze disappeared. Her focus sharpened instantly, as though someone had turned the projector off and the lights back on in her head.
“Nadia,” she said, sharp as the razor blade that she’d earned as a nickname. “Come in, dear. Come in.”
She led me into the sitting room where we’d talked before. I reminded myself to be gentle, and to avoid being the sledgehammer whose image I sometimes invoked. She told me she had hot water and offered me tea. I declined and told her I’d just finished breakfast. We sat down and faced each other. She eyed me curiously.
“There was a note of finality in your voice when you called this morning,” she said. “You have some news for me? You’ve learned something important, yes?”
I told her everything that happened last night and this morning. She listened in her typically inscrutable fashion. She raised her eyelids and shifted in her seat when I recounted the most dangerous moments, in the vineyard and later in the gravedigger’s office. I told her the state police were calling in the FBI, and that they suspected I’d broken up a multimillion-dollar arts and antiquities ring that may have spanned the entire Northeast, and included other middlemen besides my godfather. I told her everything except the bombshell Rus had dropped on me. The one that had shed light on my overly active imagination. That he had not killed his brother, nor had Marko. That I’d invented the story for my own purposes and that she’d encouraged me for her own reasons, whether because of her illness or in a desperate stab to be part of something meaningful as she watched herself deteriorate.
“And what did Rus say about your godfather’s death?” Mrs. Chimchak said.
“He said he didn’t kill him.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s hard to explain. His delivery, his tone of voice, the circumstances under which he said he didn’t do it. All the ways in which we reveal ourselves when we’re lying. I have some experience with people under pressure as a forensic financial analyst. He showed none of the signs a liar usually does. None.”
“I see. Did Rus have any thoughts on who did kill him?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“No one,” I said. I softened my voice. She appeared so sharp and focused, I had no doubt she’d infer a reference to her illness if I wasn’t careful. “He believes his brother died the way the police said he did. Accidentally.”
“And you agree with him now? Did he change your mind?”
“Yes. He changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“He made me realize I had my own agenda. That I had personal reasons for wanting to be in Hartford, and so I convinced myself my godfather was murdered. I believed what I wanted to believe.”
“So you believe what Rus said. And yet he lied to you when you first met him in his house. He told you he didn’t think his brother — your godfather — could have killed himself. You believed him then, and you believe him now. How can you be sure he hasn’t fooled you this time? How can you be sure he isn’t the murderer?”
I shrugged. “I can’t be one hundred percent sure. But I trust my instincts. I said this was all about my godfather, but I lied. It was all about me. Rus was right about that. He knew me well enough from when he’d been my father-in-law to know I had an ulterior motive for my so-called investigation.”
Mrs. Chimchak nodded for a moment, as though she were considering everything I’d said. “And what about me?” she said. “Why do you think I agreed with you? Why did I buy into your theory of murder so passionately and so thoroughly?”