A Skeleton in the Closet (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) (28 page)

“Fine.
You will tell me when you are ready. In the meantime, where is the remote control?” He made himself more comfortable in the chair.

I handed him the remote and his cell phone. “Enjoy yourself, and order a pizza for dinner. I’ll bring you a glass of wine in a few minutes. I just need to use the land line to make a phone call first.”

He nodded, already busy surfing through the channels.
“Margo or
Strutter
?”

“I’ll call them later, but first …”

“Tell Emma I said hello,” he said.

Fifteen

The following morning, Margo,
Strutter
and I were lingering in our favorite booth at the Town Line Diner, where Sherrie refilled our coffee cups yet again. John
Harkness
had joined us, but Armando had opted to stay at home, nursing a headache.

Breakfast had long since come and gone. We had a lot to talk about. I had brought my partners up to speed by telephone the previous evening on Saturday’s events, but John had news to share about the results of Van Man’s interrogation. This time, he didn’t need to refer to any notes to remember the details.

“The man who assaulted Kate is named Michael
Armentano
,” he began. The rest of us exchanged puzzled looks. The name meant nothing to us. “No, you wouldn’t recognize it. He’s a complete stranger to you, as well as to the
Henstock
sisters. And as you may have already guessed, he’s not really a plumber, which explains why we couldn’t find him or his company. Throughout this caper, he was operating under an alias.”

“Caper?
So he did intend to commit a crime,” I observed as John sipped his cooling coffee.

“Hard to call it a crime, really, in anything but the strictest technical sense.
He didn’t even break into the
Henstocks
’ house, if you recall. The door was always open, and Henry was pretty easily dissuaded from his watchdog duties with a handful of raw sirloin.
Armentano
didn’t actually hurt anyone. Kate did far more damage to him than he did to her,” he grinned at me.

“That was self-defense,” I protested, feeling a bit guilty as I remembered my violent attack on what had turned out to be a senior citizen. “He was holding a gun on me!”

Margo and
Strutter
nodded in vigorous agreement, but John shook his head. “Sorry, Slugger, but what you thought was a gun turned out to be nothing more than a plastic water pistol that he brandished to get you to cooperate. Guess he didn’t know who he was tangling with.” He smiled to soften the effect of his words. “Good thing he didn’t pull that trick on Margo. She would have ripped off one of her shoes and killed him with a spike heel.” Margo and
Strutter
giggled, and I subsided.

“So what was the crime that this Michael
Armentano
, not really a plumber, intended to commit but didn’t actually?”
Strutter
brought us back to the business at hand.

“Michael
Armentano
is the son of one Adrian
Armentano
, a very elderly man now in his final days at the hospice in Branford,” John continued. Back in the nineteen-forties, Adrian was a mason. Judge
Henstock
hired him to build his document lock-up in the basement in nineteen-forty-five. During the course of the construction work, Adrian asked the Judge to represent his wife, Marianna, in the settlement of a dispute with a local tradesman, which he did a little too assiduously, if you get my drift.”

Strutter
and I exchanged puzzled looks. “You’d best spell it out,
Darlin
’,” Margo prompted. This time, I noted, John didn’t object to the term.

“As you know, Kate,
Lavinia
Henstock
suspected that her father had been inappropriately involved with a local woman. Turns out she was right. The woman was Marianna
Armentano
, Adrian’s wife and Michael’s mother. They were having an affair,” John stated bluntly.

“Huh!
Lavinia’s
intuition was right on the money,” I commented. “So then what happened?”

“Michael
Armentano
was an infant when all this happened, but way back then, Adrian was a hot-blooded Italian in his mid-twenties. He found out about his wife’s affair with the Judge, as Marianna feared he had. That was the conversation
Lavinia
overheard in the Judge’s study that night when she found the door locked. Adrian told Michael a few weeks ago on his deathbed that he had confronted his wife. When she attempted to deny it, he struck her so forcefully that he snapped her neck. She died almost instantly.”

We sat, coffee untouched, mesmerized by the tale that was unfolding.

“Adrian was overcome with remorse. He wanted to kill himself, he told Michael, but he had his infant, and now motherless, son to consider. So he did what he felt he had to do at the time. He wrapped his wife’s body in a tarpaulin. Then he waited for the Judge to shut himself up in his study the following evening and
Ada
to go out with her friends. He let himself in the side door of the
Henstock
house using the key he knew the Judge left under a planter on the porch. He made his way quietly to the basement, carrying his wife’s concealed body, and bricked her up behind a false rear wall he created in the closet using leftover materials that were still stacked down there. Then he let himself out the same way. He was betting that if the body was ever found, the authorities would assume it had been the Judge, not he, who had killed her. In a way, it sort of was,” John opined.

By this time, I was on the edge of my seat, but John still hadn’t answered my most burning questions. “That doesn’t explain what Michael
Armentano
was searching for so desperately that he would break into the house and then
pretend
to hold a gun on me for information.”

John sighed heavily. “You’re right. There’s more. For over sixty years, Adrian kept his secret, but on his deathbed, he confessed to his son.”

“But why?”
Strutter
vocalized the question on the tip of my tongue.

“Originally, Adrian told Michael that his mother had been having an affair with the Judge, and he had had a terrible fight with Marianna over it. But he told the child Michael that Marianna had returned to the old country in fear for her life, not that he had killed her. In the intervening years, it had occurred to him that the Judge might have kept something, love letters from Marianna or at least papers relating to
Henstock’s
representation of
her, that
might lead the police to Adrian, if her body were ever found. He didn’t want Michael to have to bear that shame. So he made a dying confession to his son and asked him to get back into the
Henstock
house and look for those documents. He assumed they would be in the basement closet. But when Michael got in, posing as a plumber, there was nothing in the closet. Then something about the back wall of the closet looked
wrongto
him. He took a hammer to it, and out fell …”

“Oh my God,” I said loudly, imagining the horror.
Strutter
got the picture at the same time and covered her face, groaning. The patrons at nearby booths looked over curiously. Margo shushed us.

“You’ve got it,” John agreed. From behind the bricks fell the skeleton of dear old
Mom.
Naturally, Michael freaked, but when he pulled himself together a little while later, he realized that he would be questioned by the police, and DNA testing would link the remains to him, thereby directly implicating his father. So he came back with an empty gunny sack and disposed of Mom in the Spring Street Pond. More bad luck for him, though. The skeleton snagged on the reeds, and along came Kate with her camera.”

I sagged back against the back of the booth, my head whirling. “But he couldn’t have known about that,” I said, still confused.

“Newspaper story,” said Margo and
Strutter
together. “And then there you were,
runnin
’ in and out of the
Henstocks
’ house with the police on a regular basis over the next few days,” Margo continued, patting me sympathetically. “In his half-crazy state of mind, he figured you had to have the documents his father had sent him to get, or at least know where in the house the
Henstocks
had them hidden.”

“But
Ada
and
Lavinia
didn’t even know about them at that time!”

“No, but they knew Michael was looking for something. So they went looking on their own and turned up that leather pouch in dear Papa’s desk.”

“That reminds me,”
Strutter
jumped in. “What was in that old pouch anyway?”

John smiled his quirky smile at her. “Exactly what everyone thought was in it … love letters from Marianna
Armentano
to Judge
Henstock
and records of his earlier representation of her in court.”

“Why would the Judge have kept those things? And why weren’t they in that closet? After all, that was why he had it built, wasn’t it?” That part still didn’t make sense.

John nodded. “Good question. As best we can figure it out, Judge
Henstock
had to be aware of Marianna’s sudden disappearance. He knew Adrian had learned of their affair, because Marianna had told him so. He probably figured out that Adrian
Armentano
had done something violent and kept those records and letters as a kind of insurance against his being dragged into it. If Marianna turned up dead, and
Armentano
tried to pin the murder on
Henstock
, the Judge figured he could produce evidence of a motive for
Armentano
, jealousy caused by his wife’s betrayal.”

We all pondered that for a moment. “It’s such an incredible sequence of events, but I guess that’s what happens when secret builds upon secret,” I mused.

“Sooner or later, the skeletons come out of the closet,” Margo agreed, “literally, in this case.”

Strutter
sat with a still-skeptical look on her face. “Assuming everything Michael told you is true, and that’s one hell of an assumption, how did he manage to be the one the
Henstock
sisters called when they needed a plumber? There’s about a hundred different ones listed in the Yellow Pages. And how did he even know that they would need a plumber?”

This time, it was Margo who answered the question. “That’s where life really gets stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make this stuff up. As luck would have it, before Adrian
Armentano
was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, he was a regular bingo player. Once a month at the congregational church hall, just like clockwork. Remind you of anyone?”

I thought for a moment.
“
Ada
Henstock
!
That’s where she was the night
Lavinia
and I got stuck in the basement.”

“Right you are, Sugar. And
accordin
’ to John,
Ada
remembers the old man well. They used to sit by each other sometimes. One night, she mentioned to the people at their table that there seemed to be a leak in the wall behind an old closet her daddy had built in the basement, and could anyone recommend a plumber to take a look-see? I guess Adrian’s blood just ran cold. He put two and two together, and very shortly thereafter, Michael appeared at the
Henstocks
’ kitchen door with a phony name and a phony business card to go with it.”

John finished the sad story. “Adrian’s guilty conscience and fear of discovery prompted a stroke, and that’s when they found the cancer.”

We were all quiet for a moment. “Poor Michael,” I said finally.
“Poor little boy, believing he had been abandoned by his mother all those years.
And then he found out that the truth was even worse.”
Strutter
reached over and covered my hand with hers.

“I know,” she said.

“He didn’t really hurt me, and he’s suffered enough for the sins of his father, not to mention those of his mother. I’m not going to press charges.”