Drawing Conclusions (20 page)

“You asked me here,” I said with my arms folded tightly across my chest. “Did you want something?”

“I fear you think I had something to do with Teddy's death.”

“And since when does my opinion matter?”

“Frankly, Constance, your opinion doesn't matter, but you seem to have gotten the ear of Detective DeRosa and your opinions couldn't be farther from the truth. I have been working closely with the police department and have done nothing but encourage the detective to find the truth.”

“That sounds like you know the truth.”

“I know I did not kill your brother.” My father answered plainly, but his face was a mangled mass of contradiction.

“Do you know who killed Teddy?”

He parsed his words with extreme precision. “My knowledge is not that specific.”

“Who the fuck are you? Bill Clinton?” I shouted with explosive anger. “It's a yes or no question.”

“Life is complicated, Constance.” He rose to a standing position, indicating my dismissal. No problem there. I was happy to depart, but I yearned for one last dig. My father had consistently underestimated me and I expected he thought I knew very little about the case. He had no idea I'd spotted Igor at his home and he was unaware that I saw Igor and Becky together. I also knew that he had been to Bonetti, Italy, in close proximity to Naomi's medical school. It was a fact I could not contain. So I dropped a heavy hint.

“DeRosa is in Italy,” I said.

My father lifted his head and stared directly at me. I held his gaze steadily while he processed the information.

“I have work to do,” he replied.

“
Ciao
,” I replied.

I left my father's office, heart pounding in my chest. I found my way to Cheski on legs too thin to support my fragile body. He noticed the change immediately.

“You okay?”

“Do you think it's possible my father had something to do with Teddy's death?”

It was apparent the officer could not maintain a poker face. He opened his eyes a bit too wide in an attempt to convey surprise at my question, but I knew where his head was. We climbed into the Gremlin.

“Come on, Cheski. Has DeRosa said anything to you?”

“You want the statistics first?”

“If they'll help,” I answered.

“Okay. There are thousands of cases where a son kills a father, but the reverse is almost an unheard-of crime,” Cheski said as he pulled out of the lab parking lot.

“Go on.”

“Fathers rarely harm adult children, but,” he said, tilting his head back and forth as he presented both sides of the argument, “parents have been known to make bad decisions.”

“Decisions that could harm their children?”

“That's what we're trying to find out now.” He drove in the direction of the police station as opposed to Harbor House. “Lamendola picked up Becky. She's being held at the station.”

“Was she in the East Village?”

“No, that address was bogus.”

“No surprise there. How did you find her?”

“I got a call when you were speaking to your father .You know the ad for the roommate that Charlie picked up in Brighton Beach? The FBI dismissed it because Charlie was too high to explain the connection. So this morning Trina thought to reply to the email listed on the ad.”

“But why would Becky talk to Trina?”

“She didn't know it was Trina. The girl played to Becky's ego and pretended she was a retailer in SoHo interested in carrying Becky's clothing line. She gave Trina an address to meet at and Lamendola scooped her right up.”

thirty-one

The interrogation room at
the police station was barren except for a worn metal table and two hard-backed chairs. By the look of the chairs and the lack of decoration, I suspected the strategy was to make the guilty party so physically uncomfortable that they confessed quickly. It seemed as though it worked. Becky shifted anxiously in her seat, with nowhere to look but directly at Lamendola seated across from her. Lamendola forced his shoulders and chest across the table, maintaining an aggressive and dominant position. He started by running through what seemed to be a list of standard identification questions. Becky refused to answer a single one. Her arms were folded snugly across her body and her bare legs were entwined tightly around each other like twisted pipe cleaners.

I was sitting with Cheski in an adjacent room watching the drama unfold on a mounted closed-circuit television. I had a hard time believing the person in front of me was my former housemate. Last time I saw her, she was taking afternoon tea on a bleak day with her pal Igor. I studied her countenance, her soft, full cheeks replaced by strains of sheer panic. She clearly had no idea she was going to ever be holed up in an interrogation room.

Lamendola was getting nowhere with her when a stray piece of paper inspired me. I bummed a pen from Cheski and started sketching, my eyes glued to Becky's face. It came easily since I had already worked out similar features a week ago. It was the shape of her nose that caught me, the flat bridge leading to eyes covered by a slight Asian lid. I interpreted her features quickly and then handed the sketch to Cheski.

“Give Lamendola my sketch,” I directed. “Have him tell Becky you're holding her father in a room across the hall.”

Cheski's eyebrow rose quizzically until he took one look at the sketch. He patted me on the back. “Damn good work,” he said, taking the paper and leaving the room. I watched through the camera as he handed my sketch to Lamendola and grumbled in his ear. Lamendola smiled smugly as if he'd just came into possession of an opposing team's playbook, which wasn't far off. My sketch showed two faces, a man and a young woman. The triangular area punctuated by the eyes and leading down to the nose was practically identical in both faces. Juxtaposed next to each other, it became immediately obvious that Becky was Igor's daughter, a fact none of us had detected until my drawing was completed. The sketch worked like a charm, bringing Becky to tears at the thought that both she and father had been caught and were being interrogated simultaneously.

As she studied my sketch, her hand rose to her mouth. I figured she had just realized I was nearby. She stood up and approached the camera, staring directly into the lens. “I'm sorry, CeCe,” she cried, tears tumbling down her round face. Lamendola led her back to the chair and asked her if she wanted a lawyer.

“I didn't do anything.” She covered her face with her hands.

“First tell me your name,” Lamendola said firmly.

“Rebekkah Volwitz.”

“Your father's name?”

“Stash Volwitz.”

I was taken aback hearing Igor's real name; it transformed the crime from a fantasy world of guessing and supposing into reality. Matching a name to my initial drawing was frightening as it gave Igor, now Stash, a form and identity. I wasn't being chased by an apparition. Stash Volwitz was a real person with intent to harm. And if I wasn't mistaken, his intent was to harm me.

“Who do you work for?'

Becky looked down at my drawing and ran her hand across the sketch. “I was helping my father,” she said, her blue eyes wet and moist.

“Whom does your father work for?”

“My uncle,” Becky said without hesitation. “My uncle Peter.”

Lamendola sat back, clearly caught off-guard by Becky's reference to Uncle Peter. Her comment must have set Lamendola's head spinning. In an amateur move, he looked into the camera as if he needed coaching.

I grabbed Cheski's arm. “He better not screw this up. This is a huge break.”

Cheski spoke into a small microphone that was wired to Lamendola's ear. “Get a last name for the uncle,” he demanded.

Lamendola's eyes lit up as if he just remembered where he had left a set of lost car keys. “Your uncle's full name?” he asked after a slight pause.

“At home he went by Dackow, but here he goes by Dacks.”

“Where is home?” Lamendola asked as he jotted down notes.

“Slovenia.”

“When did you immigrate to the United States?”

“When I was five. My uncle helped us come to the country after my mother died. Uncle Peter is my mother's brother.”

“How did your mother die?” We watched Becky's face fill with grief. I almost felt sorry for her, but I knew in my heart that she and her father had done something unforgiveable.

“We were very poor. Everyone in our village was poor except my uncle. He always had money.” She wiped her eyes with her hands.

Lamendola retrieved a box of tissues and gave her a second to collect herself.

“My uncle recruited villagers to participate in drug trials. It was easy money. You just had to be healthy. People would take the pills and every few months, American doctors would give you a check-up to determine if the pills had an effect on you. But one time, my mother and about ten other villagers got sick right away.” Her sobs seemed endless as she replayed her mother's final days.

“My mother was in terrible pain and throwing up blood. I stayed home from school and sat by her bed until she passed. My uncle paid the villagers to keep quiet, but my father wouldn't accept the money. He pressured my uncle to bring us back to the United States with him instead, and he did. Now my father works for my uncle in security at his company.”

“And you are also employed by your uncle?”

“Sort of.”

“Explain.”

“The girls from home work for a living”—Becky paused—“if you know what I mean.”

“But you've grown up here.” Lamendola's voice was laced with sympathy. He was losing perspective, forgetting she was a suspect in Teddy's death. “Why would you need to do that type of work, Becky?” He made a critical mistake by using her first name.

Cheski groaned through the microphone and admonished Lamendola's overly familiar line of questioning. The message got through, and his face went from kind to cold in a matter of seconds.

“I'm not legal,” Becky offered. “My uncle kept promising he'd process my paperwork. He knew how these things worked, but he wanted me to help with a job. He told me all I had to do was get close to Teddy, but just as a friend. No … intimate stuff. There was another girl before me, but she wasn't good at it, my uncle said.”

“Was that Dr. Naomi Gupta?” Lamendola asked.

Becky nodded affirmatively.

“What was the purpose of staying close to Dr. Prentice?”

“I had to tell my uncle anything Teddy said about his work. I tried taking notes after we talked, but the medical terms were confusing. It was hard and I kept disappointing my uncle, especially if we had plans with Teddy's work friends. I didn't understand what they were talking about.”

Just as Charlie and I had suspected, Becky and Naomi worked for the same person, Peter Dacks, both assigned to watch Teddy at different points in time.

“Were you trying to be Dr. Prentice's girlfriend?”

“No, Teddy wasn't interested in me that way,” Becky said, as if she were apologizing for not successfully selling her body to a disinterested client. “I promised my uncle I could still stay in Teddy's life by connecting with his friends. That's how I met his sister and the people at Harbor House. I was actually happy for once.” She looked away, lost in thought now.

It wasn't that she had fooled us into thinking we were all friends; we were all friends because when Becky was with us, she wasn't acting.

“Tell me what happened the day Teddy died.”

“I was trying to break away from my uncle. I thought I could actually make it as a clothing designer, and then he came to see me. He asked me to visit Teddy's office. He knew it was easy for me to enter the building because the receptionist had stopped asking me to sign in.”

Cheski whispered to me, “Now we know why her name didn't appear on the visitor's list.” I nodded and then turned my attention back to the interrogation. I knew I was about to hear something that would make me terribly upset. I saw that Becky, too, could see it coming as she continued to twist and turn her body like a snake shedding its skin.

“And you brought him something?” Lamendola led her.

“I didn't know,” she screamed, practically clawing at the policeman. “How could I know there was something in the cookies?” She stood and started pacing around the room, her movements frantic as she recounted her horror at the site of Teddy choking. She had snuck a cookie in the car ride over with no reaction, so she assumed a piece had simply lodged in his throat. She attempted to give Teddy the Heimlich Maneuver, but he shoved her away. He must have known an obstruction was not the cause of his choking; the symptoms would be entirely different. Becky's story was mesmerizing and dreadful, a nightmarish account of my brother's last breaths. I caught my reflection in the monitor's screen, my hand partially over my eyes, as if I could soften the gruesome blows.

Becky rubbed her throat as she spoke. “I realized it was hopeless and I knew my uncle was behind it. I opened Teddy's office window and crawled out.”

Since she had never signed in, no one remembered her presence on the day Teddy died.

Lamendola sat stone-faced, pen idle in his hand. When Becky crumbled to a halt, he stood abruptly and stormed out of the room, leaving her alone with her confession. He joined Cheski and me, and we watched the monitor as Becky cried like a baby. Her remorse was genuine, but it was too late to recant.

“I can't believe this,” I said, circling the room and swinging my arms as if I were addressing a packed stadium. “Becky killed Teddy. She just admitted it!” The confession was startling despite having seen her with Igor. I'd known she was guilty of something, but I couldn't comprehend that someone I lived with had killed my brother. Part of my resistance was that I bought her protestations. I actually believed she had no idea the cookies were tainted. She may have been desperate to gain citizenship, but Becky did not premeditate Teddy's murder. However, she had made one fatal error. She could easily have called for help. In a building filled with medical professionals, a swift injection could have saved Teddy's life. She could argue there was no intent to kill, but there was also no intent to save. She watched him die and, knowing she had done something wrong, purposely snuck out of the building.

“Now what?” Lamendola asked. “Where do I go from here?”

“We need to know the connection between my father and Dacks,” I said.

Lamendola and Cheski stared blankly at each other, as if this were beyond their job description. On some level, I knew they felt sorry for Becky's unwitting involvement in a complicated murder case. She was adorable and sweet and had clearly been a victim of her uncle's evil manipulation.

“Come on guys. If Frank were here, he'd ask the hard question. Get in there and get it done.”