The Altar Girl (6 page)

CHAPTER 9

L
IFE WAS MOVING
in slow motion now . . .

Donnie put my glass on the table. He didn’t reach for the refrigerator door. Instead he paused to listen to himself. He grinned. I had no idea what he was talking about because I was focused on what I was about to do. Which was unthinkable. The conviction with which I needed to act, the suffering I was going to inflict, the repercussions to my face, body, and life if I messed it up . . .

“You still go to the blessing of the Easter baskets?”

I sharpened my focus. Heard Donnie. He’d just asked a question. I realized I’d better answer.

“Sure,” I said. “I go every year.” In fact, I couldn’t remember when I’d last gone. Maybe fifteen years ago.

“I used to go with my mother. Everyone getting together in the school gym for the priest to go around and sprinkle holy water on their
babkas
and tacky colored eggs. It’s all bullshit but I liked it. I liked it because it was the one day a year where no one gave a shit who you were. Your family welcomed you back. The community welcomed you back. It’s just a great tradition. Wayward boys like me can come home for one day. No matter what you’ve done, everyone is happy to see you. Happy to see children with their mothers.”

Donnie Angel extended his arm and grasped the fridge door. He had to twist a little bit to the right because of the refrigerator’s location in the corner. He opened the door and reached inside to grab the bottle.

I jumped to my feet, stepped forward and curled my right leg up to my waist. This time I was the one with the element of surprise. His face registered shock but there was no time for him to react. His legs remained twisted, still facing the fridge. I snapped my heel against his lower left leg with all my might. The meat of my shoe connected with the bone.

I heard the crack. It was a sick, gut-wrenching noise. I must have closed my eyes before impact because the image of a paint stick breaking in half flashed in my mind. By the time I opened them, Donnie was lying on the floor wailing. He brought his hands to his leg and touched it, but that only made him scream even more.

My plan at this point was to get out of the van as quickly as possible. Much to my shock, however, I stood there staring down at the man who’d taken me against my will, who had a machine to break legs and was about to use it on me. The truth was I felt compassion for him. He was a human being. I’d hurt him. To make things worse, I truly believed that he liked me. In his own demented way, he believed he’d done me a favor by not killing me, and by planning to break my left instead of my right leg. And, as he’d said at the beginning, we went back. We went way back, all the way to the Grantmoor on the Berlin Turnpike.

Also, I’d been a devout Ukrainian Catholic growing up, and I took this cheek-turning business very seriously. I believed in the life-affirming power of unequivocal forgiveness. Based on my life until this moment, I would have expected to have been consumed with empathy for the man I’d hurt even though it was an act of self-defense. That’s the way I was wired.

But now, compassion wasn’t the only emotion that gripped me. Instead, a quiet rage had gathered inside me. It was accompanied by a giddy sense of satisfaction. It coursed through my veins, drowned my Catholic tendencies, and left me liberated. Perhaps I’d overdosed on humility, which was a way of saying I was sick of being pushed around. By my parents, my ex-husband, my bosses in New York, and now Donnie Angel. Whatever the reasons, I felt more empowered than I had since childhood as I gazed at the agony I’d inflicted.

“Bitch . . . Are you fucking crazy?” Donnie clenched his teeth as though gathering some more willpower to fight the pain. A deep breath. Eyes looking as though they might pop out of his sockets. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I know what I’ve done.” The words rolled off my tongue one at a time. “Spiral . . . tibial . . . fracture.”

I assumed the van was soundproofed for obvious reasons. The driver and the other man who’d lifted me off the street hadn’t heard Donnie any more than they would have heard me if my leg were the one that had been broken. I found the phone beside the liquor decanters and lifted the receiver.

A man’s voice. “Yeah?”

“Pull over,” I said, sounding as agitated as I could. “I think he’s having a heart attack.”

The van swerved right and slowed down. I jumped out the back door before it came to a complete stop, leaving Donnie shouting obscenities in my wake. What impressed the hell out of me was that he’d switched to Ukrainian swear words. Maybe that line I’d made up about my godfather saying Donnie had a Ukrainian soul wasn’t completely fiction after all.

I recognized my location as soon as my feet kissed the pavement. The grand stairs leading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the right. The former Stanhope Hotel on the left. Fifth Avenue and 81st Street. Six blocks from my apartment. They really had been circling my neighborhood.

I ran north along 5th past the museum. The van wouldn’t be able to make a U-turn. Traffic flowed only one way and that was south. I didn’t bother looking behind me. I kept my eyes focused on the lights atop the yellow cabs.

A vacant taxi appeared within four blocks. I jumped inside and told the driver to take an immediate left on 84th Street. The van was still parked to the side. I’d left the door open behind me but it was shut now. I suspected the men were tending to Donnie.

I told the cabbie to drive straight across 83rd and drop me off on 1st Avenue. I ran the final block to my apartment and locked myself inside. Logic dictated Donnie would expect me to go home, but I wasn’t worried about him. I lived in a protected building with seasoned doormen. No thug was going to get past them. To make sure, I called downstairs and told them a blind date had gone bad and to keep me informed if any strangers asked about me. The doorman who picked up promised to keep me safe, and I was glad I’d been a generous tipper at the end of the year, back when I had the money to be one.

I trembled as I peeled my clothes off. Didn’t leave the steaming shower for twenty minutes until I’d managed to calm down.

Then I did what I’d been planning to do all night.

I uncorked that bottle of wine and tried to figure out what I was going to do next.

CHAPTER 10

N
ADIA CUT TWO
small branches off a young oak tree and trimmed them to arm’s length. Using some twine, she secured the sticks to each side of the Rodent’s ankle with the Ace bandage to form a splint. That locked the ankle in place so that it wouldn’t be hurt any worse when they moved him. He winced from the pain as she put it on, and Nadia did her best to keep him calm by talking to him as she worked.

Afterward, Nadia cut down two saplings with her knife. The whacking tired her out even more, and for a second she was afraid she might faint. Only adrenaline kept her going. The Giraffe noticed this and came rushing to her side with genuine concern, but Nadia waved her off and kept working. She asked the Giraffe to help her spread out the poncho.

After they did so, Nadia fixed a sapling to each side of her poncho and made a stretcher out of it. Together, the four of them lifted the Rodent onto the stretcher. The nearest ranger station was three miles away. Nadia drew a map for them and directed them toward the trail.

The Rodent thanked her profusely. He reached out with his hand, grasped her shoulder, and squeezed it the way she had done to his. The Kangaroo offered Nadia money, but she refused. She was almost insulted but realized they were city folk and they wouldn’t understand the PLAST code, that it was her duty to help anyone who needed it. They offered to take her address and send her the poncho, but she refused that, too. She was worried her father would get mad at her for giving out their address to strangers.

The Giraffe came over and gave her a hug. Nadia recoiled at first because she wasn’t used to anyone touching her, but she knew the Giraffe meant well so she decided it was okay.

Afterward, the Kangaroo and the Ferret lifted the stretcher and followed the Giraffe toward the trail.

Nadia made her way back toward camp. She’d given away her poncho, so if it rained she’d probably get soaked. It was a bad thing to be in the forest without a poncho. There was a reason Mrs. Chimchak had taught her to keep it at the top of her knapsack. Still, giving away the poncho was a matter of honor. She had to put the well-being of a sick individual above her own.

As soon as she returned to camp, though, Nadia realized she had an even bigger problem than life without a poncho.

Her fire had died. Partially burned wood and ashes were scattered all over the place. Some animal had ransacked her camp. There were no glowing embers, no sign of life for her to work with whatsoever.

She’d drunk all her water. She’d planned to boil some from the stream when she returned.

Now she had no poncho, no water, no fire, and no matches with which to light a new one.

And she had two days and two nights to go.

CHAPTER 11

I
SLEPT FITFULLY
and woke up the next morning with that dread in the pit of my stomach, the one that reminds you something horrible is going on in your life even before you’re alert. Then I remembered my abduction, Donnie Angel’s champagne wishes and caviar dreams, and breaking his leg like a paint stick. My hunger pains vanished in a blink, and I found a moment of joy amidst the misery. If nothing else good came out of it, my current predicament was going to help me lose those last seven and a half pounds.

Even before downing the second of three glasses of wine the night before, I knew exactly what I was going to do next. I’d become a competent financial analyst because of my detailed approach to understanding a business and its financial statements. One of the ways I dissected a complex holding company with a myriad of subsidiaries was to draw a picture. It helped me visualize what was going on among the individual entities, if money was being borrowed or lent to support one at the cost of another, or if funds were being siphoned off at the top to pay the owners. I spent the morning visualizing my godfather’s life the same way, and plotting the course of my investigation. Then I placed a phone call to an old friend.

After lunch, I arranged for one of the doormen to walk me to my parking garage. His shift ended at 3:00 p.m., which worked out perfectly. I drove my usual route along the Hutchinson River Parkway, keeping a sharp eye on the rearview mirror, but darted onto I-684 at the last second. The entrance ramp twisted and turned onto a straightaway. I gunned the engine on my vintage Porsche 911 through the curve and then ducked into the right-hand lane and slowed down to fifty-five. Every single car passed me for the next ten miles. I didn’t recognize any of them, and I didn’t see anyone following me either.

Not that it mattered. By now it was early rush hour. Cars hugged each other’s bumpers while cruising at the speed limit. Donnie may have gotten away with lifting me off a dimly lit New York street at midnight, but he wasn’t going to be able to pull it off on the highway. The streets of Hartford would be an altogether different matter. It was going to be up to me to be prudent and cautious.

I knew he would be informed of my arrival because he somehow knew the details of the questions I’d asked Roxanne Stashinski at my godfather’s funeral reception. Word would get around that I was back. It was a small community, and people talked. There was always the possibility that Roxy herself had betrayed me to Donnie Angel, or gossiped innocently to someone about the questions I’d asked her. But I doubted it. She had no motive, and I’d known her my entire life. I trusted her as much as anyone outside my family, though that wasn’t saying all that much.

Roxy was my godfather’s niece. She was also my best friend growing up. We’d gone to summer PLAST camps together, and attended Ukrainian School at night until she quit after the seventh grade. Her mother had studied ballet and she’d inherited her long, lithe frame and feline features. As a kid, I’d wished I looked more like her, but mostly I wished I’d fit in as well. Everyone thought Roxy was cool, at Uke camps and at American school. It helped that she was thin and did the kinds of things cool girls did, like smoke cigarettes and experiment with drugs.

Her popularity with boys, in fact, was the beginning of the end of our childhood friendship. During our last PLAST camp together, she turned cold and stopped being friends with me. Something had changed but I didn’t know what, until I caught her giving a blow job to a sixteen-year-old boy from Brooklyn in the tall grass behind the propane tank. We were fourteen at the time.

Twenty years later she had the life every immigrant coveted for his child. She was married to a full-blooded Ukrainian and had two kids. He was a contractor, she was a homemaker, and when they went to church on Sunday, they were the envy of every parent whose children had either left or married outside the culture.

We’d rekindled our friendship five years ago when I’d married her brother.

I picked her up at a car wash two blocks away from the Ukrainian National Home, where she’d been cooking with the other Uke
ladies in preparation for bingo night. She was frowning even before she pulled the passenger door open. She still sported killer legs in tight jeans but her face resembled a shrunken raisin. It reminded me of what some famous actress had once said: that as she aged, a woman had to decide whether to preserve her ass or her face. She couldn’t keep both. I guess that’s one of the things I’d always liked about Roxy. We were both flawed. Neither of us was pedestal material.

“The car wash? Really?” Roxy said.

“I’m sorry. I’ll explain. Get in. Quick.”

I looked around to see if my favorite van had arrived, or if a crazed man in cleats was running toward me with a mallet in his hands. Such was my state of mind since last night.

Roxy threw her bag in behind her and climbed in the car. She held what looked like a plate covered by a paper bag in her hands. The delicious smell of fried potatoes and onions hit me. I didn’t wait for her to put her seat belt on. Instead I slammed the car into first and took off.

“Hey,” Roxy said, her head snapping back from the torque. “What the . . .” She whipped her seat belt across her shoulder and snapped it in place. “I need to be back in an hour but you’re taking that way too seriously.”

I took off down Wethersfield Avenue and veered right onto Brown Street. The tires screeched. Roxy gripped the overhead handle. “What’s going on? Am I missing something?”

“Yeah.” I hammered the throttle. The engine sang and the car flew. “This morning when I called you. I didn’t tell you everything.”

I had told Roxy I was coming back to Hartford and that I needed to meet her. I hadn’t given her any details because I didn’t want to listen to her try to stop me. I also didn’t like the idea of speaking to anyone on the phone about what had happened to me or about my godfather’s death. If I were asking any questions about either subject, I wanted to be able to shine a flashlight in the other person’s eyes so I could see what was going on behind them.

I gave her an abbreviated version of the previous night’s events. She interrupted with a series of mild exclamations but otherwise listened until I was done.

“And that’s it?” Roxy said. “That’s everything?”

She asked the question in a tone that suggested I’d failed to mention something obvious. I quickly replayed what I’d told her in my mind.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s everything.”

“No. It’s not everything. What you haven’t told me yet is that you called the cops. If not last night then this morning. Tell me you called the cops, Diana.”

Diana was an anagram for Nadia. Roxy had figured it out during PLAST camp and decided it would be my nickname. I secretly loved it at the time. It made me feel popular and glamorous. It made me feel that I was more assimilated and American, which I wanted above everything else.

Now I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it was a sweet reminder of the times Roxy had been nice to me when we were kids. On the other hand, I felt hopelessly unworthy of sharing the name of an immortal princess. The thing with nicknames, though, is that once they stick, there’s nothing you can do about them.

“No,” I said. “I did not go to the cops.”

“Why not?’

“That would be the wrong thing to do. Come on, Rox. You know that.”

“If you report it, they’ll arrest Donnie. They’ll get him off the street. Otherwise, that sick bastard is coming after you. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know that. I also know that it’s not only Donnie I need to worry about. I doubt he’s in this alone.”

“Have you talked to your mother or brother about this?”

“No.”

“Did you at least call them?”

I tried to look cool, but I swallowed before I could form a single word. “Of course I called. The question isn’t whether I called them, the question is whether they picked up or called back.”

“And did they?”

It was my turn to fire Roxy a disapproving glare for even asking. Of course they hadn’t called back. They both hated me.

Roxy shook her head. “You’ve got to go to the police. You’ve got to go now.”

“The number one rule is to stay inside the community,” I said. “You know that. The minute I go outside the community for help all bets are off.”

“But what if all bets are off already?”

“If Donnie wanted to kill me, he would have done it in the van. All he was doing was scaring me.”

“Yeah. By breaking your leg. Except now you broke his. And what exactly do you think he’s going to do next time?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t matter? Do you want to die?”

“I didn’t mean it doesn’t matter in the sense that I don’t care if I get hurt. I meant it doesn’t matter what Donnie’s planning. It’s better than if I go to the cops. Then I’m threatening his entire organization. Then there’s not even a debate my life is in danger.”

Roxy stared out the windshield and took a few audible breaths. I waited for her to calm herself down before lobbing the questions I’d been waiting to ask.

“Did you see Donnie at the memorial service or the funeral?”

“God no,” Roxy said. “Why would he be there?” Roxy was implying that he wasn’t a relative or a close friend of the family.

“Exactly. That means someone must have told him I was asking questions. That I may have appeared suspicious about the circumstances of my godfather’s death.”

“Yeah. Obviously. I did.”

I assumed she was joking until I glanced in her direction and saw her striking a defiant pose, looking straight ahead at the windshield, lips pressed tight, jaw elevated a few haughty inches. Then all my insides seemed to slide up into my throat. “You did what?”

Roxy turned toward me, tilted her head and widened her eyes. “You’re kidding me, right?”

I took a deep breath and exhaled. I felt horrible for even contemplating my best friend had ratted me out. I waved my hand as though surrendering. “I wasn’t suggesting that you talked to him—”

“Yeah you were. But that’s okay. I understand. You’ve always been a cold psycho-bitch. I still love you. In fact, that’s probably the reason I love you . . .”

“I’m just asking. How did he know what I was thinking? Did you mention our discussion to anyone?”

Roxy laughed. “You’re officially on the verge of pissing me off. Yes. After you left the memorial service, I walked to the front, stood by the casket, and made an announcement to the general public. ‘My psycho-bitch former sister-in-law thinks my uncle was murdered!
’
”

I shook my head and muttered a few Ukrainian obscenities under my breath, the kind that used to sneak past my father’s gritted teeth whenever his family disappointed him, which was pretty much all the time. Roxy knew the same obscenities, I was sure. It was the order and cadence of delivery that distinguished one frustrated parent from another.

“There had to be two hundred people at the memorial service,” Roxy said.

I nodded. “Anyone could have overheard me.”

“Just because Donnie wasn’t there, doesn’t mean he didn’t know half the people who were.”

“True that,” I said.

“Why are you doing this, Diana?”

“Because I loved my godfather and someone killed him. I want to find out who and why.”

“Oh yeah? Diana the noble warrior, since when?”

I shrugged. “Since now.”

“Come on. What’s this really all about?”

I saw the logic in her question, but I didn’t have the time or desire to contemplate it. “This is just something I have to do. That’s all I know.”

Roxy sat quietly for a moment. “So what’s the plan?” She infused her voice with a note of determination.

“There’s obviously a link between my godfather’s business and Donnie Angel. I’m going to start there and see what I can figure out.”

An incredulous laugh burst from Roxy’s mouth. It sounded more like a bark. “Sure. Of course you are. Piece of cake. And you’re going to do this all alone?”

“That’s right. I do all my best work alone.”

“It’s good you’re driving around in an old Porsche. You’ll blend right in wherever you go.”

“It is what it is.” The truth was I had no choice. I couldn’t afford a rental.

“Don’t you think he might be waiting for you? At my uncle’s house? Right now?”

“Highly unlikely. He expects me to stay in New York or go somewhere else to hide. The last place he expects me to go is to his turf in the Hartford area. And the absolute last place he expects me to go is the scene of the crime. That’s why, for now, this is as safe a place as any for me to be.”

“Yeah. For now.”

“And by the way . . . After tonight, I don’t want you involved. I don’t want you in harm’s way.”

I needed Roxy tonight to get access to my godfather’s house. As his niece, she had been his emergency contact and had a copy of the front door key.

“Yeah, yeah. Poor Diana. Doesn’t want to be beholden to no one. Always the loner. Didn’t have any friends growing up. Doesn’t have any friends now. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Spare me your martyr complex. I brought you potato pancakes, you know.”