The Famous Dar Murder Mystery (6 page)

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Authors: Graham Landrum

BOOK: The Famous Dar Murder Mystery
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Then I calmed down a bit and began to do some constructive thinking. I reviewed a few things. The man named Luis Garcia Valera had come in on USAir Flight 326, and he had had a reservation also on USAir. He had come to Borderville from Santa Barbara on the way to New York.
Santa Barbara! Ethel Muehlbach! Wasn't that where Ethel lives? Of course it was!
I met Ethel at Continental Congress three years ago and then happened to run into her again in Constitution Hall last year when I was in Washington with Henry.
Mills graduate—and a very smart girl. And it seemed to me that her husband is a surgeon. She is the kind of girl who would know about any major event in Santa Barbara. I looked at my watch. It was ten o'clock. Maybe at 1:30 it would be safe to call her.
I had plenty to do in the meantime. I never get all the Christmas cards addressed on time, and that means I have to write letters to all the people who didn't get the card. The result is that my friends from the latter part of the alphabet expect long letters from me in January and February. But I was down to the
Ws.
I was doing pretty well for me.
In fact 1:30 arrived just about the time I realized I was hungry. I made up half a package of Knorr soup and had some of the leftover congealed salad. And that was lunch.
I got Ethel's number from the directory service. She picked up the phone on the third ring.
“Helen!” she squealed when I said my name and did my song-and-dance about Continental Congress. “Of course I remember you. Where are you?”
In some ways it was better in the old days when the operator used to announce: “You have a long-distance call from Phoenix, Arizona,” or wherever. You knew it was long distance then, but now I had to explain that I was in Borderville; and again she said, “Where?”
We are not a famous town, but we are not insignificant either. We have approximately thirty thousand people on the Tennessee side and almost forty thousand on the Virginia side. Parsons City, seventeen miles south of us, has eighty-five thousand and a large regional university; and Cooksport, the other point on our triangle, is twenty-five miles away with seventy-five thousand. So we are not a mere hamlet, and the three cities with their shared airport form a center for light industry, trade, and transportation. But the world does not know this, and I am constantly having to explain. For present purposes I contented myself by stating that I was calling from Tennessee.
I asked Ethel if Luis Garcia Velera had given a concert in Santa Barbara.
“Lu García?”
“Luis Garcia Valera,” I repeated.
“We call him Lu. Of course I've heard him many times. He's awfully good. I suppose you are thinking of him for your concert series.”
“He lived there in Santa Barbara!”
“Why yes, he does.”
So García's home was Santa Barbara, and he was taking his harp to Spain but had made a side trip to Borderville, Virginia-Tennessee, a place that some people believed, albeit erroneously, to be out of the way.
“Suppose you just tell me all you know about him,” I said.
“Oh,” Ethel began, “he's a very nice man. Arthur knows him—plays golf with him now and then and of course he belongs to the club. His wife was very nice—southern girl—died suddenly about eight years ago—very sad!
“He's highly regarded as a musician and has his own conservatory—the Garcia School, I think he calls it. People come from just about everywhere to study harp with him. The harp is such a beautiful instrument—let me see …”
There was a pause before Ethel went on. “I read—that's it—he's gone abroad, concert tour. Oh, he's just very fine.”
“Ethel,” I said, “are you where you are comfortable?”
“Yes,” she said, “Why?”
“Good, because I have a long story, and you'll find it interesting.” I told her about the whole adventure and my problems with Butch Gilroy.
“You don't mean it!” she said when I had finished. “But then I have always said that a Regent, if she is worth anything, can handle any crisis, and you are a Regent. Now what can I do to help you?”
“You've already done a lot,” I replied. “But suppose you give me a description.”
“He's very good looking,” she said. “Maybe sixty or more. His parents were refugees—perhaps came to America about
thirty-six. Yes, I'd say he is at least sixty—dark, of course—lots of wavy hair.”
“Could it be a wig?” I interrupted.
Ethel laughed. “Yes, it is. Much too good to be true. Well, let's see—I would say the features are regular. Rather heavy eyebrows. Rimless spectacles. Not quite six feet tall. Medium build—very expensive clothes—always. His wife had money.”
“Does he have relatives there?”
“No—none here, I think. I could ask.”
“Do,” I said, “and I can't thank you enough.”
As soon as we disconnected, I knew what I had to do. I was positive that the person who used García's ticket on USAir had not been Garcia. I was going to build a fire under Butch Gilroy and make him do the right thing. I immediately called Al Manley at the
Banner-Democrat
and told him I was absolutely sure that the corpse in question was Luis Garcia Valera of the Garcia School of Music in Santa Barbara, California, that he was known internationally, and that efforts were being made through a friend to locate the next of kin.
I explained that I knew Ethel through the DAR. He kept asking me specific questions, and I hardly knew whether I should pull back before plunging into such notoriety as the
Banner-Democrat
could create. But I went right ahead.
The next morning I read the following story:
DAR IDENTIFIES BODY
Transcontinental Cooperation of Women's Organization Provides Information
The body discovered ten days ago by representatives of the Old Orchard Fort Chapter, DAR, of Borderville has now been identified as that of the internationally known musician and
educator Luis Garcia Valera, according to Mrs. Henry Delaporte, Regent of the chapter.
A clue picked up at Three City Airport led to Santa Barbara, California, where Delaporte contacted DAR member Ethel Muehlbach. Through Muehlbach an accurate description of Garcia was secured. “The body we found in Brown Spring Cemetery tallied in every way with the description furnished by Mrs. Muehlbach,” Delaporte stated. “I have not the slightest doubt that the man buried as a pauper here last week was in reality a musician of international reputation,” she added.
Delaporte and Muehlbach became acquainted when both were delegates in 1983 to Continental Congress, an annual meeting at the national headquarters of the DAR in Washington.
“She was quite surprised when I contacted her,” Delaporte said of the Santa Barbara woman. It is not unusual, she observed, for delegates to Continental Congress to meet and form friendships with delegates from widely separated chapters. “I have met many interesting women through the DAR, but I never expected one of them to help me identify a corpse,” Delaporte said.
There was also a story headed SHERIFF TERMS IDENTITY PREPOSTEROUS. And of course Butch Gilroy was contending that Garcia Valera had boarded a plane to Kennedy that Sunday.
 
 
Elizabeth Wheeler
Mr. Manley was so nice and checked every DAR story with me to be sure he had written it right, and the story in the
Banner-Democrat
had all the details right so that we could get our credit for the inches. I just went right into the kitchen and got busy.
Now, I promised that young man some Belgrade bread. That's a recipe that I have never seen in any of the books. I got it from one of Mama's friends—she was Austrian—and she was an old lady forty years ago, so it is an old recipe going way, way back. Anyhow, it is just one of the best cookie recipes I know anything about. Here's how you make it:
BELGRADE BREAD
Cream 5 eggs and 2 cups sugar. Add 4 oz. finely cut or ground almonds, 1 t. nutmeg, ¼ t. cloves, 1 t. baking powder, 4 oz. citron finely
cut. Then add 3 to 4 cups flour to make a stiff batter. Roll out to thickness of ¼ in. and cut into desired shapes. Paint top of each cookie with beaten whole egg to which a little milk may be added. Bake in 350° oven 8 to 10 minutes. They should not be baked too long because they become hard.
So that was the recipe I made; and I put the cookies in a nice box, prettied myself up, and went down to the newspaper office. And there was Mr. Manley; he said he had been expecting me. I told him he could always count on me and that I was sure I could count on him.
He just opened up the box and started in, and all the other people in the office had learned what to expect whenever I came in; and they came over right away. So I guess I didn't make too many cookies after all.
We had just a wonderful time, and I liked the other reporters and secretaries and so on just as much as I liked Mr. Manley. I don't know whether they liked me, but I must say that they liked my Belgrade bread. Then Mr. Manley said, “You know, I put that story on the wire.”
I didn't really know what that meant.
“I sent it out on the wire,” he said. “It will go to the Associated Press.”
I guess my eyes must have got big about that time, because he said, “Oh, not all the papers will print it, but some will, and you'll get lots of inches.”
My! I never expected anything like that, and I began to think what I could do for that nice young man. So I promised him I would keep the goodies coming just as long as he did the right thing by the DAR. And he said, “I think we can do business. That sort of makes us partners, doesn't it?”
I said, “It sure does.”
As I was going out, he said, “I'll be on the lookout for the story in the exchange.” That's the papers in other towns that exchange with the
Banner-Democrat.
About three days later, the mail began to come in. Friends from all over east Tennessee and Virginia and Kentucky and North Carolina and West Virginia began sending clippings to our members. We got clippings from Roanoke, Marion, Parsons City, Cooksport, Knoxville—just everywhere. And Alice Turner's niece saw the story and sent it to us from Indianapolis! When we got all the clippings together, we had almost two yards of publicity; and I felt sure it would all count because it was about our chapter and our project and all.
 
 
Hornsby Roadhever
I am writing this at the request of Mrs. Helen Delaporte, who as I understand it intends to include it in the minutes of her DAR chapter.
I am Hornsby Roadheaver of the Roadheaver Agency in San Francisco. I manage between fifty and sixty of the biggest names in music and dance on the West Coast. I book my artists with the Community Series Inc. and with all the big symphonies and civic opera companies in the United States and Canada. Lately I have booked several concert tours in Europe.
I began handling Luis Garcia seventeen years ago. Since that time he has averaged about ten concerts a year. Over the years he has made in the neighborhood of $180,000 with me, and I don't have to tell you it has been profitable for me also.
Lu was a different sort of fellow. You could say that about any of my artists, but Lu was not only different from ordinary people, he was different from other artists. I would say he was
proud—not proud in the same way all artists are, but proud in his own way.
You take a soprano who has a few notes above high C. There is something about that that she just can't get over. Every third sentence she speaks for the rest of her life will have something about “my career” in it. She can't find anything good to say about any other soprano, unless she is being interviewed on TV—but that's another matter.
You never saw a man as polite as Lu was. There was no respect he demanded for himself that he didn't show to other people. Dapper—good looking in a way—he was just something you don't run into except in old novels—maybe like
The Count of Monte Cristo—I
think that's the title of it.
You would never say I was close to Lu—nobody was—but we've had dinner, cocktails, whatever else together for all those years. He was always friendly. But in spite of that, we never quite managed to become real friends—you know.
Still, I liked the guy; and when I read that he had passed away, well, just thinking of the guy himself, the first thought that came to me was: “I'm sorry. Something important got away from me again. It was too bad I hadn't known him better.” It wasn't till a couple days later that I thought about how much money I was kissing good-bye.
But after all, our relationship had been business; and even though he was now dead, the business was unfinished. There was an agent in Madrid who would be getting nervous, and he would be screaming pretty soon because Lu did not show up.
You see, what Lu had planned to do was to take rooms in Madrid, where he could rest up and practice before he began the tour.
So there would be no reason for me or anyone else to miss Lu (he had no family here) until almost time for his first concert.
It was a real shock to learn from the morning paper that one of my very own artists had been murdered.
It took me about an hour to realize that it was up to
me
to do something about it. You see, he lived down there in Santa Barbara. I knew he didn't have any family, and I didn't have the ghost of an idea who his lawyer was or his accountant. He had a little school down there—just his own—just harp and nothing else.
But you see, I had that number, and I called it.
The voice that belonged to the second in command down there sounded very sweet and very young to me. “Dear,” I said, “how old are you?”
“What is this?” The voice didn't sound quite so sweet anymore.
“Well,” I said, “if you are forty-five, I have an unpleasant task to dump on you: notifying some people in Europe that since they are not going to be seeing Lu Garcia after all, they had better send his baggage back and who knows what else (I never had an artist die like this before); but if you are under twenty-four, I'll do it myself.”
“I'm twenty-six,” she said.
“I think I'll do it for you anyhow.”
“Is it about the Spanish tour?”
“Yes.”
There was one of those pregnant pauses we so often read about.
Then I said I was Hornsby Roadheaver; and yes, she knew who I was. And she knew that Lu had sent his harp and all his luggage except for one bag direct to an address in Calle Calderon in Madrid. She sounded really forlorn.
“Were you close to him?” I asked.
“Not in that way,” she replied. “He was just a wonderful man, and he taught me everything I know.” She sounded like
she really meant it, and I was afraid she was going to cry into the phone just any second.
“Do you know any more about—” I began. “Do you know any more about what happened?”
“No, only what's in the paper just now.”
Can you imagine it! The poor kid didn't know anything about it until she saw it in the paper. And here I had been smart-mouthing all over the wire.
Well, I could see that this sweet kid didn't know anything that I didn't know. But I had the news story in front of me—all about the DAR, if you would believe it! “Dear, I tell you what,” I said. “Just look up the number of this Ethel Muehlbach for me, and I'll let you go.”
I could hear the pages rustle as she looked up the listing in the book. When I got the number, I thanked her and rang off.
And that was how I got to know Janie Sieburg—because that's who that sweet voice belongs to, and there's more to be said about her in a later installment.
Muehlbach gave me Helen Delaporte's number. I called Helen right away, and she was the other good thing that happened to me that day. Janie and Helen are two real charmers in very different ways. Janie—the young chick—a knockout to look at, as I soon found out (but an excellent harpist and I am going to get her engagements and she will pack the houses as soon as the public sees her picture), real blond hair and gentian eyes. And just wait until they hear her play. And Helen—mature, poised, intellectual, forceful. And when I got to know her, I found out that she is an excellent musician too and dedicated to her work.
I rang up Helen immediately and explained who I was.
“I guess you are sure this man was Lu García?” I said.
“Without question,” she came back. I knew from the way she said it that she was right. But you know how sometimes
you just hope that what you know is true isn't that way after all.
“Could you just describe him a little?” I said.
She told me all the usual things—height, weight, age, etc. And then she said there was something strange about the appearance of the left eye. You see, that was one of the few things he told me of a personal nature about himself. He didn't use the word
blind,
but he said that with monovision he did not like driving more than was necessary.
Then she asked me about his hair. I said that he had a regular forest on his head. The fact is I often envied him because my own crop is getting a little sparse up there.
She said that was a discrepancy, but she felt sure that there was a wig missing. So—I was willing to buy that, because that hair of his really looked like an ad for Breck.
Then she went on with the description, and it checked out right along. When she came to the clothes he had on in the air terminal, I knew there couldn't be any mistake because of the suede jacket. That just sounded like Lu Garcia: flash, but class just the same. From the description, it had to be Lu.
Then Helen told me about some man who used Lu's name and flew out of that Three City Airport on Sunday after Lu would seem to have been killed.
I was getting to be a little puzzled. I was searching around in my mind for something, and I wasn't sure what that might be. But I had told that cute voice down in Santa Barbara that I would do a job for her.
I needn't have worried about what to do because Helen told me what it was.
“Take down this number,” she said. It was the number of the commonwealth attorney. “The best thing to do is call him,” she said. “They are not going to do a thing at this end as long as they can deny the identity. But if you call Ron
Jefferson and demand clarification, the next move will have to be his.”
So Helen and I hung up, and I dialed that commonwealth attorney and just barely caught him in the office because by that time it was almost five o'clock there in the East. I offered to send him publicity stills for identification, but he said the only way to identify the body was for someone who knew Lu to look at the corpse.
Now, I really wasn't interested in a transcontinental flight to some place called Borderville in the Virginia boondocks. I mean, after all, even though my Daddy was on the Bible-Belt revival circuit for years, I don't manage country and western. I was very dubious. He said I should let him know if I was going to make the trip so he could get an exhumation order. It really didn't sound like a party I wanted to attend.
After we rang off, I got to thinking about it. I was in the soup on this anyhow I looked at it. I dithered about it all evening and finally called Janie again the next morning. We did considerable talking before I asked for the name and number of Lu's lawyer, which was why I called her in the first place.
The lawyer said that there would be trouble with the estate unless we could get a death certificate for Lu Garcia and, what's more, that Janie was the biggest beneficiary of his will.
After that second talk with Janie, I was ready to do just about anything to look like Mr. Big to her. So I thought maybe I would go back there to Borderville and identify the remains. All the same, it looked to me like the round-trip ticket would be just a little pricey. But then I asked this lawyer if the trip might be charged to the estate. As soon as he said yes, my mind was made up that I was going to take a trip east.
So I went to Borderville.
I got to Three City Airport at 11:45 P.M. on Sunday, March 6, because I missed a connection at a place called
Charlotte, North Carolina. I checked in at the Sunset Inn just next to the terminal at Three City and didn't wake up the next morning until half past ten. I called this Jefferson person—the commonwealth attorney. He sounded relieved to hear from me because he had the undertaker ready to dig up the coffin. He told me he would send a car for me at two o'clock.
As soon as I looked out, I saw mountains; and believe me, it was cold outside with heavy clouds. I got in the car beside the driver and began to wish I hadn't. The roads were like absolutely drunk, and this guy's driving was like something else.
We finally pulled into a cemetery and drove clear to the back, which seemed to be where they plant paupers and such.
The grave had already been opened, and the coffin all crudded up with red clay was on the surface at one side. Jefferson shook my hand, said he was glad to see me, and asked how it was at the Sunset Inn, then told the undertaker's man to open her up.
It was worse than I expected. The lower part of Lu's face looked like it had been tenderized. His nose was smashed in, and the undertaker hadn't bothered to rebuild anything.
There was no hair topside, but the suntan came right up to the line and the scalp was strictly pale skin from there on. The face was in really bad condition, and he had been dead for some time, but I knew in my vitals that this was Lu Garcia.
I nodded, “That's him.”
The D.A. turned to the undertaker and said, “Take him to the morgue. I suppose the body is to be sent to California?”
“Yes,” I said, though I hadn't thought of it before. I sure hoped that somebody would do something to make Lu look better before Janie saw him.
There were some papers for me to sign.
“When does your plane leave?”
“Four-thirty,” I said.
“Where would you like us to take you?”
“Sunset Inn,” I said, and he told the driver to take me there.
Going back out that hilly road, I guess I was a little reflective, the way you are after a funeral. Lu and I had been friendly—a glass of wine, a good steak, that kind of thing. He had a real talent, and I was pretty depressed that it had come to this. In fact I didn't realize for about ten minutes that it had begun to snow in a sort of neglectful way.
By the time we got to the inn, the snow had got down to business. It had been a long time since I was in a real snowstorm. About three-thirty I opened my door and stood under the overhang just a minute. The snow was two and a half inches on the ground and there was not a sound. I looked over toward the control tower. As I thought about it, I hadn't heard a plane come in for half an hour. I called the ticket counter. All flights canceled. There I was without even an
Esquire.
I had already found out that the TV in my room was one that Noah threw out of the ark. What to do? Then I happened to think that I had had that telephone contact with Helen Delaporte. I decided to give her a call.
That turned out to be a smart move, because she came out and got me—through snow and ice—and gave me a big dinner that you couldn't buy at a San Francisco restaurant and entertained me like a movie star.

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