The Happy Birthday Murder (12 page)

My class Wednesday morning was quite lively. This year, for the first time, I had several male students, and they changed the rhythm of the class. One of them slept through most of the classes, but the others contributed and often had points of view provocatively different from the women's. One of them frequently insisted that whatever the title of the course, we should read at least one good, solid detective novel written by a man. He reiterated his feelings again this morning.

“Let's take a vote,” I said.

The women overwhelmingly agreed and even the sleeper woke up long enough to raise one arm.

“OK. I'm agreeable. Do you have a suggestion or do you want me to pick the book?”

“Something tough,” Barry Woodson said.

“Give me a name.”

“Block,” he said. “Lawrence Block. One of the Scudder books. I've read a lot of them. They're really cool.”

“Fine,” I said. “How about
Eight Million Ways to Die
?”

“Sure.”

“Let's add it to the list. Can you have it read in two weeks?”

There was a collective groan. I've learned not to take such things too seriously. Leave it to the students and the
syllabus will include one seventy-five-page-long novella and a lot of deep thought.

“Two weeks,” I said. “Now let's get back to Christie.”

As I usually do after my class, I had a good lunch in the cafeteria, then drove into New York. Jack had shown me how to get to the station house where George Reilly spent his days. I hadn't been to Brooklyn for some time and it was rather nice revisiting it. It was at the Sixty-fifth Precinct that I had first met Jack while I was looking into a forty-year-old murder that took place on Good Friday in 1950. I didn't expect anything quite that exciting to happen today.

I had to park a few blocks away because the streets were full. I walked back and went inside, waiting till some business was taken care of at the desk. Then I went over and talked to a remarkably young-looking sergeant.

“I'm looking for George Reilly,” I said.

“Lemme check.” He made a call and came back. “He's in. Hey, Mario, you got a minute to take this lady down to the property locker?”

“Sure, Sarge.” Mario was also young, an officer in uniform. He came over and said, “Right this way.”

We went downstairs, and when we got to the property locker it turned out to be a room with an old-style two-piece Dutch door, separated in the middle by a scarred shelf. The interior was wire cages floor to ceiling. When we got to the door, he called for George, who was probably taking a postprandial nap. There were some grunts and yawns and a stocky, graying middle-aged cop came to the window.

“Thanks,” I said to Mario. “Officer Reilly, I'm Christine Bennett. I'd like to ask you about something that happened several years ago.”

“You a cop?”

“No. I'm looking into a pair of mysterious deaths that happened twelve years ago and involved people living in my town. One of the victims was shot with a gun that once belonged to you.”

“Not that again,” he said, visibly unnerved.

“Do you know about this death?”

“It got back to me.”

“I wonder if you would tell me how you lost that gun.”

He sighed audibly. “You know, I been through this so many times—”

“I know you have, and I apologize for bothering you again.” I resisted the impulse to say I knew he was very busy. “But I've discovered something connected to that death—”

“It was a suicide, right?”

“An apparent suicide, yes. We have no idea where the victim got the gun or if it was even his, and I just want to go over your end of it one more time.”

“It's all in the record, but here goes. It was February of '69. I was assigned to the Two-Six in Harlem and the snow was like unbelievable. It's the worst storm I ever saw. I was out on the street because a call came in about a disturbance in one of the tenements there. We could hardly get up the front steps, there was so much snow already. We went inside and rang the bell to the apartment. It was on the fifth floor. They're always on the fifth floor,” he added. “I don't think I ever had a call on the first or second. Anyhow, they didn't answer, so my partner rang another bell and we got buzzed in. We went up, knocked on the door, announced ourselves, but there wasn't a sound. We knocked on the next door and a girl opened up and said she'd heard something, but she thought they'd gone out. You gotta remember, this was a long time before the modern nine-one-one. Nowadays, nine-one-one knows where you're callin' from.
If someone called the police and didn't give a name and number, we had no way of finding that out back then.”

“So you didn't know if the girl who answered the door had called or someone in the apartment you were told to go to.”

“You got it. Anyways, we didn't have a reason to bust the door down, so we didn't. We asked downstairs did anyone hear anything up on five, and no one heard. Or they said they didn't. So we went back down to the street, walked down the front steps—you couldn't even see where we'd walked up ten or fifteen minutes ago, that's how hard it was snowing—and some guy came out of the shadows and jumped me.”

“That must have been terrible,” I said.

“Lemme tell you.” He nodded his head and I could almost sense him remembering that night, the cold, the snow, the shock of the sudden attack. “Anyway, I went for my gun. My partner, meanwhile, he was jumped by another guy, so he was no good to me. While I was trying to pop the holster, this guy gives me a chop on my wrist with somethin'; I thought he broke it. He was on my back, you understand, a big, heavy hulk of a guy. I know I screamed when he chopped me. Next thing I know, I'm lying in the snow, the guy is gone, and my gun is gone.”

“What about your partner?”

“My partner was luckier. He got the other guy off his back and then the two of them took off. We couldn't see them three seconds after they started to run. My partner didn't chase them 'cause he thought I was hurt and he didn't know about my gun.”

“It sounds to me like all they wanted was the gun.”

“That's the way I figure it. We spent some time there kickin' around the snow to see if my gun was there, but we never found it. We called the precinct and they sent a sergeant and then later the duty captain came and some
other cops to search. We went back to the house and I made out a UF-sixty-one report and the duty captain interviewed me.”

“How long was the snow on the ground?” I asked.

“Weeks. They limited traffic because they couldn't clean it up. In Queens there was almost a revolution.”

“Why?” I asked innocently.

“When there's a lot of snow, they don't plow Queens till every other place in the city is taken care of. That's just the way it is,” he said, accepting life in New York as New Yorkers knew it. “The mayor took a lotta flak about that, but hey, he got reelected. People got short memories.”

“Are you sure the man who attacked you took the gun or is it possible it just got dropped in the snow?”

“Anything's possible. It was night; you couldn't see. If the gun dropped, it would've gone right through the snow and got buried. We were all over the place, stomping around to get these mutts off of us. All I know is, when they ran, I didn't have my gun.”

“Were you able to describe the men who attacked you?”

“They were on our backs; we never saw them. Black, what can I tell you? Both black, one pretty big, one not so big. We went down the street about a minute after the fight, but they were long gone. They coulda ducked into an alley, another tenement, and come out on the next block.”

I didn't think I could get much more out of him. “Thank you, Officer Reilly. I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.”

“You know, I paid for that loss. I got a complaint, went to the trial room, and lost five days' pay. No deal, they said. That really hurt. And I had to buy another gun besides.”

“I'm sure it did. Well, at least it's nice and warm in here.”

“Right. I couldn't ask for better.”

I drove back home and picked up Eddie at Elsie's. She
was planning to bake a wonderful cake for his birthday and wanted to know if I had arranged a date for the party. It was just a few weeks away and I knew I'd better get started and send out invitations. We looked at the calendar and figured out a date. Then I drove us home.

When we'd taken off our coats, I called Mel.

“Hey, I haven't seen you guys for a while. Feel like coming over?”

“I was going to invite you.”

“Nah, come over here. I just put the heat up. No reason to heat up two houses, right?”

I laughed. She knew how careful I was with money. I always put the heat down when I left, and she was right: why heat two houses? And Eddie always enjoyed going over there.

It was nice and warm when we walked in. Mel teaches and comes home when the kids do, so she'd been there for half an hour or so. She scooted Eddie upstairs to play with her children and we did our usual, making tea and sitting in the family room.

“So what's new in your life?” Mel asked when we were comfortable.

I told her what I had learned about Laura's husband and Betty's son.

“Let me understand this. You put two accidental deaths in two different places together because of the sneakers the victims were wearing?”

“It was a lucky coincidence that I read the letters in my aunt's box of memorabilia and then got in touch with the survivors. Everyone thought Darby was lost in the woods and died of exposure because he couldn't find his way back. And it appeared that Laura's husband shot himself. And maybe he did. But sometime between when he left his house after his big birthday party and when he was shot in his garage, he and Darby Maxwell met.”

“Amazing. So why did they trade sneakers, or don't you know that yet?”

“I don't know anything for sure, but my theory is that they were both held against their will for a while by a person who may have known Larry Filmore and may have just come across Darby Maxwell. If Filmore had a feeling that this was all going to end up badly, he wanted to make sure that something would be wrong on both the bodies so that it would be obvious that the deaths weren't accidental.”

“Brilliant,” Mel said.

“Brilliant of him. Only no one noticed the wrong sneakers until sometime later and it didn't seem important enough to tell the police. The women assumed it was some kind of mistake or mix-up. You know, the people in the medical examiner's office get very defensive when they think you're accusing them of stealing something. All the clothing and other possessions were inventoried, so it would be foolish for someone at the end of the line to make a switch and keep something for himself.”

“But it was no mistake and that changes everything.”

“Right.”

“What does Laura Filmore have to say about all this?”

“She came to Connecticut with me last Friday and met Betty Linton. I had hoped we'd find some person that they both knew, but it didn't work out. Still, both women are now convinced that there was some kind of foul play involved in the deaths.”

“This is very creepy, Chris.”

“I only hope I can find out what went on. Tell me, have you ever heard any scuttlebutt about Laura's husband?”

“Never. I told you, we didn't live here twelve years ago. You'll have to ask one of the old-timers in town. But it might get back to Laura.”

“I've thought of that. I'm sure she wouldn't appreciate my trying to dig up dirt about her husband.”

“You think there is any?”

“There has to be. Somebody called him in the middle of the night.”

“Maybe Laura lied about that.”

“Then why did he leave the house? I agree she may have lied about part of it. Maybe he didn't tell her he was going to the plant because there was a problem. Maybe he said, ‘I'm going to see so-and-so in Connecticut because he's making my life miserable.' But I doubt it. If he was going to see so-and-so, he'd have done it during the day or the middle of some other night. That just wasn't the right night for him to go anywhere.”

“I think you've convinced me. But she may know where he went.”

“Yes, she may.”

“And that means she's holding back. But why would she do that, Chris? Even if she lied the morning after he disappeared, she would have gotten pretty worried when he didn't come back. If she knew where he was going, wouldn't she have told the police?”

“I think she would have. I really think this woman loved her husband. She didn't run away with anyone else after he died.”

“And she didn't run out and spend a lot of his money,” Mel put in. “She stayed in the same house; she worked at the same things. And she's a wonderful volunteer at the school. She is so good with the kids. I have to tell you, I really like her.”

I had the same feelings about Laura myself, although I didn't know her very well. But I was glad to hear Mel stand up for her. “So the chances are she didn't lie about where her husband went. He told her one thing and did another.”

“He was protecting her.”

“From what?”

“If I knew that, I'd know who was responsible for his death.”

I did a lot of thinking that night. I hadn't learned much from my two days in Connecticut. No one I'd talked to, including Mrs. Pasternak, seemed at all suspicious. You couldn't haul people in for questioning because they had a barn or shed behind their house that Darby and Larry Filmore might have spent a night in twelve years ago. I still had a number of houses on the map that I hadn't driven by, most of them to the northwest of the last place Darby was seen. And I hadn't yet seen the pond that Betty had mentioned, which had been searched on the chance he had drowned in it. But I thought I needed to know more about Larry Filmore and it took me a while to think of someone I could ask.