The Happy Birthday Murder Read online

  “Has that ever happened?”

  “There was a power outage once and the timers all went crazy. The lights were going on during the day and they were off all night. We left a key with the police and she called and they came out and reset everything.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t look happy,” he said.

  “I just don’t seem to be making progress.”

  “Oh, gosh,” Mrs. Gallagher said. “You’re so down. Things’ll turn up. They always do.”

  “Even for me,” her husband said. “I spend my time working on unsolvable problems, so I know how you feel.”

  “And you solve them?”

  “Most of the time. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t get paid. It’s a matter of looking at the problem from different points of view.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate your help and your encouragement.”

  I went outside and got in the car. How many points of view could there be? I had one; Jack had one; Joseph and Arnold had contributed theirs. I was convinced that what Jack and I had worked out the other night was right, that Darby had stumbled into one of these houses and, by coincidence, the blackmailer of Lawrence Filmore took him in and saw an opportunity to make money. But I couldn’t go any further unless Laura told me what I was sure she knew.

  I started the car and drove down the road to the Franklins’ house. Michelle Franklin was home and invited me in.

  “Still trying to find out what happened to that retarded boy?” she asked as we sat in her kitchen.

  “Still trying and not getting anywhere. I was just talking to the Gallaghers. They said once when they were away there was a power outage and you called the police to reset their timers.”

  “I remember that. We got an awful snowstorm. Couldn’t heat the house except with the fireplace. We rounded up our sleeping bags and slept in the living room.”

  “When was that?” I asked, grasping at straws.

  “Three or four years ago.”

  No good, I thought. “I walked through the woods the other day,” I told her.

  “That’s pretty dangerous if you don’t know the terrain.”

  “I had a compass.”

  “Good. I’d hate to have to organize a search party for you.”

  “Do you ever go away and leave a house sitter here?”

  “I don’t have to. I have my mother next-door.”

  “Of course.”

  “Anyone around here have a barn or a cottage out back?”

  “Not here, but there’s lots of them around.”

  “I’ve seen some,” I said.

  “I remember they thought he might have fallen in the pond,” Michelle said. “Did you see the pond?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “There have been some drownings there, not for a long time, but you don’t forget something like that.”

  “But Darby didn’t drown.”

  “No.”

  “Well, I guess I’d better get back. I have to send invitations for my son’s birthday party. It’s coming up pretty soon.”

  “That’s fun.” She smiled. “Give me your number. Maybe I’ll think of something.”

  I wrote it down, thinking she was feeling sorry for me. But you never know. People remember things.

  —

  After I picked up Eddie, we went to one of our favorite stores and picked out invitations, paper plates, napkins, candles, and party favors. Eddie was very excited about it. I let him do all the choosing and he carried the bag back to the car when we were done. At home, he took everything out to look at each purchase. We talked about where the party would be, where everyone would sit. Then he sat down with me and I wrote out the invitations.

  When Jack came home, he had some mysterious packages with him. I knew he wanted to get Eddie a baseball mitt, and from the shape of one package I assumed there was a bat to go with it. I hoped Eddie could be persuaded not to try them out inside the house.

  Later Jack told me he had gotten the results of the tests on the gun Laura had found in her garage. “Only Filmore’s prints and not many of them. The gun was wrapped in soft silicon cloth to prevent rust from forming. He kept it clean and I’d be willing to bet Laura was telling the truth that she didn’t know where it was. It sounded like no one had touched it since Filmore did.”

  “Did they dust the box?” I asked.

  “They did. She brought it in in a shopping bag. They said it was pretty dusty and they couldn’t pick up anything useful on it.”

  “What’s going to happen to the gun?”

  “Laura turned it in. She said she doesn’t want a gun in the house and I doubt whether they’d give her a license for it. It was loaded, by the way.”

  “It was?”

  “Yup. Filmore meant business. I’m glad no one came across it all these years. Could have been a tragedy.”

  “Well, there we are. I’ve exhausted every lead and possibility I can think of. The people who were away when Darby was lost left their house locked up with no house sitter. Either one of those very nice people is lying or Darby got himself to a house that’s beyond the ones we checked out.”

  “Or a house that isn’t there anymore,” Jack said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Houses burn down. Sometimes they’re razed and a bigger one is built.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said without enthusiasm.

  “What’s that thing on the kitchen counter?”

  “A persimmon. Laura gave it to me yesterday. She said they picked them when she was a child. I’ve never eaten one. Have you?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s a pretty color.”

  “She says they’re heavenly, but they need to be very ripe. I’ll let you know after I eat it.”

  19

  I had a great class on Wednesday. The students were lively and argumentative. Nobody slept; nobody even yawned. Most of the class had already begun to read the Block book, and a few of them were confused. The book had been made into a movie and, as often happens, changes had been made that were troubling. In the books, the city of New York was almost a character. On-screen, the book took place in Los Angeles.

  My students were irate. How could Hollywood do this? The discussion almost went out of control, but they spoke with such passion, with such feeling, that I let it continue. The handful of students who had not yet started the book were almost jealous of those who were already reading it.

  When I went down to the cafeteria afterward, several students asked if they might join me for lunch and we continued talking on several related subjects. I felt exhilarated when I was finally in the car driving home.

  I had mailed the invitations to Eddie’s party late the previous afternoon, and apparently they had arrived, at least the ones sent to Oakwood addresses, in today’s mail. There were two messages on my machine from mothers of young guests accepting. I let Eddie listen to the messages so he would know his friends were looking forward to his party.

  One of the problems I had was what to serve the children. The memory of food poisoning at Ryan’s party was still very fresh and the mystery still unsolved. I decided perhaps pizza was a better idea than hamburgers, especially since I wouldn’t be cooking out-of-doors. I could pick up the pies and reheat them one by one. Jack agreed that was a good idea and suggested that for those of us who were past single digits in age we might consider ordering a pie with pepperoni, mushrooms, and anchovies. I promised to do so.

  Late that evening, when we were already upstairs and getting ready for bed, the phone rang. Jack picked it up, said a few words, and handed it to me. “Laura Filmore,” he said with his hand over the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Laura.” She sounded serious.

  “Hi, Laura. Is something wrong?”

  “I want to talk to you. Now. Can you come over?”

  I looked at my watch. I didn’t really want to do anything but go to sleep, but she sounded as though something important had come up. “I’
ll be there in ten minutes.” I hung up and told Jack where I was going.

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said.

  I was startled. “Why?”

  “I don’t like this. Call her back and tell her to come here. Lay it on me. I just don’t want you alone with her in her house right now.”

  It was clear that he was worried. I picked up the phone and dialed Laura’s number.

  “I’ll pick her up and drive her here,” Jack said, reaching for his shoes.

  “Yes, all right,” Laura said finally, sounding reluctant. “I’ll drive myself. Jack doesn’t have to go out.”

  “I’ll stay up here while you talk,” Jack said when I told him she would drive herself.

  Feeling nervous, I went downstairs and turned the light on over the front door. I couldn’t remember a time Jack had reacted that way. He sometimes expressed reservations at what I did and where I went, but he had never said, “Don’t go,” before. I didn’t like it.

  Laura rang the doorbell about ten minutes later. I had the feeling she might have had to dress before leaving the house and maybe that was why she had asked me to join her rather than the other way around. She was wearing jeans, a big smoky blue cashmere sweater with a cowl neckline, and sneakers, no jewelry, and her hair looked as though she hadn’t put it in place after she pulled on the sweater. I was struck by what a good-looking woman she was, and I thought again that if she had wanted to remarry after her husband died, she could have found someone easily.

  “It’s cold out,” she said.

  “I’ve got the heat up in the family room. Give me your coat.”

  “I’ll drop it on a chair. I’m not staying long.”

  We walked through the kitchen and she stopped suddenly. “That’s my persimmon. You haven’t eaten it yet.”

  “You said to let it ripen a few days.”

  She touched it. “Eat it tomorrow. I think it’s ready.”

  We went into the family room and I shut the door between it and the kitchen to keep the heat in.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’m fine. I’ve been thinking about what we talked about the other afternoon, about what you said.”

  I tried to remember what I had said to her. It was after my lunch with Joseph and Arnold. They had both believed Laura knew more than she was telling me. “We talked about a lot of things,” I hedged.

  “I am going to tell you the truth,” she said. “And after that, you will understand why I want you to stop this investigation and to forget what I’m about to tell you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Where is Jack?”

  “He’s upstairs. He can’t hear us.”

  She got up, opened the door to the kitchen, saw that no one was there, and sat down again. “You’re right. I know why someone called my husband.”

  I almost stopped breathing. “Tell me, Laura.”

  “It wasn’t Larry; it was me.”

  So Joseph had been right. “OK.”

  “I was driving on Route Two-eighty-seven one night. There was an accident with another car. I left the scene. That’s the story.”

  “You didn’t report it.”

  “No. And the other driver told the police it was a hit-and-run and he didn’t get my license plate.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You were drunk,” I said.

  “I wasn’t drunk. I hadn’t had a drink for days. There was no alcohol in my system.”

  “Were you at fault?”

  “I don’t know who was at fault.”

  I stopped to think about what she had said. “But he did have your plate number.”

  “Yes. That’s how he got our name. That’s how he got our phone number, Larry’s number. That’s how he came to call Larry and threaten to expose me if we didn’t pay up.”

  I was sure she had rehearsed this. That was why she had waited till late at night before calling. Something of the truth was in this story, but much of what she had said might be false. If I checked on hit-and-run accidents on Route 287, I would never find anything about this one. It had probably happened somewhere else, perhaps not even in New York State.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “More than twelve years ago. I’m sure you’ve figured that out already.”

  “You were able to drive your car home?”

  “Mine was less badly damaged.”

  “Was someone hurt in the accident, Laura?”

  She stared in front of her. “I’ve told you all I’m going to tell. I just want you to stop. My husband died because of this. I live with that knowledge every day of my life.”

  “Why didn’t you just go to the police?” I asked. “Just tell them what happened and that the other driver was blackmailing you?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Did you kill someone, Laura?” I could hardly bring myself to ask the question.

  “I’ve finished my story. I can’t answer any more questions. I just want you to know that when my husband left our house that night after the party, he told me he was going to the plant. I didn’t know he had gotten a call earlier in the evening until you showed me that picture. I’m sure you’re right that the blackmailer got Larry and Darby Maxwell together and tried to use Darby to get Larry to come up with more money. If I had known where Larry was, I would have told the police regardless of the consequences.”

  That had the ring of truth. “When the driver of the other car first called your husband, did Larry pay him off?”

  “Yes.”

  “A lot of money?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he make the payoff? In person? In the mail?”

  She closed her eyes. “I don’t want to answer these questions, Chris. Larry paid him off. He never went to Connecticut. He just paid him. And paid him again.”

  “I see.”

  “And then we thought it was over. But we were wrong.”

  “That person, the blackmailer, he must have had some proof that you were at the wheel of the car the night of the accident.”

  Laura stood and put on her jacket. It was a beautiful warm-looking shearling. “He had a piece of evidence,” she admitted. “It was enough to convict me. It was enough to destroy my life.”

  I got up and opened the door to the kitchen. The kitchen was ice-cold and I shivered.

  “Will you stop?” she said. “Will you leave me in peace? I pay for what happened. I pay much more than money. I will never stop paying. Isn’t that enough?”

  “It is enough,” I said. But it wasn’t that simple. There was Darby.

  We walked through the house to the front door. The light was still on outside.

  “Can you drive?” I asked.

  “Yes. I can drive. Can you forgive?”

  She was down the steps before I could answer.

  When her car had gone down to the end of Pine Brook Road, I turned off the light, checked to make sure the door was locked, and went upstairs. Jack was wearing his navy blue terry cloth robe and was propped on the bed reading a book. He closed it and looked up at me as I came into the room.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” I said. I sat down and told him what I had just learned.

  “Evidence,” he said, picking out the crucial word in my story.

  “I can’t think what it is. I asked her if she was drunk and she said she hadn’t had a drink in several days.”

  “What makes you think she was telling you the truth this time?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Maybe because she admitted to something that could be a felony. I think she mixed some truth with some fiction so that I couldn’t possibly figure out when this accident happened or on what road. She was specific about saying Route Two-eighty-seven, but I think she wanted to put me off. I would guess that it really happened at night, as she said, or there would have been a bunch of cars full of witnesses. But what piece of evidence could the other driver have taken
away?”

  “A piece of her car, a fender maybe.”

  “But that car is long gone, maybe twenty years gone, so a fender wouldn’t do much good now, but she still won’t come clean on the accident. It has to be something else, something tied directly to her.”

  “Maybe she had the suicide gun with her.”

  “Mm.” I thought about it. “Larry Filmore got the gun illegally and let her take it with her for protection when she drove alone. That would explain why she didn’t want the Oakwood Police pursuing the history of that gun beyond Officer Reilly.”

  “It would have her prints on it,” Jack said, “just from putting it in the car.”

  “Laura’s not the kind of person who would carry a gun.”

  “That remains to be seen. I’m going to check on that suicide gun tomorrow. It’s time to get back to basics, investigation one-o-one, read all the reports, don’t assume anything. All the information I got on it was secondhand, from the Oakwood Police, and all they told me was that the cop in New York lost it in a snowstorm. Let me see if there’s more.”

  “My feeling is that someone died in that car accident,” I said.

  “I get the same feeling. That’s why she can’t own up to it even fifteen or twenty years later.”

  “But why didn’t the survivor in the other car just tell the police what the plate number was?”

  “Could be a lot of things. Maybe he’d picked up a hitchhiker and that’s who died. The driver didn’t give a damn about bringing her to justice. He just saw a chance to make some easy money.”

  “A crime of opportunity,” I said. “Just like what we’re speculating happened with Darby. It’s how this guy operates.” I leaned over and pulled my shoes off. “Let’s see if anything interesting turns up on that gun and then I’ll try to figure out where to go.”

  “Why did she run?” Jack said, almost to himself.

  “Because she looked in the other car and saw that someone was badly hurt. She panicked.”

  “You can always make a case that it was the other guy’s fault.”

  “She wasn’t thinking straight, Jack. Your car gets hit, you get disoriented.”

  “But later, when she got home, when she talked to her husband, when she calmed down, what kept her from turning herself in then with a really good lawyer at her side?”