The Happy Birthday Murder Read online

  I stood up and buttoned my coat. The room had gotten pleasantly warm as we talked. “Thanks for your time,” I said.

  He looked troubled. “What makes you think someone was in that guest house?” he asked.

  The truth was that I couldn’t think of any other place Darby could have been together with Larry Filmore, but that wasn’t the kind of answer I could give him. “It seemed logical,” I said.

  “That doesn’t mean it happened.”

  “No. I guess it doesn’t.”

  21

  I drove home thinking about what Dave Gallagher had said. It was certainly true that logic didn’t have to equate with reality. Yet the coincidence of the Gallaghers being away and the guest house burning down during that period of time seemed too great to attribute to chance. My theory was that after whoever had been blackmailing Larry Filmore had seen to it that Filmore died, he then let Darby go in the woods, as far away from the Gallaghers’ as he could manage, and then went back, set fire to the guest house, and went on his way. Perhaps he was one of the anonymous callers reporting the blaze, perhaps not. Michelle Franklin might not have seen the fire or smoke for some time, as the guest house had been on the far side of the Gallaghers’ house, the right-hand side, and not visible from the Franklins’. There had been a sketch in the file at the firehouse that had shown that quite clearly.

  I had no doubts about the Gallaghers themselves. It seemed pretty clear that they were away at the time of the fire and probably during the whole period that Darby was lost. Was it possible that Filmore’s blackmailer just happened to break in, then found Darby, called Larry Filmore, and went on from there? And all of it just happened to take place while the Gallaghers were away? What telephone had the blackmailer used? Twelve years ago half the population didn’t walk around with a phone in their pocket. The person had to have a car. Hiking into town to use a phone and buy food seemed improbable. It was almost as though someone who knew the Gallaghers knew they would be away and decided to use the guest house. And that would mean the Gallaghers should have a good idea of who the person was.

  By the time I got home I had convinced myself that Dave Gallagher had not told me the whole truth. With the guest house long gone, there were no remains to sift through. I could never find out if the door of the guest house had been opened with a key or broken into. Windows often burst during a fire, so broken glass would not signify a break-in to the firemen examining the ruins. Perhaps the intruder, if that is what he was, had simply lit a match, set some upholstery or a rug on fire, and left the building, waiting to be sure there was a good fire before driving away.

  I picked up Eddie and we went home, the conversation far from what had occupied my mind in the preceding hour. He had talked to his nursery school class, and almost everyone was coming to the birthday party. He was very excited. And Elsie was baking a special cake.

  “That’ll be a great cake,” I said.

  “I like Elsie’s cakes.”

  “I know you do. You’ve been eating them since you were just a baby.”

  “I want ice cream at the party, too.”

  “That’s on my list. Daddy and I thought it would be fun to have pizza.”

  His face lit up. “A big pizza?”

  “Yes. There’ll be plenty for everybody.”

  “That’s gonna be a good party.”

  “You bet.”

  —

  There was a message from Jack on the answering machine, but it was too late to call him back. He would be on his way home. I hoped it meant he had heard back from his friend who was trying to trace the gun. When he got home in time for dinner, he said he had a bunch of things to tell me.

  I could hardly wait, but as usual we did wait. Eddie had to tell Jack about the party, and there was a bath and reading before he went to sleep. Finally, Jack and I sat down to talk.

  “I think the gun that killed Larry Filmore had a long uncharted history,” Jack began. “After it was stolen from Officer Reilly in 1969, it got from New York down to Florida, but it took about ten years. In 1979 it turned up in a pawnshop/gun shop in Boca Raton. The person who bought it was a young guy named Paul Norman, twenty-five years old, clean record, getting a job as a security guard. He needed to provide his own gun for the job. And that’s the last we know about the gun till it turned up in Larry Filmore’s garage.”

  “That’s kind of disappointing,” I said. “I had imagined it belonged to some lowlife who would blackmail the Filmores.”

  “It did. Paul Norman has a sheet you wouldn’t believe. He started out as a security guard with his own gun and a clean record, but he started getting into trouble a couple of years later—drugs, gambling, you name it.”

  “He has an arrest record?”

  “You bet.”

  “Then they must have confiscated the gun.”

  “He never had it on him when he was arrested, and he claimed to have lost it. I got an inch of paper faxed to me this afternoon.” He took it out of his briefcase and showed it to me. “It’s all here. The last time he was arrested was about four years ago. He’s doing a bit in the Florida Correctional System. Right now he’s a guest at the North Broward Detention Center.”

  “I wonder if he’s our man,” I said. “He could have sold the gun to someone years ago.”

  “Always possible. But from the sheet, he looks like the kind of guy you’re after.”

  I took the papers from Jack and started looking through them. The photos of Paul Norman, front and side, showed a sullen-looking young man at his first arrest. In subsequent pictures, he got older and angrier, his hair sometimes short, sometimes long, his face sometimes clean-shaven, sometimes bearded, sometimes just not shaven. At his best he wasn’t very pleasant-looking.

  I knew I could show Laura the pictures and ask her to identify the man, but I wasn’t sure that was the way to go. She didn’t want to be linked to the accident she had run away from, and she had asked me to stop my investigation.

  “What are you thinking?” Jack asked.

  “What my next move is.”

  “You can talk to Paul Norman.”

  “Why would he admit to another felony? Another couple of felonies, especially homicides? He may have caused Larry Filmore’s death and Darby Maxwell’s death, he may have blackmailed the Filmores, but none of that is part of his record.”

  “What is it you want?” Jack asked.

  “I want to know who’s responsible for the deaths of Darby Maxwell and Larry Filmore.”

  “You want to tie someone to the Filmore blackmail?”

  “I feel very conflicted about that, Jack. I don’t want to cause Laura any more trouble.”

  “I’m not sure you have a choice. The death of Laura’s husband seems to be connected to that old accident. You prove one connection, you’ll probably have proven the other. I have an idea, but I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

  I didn’t ask what it was till I had thought about it. Everything was very tenuous. All I had was a series of incidents that had happened at the same time. The only hard evidence was two pairs of men’s sneakers that had been identified as belonging to Larry Filmore and Darby Maxwell. There was really no case if I didn’t come up with another crucial piece of hard evidence or an admission by the Gallaghers that Paul Norman had spent two weeks in their guest house twelve years ago. “Tell me your idea,” I said.

  “We get the Florida system to offer Norman a deal like time served for his current felony if he turns over the evidence he said he had in the accident Laura was involved in.”

  “Then she’s in big trouble.”

  “It happened a long time ago—we don’t know how long because she won’t say—and I think it’s very likely she can get a reduced sentence like community service, especially since this guy blackmailed her.”

  I felt like I was going in circles. “But if Paul Norman did all these terrible things, I don’t think he should go free.”

  “He won’t. As soon as he agrees to the deal, we’l
l re-arrest him for blackmail and see if we can tie him to Filmore’s death. And Darby’s.”

  “That’s really deceitful,” I said.

  “You think it’s immoral to play a trick on someone who took two innocent lives?”

  I did, actually, although I wanted very much to find the person responsible for Darby’s death. I knew Jack didn’t need my permission to set in motion a deal with Paul Norman. He had all the facts I had, and he knew the procedure. I just wasn’t sure I wanted him to do it. “Let me sleep on it. OK?”

  “Fine with me.”

  I thought about it for half an hour, weighing possibilities, trying to come up with alternatives. Finally, I went to the phone and called the Gallaghers’ number. If Dave answered, I would hang up. I wanted to talk to Frannie, and I wanted to hit her with a question she wasn’t expecting. The kind of work she did was probably done only during the day, so there was a good chance she would be at home at night. I listened to the rings.

  “Hello?” It was Frannie.

  “Mrs. Gallagher,” I said, not introducing myself, “I have some news about Paul Norman.”

  “Paul? Has something happened? Is he all right?”

  Pay dirt, I thought. “This is Chris Bennett,” I said. “I think we need to talk.”

  “Oh.” She sounded let down. “I can’t.”

  “It’s very important.”

  “Not over the phone.”

  “Tomorrow morning then.”

  “All right. Don’t come before eleven.” She hung up.

  —

  I left after leaving the makings of lunch for Jack and Eddie. I had given Jack permission to try to get Paul Norman to turn over whatever evidence he might have in the accident involving Laura in return for some kind of deal. I didn’t like it, but I was now certain he was my man.

  I got to the Gallaghers’ house a few minutes before eleven. It had snowed overnight in Connecticut, and I could see that a car had backed out of the garage and not come back. I drew up in the fresh snow beside the tracks. When I got inside, I saw that Frannie was alone.

  “Kitchen OK?” she asked.

  “It’s fine.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s a long story. What’s more important is your relationship with Paul Norman.”

  “That’s a long story, too. He’s my cousin, my cousin’s son. He lived for a while in my parents’ house. His mother had a tough life and she couldn’t always take care of him and hold a job, so he stayed with us for a couple of years. I can’t tell you how much I loved him.” She seemed near tears.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “He was like a little brother to me. He was a good boy; he really was. He didn’t get in trouble till he was in his twenties.”

  “Where was this, Frannie?”

  “I grew up in Florida. My mother still lives there. My cousin, Paul’s mother, died a few years ago. Everything that could go wrong for her did. And for him, too.”

  “Do you know where he is now?” I asked.

  “He’s in prison. I thought you knew that.”

  “I just wondered if you did. I want to know about Paul and the guest house.”

  She sighed. “He called me once and said he was in New York and could he visit. I said, ‘Sure; come up. We have a guest house you can stay in.’ ”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know. Years and years ago. Maybe twenty years, I’m not sure. He was in New York when he called. He drove up and stayed a week or so. Then he left. Then he got in trouble. One day he called again and he came up and stayed for a few days again. Dave never liked him, but he was family. I couldn’t turn him down.”

  “Did he have a key to the guest house?”

  “I suppose he could have had one made. He always gave me back mine before he left.”

  “So he could have come anytime he wanted,” I said.

  “He always called first. He respected me. He wouldn’t just come out of the blue.”

  “Tell me about twelve years ago.”

  “When the boy died in the woods.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know what I can tell you. We weren’t here.”

  “But Paul was.”

  She looked at me with full eyes. “I don’t know that for sure. All I know is we got a call from him in August from Florida and he said he was thinking of coming up north and could he use the guest house. I told him we would be away, but he could stay if he wanted to. I left the key under the mat.”

  “Did you talk to him when you came back and found the guest house burned down? Did you ask him how it happened?”

  “I never knew where to call him,” she said, looking as though this was all too much for her. “I didn’t know if he’d been here.”

  “But you knew he’d asked.”

  “Yes. And I knew nothing about the boy who died. I didn’t hear about that till later, and I swear to God I never made a connection till you talked to Dave yesterday.”

  I had no reason to doubt what she had said. If something happened while a person was away, he might not hear about it for a long time, if ever. “I want you to tell me about the automobile accident,” I said.

  She looked startled. “How do you know about that?” she said, and I knew the whole truth was going to come out.

  “Please tell me, Frannie.”

  “Does it have something to do with the boy who died?”

  “I think it may.”

  “My God.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head slowly. “I saw the car the next morning. It was—”

  “When was this, Frannie?” I asked, interrupting.

  “The accident? I don’t know. It was before the guest house burned down, because Paul never came back after that.”

  “But you don’t recall how many years ago it was?”

  She shook her head. “Years. I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

  “Go on. I’m sorry I interrupted. You were telling me how you saw the car the next morning.”

  “The car, yes. It was an old car, but it was in pretty good shape and Paul took good care of it. He was staying with us and he’d gone out the night before. I went outside to pick some vegetables from the garden and I saw the car. The side was all bashed in. I knocked on the guest house door and went inside. He was still in the bedroom, but he came out in a pair of jeans and no shirt. I said, ‘Paul, what happened to the car?’ He said some bitch had hit it while he was driving home from New York. He said it was a hit-and-run and a friend of his sitting next to him got hurt pretty bad. I asked him if he wrote down her license plate number and he said he had it, but he didn’t want to get involved with the police. It was a big car and it was from New York, not Connecticut. Oh, and there was something else. He said he had something of hers, the woman who was driving, and it would prove she was at fault.”

  “Did he show it to you or tell you what it was?”

  “No. But he seemed pretty pleased with himself. Anyway, he said he was able to drive his car to the nearest hospital and he left his friend there.”

  “What happened to the friend?”

  “I don’t know. Paul left a couple of days later.”

  And there was no phone in the guest house and Paul had given no number to anyone. “Did he ever talk about that accident when you saw him again?”

  “I asked once about the man who was hurt and he said not to worry. Paul didn’t always tell the truth, you know. He lived a strange life.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She sighed again. Recalling these incidents was taking a toll on her. “He was such a cute little boy,” she began. “His mother really loved him, but she just couldn’t handle taking care of him and earning a living. There was never any father, and that wasn’t so common that many years ago. He was a good boy when he lived with us, and he did OK in school. He wasn’t the greatest student, but the teachers liked him. He was good in sports; I remember that. He had a few jobs after high school, but when he was in his t
wenties he got a really good job in security with some company down there. He stayed for a few years and he had a girlfriend and everything seemed to be going well for him.”

  “And then?”

  “I guess things looked better than they really were. He got involved with drugs and all the wrong people. And then he was accused of stealing.”

  “While he was working in security?”

  “Uh-huh. That was the end of the job. It was the end of his life as a normal person.”

  “Did he go to prison?” I asked.

  “Not the first time. But later he did. He just couldn’t seem to keep out of trouble. He lost the girlfriend, too. We all hoped she would steer him the right way, but she couldn’t. I know she tried. I always thought when he came up here I could influence him, but he kept getting into trouble and nothing seemed to help.” She had been looking down at the table or out the window as she spoke. Now she turned and looked at me. “How could Paul have possibly been involved with that young man who died?”

  I told her briefly, not mentioning Larry Filmore.

  “You think he used that boy to get the mother to pay for his return?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “I hate to say it, but it sounds like Paul. It’s the kind of thing he would do. Trouble just seemed to fall into his lap and he would take advantage of it. You don’t think he actually killed that boy, do you?”

  “Not directly. I think he may have taken him into the woods and pointed him in a wrong direction to get him lost. The young man died of exposure. There were some cold nights during the time he was lost.”

  “Oh, Paul,” she said, putting her head in her hands.

  “I’m sorry to have brought up all these painful memories.”

  “It’s not your fault. I wish his life had been different. I wish he had made his life different.”

  “Thanks, Frannie. I think I have all the facts I need now.”

  “I don’t see what the accident has to do with anything.”

  “There’s a little more that I didn’t go in to. I think he kept that to himself.”