The Happy Birthday Murder Read online

  “I’ll ask Laura,” I said, making a note in my book. It was surely something she would remember.

  “I’ll get on the computer on Monday and see what I can find out. I’ll check his wife out while I’m at it.”

  “Laura?” I said with surprise.

  “Why not? Doesn’t hurt to cover all bases. So you’re getting up at the crack of dawn tomorrow?”

  “A little after the crack. And I’ll be back by the time you two lazy guys are getting up.”

  I told him later about Laura’s admission.

  “I can understand it,” he said. “Suppose I had to say whether my mother or sister had been somewhere that might make her a suspect in a crime. I’d sure as hell rather not connect her, even if I was absolutely sure she’d done nothing.”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in looking into all these cases in the last few years, it’s that you don’t know anyone except yourself. It’s true I trust you completely, but I’ve seen trustworthy people lie and evade the truth so many times that I can’t dismiss the possibility that the Filmores’ friends in Connecticut are in some way connected to his death.”

  “You’re right to be skeptical, Chris, but maybe Laura’s friends are people going back to early in her life, or maybe even a sister or brother. Think of how they would feel if they knew Laura had given their names as possible suspects.”

  I understood, but it hampered my investigation. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “She’s not giving up the names. I’ll have to work around it and hope they’re not the ones.”

  —

  On Sunday morning my old habits kicked in and I awoke five minutes before the alarm went off. I crept out of bed, thinking how strange it was to see Jack lying there fast asleep. Typically, he’s an early riser like me, and on weekends, if he gets up before me, he lets me sleep.

  I dressed quietly and went out to the car. It was so still out, I could hear every rustle of the leaves as I walked back to the garage. Laura had given me driving instructions, in fact the exact route her husband always took from Oakwood, and I followed it to see what he had always seen and to time it.

  I arrived at the plant before eight and parked in the visitors’ area, although the lot was almost empty. They closed on weekends, and I assumed the few cars were those of security and maintenance staff. Inside, I found a stocky middle-aged man in a uniform sitting inside a room with a bank of TV monitors, a round desk with enough lights to decorate a Christmas tree, and a black walkie-talkie station. It all looked pretty high-tech to me. I knocked on the door and he looked up and waved me in.

  “You must be Mrs. Brooks,” he said.

  “I am. And you must be Charlie Calhoun.”

  “Right you are. Why don’t you take a seat in one of the comfortable chairs outside? My replacement’s in the building and I’ll be out as soon as he signs in.”

  “Fine.”

  I went out to the lobby and sat in a maroon chair that was truly comfortable. I had hardly taken my coat off when a young man in the same security uniform Charlie Calhoun was wearing came into the lobby.

  “You waiting for someone?” he asked.

  “Mr. Calhoun.”

  “He’ll be right out.” He went inside the office and Charlie Calhoun emerged a moment later, carrying two large cups of coffee.

  “This way, ma’am.”

  “I’m Chris,” I said. “Let me take one of those coffees.”

  We walked down a long hall and into an empty cafeteria. He turned the lights on and we sat at a table for four near a window. Outside were woods. It seemed a lovely place to eat a meal.

  “I’m Charlie,” he said, offering his hand. “Mrs. Filmore said you think the boss didn’t kill himself.”

  “There’s a good chance he didn’t. I don’t know if I can prove it, but I think it’s worth a try.”

  “Well, if it hadn’t happened the way it did, I wouldn’t’ve believed it, either. He wasn’t the suicide type.”

  “I’d like to assure you that anything you tell me will not get back to Mrs. Filmore.”

  He grinned at me. “What? You think I’m going to rat on the boss? No way. There’s nothin’ to rat about. He was as good a boss as you could find. Once when I got some real bad news in the middle of the night, he came over and sat here so I could go home. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”

  I agreed. “But there may have been people who didn’t see eye to eye with him.”

  “There always is. He got in a shoutin’ match once with a young guy who was new and was takin’ advantage. That’s a long time ago and the little creep didn’t have the guts to hurt anyone anyway.”

  “You have a name?” I asked.

  “Not at this late date. I prob’ly wouldn’t recognize it if I saw it.”

  “Mrs. Filmore said you were on duty the night Mr. Filmore disappeared.”

  “I’m on every Saturday night, unless I’m sick or on vacation. I swing out, you know, off on Sunday and Monday, so I was here.”

  “Mr. Filmore told her, after he got off the phone in the middle of the night, that there was trouble at the plant.”

  “I been over this with the police a thousand times. There wasn’t no trouble, nobody ever called except my wife, and I never saw him.”

  “Could someone else have called to tell him there was trouble that night?”

  “Don’t see how. I don’t think there was another soul in the building. They was all at the party. You know about the party?”

  “Mrs. Filmore told me about it. Is there a reason why you didn’t go?”

  “I’m not much of a party man. You gotta get dressed up—that was a fancy shindig, you know?—and they needed someone here like always. Mr. Filmore, he said he’d get another guard, you know, from an agency, but hey, they don’t know the place like a regular. I said just save me a piece of cake; I’ll stick with the job.”

  “I guess you never got the cake,” I said.

  “You know what? I did. He made an arrangement with the caterer and they delivered a little box with a big piece of cake in it. He was that kind of man. He never forgot a promise.”

  “What kinds of problems might come up during the night?” I asked.

  “Oh, a lot of things. Round that time we had problems with the furnace. After Mr. Filmore died, they just replaced the whole thing. Pretty expensive, but it hadda be done. Sometimes the power would go off in a storm. We also have a lot of chemicals and leather, so the fire alarm system has to be watched for smoke and water leaks. Once a vagrant came in and I couldn’t get rid of him. Don’t ask me how he found this place. It’s off the beaten track, to say the least.”

  I had thought so myself as I drove to it. “Did Mrs. Filmore take over the business after her husband died?” She had told me she had.

  “Yeah, for a while. But it wasn’t right for her. She started comin’ in days like her husband did, but after a coupla months she hired a plant manager and some other people to run the business. She still owns it, and she comes in once in a while, specially around the holidays, but she don’t run the place anymore.”

  That squared with what she had told me. “I’m sure it’s a very hard job,” I said.

  “You gotta know a lot and she didn’t. Everybody helped, but she could see it wasn’t working out. She did what was right for the company.”

  “And I guess you’re happy working here.”

  “It’s a great job. I’ll retire in a few years with a nice pension. Then I’ll have to learn how to stay up when it’s light out.” He grinned again.

  There didn’t seem to be much else I could ask. We had both finished our coffee and I was sure he wanted to get home. “Bottom line,” I said, “you didn’t call the Filmores that night.”

  “No, ma’am. Didn’t call and didn’t have a reason to. It was a quiet night. I didn’t hear till Sunday afternoon when the police came that he was missing, and I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Sometimes you remember things,” I said. “Here’s my
phone number if something comes to you. Anything at all. I really think there’s a good chance someone killed Mr. Filmore and I’d like to find out who.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said, gathering the cups and napkins from the table.

  We went out to the parking lot together, shook hands, and walked to our separate cars.

  —

  I hadn’t expected to get anything useful from Charlie Calhoun, so I wasn’t disappointed. Nor did I think he was holding back. He had seemed quite up-front and I believed that his affection for “the boss” was genuine.

  I got home to find Jack and Eddie putting together a Sunday breakfast with bacon and eggs. The coffee smelled a lot better than what I had drunk half an hour earlier.

  “Where did you go, Mommy?” Eddie asked as I took my coat off.

  “I had to talk to someone very early.”

  “A policeman?”

  “No, sweetheart, not the police.” Obviously he remembered where Jack had gone yesterday afternoon.

  We all pitched in and had a good breakfast and went to mass. In the afternoon, we picked up Gene and took a drive that ended with a sundae at one of our favorite places. I enjoyed the feeling of relaxation with my family, knowing that after today I was going to be very busy looking into the case.

  When I got into bed many hours later, I picked up a mystery by Agatha Christie, one that I had never read. It put me in the mood of my students, and I liked that.

  10

  My day began early on Monday, as soon as Eddie was off to school. I drove up to Betty’s house and got there at midmorning.

  “She’s a nice woman,” Betty said when we were inside.

  “Yes, she is. And she’s lived with this terrible uncertainty for a dozen years. She’s never been able to figure out why her husband would take his life, especially after one of the happiest occasions he had ever experienced.”

  “Let me ask you something, Chris. If we establish that Laura’s husband’s death is somehow connected to Darby, does that mean that Darby may have been murdered, too?”

  “I think someone may have contributed to his death, not that someone shot him or anything like that, but that in some way this person prevented Darby from being found.”

  “I guess that means I have some unhappy times ahead of me, thinking about how he was treated.”

  “Does that change how you feel about pursuing this?”

  “It’s too late to stop now that we’ve started. Come into the dining room. I’ve got stuff spread out all over the table.”

  Most of the things on the table were maps, interesting maps. One was an aerial view with the house Darby had started out from, the woods behind it, clearings, ponds, more woods, and a number of houses he could have reached, although they were fairly far from his starting point, a mile or more. And on the perimeter were roads. If only you knew where you were going, you could reach a road. It made the tragedy seem that much worse when you could see rescue so close at hand.

  “You know,” I said, looking at that map, “if Darby took a turn here or here,” I pointed to two places perhaps half a mile from a road, “he could have ended up on a busy highway.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “That it’s possible, now that I see the whole layout, that he did get to a road and Larry Filmore might have picked him up.”

  “Why was Larry Filmore there?”

  “When we know that, we’ll know why he left home in the middle of the night and what the great secret in his life was. All I’m suggesting is that he may actually have been a Good Samaritan. He’s driving to meet whoever called him at home, he sees Darby at the side of the road, realizes he needs help and he’s not a threat, stops, and picks him up.”

  “Darby knew his name and my address. Why didn’t he return him to us?”

  “Because he was in a hurry. Whoever called him threatened him in some way. If he had stopped to find where Darby lived, he wouldn’t have arrived at his destination on time and something terrible would have happened. That’s my theory.”

  “So the Good Samaritan delivered my son into the hands of a killer.”

  “Possibly. Remember, that’s only one explanation of the facts. It’s equally plausible that Darby knocked on a door himself, one of these houses here.”

  “There was a lot of publicity, Chris. The police drove along roads with loudspeakers.”

  “Betty, it’s very unlikely that Larry Filmore found Darby in the woods, sat down with him and exchanged sneakers, and let him go. It defies explanation.”

  “You’re right. Their paths crossed either at someone’s house or, as you suggested, in Larry Filmore’s car. Why did Larry Filmore kill himself?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe someone made a terrible threat against his family and he knew the threat would evaporate if he was no longer living. And maybe someone very clever killed him and made it look like suicide.”

  “And Laura has no idea what this is about?”

  “Not at all. He left the house and was found a few days later in his car in his own garage, dead of a single bullet to the side of his head. The gun was next to him.”

  We stood there looking down at the dining room table with the maps spread over its entire surface. Then Betty said, “Let’s get started.”

  We folded the maps and went out to her car. This time I had come prepared for the woods. I had bought myself a small compass. With that and the maps, I had more faith in my ability to find my way back to a starting point.

  This time we didn’t start from the friend’s home. Instead, Betty drove us to a rural area at the eastern end of the map, where three houses stood along a rustic road, a few hundred feet apart from each other. The first two were brick and could have been fifteen or twenty years old, although I’m no expert. The third one, farthest down the road, appeared to be an old farmhouse.

  “These two,” Betty said as she turned into the first driveway, “belonged to a mother and daughter. The mother was in her sixties twelve years ago and the daughter was married with two children. The name here is Warren.”

  We got out of the car and went up to the front door. A chime played a short tune when Betty pushed the button, and the door was opened almost immediately by a whitehaired woman wearing dark brown wool pants, a yellow shirt, and a camel-colored sweater over it.

  “I know you,” she said, looking at Betty as though trying to pull a name out of the past.

  “Betty Linton. My son, Darby Maxwell, was lost in the woods twelve years ago.”

  “Oh, yes, the poor child. Come in; come in. It’s cold out there.”

  We went inside to a very warm living room with a woodstove in the fireplace. The heat that radiated from it was very strong, and I could imagine it warmed the whole downstairs. We made introductions and sat down.

  “I remember you now,” Mrs. Warren said. “My husband joined the search party back then. Your son died, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Thank you for helping.”

  “That’s when I met you; I remember now. You came by afterward to thank us.”

  “Yes. A lot of people were very helpful. I’m eternally grateful.”

  “You don’t find many people anymore who say thank you. I’m sorry it turned out the way it did.”

  “Mrs. Warren, some new information has been found. We think Darby may have spent some time in a house before he died.”

  “It wasn’t here. We would have turned him in.”

  “I know that. But maybe you’ve heard something over the years.”

  She shook her head. “It’s pretty lonely out here. My daughter who lives next door didn’t say anything and our neighbor down the road—I don’t know if they were there when it happened. They’re away a lot.”

  “Mrs. Warren,” I said, “do you know people around here who own guns?”

  “Hunting guns? Lots of folks have ’em. My husband used to do some hunting. When he died last year, I got rid of the gun.”

  “I was thinking more of handguns.” />
  “That’s harder to know about. Probably the police know. They’ve got to be licensed.”

  “Back when Darby got lost, were the people around here longtime residents?”

  “All three of these houses had the same people in them. The neighbors farther down, the Gallaghers, they bought that house about twenty years ago. Now there’s other houses—no, they’re newer. They weren’t here then. But if you go up this road to the end and turn right, there’s other houses there.”

  Betty was shaking her head. “He would have come to this road first.”

  “You’re right. Poor thing. Such a sad way to die.”

  “Did you ever know anyone named Filmore?” I asked. “Lawrence Filmore and his wife, Laura.”

  She shook her head. “I knew a Laura, but it’s not Filmore. Talk to my daughter, girls. She’s home now and she’s much more outgoing than I am. She’s active in the garden club and the church and she does some volunteer work at the school. She knows lots of people. But she doesn’t have any guns.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  We got up and left.

  —

  “Sure, come right in.” Mrs. Warren’s daughter, Michelle Franklin, was effusive in welcoming us. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll fix us some coffee.”

  Before we could decline, she was off to the kitchen, banging things around, calling to us to sit wherever we wanted. Five minutes later, she was carrying in coffee cake that looked wonderful and then the rest of her offering.

  “How’s Mom?” she asked as she poured coffee into flowered mugs.

  “Oh, you mean your mom?” I said.

  She laughed. “I haven’t called her yet today.”

  “She’s fine. That’s some wood-burning stove she’s got over there.”

  “Aren’t they wonderful? Her heating bill is almost nothing. That little stove just pours its heat all over the house. We’ve got it fixed so it goes up to her bedroom through a vent in the living room ceiling. There we are. Sugar? Cream? This is great cake. My friend baked it yesterday and I just happened to visit and came away with a nice chunk.”