The Happy Birthday Murder

by Lee Harris

  “You think it has to do with the mysterious piece of evidence?”

  “I don’t know, but I sure as hell want to find out.”

  —

  I felt the same way, although I defended Laura’s actions in my own mind with the arguments I had given to Jack. On Thursday morning, I took Eddie shopping and cleaned up the house when we got back. Several more mothers called about the party, one saying her daughter couldn’t make it. That still left us with a good crowd.

  After lunch Jack called. “I’ve got a piece of what I’m looking for,” he said. “There may be more to come. It turns out after the suicide the Oakwood Police got in touch with Smith and Wesson and asked for information on the gun. Smith and Wesson knew it was part of the lot that had gone to NYPD and Oakwood found out about how it got lost back in ’69. They stopped their investigation after that.”

  “Any reason?”

  “I got a roundabout explanation that boils down to the fact that Larry Filmore was a good guy who lived in town and he’d died a terrible death and why make more trouble? I didn’t exactly hear those words, but I got the feeling that what they weren’t saying was that Laura asked them to stop.”

  “And it’s a small town, so they did.” It wasn’t farfetched. The police here in town often go out of their way to be nice to residents.

  “Right.”

  “So maybe you’ll find out where Larry Filmore got the gun and maybe you won’t.”

  “That’s about it. But it’ll take some time.”

  “It’s twelve years. How much difference can another few days make?”

  —

  In the afternoon I took Eddie to a friend’s house, his friend, that is, and came home to read and think. As I walked through the kitchen on my way to the family room, I saw the persimmon. I touched it carefully. It was still unblemished but softer than when I had brought it home. I took it to the sink, feeling like a kid doing something wrong, peeled back the very thin skin at the top, and took a bite out of the flesh.

  It was truly heavenly. I had never tasted anything like it. With half my face wet, I sucked the delicous fruit into my mouth and relished it. I had never tasted anything so good.

  I laughed when I had finished it. My face and fingers were wet and I washed them with soap, patting myself dry with a paper towel. Next fall, I would remember to buy a couple for another fall treat.

  20

  A little while later Jack called to say he had asked a friend in the Firearms Unit of NYPD to look into the history of the Smith & Wesson that killed Filmore. “I told him a little about the Filmore case and I think I got him interested. I didn’t want to ask Oakwood to do this because they made a decision twelve years ago to let it be and I don’t want to sound like I’m critical. This way, if nothing turns up, Oakwood doesn’t know about it.”

  “Where’s he going to look?”

  “Probably with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They have a massive database in Atlanta, Georgia. If the gun passed through a legitimate gun dealer, there’ll be a record. If it didn’t, we’re dead.”

  “Maybe it was used in the commission of a crime before Filmore killed himself,” I said.

  “Then it would be in custody somewhere and it wouldn’t have killed Filmore.”

  “Right. Well, let’s hope something turns up.”

  I wasn’t very hopeful. Whoever had stolen the gun from Officer Reilly during that snowstorm in 1969 wasn’t likely to have walked into a gun dealer and offered it for sale. On the other hand, it might have passed through many hands and ended up with a legitimate dealer after a long sojourn.

  I called Joseph after dinner and told her what Laura had confessed. “It looks as though you were right. It was Laura, not her husband, who was being blackmailed.”

  “And she’s still afraid to come forward. I wonder what the evidence is that concerns her so much. Maybe she tried to bribe the survivor in the other car and he grabbed her handbag or her wallet.”

  “With her fingerprints on it,” I said.

  “I’m going to withdraw that. She’d probably just say she was robbed. It must be something else. I’ll think about it, Chris. But you’ve begun to break down her defense. She may tell you more if you give her some time.”

  “I hope so. Did you get to your meeting on time the other day?”

  “I was embarrassingly late,” she said with a laugh. “But the participants were discussing something so intensely, they didn’t even see me come into the room. And although I know it’s not an excuse, I really feel I benefited from that discussion at lunch. I hope you never give up these exercises of yours.”

  I promised her I would remain open to anything that came my way. I found it interesting that she referred to my investigations as “exercises.” Often I felt that way about them myself, but only at the beginning. Somehow, becoming involved in the personalities, the human side of these mysteries, took a toll on me. I now knew something about Laura Filmore that she didn’t want me to know, something that was a blot on her life. She had left the scene of an accident in which someone may have been killed, and she may have been responsible. From the way she described it, it sounded as though either car could have caused the accident, and that made me feel that she knew she was at fault and couldn’t admit it. I didn’t want to tell the police about it, but I rather hoped she would decide to do it herself.

  In the evening the phone rang and Jack got up and answered it. He brought it to me from the kitchen. “Someone named Franklin,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s Connecticut.” I took the phone. “Hello?”

  “Chris?…This is Michelle Franklin. You were up here a couple of days ago?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “Well, like you said, sometimes you think of something.”

  “Yes, tell me.” I felt a surge of energy.

  “One of the times you were here you mentioned barns and caretakers’ cottages? You know, Frannie Gallagher had one behind her house a long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. But someone lived there once in a while.”

  “There’s nothing there now,” I said.

  “It burned down.”

  “Really. Do you know when?”

  “I don’t remember, but a long time ago. Years.”

  “Before or after Darby Maxwell was lost in the woods?”

  “You’ve got me. It’s just I was talking to my husband and he remembered the fire. The barn was back near the woods and we were afraid there’d be a forest fire. We could see the flames from our house.”

  “But there wasn’t a forest fire,” I said.

  “No. The firemen came and put it out. But it was a real eyesore for a couple of years. The Gallaghers left it that way for a long time. Every time you drove by you saw the blackened wood. Finally, they got it cleaned up.”

  “Do you know who stayed there?”

  “No idea.”

  “Man or woman?”

  She said, “Mm. I really couldn’t tell you.”

  “Thank you very much, Michelle.”

  —

  “Doesn’t mean much,” Jack said when I told him. “You’ve seen a lot of secondary structures up there. People don’t even remember who they rented to ten or twelve years ago.”

  “True. But it’s something to keep in mind. Maybe I’ll call the police up there tomorrow and ask if they have a date for that fire.”

  “Can’t hurt. And meantime, we’ll see what BATF comes up with.”

  —

  I don’t know when it struck me that something Laura said didn’t ring true. Maybe when I came downstairs on Friday morning to make breakfast.

  “The persimmon’s gone,” Jack said, coming into the kitchen.

  “I ate it yesterday. I meant to tell you. Laura was right. It’s a heavenly experience. I’ve never tasted anything like it. And to think she picked them from trees when she was a kid.”

  “No kidding. She’s a southerner?”


  “Is that where they grow?”

  “Yeah, in the South. What’s wrong?”

  “She’s from Wisconsin.”

  “She tell you that?”

  “Yes. I asked her. It didn’t occur to me till you said that.”

  “Maybe she went to school in Wisconsin.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “I’m not sure at all.”

  —

  After Eddie was in nursery school, I called the police in Connecticut and asked about the Gallaghers’ barn or cottage. I said I had heard they had one that burned down.

  The officer I talked to sounded harried and said he really didn’t have time right now to look into it, that he didn’t remember anything about it. He didn’t ask for my phone number to get back to me, so I figured he didn’t want to. And from the sound of his voice, he may not have been around ten or twelve years ago. I hung up and tried to think where to go from here.

  Finally, I called Michelle back. “I’m trying to track down the date of the fire at the Gallaghers’,” I said. I told her the response of the police. “Is there some way I can reach the firehouse without going through an operator?”

  “Just a minute.”

  I listened while she flipped pages. “Here’s their non-emergency number.” She dictated it. “I’m not sure you’ll get a fireman if you call now—they’re volunteers, you know—but I seem to remember a friend of mine telling me some of the firemen who have jobs in the area drop in there to have lunch together.”

  “Looks like I’m going back to Connecticut,” I said.

  “Cheer up. They’re nice guys. Bring along a sandwich and you can have lunch with them.”

  It sounded like a good idea. I put together my old standby, tuna on whole wheat, grabbed a bottle of juice and a napkin, and took off. I had been to only one other firehouse to talk to the volunteers, and that was a couple of summers ago when we were out on Fire Island and the fire chief was murdered. I remember that the men were very helpful and had a lot of records that proved quite useful.

  I found the firehouse by following Michelle’s directions. A few cars were parked outside, and I left mine next to them and went inside. Shiny fire trucks took up half the space. In the other half, several men were sitting at a table with brown-bag lunches open in front of them.

  “Hi!” one of them called. “Help ya?”

  “Michelle Franklin told me you meet here for lunch. I’m up from Oakwood, New York. Can I join you?”

  “Sure. Pull up a chair. There’s lots of room.” Actually, he got up and got the chair for me.

  I sat down and opened my lunch. I told them I was interested in when the fire at the Gallaghers’ had taken place. The men were all old enough that they would remember it. I had a feeling it was the older ones who met here.

  “Gallagher,” the man who had invited me in said. “I remember that one. Little house out back. That was some time ago. Can you wait till we’re finished eating?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s your interest?”

  I told them I was looking into the death of Darby Maxwell.

  “We were all on that search party,” one of the men said, putting a fat sandwich down on a piece of paper towel. “That was real sad. Poor guy didn’t know where he was, didn’t have a chance. Had some cold nights while he was in the woods. That’s what did him in.”

  We talked about it for a while. They described how they went through the woods in a long line, following the trackers and sheriff’s bloodhounds, how they called Darby with a loudspeaker.

  “It was like he wasn’t there,” one of the men said. “And then suddenly he was there and he was dead.”

  It was like he wasn’t there. I didn’t comment on that, but it was what I had come to believe.

  When all the sandwiches were eaten and all the beer and soda drunk, we cleaned up after ourselves and a man named Mike took me into the fire chief’s office. There were pictures of his family on the desk, three generations of them. Mike went to the big file cabinet in a corner of the room and started looking through it.

  “Gotta be ten years ago,” he said. “We never found out what caused it. Probably a match or a candle or somebody smoking carelessly.”

  “Was anyone living there when it happened?”

  “Apparently not. Place was empty. Gallaghers were away.”

  “They were away?”

  “Yeah, they take a lot of trips. He works at home, so he makes his own hours. She’s at the hospital, I think, but not full-time. Nice life.”

  I agreed, watching him go through the files. “If it was a match or a cigarette, someone must’ve been there.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Could be someone broke in while the Gallaghers were away. We called them where they were at, but they were coming home the next day anyway. Here it is.” He pulled a folder out of the drawer. “Gallagher. Guest cottage. Looks like it happened about twelve years ago.”

  I felt a chill. “Twelve years? That would make it the year Darby Maxwell died.”

  “No kidding.” He turned pages. “Wanna look?”

  “Please.” The fire had taken place after Darby’s death. The structure that had burned down had a living room, kitchen, one bathroom, and two bedrooms, all on one floor. It was built of wood and furnished. Nothing had been salvaged from the fire.

  “Did it ever occur to you that it might be connected to Darby Maxwell’s disappearance and death?”

  Mike looked at me with a frown. “I don’t get what you’re driving at.”

  “One of the men at the lunch table, Pete, I think, said, ‘It was like he wasn’t there.’ Maybe he was in that guest house for a few days before he died.”

  “You mean like he broke in looking for shelter?”

  “I have some ideas, but they’re not conclusive. I think someone in that little house may have held Darby hostage, hoping to get his mother to pay a ransom.”

  “Wasn’t any ransom asked for that I ever heard.”

  “I know. Are you sure the Gallaghers were away?”

  “Oh, yeah. The police called them somewhere in Europe, France maybe. The Gallaghers were away when that house burned down.”

  And it wasn’t likely they’d just arrived in France if they were coming back the next day. “Then maybe someone else was using the house.”

  “You got me. All I did was answer the call.”

  “Who reported the fire?” I asked.

  “The family next-door. Franklin, I think it says. There were some other calls, too.”

  “There aren’t any names?”

  “Folks don’t always give their names. They pick up a phone, call it in, and go about their business. Nowadays with nine-one-one, we know where the call comes from, even if they don’t identify themselves. It’s cut way down on false alarm calls.”

  I gave him back the file folder. “Thanks, Mike.”

  “You look troubled.”

  “I am. I’ll have to talk to the Gallaghers again.”

  “What can they tell you? They were three thousand miles away.”

  That was the problem.

  —

  “Frannie’s at work,” Dave Gallagher said.

  “Maybe you can help me.”

  “Come on in.”

  We went into his office, a cluttered room with two computers, stacks of books and papers on the floor, a bookcase filled with books arranged both vertically and horizontally, and a window that looked out on the woods. Dave took a seat behind his desk and waved me to the other chair in the room. I unbuttoned my coat but left it on. The house was cool, but he plugged in an electric heater and closed the door.

  “Big money saver when you heat just one room,” he said with a smile.

  “It’s nice that you’re able to work at home.”

  “Gives us a lot of leverage. And Frannie can almost make her own hours, too. We like traveling and this makes it easy.”

  “I know you told me you
never have a house sitter when you’re away, but I heard you used to have a guest cottage out back.”

  “That was some time ago. It burned down while we were on a trip.”

  “Did you rent it out or invite anyone to stay in it?”

  “We used it like a guest cottage. We have friends that live far away and it was nice to give them a private place to stay. But when it was gone, we decided not to rebuild it. We never found out what caused the fire and we didn’t want to take any more chances.”

  “I was just over at the firehouse,” I said. I didn’t want to give the impression that I was checking up on him and his wife, but I didn’t know how else to put it. “They told me your guest house burned down when Darby Maxwell was lost in the woods.”

  “Is that when it happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t see the relevance.”

  “Did you keep the guest house locked?”

  “Sure. We didn’t want trespassers.”

  “Was there a phone in the guest house?”

  “Never.”

  “I thought maybe Darby spent some time in there when he got lost.”

  “In our little house? How would he get in?”

  “Maybe he broke a window,” I suggested.

  “I suppose that’s possible.” He didn’t look as though he believed it.

  “Or maybe someone was there already to let him in.”

  “How would I know that?” Dave Gallagher said. “This is pure speculation, and if we were in Europe we’re not responsible for some tramp breaking into our house.”

  “That’s true. I just wondered if you had given the house to someone while you were away.”

  “We didn’t. We told you. We never had a house sitter.”

  “When you came back, after the fire, did anything look strange to you? As if maybe someone had been inside?”

  He smiled. “There wasn’t anything left to look strange. The guest house burned down to the ground. What was left was a bathtub and a sink. Anything combustible went up in smoke.”

  “I see.”

  “It was a shock to see it when we came back. It was a real nice little house. But it was made of wood and it burned right down to the concrete slab. The furniture was gone; the dishes were cracked and coated with black soot. It was a mess.”