The Happy Birthday Murder

by Lee Harris

  “I know,” I said.

  She nodded. “It was the persimmon, wasn’t it?”

  “That was part of it.”

  “You didn’t stop when I asked you.”

  “I couldn’t. There was Darby. Betty wanted to know who was responsible for his death and the two deaths were all wound up together.”

  “Yes.”

  “I went to Florida, Laura. The man whose car you hit is in jail down there. I talked to him with his lawyer present. He said the man in his car died later that night.”

  “I know. He blackmailed me, remember?”

  “His girlfriend turned over the evidence you threw out of the window that night.”

  Her eyes teared. “How could I have been so stupid?” she said.

  “You were frightened and you panicked. The Florida authorities tested the marijuana cigarette for prints and they lifted some. They match yours.”

  “Where did you get mine from?”

  “The pictures Celia Yaeger gave me.”

  “You showed me those pictures to get my prints?”

  “I showed you those pictures so you would see your husband receiving a phone call during the party. I had no idea of your involvement. Later, I remembered you had handled them.”

  “And then what?” she said.

  “Then your prints were checked to see if there was any more information about you in police files.”

  “I see.”

  “And there was.”

  “So you know it all.”

  “I know a lot of it. The full report is being faxed to the New York police. We’ll see it tomorrow.”

  “It’s not what it seems to be.”

  “I’d like to hear it from you, Laura.”

  She got up and walked to her husband’s grave, knelt, and moved the flowers slightly, more to take up time, I thought, than for any aesthetic reason. Then she faced me, looking forlorn.

  “It was a bad war,” she said, “the one we fought in Vietnam. You wouldn’t know. You were just a child at the time. I was a student and a lot of us were angry about the war, but no one would listen to us if we spoke softly. So a group of us decided to do it our way.”

  “Which was?”

  “To do things that wouldn’t go unnoticed. To call attention to a bad war.”

  I had the feeling she was picking her words carefully, perhaps that she had prepared for this moment for many years, hoping it would never come. “And how did you do that?”

  “We did things that made a splash but didn’t hurt anybody. Once we made a huge bonfire in a field outside a small town. We called the local radio station and said that in Vietnam fires like that killed women and children and destroyed their homes. Then we moved on.”

  “You committed armed robbery,” I reminded her.

  “We needed money to live, so we took it. I’ve spent my life giving it back, Chris. Not just money but my time, my energy, my heart and soul.”

  “Everyone is grateful for that.”

  “But it isn’t enough, is it?” She bent and picked up a twig several inches long, broke it in half, and dropped it on the grass.

  “There were two homicides,” I said.

  “They weren’t intentional and I had no part in them. I never shot a gun; I never carried a gun; I never touched a gun.”

  “Then I’m sure something can be worked out.”

  “Unfortunately, in that state being an accessory is as good as shooting a gun.”

  “I see.”

  “It was a hardware store. All we wanted was what was in the cash register, just enough to eat and buy gas. It was a busy store—we’d watched it—and we went in when it was empty. The owner opened the register and started to take the bills out. All of a sudden, he had a gun in his hand. I was terrified. Maura started screaming. The man with the gun turned toward us and Roger got a shot off. It was a good shot. The man dropped out of sight behind the counter. Next thing we knew, there was a cop in the doorway shouting at us to drop our weapons. Roger shot twice and the cop fell. We ran out of the store and drove away.”

  She seemed exhausted by the story. She came back to the bench and sat beside me. “Three shots,” she said. “Two men dead.”

  “It must have been horrible.”

  “It was.”

  “Did the gang break up then?” I asked.

  For the first time, she hesitated. “Not at that moment,” she said finally. “We stayed together till we got to California.”

  “Doing what?” I needed to know, to hear it from her.

  “We did some things.”

  That was it. I had hoped she would say they had disbanded after the hardware store disaster, that Jack’s information was wrong, but she didn’t.

  “I can’t describe the remorse I felt,” she said after a moment. “I thought of those two lives lost, an older man who had a big family and the cop. I can still see his face in the doorway, very boyish. He was in his twenties. He wasn’t that much older than we were. He was newly married and his wife was pregnant. I see his face sometimes in my dreams.”

  “Why didn’t you stop after that incident?”

  “It’s hard to explain. We needed each other. We couldn’t just break up into five pieces on the spur of the moment. And we still needed money.”

  I thought about it. “Did you have a relationship with one of the men?”

  “Maybe. Maybe that was it for me. I never saw any of them after we got to California. Most of them went to jail. I read about it.”

  “One died of an overdose.”

  She was still.

  “The night of the accident,” I said. “You were smoking.”

  She shook her head. “I was so stupid. I hadn’t smoked grass for years. Larry never knew I had smoked it. He didn’t know anything about my life before we met. I was with some friends and one of them handed me a joint. I lit up when I was driving. It had more of an effect on me than I remembered. My car probably wandered into the other lane. Of course I shouldn’t have been smoking. Of course I shouldn’t have tossed it out the window—I saw him in the rearview mirror, picking it up as I pulled away—but I wasn’t thinking straight. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t been smoking. Larry died because of it.”

  “And another man,” I said.

  “Yes.” Her voice was very low.

  “What did you tell your husband when you got home that night?”

  “Just that there’d been an accident, that I’d panicked, and that I was afraid. Later, when the calls began, I told him I’d been smoking. He protected me because he loved me. But on the night of the party, I didn’t know where he went until he didn’t come home. Then I began to suspect he’d been called by the blackmailer, who we both thought was out of our lives. But I had no idea where he was. And of course, I didn’t know there was someone else involved.”

  I sat quietly. She had lived two separate lives, and now she was about to start a third. There would be lawyers and appearances in court, stories that were true or partly true or completely false. In the end, perhaps there would be a plea bargain, a balance of her old life against her new one, what she had once been weighed against the person she had become. I hoped she would stay out of prison, but I wasn’t sure that could be arranged.

  Suddenly she looked at me with a smile. “You see why I refused to give you the names of my friends in Connecticut. I knew they weren’t involved and I didn’t want to get them involved.”

  I nodded. It seemed so long ago, I had almost forgotten.

  “Did he tell you he blackmailed me?” she asked. “The man in jail in Florida?”

  “Not yet. We just got the cigarette from him and his description of what happened that night. He doesn’t know we know about the blackmail and the murder of your husband. But we’ve tied the gun to him.”

  “Larry must have thought he could somehow get himself out of his clutches if they came to the house. Maybe he said he had money in the fishing box.”

  “That’s where you found the gu
n?”

  “Yes. But I guess the killer got suspicious. I wish I’d gotten up when I heard the bang. I wish—”

  “Will you turn yourself in, Laura?”

  “To the police?”

  “You really have to.”

  “I’ll end up in jail.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Suddenly I heard the sound of running feet and someone shouted, “Police! Don’t move.”

  “Oh, no,” Laura said.

  Three uniformed members of the Oakwood Police Department appeared, all of them holding weapons.

  “It’s OK, Chris!” I heard Jack call from the path.

  I turned toward him and called back, “Where’s Eddie?”

  “In the car. He’s fine.”

  The police officers were busy handcuffing Laura and reading her her rights as I walked back to where Jack was.

  “Chris!” she called.

  I took a few steps in her direction.

  “Make him pay for killing Larry.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  “I guess I can call my mother now,” she said, tears forming in her eyes. “She’ll see her grandchildren for the first time, and her great-grandchildren.”

  I turned away. I didn’t want to see her taken to the car.

  25

  I gave a long statement to the Oakwood Police that afternoon while my husband and son made dinner. Larry Filmore had been murdered in Oakwood and they were very interested in what I had learned about his death and the suspect I had uncovered. They didn’t really know anything about Darby Maxwell’s death, but they got in touch with the police in Connecticut and arranged for someone to come down the next day and take another statement from me. They called the prison in Florida and began to make arrangements for Paul Norman to be brought to New York State for questioning in the two deaths and in the automobile accident as well. It was a complicated business and I had to keep straightening out the chronology and identifying the players. I gave them chapter and verse on the gun that had killed Filmore, going back to the winter of 1969, when one of the cops talking to me had not yet been born.

  It was exhausting and I knew I would think of more details when I got home, but I wanted to give them as much as I could today to spare myself another similar ordeal.

  When it was over, I asked about Laura.

  “She’s been taken to the FBI office in White Plains,” one of the cops said. “She asked for a lawyer and I think he was waiting for her when she got there.”

  “I’d like to bring her some things, a toothbrush and some clothes,” I said.

  He told me whom to call in White Plains. Then I drove home.

  Jack and Eddie were having a good time in the kitchen. Something in the oven smelled very good.

  “You look like hell,” Jack said.

  “This was one tough day.”

  “Go take it easy. We’ve got everything under control.”

  It was what I wanted to hear.

  —

  I spent a lot of time that night thinking about something I was sure Laura—or Luann—had not thought about until it was too late, consequences. I thought of pebbles thrown into ponds and the ripples they made. I thought of children touching fire, not understanding what would happen to their skin. And I thought of young people stealing and killing for a cause they considered worthy.

  How many of them, I wondered, had done what Laura did, simply become someone else and put the past behind them? And how many others had paid a price? I had been born at a different time and not lived through the turmoil of the sixties and seventies at an age when I could have been drawn into the kind of life Laura had experienced. At what age did a person need to accept responsibility for his actions? At what age did he need to think about the consequences of what he did? Had Laura ever accepted such responsibility or thought about those consequences? After all, at an age when she was a wife and mother, and had been for many years, she had driven while smoking an illegal substance and had left the scene of an accident she may have caused.

  And still, as she had said this afternoon, she had spent much of her life making restitution. My questions had no certain answers, and that’s probably why they kept me awake so long.

  —

  The next day I talked to the Connecticut police in my own living room. The detective who came down was old enough that he remembered Darby well, the search parties, the community gathering together to help. I told him about the Gallaghers and their cousin, Paul Norman. I told him about the trip Frannie and I had made to Florida and what we had turned up. I gave him names and numbers and suggestions. When he left, I called Betty Linton and went over a lot of it again. To say she was shocked at Laura Filmore’s part in all of it was an understatement.

  Later in the day, Jack called. He had heard from the hospital.

  “What hospital?” I asked, alarmed.

  “About the chocolate.”

  “Oh,” I said with relief, “that hospital.”

  “They said there was a substance at the center—I don’t have my notes right here—that induced vomiting in the kids who ate it. The police are questioning Ryan’s brother to see who gave him the candies.”

  “He’s just a boy,” I said. “I hope they won’t charge him with anything.”

  “They just want the source, if they can nail it down. The hospital was very grateful that we turned up the candy.”

  So was I.

  —

  Laura Filmore posted a huge bond, over a million dollars, and was released from prison in her own recognizance. She hired a name-brand lawyer who is putting together a defense for her trial, which is scheduled for next year. The town turned out to support her, and I was with them all the way. Her elderly mother came to visit, renewing their once close relationship. It was the first time they had seen each other in over thirty years. I was glad something really good came out of Laura’s problems.

  —

  Some time later, I heard from Frannie Gallagher. Paul had been flown to New York, where he was questioned by detectives from Oakwood and Connecticut. Confronted with evidence about the gun, the fire at the Gallaghers’, and assorted other things, he made a deal that included a confession to having harbored Darby Maxwell in the guest house for several days and not turning him over to the police. He refused to admit he had had a hand in Darby’s death.

  He also refused to admit he had shot Larry Filmore. Filmore had driven them to Oakwood, he said, promising Norman money that was locked in a box in the garage. But they had gotten in an argument about who would go for the box and Filmore had taken the gun from him and shot himself, after which Norman fled. That’s about as believable as some of my son’s fantasies. If Larry Filmore had a gun in his hand and Paul Norman was nearby, who would be the most likely target?

  When they talk about tangled webs, I think they probably mean situations like that.

  The detective from Oakwood who did the questioning was my old friend Detective Joe Fox. We have had our problems in the past, but I have grown to like him very much and to trust his instincts. He called one day and asked if he could come over to talk to me about the case. I invited him for the evening and got a nice coffee cake to serve when he came.

  He arrived with flowers, not for the first time, and we all made ourselves comfortable in the family room. Jack had gotten a really good fire going and Eddie was asleep upstairs. It was already December, and a light coating of snow covered all the lawns on the block.

  “You get all the good ones, Mrs. Brooks,” Joe said, sipping his coffee. He never calls me Chris.

  “This one came out of a carton in the basement, some letters and cards my aunt saved. We had a little water down there from an open window and I decided to go through the papers and see what was worth saving.”

  “But surely your aunt didn’t have knowledge of a homicide.”

  “She didn’t, and I didn’t, either. I just wanted to meet the people who had written to my aunt. It was the sneakers that made me realize something was ami
ss.”

  “The sneakers, right. That was in your statement. I asked Paul Norman about them. From the look on his face, I could tell he didn’t know what I was talking about. You want to tell me about it?”

  I went through it for the last time, or so I hoped, Larry Filmore’s brilliant move to alert the world that something was amiss.

  “So why wasn’t the world alerted?”

  I spelled it out for him.

  “Ah.”

  “And it was only by chance that the two surviving women mentioned the sneakers to me. If they hadn’t, none of this would have happened.”

  “Misplaced sneakers,” the detective said thoughtfully. “I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m held hostage.”

  “I hope there’s no next time,” I said.

  “Thank you, dear lady. So do I.”

  EPILOGUE

  It was winter when an envelope with my name and address typed on the front arrived. The return address was a mysterious FG and a street that looked familiar but didn’t quite register. I slit it open and pulled out a couple of sheets of paper obviously copied on a machine. A small note-sized paper fluttered to the floor. I picked it up, smiling at the bright flowers along the top.

  The note read:

  Dear Chris,

  I thought you would want to see this. I got it a couple of weeks ago and didn’t know whether I should send it along but decided I should. I hope this answers all your questions.

  Love,

  Frannie

  —

  Frannie Gallagher, I thought. I made myself comfortable and began to read.

  Dear Frannie,

  Peabody says he’ll mail this to you without looking at what it says. I want to come clean, at least to you. I owe you that much. It’s always bothered me that I burned down the guest house and didn’t tell you. I should of paid you, but I was short on cash and after awhile I just forgot. You know me.

  I knew you and Dave were going away that time for a couple of weeks ten or eleven years ago, whenever it was, and I had something doing in New York and when I got it done, I figured I’d rest up in Connecticut. I always like it there. So I drove up and made myself at home. All I wanted was a couple of days to rest up and sleep and maybe walk in the woods.