“That’s how things stood when Opal Ledbetter made her national defense report for the May meeting of the chapter. And that triggered a memory. It came to me that Duncan Yardley must be the operator of the Gold Coast.”
Harriet began to fumble in her famous pocketbook. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she said.
I don’t know why the question should have surprised me. Neither Henry nor I smoke, and I had known Harriet for such a long time without ever having seen her with a cigarette that I felt just a bit shocked at her request. I could tell that Henry too was taken by surprise as he reached for the matchbook in its holder between the salt and pepper shakers.
Harriet looked up with a mischievous grin. “Well, I’m not going to smoke,” she said as she extracted something wrapped in Kleenex from her purse. She handed it to him. “That’s the evidence,” she said. “That’s where the Drover money comes from today. From these marijuana cigarettes and the other stuff he has in those little plastic packets I saw in his safe while I was in his office down at the Gold Coast. And I believe we will find that he is in the dope business much deeper than that.
“Meanwhile,” Harriet continued, “at Helen’s suggestion, Margaret Chalmers and I took up our post watching the Borderville Transfer premises. We found a very strange pattern. Every so often, about seven or seven-thirty in the evening, a car from the south—always from the south—would roll up that hill and drive right into the warehouse. Then the next day, early, three cars would sort of converge, go into the warehouse for a while, and then come out and go off different ways. Then in five or six days the same thing would happen again.
“Now you can’t tell me they weren’t distributing something.
“Then Helen saw this Highsmith fellow wearing a suede jacket that she thought belonged to Garcia. And when the police began looking for that jacket, what should happen but somebody shot Highsmith out there on four-twenty-one.
“And they almost shot our little Helen.” Harriet leaned over and patted me on the arm.
“At that point we had pretty good evidence that both Duncan Yardley and Allen Comming were in the dope business, but I didn’t see how we were going to prove that either of them had killed Luis Garcia.
“Well, I thought, we haven’t investigated Bettye VanDyne the way we have snooped around those boys, and she’s right here in the county. So I went out there.
“It’s a very pitiful thing; that place is so poorly kept up. That girl isn’t making anything there. And I hadn’t been talking to her ten minutes before I knew she was on drugs.
“It was just very sad. And yet—you can’t just let a murderer go.
“Then that man—I call him the ‘Confederate veteran’—came around the corner, and he must have known in a minute who I was. So I was eager to get away from there and mostly from him.
“While Miss VanDyne was opening the gate to let me out, two things happened almost at the same time. I saw the broken lens of García’s glasses, for one thing.”
Harriet delved into her purse once more and came up with a rumpled envelope. “Here are the pieces. Dr. Thomason worked out the prescription from the fragments. It turned out that there are parts of two lenses here. One was a prescription lens, and the other was not a lens at all, which, if you’ll think about it, is the way it would have to be, since the poor man was blind in one eye. Helen got me the address of Mr. García’s ophthalmologist in California so I could write out there and check it. According to the prescription he sent me, these are Mr. García’s lenses. And I would think that that means that Mr. García was killed right there at Bettye VanDyne’s gate.
“Now, for the other thing that came to me just at the time I saw the glint of the glass among the pebbles—Bettye VanDyne was standing there holding the chain that ordinarily keeps the gate shut. It was then that I first thought of her as a menacing figure. That poor girl is very strange. If she was hopped up on something, she could swing that chain with that great big padlock on the end of it, and she could kill somebody with it. And I don’t suppose that it would take too much to crush a man’s windpipe with a heavy chain swinging around like that.
“And, of course, if you think about it, most folks would protect their face and eyes with their hands. But, no, with Mr. García, all that was different. Those artist’s hands of his meant more to him than his eyes. So he didn’t raise his hands, and so that chain with that big lock on it just hit him and hit him. I don’t know whether she actually hit his glasses or they fell off and got stepped on and broken. I suppose somebody picked up what was left of the frames—they would be easy to see. And maybe they took the pieces of glass that were easiest to find.”
Harriet paused. “I’ve been talking too much,” she said. “Let me get a sip of water.”
Henry gave me that look he gives when he is impressed, and I was as proud of Harriet as I could be. After this, Henry would have to take my “old ladies” much more seriously than he had before.
“Now, there’s one other thing,” Harriet began again. “I believe that they always require a motive in detective stories and in murders and things like that. Well, Helen sniffed out that one too. Evelyn Haverty Garcia was an addict and died as a result of her addiction. Helen learned that from her friend in Santa Barbara, California.
“The way I see this, Mr. García was a man of fine gentlemanly instincts. A man like that, and with a sense of honor and all that, such as they say the Spanish have, would never accept the death of a loved one by drugs. Why, that’s borne out by the way he let it seem that she had died of heart trouble.
“Just consider the position he was in. I don’t know how the Drovers divvy up the proceeds from their drug business, but according to Angus Redloch, Evelyn Haverty would have been getting some income from the family business, namely the Borderville Transfer. But we know that for all intents and purposes there is not much legitimate transfer business going on at that place. And when Evelyn died and Garcia inherited, why, that made Luis Garcia a participant in whatever was going on over there at Borderville Transfer.
“Now, suppose that in some way—and I don’t know that we will ever find out how—Mr. Garcia got wind of the drug operation. Maybe it had something to do with the variation in how the money was coming to him, or maybe he was just wondering why he was not getting any money—however it might be, if he ever got such a notion, how would he react? How would you react to that, Mr. Delaporte?”
It was a rhetorical question, and Henry did not have to answer; for Harriet went on immediately: “I think he did just what you would have done—Mr. Garcia came to Borderville to investigate. It wouldn’t be too hard to find out that something fishy was going on.
“There is no way we can know how he got his information, but let’s just say that he went out to Bettye VanDyne’s place to see if she would cooperate with him, and let’s say that he found that she was on dope.
“All right! I imagine he pointed out to her what she was doing to herself. And then he probably went on to point out what the drug trade was doing to thousands of young people everywhere. And then I think maybe some kind of quarrel broke out and she realized he would go to the authorities, and that was when she struck him with the chain.
“Now have I got that right?” Harriet demanded.
Henry rubbed his chin. “You have made a case,” he said. “Where is this farm of Miss VanDyne’s?”
“Down here about ten miles out of town.”
“On which side?”
“Tennessee.”
“That’s good,” Henry said. “We don’t have to deal with Gilroy and Jefferson; they are on the Virginia side. If you want me to, I’ll take your evidence and lay it before the Tennessee authorities. There is certainly enough here to call for an investigation.”
“Now, hold on a minute,” Harriet said. “I don’t want you going in there after poor Bettye in such a way that while the police are investigating her, the other Drovers can get away and leave the country. After all, Miss VanDyne probably saved my l
ife; and she killed only one man, but just look at the lives that have been ruined by the narcotics trade.”
“The federal officers will take care of the narcotics angle,” Henry said.
“Oh, that’s good.” Harriet was all smiles—almost as if she had won a bridge tournament.
All told, it was undoubtedly the most extraordinary dinner conversation Henry and I will ever experience. He went right home and made an appointment to see Glenn Martin, the Tennessee sheriff, the next morning at 9:00.
It was a week before the arrests took place. The federals made a raid on the warehouse and the Gold Coast simultaneously. Both places proved to be very interesting.
Allen Comming was in his office down at the foot of the hill below the warehouse at Borderville Transfer. At the warehouse itself, the officers found a man in the act of taking three hundred packets of cocaine from the upholstery of the backseat of a car with a Florida license plate. And they caught three couriers, one of them apparently a new man who had taken the place of Highsmith.
Yardley was arrested at his home, and the raid on the Gold Coast yielded drugs of various description—quite enough to keep him in the penitentiary for many years.
Meanwhile, the sheriffs men were watching Bettye VanDyne’s farm. Only a few minutes after Allen Comming’s arrest, Betty ran out of the house and got into an old gray Plymouth. The deputies were waiting for her at the gate.
They brought her to the jail and questioned her for three hours before they got her complete confession.
The newspapers went wild. They had the story from the Tennessee sheriffs office, and they wanted a statement from me because the affair had been so often referred to as the DAR Murder Mystery. Elizabeth Wheeler’s friend Mr. Manley called me right away. “No,” I said, “I don’t wish to make a statement. But I am sure you can get a very good story from Mrs. L. Q. C. Lamar Bushrow.”
Bettye VanDyne was let out on bail, and the following day her stable boy found her body. She had deliberately taken an overdose, and she had left a suicide note, a copy of which I shall now insert into this record.
“If anybody cares,” it began,
“Daddy first got into the drug traffic in 1955. He was in debt very deeply and tried to raise money through Uncle Baker Comming. Tony Hancock found out about it. He had been prescribing narcotics illegally for years and knew about a man called Herbert Donaldson in Florida. Donaldson set Daddy up with three boats and a fishing venture as a cover for drug running. It was not a big operation then, and Daddy was only involved in bringing the stuff—hash, pot, coke, whatever—to shore at different places.
“One time Daddy couldn’t make his rendezvous ashore where it had been planned because of a storm, and he put into Lauderdale, where we lived then.
“I was in high school, and that night I was driving around with a bunch of kids through the storm and said,”Let’s go down to the boats.”
“Daddy was sleeping off a drunk, so we scrambled all over that boat and found the drugs. That was the first time I ever shot up.
“It went on from there. When Daddy died in ’68, I realized I would have to do something about the habit. So I checked into a clinic down there. It was really bad, but I got through it all right and knocked the habit for a while.
“Then I got on it again and had a really bad experience. I went to the same clinic and took the cure. But I just went back to drugs again. I took the cure a third time, and it was the same old story.
“I know now that I am hooked forever. I don’t have the strength to go through a clinic again, and I know it wouldn’t do any good if I did.
“When Mother died, I inherited her part of the Drover estate. That brought me in close contact with Allen Comming. He had been running the business for several years, and it just fell apart in 1973. He was in big debt and didn’t know what to do, when Tony Hancock told him how to get contact with Donaldson. With Allen it was a choice between joining the operation and taking bankruptcy. Allen, Jr., took over when his father died in 1975, and Duncan Yardley came in on the deal later.
“Those two bastards took all the money for themselves. I was lucky if I got fifteen hundred a year. They said it came from the transfer business. Then to keep me quiet they let me have all the coke, pot, anything I wanted.
“I could have done really well if I had been willing to be a dealer. But I knew what drugs do to people, and I just couldn’t bring myself to sell misery to those poor saps out there. So Allen and Dunk gave me any of the merchandise I wanted just to keep me quiet.
“I always loved horses. The only real pleasure I have had these last years has been seeing my colts grow into big, beautiful animals.
“Last February when Lu Garcia came out to the farm, he had some idea that he could get me to help him force Allen out of the racket. He was standing at the gate and said that he could stop it all with the law.
“I panicked. I just could not go through withdrawal again. The chain with the lock on it was on the ground just at my feet. I picked it up and in a rage struck out at Lu. He was above me, and I had to reach to strike at his face. The first time I hit him, his foot slipped on the gravel and he fell. I hit him again and again.
“When he didn’t move, I knew he was dead.
“It was a dark night, and the body had rolled down the hill, where car lights would not touch it even if someone drove by.
“I stood there a long time. Then I went into the house, and it was about half an hour before I could think what to do. I called Allen. And he called Tony Hancock.
“Tony always comes to Borderville when Allen and Duncan want to talk business. He’s afraid of wiretaps.
“In about twenty minutes Allen came and put the body in his station wagon. He took it to the warehouse to wait for Tony.
“When Tony got there, he told Allen to have Joe Highsmith dump the body in the lake. So Allen got Joe up and had him take the body in the station wagon out to the bridge. But there was too much traffic on 421 to throw it from the bridge, and the lake was so low at that time that he couldn’t drive down to the water without getting stuck in the clay. So he brought the body back.
“Meanwhile Allen brought Duncan into it. He was the one who thought of planting the body in that cemetery. They told Joe to burn Lu’s clothes; and he did, all except the jacket.
“It has been a lousy life. I am writing this so that someone will know not just what I did, but why I did it. When I started out, I certainly didn’t mean for it to end this way. I was suckered into it. It was the same with Allen and Dunk. Drugs just got to be the family business.
“The one who caused it all was Tony Hancock, and I only hope that if I go to hell (and I guess I will), I’ll see him there, because I have a score to settle with him.”
The federals had already learned from Bettye’s confession at the jail that Hancock was very much a part of the drug ring. And they had notified the officers in Roanoke to pick him up. But he had already heard the news, and he and his nurse had disappeared.
All of this was swirling around us when all sorts of reporters and photographers hit town. There was a team from Knoxville, and even one from Atlanta. They came out to our house.
“Don’t interview me,” I said. “Interview Harriet Bushrow, Margaret Chalmers, and Elizabeth Wheeler.” And that is what they did.
The Knoxville photographer got a picture of the three standing on Margaret’s front porch. But the photographer from Atlanta was really clever. He photographed the three ladies in the pose of Grant Wood’s painting known as Daughters of the American Revolution; and that is the picture that was copied all over the country.
EXCERPT FROM THE MINUTES OF THE SEPTEMBER MEETING OF THE OLD ORCHARD FORT CHAPTER, NSDAR
Mrs. Bushrow reported that as a direct result of the investigation carried out by herself and Mrs. Ledbetter, the exhibition of male striptease dancing has ceased and the Gold Coast nightclub has been closed.
THE FAMOUS DAR MURDER MYSTERY. Copyright © 1992 by Graham Landrum. All righ
ts reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
eISBN 9781429938860
First eBook Edition : June 2011
Production Editor: David Stanford Burr
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Landrum, Graham,
The famous DAR murder mystery / Graham Landrum.
p. cm.
“A Thomas Dunne book.”
I. Title.
PS3562.A4775F3 1992
813’.54—dc20
91-33458
CIP
The Famous Dar Murder Mystery Page 18