The Cinco de Mayo Murder

by Lee Harris

  “Who sent it?”

  “I don't know. It was paid for, I remember that. I asked the man if I had to pay and he said no, it was all taken care of. I called my husband and told him. I wouldn't open it till he came home.”

  “Was it locked?” I asked.

  “Not with a key. With some wire. If you opened the wire, it broke.”

  “For security,” I said. “Did you have the key?”

  “It was on the key ring in Heinz's pocket. He had the key to our house and the keys for both suitcases. But only one suitcase came, and we never found out who sent it.”

  “Do you remember what was in it?”

  “Clothes. Clean clothes, dirty clothes. Some schoolbooks. There was nothing important, nothing that could tell us what had happened to our son on that mountain.”

  “What did you do with the suitcase?”

  “I don't remember anymore. I washed the clothes, I hung them up in his closet. Later on, after my husband died, after I had my stroke and I knew I couldn't live there by myself, I gave away everything that I couldn't take with me to Hillside Village.”

  I thought how terrible that must have been, disposing of the clothing and mementos of the two people she had loved most. I, too, had a husband and a son—a husband who had achieved a great deal because of his hard work and strong commitment, and a son who we hoped would go even further with his life.

  “Did you try to find out who had sent the suitcase?” I asked.

  “My husband called the police. They said there was no suitcase. They had given him everything they had.”

  “Which was the wallet, the keys, and the small backpack.”

  “Yes. That was all. And we never got the second suitcase.”

  “Do you know what was missing from his things?”

  “No. He had simple clothes, enough to go a week before doing a laundry. If a blue shirt was missing or a pair of jeans they were all wearing, how should I know? And why should I care? Nothing mattered to me anymore.”

  “I understand. Tell me, did you speak to him often on the phone?”

  “Not so often. We wrote letters.”

  “Letters,” I said with surprise. In the years I had taught English at St. Stephen's, I had come to realize that correspondence between students and parents was rare. The telephone provided the main, if not the only, linkbetween the generations. Checks came in the mail and little else. Today even that has probably changed, and e-mail has replaced the phone.

  “My husband used to get angry at big phone bills. He said it was cheaper and more permanent to write letters.”

  “Your husband was right,” I said. “Do you have Heinz's letters?”

  “I have every letter he ever wrote to me.”

  At that moment, a bell sounded. People rose and started toward the dining hall.

  “Would you mind if I read the letters he wrote you his last year at Rimson?”

  “I can find them for you. I don't have to go to lunch. We can—”

  I smiled. “Yes, you do have to go to lunch, Mrs. Gruner. I'll walk you over. I'll come back this afternoon.”

  She began to argue, but I assured her there was no hurry. We walked together, and at the door to the dining room we said good-bye.

  Letters, I thought as I walked out to the car. Pieces of paper with writing on them. I began to giggle. Who could have imagined a cache of letters that might answer all sorts of questions about Heinz Gruner's life?

  I went home and made myself a healthy salad, ate it with gusto, and read my paper. When Jack called, just to say hello, I told him the news.

  “He wrote letters?” my disbelieving husband said. “I thought those went out with the cavemen.”

  “You never know, do you? Anyway, we know for sure that Heinz left Rimson with two suitcases, and someone went through them, took what he wanted, and returned the rest. Someone was with him, Jack. Someone joined him on the flight or met him in Phoenix.”

  “How many detectives you got working on this with you?”

  I laughed. “Just the usual. Hey, if you've got some spare time, see what you can find out about a guy named Steven Millman.” I gave him all the information I had.

  “Sure, I'll do that little favor for you, honey. I'm expecting to have some spare time next January. That suit your investigation?”

  “OK, Lieutenant. I'll back off.”

  “If we could just get rid of those civilians, we'd have a pretty nice life here. I'll see what I can do.” He read back what I had told him and I approved it. “You going to read those letters?”

  “I'm going to try to do it this afternoon. Eddie's taken care of after school, so I have a couple of empty hours. I'll start with the last ones and work backward. Maybe he mentions a name that's not on my list.”

  “Have fun. I've gotta run.”

  I waited an hour, in case Mrs. Gruner wanted to take a nap after lunch. Then I drove back to Hillside Village. Many residents were sitting in the sun. At one table, four women were playing cards. A man and a woman were playing chess at another. Mrs. Gruner was not in the group.

  I went inside and the receptionist called upstairs. “She's waiting for you. Can you find your way?”

  “Sure.”

  The door to Mrs. Gruner's room was ajar. I tapped on it and pushed it open. Mrs. Gruner was sitting on the bed, a carton beside her.

  “Come in, come in,” she said. “I have all the letters right here. These,” she lifted a stacktied with a ribbon, “are from my husband. He wrote to me when we first knew each other.”

  “Did you live far apart?” I asked.

  “No. We lived quite close, but he liked to write letters. He was an old-fashioned man, but a good one. And he wrote beautiful letters.”

  I looked at the top envelope. It was addressed in black ink in nearly illegible handwriting. An unusual stamp was stuck in the upper right-hand corner, and I realized this correspondence had taken place in Germany.

  “The rest are from my son.” That was most of the letters in the carton. They were sorted into packets about four to six inches thick. “These are the ones from his last year at Rimson.” She handed me one. The top letter had a postmark of May second, the last letter Heinz had written his parents before taking off for Arizona.

  I took the pack and sat in a chair. “May I sit and read?”

  “Of course. I will leave you alone for a while, Chris. We can talk when I come back.”

  I started to protest, but she was already on the phone, asking for assistance to go downstairs. When the aide came, she left with him. I waited a few minutes, then untied the string and set the letters down on an end table with the last letter on top. It was an eerie feeling.

  The top of the envelope, like all the other envelopes in the collection, had been sliced open cleanly. I reached in and pulled out the single sheet of paper. It was dated and began, “Dear Mom and Dad.” He described the take-home final in German literature he had completed and just turned in. He thought he had done pretty well on that. He was finished now and beginning to pack for his trip. He thanked them for the gift of this vacation he was so looking forward to.

  He would be the first to leave the dorm the next morning. Right now it was very quiet, everyone studying. He talked about some courses, mentioned a professor who had excused him from a final, said that one of the boys on the corridor had fallen asleep the night before while studying and didn't wake up till breakfast time, almost hysterical at the hours he had lost. There was no mention of a traveling companion to Arizona or a specific destination.

  At the end of the letter, which continued to the second side of the sheet, he finished with a few lines in German. I know a little French, but not a word of German. It seemed that the lines were personal, affectionate comments to his parents, having nothing to do with school. I put the letter away and started on the second.

  In this one he mentioned going out to dinner with Herbie and Barry—the lawyer I had spoken to the day before, most likely—and described the hamburge
r he had eaten, obviously one of his own design. I sensed the fun of being at a college far from home, the freedom students had, the pleasure of dropping petty responsibilities like eating at prescribed times or keeping one's room clean, instead being able to associate with this one for a meal and that one for a good discussion. Nowhere did I sense sadness or heartache. This was a young man reaching the end of another year at a fine college, putting his finals behind him, looking forward to a trip.

  I worked my way backward in time, from envelope to envelope. Professors were mentioned. Herbie had decided on a major in American history. Heinz had decided definitely on European history. He would apply for a Fulbright to Germany in his senior year. Professor Hershey was all for it.

  But although the letters were well written and newsy, they didn't add to my knowledge of the Arizona trip. He mentioned when the airline tickets arrived and said he would buy a backpack when he got there. It would be easier that way. I raced through the envelopes, wanting to read as much as I could before Mrs. Gruner returned. I was already back in the winter of that year, reading descriptions of deep snow, narrow paths plowed between buildings, when I came to a sentence that stopped me: “I saw K on campus today. He's fine and sends his regards.” And on to an anecdote about someone answering the wrong question in class that morning.

  K, I thought. Someone who isn't often on campus. Maybe I had found the mysterious stranger.

  Mrs. Gruner returned shortly afterward. She stepped carefully off the wheelchair and walked unaided into the room, turning to thank the man who had pushed her to her door.

  “It's a beautiful day,” she said, lowering herself into the second chair in the room. “Have you had time to read some letters?”

  I told her she was lucky to have them, that Heinz was a fine letter writer, and I had learned much about the people at Rimson and how the college worked. She accepted my comments with her usual mixture of pleasure and sadness.

  “He doesn't write much about the trip,” I said.

  “No. He would tell us afterward how it was. He had his ticket, he had some pocket money.”

  “How did he pick Arizona?” I asked.

  “He heard about it. He read about it.”

  “Maybe someone he knew at school lived there?”

  She considered that. “Yes, maybe.”

  “But you think he went alone.”

  “I don't know. We sent him one plane ticket. If he went with a friend, then his friend would get his own ticket.”

  “Of course.” I pulled out the winter letter with the reference to K and read her the two brief sentences. “Do you remember who this person was?”

  I am sure her face changed. She was a plain woman with pale skin, probably because she didn't spend much time outside. I can't say she ever looked happy; at best, she looked neutral. But when I read those sentences aloud, something fearful flickered over her face.

  “What was the name?” she asked, her voice unsteady.

  “There is no name, just the letter K, as in Kafka,” I said, making a small joke.

  “I don't know anyone named Kafka. When is this letter? When did he write it?”

  I looked at the date. “In March. It was still winter.”

  “What does this have to do with Arizona?” There was anger in her voice, or at the very least annoyance.

  “I don't know what it has to do with Arizona. I'm trying to find out if someone was with Heinz when he had his hiking accident.”

  “Well, surely this, this K would not have been with him.”

  “Why are you so sure?” The change in her demeanor was so striking, I felt it was necessary to press forward.

  “Because—because he has no name. He is not one of the friends. He is not a professor. He is nobody.”

  “Mrs. Gruner, your son wrote to you that he saw someone that you and your husband knew by name. This man sent you regards. If you prefer not to talk about him—”

  “I'm tired. This has been a difficult day, going through the letters, talking about all this again. I need my Mittags schlfchen.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My nap, my afternoon nap. If you will excuse me.”

  I stuck the letter back in its envelope, tied the group together with the original string, wished her a good sleep, and went home.

  * * *

  “Well, that's crazy,” Melanie Gross said when I finished the story. Her kids were in one place, my son in another, and we had a rare childless late afternoon together.

  “Could I have hurt her feelings in some way when I said ‘Kafka'?” I asked.

  “Ridiculous. Kafka's a famous writer. Whoever this K person is, he's roused some old memory that she doesn't want to confront. Or that she doesn't want you privy to. Something secret in her life.”

  “Or Heinz's life.”

  “Where is Rimson located?” Mel asked.

  “In the middle of nowhere in Illinois. Some guy named Theodore Rimson had a large piece of property that he gave to a group of men who were trying to start a liberal arts college about a hundred years ago.”

  “For men.”

  “Of course for men. How many people thought women could fill a college back then? According to the literature the dean sent me, it became coed in the 1920s, long before Harvard, Yale, and Princeton decided to do the same thing.”

  “So it's in the middle of nowhere, which means that if Mr. K wanted to have a talk with Heinz Gruner, either he lived near the college or he made a special trip there to see him.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So it wasn't a case of Heinz walking down a path and seeing Mr. K and saying, ‘Hi there, how are you?’”

  “It was by appointment.”

  “No one on your list has a name starting with K?”

  I shook my head. “Mel, K could be Karl. K could be Kenneth or Kevin or Keith.”

  “He could be professor emeritus, maybe someone who knew Heinz's parents.”

  “Then what's she so upset for? You should have seen the transformation in her personality when I read her those two sentences saying Heinz had seen K on campus, that he was fine and sent his regards.”

  “She's holding something back. Just the fact that her son referred to him as K instead of by name shows there's something secret about him.”

  “You're right. Funny, Herb Fallon mentioned what was probably this meeting between Heinz and someone not from the college. They didn't meet secretly, but Heinz handled the meeting as though it was a secret from everyone except his parents.”

  “Which means the man had nothing to do with the college,” Mel said. “He traveled to the college to see Heinz.”

  “Who would do that?” I said, almost to myself. “I don't even have an idea of how old this man is, but I assume older than an undergraduate. He knows the elder Gruners. He's on good terms with them because he sends them regards. He has some special connection to Heinz.”

  “He's Heinz's real father,” Mel said.

  “You do come up with startling possibilities.”

  “He's a wealthy friend of the family who paid for Heinz's education as long as Heinz made a B average.”

  “I don't think B would cut it in that family.”

  “Then A-minus. And he checked on Heinz every year, maybe every semester.”

  “That could be, Mel. I don't think the Gruners were wealthy people. I'm sure Rimson was always expensive, although they probably give scholarships to good students.”

  “Maybe K was just an old friend who was interviewing for a faculty job and looked up your friend Heinz to say hello.”

  “Then what's all the secrecy about? Mrs. Gruner practically threw me out of her room over this person. She won't talk about him. She doesn't even want to think about him.”

  “You've got yourself a problem, Chris. I've given you three wonderful scenarios. I don't think I have the energy to come up with a fourth.”

  I smiled and Mel laughed. It was late afternoon, and she had taught all day. She was doing pretty well in t
he energy department from what I could see.

  “I'll have to keep at this,” I said. “But I'm afraid my friendship with Mrs. Gruner has ended. I don't know how to handle this.”

  “Give her a few days and call her up, just to see how she is. Offer her a drive. Take her to lunch. You're certainly a gracious person. She'll thaw. Maybe she'd like to visit your house. Can you imagine what it's like to live in Hillside Village for years and never see the inside of a house?”

  I had already done that. “I just hope she agrees to talkto me.”

  I walked home slowly, admiring the flowering trees on both sides of the street that made spring so beautiful in the Northeast. Shiny new leaves were appearing daily on shrubs and deciduous trees. Spring is really my season.

  I still had half an hour before Eddie would be dropped off, and dinner required only warming up. I fished out the phone number for Martin McHugh and dialed it, preparing to disconnect before the voice mail picked up.

  “Yeah, McHugh,” a harried voice said.

  “Mr. McHugh, my name is Chris Bennett and I was a friend of a Rimson classmate of yours.”

  “Rimson. That's awhile.” The voice a little less harried.

  “Heinz Gruner. Do you remember him?”

  “Lived on my corridor one year. I'm sorry to tell you he died, if you don't already know.”

  “I do know. It's why I'm calling you.”

  “Where are you, Miss—”

  “Chris Bennett. I'm calling from Oakwood, New York.”

  “Oakwood, yeah. I have friends up that way. I'm in the middle of something right now. Would it be possible for me to call you later on?”

  “Sure.” I gave him my number.

  “Better than that. Could I take you to lunch tomorrow? I'd like to get away from the office for a while anyway and I have a club nearby. How's twelve fifteen?”

  Considering that McHugh had been on my “lost” list, this was quite a turn of events. “That would be lovely. Just tell me where.”

  He gave me directions, told me where to park, and we had a lunch date. I hung up grinning, with twenty minutes before Eddie came home. I dialed Herb Fallon's number.