The Thanksgiving Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  “I read my sister’s last letter to my mother, but not till a long time after she wrote it. My mother died around the time Natalie was killed. I tried to get hold of her, but she’d moved and left no forwarding address and no new phone number. I wrote and the letter came back. I called and the number’d been disconnected. I had a job up in Alaska and I didn’t have time to look for my sister. I had all my mother’s things put in storage, and when I came back a couple of years later, I started going through them. There was the letter from Natalie, and she said she’d just been called for an interview at a new ad agency called Hopkins and Jewell.”

  “She hadn’t had the interview yet?”

  “Didn’t sound like it. So on a chance, I got the number, called, and asked for her. When they put someone on, I said, ‘Hi, it’s Teddy,’ and she said, ‘Who?’ as though she’d never heard of me. And it wasn’t her voice, I mean my sister’s voice. It was just too much of a coincidence, my sister getting an interview with this company and someone else with the same name holding a job there. So I took everything I had out of the bank and went to New York.”

  “You knew she had last lived near Gramercy Park.”

  “I not only knew it, I’d visited her there when I was in New York almost seven years ago.”

  “And one morning in the elevator she introduced you to her neighbors, the Fosters.”

  He looked at me curiously. “You know, you’re right. I didn’t think to look for anyone in the building. I just asked the super when and where she’d gone. He knew when, but he had no forwarding address. Neither did the post office. And there was no listing in the phone book under her name. I suppose she had an unlisted number, but if she did, that is, the other woman, I couldn’t get hold of it. I called a bunch of N. Millers, but they’d never heard of Natalie.”

  “So you decided to get a job with Hopkins and Jewell,” I said.

  “I had to learn word processing first, but it wasn’t hard. I’ve learned a lot harder stuff in my life. What was hard was getting a job at H and J. I started out at another place, kind of to hone my skills. Then I found out what employment agency sent people to them. Arlene liked me. She hired me right off.”

  “Arlene interviewed you herself?”

  “After Wormy. They run a pretty tight ship there. One of the partners approved of everyone who was hired.”

  “So you became Natalie’s friend.”

  “That wasn’t easy either. She didn’t want boyfriends who weren’t rich or promising, and I’m a lot younger than she is. But I managed. We talked a lot and I think she liked me.”

  “I guess by that time you’d met up with Steve Carlson.”

  “Yeah. He had no problem lending me his ID. He thought it was a gas. He knew the whole story. He just never knew what I did on Thanksgiving Day.”

  “Did the fake Natalie ever slip up?”

  “Never. She was very cool, always in control. I once asked her where she’d worked before and she was very vague, said it was some place on Sixth Avenue that’d gone out of business. Everything she said was possible. Nothing was checkable.”

  “You knew where she lived, though, didn’t you?”

  “She couldn’t really keep that a secret. They had her address on file, and Wormy used to distribute a Christmas card list every fall. But she never actually said who she was marrying, not his last name anyway. He was Sandy Somebody and he lived in New Jersey.”

  “How’d you find her?”

  “I followed her a lot and then one day he picked her up. I drove my car to work on a day when they were going out. After that it was easy. And Wormy had her new address after she got married. She needed it for the W Two.”

  “Did you always intend to kill her?”

  “I just wanted to find my sister. I wanted to know what happened to her. I started out thinking maybe this was a coincidence, a second Natalie Miller at H and J, but then I got the feeling there was more to it. I tried to get over it when she left to get married, but I couldn’t. I knew I’d only have one chance, that if I let her live, I’d have to get out of town, and I was ready to do that. But I didn’t want to burn my bridges. I picked Thanksgiving Day on the chance she’d go to the parade. She’d told me once how much she wanted to go, but no one would take her. So I followed them and waited till one of them might be occupied. She walked around the corner and I gave her a big smile and said hi.”

  “And she was just as happy to see you.”

  “Until I grabbed her and ran her through the crowd on Central Park West to the next block. If he went to look for her, she was long gone.”

  It’s very satisfying when everything you know and theorize starts to link up, but this was all so sad, I couldn’t take pleasure in the satisfaction. “Did she tell you what she did?”

  “When I applied a little pressure.”

  “Did she tell you why, Ted?”

  “I gather they’d both applied for the job at H and J and my sister was called for an interview. The fake Natalie did a little research on her own, went to see what Jewell looked like, and she liked what she saw. She asked my sister to let her go in her place and my sister refused. They went away for a weekend before the interview, she didn’t say where, and I guess they had a big fight and my sister ended up dead.”

  “She didn’t tell you where she buried the body?”

  He shook his head. “I was desperate to know. She said if I let her go, she’d tell me after she was safe.”

  “She couldn’t have done that,” I said. “Your sister was buried on family property. The body would have led right to her killer.”

  “You found her?”

  “On Saturday. The woman posing as your sister was named Connie Moffat. She buried Natalie on her cousin’s property that weekend that they went upstate. There was a handbag with the remains and it had Natalie Miller’s driver’s license in it. And a picture.”

  “My God.”

  I pulled Connie’s key ring out of my bag.

  “That’s the key to her desk,” he said.

  “And this is the key Martin Jewell gave her for the door to the old office when they were having an affair. This one fits the apartment at Gramercy Park.” I showed it to him. “What surprised someone I showed it to was how she would have an original key to the apartment on an old key ring if she had to turn it in when she moved. But Connie was a subtenant. She must have given the super her duplicate key from her own key ring without thinking about it. The key she kept was your sister’s. There were no keys in the pocketbook.”

  “She roomed with my sister for a while at the end. They’d met at a class a couple of months before. She told me that on Thanksgiving Day when I was prying information out of her.”

  “It probably started very innocently.”

  “I hate that woman,” he said with a sob in his throat.

  “What did you do with her?” I asked gently.

  “Sorry. That’s my secret.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  He shook his head. “Thanks for coming. I led you a merry chase. I didn’t expect you to be nice to me.”

  It hadn’t all been kindness. I wanted information from him. I wanted to know the missing details, the motives, the means he had used to achieve his end. “Do you need a lawyer?”

  “They read me my rights last night. They’ll supply one.”

  “I can get you someone very good.”

  He put his head down and wept. I patted him on the back and called for someone to come and let me out.

  —

  I went home and made some phone calls. The first one was to Arnold.

  “Haven’t heard from you for a while. You get your man yet?”

  “Last night. I didn’t get him; the police did.”

  “With a little help from the suburbs.”

  “A little,” I admitted. “It’s a very sad case, Arnold.”

  “Murder is always sad.”

  “This is a brother avenging his sister’s death. I really feel for him.” />
  “You feel for everyone, Chrissie. It’s why we love you. I guess he needs a lawyer.”

  “Very badly. I hate to ask—”

  “It sounds like an interesting case. What more can a lawyer ask for?”

  Plenty, I thought, but I thanked him and gave him the information he needed. Then I called Sandy Gordon.

  29

  I had a long talk with Joseph on Wednesday. She called Tuesday evening and said she had a meeting at the Chancery the next morning and could we meet for lunch after that? There was nothing I wanted to do more. My conversation with Sandy had been difficult, to say the least, and I looked forward to sitting down and relaxing with an old friend.

  We met at the magnificent restaurant in the Palace Hotel across Madison Avenue from the Chancery at twelve-thirty and Joseph ordered Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks for herself and a glass of Chablis for me. We touched glasses before we sipped.

  “I think you have lots to tell me,” she said.

  “You were right to be concerned about the key. The woman who was kidnapped had murdered a woman named Natalie Miller, and when she buried the body, she removed the dead woman’s keys from her handbag. When the killer, Connie Moffat, moved out a few days or weeks later, she must have turned in her own duplicate key and hung on to the dead woman’s keys. There were no keys in the dead woman’s bag, but there was identification. She was the real Natalie Miller. Connie took on her identity after killing her. They fought about a job, maybe about the man one of them might work for. I’d guess Connie didn’t have the kind of work record that the real Natalie had. This was Connie’s way of setting her life straight. She started over as someone else.”

  “And did well in the job, I gather.”

  “Very well. She worked hard, was dedicated and devoted, managed to have an affair with the boss that unfortunately for her didn’t end in marriage. But they went away for a weekend upstate, and while he slept, she drove to the place where she’d buried the real Natalie.”

  “That was chancey.”

  “In fact, she got caught. Her cousin was sleeping upstairs and came down with a shotgun to see who was there. They spoke. It was the last time they saw each other.”

  “You haven’t told me who the killer was.”

  “That’s really the saddest part of the story, Joseph. It was the real Natalie’s brother.”

  “A case of revenge.”

  “Revenge, anger. He wanted to know where her body was buried and she wouldn’t tell him. Now he won’t say where she’s buried.”

  “Maybe that’s his true revenge.”

  “I gather Connie had a pretty miserable childhood. Her father broke her nose once when he hit her. She must have had it fixed when she came to New York. It’s terrible when you see where people are coming from and where they end up. You want to shake them and tell them to give life a chance; violence isn’t the way.”

  “But we’re realists.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have another story to tell me.”

  “I found my mother’s sister.”

  It was a long lunch, and since we were both taking trains from Grand Central, we walked over there together, neither of us in a particular hurry.

  I had some errands to run when I got home, and coming back, I spotted Mel out with her kids and they came over to visit. Mel had heard nothing from Sandy, so there was a lot to tell.

  By the time she left, I was afraid to call Olive for fear she might be in the middle of an afternoon nap. So I lay down and took one myself.

  On Thursday a woman called asking for me. When I said I was Christine Bennett Brooks, she put a man on.

  “Mrs. Brooks, this is Stanley Colvin, Olive Cleaver’s attorney.”

  “Is she all right?” I asked, feeling uncomfortable.

  “I’m sorry to tell you Ms. Cleaver passed away Monday night.”

  “Oh no. I saw her Monday. She seemed to be doing so well.”

  “I think she was very happy to have met you in the last days of her life.”

  “Would you like me to arrange a funeral?” I felt choked up, but knew the question had to be asked.

  “She took care of everything a long time ago, Mrs. Brooks. Her remains were cremated yesterday, and her ashes will be distributed according to her wishes.”

  “I see.”

  “She was a very independent person, right up until the end. But she made an addition to her will only a few days before she died. She left you two thousand five hundred dollars and said you would understand why she was giving you that amount.”

  My tears were falling by that point, but I managed to thank him for calling. My aunt had repaid her debt for all time.

  —

  Arnold took over Ted Miller’s case. Ted had no desire to stand trial, and Arnold was able to make an interesting deal with the DA. In return for Ted’s telling them where the remains of Connie Moffat could be found, the murder charge was reduced to manslaughter. Everyone concerned seemed pretty pleased to have it taken care of that way.

  He had killed her and left her body in the Pine Barrens way out on Long Island. He led the police to the spot and they found what was left of Connie Moffat. An autopsy determined she had been shot with a small-caliber gun that Ted no longer owned. Because of the deterioration of the body, it could not determine whether she had been pregnant. But it didn’t rule it out.

  A few days later Detective Evelyn Hogan called to brief me on some new findings. Connie Moffat had lived in New York for a number of years and held a number of jobs. About ten years earlier she had married, but there was no record of a divorce in New York State, so it was unclear whether her marriage to Sandy was even valid.

  Sandy and I met finally to talk. He took me to lunch in New York and apologized for a lot of things he didn’t have to apologize for. I gave him back the carton of stuff he had given me so many weeks ago, and the way he looked at it, I had the feeling it was headed for the junk pile.

  “I have only one question,” I said when the lunch was coming to an end. “Your wedding pictures—you had a Jewish wedding, didn’t you?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Did Natalie say she was Jewish?”

  “She did, in fact, after she knew I was. I think she must have done a little research before the wedding because she needed her Hebrew name for the papers.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And she came up with it when she was asked.”

  “She really loved you, Sandy.”

  “I was a fool.”

  “You’re a good-hearted person and you did nothing wrong.”

  “Thanks, Chris.”

  He settled our expense account and I refused to take anything for investigating. About a week later I heard that he had sent a very generous donation to the General Superior’s fund at St. Stephen’s Convent. He couldn’t have done better.

  —

  I took my inheritance and put it in the bank, where it will accumulate some interest while I think about what to do with it—or forget about it.

  Months later, the following November, Jack and I drove into New York early on Thanksgiving Day, parked up near Columbia University, and took a bus down Broadway to Sixty-fourth Street. Then we walked over to Central Park West, passing the Statue of Liberty on the left and Olive’s building on the right. On the north corner we stood in the cold and watched the parade. It was everything I remembered and then some, the bands, the horses, the floats, and of course, the huge balloons that floated two stories above us. Jack bought me a balloon and tied it on my wrist, and I laughed a little and cried a little.

  I will take my children someday and we will stand on that corner, and while they enjoy the moment, I will remember a time long ago, the happiness of being with my father, and a woman who wanted to make her peace.

  For Frank Randall

  who’s seen more parades than I have

  The author wishes to thank Ana M. Soler, James L. V. Wegman, Alan E. Baker, C.P.A., Matthew G. Saltarelli, M.D., W
alter Johnson, and Karen Shalom of the School of Art, Old Church Cultural Center, Demarest, New Jersey for their patience, cooperation, and invaluable information.

  By Lee Harris

  Published by Fawcett Books:

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