The Rotary Club Murder Mystery

by Graham Landrum

  “Well,” she said as she opened her eyes quite wide, “it is perfectly obvious.” She pointed out that it was atypical of district governors to commit suicide. I had to admit that past events supported her theory.

  Then she brought up the matter of the book Break In by Dick Francis. I have read the book, and I had to admit that I would never have committed suicide without having finished it—that is, assuming that I had gotten well into it.

  “Now that ‘suicide’ note,” she said, “there’s nothing to that at all. People who commit suicide either leave no note or else they try to justify themselves or leave instructions. And that note did none of that. Besides, why would the man bring his memo pad to Borderville to write his farewell to the world?”

  It was beyond question a paltry note. If I ever commit suicide, I hope I shall be able to contrive a more impressive explanation. Mrs. B. had gained her point.

  “And think,” she continued, “what inconvenience it would cause for him to commit suicide here in Borderville. He would have that long drive from home for nothing, and then the body would have to be taken back to North Carolina by the undertaker. And what about his car? Somebody would have to drive his car back down there. Then think of the inconvenience and embarrassment to the Borderville Rotary Club. Nobody with the responsibility of a district governor would put a club through that. There they would be with no speaker, and such a bust-up of everything!”

  With this, too, I agreed.

  “I believe Fred told me there was a silencer on the gun,” she said. “Well, that’s a how-do-you-do! So polite about not disturbing the other guests at the motel when he was putting everybody else to so much trouble. If he wanted to be private about it, why didn’t he go off into the woods to blow his brains out?”

  It had never occurred to me to blow my brains out, but I could see much in what she said.

  “And did you ever see the man?”

  I admitted I had not, and Harriet went on. “Well, neither have I, but I saw that picture they ran in the Banner-Democrat. And I know that picture was taken fifteen or twenty years ago. But if he still had any of that wavy hair, he wouldn’t commit suicide in a way that would be detrimental to his good looks.”

  Harriet drew herself up as much as to say, Now you see which is the vain sex.

  Then she pointed out that our district governor, before he retired for the night, had made preparations for the next day. “That,” she said, “proves that he did not come here to commit suicide.”

  Again I granted her point.

  After we had talked about it for some minutes, I said, “Yes, Mrs. Bushrow, all that you have gone over is true, and the whole thing is altogether unexplained. But even though we cannot reconcile the facts, there is still one element that can only be explained by the assumption that Charles Hollonbrook took his own life: The chain was on the door.”

  Mrs. B. gave me what was obviously meant to be her best smile. “I knew you would say that,” she admitted. “And I don’t know how to explain it. But he was killed in that room with the chain on the door, and so there must be some explanation.” The smile lingered, daring me to find fault with her reasoning.

  My wife is a northern girl, educated at Vassar. She does not stoop to womanly wiles; and in a way I am glad that she does not, for I would be forever at a disadvantage if she did. Still, it is a delight when the fair sex, even at advanced age, sees fit to use the full artillery.

  Mrs. Bushrow did not wait for me to think up a rejoinder. Instead, she pressed her advantage: “We shall know how it was done when we know who did it. I am sure of that.”

  I believe that was putting the process hind-end-to. Nevertheless, there was a kind of logic there, which was to be proved by later events.

  “And you have some idea who did it?” I said.

  “Oh, it was someone who had cause,” she replied. She seemed rather pleased with her answer, which, of course, was no more than a truism.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Somebody wanted to kill him,” Mrs. Bushrow announced, as though I could never have thought of such a thing.

  When I didn’t say anything, she went on. “I note once in a while that somebody is killed by a poor, deranged person who didn’t even know the victim. But I don’t imagine that happens very often. No, it is going to be somebody that knew Mr. Hollonbrook well—someone very close to him. People murder someone because they can’t go on living with that person so close to them, perhaps threatening them or their peace of mind every day in the same house or office—or perhaps interfering with something important to that person—maybe fooling around with his wife or something like that. And that means that the man that kills and the man that gets killed are close in some way and the killer has to murder to get out of whatever it is that is compelling him.”

  “Then you are thinking of some one person specifically,” I said.

  “Why, of course,” she said. “There is one person who is bound to inherit and would have access to the gun. I would hate to think that the poor man’s wife did it. But then, that is the first thing that we must think. Mr. Delaporte, there are many reasons why a wife might wish to kill her husband. Perhaps he is cruel to her; perhaps he runs with other women; perhaps she is silly enough to think she loves another man. Then there are all sorts of little frictions; and if a woman doesn’t have enough to occupy her mind, she can magnify these little frets until she is practically beside herself. Not that any of that is likely to be the case with Mrs. Hollonbrook, but we have to consider those things.

  “Of course she would know where her husband would be staying and all that. Oh, I think the man’s wife would be the first person we could think of.

  “And then she is the only suspect that we know about right off. She is the logical point at which to start. And we know where she says she was when her husband was killed.”

  “And that was Wilboro Beach,” I said, and grinned.

  “You guessed it.” Harriet returned my grin with a wink. “But we don’t know that for a fact. The sheriff had such a hard time finding her. Now I just wish I knew exactly where she was staying in Wilboro Beach all that time.”

  “Very well,” I said, “I can get the details from the sheriff’s office and let you know. I’ll be very glad to do it.”

  That was the wrong thing to say, because she came back immediately with “And then when you are in Wilboro, you will just check up on the alibi, won’t you?”

  It was not a request; it was a command. She had been right: A telephone conversation would not have served her purpose.

  So there I was with Mrs. Bushrow’s commission to verify the whereabouts of Mrs. Charles Hollonbrook on the night of May 26/27.

  In fact, Helen and I had not planned to go down to Wilboro at all soon, but Mrs. B. had excited and directed my curiosity into a certain channel. As soon as Helen came home, I cleared my schedule, which fortunately I was able to do, and we went off to Wilboro.

  Arriving at the beach, we enjoyed a shore dinner and went to our room that first night, glad that we were too old to think that we must dance or go to a movie or any of the other things that are obligatory for the young.

  The next day bright and early, I looked at the address of Mrs. Hutton’s Resort Accommodations, which had been given to me by the Ambrose County Sheriff’s Office, and inquired at our motel how I might get there.

  “Oh, yes,” the room clerk said, “Mrs. Hutton was well known. She has been dead now for ten or fifteen years, but the place is run by her niece, a Mrs. Saunders.” He said she had remodeled the place and that it was now very tony, very pricey, but he lamented that she did not pay her help “worth a damn.”

  He gave me directions, and I had no trouble finding the place.

  Mrs. Hutton’s was a two-story frame building with Victorian galleries across the entire front. Green rocking chairs adorned both the upper and the lower level. Although it was only 9:30 when I approached this structure, almost half of these rockers were already occupied.

/>   I went in through the big double doors—open, of course, to catch the breeze coming off the ocean. The interior was very posh, with antique furniture and real oil paintings. At the desk, I asked for Mrs. Saunders and was told to wait.

  Within a few minutes, Mrs. Saunders, a woman in perhaps her early sixties, appeared. She was smartly dressed, carefully coiffured, and obviously capable.

  “Can I be of service, Mr … .” She consulted the card I had given to the desk attendant. “Mr. Delaporte?”

  I explained my mission.

  There was a slight pause. “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Saunders said rather brusquely, “I am not likely to forget. What was it that you wanted to know?”

  “Well,” I said, “I would like to know exactly when she came and when she left.”

  “She came on May 25 and left about four-thirty on May 29.”

  “And was she here every day during that period?”

  “As a matter of fact, she was not. When we got inquiries from the police and the undertaker and even the Rotary Club, I believe, we discovered that Mrs. Hollonbrook spent the night of the twenty-fifth with us; but on the twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, and twenty-eighth, although she retained her room, the maid says the lady did not sleep here.”

  I don’t know what answer to my question I had expected, but I certainly had not expected the answer that I received.

  “You have no idea where she was during that time?”

  “None whatever.”

  I had one other question. “When you finally contacted Mrs. Hollonbrook, what was her reaction?”

  “Surprised—certainly. I think surprised is the best word.”

  “May I take it, then, that her reaction was less than what you would have expected of a wife who had just been informed of her husband’s suicide?”

  “Something of the sort.”

  “And did you tell the Ambrose County sheriff that?”

  “The question did not come up.”

  Mrs. Saunders’s information had been given from personal knowledge and with absolute assurance. There seemed, therefore, to be nothing further to ask. I thanked Mrs. Saunders and returned to my motel.

  I confess that up to this point I had cooperated with Harriet Bushrow because she is a friend of my wife and I admire her spirit and intelligence and, quite frankly, because I was curious. But now it occurred to me that there was a very firm basis for suspicion in this case. District governors of Rotary frequently bring their wives with them, and the local Rotary Anns are required to entertain the distaff side of our governance.

  It would not be a breach of decorum if the governor’s wife did not accompany him. A district governor’s wife may work or have home obligations, or she may merely be disinclined to go with the old boy. But even in this day of women’s lib, one would scarcely expect a wife to hightail it to a beach resort the minute her husband leaves the house, rent a room at a high-priced place, and then go off mysteriously for three nights while the expense of the room continued. On the credit company’s bill, it would look as though she had stayed in thoroughly proper accommodations during the whole period. How better and more safely might a woman play tag with her marriage?

  I did not see how Hollonbrook’s death in a locked room could be anything but suicide, but Harriet had assured me that if she found the murderer, she would be able to find how it was done. She had been brilliantly successful once before. Perhaps she could do the same in the Rotary Club Mystery, although I sincerely hoped that our little affair would never achieve such notoriety as to be the Famous Rotary Club Mystery.

  AT THE READY

  >> Maud Tinker Bradfield <<

  Harriet Gardner and I were chums and roommates at Catawba Hall—oh, so many years ago! Never did I have such a friend, and never did we have such times as then—when women were denied all forms of equality and freedom. But the beauty of it was that we were young and having so much fun that we didn’t think much about other things.

  In those days at a girls’ school, there were no men around except on designated occasions. And we thought those occasions were unduly rare. We weren’t told about it, but one of the reasons why our parents sent us to schools for girls only, was that they wanted us to marry and they hoped that the instruction we received at such schools would help us do it. So we were taught things that would make us the right kind of companions for men of the sort that our parents hoped we would find and marry.

  What fun it was when the men did come to us! The Nuthaw Military Institute was only seventeen miles away from us, and a train from Nuthaw arrived in Catawba in the evenings at 7:09 and a train from Catawba arrived in Nuthaw at 10:15. That did not leave much time for us to see our beaux on “permitted” evenings, but oh, what good use we did make of those three hours!

  Jay was a cadet at Nuthaw, as was Lamar Bushrow, and those boys managed to see us, permitted or not, at least once every week. I won’t talk about Jay except to say that he was mine and quite satisfactory; but since Harriet is the subject of my tale, I will say something about Lamar.

  He was just about the handsomest thing anyone ever saw. He stood six feet tall and was slim in the hips and broad in the shoulders. He had beautiful blond wavy hair and a tiny mustache. All the girls swooned over him. But he had eyes only for Harriet.

  Now don’t get the notion that Jay and Lamar were our only beaux. That would be entirely wrong. Harriet was quite a popular girl. There were always three or four cadets who called on her at the same time. I had several beaux, too, but never as many as Harriet had.

  Actually, I feel sorry for girls now, who usually seem to have just one beau. When we were besieged with two or three at a time, we had no opportunity to get serious (until the right time came along) or to get into trouble. But did we mind? Not at all. To sit on a veranda on a May evening with three or four young men trying their best to please while each attempted to outdo the others is very pleasant to a young woman.

  So it all came back to me when I got Harriet’s tetter—dear Harriet, who was always so much fun! She was taller than I and looked like a princess, and there was no mischief she and I did not get into. How well she played the part of Tony Lumpkin in the class play! I was Miss Neville, but Harriet got all the applause. And I admit that she deserved all of it.

  But back to Harriet’s letter.

  It was so good to hear from Harriet; we had always corresponded at the necessary times—such as birthdays, special occasions, and, of course, whenever one of the old girls of dear old Catawba passed on. But I was really surprised when Harriet proposed a visit, and even more surprised and thrilled when she explained her reason for coming.

  Harriet had written to me about the DAR business, and I had read all about it in the papers and in Time magazine, and then, too, she had sent me the book when it came out. But now she was on another detective case and she was asking me to help her!

  Don’t think that I have been exactly comatose all my life. Jay and I had three children, a son who lives in California, another in Kentucky, and a daughter who lives here in Stedbury. We all had a very happy life. Jay did very well in insurance, and we got to do a lot of things that were interesting. We went to Europe three times. And we had enough money that I could collect old silver in a modest way. And then, too, I had my painting, and it was lots of fun when one of my pictures took a ribbon in a competition. But I am too shaky now to paint anything but daubs. Since Jay has been gone, it didn’t make sense to hang on to all of that silver, and I sold it. I got rid of our big house, and now I have this little place that is just right for me.

  So my life has been less exciting during the last few years. I had just decided that the only career left me was that of “old lady.”

  Now Harriet was opening a vista of intrigue and excitement, and I could hardly wait.

  The appointed day and the estimated hour came, and, sure enough, pretty soon I heard a car draw up in front of the house. Someone got out, and I heard “Yoo-hoo!”

  I tell you it took years off my age. I r
an to the door, and there was Harriet coming up the walk—no longer so tall and by no means so slim—but Harriet nevertheless, still with the spring in her personality, if no longer in her step.

  Lord, how we hugged and kissed! It knocked her hat catawampus.

  I showed her my guest room. We brought her things in, and I gave her a few minutes to use the powder room. Then we sat down together in the living room.

  “It was such a thrill to get your letter!” I said. “And I have been thinking every day about what you wrote in it.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Harriet said, dabbing at her forehead with a little lace handkerchief—the air conditioning in her car had gone bad on her. “I wouldn’t have taken on this little matter if I hadn’t thought, Well now, Stedbury, North Carolina! Won’t I have fun down there with Maud, and won’t we work on this together. You have been sniffing around, haven’t you? And you can tell me all about this Hollonbrook?”

  Of course I knew something about Charles Hollonbrook and his marriages and shenanigans of various kinds. Stedbury used to be so small, hardly anybody knew where it was, and so we mostly knew what everybody in town was doing. But then the Second World War came along, and we really grew because we had our own war plant. When the war was over, our prosperity kept up for quite a while. We are much larger today than we used to be. So, while I knew something about the Hollonbrooks, it is harder to keep up with what goes on now, and I am out of so many things in which I used to be quite active.

  I knew, of course, that “Holly” Hollonbrook—that’s what they call him—came here right from Vietnam. We all thought he and his wife were such a sweet couple. And then there was the Hollonbrook divorce and another marriage—to his secretary, a very pretty young woman, whom I have seen many times at the club. And, of course, Holly came into Rotary, and Jay knew him in that way.

  I know more about Linda, the first wife, than I do about Alice, because Linda and I use the same beauty shop. Nothing ever goes right for poor Linda. Whether or not she is justified, I cannot say, but she constantly complained that Holly did not give her enough money.