The Rotary Club Murder Mystery

by Graham Landrum

  Well, what am I doing preaching? There is as much wrong with me as there is with any of us. Holly’s death has brought me to think about a good many things I had figured would be put off for a long, long time.

  As soon as I heard that the Harriet Bushrow was in town, it flashed through my mind that she was here because of Holly’s death. I knew all about Harriet because her book, The Famous DAR Murder Mystery, was reviewed at my study club. We were studying the achievements of Appalachian women. Brenda Miller had chosen the book because she thought it said something about the region—and a lot about feminine initiative.

  So Harriet Bushrow didn’t think Chuck had committed suicide. And neither did I. But I had better get on with what happened during our visit.

  When the door chimes sounded, I was not prepared for the commanding figure I was to find at my door. She looked like—well, she looked like the Queen Mother. Not that Harriet seems haughty—nobody could be more down-to-earth. It is something in the way she holds her head—and those clear gray eyes look at you with absolute assurance, as though she sees you through and through and is considering what she will do with you.

  She had on the hat with the red poppies—and, of course, the famous cut-crystal necklace. She was wearing what would have been a little black dress if it had been four sizes smaller, and a summery white jacket with sleeves that stopped just below the elbow. And she wore white gloves! There was a red purse—and red shoes!

  “Mrs. Bushrow!” I exclaimed. She was all that I had imagined, and a good deal more.

  “Yes, my dear,” she said, “I am Hattie Bushrow.”

  Coming into the living room, she took in everything in a brief but very efficient survey. It suddenly struck me that I was being judged.

  Recalling that Harriet was an expert on antique furniture, I said, “I’m afraid it is all new.”

  “All furniture starts out that way,” she said. Then she looked around again and added, “It is very pretty.”

  I felt this was faint praise but perhaps kindly meant. We sat down and she turned her attention to me. I had on light blue slacks and a matching silk blouse with a discreet monogram. I was wearing my gray mules. I knew I was in perfect taste—better taste than Harriet Bushrow, thank you. But somehow I knew she was calculating all of this. I was very nervous and uncertain of myself.

  Then suddenly, she smiled, and I was completely at ease.

  “Now, darlin’,” she said—she has this wonderful Old South accent—“I believe you have something to tell me.”

  Yes, I had something to tell her, and I had rehearsed it several times, but I had not made up my mind where to begin. I said as much.

  She was quite sympathetic, said she understood how hard it must be for me so recently after my husband’s suicide.

  “His murder,” I corrected her.

  She pretended to be surprised, her eyes growing large, her mouth gathered into an 0: After a moment’s pause, she said, “But the room was locked, and the police assure us that he took his own life, so why do you say it was murder?”

  “Because you do,” I accused. “You wouldn’t be here if you did not. You say he did not commit suicide. And I say he did not commit suicide.”

  “I know why I say it. Why do you say it?”

  Well, there it was. Why did I not think Holly had killed himself? Certainly he had never seemed inclined in that way. And when I last saw him, he appeared very confident, very self-possessed.

  “I know it looks like suicide,” I admitted. “And I can’t offer any other explanation. But at the same time, I simply can’t see Charles Hollonbrook killing himself. It wasn’t his nature. That’s all I can say.” I paused, expecting her to make some rejoinder, but it became obvious immediately that she was waiting for me to go on. “Perhaps,” I added, “it’s just that I don’t want it to be that way. And because—well because I very much need it to be murder.”

  “In that case,” she said, “I’ll lay my cards on the table and get one question out in the open and taken care of. What were you doing during that time when everybody thought you were down at Wilboro Beach—staying at Mrs. Hutton’s—wasn’t it? But you weren’t really, were you? You weren’t there on May 26th or 27th, were you?”

  She looked at me—very kindly but insistently, waiting for me to explain about Wilboro Beach and May 26 to 27. “So you suspect me,” I said. It was only natural that she should.

  “No,” she said, “I do not—not now, at any rate. If you had killed your husband, you would have been careful to be where you could receive word when his body was found. He was killed sometime after he went to bed—maybe a little after midnight. The body wasn’t found until noon the next day. You could have killed him and gotten back to Mrs. Hutton’s by that time—easity. But they didn’t find you until the twenty-ninth. And the maid at Mrs. Hutton’s says you didn’t use your bed for three nights running.

  “Of course, that’s your private business,” she continued, “but it will all come out when the sheriff discovers—when I tell him—that it was murder. You see, I have to find an explanation. You were with a man, I suppose.”

  Holly’s death was a very real shock to me. The readers will probably think me a hypocrite for saying so. It was not that I loved him, and yet perhaps I did just a little. Loss was not the shock, though I’ll explain the loss presently. The shock came when I began to view myself in a different light. I told myself I wasn’t ashamed. But what I saw in myself wasn’t pretty. It was more that I was surprised. I was surprised at how little feeling I had. Cynical was the word that came to me, and I could not escape it.

  How must I appear to a woman from another age—a woman such as Harriet Bushrow? The sexual revolution—open marriage—women’s iib—what would she know about such things? She would judge me, no doubt. She might well condemn me as a “scarlet woman.” That didn’t bother me. But I feared that she would find me merely cynical, empty, without value.

  Nevertheless, I needed Harriet Bushrow—really needed her. I believed that when she heard my story, she would become my ally.

  So I began at the beginning.

  I grew up in a small town in eastern North Carolina—not far from the Virginia border. It was an uptight little place—Baptist churches, Dairy Queen, all those things—not so different from Stedbury. They tell me it has changed back there. There are drugs and teenage pregnancy and all the rest. But it wasn’t that way when I was a girl.

  After high school, I went to Raleigh to a business college. I learned a lot in Raleigh. I was all right at the business college—top of the class, in fact. But there were other things. I found that men looked at me and that I liked it. I was very confident.

  Then there was Holly with the position here in Stedbury, and I became his secretary. We didn’t become lovers for over a year.

  I was not the cause of the divorce. That had been coming on for several years. Linda was the girl Holly had married as a first wife.

  Yes, I am cynical. I admit it. She was a first wife and that was all. Holly was on the way up, and she could not cope with that. She whined a lot and complained, and I am sure that she knew she was merely tolerated and actually rejected.

  She probably did not know about me and Holly, though she should have suspected. But Holly and I were very circumspect in the office. And after all, he didn’t marry me until a year after the divorce.

  Meanwhile, we were together as often as we could get away without arousing suspicion. I know all the motels at a radius of thirty miles from Stedbury.

  When we were married, I knew what Holly expected of me. Sex—yes, Holly had an appetite that way. Yet there was as much ego in it as hormones. He was a dominant male animal out for conquest in an age of sexual equality. He needed it. It drove him.

  Oh, I found out about that very soon. And I admit that I was hurt. I had yet to develop my carapace. I cried buckets over his first infidelity. But he was not going to let it lead to divorce. He swore he loved me. He promised that if I stayed with him, together
we would have everything we wanted. He promised me jewetry—that was how I got my tennis bracetet—the first one in town. Still I was not satisfied.

  Then he took out the policy on his life—half a million dollars. He asked me if that didn’t show that he meant what he said.

  I was still very naïve, and half a million sounded very big to me. So I began to weaken. Holly said we should have an “open marriage.” Everything I read suggested that other women were doing it. So why shouldn’t I? I decided to go along. Holly had a new fling about once a year. And since he always discarded the woman and was careful not to get her or me pregnant, I put my trust in that life-insurance policy.

  Meanwhile, I was not a pushover. I have had only two affairs, and I was careful not to seem interested in men.

  At this point, Mrs. Bushrow interrupted.

  “How different it all is!” she said. “We always flirted. Our husbands expected it. Not serious flirting—just polite banter. If men found us attractive, in a nice way, of course, it showed the world our husbands had won a prize when they married us. We flirted, but we never had affairs.”

  I realized that this woman from another age was not surprised at what I had told her. “You are not shocked! You do not judge me, do you?”

  “No, I’m not shocked. But I do judge you,” she replied. “I judge all you modern girls. You have sold your birthright for a mess of pottage. In my day, we managed our husbands. They worked for us. And we worked for them, too. We kept the home and had their children. And we helped them in their careers. But you see, we fascinated them. We kept them charmed. And we were true to them. It would have been heartless if we hadn’t been.

  “Yes, I judge you. But then you didn’t have the training we had, and that’s not your fault.”

  “I am not proud of myself,” I said, “but it’s not because I was unfaithful to Holly. For I was faithful to him. I was faithful to him as long as he was faithful to me.” And then I got on with my story.

  Holly’s latest interest was Kim Mayburn. She is a divorcee who came back here a little over a year ago. Her father was the state senator from this district for many years. I think it gave Holly a kick to think he was bedding a senator’s daughter.

  So, about that time Clifford Avery came atong—from Baltimore—Ivy League—very suave and good-looking—self-assured—all the things Holly would have liked to be if he could have. And Cliff liked what he saw in me. I met him in Louisville at the Derby. We amused each other and finally fell into his bed.

  “If you want to know where I was on the night of May 26,” I said, “I was on a yacht with Cliff; and if his word is not enough, then I have no alibi.” I paused, and Mrs. Bushrow seemed to be considering this.

  I resumed my explanation.

  After Holly’s funeral, Dan Blake, my lawyer, and I opened Holly’s bank box. It was jammed with all the stuff that might be expected—birth certificate, his medals, papers of all sorts, fire insurance, and so on. We found the policy made out to me as beneficiary; it had been in effect since 1981. But we had not expected another policy for $500,000 made out to the benefit of Kimberlin Mayburn. For a minute or two, I was stunned. It was humiliating and unfair after all I had put up with. And then it just hurt. I couldn’t keep the tears back, and I’m afraid I was hysterical.

  Poor Dan! There we were in the bank vault together. It must have been embarrassing for him. He is such a nice little man with a nice little wife and four children! And then after I calmed down, he pointed out that we had not found the will.

  It was just as if a great dark cloud was hovering over me. I didn’t know just what it meant, but I felt that a will absolutely had to be found. Yet I knew Chuck well enough that I was confident the will, if there was one, would have been in that box.

  Dan and I went immediately to Holly’s office, and with Paula Stout, Holly’s secretary, we went through every file, every drawer, absolutely everything in the office. Then we came out to the house and went through everything here.

  “Who was the lawyer that drew up the will?” Dan asked.

  “Wasn’t it you?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I was positive that Holly had never gone to any lawyer other than Dan.

  “Then there is no will, is there?”

  “It begins to look that way,” he said.

  “But what happens if there is no will?”

  “The statutes of North Carolina take effect. There will be distribution among the heirs at law.”

  “And they are?”

  “Yourself and Holly’s children.”

  That was when the real panic set in. Holly had always been reckless. When he got money, he spent it——clothes, cars, our house. And he was reckless with credit, too. When he began developing Hollondale Estates, he plunged pretty deeply. I did not know how far. But in the bank box, we had found note after note—all owed to the Estonia Savings and Loan. The obligations were all in the name of Hollonbrook Realty, Inc., or Hollondale Estates, Inc. But if all those notes were foreclosed, Holly’s personal estate would amount to his checking account and the residence, and there is still a lien on that.

  My Porsche is in my name, and I have some jewelry and a few furs. Whatever may be left over after Holly’s debts are settled would be divided four ways. And I would have practically nothing from that.

  And, the life insurance won’t pay off in case of suicide!

  That was my story, and that was why I was staking everything on Mrs. Bushrow’s ability to prove that Chuck died, not by his own hand but at the hands of a murderer.

  “Darling,” Mrs. Bushrow said after she had considered this a little while, “with your husband out of the picture, are you going to marry this Mr. Avery, I think you said his name was?”

  I took a deep breath. “There is no marriage for me in this,” I said.

  “Why not? You speak of this gentleman’s cultivation and good looks. And a man with a yacht—and I must say, sweetheart, you seem to have thought him ideal. Is there something I am missing?”

  “You are missing something,” I admitted. “He has a wife, and the money is hers. Cliff is strongly attracted to me, but he could never live without money—lots of money.”

  “Well, dear,” my visitor said regretfully, “if an old woman can say so, you seem to have driven your ducks to a mighty poor market.”

  “To put it mildly,” I added.

  “Don’t worry about that now,” she said. “It was murder, all right; we are going to prove it.”

  There was one more thing that I had for Mrs. Bushrow, and I placed an envelope in her hand.

  From this point on, Mrs. Bushrow became the dominant party in our interview. Consequently, it seems better to turn the narrative over to her.

  NEW LIGHT ON THE MYSTERY

  >> Harriet Bushrow <<

  That was quite a story Alice told me—all that about “open marriage” and the missing will and the insurance policy. She just told it all, and I have to hand it to her—she was very frank. Then, after she got through with her other revelations, she put a brown envelope into my hand.

  “This was in the bank box,” she said.

  Out of the envelope, I drew a yellowed newspaper clipping. It was from the Roanoke, Virginia, paper, dated April 10, 1971. There was a picture of a woman—about like most pictures in the papers. The story said: KITTY HERBERT RELEASED FROM PEN. “Kitty Cornelia Herbert, who was convicted of the stabbing death of her husband, the late J. H. Herbert, in 1959, has been released from Beckwith Prison for Women after having served nine years of a twenty-year sentence. The public will remember that Herbert was found guilty on all charges but pleaded extenuating circumstances, testifying that James Howard Herbert, the murdered man, had habitually forced her to engage in demeaning and dangerous sex acts. Because of the husband’s position as justice of the peace in Hainsford County, the case received wide notice.” In the margin was penciled “Caroline Rawlings.”

  I couldn’t see what this had to do with anything, and my bra
in was just full of so many other things that I just had to know about. So I merely put the clipping back into the envelope and laid it on the little lamp table beside me while my mind went on to other things.

  No will! That meant that good old Holly’s children were involved. Whether or not there was a will, surely they would expect something to come to them. Would they have known that their father was in debt and that there wasn’t much estate for them to inherit? From the looks of things—Hollondale Estates, you see, and being on the board of the country club, and district governor—I didn’t have any trouble imagining how someone on the outside would get the idea that Charles Hollonbrook had left an estate like the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  So I asked.

  “Tell me about that first wife and the children.”

  Alice made an ugly face that put me into the picture but didn’t give me any of the details.

  “Holly has taken a lot of criticism from them—and it is all unfair.”

  “I suppose he paid support?”

  “Yes, regularly without fail.”

  “I understand the mother has exclusive custody.”

  “No, it wasn’t that way,” Alice said. “Right after the divorce, Holly had no way to take care of the children. So he left them with Linda. And she was agreeable. Then when we got married, he decided to exercise his rights and tried having Jimmy, the oldest—the other two are girts—spend the summer with us. I did everything I knew to be, if not a second mother, at least a friend. Jimmy was belligerent and stubborn, and Holly was afraid to punish him because the boy was so high-strung.

  “The second summer, he came and stayed a week. Linda had stuffed his head with so many lies about Holly and me that we couldn’t do a thing with the boy. When he hit his father on the nose with a junior baseball bat, Holly sent him back to his mother.

  “She has made a real mess of him. The school notified Holly that Jimmy was on pot, and Holly raised a stink with Linda about that. She denied it. And that’s pretty much where we left it. Then last year, Jimmy wanted to go to State, and Holly gave him the money. But Jimmy failed all his courses the first semester. So he came home and wanted money to go to California to study something about television. Holly said NO in big capitals, and they actually had a fight. Now Linda has told everyone that Holly refused to help Jimmy.”