The Fortieth Birthday Body

by Valerie Wolzien

  “What’s there to pool?” Harvey Bower pushed his hair back again. “I thought we talked about all this on the phone last night. We three had affairs with Dawn Elliot over the years. We also know that Jed Henshaw did. She was murdered and turned up in his garage. Not in one of our garages but in his. The question is do we go to the police and tell them that Jed slept with her?”

  “Or did he already tell them himself?” said Guy Frye. “Look, I’ve got the day to kill, so I don’t care, but I don’t understand why we’re here.” He carefully picked the largest piece of crumb cake from the platter in the middle of the table. “Those cops from Hartford seem to know what they’re doing. They’ll check out Jed’s relationship with Dawn and they’ll find out that he slept with her …”

  “And what if they don’t?” interrupted Harvey, sloshing the coffee from his cup as he leaned closer to the table. “Suppose they don’t find out that Jed slept with her? Suppose he didn’t tell them about it the way we did? Suppose they figure that he had nothing to do with Dawn Elliot and someone slipped her body into his garage to incriminate him and get themselves off? Then whom will the police come to? One of us, damn it! And what if a policeman shows up during a spot inspection from the state? How would that look? It might not make any difference to you, but this investigation could wreck my life. I want this whole thing over as soon as possible and if Jed killed Dawn so that Susan wouldn’t know he slept with her, then he should be arrested for it!”

  “First things first,” came the calm voice of Dan Hallard. “We may be jumping to conclusions. Sex may have nothing to do with the motive for Dawn’s murder. For all any of us know, they’re looking into her relationship with her husband …”

  “And sex had nothing to do with that relationship,” Guy added, snickering and wiping powdered sugar from the front of his shirt.

  “Possibly not, but that has nothing to do with the fact that the three of us had uncomfortably close relationships with a murdered woman, and we have to decide if we are going to tell the police that there is a fourth. Now. If we wait, that will look suspicious too.” Dan Hallard reached toward his coffee as his beeper sounded. “Dawn … I mean, damn. I’ll get it at the phone over there.”

  “How about this … ?” began Harvey, waving at the phone sitting on the table.

  “No. More confidential over there. No offense, but you have to be careful in a town this size. Can’t have rumors starting about who’s having trouble with their ovaries and who isn’t.” He got up and left the table.

  Guy rearranged his position slightly so that his back was to the doctor before he spoke. “ ‘Dawn … I mean damn’?” he quoted, with a broad smile on his face. “Do you think that means something?”

  “Maybe that we all have Dawn Elliot’s death on our minds,” was Harvey’s rejoinder. “I doubt that he murdered her, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “Someone did.”

  “I won’t argue that.”

  “So what about Colin Small?” Guy asked. “Brigit says that he slept with Dawn too. Evidently Maureen thinks that he’s going to use it as an excuse to leave her and the girls or something. How come he isn’t here?”

  “I called him last night,” Dan Hallard replied, returning to the table. “He had some important work to do today. But the police know about Dawn and him, and he’ll go along with anything we decide about telling them about Jed. The Henshaw/Elliot affair was a surprise to him, though. I don’t know what that means, but I vote that we call Sardini and tell him that Jed Henshaw was Dawn’s lover, too. After all, we’ve confessed, so we’re suspects. Why should Jed get off the hook?”

  “I doubt if he is. After all, her body was found in his car,” Harvey reminded him. “But, as it happens, I agree with you. I think we should tell what we know because otherwise we’re keeping information from the police, and that in itself could get us into trouble.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” Guy said impatiently.

  “Nothing,” came the reply as a dull thumping noise began from under their feet.

  Harvey looked up first. “What is that banging noise? It doesn’t sound like it’s coming from the squash courts—too rhythmic. And this is coming from the basement, isn’t it?”

  The men listened to the muffled pounding. “Aerobics classes,” Dan Hallard decided after a few moments. “The bartender was telling me about them. They just began yesterday and he says they’re driving him crazy.”

  “That’s right. Gloria said something about joining. I think there’s even a sitting service provided for the younger kids and she thought it might be good for Missy to get out some. I wonder if they’re down there right now,” Harvey said.

  “How are they doing?” Dan asked. “Missy looks like a healthy, happy child. You were lucky to get her. There aren’t a lot of children available for adoption these days.”

  “Don’t we know it. Listen, why don’t we hurry up here and maybe I can grab a few minutes with my new enlarged family before getting back to work,” Harvey said, suddenly serious.

  “Good idea,” agreed Guy. “We think one of us should tell the police what’s what about Jed and Dawn. Do you agree?”

  “Fine. Who’s going to be the one to do it?” Dan Hallard answered. “I can’t see any reason for all three of us going together, do you?”

  “I’ll do it,” volunteered Guy Frye, standing up. “In fact, I’ll go do it right now.”

  “Fine,” agreed the doctor. “You agree, Harvey?”

  “Sure. Are you going to mention this meeting to them? Not that I think you should keep it a secret,” he added quickly.

  “I’ll say that we all know about the affair and think that they should too, okay?”

  “Excellent. They will contact us if they think it necessary,” Dan Hallard said, “and I think that’s just fine.” He paused and signed the check that had discreetly been left on the edge of the table.

  “Then I’ll be off. See you both around.” And Guy Frye pulled on the leather bomber’s jacket that had been hanging on the back of his chair, nodded his good-byes, and started for the door.

  “That bastard is going to enjoy it,” Harvey Bower said, feeling slightly sick.

  “Probably,” was Dan Hallard’s assessment, wondering if Colin Small really was so busy he had to miss this meeting. He returned to the present. “Why don’t we see if your new daughter is around here somewhere?”

  But it turned out that Gloria and Missy weren’t attending the aerobics class this morning and only Kathleen, taking a break in her leg lifts, was there to see Dan Hallard and Harvey together on this weekday morning.

  VI

  “Well, I don’t understand why you are giving information to Kathleen Gordon. It seems to me that we should keep what we know to ourselves,” Mitchell was saying, a self-righteous tone to his voice.

  “But it is my choice. I’m in charge of this case,” Sardini replied, not looking up from the papers in front of him. He was more than a little tired of having every decision he made second-guessed by this man. “Yes? What is it?” he angrily asked the woman who had come knocking at his door.

  “Two gentlemen to see you, sir,” she reported. “That is, there are two gentlemen here to see you, but they didn’t come together and they don’t want to see you together. One’s name is …” she paused to check the slip of paper she carried, “one’s name is Jesse Clark and the other is Guy Frye. Do you want to see either of them?”

  “I want to see them both. Especially Jesse Clark, but I need to spend more time with him. Tell you what. Ask Mr. Frye to come in first but make sure Jesse Clark waits. In fact, if he has any inclination to leave, call one of your men to hold him on some pretense. They can call me if they need any suggestions. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “And there’s an APB out on Jesse Clark right now. You may as well call it off since he’s here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bring in Guy Frye,” he urged her as she seemed about to tak
e root in the doorway.

  “Yes, sir!”

  She must have hurried because the man appeared in her place almost immediately. “Hello again, Detective,” he said, and, getting right to the point, “I have some information about the death of Dawn Elliot that I think you might be interested in.”

  “Please come in, Mr. Frye. We’re interested in all information about Mrs. Elliot, and we appreciate you coming in to tell us what you know.”

  Guy Frye came in and sat down, and told his story in the nastiest way he knew how.

  “That is very interesting, Mr. Frye,” Sardini said when the man was finished. “It gives us a lot to think over and we certainly appreciate that you came in and told us about it. No matter how painful it is to talk about a good friend, this is just the information we need. Thank you very much,” Sardini said, ushering the man out the door.

  There almost wasn’t time enough for Guy Frye to get angry about how quickly he was dismissed. Almost. As the door closed behind him, he would have been interested if he could have heard Mitchell’s comment.

  “Well, that wasn’t anything we didn’t know. Not only did Mr. Frye’s wife already tell us about that, but we heard the same thing from that obstetrician, didn’t we? A man named Hallard or something, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Sardini agreed for once. “Dr. Dan Hallard.” He rearranged a small tape recorder that was sitting to one side of his desk before speaking again. “I think it’s time that we saw Jesse Clark.”

  VII

  “I have very little time, Mrs. Gordon. I am flying to the coast tonight and I must pack.”

  “Just a few minutes then. I promise I’ll be brief.”

  Kathleen stood outside the entrance to the large white brick Colonial where the Elliots lived when they were in town and tried to convince Richard Elliot to let her in. He was standing in the doorway so that she couldn’t even see inside. Unlike his usual pseudo-English sartorial display, he was wearing carefully bleached jeans, an even lighter blue silky chambray shirt, Gucci loafers, and no socks. He looked like what people thought Southern Californians look like. Except for his ankles: They looked cold.

  Maybe it was the icy breeze that convinced him, but he suddenly stepped aside and suggested she come in. Before he could change his mind, she did.

  “Thank you. I really won’t take much time,” she began.

  He waved away all such concerns with his right hand while closing the door with his other. “I’ll manage. I have learned to travel light while following my shining star. Come in, dear lady, come in. You will be my last guest at this house; the last person to visit the home of my parents.” And, with a suitably expansive gesture, he led her into the large living room off the spacious center hall.

  “What a lovely room,” she commented, feeling something was expected of her.

  “It is exactly the way it was in my parents’ day. Of course some of the furniture wore out and had to be replaced, but Dawn saw to it that the replacements found were as close to the originals as possible. In many cases, she found exact duplicates.” He continued, but Kathleen wasn’t really listening. The room into which she had been ushered was decorated as one would expect the Colonial home of an upper middle class family in the fifties to be decorated. A little too much pine, a little too many ruffled prints and cotton calicos, certainly too many wrought iron knickknacks, but not without its charm and a lot of comfort. Dawn Elliot had lived here?

  “It’s nice that your wife liked your parents’ taste,” she said, feeling that some sort of comment was again expected.

  “She hated it,” came the terse reply.

  Kathleen, startled, looked carefully into the face of the man sitting on the couch across from her. He was looking around the room and fiddling with a replica butter chum. Kathleen thought that his last statement might have been the only impromptu thing she had ever heard him say.

  “You think that she wanted to change it?” she asked.

  “She made no secret to me of how little she liked it. She said we lived in a museum dedicated to mediocrity.”

  “Then why … ?”

  “Because she had to, that’s why!” Richard Elliot toppled over the churn in his anger. It fell toward Kathleen and she reached to pick it up. “Just leave it,” he ordered. “It’s not my problem now.” He focused all his attention on Kathleen. “She left me nothing in her will you know. Absolutely nothing. Everything goes to that cousin of hers, as if he needed more money. The man is a millionaire! A goddamn millionaire and now he has everything of hers too! It makes me sick! And after all I did for her, too!”

  “All you did?” Kathleen repeated the phrase slowly.

  “Yes, all I did,” he repeated sarcastically. “She would have gone to jail, if it hadn’t been for me!”

  “To jail? For what?”

  “For murder, that’s what. There, that surprises you, doesn’t it?” He sat back in his chair, and crossed his arms. “You haven’t been in this town very long, but I know that everyone thinks that Dawn was too good for me. I know that no one knows why we married, why we stayed married, why she was supporting me with her money, why she came to live in this house that she hated and pretended that our marriage was real for a few months each year. No one knows the truth because I told no one the truth. But now that she’s dead, I have no obligation to support her lies anymore, do I?”

  “No,” came the honest reply.

  “So …” He took a deep breath. “So I will tell you the truth. You were a meter maid or something, you’ll know what to do.”

  Kathleen nodded, ignoring the insult. “Of course.”

  “My wife, Dawn Elliot, the woman whom everyone thought was so superior, so educated, so brilliant, so everything perfect … My wife killed people. Two children.”

  “How?”

  “She ran over them. She was driving home from a Halloween party in 1969, and she ran over two little children out trick-or-treating, and killed them. What do you think about that?”

  “How do you know?” Kathleen asked, not doubting the truth of what he was saying. He was such an incompetent actor that she knew he couldn’t be lying, but she needed to hear more of the story.

  “I was with her. In fact, she was driving my car!” And he sat back and looked smug. “Oh, how I’ve waited to tell this to someone,” he continued. “You see, we had just begun dating. Oh, I had known Dawn for a long time. We were in college together, but she hadn’t had time to go out with me. She was always busy studying. But we ran into each other at a party, a costume party in fact. I never found out who her date was but he had driven her to the party in her car—a Jaguar XKE—and had left the lights on and the battery was dead when they got ready to leave. Well, Dawn and he had an argument or something. I never heard the whole story. Anyway, she wanted to get home in a hurry so I offered to give her a lift. Dawn agreed, as long as she could drive, and we left her date to find someone to jump-start her car and took off. The party was here in Hancock and she was living in the city doing some research work at NYU. It wasn’t late, only a little past nine, and there were still children out trick-or-treating. Dawn had been drinking—we all had—and she was driving a little recklessly. You know how hilly and curvy the streets are around here, and, in the fall, the gardeners pile the leaves that they sweep off the lawns into the street, near the curb. That night, Dawn was driving a little too fast and running the tires of my old Corvair into those piles and making the leaves blow up into the air when …” He paused and Kathleen thought that, for the first time, he was moved. “… when there was this awful thud. We both knew that she had hit something. The car had even risen a little into the air as we rolled over it … them. When we got out of the car, we found two children. One was dressed as a clown in red-and-white polka dots with ruffles of red and white stripes. The other a black witch with a tall pointed hat. Both costumes were bloody. And the children were dead.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I think I was frozen. But Dawn didn’t stop to grieve. I rem
ember exactly what she said: that no one had seen us, that there was nothing we could do to help these children now, that it would ruin her life if anyone discovered that she had been driving the car that hit them, that we should get out of there immediately and shut up about it. And then she reached down and picked up a Tootsie Roll that was lying on the ground and took off the wrapper and popped it in her mouth. She got back into my car, still chewing on the candy, but this time in the passenger’s seat. She said we should get the hell out of there.

  “And we did. I drove away from there as fast as I could. And she was right. No one knew my car had killed those kids. No one knew Dawn was driving; neither of us was ever connected with the deaths.”

  “You drove her to her apartment?”

  “Yes, she was upset and she asked me to spend the night and I did, of course.”

  “Of course,” she agreed, feeling sick.

  “In fact, and I don’t like to be indiscreet, but we spent the next week in her apartment. We only left to go to the deli around the corner for food and the liquor store for wine. We didn’t read the papers; we didn’t turn on the TV; we just enjoyed our solitude. We were married on Thanksgiving Day in the Episcopal church where my parents were married. At first I thought nothing had changed for Dawn, except for the fact that she wouldn’t drive a car. I thought that was understandable after what she had been through. But the moment we were married she became a self-centered woman, determined to carry on with her career despite the demands of my life.”

  “You lived in this house?”

  “Not at first. My parents died about a year later and I was left this property. I insisted that we keep it up and live in it for a while each year. Dawn didn’t like Hancock but she had to do what I wanted.”