The Famous Dar Murder Mystery (15 page)

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Authors: Graham Landrum

BOOK: The Famous Dar Murder Mystery
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Now, who on earth could make such a dumb mistake? An old woman eighty-six years old can. That's who. And she can get away with more than that too.
I told the men I was eighty-six years old; and while I was saying it, I kept coming into the room.
“I asked them out there,” I said in a dazed kind of voice, “and they said the ladies' room was to the left.”
One of the men had got his cigar out of his mouth and was about to tell me to go about my business, but I was not ready to let him tell me to do anything. I just came on up to the desk and rested my hand on it with my pocketbook hanging from my wrist. “You know we old ladies get mixed up sometimes, and you just have to put up with us.”
Then I made a motion as if I was going to lift my hand for something and let the pocketbook upset a stack of magazines on the corner of the desk. Some of them slid off onto the floor.
“Oh, my goodness,” I said in the most authentic confusion you ever saw. “Look what I have done!” and I began to reach down to pick up the magazines. Of course, the young man behind the desk got up immediately. “I'll get those things. I'll get those things,” he said.
“No, no,” I said, and I replaced one of the magazines on the desk. He picked up the rest. The two of them fussed around arranging them in a stack. By that time they certainly were disgusted. I said to the one who had been seated at the desk, “Are you the manager of this club?”
The other man said, “Jesus Christ!” in sort of an undertone.
I turned and got my first good look at him. And would you believe it? He was one of those drivers we had seen at Borderville Transfer—the dark one that always reminds me of a Confederate veteran. He looked different because he had on a suit.
“Clear out, Joe. I'll take care of this, and we can do the other stuff later,” the younger man said.
Then he looked at me and said, “I am the owner.”
“And what is your name?” I asked.
“Dunk Yardley,” he answered.
So you see I had him.
“Oh,” I said, “you aren't Tony Yardley's boy are you?”
“Grandson,” he muttered.
“Of course! Of course!” I beamed. “I used to know Tony so well—I guess it was sixty years ago. She was one great old gal. We used to cut up together.
“Well, Dunk, you certainly have a fine club here. How long have you been open for business?”
He said he had opened in the last part of April.
“Well,” I said, “I've been out of town, and I just didn't know about it. Now, if you'll tell me where the ladies' room is, I won't bother you anymore.”
And I'll have you know that he personally escorted me to the ladies' room! I went in, and he probably thought that was the end of the episode.
Just as soon as the door closed, I put my pocketbook in the farthest corner. I wadded up some paper towels and put them over it. That rest room was just filthy enough that nobody would think there was a purse under that mess. Then I flushed the toilet in case Dunk happened to be close enough to hear.
I stepped down the hall, poked my head into the office, and said, “Dunk, I hate to bother you again, but I think I must have left my pocketbook in here.”
Well, that gave rise to a grand search, which was just what I wanted. While he was looking for the bag, I was getting a good look at everything he had in the room. But there was nothing out in the open that would support my suspicions.
I said, “I believe I may have left my purse in the ladies' room after all.” And, of course, that was the truth.
So I toddled down the hall again to the ladies' room to retrieve my pocketbook. If Dunk thought he was shut of me, he wasn't; for I went right back to his office and flounced in saying, “I found it! I found it!” in a jubilation that should have won me an Academy Award.
“Oh, Dunk, I'm so relieved,” I said as I perched myself on his desk, accidentally hiking my skirt up so I could display my knobby old leg.
There is nothing that puts a man off more than close proximity to a woman that he fundamentally does not want. Age has absolutely nothing to do with this principle, but it sure does diminish the desirability of the woman.
So I sat there and casually opened my bag and began to powder my nose. Oh, he might have felt differently about me if I had been sixty years younger.
“Dunk,” I said as I was looking at myself in the mirror of my compact, “I couldn't help noticing that a lot of the girls in there in the club were smoking pot. Are you a dealer?”
He was quick to deny it. He said he couldn't keep his customers from bringing it into the club, but he certainly hoped I wouldn't get the idea that he was a pusher.
“Oh, Dunk,” I said, “I was hoping I could buy a joint—I think that's what they call it now—from you. When Tony and I were young, we used to call them reefers.” And I made up one or two escapades about Tony and what a wild crew we used to be.
“Dunk, I want to smoke a reefer again. Won't you sell me just one?”
“I'm not a pusher,” he said for the third time, “but I'll give you one of my own if you will smoke it right here.”
“Dunk, you are a darling,” I said; and I'll probably go to hell for saying it, for he certainly was no darling. He reached in his pocket and took out a little leather case, from which he took this little rolled-up thing.
I put the little cigarette in my mouth. “Light it for me,” I said and leaned forward.
He got out his cigarette lighter and held the flame up for me.
“Well, I'll be damned,” he said when he saw I was in
business. “Tell you what I'll do. I'll give you a little present.”
With that he turned toward his grandfather's wall safe, which was closed but not locked. He pulled it open and took half a dozen marijuana cigarettes out of a big box.
Now, all of that was going on behind my back because of the way I was sitting. But I had my vanity in my hand and could get a pretty good look into the safe. I could see lots of little transparent packages, and I can tell you it wasn't all pot. In fact, if I had been dumb enough, I might have said some of it was sugar. Of course, he shut the door of the safe right away; and when he turned around, you can be sure I was looking somewhere else.
“How much do you charge?” I asked.
“Just be my guest.”
I told him again that he was a darling and threw my arms around him and kissed him so that he was very happy to get rid of me when I finally left his office with my pocketbook and my reefers and of course the first joint that he had given me, from which I had taken only two real drags.
I went back into the club and announced to Opal: “We can go now.”
 
 
Helen Delaporte
On the twelfth of June, Henry and I celebrated our anniversary by going to the Loft Theater in Ambrose Courthouse. The play was
A Doll's House
—not at all the sort of play to commemorate an anniversary—but very well staged.
It was a clear, cool evening with a nearly full moon high above the Blue Ridge as we drove the seventeen miles back to Borderville. I thanked Henry for a lovely evening. We don't go out together—just the two of us—as often as we once did. There are so many things that pull us in opposite directions: his preparation of briefs at all hours and any number of civic responsibilities, and my music along with so many other things, not the least of which is the Old Orchard Fort Chapter. Thank God for anniversaries and an old-fashioned date with my husband.
Out of our silence Henry said, “Are men really as stupid as Torvald?”
“Torvald!” I exclaimed. “He's not the stupid one in that play. Nora is the nitwit.”
Henry professed to be amazed at my attitude. But it is a fact. If Nora had had any sense at all, she could have made Torvald Helmer into absolutely anything she might have wanted. I have never come across in life or fiction any man as much a lump of dough as Torvald Helmer. All he needed was to be punched down several times and allowed to rise again. Any intelligent woman could have handled him and had an excellent husband in the final product.
By the time we had thrashed that subject fairly soundly, we were swooping down Johnston Street toward Division, where we were stopped by a red light.
One disadvantage of living in a town that straddles a state line is the fact that all streets change their names when they cross the border. For example, in Virginia we were on Johnston, named for the Confederate general Joseph Eggleston Johnston. But the same street continues on the Tennessee side as Polk, named for the eleventh president. Johnston, of course, was a Virginian, and Polk was a Tennessean; and never the twain shall meet—except in Borderville, Virginia-Tennessee.
I explain this because you need to know that on the corner of Polk and Division there is a snooker parlor called Dan's. I am not clear about what snooker is, but it seems to be a masculine activity; and in our area at least, the feminists have not yet liberated it. Which is not to say that women of a sort do not go into Dan's now and then. And if they go in, they also come out, as one was doing when we came to a stop.
I could see her quite clearly. She had a great mass of tangled hair in the style the girls are wearing, and to say that her boobs were big would be the only way to describe accurately the protuberance of her breasts. Now that women can wear skirts of any length, she had opted for almost no length at all. She was such a caricature of what she intended to be that I could hardly take my eyes off her.
But as the light changed and we began to move, I did take my eyes off her and saw behind her a dapper figure—the male version of the same ideal expressed by the young woman.
“Stop, Henry!” Stop!” I said.
Already the car was entering Polk Street.
“Why?”
“Because!”
I was not quick enough. We were already half way down the block.
“Stop! Just stop!”
Henry stopped.
“It was his coat!”
“Whose coat?”
By this time the traffic light had changed again; looking back, I saw a car going east on Division. And in it, I just knew, would be the girl in the skimpy dress and the man in Luis García's green suede coat.
“Oh Henry,” I said, “it was—it really was the green suede coat just like the one Jacqueline Rose and that man at Rentz Auto saw Garcia wearing.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I am sure,” I said. How else can anyone be sure except by seeing? “Turn left at Broad and get back to Division as quickly as you can.”
Henry did just what I asked. He always does, but unfortunately there has to be a little discussion first.
When we merged into Division Street, there was no sign of anything at all going east.
“Henry,” I said, “that really was the coat—
the
coat. Find that coat, and we will learn at least something. But we will never find it now.”
Henry had pulled over to the curb. Division Street is quite well illuminated, and I could see the concern on his face.
“If we had only seen the number of his license!” I said.
“I'm sorry—I'm really sorry.”
“Of course you are, darling,” I said, and touched his cheek with my hand.
“I'll do whatever you say.”
“It's too late now.”
“Well …”
“Yes it is.” I kissed him. “Let's just go on home.”
“I'll report it. I'll report it to both sheriffs tomorrow.”
“Forget it. It wouldn't do any good.”
And Henry forgot it, at least for the moment; but I did not.
For the next few days the whole experience—from the finding of García's body to the surfacing of García's coat (if it actually was García's coat)—kept coming to mind in bits and fragments. I was assured of the truth of what I knew—but there I had to stop. Henry had asked me how I could be sure, and I had not been able to answer.
Yes, I knew—but perhaps for the present I should put quotation marks around the word.
We “knew” that there was a connection between the Drover clan and Brown Spring Cemetery because there were Baker graves there. We knew—really knew—that Baker Comming's mother had been a Baker. But the two things weren't quite the same. If I looked at it from Gilroy's point of view, I could see that it was a web of supposition such that he would think it the imagining of excitable women devoted to ancestor worship.
And the next item: We “knew” that something illegal was going on at Borderville Transfer because two old women had watched various cars come and go. And yet the very nature of Borderville Transfer required that cars should come and go. Why did we “know” that something illegal was going on there? We “knew” because we “knew” that there was a connection between Brown Spring Cemetery, where García's body was discovered, and the Drover family. As far
as our observations at Borderville Transfer were concerned, was there anything suspicious about cars that drove into a warehouse and drove out again? Was there any reason why employees of Borderville Transfer should not garage their cars in a warehouse?
And then Harriet had reported pot being smoked at Duncan Yardley's nightclub. I wondered if there was such a club in the nation where pot was not smoked. But Harriet had seen into Duncan Yardley's safe. That was an eighty-six-year-old woman's evidence: what she thought she had seen reflected in the mirror of a compact with a diameter of two inches. I knew—or did I “know” that Harriet knew, actually knew—what she had seen.
And now I had seen a green suede coat and had “known” that it was the coat worn by Luis Garcia Valera when he had been seen at the Three City Airport.
How was I to get from “knowing” to knowing? The fact that I was impatient with the distinction merely kept me from thinking as clearly as I should have liked.
But then there is the larger question of why we do any of the things we do. There are easy answers to this question, but the real answer is sometimes hard to find. I was impelled—actually impelled—that is all that I can say.
And so I finally went to see Butch Gilroy.
Butch had had to take me seriously recently—not because of what I was telling him now, but because I had been right in the past. The identification of García's body by Hornsby Roadheaver had made it impossible to ignore me. Butch was not about to get himself into an embarrassment like that again. He had to listen, and he had to do what I asked.
I was polite, and he was polite, though neither of us was sincere. I told him about Jacqueline Rose and the agent at Rentz Auto and how both had noticed the suede coat. I also pointed out that the color was unusual and doubted that many
of the men in our area would have so expensive a coat of that color. He volunteered that he himself had never seen such a coat and promised that he would put the word out to look for it.
Sunday a week later, when I got home from church, there was a message on our answering machine to call the Virginia sheriffs office. When I did, I spoke not with Butch Gilroy but with one of the deputies. The coat had been found.
Highway 421 is a marvel of highway engineering—a marvel because it is so wretched. It stretches by tortuous route from Fort Fisher on the North Carolina coast to Michigan City, Indiana. And when it goes over the mountains, it seems to have sought out the most dangerous course it could take. One such patch is to the southeast of Borderville in Tennessee, and another is to the northwest of Borderville in Virginia.
There is a section of that road notorious for the fatalities that have occurred there. Like all such places, it is known as Deadman's Curve.
That very morning a car had gone off the road there into a ravine, killing the driver. And in the trunk of the car had been a garment bag containing a green suede coat. The car had a Virginia license, and I don't suppose anyone would have thought anything about the coat except that sewn into it was the label of a Santa Barbara clothing store. Would I please come to the sheriffs office and see if it was the same one I had reported to Sheriff Gilroy?
All I knew about the coat was what Jacqueline Rose and the boy at Rentz Auto had told me. But of course I went, and of course it was the same jacket. While I was inspecting it, Gilroy came in.
“I guess this solves the murder,” he said.
“It does?” I said.
“Well, of course it does. This man had the coat that Valera
man was wearing when he was killed. That ought to be pretty clear.”
Gilroy has never understood that the Spanish custom requires that the surname of the father's family precede the surname of the mother's family, but I saw no reason to go into that with him just at present.
I looked at Gilroy steadily for about thirty seconds while he looked at me just as steadily. What his look said was, Don't make any more trouble for me, sister. And what my look said was, You just wait.
What I actually said was, “What is the name of the man who was driving the car in which you found this coat?”
“Highsmith.” Gilroy had no objection to telling me that. “Joseph Christopher Highsmith.”
I went on home, wrote a few overdue letters, and talked to both of the children on the telephone. About five o'clock I called Margaret Chalmers and asked her if she had been watching the Borderville warehouse that morning.
She had not. “Why? Has something happened?” she asked.
I explained.
Margaret gave a nervous laugh. “Well,” she said, “Harriet thought Saturdays and Sundays being the weekend …”
“Of course,” I said. “When I asked you to watch that place, I never expected you to be so constant. I only supposed that if you noticed something casually, you could train the telescope on it. The reason I called was that if you had seen a car leaving the warehouse this morning, and it turned out that it was the same car that was wrecked, we would have a proved link between this Highsmith and the Drover family.” Then I explained about the accident that had killed Highsmith.
“Oh, I do wish we had been watching,” Margaret said. “Usually Harriet watches in the morning while I do my errands. Then in the afternoon I take over and she goes home.
And both of us have our Sunday schools. I don't think Harriet is teaching just now, but she is very faithful about her church, and I have the Mary and Martha Bible Class at the little Methodist church out in the valley where I grew up.”
One cannot argue about that.
I assured Margaret that no harm was done, though I privately wished the Mary and Marthas in Halifax. On the other hand, neither of the ladies would have been able to describe a contemporary automobile with any accuracy. Would they know a Honda, a Nissan, an Isuzu, an Audi, or for that matter a Thunderbird? Then again, how good would I have been in the same situation?
So I thanked Margaret. What those two ladies had done was far beyond what I had had in mind. But probably it had been pleasant for them.
That call put Highsmith's crash pretty well out of my mind. But it was brought back to me forcefully the next morning when the
Banner-Democrat
headline read:
DAR MYSTERY SOLVED
An automobile fatality at “Deadman's Curve” on Highway 421 early yesterday morning unexpectedly brought the solution to the mysterious death of the internationally noted musician Luis Garcia Valera. The driver of a 1987 Dodge that crashed over the guardrails into Willow Creek had in his possession the coat identified by Mrs. Helen Delaporte as the property of Garcia.
Readers will remember the discovery last February of the body of the murdered musician by a party of members of the Old Orchard Fort Chapter, NSDAR … .

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