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Authors: Graham Landrum

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As the flames licked up and the paper shriveled into a fragile ash, it occurred to me to ask, “And where did your son's marriage take place?”

“In Boone.”

I wondered if I had done the right thing to surrender that clipping. Boone, North Carolina, you see, is just a skip and a jump across the mountains from Borderville.

THE SUICIDE NOTE

>>
Maud Tinker Bradfield
<<

H
arriet is right when she says that old women make good detectives. We sit alone in the house, and if we have enough sense not to be able to stand TV all day, we just have a few things to think about. So we think about them and think about them until we get them sorted out.

When Harriet went off to Estonia, I was alone in the house, and in the quiet I began to review what we had been talking about the day before.

Whoever killed Charles Hollonbrook had to have had a motive and some way of getting hold of that gun. That's all well and good. But there is something else.

There had been a note found by the bodyâa note that looked like a suicide note. But Harriet didn't think the contents of the note were quite the thing for a suicide.

All right then. If the note was written on Charles Hollonbrook's personalized notepad, the fellow who killed Hollonbrook must have gotten one of those notes from Hollonbrook himself. So when Harriet got back from Estonia, I put it to her. I said, “Hat, you said the note that was left by the body came from Charles Hollonbrook's personalized notepad. Don't you
think we ought to look into that? We need to find out how the murderer got hold of that note.”

She said, “That's right.”

“Well, don't you think we ought to get that worked out?”

“Yes indeed,” she said.

“And while there are probably a certain number of people who could have gotten the gun and a certain number who could have gotten the note, if they are not all the same people, wouldn't that cut down the number of people who could have done it?” I reasoned.

It was worth looking into, and we talked about it for a while. Harriet said, “I wonder if that man had more than one pad.”

“Easy enough to find out,” I said. “I'll call Paula Stout and ask her.”

I never was what you would call a friend of Paula's or of her mother, who died six or eight years ago. But I can remember when I used to buy Girl Scout cookies from Paula, so it was less awkward for me to call her than for Harriet to do it.

Paula reported that there had been six pads originally. One pad had been placed in the pad holder on his desk. He had taken one pad home. And another had been placed on his desk when the first pad ran out. There were three pads left in the supply cupboard.

That didn't seem to get us very far, because the sheet from the notepad wouldn't have done the murderer any good if Charles Hollonbrook hadn't written on it. So the murderer had to be the one who had originally received the note or someone who had had access to the note after it was laid aside.

“Now tell me exactly what was in the note,” I said.

Harriet got her purse and took out the little notebook she jots everything down in. She leafed through a few pages and found the place. She handed me the notebook and I read: “Sorry to disappoint you, but I can't make it today. C.J.H.”

“That is odd,” I mused. “I mean as a suicide note. Who was supposed to read it? The Rotarians? That doesn't sound like a
note you would write to a Rotary Club to tell themâwellâ” I broke off.

“To say to them that you would rather die than eat their meat loaf and English peas?” Harriet concluded the sentence for me.

Actually, I would think a suicide note would be rather daunting. If I had to write one, I think, in preference I would give up the idea of killing myself. Good heavens! Suppose you didn't spell everything right!

However that may be, I felt sure that Charles Hollonbrook would have thought up something a good deal more impressive than the note that was found by his body.

“I can't make it today.” Now that word todayâthat's what you say when you wake up in the morning. And you say today at night when you look back over the past day. But even after midnight, you don't speak of the coming day as
today
. You call it
tomorrow.
And the way I understood it, Hollonbrook had died at night.

I said all this to Harriet, and all she would comment was, “I've already told you; it is not a suicide note.”

“But what kind of person would he write a note like that to?” I asked.” âSorry to disappoint youâ' It sounds like he is breaking an appointment, probably lunch or a meeting someone else has made plans for, or maybe he failed to do something for someoneâand he just pushes it aside. He surely couldn't write a note like that to someone he cared about.”

“Why not?” Harriet wanted to know. “He could slip it into a box of chocolates and send it to her. Or do men still send chocolates to the âother woman'?”

“I wouldn't know,” I answered. “But I see what you mean. The note could be just a kind of explanation for the gift. If we look at it that way, there could be any number of those notes in existence.”

“It strikes me more like a note to somebody he doesn't have to be polite to,” Harriet said, “somebody who takes orders,
somebody who expects to be at his disposal. The best bet for that would be the girl in his office.”

“Or his wife,” I said, just to be cute.

“No,” Harriet said, “that note wasn't written to his wifeâand it wasn't written to his ex-wife, either. It has been some time since either one of those ladies would be what you would call disappointed if Charles Hollonbrook did not show up.”

We both sat quietly for a minute or soâit was like those times when you are working a crossword puzzle and can't think of a word.

Then Harriet said, “Maud, you are right. He wrote that note to some one or some people he didn't have to be polite toâthat means people who won't take offense because they know him so well or because the circumstances don't matter to them. Why couldn't that note be intended for his gun club?

“I've got their names right here.” She leafed through the pages of her notebook. “Here they are: Pete Gambrill, Don Kelsey, J. D. Robinson, and Mark Fuller. Do you know any of them?”

Well, I didn't know the Kelseys or the Fullers. But I knew J. D. Robinson by sight. He has a sign-painting shop on Second Street, and Jayâmy husband, now deceased, knew him in the Shrine. And Pete Gambrill is somebody I can't live without. He is a heating and air-conditioning engineer. He looked after the furnace at our home on Fifth Street, where Jay and I lived for forty years. He kept that old furnace going long after they stopped making replacement parts. And now that I have this little place, he takes care of my heat pump.

Harriet was right much taken with her idea about the gun club, and I saw that she wanted to follow it up, so I went to the phone.

Pete was in the office and wasn't busy. I said, “You are going to have a visit from two decrepit old women who want your advice.”

Pete said, “Wheel them in.” That was just like him.

I would guess Pete would be about fifty. He is a little on the heavyset sideâhas a bald spot on the crown of his head. I thought he and Harriet ought to get along pretty well.

When we came into his officeâit was a horrible messâhe jumped up and said, “Mrs. Bradfield, you told me a fib. You said two
old
ladies were going to come to see me.”

But he didn't get a rise out of
me
. I've known him too long. I introduced Harriet, and it turned out that he had already heard about her because his daughter has a part-time job in the library. He hurriedly cleaned off the only other chair in the office.

“But where will you sit?” I asked.

“Oh, I'll just sit here on the corner of the desk,” he said, pushing the telephone and a pile of papers off a spot hardly big enough to accommodate him. He half-leaned and half-sat thereâan oversized, round-faced cherub beaming at us.

Harriet explained what she wanted to know and why she wanted to know it.

He said he could tell us about it.

It seems that the gun club didn't have any very formal organization, but they generally got together on Saturday mornings about 10:30 or 10:45 to practice on the range in the basement of the Hollonbrook house.

Since the members had their own keys, they could get into the basement when neither of the Hollonbrooks was at home. If Holly was at home when any of the club members came in and began to shoot, he would come down and join in the shooting.

But if he wasn't going to be at home, he would place a note in the crevice between the glass and the frame of the door to his rifle cabinet. And the note was always the same. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I can't make it today.”

“Now, Mrs. Bushrow,” Pete said, “and with apologies to you, Mrs. Bradfield, if you have found out anything about Holly, you
know he was a ladies' man. And those notes meant that where he wasâwas with one of his ladies.

“You see, Mrs. Hollonbrook plays golf, and she was in the habit of playing with her foursome at the country club. And afterward, she would have lunch with the other ladies.

“Those notes got to be a real joke, because”âPete paused and looked mischievousâ“because he was
making
it.”

“Shame on you,” I said.

But of course it was perfectly true. And the explanation made sense. Harriet thanked Pete and said that he had been a great help.

“Maud,” she said as we were driving home, “we know now at least one way that the murderer could have gotten the note.

“Hollonbrook might find out at breakfast that his wife would be gone from the house from about ten o'clock in the morning until maybe one-thirty in the afternoon. Then he could call his sweetie pie on the telephone to let her know he would be with her soon. He could write his noteâalways the same. And probably he knew what his buddies understood from
make it
. It had the further advantage of being a way of publicizing his conquest, you see.

“Then he would come home before Alice did, take down the note, and maybe open the drawer to get his pistol out for some target practice. So he could have dropped the note into the drawer, and Alice would never have found it.

“But if all of this is true,” she concluded, “we are right back where we were, because any of the others who had access to the pistol could have found the note in the same place.”

MY VISIT TO VIC DOUGLASS

>>
Harriet Bushrow
<<

I
woke up the next morning trying to think what it was I had had in the back of my mind to do. There were so many threads leading this way and that way, and they all seemed to be balled up in a big mess. The name of Douglass came to mind. I had written it down in my memorandum book, but somehow I kept ignoring it.

Hollonbrook and Douglass was the name of the firm when Charles Hollonbrook first came to town. And I had already concluded that some kind of spat had developed that had busted up the combination. Although that had been a long time ago, perhaps it would be good to find out about it. So I put the question to Maud: Did she know this Vic Douglass?

He was a very nice man, she said, with a modest little wife and two daughters. Disciples, she said. His name was Vic and his wife was Nancyâjust a plain, nice couple.

With that kind of recommendation, I thought, Thank the Lord I'm not going to run into anything exotic like people who go off on yachts with gentlemen friends from Baltimore or crazy people who had to divorce their French husbands. People like that are interesting, but enough is enough.

So I followed Maud's directions about how to get to his office, and I didn't have any trouble at all.

It was just a tiny little buildingâone room for the office and, I suppose, a washroom at the back. The furniture was plain and oldâjust practical, you knowâno upholsteryâjust plain wood chairs. There were venetians on the windows but no drapesâlinoleum tiles on the floorâno carpeting.

Vic Douglass was a heavyset gentleman in his late forties. He had a pleasant, open face and black hair. Without being what you would call handsome, he was good-looking.

He said, “Good morning, ma'am. How can I help you?”

I told him who I was and why I wanted to talk to him.

“So you think old Holly was murdered?” he said. He wasn't exactly smiling, but the idea didn't seem to bother him.

“Whether he killed himself,” he went on, “or somebody finally got him, I would say Charles Hollonbrook had been on a collision course as long as I have known him.”

The story began when Vic and Holly were at Granville State College. Vic's fraternity was in trouble with the dean on account of grades. But Vic had a certain freshman for his lab partner in his chemistry class, and the freshmanâthat was Hollonbrook, of courseâwas just a crackerjack student, making A's and all that.

The upshot was that Holly was taken into the fraternity to raise their grades.

Holly's people weren't what you would call well-off and Hainsford is just a very rural small town. So being at Granville State and being in a fraternity, Holly was in a different world from the one he had known. What did he do then but take Vic as a kind of model.

We see that so often, you know, with a young person who is not sure of himself. That is why it is so important to have a sense of family. I could never in this world have forgotten that I was a Gardner and that my mother was a Hadley.

Anyhow, Holly attached himself to Vic, who was two years
ahead of him in college. Vic graduated, got married, and went to work for his father. And Holly graduated, too, but he got drafted and went to the Vietnam War.

In the army, he was just the way he had been in college. He got to be a first lieutenant and was cited for bravery and got several medals. Then he was badly wounded and given a medical discharge.

He came back home to Linda, the girl he had married just before he went to Vietnam. In the meantime, Vic's father had died, and Vic had come into a little money.

The two friends got together and opened their realty firm in Stedbury, which looked like it had a future then.

Just as I had noticed from looking at all those years of the Stedbury Gazette, Douglass and Hollonbrook had had all the business they could handle. Vic was frank to admit that Holly was the best salesman he had ever seen. His experience in the war had given him a kind of assurance. And with the medals and the good looks, there was a kind of glamour about him. But it was just his constant drive that put him ahead in whatever he did.

“I don't think he was smarter than anybody else,” Vic said. “He just didn't hesitate to do whatever would get him what he wanted.”

And that brought the story down to the episode of Featherstone Plastics.

Everyone has heard of Featherstone Plastics. I dare say there is not a house in the country that doesn't have at least fifteen items made by Featherstone.

Well, Vic heard that Featherstone was thinking of opening several plants in the South. And there was a piece of farmed-out land that could be gotten for very little. So the firm took out a loan and bought the property.

Meanwhile, the chamber of commerce was working tooth and nail to bring the Featherstone plant to Stedbury and it
looked like Featherstone would take the property that Hollonbrook and Douglass had to offer.

Then behind Vic's back, Holly found another site. The owner had just died, and the heirs were eager to sell the property and divide the proceeds.

Holly, on his own, without saying a word to Vic, scraped up every penny he had and took an option on the property; in ten days' time, he sold it to Featherstone.

That broke up the firm. Poor Vic was left with the other property, which then had no value. All of Vic's money was tied up in that land, with no prospect of getting it back.

“Mrs. Bushrow,” he said, “if Holly had been killed fifteen years ago, I would have been your prime suspect. It wasn't just what he had done to me. He did it to my family, too. I tell you, we went through some pretty hard times.”

“And you don't feel the same way now?” I asked.

“No, not really,” he replied. “It's too sad a story. Holly had a potential and he used it. Everything fell before him. But what a price he paid!”

In spite of all the dirt I know about Charles Hollonbrook, I had a feeling for what Vic Douglass was saying. All the same, there were other things that I wanted to know.

“Was he always after the women, the way they say he was?” I asked.

Vic got a faraway look in his eyes. “No,” he said, “when I first knew him, he was making too many A's to chase girls. The brothers in the fraternity, even though they wanted his grades, ragged him hard about being out of it as far as the sex scene went. I wouldn't guarantee what happened after I left Granville. Linda Logan, the first wife, was a pretty little thingâsweetâsmall-town backgroundânot all that bright. He may have been to bed with her by the time they graduated. But he married her. That used to be doneânot at Berkeley perhaps. But at Granville State College, the girls still expected it.”

He was silent for a moment. He was thinking back to that earlier day, as we all do.

“Linda wasn't meant for a man like Holly. She tried, but she didn't have it. Before the children came, she did her best to keep up. She would go to parties and drink along with the others, but she would just get tiddly, and people would say, âPoor Holly, why did he ever marry that woman?'

“But then Aliceâyou know she was in his office. She was a small-town girl, too. I think they began sleeping together about a year after she came to work for him.

“The delay,” he added dryly, “was occasioned by an affair that had started before Alice came into the picture.

“I suppose you've seen Alice. She's very cool these daysâgood-lookingâclotheshorse. From an outside point of view, she is the ideal Mrs. Charles Hollonbrook. Holly couldn't stay away from other women.”

Vic looked at me a second or two with a glint in his eye. “I know what you want to ask me,” he said. “You want to know if it ever happened with my wife. The answer is noânot that he wouldn't have tried if he thought he could. My wife is as true as a plumb line. As a judge of character, I have made one major mistake. That was Holly Hollonbrook. But I picked the right woman, and in my marriage I am the happiest man in town. That's why I don't hold anything against Holly anymore. He could never have had what I've got.”

I thanked Vic. He got up when I did. I couldn't help saying, “I believe from the way you talk you are from Georgia.”

“Yes, I am.”

“And you know who the Bushrows are.”

“Of course I do.”

Now wasn't that nice?

BOOK: The Rotary Club Murder Mystery

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