The Thanksgiving Day Murder (21 page)

We got out and she led the way to the front door. Inside it was almost as cold as out, and she had warned me in advance that the water was turned off to keep the pipes from freezing, so we couldn't use the sink or toilet. We had eaten on the way and stopped to wash before we got here.

I was quite charmed by the house. There were old timbers along the living room ceiling, and the well-cared-for floors were uneven in a way that indicated age. The kitchen had been carefully modernized, leaving old beams bare with kettles hanging from them.

I followed her up the steep, narrow stairs to the second floor, where there were four bedrooms, the last and smallest having belonged to Connie. There was a big oval rag rug on the floor and what looked like a handmade quilt on the bed, a lovely room for a single person. There wasn't much in it that would tell me anything about Connie because it had been occupied by other people in the decades since she had left. Down the hall was the bathroom, an ancient claw-foot tub surrounded by a plastic shower curtain prominent against the wall.

“Years ago I decided we should get a new tub,” Mrs. Lewellyn said, “but my friend started telling me that the old claw-foot ones fetched a fortune now, so I left it. Makes it look awful old, though, doesn't it?”

“It looks lovely. I think this is a wonderful house.”

“Well, I don't know what else I can tell you.”

“Where did you see Connie that last time when she came at night?”

“Down back. I'll show you.”

She held on to the banister going down, her feet side-ways
on the narrow treads, and I followed suit. She took me to a back door that she opened with a key. We stepped outside onto a concrete patio that was cracked with age.

“She was over there near that tree, the big oak at the edge of the grass. I saw her from up there.” She stepped away from the house and pointed up.

I walked across the patio, then over to the tree. Any of the windows on the back of the house would have a view of this tree, and probably most of the lawn between the tree and the patio. I went back, circling what looked like a moss-covered flower bed.

“That's the tulips,” she said as I neared. “I got a whole bucket of bulbs one fall and planted 'em till my knees hurt. Then the damn squirrels came and tossed them around the place. I was madder'n hell,” she said, using language I hadn't expected from her. “My knees'll never forgive 'em.”

“And you're not sure when that was.”

“It's gotta be three or four years ago.”

“Did you replant the tulips?”

“I did, and we put a netting over the place to keep the squirrels away. It worked. You should see those tulips in the spring.” She looked cold, although the day was mild.

“Why don't we go somewhere for a cup of hot coffee?” I suggested. “Then we can go back to Albany.”

“That's all? You're finished here?”

“I'm finished,” I said. I didn't want to tell her that I was only starting.

“I think we have to try it, Jack.”

It was the same night. I had come home late, worn out from a day at the wheel. “I think Connie or Natalie or whatever her name was hid something there, maybe when she sent the postcard to Dickie Foster. There are still two small keys on the ring. Maybe she buried a lockbox or suitcase. She came back a year later, or sometime later, I'm not exactly sure when, to make sure her secret was still intact. Whatever it is, it's going to answer all the questions we have.”

“Let's go up on Saturday.”

After I checked with Mrs. Lewellyn, I let Roger Belasco at the weekly newspaper know. She wasn't happy at the prospect of having her beautiful tulips dug up a second time, but I promised I would pay to have a gardener replant her bulbs, or new ones if she chose.

We got up at six on Saturday and drove up to Albany to pick her up. She was ready and we wasted no time setting out for the country house. We had a pickax and shovels in the trunk, but we needn't have bothered. Mrs. Lewellyn's garage had a great assortment of tools. At eleven-thirty, with a representative of the newspaper looking on, we set to work.

I have to admit my heart broke every time a bulb was unearthed. Some of them were already showing fresh spring
shoots, and Mrs. Lewellyn took each one fondly, wrapped it, and put it in a box in the garage. The recent weather had not been cold enough to freeze the ground solid, and once we were through the top layer, the earth wasn't very hard to move. Not that it was easy, because it wasn't. We stopped to eat at Jack's suggestion (cops are always hungry), stopped to rest, stopped to chat with the newspaperman, whose name was Joe Belasco, Roger's son. Eventually young Joe, either embarrassed at watching Jack and me work or bored with doing nothing, picked up a shovel of his own and joined in.

He was the one who called, “Hold it,” sometime after we had gotten back to work after breaking for lunch.

“What is it?” Jack and I said almost in chorus.

“Hit something. Maybe a rock, but there haven't been any rocks for a while.”

“OK,” Jack said. “Let's just take a look.” He was all cop now, his voice a monotone, all business. He bent down where Joe pointed with the shovel and started pulling the earth away with his gloved hand as I knelt and watched. “Here we go. It's not a rock. It's—” He pulled some more earth. “Looks like a bone of some kind. Maybe a rib.”

“What?” Joe said, paling.

I said nothing, but my stomach didn't like it.

“Looks like we've got a skeleton here, folks. I think this is the point when we stop working and call in the police.”

They came pretty quickly, two young men who looked strong enough to wield shovels. They were also pretty excited, never having experienced anything like uncovering human remains.

Mrs. Lewellyn wept when I told her and refused to come outside. We had built a fire in the woodstove in the living room, and the downstairs was now comfortable enough to walk around in without a coat on. She remained in her chair, determined not to view whatever was being uncovered
in her tulip bed. I went out and watched the careful, slower progress being made by the two uniformed officers under Jack's guidance. The bones were no longer held together, but I could see unpolished fingernails at the ends of fingers, buttons, teeth, a ratty-looking belt with a metal buckle.

“Hey, look at this,” one of the officers said, leaning over the hole, which was now about three feet deep. He reached down and pulled out a woman's handbag.

It was dirty and wet, most likely black before the earth and weather attacked the color. The cop held it out and I walked over and took it from him. “Do you mind if I open it?” I asked.

“Go ahead. We need to know who it is. I guess it's a woman, right?”

I took it from him and went over to the patio table with Jack. I had to carry it with my hand at the bottom because the seams were coming apart. On the table, we got it open without tearing it, and I looked inside, then reached in. A wallet came out first, the kind with a purse to hold coins and several pockets for bills and cards. The first plastic card I pulled out had a name on it.

“Natalie Miller,” I said.

“Not Gordon?”

“Miller,” I repeated. “And here's a Social Security card. She must have had it laminated. It's in perfect shape. Natalie Miller.”

“Keep looking.”

And then I found it, a New York State driver's license issued to Natalie Miller, a color picture in the corner. The birth date made her about thirty-four now, and the face was one I had never seen a picture of. I took it inside and showed it to Mrs. Lewellyn. “Is that Connie?” I asked.

She barely glanced at it. “Not in a thousand years. Is this the girl who's buried in my garden?”

“I think so. It'll take a while to find out for sure, but it's a pretty safe bet it is.”

“How'd she get there?”

“I'm not sure,” I said, reluctant to answer with what I believed to be the truth.

“You think Connie killed her?”

“I think there's a very good chance.”

“Lord in heaven.”

“Can someone explain to me what's going on?” Joey Belasco was waiting for me as I came outside, notebook and pen in hand.

“I'll try,” I said.

“I thought we were looking for Connie Moffat.”

“We were, sort of.”

“And whose body is this?”

“A woman named Natalie Miller.”

“How'd she get here?”

“Probably she was murdered and buried here about five years ago.”

“You think Connie did it?”

“I think it's likely.” One of the policemen had told us a few minutes earlier that the skull appeared to have been bashed in, probably by a shovel, making everyone very uncomfortable about Mrs. Lewellyn's tools.

“So what's happened to Connie?”

“I think she's probably dead.”

“You know where she is?” He held his pen up, waiting for me to speak.

“No, I don't. But I'm pretty sure I know who killed her.”

“I have made so many stupid mistakes, Jack, I just can't believe what I've done.”

“Enough,” he said. “It's only one mistake.”

“But I did it over and over.”

“Don't tell me how dumb you are, OK? You found her. Nobody else even came close. Man, am I hungry.”

We had driven Mrs. Lewellyn back to her Albany house and then we'd gotten ourselves a room at an inn out of town. It was too late to drive home and we both ached from digging, so we were making a night of it. I was hungry, too, starving, in fact, and we had to hurry down before the restaurant closed. But I was furious at my mistake, repeated over and over, or at least a couple of times. And much as I was now looking forward to dinner and a night with Jack in a romantic inn, I was anxious to get back to New York and clean up the case of Sandy Gordon's missing wife. But that would have to wait for tomorrow.

We drove straight to Manhattan when we left the inn on Sunday morning, and continued down to Gramercy Park. In front of Natalie's old apartment house, Jack sat at the wheel and I got out. Coming down the street was Dickie Foster, children and husband in tow.

“You looking for me?” she called.

“Yes. Hi. Hi, Mr. Foster. Nice to meet you. I'm Chris Bennett. Do you have a minute to look at a picture?”

“Sure. We've just been walking around, it's such a nice day.”

I took out a copy of the picture of Connie Moffat, aka Natalie Gordon, and handed it to her. “Do you recognize her?”

“I think so. Paul, look at this.” They put their heads together for a moment. Then Dickie said, “I think this was the girl who roomed with Natalie at the end, before she moved out.”

“Then this isn't Natalie.”

“Oh no. Natalie's small and blondish, nothing like this. This was a taller woman. I never met her; at least I don't remember her name.”

“This is the woman I've been looking for,” I admitted.

“But you said you were looking for Natalie.”

“I think the woman in this picture killed Natalie and took over her identity. I never realized there were two missing women. You and I were talking about different people. I never showed you the picture or I would have known a long time ago what was going on.”

“What a story. What do you think happened?”

“I think this woman killed Natalie around the time of the move. I'd guess Natalie had no intention of moving, but when she got killed, the killer had to go somewhere else to establish her new identity.”

“Who would kill a nice girl like Natalie?”

“Maybe someone who wanted a good job and didn't have the credentials for it.”

“I think we should move out of this city,” Dickie said.

“Next year,” her husband said. “I promise.”

We drove home. Now I knew exactly when and where the transformation had taken place and I had a motive. There might have been more to it than that, an argument, a temper not well controlled, maybe some promises given and then broken. I might never find out, but there was still a chance Connie's killer knew, and I hoped he would tell me.

When we got home I went through my notes and then looked up a phone number. We had decided Jack would make the call while I listened on the upstairs phone.

It rang twice and then a familiar voice answered with, “Hi there.”

“Hi yourself,” Jack said in a bantering voice. “This Ted?”

There was silence. Then a far less happy voice said, “Who's this?”

Jack and I hung up. I had hit pay dirt.

Jack tracked down Detective Evelyn Hogan at her home and told her he had information on the disappearance of Natalie Gordon. Then I got on the phone and we agreed to meet the next morning at her office at One Police Plaza.

She was a nice-looking woman in her late thirties, dressed smartly in a gray suit with a white, collarless blouse, more, I thought, like a woman going to work in industry than a police detective.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Brooks,” she said. “I'm Evelyn.”

“I'm Chris, Chris Bennett most of the time.”

“I hear you succeeded where I tried and failed.”

“You didn't fail. You were right as far as you went. I had a lot of time, some very special help, and a lot of luck.” I thought fleetingly of Sergeant Al DiMartino. “I think I know who kidnapped the woman known as Natalie Gordon, but I don't know what he did with her.”

“I'm all ears. Can I get you some coffee?”

“Sure. Black.”

We talked for some time and I let her Xerox my notes. She was impressed that I'd found the building near Gramercy Park and also that I had dug into the people at Hopkins and Jewell. Her predecessor on the case had made a few phone calls and listed them on the D.D. 5s but had never gone down to see anyone in person.

“So this is the one,” she said when we reached the point in my notes where his name was.

“This is the one. It has to be.”

“Let's give it a try.” She picked up the phone, dialed, and asked for our suspect. “I see,” she said, doodling on a piece of paper on her desk. “When was that?…Uh-huh. Any forwarding address?…OK. Thanks for your help.” She hung up. “He quit. Didn't come in one day and they haven't seen him since. We'll have to stake out his apartment. You have that address?”

I had found it in the Brooklyn phone book yesterday and written it down.

“I'm not calling till we have manpower in place,” Evelyn said. “I don't want to alert him that we're on to him. That call your husband made yesterday must have scared him. I hope it didn't scare him into leaving.”

“So do I.”

“We'll have to get a photo and put out a Want for Questioning, do some digging into his background, former employers, that kind of thing.”

“I wonder what he's doing since he left Hopkins and Jewell.”

“I'd guess he's found himself another job. It's pretty hard to live in New York without work. I'll get the Brooklyn Borough Detective Task Force in on it and assume we'll make our move when he gets home tonight. You're sure he has no idea you went upstate over the weekend and found that skeleton?”

“I'm sure. And it won't be published till Wednesday. It's a weekly that covered it.”

“But there are police records now, and papers pick up that kind of story. I'm going to get the task force moving right away, in case he's home and tries to make a getaway. Can you identify him for us?”

“Absolutely.”

“Now I've got to ask you some questions, and your answers are very important. I need more than a strong suspicion that this man, Theodore Miller, or whatever name he's using, is a killer.”

“Before we go on,” I said, interrupting her, “I'm a little confused. The body we dug up over the weekend isn't the body of Connie Moffat. How are you going to build a case against Ted Miller if we don't have a body?”

“It's tougher without a body, but it's been done before and we can do it this time if we have enough evidence, or a corroborative statement from someone who may have
witnessed the killing or who Miller may have told about it, maybe with some incriminating details. At this moment I don't have a case. What I need from you is enough evidence that I can bring him in for questioning and search his apartment. So tell me, what have you got that says he's our man?”

I stared at her. Logically it worked, but in terms of solid evidence, I had nothing. “It has to be him,” I said lamely.

“Tell me why.”

Everything added up, but I didn't have anything tangible I could hand her or point to. “I guess it's all in how I see it. This man with a down-home way of speaking called on Friday and—”

“He called you?”