There was a pause. Then I heard his swivel chair squeak as he took his feet off the desk.
“Have you got those names?” I asked.
“Oh yes—er—Rose and Middlemarch.”
“The second name is Millmarsh.” And I spelled it for him.
“Ross and Millmarsh,” he repeated. “Well, I’ll tell you what, dear; we’ll check this out and get back to you, right?”
What can be said to something like that? What I said was, “I would certainly appreciate it if you would.” I knew what his words meant and I knew what he meant; and they weren’t the same thing.
“Bye-bye, now,” he purred, and put the phone in its cradle. I sat there with a dead instrument in my hand. Ron Jefferson, unlike Gilroy, had given me the velvet brush-off. While I was still holding the phone in my hand, I heard a click. Ron had picked up his phone again. He was trying to call out. It didn’t work. I sat holding my own instrument waiting to see what would happen. In less than a minute there was a click again, and I heard, “Oh, Goddamn it.” I hung up.
I just sat there in the breakfast room looking at the amaryllis that was trying to bloom. Ron Jefferson was no doubt talking to Butch Gilroy by this time. And no doubt they were talking about me. I could very easily imagine what they were saying. But it wouldn’t be flattering—I was sure of that.
I made considerable progress with the music for Holy Week. Saint Luke’s is not especially high; but though it is a small parish, quite a number of our people are knowledgeable and can tell good music from bad. Not that they know how much it takes to produce good music. Few of them have any idea what it’s like to play for that long service on Palm Sunday, three hours on Good Friday, the Easter Vigil, and then Easter morning. When the vocal music is added, an organist-choir director has enough to occupy her in February and March without the DAR, and certainly without a murder.
Henry came in at 6:45. He had been in court all day and was tired. I got out two fillets and frozen peas and put some potatoes on and mashed them. It’s his favorite meal! There were two slices of lemon pie left. That and two cups of coffee seemed to revive him.
Over the last cup I told him about my day. He did not seem surprised. He pulled his chin and looked out the window at the oldest Blankenbeckler boy across the street revving up his Honda under the streetlight.
“Well,” Henry said, “you definitely have important information there. You’ve got a name, and it’s the name of a missing man, whether it turns out to be the murdered man or not. If Butch wants to trace this Garcia, he’ll easily find out the truth of the matter. If Garcia was in town any length of time, his movements should not be hard to discover. He must have cashed travelers’ checks and shown proof of identity more than once. Butch can do a lot with that if he wants to.
“But what you’ll have to prove to Butch is that the man who flew in to Three City Airport is the same man who was found at the Brown Spring Cemetery, and he’ll resist the proof.
“It was a stroke of luck that what’s-his-name made such a thing about his harp.”
“García Valera,” I interjected.
“García Valera,” Henry repeated. “Butch will check the motel and make further inquiries at the airport. Apparently you gave a pretty accurate description. All of that from looking at a battered corpse for a few minutes! I have a very intelligent wife. You would make a good witness. Perhaps I can use you sometime.”
Although Henry was teasing, I liked it.
“Of course,” Henry continued, “there will have to be a positive identification by someone who knew Garcia. Butch is going to resist your identification.”
“Why?”
“Natural inertia. A man comes here traveling under the name of Garcia. Well enough! But nobody has missed him. If this is Garcia, you would think someone would wonder why he hasn’t showed up wherever he was expected to be. Consider the harp. People don’t carry them around unless they are going to play them somewhere. So why hasn’t Garcia been missed? And why hasn’t there been an outcry? And where is his luggage other than the harp?
“You and I are pretty sure that Garcia, the man at the airport, was also the man you found at Brown Spring last Wednesday. But Butch will have to find someone who knew him and have the body identified.”
The following day I went on with the housecleaning. I got all the mildew off the shower curtains in the downstairs bathroom and reorganized the shelves in the pantry. I divided and repotted the shamrocks. In fact I kept so busy that I didn’t even practice.
I cooked a nice pot roast and made a congealed salad. We enjoyed both; and by the time I had the dinner dishes put away, I had no intention of doing one other thing or having a serious thought. I propped myself up with pillows and read a detective story until Henry came to bed.
In the morning, as usual, Henry took the first section of the Banner-Democrat while I read the grocery ads. My idea of sexual equality is to have two subscriptions to the Banner-Democrat so that I do not have to wait for the first section. But since Henry goes out and finds the paper where it is so often thrown—under the holly hedge—it is only right that he should get the first section if he wants it.
He reads absolutely every word on the editorial page, then swaps it for the financial page, and thus gets through his juice, cereal, toast, and eggs most days without a word.
On the other hand, it is very pleasant after he has left for the office. I pour a second cup of coffee and sit there in my robe leisurely scanning the front page, the obituaries, the features (I always read “Dear Abby,” although I can’t stand the woman). Then there is the club calendar.
I had got that far when my eye lighted on the following story:
DAR CORPSE STILL NOT IDENTIFIED
No evidence has been found to identify the body of an apparent derelict discovered last week by a party of local DARs in a rural cemetery in Ambrose County. Sheriff Calvin (“Butch”) Gilroy observed that identity can be established only if the body can be identified by a relative or associate unless the deceased’s fingerprints are on file.
“Those transients give us lots of trouble,” Gilroy said, “but we’re working on it.”
The body was discovered last Tuesday by members of the Old Orchard Fort Chapter, NSDAR, in search of the grave of Adoniram Philipson, soldier of the American Revolution. Mrs. Henry Delaporte, Regent of the chapter, led a committee charged with the project of memorializing the long-dead hero.
The story went on from there—about five more inches.
My first reaction was surprise that the form was exactly right: “Old Orchard Fort Chapter, NSDAR. DAR is correct too, but NSDAR, which stands for National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, is better. That seems so simple, but it is surprising how often the papers get it wrong. I had not yet learned, you see, of Elizabeth’s educational campaign.
Although glad to see the story because of course it would count as inches, written as it was, I hardly had time to be pleased before I realized that the news story proved that Butch Gilroy had absolutely ignored me—just as I had suspected.
I picked up the phone and called the Banner-Democrat. They put me through to Albert Manley, whom I did not at that point know, although I got to know him and like him very much later on. I told Al how I had identified the dead man and had notified both Gilroy and Jefferson.
Al perked up right away; and if I had only realized it, I had just ensured myself a degree of notoriety. But I was so provoked by that stupid sheriff that I didn’t much care what I was doing.
After I finished my conversation with Al Manley, I rang the sheriffs office.
“Sheriff Gilroy?” I said when he came on the phone. He recognized my voice.
“Now, Helen, you had a nice little time being detective. But you know we in the sheriffs department are professionals. We have experience in these things and procedures that we follow. Amateurs don’t know anything about procedures, and so they make mistakes.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. �
�I identified that corpse for you. You were hardly civil when I gave you the information. I also gave all the evidence to Ron Jefferson. There is no doubt that the man was Luis Garcia Valera. Now what do you mean by telling the Banner-Democrat that no identification has been made?”
“Now we investigated thoroughly at the Sunset Inn. Valera was there all right—but he checked out. And we made a special inquiry at the airport. And what do you know—Valera went out on USAir Flight four-oh-seven on Sunday morning to New York.”
“Did what?”
“Left town about eighteen hours after the coroner says that bum you stumbled onto out there at Brown Spring had already turned in his chips. Like I say, we use procedures. We check everything. We know what we are doing. We use standard procedures.”
“Too bad you don’t use your brain.”
“Don’t what?”
“Use your brain. I told you that girl at the ticket desk recognized Mr. García immediately from my description.”
“Well, of course!” Butch said. “It was this Valera guy; but like I told you, he got on a plane and went to New York.”
“How could he get on a plane and go to New York when he was lying dead in the Brown Spring Cemetery?” I demanded.
“But he wasn’t lying dead in the Brown Spring Cemetery,” Butch insisted. “That was somebody else—like I say—a bum.”
“Look,” I said, “I saw the man’s body. I described him accurately, and that Miss Rose recognized the description immediately. You can’t tell me that Luis Garcia Valera had a doppelgänger lying dead in the cemetery while the real Garcia flew off to New York.”
“Had a what?”
“Doppelgänger—an exact double.”
“Well, he must have had one of those things, because it’s a cinch he flew to New York on USAir Flight four-oh-seven.
What do you say to a person like that? I just said, “I am going to say good-bye to you, Sheriff Gilroy. But I’m warning you that you are going to hear from me again.”
“Suit yourself.”
I felt that I absolutely had to do something about the situation immediately. And so I called Henry, but Henry was in court. So I tried to get Al Manley again. Al had also gone to the courthouse. (There was a big liability suit against the city that the whole town had been following, and it was about to come to a decision.)
Then I calmed down a bit and began to do some constructive thinking. I reviewed a few things. The man named Luis Garcia Valera had come in on USAir Flight 326, and he had had a reservation also on USAir. He had come to Borderville from Santa Barbara on the way to New York.
Santa Barbara! Ethel Muehlbach! Wasn’t that where Ethel lives? Of course it was!
I met Ethel at Continental Congress three years ago and then happened to run into her again in Constitution Hall last year when I was in Washington with Henry.
Mills graduate—and a very smart girl. And it seemed to me that her husband is a surgeon. She is the kind of girl who would know about any major event in Santa Barbara. I looked at my watch. It was ten o’clock. Maybe at 1:30 it would be safe to call her.
I had plenty to do in the meantime. I never get all the Christmas cards addressed on time, and that means I have to write letters to all the people who didn’t get the card. The result is that my friends from the latter part of the alphabet expect long letters from me in January and February. But I was down to the Ws. I was doing pretty well for me.
In fact 1:30 arrived just about the time I realized I was hungry. I made up half a package of Knorr soup and had some of the leftover congealed salad. And that was lunch.
I got Ethel’s number from the directory service. She picked up the phone on the third ring.
“Helen!” she squealed when I said my name and did my song-and-dance about Continental Congress. “Of course I remember you. Where are you?”
In some ways it was better in the old days when the operator used to announce: “You have a long-distance call from Phoenix, Arizona,” or wherever. You knew it was long distance then, but now I had to explain that I was in Borderville; and again she said, “Where?”
We are not a famous town, but we are not insignificant either. We have approximately thirty thousand people on the Tennessee side and almost forty thousand on the Virginia side. Parsons City, seventeen miles south of us, has eighty-five thousand and a large regional university; and Cooksport, the other point on our triangle, is twenty-five miles away with seventy-five thousand. So we are not a mere hamlet, and the three cities with their shared airport form a center for light industry, trade, and transportation. But the world does not know this, and I am constantly having to explain. For present purposes I contented myself by stating that I was calling from Tennessee.
I asked Ethel if Luis Garcia Velera had given a concert in Santa Barbara.
“Lu García?”
“Luis Garcia Valera,” I repeated.
“We call him Lu. Of course I’ve heard him many times. He’s awfully good. I suppose you are thinking of him for your concert series.”
“He lived there in Santa Barbara!”
“Why yes, he does.”
So García’s home was Santa Barbara, and he was taking his harp to Spain but had made a side trip to Borderville, Virginia-Tennessee, a place that some people believed, albeit erroneously, to be out of the way.
“Suppose you just tell me all you know about him,” I said.
“Oh,” Ethel began, “he’s a very nice man. Arthur knows him—plays golf with him now and then and of course he belongs to the club. His wife was very nice—southern girl—died suddenly about eight years ago—very sad!
“He’s highly regarded as a musician and has his own conservatory—the Garcia School, I think he calls it. People come from just about everywhere to study harp with him. The harp is such a beautiful instrument—let me see …”
There was a pause before Ethel went on. “I read—that’s it—he’s gone abroad, concert tour. Oh, he’s just very fine.”
“Ethel,” I said, “are you where you are comfortable?”
“Yes,” she said, “Why?”
“Good, because I have a long story, and you’ll find it interesting.” I told her about the whole adventure and my problems with Butch Gilroy.
“You don’t mean it!” she said when I had finished. “But then I have always said that a Regent, if she is worth anything, can handle any crisis, and you are a Regent. Now what can I do to help you?”
“You’ve already done a lot,” I replied. “But suppose you give me a description.”
“He’s very good looking,” she said. “Maybe sixty or more. His parents were refugees—perhaps came to America about thirty-six. Yes, I’d say he is at least sixty—dark, of course—lots of wavy hair.”
“Could it be a wig?” I interrupted.
Ethel laughed. “Yes, it is. Much too good to be true. Well, let’s see—I would say the features are regular. Rather heavy eyebrows. Rimless spectacles. Not quite six feet tall. Medium build—very expensive clothes—always. His wife had money.”
“Does he have relatives there?”
“No—none here, I think. I could ask.”
“Do,” I said, “and I can’t thank you enough.”
As soon as we disconnected, I knew what I had to do. I was positive that the person who used García’s ticket on USAir had not been Garcia. I was going to build a fire under Butch Gilroy and make him do the right thing. I immediately called Al Manley at the Banner-Democrat and told him I was absolutely sure that the corpse in question was Luis Garcia Valera of the Garcia School of Music in Santa Barbara, California, that he was known internationally, and that efforts were being made through a friend to locate the next of kin.
I explained that I knew Ethel through the DAR. He kept asking me specific questions, and I hardly knew whether I should pull back before plunging into such notoriety as the Banner-Democrat could create. But I went right ahead.
The next morning I read the following story:
DA
R IDENTIFIES BODY
Transcontinental Cooperation of Women’s Organization Provides Information
The body discovered ten days ago by representatives of the Old Orchard Fort Chapter, DAR, of Borderville has now been identified as that of the internationally known musician and educator Luis Garcia Valera, according to Mrs. Henry Delaporte, Regent of the chapter.
A clue picked up at Three City Airport led to Santa Barbara, California, where Delaporte contacted DAR member Ethel Muehlbach. Through Muehlbach an accurate description of Garcia was secured. “The body we found in Brown Spring Cemetery tallied in every way with the description furnished by Mrs. Muehlbach,” Delaporte stated. “I have not the slightest doubt that the man buried as a pauper here last week was in reality a musician of international reputation,” she added.
Delaporte and Muehlbach became acquainted when both were delegates in 1983 to Continental Congress, an annual meeting at the national headquarters of the DAR in Washington.
“She was quite surprised when I contacted her,” Delaporte said of the Santa Barbara woman. It is not unusual, she observed, for delegates to Continental Congress to meet and form friendships with delegates from widely separated chapters. “I have met many interesting women through the DAR, but I never expected one of them to help me identify a corpse,” Delaporte said.
There was also a story headed SHERIFF TERMS IDENTITY PREPOSTEROUS. And of course Butch Gilroy was contending that Garcia Valera had boarded a plane to Kennedy that Sunday.
HOW THE PUBLICITY BEGAN TO SPREAD
Elizabeth Wheeler
Mr. Manley was so nice and checked every DAR story with me to be sure he had written it right, and the story in the Banner-Democrat had all the details right so that we could get our credit for the inches. I just went right into the kitchen and got busy.
Now, I promised that young man some Belgrade bread. That’s a recipe that I have never seen in any of the books. I got it from one of Mama’s friends—she was Austrian—and she was an old lady forty years ago, so it is an old recipe going way, way back. Anyhow, it is just one of the best cookie recipes I know anything about. Here’s how you make it:
The Famous Dar Murder Mystery Page 5
