The Famous Dar Murder Mystery

by Graham Landrum

  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 A
uto 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 … .

  Bless Elizabeth and her cookies!

  Well, there it was. I had identified the jacket! I wondered how that would sit with Gilroy. It was beginning to be more than a little silly. Nevertheless, we would get our inches, and I feel sure that no chapter in the society has ever taken on a murder as a chapter project.

  Henry, you may be sure, did his best to tease me about the news story, and I pretended that I was not teased. But after he left for the office, I was consumed with an uncontrollable desire to go out and see the wreckage.

  Although it is a dangerous road, the scenery would be beautiful if the driver dared take her eye off the road. As soon as 421 leaves the city limits on the Virginia side, it begins to climb rather gently. It meanders—that’s the only word for it. On either side the knobs rise. Because access is so difficult, houses along the way are built close to the road. Behind them bluegrass meadows often climb halfway up the hills to be met with thick forest growth of pine and tulip poplar. Here and there is a patch of tobacco. In other places the trees grow almost to the road on both sides of the highway. Sometimes mountain streams flash along beside the road. And occasionally one gets a distant glimpse of a peak.

  But it is not wise of the driver to look.

  The thing that makes Deadman’s Curve so dangerous is the fact that it comes abruptly at the end of an unusually long (for 421, that is) stretch of straight road. I am not good at estimating distances, but I should say that perhaps one thousand feet of highway precedes the turn. The road, so straight as it is, does not appear to be sloping downward as severely as it actually is. And one is not apt to realize how fast he is going. So in spite of the sign with the wiggly line and the warning that 15 MPH is safe speed, my heart has always risen to my throat every time I have gone around that sharp turn and looked down an almost sheer cliff at least one hundred feet to Willow Creek.

  This time, to be sure, I did not go around the bend, but parked a reasonable distance from it and as far over as the berm of the road would allow.

  As I approached the curve, I was impressed by the irony of the peaceful scene. To the left, hiding the curve, the trees rise high and have been taken over by kudzu, that curse of the southern states. Beyond the “jump-off” and not too far away were the trees of the other side of the ravine. And beyond that one can see the mountains along the Clinch.

  I walked along the rocky berm toward the infamous curve. I could see that the guardrail had been knocked catawampus.

  Then as I stood at the rim of the bluff and looked down, I saw the wreckage. What was left of the car stood on its nose. The lid to the luggage compartment had sprung open and yawned at me like a baby blue jay waiting to be fed.

  There is a road along Willow Creek—so far down that it gives one the impression of looking at a topographical model. And as I watched, a wrecker came along to remove the remains of the car.

  There was the rattle of a chain. The hook was attached and the mechanism made its sound as the wreck was reeled in with a further crunch of metal on stones. At last it was on the road and on its way somewhere.

  It had been a black car—probably nondescript. I went back to my own car and returned home.

  Shortly after dinner Henry and I were relaxing in the den when the phone rang. It was Manley from the Banner-Democrat.

  “Mrs. Delaporte?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you aware that Larry Highsmith, whom you identified yesterday as having García’s coat in his possession, was shot in the head before his car crashed?”

  I had not precisely identified Highsmith as having Garcia’s coat, but I was so taken by surprise and so interested in the news that I merely answered, “No!”

  “The coroner reported it today about four o’clock. A thirty-thirty bullet struck him in the left temple and killed him instantly.”

  There was a pause. What else could there be? I could think of nothing at all to say.

  “Are you still convinced that Highsmith was García’s murderer?” Manley asked.

  “I am not,” I said. “I never was. What gave you that idea?”

  “I believe it was the sheriff.”

  “You asked him if I was satisfied?”

  “Yes, and he assured me that you were.”

  “Well, I am not satisfied.”

  “Do you have any evidence, other than the fact that Highsmith himself has just been murdered, to indicate that he did not murder García?”

  “Mr. Manley, I am not the sheriff,” I said.

  He laughed. “No, but you would be a be
tter sheriff than he is.”

  I laughed back. “I think you mean that for faint praise.” “I’ll ask you again. Do you have any evidence about this murder? Was it connected with Highsmith’s possession of García’s jacket?”

  “Now, Mr. Manley,” I replied, “we know the coat belonged to Luis Garcia because of the Santa Barbara label sewed inside it. The only thing I did was to trace Garcia, find out that he was located in Santa Barbara, and, well, maneuver Gilroy into an admission of his identity.”

  “And that’s all you have to tell me?”

  “When and if I know any more, I shall certainly tell you about it,” I said. “Now, tell me something. Did the investigators find any drugs on the body or in the car?”

  “Why do you ask me that?”

  “Because I want to know.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I have my reasons. Just tell me if they found any drugs.”

  “It is interesting that you should ask. There was a nice largish package that was at first taken to be cocaine. But it turned out to be washing soda. Now, do you have something to tell me?”

  “When I know something, you will be the first to hear it,” I said, and that concluded the call.

  I went back to the den and told Henry that Highsmith had been killed by a thirty-thirty bullet. He pretended he wasn’t surprised, but I know he was.

  “Why in the world?” I asked.

  Henry laid down his book. “You’re why,” he said. “You saw that jacket. You reported it to Gilroy. He actually put out a description of the jacket. The word got back to persons unknown, who did Highsmith in.”

  But wasn’t it just a bit excessive? Why couldn’t the coat simply be destroyed? And even if I had recognized Highsmith from that mere glimpse of him under the streetlight in front of Dan’s Snooker Parlor, wouldn’t it have been simpler and more satisfactory from Highsmith’s point of view if Highsmith merely vanished in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, or any other large city?

  “Perhaps there are other factors,” Henry offered.

  Pressed to explain, he thought for a minute and said, “Try this scenario: Suppose that Allen Comming killed Garcia. Highsmith is called in to help him dispose of the body. Afterwards, Comming tells Highsmith to get rid of García’s clothes. Five months later, Highsmith, who is something of a peacock, pulls out the suede jacket that he has stashed away and wears it to impress the doll you saw him with last week. You stir up Gilroy. Comming is maybe tired of Highsmith for some other reasons, sees his opportunity to waste his unreliable henchman and pin García’s murder on the poor sucker. Gilroy is satisfied, you are satisfied, and that is the end of the episode.”