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Authors: Graham Landrum

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BOOK: The Rotary Club Murder Mystery
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“Yes, I judge you. But then you didn't have the training we had, and that's not your fault.”
“I am not proud of myself,” I said, “but it's not because I was unfaithful to Holly. For I was faithful to him. I was faithful to him as long as he was faithful to me.” And then I got on with my story.
Holly's latest interest was Kim Mayburn. She is a divorcee who came back here a little over a year ago. Her father was the state senator from this district for many years. I think it gave Holly a kick to think he was bedding a senator's daughter.
So, about that time Clifford Avery came atong—from Baltimore—Ivy League—very suave and good-looking—self-assured—all the things Holly would have liked to be if he could have. And Cliff liked what he saw in me. I met him in Louisville at the Derby. We amused each other and finally fell into his bed.
“If you want to know where I was on the night of May 26,” I said, “I was on a yacht with Cliff; and if his word is not enough, then I have no alibi.” I paused, and Mrs. Bushrow seemed to be considering this.
I resumed my explanation.
After Holly's funeral, Dan Blake, my lawyer, and I opened Holly's bank box. It was jammed with all the stuff that might be expected—birth certificate, his medals, papers of all sorts, fire insurance, and so on. We found the policy made out to me as beneficiary; it had been in effect since 1981. But we had not expected another policy for $500,000 made out to the benefit of Kimberlin Mayburn. For a minute or two, I was stunned. It
was humiliating and unfair after all I had put up with. And then it just hurt. I couldn't keep the tears back, and I'm afraid I was hysterical.
Poor Dan! There we were in the bank vault together. It must have been embarrassing for him. He is such a nice little man with a nice little wife and four children! And then after I calmed down, he pointed out that we had not found the will.
It was just as if a great dark cloud was hovering over me. I didn't know just what it meant, but I felt that a will absolutely had to be found. Yet I knew Chuck well enough that I was confident the will, if there was one, would have been in that box.
Dan and I went immediately to Holly's office, and with Paula Stout, Holly's secretary, we went through every file, every drawer, absolutely everything in the office. Then we came out to the house and went through everything here.
“Who was the lawyer that drew up the will?” Dan asked.
“Wasn't it you?” I asked.
“No.”
I was positive that Holly had never gone to any lawyer other than Dan.
“Then there is no will, is there?”
“It begins to look that way,” he said.
“But what happens if there is no will?”
“The statutes of North Carolina take effect. There will be distribution among the heirs at law.”
“And they are?”
“Yourself and Holly's children.”
That was when the real panic set in. Holly had always been reckless. When he got money, he spent it——clothes, cars, our house. And he was reckless with credit, too. When he began developing Hollondale Estates, he plunged pretty deeply. I did not know how far. But in the bank box, we had found note after note—all owed to the Estonia Savings and Loan. The obligations were all in the name of Hollonbrook Realty, Inc., or Hollondale
Estates, Inc. But if all those notes were foreclosed, Holly's personal estate would amount to his checking account and the residence, and there is still a lien on that.
My Porsche is in my name, and I have some jewelry and a few furs. Whatever may be left over after Holly's debts are settled would be divided four ways. And I would have practically nothing from that.
And, the life insurance won't pay off in case of suicide!
That was my story, and that was why I was staking everything on Mrs. Bushrow's ability to prove that Chuck died, not by his own hand but at the hands of a murderer.
“Darling,” Mrs. Bushrow said after she had considered this a little while, “with your husband out of the picture, are you going to marry this Mr. Avery, I think you said his name was?”
I took a deep breath. “There is no marriage for me in this,” I said.
“Why not? You speak of this gentleman's cultivation and good looks. And a man with a yacht—and I must say, sweetheart, you seem to have thought him ideal. Is there something I am missing?”
“You are missing something,” I admitted. “He has a wife, and the money is hers. Cliff is strongly attracted to me, but he could never live without money—lots of money.”
“Well, dear,” my visitor said regretfully, “if an old woman can say so, you seem to have driven your ducks to a mighty poor market.”
“To put it mildly,” I added.
“Don't worry about that now,” she said. “It was murder, all right; we are going to prove it.”
There was one more thing that I had for Mrs. Bushrow, and I placed an envelope in her hand.
From this point on, Mrs. Bushrow became the dominant party in our interview. Consequently, it seems better to turn the narrative over to her.
>>
Harriet Bushrow
<<
 
 
 
 
 
T
hat was quite a story Alice told me—all that about “open marriage” and the missing will and the insurance policy. She just told it all, and I have to hand it to her—she was very frank. Then, after she got through with her other revelations, she put a brown envelope into my hand.
“This was in the bank box,” she said.
Out of the envelope, I drew a yellowed newspaper clipping. It was from the Roanoke, Virginia, paper, dated April 10, 1971. There was a picture of a woman—about like most pictures in the papers. The story said: KITTY HERBERT RELEASED FROM PEN. “Kitty Cornelia Herbert, who was convicted of the stabbing death of her husband, the late J. H. Herbert, in 1959, has been released from Beckwith Prison for Women after having served nine years of a twenty-year sentence. The public will remember that Herbert was found guilty on all charges but pleaded extenuating circumstances, testifying that James Howard Herbert, the murdered man, had habitually forced her to engage in demeaning and dangerous sex acts. Because of the husband's position as justice of the peace in Hainsford County, the case received wide notice.” In the margin was penciled “Caroline Rawlings.”
I couldn't see what this had to do with anything, and my brain was just full of so many other things that I just had to know about. So I merely put the clipping back into the envelope and laid it on the little lamp table beside me while my mind went on to other things.
No will! That meant that good old Holly's children were involved. Whether or not there was a will, surely they would expect something to come to them. Would they have known that their father was in debt and that there wasn't much estate for them to inherit? From the looks of things—Hollondale Estates, you see, and being on the board of the country club, and district governor—I didn't have any trouble imagining how someone on the outside would get the idea that Charles Hollonbrook had left an estate like the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
So I asked.
“Tell me about that first wife and the children.”
Alice made an ugly face that put me into the picture but didn't give me any of the details.
“Holly has taken a lot of criticism from them—and it is all unfair.”
“I suppose he paid support?”
“Yes, regularly without fail.”
“I understand the mother has exclusive custody.”
“No, it wasn't that way,” Alice said. “Right after the divorce, Holly had no way to take care of the children. So he left them with Linda. And she was agreeable. Then when we got married, he decided to exercise his rights and tried having Jimmy, the oldest—the other two are girts—spend the summer with us. I did everything I knew to be, if not a second mother, at least a friend. Jimmy was belligerent and stubborn, and Holly was afraid to punish him because the boy was so high-strung.
“The second summer, he came and stayed a week. Linda had stuffed his head with so many lies about Holly and me that we couldn't do a thing with the boy. When he hit his father on the
nose with a junior baseball bat, Holly sent him back to his mother.
“She has made a real mess of him. The school notified Holly that Jimmy was on pot, and Holly raised a stink with Linda about that. She denied it. And that's pretty much where we left it. Then last year, Jimmy wanted to go to State, and Holly gave him the money. But Jimmy failed all his courses the first semester. So he came home and wanted money to go to California to study something about television. Holly said NO in big capitals, and they actually had a fight. Now Linda has told everyone that Holly refused to help Jimmy.”
“Aha!” I said. “When did this fight happen?”
“About the end of March.”
“Was that the last time he was in the house?”
“Well, no,” she said. “As a matter of fact, he came back a week or two later whining and halfway apologizing. This time, he wanted money to get his car out of the pound … . Oh, yes, his father bought him the car, but he said Jimmy would just have to work to get the money to get it out of the pound.”
Well, I found all of that interesting. “How long was Jimmy in the house at that time?”
“Why, I don't know,” she said. “An hour—hour and a half. I could hear him arguing with Holly from the bedroom where I was reading.”
“Where did your husband keep his guns?” was my next question.
“Oh my God, I never thought of that! You don't think …” I waited for her to complete her question. During the pause, I could see her adjusting to the idea.
“I see what you mean. Jimmy was an heir. But would he go that far?”
“Oh, my dear,” I said, “with all this television, these young people get to hear and see about everything, and I'm just old-fashioned enough to say, ‘Monkey see, monkey do.'”
“But he would have no way of knowing there was no will.”
“Wouldn't need to,” I said. “He's his father's son. He would expect to get something from his father's estate, will or no will. And even if you told him, he would never be able to understand that his father was financially strapped. Now the guns. Where did your husband keep them?”
They were in the basement, but she said that Charles had kept them locked up. I asked if I could have a look, and she said I could. So we went down some steep stairs from the kitchen. And when we got down to the basement, there was a regular shooting range down there with special lights trained on the targets. It was just elaborate.
“He planned this house around his pistol range,” Alice said. “That's why the house is so broad across the front. He had his pistol-club buddies come down here once a week. They shot away for more than an hour sometimes. That's why I made Holly use silencers.”
And that explained something that had been troubling me from the very start.
There were rifles locked in a regular gun cabinet with a glass door, and beneath that there were locked drawers for the pistols.
“And where are the keys kept?” I asked.
“In a drawer in Holly's bedroom.”
“And you were in your bedroom when the boy was last here?”
“Yes.”
“Reading?”
“Yes—reading and talking on the phone.”
“Is your bedroom closer to the living room than your husband's?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And would the boy have to pass your door to get to his father's bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“And was the door open?”
“I believe it was.”
“Would you have seen the boy if he passed your door?”
Well, it turned out that she wouldn't have seen him because the head of her bed, where she was reading, was against the wall where the door was. So it was plain as day that the boy could have gotten the pistol, ammunition, and silencer. Whether he would know when his father was going to be in Borderville or not, I couldn't say. But perhaps that would come out later.
“Now I want to know about the house key. Where do you keep it?” I asked.
“I keep mine in my purse, and Holly kept his on his key ring. Martha comes once a week and has her own key,” she explained, “and, oh yes, Paula.”
“Paula?”
“Paula Stout. She's Holly's secretary. She feeds the dog when both of us are gone.”
Now I'm a back number, and I am the first to say so, but I have read about all the things that cause feminists to complain—that now secretaries won't make the coffee and won't do this and won't do that. So naturally I raised my eyebrows at a secretary who fed the dog.
“Oh, Paula took care of everything when both of us were gone. She's been in the office ever since I left it.”
So this Paula was in a position to know that Charles Hollonbrook was going to be in Borderville on May 26 to 27 and probably made the reservation at the Borderville Inn. And she knew Alice would be away—probably even knew why—and with the run of the house she could undoubtedly find the key to the drawers where the pistols were kept. I took my little memorandum book out of my purse and put a line under Paula's name.
“Now, where can I find her?” I asked.
“At the office. She's running the office. Or she might be at
one of the Ducky's. We have three franchise shops—Ducky's, you know—the food shops. Franks, hamburgers, and sausage biscuits. With the real estate as slow as it has been, it has been very good to have Ducky's. Paula kept up with them for us when Holly was away.”
I wondered if those shops and the people who worked there might be something to look into. How many people we deal with daily whom we may offend—perhaps more seriously than we know! But just then I wanted to know about Paula Stout. Had she been another of Charles Hollonbrook's conquests?
So I asked.
“Well—” Alice said. “With Holly, it would not be out of line to think so. I have wondered about it myself. After all, he had it on with me when I was just what she is. So why not Paula? I finally decided no, there is nothing there.”
Nothing there? The way she said it left a question in my mind. And it seemed to me I had to know more about this young person who had a key and knew where the victim was going to be and when he would be there.
“Is this Paula unmarried?” I inquired.
“Yes, unmarried.”
“How old?”
“About thirty-five.”
“Does she go out with anybody?”
“No boyfriend—that's what you mean, isn't it?”
Well, yes, that was what I meant. I got the impression that Alice took Paula for an old maid.
“Now, darling,” I said, “you have to tell me everything if you want me to find the killer. Why don't you think Paula had a fling with your husband?”
“Because she adored him. She has adored him for more than ten years. Holly could never be faithful to a woman for three years, let alone ten. So—they've never been to bed. At least I don't think they have. Besides, she is a Baptist.”
I don't know how Baptists get the reputation for being so
holy. Aren't they the ones that are always having to go down to the front of the church to “get right with God”? Well, if they have to get “right with God,” doesn't that mean they sometimes get “wrong with God”?
But I wrote down
Baptist
by Paula's name. And Maud is a Baptist. I was pretty sure Maud would have an opinion about Miss Stout.
“Now, let's see,” I said. “Going back to the gun club. They met once a week. Did they meet just the same when you and Mr. Hollonbrook were away?”
They did.
Then how did they get in?
It turned out that each of them had a key to the basement door. Alice led me through the furnace room and showed me the door.
“I believe you don't have neighbors on either side,” I said.
“That's right.”
“So any one of those men could get into the house without anybody seeing him and get the gun—but he wouldn't have a key to the drawers, would he?”
“No. Those are only Holly's guns in the drawers,” Alice said.
“But one of them could search through the house and find the key, couldn't he?”
“Well, no,” she answered. “When I go away, I always lock the door at the top of the stairs.”
“Maybe Paula could have unlocked it,” I suggested.
“But why would she come down here? There was no need for it.”
That was true—at least we did not know of a reason—unless she took the gun herself. But if she didn't take the gun and didn't unlock the door at the top of the stairs, the men in the pistol-shooting club could not have gotten the Hollonbrook gun without breaking the drawer open. And the drawer showed no sign of having been forced.
I will admit that it looked impossible. A man was shot in a
locked room with his own gun—that had been locked in his basement at home. And the key to that drawer was upstairs, and the door between the basement and the upstairs was locked.
It looked as though the men of the pistol club were out of it. Paula and the boy, Jim, could have gotten the gun, and Paula was in the best position to know about Charles Hollonbrook's movements, while Jimmy was angry with his father. He could have got the key to the drawer—but no! He did not have the key to the house.
“You had a key,” I said, “your husband had a key to the house, and Miss Stout had another. What about the key to the door at the top of the stairs to the basement? Where was it kept?”
BOOK: The Rotary Club Murder Mystery
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