The Happy Birthday Murder by Lee Harris

of the happiest occasions he had ever experienced.”
    “Let me ask you something, Chris. If we establish that Laura’s husband’s death is somehow connected to Darby, does that mean that Darby may have been murdered, too?”
    “I think someone may have contributed to his death, not that someone shot him or anything like that, but that in some way this person prevented Darby from being found.”
    “I guess that means I have some unhappy times ahead of me, thinking about how he was treated.”
    “Does that change how you feel about pursuing this?”
    “It’s too late to stop now that we’ve started. Come into the dining room. I’ve got stuff spread out all over the table.”
    Most of the things on the table were maps, interesting maps. One was an aerial view with the house Darby had started out from, the woods behind it, clearings, ponds, more woods, and a number of houses he could havereached, although they were fairly far from his starting point, a mile or more. And on the perimeter were roads. If only you knew where you were going, you could reach a road. It made the tragedy seem that much worse when you could see rescue so close at hand.
    “You know,” I said, looking at that map, “if Darby took a turn here or here,” I pointed to two places perhaps half a mile from a road, “he could have ended up on a busy highway.”
    “What are you thinking?”
    “That it’s possible, now that I see the whole layout, that he did get to a road and Larry Filmore might have picked him up.”
    “Why was Larry Filmore there?”
    “When we know that, we’ll know why he left home in the middle of the night and what the great secret in his life was. All I’m suggesting is that he may actually have been a Good Samaritan. He’s driving to meet whoever called him at home, he sees Darby at the side of the road, realizes he needs help and he’s not a threat, stops, and picks him up.”
    “Darby knew his name and my address. Why didn’t he return him to us?”
    “Because he was in a hurry. Whoever called him threatened him in some way. If he had stopped to find where Darby lived, he wouldn’t have arrived at his destination on time and something terrible would have happened. That’s my theory.”
    “So the Good Samaritan delivered my son into the hands of a killer.”
    “Possibly. Remember, that’s only one explanation of the facts. It’s equally plausible that Darby knocked on a door himself, one of these houses here.”
    “There was a lot of publicity, Chris. The police drove along roads with loudspeakers.”
    “Betty, it’s very unlikely that Larry Filmore found Darby in the woods, sat down with him and exchanged sneakers, and let him go. It defies explanation.”
    “You’re right. Their paths crossed either at someone’s house or, as you suggested, in Larry Filmore’s car. Why did Larry Filmore kill himself?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe someone made a terrible threat against his family and he knew the threat would evaporate if he was no longer living. And maybe someone very clever killed him and made it look like suicide.”
    “And Laura has no idea what this is about?”
    “Not at all. He left the house and was found a few days later in his car in his own garage, dead of a single bullet to the side of his head. The gun was next to him.”
    We stood there looking down at the dining room table with the maps spread over its entire surface. Then Betty said, “Let’s get started.”
    We folded the maps and went out to her car. This time I had come prepared for the woods. I had bought myself a small compass. With that and the maps, I had more faith in my ability to find my way back to a starting point.
    This time we didn’t start from the friend’s home. Instead, Betty drove us to a rural area at the eastern end of the map, where three houses stood along a rustic road, a few hundred feet apart from each other. The first two were brick and could have been fifteen or twenty years old, although I’m no