~ The Mystery Club Solves A Murder ~

by

Harley L. Sachs

One

For the first morning in a week it was not raining in Portland. At last Mary Higgins might catch sight of the rumored Peregrine falcons.

Wearing her green, hooded rain jacket and using her gold-headed cane for support she had climbed painfully up the South Broadway grade to a vantage point for a clear view. There was another spot higher up, but the climb was formidable. The shoulder of the winding road was so narrow, there was no room for a person on foot to stand out of the way of the traffic.

Mary had forgotten how heavy her binoculars could be. Her grand-nephew Charlie had given her a lightweight pair of ten power birder’s binoculars for her eightieth birthday, but she found them difficult to hold steady. Instead she stuck to the seven by fifties, a sentimental souvenir from her days as an RAF pilot in World War II. That was nearly sixty years ago. Her legs were a lot stronger then, and her hands steady, not trembling with the onset of Parkinson’s. You had to be tough to be old.

She rested against the guardrail at the edge of the steep street to catch her breath. The Plaza was down below, a long, twelve story zigzag building that housed her and nearly three hundred other retirees, mostly women. From here she could see the Plaza roof, look down into the parking lot between it and the hill where she now stood, and beyond to the Willamette River and southeast Portland. On clear days Mount Hood was visible, its classic volcano shape crowned with snow all year.

A bird soared above one of the Oregon Health Sciences University buildings high on the hill above her. Was it the falcon someone had said they saw? There was a nesting pair in a skyscraper near Lloyd’s Center on the other side of the river, doing a nice business in pigeons. But what about this side of the Willamette?

Even without using the binoculars Mary Higgins could see it was a hawk. She wasn’t sure which. Occasionally a flock of sea gulls would circle the park after heavy rains, foraging for earthworms driven up out of their hiding places in the turf. Today there were no gulls, but a pair of crows were interested in something. What was it?

One of the crows settled cautiously on the Plaza parapet. She focused the seven by fifties on the parapet. The roof was covered with heavy, red gravel, except where it was set up as a patio. On days when it wasn’t raining, residents could sun themselves and enjoy the view.

The other crow was interested in something down on the roof between the old wing of the Plaza and the new extension. Mary could see the notch between the two sections of the Plaza from this vantage point. What were the crows after?

Mary Higgins leaned over the guardrail to get a better angle with the binoculars. Now the other crow had left the parapet and joined its partner to peck at something. She knew crows were garbage birds, carrion eaters, but there was little road kill here in the city. Crows were reduced to foraging the Park Blocks trash cans or the Dumpsters. What had they found on the Plaza roof?

It looked like a bundle of laundry, something white. If she could just hold the binoculars steady... Crows wouldn’t be interested in a bundle of rags. Mary shifted her weight and steadied her elbows against her stomach. It looked like...

The blast of a car horn and the crunch of gravel startled her. An SUV with big wheels and a thumping stereo narrowly missed her. She felt herself teetering, about to fall over the railing. Her cane slipped off the guardrail and clattered onto the gravel. She pulled herself back to safety doubly chilled. It was not only the fear of being struck by a car or falling down the bluff that sent a chill across her fragile shoulders. It was what the crows had found--it looked like a body on the roof.

Mary Higgins picked up her cane and hurried down the Broadway grade as fast as her painful knees would tolerate. She had seen corpses before, at the airfield in England--shattered airmen dragged from burning aircraft--and remembered the stench of scorched bodies. The associations jumbled together in her mind--the fear, the horror, and the loss.

She needed a closer look at the crows’ find to make sure. The view from the roof should do it.

 Two

Mary Higgins was breathless when she got back to the Plaza. As the crow flies, the distance between her lookout on South Broadway and the Plaza was only a couple of hundred yards. Measured step by painful step, aided by a cane, it was a long climb down the hill and around the corner, then back up the steep driveway.

Only half an hour ago she had passed through the lobby and greeted Tad, the personable young receptionist. Now, filled with urgency and dread, she was out of sync.

Tad noticed her agitation. "Something wrong, Mrs. Higgins?"

"Might be," she answered as she pushed the elevator button.

"Did you find your Peregrine falcon?"

"No. Something else." If she said she’d seen a body on the roof Tad might think she was dotty. At the Plaza it was acceptable to be eccentric, but not to lose your grip on reality. She wasn’t ready to be moved into assisted living yet.

Mercifully, the elevator door slid open. Mary Higgins punched the button for the roof and rested on the stool to catch her breath. Her knee throbbed and the binoculars felt as heavy as a cement block around her neck.

The elevator reached the roof and the door opened onto a deserted workroom where the maintenance people kept tools and coils of cable. Mary recognized the big coil of rope the daredevil window washers used when they let themselves down the side of the Plaza in a bosun’s chair. Now the presence of death made this deserted place seem sinister.

She pushed open the door to the roof, crossed the flagstone patio, and picked her way on the uneven gravel to the parapet where the crow had stood. Then she looked down.

The crows were down below, watchful, nervous, and pecking at something. Mary Higgins made sure the strap of her binoculars was secure around her neck before she leaned over to focus them. She had a moment of vertigo and fear. It was a long way down.

She was right. It was a body, a woman in a bathrobe.

There was a telephone in the workspace by the elevator. Mary picked it up and dialed zero.

Tad answered. "Front desk."

"This is Mary Higgins, Tad. I’m up on the roof. You may not believe this, Tad, but there’s a corpse on the roof between the two wings."

"A corpse? You’re not making this up, Mrs. Higgins? This isn’t something you cooked up for the Mystery Club?"

"No, Tad, this is real. Call the police and tell them to come right away. I think they’ll need a ladder to get up there from the parking lot."

Mary Higgins returned to the edge of the roof. She could feel her heart pounding. Lest she have a dizzy spell and join the corpse down below, she stepped back from the parapet. Tad was right. This was something for the Mystery Club. How exciting!

A group of six Plaza residents, they met every Monday afternoon in the Plaza library. They were all women, the oldest over ninety, the youngest in her seventies. Besides Mary Higgins, the Mystery Club comprised of diminutive Wilma Peters, who lived on the twelfth floor, stout Roberta Nelson, who suffered from osteoporosis, Ann Chambers, whose body was so frail she needed a walker to get about, Katherine Seller, a feisty member of the Plaza Board, and Viola Cartwright, who was nearly blind from macro degeneration. Except for Katherine Seller, who was from New York, they were all native Oregonians, some whose grandparents had made the perilous journey westward on the Oregon trail. The special interest that brought them together once a week was women mystery writers like Mary Higgins Clark and female detectives like Mrs. Polifax. A body on the roof was a perfect mystery for them to solve.