Read Online The Famous Dar Murder Mystery by Graham Landrum - Free Book Online Page A

annual meeting at the national headquarters of the DAR in Washington.
    â€œShe 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
    Â 
    Â 
    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:

    BELGRADE BREAD
    Cream 5 eggs and 2 cups sugar. Add 4 oz. finely cut or ground almonds, 1 t. nutmeg, ¼ t. cloves, 1 t. baking powder, 4 oz. citron finely
cut. Then add 3 to 4 cups flour to make a stiff batter. Roll out to thickness of ¼ in. and cut into desired shapes. Paint top of each cookie with beaten whole egg to which a little milk may be added. Bake in 350° oven 8 to 10 minutes. They should not be baked too long because they become hard.

    So that was the recipe I made; and I put the cookies in a nice box, prettied myself up, and went down to the newspaper office. And there was Mr. Manley; he said he had been expecting me. I told him he could always count on me and that I was sure I could count on him.
    He just opened up the box and started in, and all the other people in the office had learned what to expect whenever I came in; and they came over right away. So I guess I didn’t make too many cookies after all.
    We had just a wonderful time, and I liked the other reporters and secretaries and so on just as much as I liked Mr. Manley. I don’t know whether they liked me, but I must say that they liked my Belgrade bread. Then Mr. Manley said, “You know, I put that story on the wire.”
    I didn’t really know what that meant.
    â€œI sent it out on the wire,” he said. “It will go to the Associated Press.”
    I guess my eyes must have got big about that time, because he said, “Oh, not all the papers will print it, but some will, and you’ll get lots of inches.”
    My! I never expected anything like that, and I began to think what I could do for that nice young man. So I promised him I would keep the goodies coming just as long as he did the right thing by the DAR. And he said, “I think we can do business. That sort of makes us partners, doesn’t it?”
    I said, “It sure does.”

    As I was going out, he said, “I’ll be on the lookout for the story in the exchange.” That’s the papers in other towns that exchange with the Banner-Democrat.
    About three days later, the mail began to come in. Friends from all over east Tennessee and Virginia and Kentucky and North Carolina and West Virginia began sending clippings to our members. We got clippings from Roanoke, Marion, Parsons City, Cooksport, Knoxville—just everywhere. And Alice Turner’s niece saw the story and sent it to us from Indianapolis! When we got all the clippings together, we had almost two yards of publicity; and I felt sure it would all count because it was about our chapter and our project and all.

IDENTIFYING THE BODY OF LUÍS