The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  She looked sad again. “I guess that’s why I was talking about Dick Clark. So we wouldn’t have to talk about Linda.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She sighed. “I just have to get used to it, I guess.” Then she looked at Sophia. “Isn’t she sweet? We called her our Christmas kitten.”

  “She sure is.”

  “That’s what I started to tell you. One day Linda and I were downstairs and there Sophia was. Just this little lost kitten. So we both sort of adopted her. We’d leave our doors open so Sophia could just wander back and forth between apartments. Sometimes she slept here, sometimes she slept over there.” She raised her eyes from the kitten and looked at me. “He killed her.”

  “Rick?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Why do I say that? Are you kidding? You should’ve seen the arguments they had.”

  “He ever hit her?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “He ever threaten her?”

  “All the time.”

  “You know why?” I said.

  “Because he was so jealous of her. He used to sit across the street at night and just watch her front window. He’d sit there for hours.”

  “Would she be in there at the time?”

  “Oh, sure. He always claimed she had this big dating life on the side but she never did.”

  “Anything special happen lately between them?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “I guess not.”

  “She gave him back his engagement ring.”

  “And that—”

  “He smashed out her bedroom window with his fist. This was in the middle of the night and he was really drunk. I called the police on him. Just because he’s a Whitney doesn’t mean he can break the rules anytime he feels like it.”

  I’d been going to ask her if she was from around here but the resentment in her voice about the Whitneys answered my question. The Whitneys had been the valley’s most imperious family for a little more than a century now.

  “Did the police come?”

  “Sykes himself.”

  “And he did what?”

  “Arrested him. Took him in.” She gave me a significant look with her deep blue eyes. “He was relishing every minute, too. A Sykes arresting a Whitney, I mean. He was having a blast.”

  So then I asked her about the night of the murder. We spent twenty minutes on the subject but I didn’t learn much. She’d been in her apartment all night watching TV and hadn’t heard anything untoward. But when she got up to go to work in the morning and didn’t hear Linda moving around in her apartment, she knocked, and, when there wasn’t any answer, went in. Linda lay dead, the left side of her head smashed in, sprawled in a white bra and half-slip in front of the fireplace that was just like Bobbi’s.

  “Maybe I had my TV up too loud,” Bobbi said. “I love westerns and it was Gunsmoke night. It was a good one, too. But I keep thinking that maybe if I hadn’t played the TV so loud, I could’ve heard her—”

  I shook my head. “Don’t start doing that to yourself, Bobbi, or it’ll never end. If only I’d done this, if only I’d done that. You did everything you could.”

  She sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Mind one more question?”

  She shrugged and smiled. “You can see I’ve got a pretty busy social calendar.”

  “I want to try and take Rick out of the picture for a minute. Will you try?”

  “You mean as a suspect?”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “All right. Now, who are three people who had something against Linda—or Rick?”

  “Why Rick?”

  “Because maybe the killer wanted to make it look as if Rick did it.”

  “Oh, I see.” Then: “I’d have to say Gwen. Gwen Dawes. She was Rick’s former girlfriend. She always blamed Linda for taking him away. You know, they hadn’t been going together all that long, Rick and Linda, I mean. Gwen would still kind of pick arguments with her when she’d see them in public places.”

  “Gwen ever come over here and pick an argument?”

  “Once, I guess.”

  “Remember when?”

  “Couple months ago, maybe.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing much. She and a couple of girlfriends were pretty drunk, and they came up on the front porch and started writing things on the wall. It was juvenile stuff. Most of us graduated from high school two years ago but we’re still all kids, if you see what I mean.”

  I wrote Gwen’s name down and said, “Anybody else who bothered Linda?”

  “Paul Walters, for sure.”

  “Paul Walters?”

  “Her old boyfriend. He used to wait until Rick left at night and then he’d come over and pick a fight with her.”

  “Would she let him in?”

  “Sometimes. Then there was Millie Styles. The wife of the man Linda worked for.”

  “Why didn’t she like Linda?”

  “She accused Linda of trying to steal her husband.”

  “Was she?”

  “You had to know Linda.”

  “I see.”

  “She wasn’t a rip or anything.”

  “Rip?”

  “You know, whore.”

  “But she—”

  “—could be very flirtatious.”

  “More than flirtatious?” She shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  “Maybe with Mr. Styles?”

  “Maybe. He’s an awfully handsome guy. He looks like Fabian.”

  She wasn’t kidding. They weren’t very far out of high school.

  That was when I felt a scratching on my chin and I looked straight down into the eager, earnest, and heartbreakingly sweet face of Sophia.

  “She likes to kiss noses the way Eskimos do,” Bobbi said.

  We kissed noses.

  Then I set Sophia down and she promptly put a paw in my coffee cup.

  “Sophia!” Bobbi said. “She’s always putting her paw in wet things. She’s obsessed, the little devil.”

  Sophia paid us no attention. Tail switching, she walked across the coffee table, her left front paw leaving coffee imprints on the surface.

  I stood up. “I appreciate this, Bobbi.”

  “You can save yourself some work.”

  “How would I do that?”

  “There’s a skating party tonight. Everybody we’ve talked about is going to be there.” She gave me another one of her significant looks. “Including me.”

  “Then I guess that’s a pretty good reason to go, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Starts at six-thirty. It’ll be very dark by then. You know how to skate?”

  I smiled. “I wouldn’t exactly call it skating.”

  “Then what would you call it?”

  “Falling down is the term that comes to mind,” I said.

  3.

  Rick Whitney was even harder to love than his aunt.

  “When I get out of this place, I’m going to take that hillbilly and push him off Indian Cliff.”

  In the past five minutes, Rick Whitney, of the long blond locks and relentlessly arrogant blue-eyed good looks, had also threatened to shoot, stab, and set fire to our beloved chief of police, Cliff Sykes, Jr. As an attorney, I wouldn’t advise any of my clients to express such thoughts, especially when they were in custody, being held for premeditated murder (or as my doctor friend Stan Greenbaum likes to say, “pre-medicated murder”). “Rick, we’re not getting anywhere.”

  He turned on me again. He’d turned on me three or four times already, pushing his face at me, jabbing his finger at me.

  “Do you know what it’s like for a Whitney to be in jail? Why, if my grandfather were still alive, he’d come down here and shoot Sykes right on the spot.”

  “Rick?”

  “What?”

  “Sit down and shut up.”

  “You’re telling me to shut u
p?”

  “Uh-huh. And to sit down.”

  “I don’t take orders from people like you.”

  I stood up. “Fine. Then I’ll leave.”

  He started to say something nasty, but just then a cloud passed over the sun and the six cells on the second floor of the police station got darker.

  He said, “I’ll sit down.”

  “And shut up?”

  It was a difficult moment for a Whitney. Humility is even tougher for them than having a tooth pulled. “And shut up.”

  So we sat down, him on the wobbly cot across from my wobbly cot, and we talked as two drunks three cells away pretended they weren’t listening to us.

  “A Mrs. Mawbry who lives across the street saw you running out to your car about eleven p.m. the night of the murder. Dr. Mattingly puts the time of death at right around that time.”

  “She’s lying.”

  “You know better than that.”

  “They just hate me because I’m a Whitney.”

  It’s not easy going through life being of a superior species, especially when all the little people hate you for it.

  “You’ve got fifteen seconds,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “To stop stalling and tell me the truth. You went to the apartment and found her dead, didn’t you? And then you ran away.”

  I watched the faces of the two eavesdropping winos. It was either stay up here in the cells, or use the room downstairs that I was sure Cliff Sykes, Jr., had bugged.

  “Ten seconds.”

  He sighed and said, “Yeah, I found her. But I didn’t kill her.”

  “You sure of that?”

  He looked startled. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means were you drinking that evening, and did you have any sort of alcoholic blackout? You’ve been known to tip a few.”

  “I had a couple beers earlier. That was it. No alcoholic blackout.”

  “All right,” I said. “Now tell me the rest of it.”

  “Wonder if the state’ll pass that new law,” Chief Cliff Sykes, Jr., said to me as I was leaving the police station by the back door.

  “I didn’t know that you kept up on the law, Cliff, Jr.”

  He hated it when I added the Jr. to his name, but since he was about to do a little picking on me, I decided to do a little picking on him. With too much Brylcreem—Cliff, Jr., apparently never heard the part of the jingle that goes “A little dab’ll do ya”—and his wiry moustache, he looks like a bar rat all duded up for Saturday night. He wears a khaki uniform that Warner Brothers must have rejected for an Errol Flynn western. The epaulets alone must weigh twenty-five pounds each.

  “Yep, next year they’re goin’ to start fryin’ convicts instead of hanging them.”

  The past few years in Iowa, we’d been debating which was the more humane way to shuffle off this mortal coil. At least when the state decides to be the shuffler and make you the shufflee.

  “And I’ll bet you think that Rick Whitney is going to be one of the first to sit in the electric chair, right?”

  He smiled his rat smile, sucked his toothpick a little deeper into his mouth. “You said it, I didn’t.”

  There’s a saying around town that money didn’t change the Sykes family any—they’re still the same mean, stupid, dishonest, and uncouth people they’ve always been.

  “Well, I hate to spoil your fun, Cliff, Jr., but he’s going to be out of here by tomorrow night.”

  He sucked on his toothpick some more. “You and what army is gonna take him out of here?”

  “Won’t take an army, Cliff, Jr., I’ll just find the guilty party and Rick’ll walk right out of here.”

  He shook his head. “He thinks his piss don’t stink because he’s a Whitney. This time he’s wrong.”

  4.

  The way I figure it, any idiot can learn to skate standing up. It takes a lot more creativity and perseverance to skate on your knees and your butt and your back.

  I was putting on quite a show. Even five-year-olds were pointing at me and giggling. One of them had an adult face pasted on his tiny body. I wanted to give him the finger but I figured that probably wouldn’t look quite right, me being twenty-six and an attorney and all.

  Everything looked pretty tonight, gray smoke curling from the big log cabin where people hung out putting on skates and drinking hot cider and warming themselves in front of the fireplace. Christmas music played over the loudspeakers, and every few minutes you’d see a dog come skidding across the ice to meet up with its owners. Tots in snowsuits looking like Martians toddled across the ice in the wake of their parents.

  The skaters seemed to come in four types: the competitive skaters who were just out tonight to hone their skills; the show-offs who kept holding their girlfriends over their heads; the lovers who were melting the ice with their scorching looks; and the junior-high kids who kept trying to knock everybody down accidentally. I guess I should add the seniors; they were the most fun to watch, all gray hair and dignity as they made their way across the ice arm in arm. They probably came here thirty or forty years ago when Model-Ts had lined the parking area, and when the music had been supplied by Rudy Vallee. They were elegant and touching to watch here on the skating rink tonight.

  I stayed to the outside of the rink. I kept moving because it was at most ten above zero. Falling down kept me pretty warm, too.

  I was just getting up from a spill when I saw a Levi’d leg—two Levi’d legs—standing behind me. My eyes followed the line of legs upwards and there she was. It was sort of like a dream, actually, a slightly painful one because I’d dreamt it so often and so uselessly.

  There stood the beautiful and elegant Pamela Forrest. In her white woolen beret, red cable-knit sweater, and jeans, she was the embodiment of every silly and precious holiday feeling. She was even smiling.

  “Well, I’m sure glad you’re here,” she said.

  “You mean because you want to go out?”

  “No, I mean because I’m glad there’s somebody who’s even a worse skater than I am.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  She put out a hand and helped me up. I brushed the flesh of her arm—and let my nostrils be filled with the scent of her perfume—and I got so weak momentarily I was afraid I was going to fall right back down.

  “You have a date?”

  I shook my head. “Still doing some work for Judge Whitney.”

  She gave my arm a squeeze. “Just between you and me, McCain, I hope you solve one of these cases yourself someday.”

  She was referring to the fact that in every case I’d worked on, Judge Whitney always seemed to solve it just as I was starting to figure out who the actual culprit was. I had a feeling, though, that this case I’d figure out all by my lonesome.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Judge Whitney as upset as she was today,” I said.

  “I’m worried about her. This thing with Rick, I mean. It isn’t just going up against the Sykes family this time. The family honor’s at stake.”

  I looked at her. “You have a date?”

  And then she looked sad, and I knew what her answer was going to be.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Ah. But Stewart’s going to be here.”

  “I think so. I’m told he comes here sometimes.”

  “Boy, you’re just as pathetic as I am.”

  “Well, that’s a nice thing to say.”

  “You can’t have him any more than I can have you. But neither one of us can give it up, can we?”

  I took her arm and we skated. We actually did a lot better as a team than we did individually. I was going to mention that to her but I figured she would think I was just being corny and coming on to her in my usual clumsy way. If only I were as slick as Elvis in those movies of his where he sings a couple of songs and beats the crap out of every bad guy in town, working in a few lip locks with nubile females in the interim.

  I didn’t recognize them at first. T
heir skating costumes, so dark and tight and severe, gave them the aspect of Russian ballet artists. People whispered at them as they soared past, and it was whispers they wanted.

  David and Millie Styles were the town’s “artistic fugitives,” as one of the purpler of the paper’s writers wrote once. Twice a year they ventured to New York to bring radical new items back to their interior decorating “salon,” as they called it, and they usually brought back a lot of even more radical attitudes and poses. Millie had once been quoted in the paper as saying that we should have an “All Nude Day” twice a year in town; and David was always standing on the library steps waving copies of banned books in the air and demanding that they be returned to library shelves. The thing was, I agreed with the message, it was the messengers I didn’t care for. They were wealthy, attractive dabblers who loved to outrage and shock. In a big city, nobody would’ve paid them any attention. Out here, they were celebrities.

  “God, they look great, don’t they?” Pamela said.

  “If you like the style.”

  “Skin-tight, all-black skating outfits. Who else would’ve thought of something like that?”

  “You look a lot better.”

  She favored me with a forehead kiss. “Oh God, McCain, I sure wish I could fall in love with you.”

  “I wish you could, too.”

  “But the heart has its own logic.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  “Peyton Place.”

  “That’s right.”

  Peyton Place had swept through town two years ago like an army bent on destroying everything in its path. The fundamentalists not only tried to get it out of the library, they tried to ban its sale in paperback. The town literary lions, such as the Styleses, were strangely moot. They did not want to be seen defending something as plebeian as Grace Metalious’s book. I was in a minority. I not only liked it, I thought it was a good book. A true one, as Hemingway often said.

  On the far side of the rink, I saw David Styles skate away from his wife and head for the warming cabin.

  She skated on alone.

  “Excuse me. I’ll be back,” I said.

  It took me two spills and three near-spills to reach Millie Styles.

  “Evening,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, staring at me. “You.” Apparently I looked like something her dog had just dragged in from the backyard. Something not quite dead yet.