Mistletoe Mysteries

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “I wandered about, trying to be unnoticeable about it. There was a small coffee break, and the Santa Clauses were standing about, talking in their natural voices. During actual instruction, they practiced their ho-ho-hos a lot and talked bass. I guess it became important to talk just to make sure they had normal voices. Then they were collected and taken on a small tour. They had to know certain places in the store so they could go to their posts and leave them unobtrusively, and for a while, as they gathered, it seemed to me there were five Santa Clauses.”

  “You mean five instead of four?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the store have extra costumes?”

  “Oh, sure. A number.”

  “So that some employee could have put on a Santa Claus suit and mingled.”

  “Yes, but I can’t say for sure. That’s the point. I got a momentary impression there were five, but it was just momentary as they were leaving. I dashed after them, and then I thought, ‘No, I better take a look at the jewelry department.’ So I did, I rushed in and there was a Santa Claus standing there.”

  “The fifth one?”

  “I don’t know. I swear to you, Griswold, I can’t tell if there was a fifth one, or if there was, if the one in the jewelry department was the fifth.”

  “Was he doing anything?”

  Dan said, “Not by the time I came in. I was caught so by surprise that I just stared at him blankly and said, ‘Ho, ho, ho.’ Just automatically, you know. And he didn’t answer. That was the funniest thing of all. He didn’t answer. I’d have thought that it would be impossible for him not to answer with a ‘ho, ho, ho’ of his own. He just stared at me briefly and left in a hurry.”

  I said, “And you chased after him?”

  “No,” said Dan, looking hangdog. “I wasted time—my fault, I admit, Griswold—looking about to see if anything had been broken, disturbed. Didn’t see a thing, of course, and by the time I realized I ought to be following Santa Claus, it was too late. He had gone and eventually the others came back and there were only four.

  “I tell you, Griswold, I stood there thinking I was going crazy. Four? Five? I was ashamed to ask. And then just before they were going to call it quits for the night, in came Mamzelle, screeching again. The necklace was gone. It had been taken right out of its case. I couldn’t tell, because I hadn’t memorized all the things that were there.

  “Mamzelle was in hysterics. There had been a short in the warning system so that it was possible to open the case without sirens sounding all over the place, and if she hadn’t foolishly announced this … I think she thought she was going to be fired out of hand, and frankly I thought she deserved it, but I gathered she had been there from the year one and was a valued employee.

  “Then I mentioned that I thought there had been a ringer in the Santa Claus department, a fifth one, and right away, everyone denied it. There had only been four. All the Santa Clauses claimed they had been together at all times and there had never been a fifth. I couldn’t argue very vehemently. I hadn’t actually seen five. There had only been that fugitive impression.

  “So I mentioned the Santa Claus in the jewelry department, and that really roused hostility, because that made it look as though one of the male employees had put on a Santa Claus suit and done the job after having been alerted by Mamzelle’s gaffe. Naturally, every one of them started giving each other alibis. Not one of them, it would seem, could possibly have been out of sight of all the others. So there you are, Griswold. It turned out no one could do it.”

  I said, “Did anyone consider that it could have been an outside job. Someone sneaking in, stealing the necklace, and then leaving the store.”

  “Not a chance,” said Dan. “Doors were all locked and those alarms were working. Whoever did it had to know where the Santa Claus suits were and he had to know the warning system was out. No, it was an inside job all right.—The trouble is that I’m the one who looks bad. I had all the knowledge needed, and I was trying to muddy the waters by talking about a fifth Santa Claus and one who was inside the jewelry department. There was no one to corroborate anything I said and the natural thought, I suppose, was that I had done it. It was clear that that was what they thought.”

  “They didn’t find the necklace on you, I hope,” I said.

  “Of course not,” said Dan. “They haven’t found it at all. Frankly, I think whoever it was who did it must know the store pretty well. He had a hiding place all picked out. But that looks bad for me, too. I know the store pretty well.”

  I said, “When you saw that Santa Claus, Dan, was there anything recognizable about him?”

  “Recognizable? Come on, Griswold, you know what a Santa Claus suit is like. It covers the entire body, with padding. You wear white gloves. You’ve got a white wig, and a thick white beard. The only part of you that shows are your eyes, nose, and cheekbones. I wouldn’t be able to recognize my brother if he were dressed up like that.”

  “The nose was visible, and noses are pretty distinctive. Was it a snub nose, a long nose, a crooked nose, a blunt nose.”

  “Griswold, I can’t tell you. I explained I was caught entirely by surprise. That Santa Claus and I were together for only fifteen seconds. The only thing in the wide world I can tell is that he didn’t ho-ho-ho me. It’s just an insoluble mystery as far as I’m concerned, but not as far as anyone else is concerned. Everyone else thinks it’s me. And even if they can’t prove it, Griswold, the word will get out and I won’t get any jobs anymore. Not that I need them, you understand, but I do value my reputation and that’s shot.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Dan,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like a terrible mystery to me. I should think the solution is quite simple.”

  Dan looked up at me sharply. “Oh, come on.”

  “No, really,” I said, and I explained.

  His eyes opened wide, and as a matter of fact, when faced with exactly what had been done, the malefactor broke down and the necklace was recovered. What was most important was that Dan emerged without a stain on his character. In fact, he was viewed as the one who solved the mystery.—And that’s my Christmas story.

  “That’s your Christmas phony, Griswold,” I said angrily. “What solution are you talking about? How did you get a solution out of what you told us?”

  Griswold, who had apparently been settling down to resume his nap, snapped his eyes open again, “I can’t believe you don’t see it.”

  He looked at Jennings, then at Baranof. “Don’t you two see it, either?”

  They shook their heads.

  Griswold sighed. “The people I have to deal with.—Look, it seems quite clear that the Santa Claus costume hides everything about a person except the eyes, nose, and cheekbones. Right?”

  “Right,” we chorused.

  “Well, there’s one other thing it doesn’t hide, you idiots. It doesn’t hide the voice.”

  “The voice?”

  “Absolutely. That’s why the Santa Claus in the jewelry department didn’t go ‘ho, ho, ho.’ He couldn’t. Because he wasn’t a he. He was a woman. Mamzelle was tall. She was skinny but there was padding. Everything was covered that could be covered but she had a high-pitched voice. She couldn’t have emitted a bass ‘ho, ho, ho’ if you had pointed a gun at her, and the absence of it gave her away. She knew the warning system was off. She had gimmicked it herself. And she made the announcement concerning it and wore the suit to spread suspicion to the men.”

  Griswold smiled and lifted his glass, “Ho, ho, ho, gentlemen!”

  MARCIA MULLER

  SILENT NIGHT

  Marcia Muller says she brought Sharon McCone to life as a female private eye because she herself had gained so much similar experience as a survey researcher, extracting information from people who didn’t want to talk to her. Sharon has been delighting fans since 1977 … longer than any of the other currently active professional women detectives in the mystery field. Part of her popularity, I think, is due to the fact that she’s been endowe
d with Marcia’s own qualities of compassion and wry humor. It came as a surprise to me that Sharon has a folksinger brother-in-law who wrote a smash-hit ballad called “Cobwebs in the Attic of My Mind” … and I couldn’t have imagined the sort of Christmas his caroling would bring to his often overworked but never undercaring sister-in-law.

  “Larry, I hardly know what to say!”

  What I wanted to say was, “What am I supposed to do with this?” The object I’d just liberated from its gay red-and-gold Christmas wrappings was a plastic bag, about eight by twelve inches, packed firm with what looked suspiciously like sawdust. I turned it over in my hands, as if admiring it, and searched for some clue to its identity.

  When I looked up, I saw Larry Koslowski’s brown eyes shining expectantly; even the ends of his little handlebar mustache seemed to bristle as he awaited my reaction. “It’s perfect,” I said lamely.

  He let his bated breath out in a long sigh. “I thought it would be. You remember how you were talking about not having much energy lately? I told you to try whipping up my protein drink for breakfast, but you said you didn’t have that kind of time in the morning.”

  The conversation came back to me—vaguely. I nodded.

  “Well,” he went on, “put two tablespoons of that mixture in a tall glass, add water, stir, and you’re in business.”

  Of course—it was an instant version of his infamous protein drink. Larry was the health nut on the All Souls Legal Cooperative staff; his fervent exhortations for the rest of us to adopt better nutritional standards often fell upon deaf ears—mine included.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll try it first thing tomorrow.”

  Larry ducked his head, his lips turning up in shy pleasure beneath his straggly little mustache.

  It was late in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and the staff of All Souls was engaged in the traditional gift exchange between members who had drawn each other’s names earlier in the month. The yearly ritual extends back to the days of the co-op’s founding, when most people were too poor to give more than one present; the only rule is Keep It Simple.

  The big front parlor of the co-op’s San Francisco Victorian was crowded. People perched on the furniture or, like Larry and me, sat cross-legged on the floor, oohing and aahing over their gifts. Next to the Christmas tree in the bay window, my boss, Hank Zahn, sported a new cap and muffler, knitted for him—after great deliberation and consultation as to colors—by my assistant, Rae Kelleher. Rae, in turn, wore the scarf and cap I’d purchased (because I can’t knit to save my life) for her in the hope she would consign relics from her days at U.C. Berkeley to the trash can. Other people had homemade cookies and sinful fudge, special bottles of wine, next year’s calendars, assorted games, plants, and paperback books.

  And I had a bag of instant health drink that looked like sawdust.

  The voices in the room created such a babble that I barely heard the phone ring in the hall behind me. Our secretary, Ted Smalley, who is a compulsive answerer, stepped over me and went out to where the instrument sat on his desk. A moment later he called, “McCone, it’s for you.”

  My stomach did a little flip-flop, because I was expecting news of a personal nature that could either be very good or very bad. I thanked Larry again for my gift, scrambled to my feet, and went to take the receiver from Ted. He remained next to the desk; I’d confided my family’s problem to him earlier that week, and now, I knew, he would wait to see if he could provide aid or comfort.

  “Shari?” My younger sister Charlene’s voice was composed, but her use of the diminutive of Sharon, which no one but my father calls me unless it’s a time of crisis, made my stomach flip again.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Shari, somebody’s seen him. A friend of Ricky’s saw Mike!”

  “Where? When?”

  “Today around noon. Up there—in San Francisco.”

  I let out my breath in a sigh of relief. My fourteen-year-old nephew, oldest of Charlene and Ricky’s six kids, had run away from their home in Pacific Palisades five days ago. Now, it appeared, he was alive, if not exactly safe.

  The investigator in me counseled caution, however. “Was this friend sure it was Mike he saw?”

  “Yes. He spoke to him. Mike said he was visiting you. But afterward our friend got to thinking that he looked kind of grubby and tired, and that you probably wouldn’t have let him wander around that part of town, so he called us to check it out.”

  A chill touched my shoulder blades. “What part of town?”

  “… Somewhere near City Hall, a sleazy area, our friend said.”

  A very sleazy area, I thought. Dangerous territory to which runaways are often drawn, where boys and girls alike fall prey to pimps and pushers …

  Charlene said, “Shari?”

  “I’m still here, just thinking.”

  “You don’t suppose he’ll come to you?”

  “I doubt it, if he hasn’t already. But in case he does, there’s somebody staying at my house—an old friend who’s here for Christmas—and she knows to keep him there and call me immediately. Is there anybody else he knows here in the city? Somebody he might trust not to send him home?”

  “… I can’t think of anybody.”

  “What about that friend you spent a couple of Christmases with—the one with the two little girls who lived on Sixteenth Street across from Mission Dolores?”

  “Ginny Shriber? She moved away about four years ago.” There was a noise as if Charlene was choking back a sob. “He’s really just a little boy yet. So little, and so stubborn.”

  But stubborn little boys grow up fast on the rough city streets. I didn’t want that kind of coming-of-age for my nephew.

  “Look at the up side of this, Charlene,” I said, more heartily than I felt. “Mike’s come to the one city where you have your own private investigator. I’ll start looking for him right away.”

  It had begun with, of all things, a moped that Mike wanted for Christmas. Or maybe it had really started a year earlier, when Ricky Savage finally hit it big.

  During the first fourteen years of his marriage to my sister, Ricky had been merely another faceless country-and-western musician, playing and singing backup with itinerant bands, dreaming seemingly improbable dreams of stardom. He and Charlene had developed a reproductive pattern (and rate) that never failed to astound me, in spite of its regularity: he’d get her pregnant, go out on tour, return after the baby was born; then he’d go out again when the two o’clock feedings got to him, return when the kid was weaned, and start the whole cycle all over. Finally, after the sixth child, Charlene had wised up and gotten her tubes tied. But Ricky still stayed on the road more than at home, and still dreamed his dreams.

  But then, with money borrowed from my father on the promise that if he didn’t make it within one more year he’d give up music and go into my brother John’s housepainting business, Ricky had cut a demo of a song he’d written called “Cobwebs in the Attic of My Mind.” It was about a lovelorn fellow who, besides said cobwebs, had a “sewer that’s backed up in the cellar of his soul” and “a short in the wiring of his heart.” When I first heard it, I was certain that Pa’s money had washed down that same pipe before it clogged, but fate—perverse creature that it is—would have it otherwise. The song was a runaway hit, and more Ricky Savage hits were to follow.

  In true nouveau style, Ricky and Charlene quickly moved uptown—or in this case up the coast, from West Los Angeles to affluent Pacific Palisades. There were new cars, new furniture and clothes, a house with a swimming pool, and toys and goodies for the children. Lots of goodies, anything they wanted—until this Christmas when, for reasons of safety, Charlene had balked at letting Mike have the moped. And Mike, headstrong little bastard that he was, had taken his life’s savings of some fifty-five dollars and hitched away from home on the Pacific Coast Highway.

  It was because of a goddamned moped that I was canceling my Christmas Eve plans and setting forth to comb
the sleazy streets and alleys of the area known as Polk Gulch for a runaway …

  The city was strangely subdued on this Christmas Eve, the dark streets hushed, although not deserted. Most people had been drawn inside to the warmth of family and friends; others, I suspected, had retreated to nurse the loneliness that is endemic to the season. The pedestrians I passed moved silently, as if reluctant to call attention to their presence; occasionally I heard laughter from the bars as I went by, but even that was muted. The lost, drifting souls of the city seemed to collectively hold their breath as they waited for life to resume its everyday pattern.

  I had started at Market Street and worked my way northwest, through the Tenderloin to Polk Gulch. Before I’d started out, I’d had a photographer friend who likes to make a big fee more than he likes to celebrate holidays run off a hundred copies of my most recent photo of Mike. Those I passed out, along with my card, to clerks in what liquor stores, corner groceries, cheap hotels, and greasy spoon restaurants I found open. The pictures drew no response other than indifference or sympathetic shakes of the head and promises to keep an eye out for him. By the time I reached Polk Street, where I had an appointment in a gay bar at ten, I was cold, footsore, and badly discouraged.

  Polk Gulch, so called because it is in a valley that has an underground river running through it, long ago was the hub of gay life in San Francisco. In the seventies, however, most of the action shifted up Market Street to the Castro district, and the vitality seemed to drain out of the Gulch. Now parts of it, particularly those bordering the Tenderloin, are depressingly sleazy. As I walked along, examining the face of each young man I saw, I became aware of the hopelessness and resignation in the eyes of the street hustlers and junkies and winos and homeless people.

  A few blocks from my destination was a vacant lot surrounded by a chain link fence. Inside gaped a huge excavation, the cellar of the building that had formerly stood there, now open to the elements. People had scaled the fence and taken up residence down in it; campfires blazed, in defiance of the NO TRESPASSING signs. The homeless could rest easy—at least for this one night. No one was going to roust them on Christmas Eve.