Thomas Godfrey (Ed)

by Murder for Christmas

  “Don’t tell us how to run our business,” Cameron cut in. “Get off the line so I can phone the Border Patrol of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It should be twice as easy to get a boy, since they’re the chaps who always get their man!”

  Just outside of the city limits, running at right angles to the river between Stanley Ave. and the Parkway, is a short street with eight neat houses on it. Five on one side and three on the other. On the side with the three houses and not quite forming a corner with the Parkway stands the Maple Leaf Tavern, boasting ten spotless bedrooms on the second floor, and downstairs a very good restaurant and a bar.

  At seven o’clock, on Friday, Dec. 20th, Mr. Burns, who had owned and run the Maple Leaf for forty years, left his wife to superintend the cooking of dinner in the kitchen. He came into the bar to start his pick-up with Bing Crosby’s “Merry Christmas” record. The first few chimes introducing “Silent Night” had scarcely pealed forth from the loud speaker over the Maple Leaf’s front door, when Det. Sgt. McMurtrie, of the Ontario Provincial Police walked into the bar.

  He and Burns were old friends. McMurtrie, tall and cadaverous with sad black eyes, was a startling contrast to the sandy-haired Burns, a Scot grown fat with good living through the years.

  They shook hands. McMurtrie ordered an ale and sat down at a table in the empty bar. Burns joined him a moment later carrying two bottles and glasses.

  “I’ll have an ale wi’ ye, Mac.”

  “On me, if ye like. Looks to me, Matey, like you’ve driven all your trade away wi’ that racket over the front door.”

  “A racket ye call it! Don’t be blasphemous, Mac. ’Tis one of God’s songs, and there’s others to come. I’ve been playing it every night now, except Sundays, for the past ten nights. ’Tis weather that’s driven the trade away and not my offering passers-by a bit of warmth and Christmas cheer.”

  “Hmph!” McMurtrie swallowed some ale, his Adam’s apple moving up and down. “And would ye have a permit, Burns, to play that thing? Seems to me the good folks on this street would be kicking with you disturbing their TV and their sleep.”

  “’Tis you who know perfectly well I have a permit, McMurtrie. Even though I’m outside of the city line, who but you has poked his long nose in here every chance he gets, checking every license and permit. And as for the folks on this street kicking, they’re all good customers and friends of mine and glad of a little music.”

  “All?” Det. McMurtrie narrowed his bushy brows. “Now there was one I recalled that you turned in for making subversive talk here during the war. What was his name?”

  “Zwicker,” Burns said. “Francois Zwicker.” Burns held up his glass of sparkling ale and looked at the bubbles against the light. “He owns the house right across the street. Number 3. God be praised, a year ago he lost his job at the Electric, where he was engineer, and moved away. The house stood vacant for a spell; then was rented for three months in the summer, to be vacant again until just this last Saturday.”

  “Rented?”

  “No, he and his missus are back, but it won’t be long, mark me. He’ll hold a job nowhere with his anarchistic tongue. I’ve forbid him my place. His missus is no prize, either. Louise is her name, a Frenchie like him. Quebec or Three Rivers. She’s there by herself right now. He’s off again, hunting another job, I’ll say. Not that he’ll keep it long.”

  A party of four came in. Burns finished his ale and got up to greet them. “The ale’s on me, Mac. Drop in again, and a Merry Christmas to ye!”

  Outside, the detective got in a big black car where four men were waiting for him. “Let’s go and get the search warrant,” he said. “Zwicker’s the name. The house is No. 3.” The car moved off.

  An hour later to the accompaniment of Bing’s voice singing. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” McMurtrie rang the doorbell of No. 3. The door was opened finally by a white-faced woman with burning black eyes and raven hair.

  “Provincial Police, Mrs. Zwicker,” McMurtrie said. “There are four men posted about the house, and we have a search warrant. Let me in, please. We’ve come to get the boy.”

  At 6:00 P.M., on Saturday, Dec. 21st, Alan Connatser’s Cessna Twin took off from the air strip at Connatser Products, on Long Island. With Steven Donegan, and Connatser, at the twin controls, it headed south as ordered. Instead of a phosphorescent-painted portmanteau, it was carrying Special Agent Hank Weeks, member of the F.B.I.

  Ronnie, safely home with his mother, had made it in time for Macy’s Christmas Parade.

  Contact by radio was made at 8:20, and almost instantly a red flasher was turned-on on the ground in a large open area some twenty miles north of New Bern, North Carolina. As the Cessna headed for a point directly over the flasher, Hank Weeks spoke into the microphone:

  “Zwicker, hear this now! This is a Special Agent of the F.B.I, speaking to you from the Cessna. Your wife has been arrested and we have the boy. She gave us the name of Walter Vollmer, the County Official who is with you now in that Patrol Car. You were followed and we know exactly where you are—in between Vanceboro and Blount Creek. You are hopelessly trapped, for cars are posted all along U.S. 17 and along State Road 33, as well as the country road you came in on. They have heard this and are closing in right now. That’s all! There’s no use your trying to escape.”

  The Cessna began to climb. “There’s just one thing that gripes me, Hank,” Connatser said disgruntedly. “Think of all the trouble you’d have saved if you’d done what Steve and I wanted to—loaded that portmanteau with just one little ol’ bomb!”

  Way up north in the Maple Leaf Tavern, Mr. Burns turned over the “Merry Christmas” record for the third time and started “Silent Night” again. On guard in the empty house across the street, in the event that the plans went wrong and Zwicker returned to his home, two members of the Ontario Provincial Police were engaged in a game of Rummy.

  “It would be a silent night if Burns would shut that blasted thing off,” one said to the other, slapping a card on the table.

  “Aye,” said the other, “still as the dead, if you’re asking me!”

  They went on playing unaware of the noise that filled every room, every cranny and every house and every street for miles around. They had lived in the midst of its deep reverberation far too long to hear it—the stunning boom of the Horseshoe Falls of Niagara, dumping its endless deafening millions of gallons down a drop of a hundred and fifty-eight feet just a half block away.

  .

  W. C. Fields, the great American comedian and humorist, died Christmas Day, 1946 in Pasadena. He had made a career out of playing cheats and cowards. He is on record as not liking children ("only if they are properly cooked.") And, it takes no stretch of the imagination to assume this contempt extended to Christmas and Santa Claus. (Try imagining Fields in Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street.)

  For his epitaph, he once suggested, "I'd rather be playing in Philadelphia." Philadelphia was not known then as one of the high points of the Vaudeville circuit. Come to think of it, it still isn't.

  The Stolen Christmas Box - Lillian de la Torre

  In 1944, Lillian de la Torre, the wife of an English professor, introduced the noted eighteenth century lexicographer and literary arbiter Dr. Samuel Johnson to the world in the surprising role of detective. She decided that Johnson, perhaps the most imposing personality of his time, had many of the keen intellectual qualities necessary to a great detective. Conveniently, he also has a built-in Watson in the person of his biographer James Boswell.

  A collection of Dr. Johnson stories appeared in 1946 under the title Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector. It met with considerable success among the critics, including the New York Times’s revered Anthony Boucher who called it “perhaps the most attractive book of detective shorts ever published.”

  A second collection was assembled in 1960, bringing the total number of stories close to thirty; a third collection has been scheduled. In each case, de la Torre was able to present style and period flavor
without compromising accessibility.

  “The Stolen Christmas Box” is one of the earliest in the series and features an intriguing problem of interlocking puzzles.

  The disappearance of little Fanny Plumbe’s Christmas box was but a prelude to a greater and more daring theft; and was itself heralded by certain uneasy signs and tokens. Of these was the strange cypher message which Mrs. Thrale intercepted; while I myself was never easy in my mind after seeing the old sailorman with the very particular wooden leg.

  Dr. Sam: Johnson and I passed him on Streatham common as we approached the estate of the Thrales, there to spend our Christmas. He sat on a stone hard by the gates in the unseasonable sunshine, and whittled. He wore the neckerchief and loose pantaloons of a sea-faring man. He had a wind-beaten, heavy, lowering face, and a burly, stooped frame. His stump stuck out straight before him, the pantaloon drooping from it. That on which he whittled was his own wooden leg.

  ’Twas a very particular wooden leg. The cradle that accommodated his stump was high-pooped and arabesqued about like a man-of-war’s bow with carvings, upon the embellishment of which he was at the moment engaged. Into the butt was screwed a cylindrical post of about half the bigness of my wrist, turned in a lathe and wickedly shod with iron.

  As the carriage passed him at an easy pace, I stared down upon him. He extended his greasy flapped hat, and my venerable companion dropped into it a gratuity.

  We found the Thrale household pernitious dumpish, for all it was nigh onto Christmas. The tall, silent brew-master Thrale greeted us with his usual cold courtesy, his diminutive rattle of a wife with her usual peacock screeches of delight. Of the party also were Thrale’s grenadier of a sister, a strapping virago born to support the robes of a Lady Mayoress, and well on her way to that honour on the coat-tails of her husband, Alderman Plumbe. Plumbe topped his brother-in-law in height and doubled him in girth. His features were knobby and his temper cholerick. He scowled upon his children, Master Ralph, a lubber of fourteen, and Miss Fanny, a year older.

  Master Ralph was rapidly shooting to his parents’ height, but unable to keep pace in solidity. He continually closed his short upper lip over his long upper teeth, which as continually protruded again. He bowed and grinned and twisted his wrists in our honour.

  Miss Fanny executed her duty curtsey with downcast eyes. Her person was tall and agreeably rounded, and sensibility played in red and white upon her cheek, playing the while, I own it, on the sensitive strings of my heart. Indeed, I could have been a knight-errant for Miss Fanny, had not I found below-stairs the veriest little witch of a serving-wench, pretty Sally, she who... but I digress.

  Among the company circulated learned Dr. Thomas, the schoolmaster, assiduously pouring oil, as became a clergyman, on waters that were soon revealed to be troubled. Miss Fanny was in a fit of the sullens (’twas of a lover dismissed, I gathered so much), and Mrs. Plumbe was clean out of humour, and the Alderman alternately coaxing and shouting.

  In an ill moment the latter conceived the idea of bribing Miss out of her pouts, and accordingly he fetches out the young lady’s Christmas box, four days too soon, and bestows it upon her then and there; a step which he was bitterly to regret before the week was out.

  “O Lud!” screamed Mrs. Thrale. “O Lud, ’tis a very Canopus!”

  “’Tis indeed,” said Dr. Sam: Johnson, “a star of the first magnitude.”

  ’Twas a handsome jewel, though to my eyes scarce suitable for so young a lady—an intaglio artfully cut, and set with a diamond needlessly great, whether for the brooch or for the childish bosom ’twas designed to adorn.

  “Sure,” screeched Mrs. Thrale in her usual reckless taste, “such a size it is, it cannot be the right gem. Say, is’t not paste?”

  “Paste!” cried the Alderman, purpling to his wattles. “I assure you, ma’am, ’tis a gem of the first water, such that any goldsmith in the city will give you £200 for.”

  Ralph Plumbe sucked a front tooth; his prominent eyes goggled. Pretty Sally, the serving-maid, passing with the tea tray, stared with open mouth. Little Dr. Thomas joined his fingertips, and seemed to ejaculate a pious word to himself. The Alderman pinned the gem in his daughter’s bosom, a task in which I longed to assist him. She bestowed upon him a radiant smile, like sun through clouds.

  Her fickle heart was bought. She yielded to him with a pretty grace, those love-letters for which she had previously contested, and the footman carried them over the way that very afternoon to poor jilted Jack Rice, while Miss Fanny preened it with her jewel like a peacock.

  ’Twas a day or two later that I made one in a stroll about the Streatham grounds. Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale beguiled our perambulation in discourse with learned Dr. Thomas about Welsh antiquities. Master Ralph Plumbe, ennuied by the disquisition, threw stones alternately at rocks and at Belle, the black-and-tawny spaniel bitch.

  Coming by the kitchen garden, we marked curvesome Sally, in her blue gown and trim apron, skimming along under the wall. She passed us under full sail, with the slightest of running curtseys. Mrs. Thrale caught her sleeve.

  “Pray, whither away so fast?”

  “Only to the kitchen, ma’am.”

  Our sharp little hostess pounced.

  “What have you in your hand?”

  “Nothing, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Thrale, for all she is small, has a strong man’s hand. She forced open the girl’s plump fingers and extracted a folded billet. “So, miss. You carry billets doux.”

  “No, ma’am. I found it, if you please, ma’am,” cried the girl earnestly.

  “Ho ho,” cried hobbledehoy Master Ralph, “’tis one of Fan’s, I’ll wager.”

  “We shall see,” said Mrs. Thrale curtly, and unfolded the billet. I craned my neck. ’Twas the oddest missive (save one) that I have ever seen. ’Twas all writ in an alphabet of but two letters:

  aabababbabbaaaabaaba ababbabbabbaaaabaaba

  abbaa’abbabbaabaaabaabaaab baabaaabaa

  aabbbaaaaaababaababaaabaa ababa’aabaaaaaaabaabb

  abbabbaabbabaaa ababa’aaaaabaabbabbaaaabaa

  abaaabaaaaaabaa baabaaabaa

  aabbaaaaaabaaaaaaabbaabaa aabbbaaaaaabaaaabbaaaabaa

  aaaaaabaaaababaababaaabaa aabababaaabaaaaaabaaabbaabaaba

  Learned Dr. Thomas scanned the strange lines.

  “’Tis some unknown, primordial tongue, I make no doubt.”

  “’Tis the talk of sheep!” I cried. “Baabaaabaa!”

  “No, sir; ’tis cypher,” said Dr. Sam: Johnson.

  “Good lack,” screeched Mrs. Thrale, “’tis a French plot, I’ll be bound, against our peace.”

  “No, ma’am,” I hazarded, half in earnest, “’tis some imprisoned damsel, takes this means to beg release.”

  “Pfoh,” said Mrs. Thrale, “ever the ruling passion, eh, Mr. Boswell?”

  “To what end,” demanded Dr. Johnson, “do we stand disputing here, when we might be reading the straight of the message?”

  “My husband has the new book of cyphers,” cried Mrs. Thrale, “I will fetch it at once.”

  She sailed off, pretty Sally forgotten; who put her finger to her eye and stood stock-still in the path, until, perceiving how eagerly I followed where Dr. Johnson and the cypher led, she flounced off with dry eyes.

  Dr. Johnson made for the drawing-room, and we streamed after him.

  Seating himself by the window, he peered at the strange paper. Dr. Thomas, Ralph Plumbe, and I peered with him, and Fanny came from the mirror, where we had surprized her preening, to peer too.

  As Dr. Johnson smoothed the billet, I threw up my hands.

  “What can be done with this!” I exclaimed. “We are to find out the 24 letters of the alphabet, and in this whole message we find but two symbols.”

  “What man can encypher, man can decypher,” replied Dr. Johnson sententiously, “more especially when the encypherer is one of the inmates of Streatham, and the decypherer is Sam: Johnson. But see where our hostess comes.”
/>   She came empty-handed. The new book of cyphers was not to be found.

  “Then,” said Dr. Johnson, “we must make do with what we have in our heads. Let us examine this billet and see what it has to say to us.”

  We hung over his shoulder, Mrs. Thrale, Dr. Thomas, the Plumbe children, and I. Ralph sucked air through his teeth in excitement, little Fanny’s pretty bosom lifted fast.

  “Now, ma’am,” began Dr. Johnson, addressing Mrs. Thrale, not ill-pleased to display his learning, “you must know, that cyphers have engaged the attention of the learned since the remotest antiquity. I need but name Polybius, Julius Africanus, Philo Mechanicus, Theodorus Bibliander, Johannes Walchius, and our own English Aristotle, Francis Bacon—”

  “Oh, good lack, sir,” cried little Fanny with a wriggle, “what does the paper say?”

  “In good time, miss,” replied the philosopher with a frown. “We have here 330 characters, all either a or b; writ in 16 groups on a page from a pocket book, with a fair-mended quill. ’Tis notable, that the writer wrote his letters in clusters of five, never more, never less; you may see between every group the little nodule of ink where the pen rested. Let us mark the divisions.”

  With his pen he did so. I watched the lines march:

  aabab/abbab/baaaa/baaba ababb/abbab baaaa baaba

  abbaa’/abbab/baaba/aabaa/baaab baaba aabaa

  aabbb/aaaaa/ababa/ababa/aabaa...

  “We now perceive,” said Dr. Johnson as his pen flicked, “that we have to do, not with a correspondence of letter for letter, but for groups of letters. We have before us, in short, Mr. Boswell, the famous bi-literal cypher of the learned Francis Bacon; as set forth, I make no doubt, in Thrale’s missing book of cyphers.”

  Mrs. Thrale clapped her hands.

  “Now we shall understand it. Mark me, ’tis a plot of the French against us.”

  “Alas,” said Dr. Johnson, “I do not carry the key in my head; but I shall make shift to reconstruct it. ’Tis many years since I was a corrector of the press; but the printer’s case still remains in my mind to set me right on the frequencies of the letters in English.”