Thomas Godfrey (Ed)

by Murder for Christmas

  Everything continued still, as if the small man below held the other in the tree in some long invisible leash; and he went on:

  “Your downward steps have begun. You used to boast of doing nothing mean, but you are doing something mean tonight. You are leaving suspicion on an honest boy with a good deal against him already; you are separating him from the woman he loves and who loves him. But you will do meaner things than that before you die.”

  Three flashing diamonds fell from the tree to the turf. The small man stooped to pick them up, and when he looked up again the green cage of the tree was emptied of its silver bird.

  The restoration of the gems (accidentally picked up by Father Brown, of all people) ended the evening in uproarious triumph; and Sir Leopold, in his height of good humour, even told the priest that though he himself had broader views, he could respect those whose creed required them to be cloistered and ignorant of this world.

  “God rest ye merry gentlemen, Let nothing you dismay.

  TEN FILMS ABOUT CRIME AND CHRISTMAS

  Christmas Holiday (1944) in which sociopath Gene Kelly terrorizes his wife Deanna Durbin with the help of his mother Gale Sondergaard. No dancing, just guns and psychopathology.

  The Lemon Drop Kid (1951) in which con artist Bob Hope sets up a phoney old folks home for Jane Darwell and her friends in order to swindle some mobsters out of $10,000 in old racing debts.

  Lady in the Lake (1946) in which Robert Montgomery (Philip Marlowe) is seen only in reflections as he solves a case of disappearance and murder in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's classic, reset at Christmastime.

  The Thin Man (1933) in which William Powell (Nick Charles) shoots the ornaments off his Christmas tree while he and Myrna Loy (Nora) contemplate the fate of a missing inventor.

  Larceny Inc. (1942) from S.J. Perelman's play "The Night Before Christmas" in which Edward G. Robinson's attempts to go straight are thwarted by Anthony Quinn.

  I'll Be Seeing You (1944) in which furloughed convict Ginger Rogers becomes romantically involved with emotionally disturbed GI Joseph Cotten at Christmastime.

  Remember the Night (1940) in which shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck gets invited home for Christmas by assistant-D.A. Fred MacMurray.

  Three Godfathers (1947) in which John Wayne as one of three outlaws on the run at Christmastime acquires a baby on the way to New Jerusalem, Arizona.

  The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935) in which Claude Rains is suspected of a Christmas Eve murder in an adaptation and completion of Charles Dicken's unfinished novel.

  Black Christmas (1974) in which Margot Kidder and Olivia Hussey are stalked by an unseen killer in a sorority house as detective John Saxon tries to discover why.

  Mothers Milk - James Mines

  If we are to have more stories of the calibre of those that appeared previously in this collection, we must look to the slush piles of our magazines to provide them. Slush piles are those towering stacks of unsolicited manuscripts that come through the mail in search of publication. Cursed by writers, disparaged by editors, they are nevertheless a necessary, even vital, evil in this time of dwindling short story markets.

  As few writers are born with agents in attendance, or publishers standing by, waiting to record each precious word, most are forced to find their readership through painful trial and error. They will read junk and feel they can do better. They will want to attract the attention of a successful agent, but will be unable because they are unknown. They will hope, then, that some astute editor will discover them in a slush pile. But how? And when?

  “Mother’s Milk” is a story from a slush pile. It was once headed for the pages of Mystery Magazine but has been rerouted here. That it finds publication is no doubt a matter of some luck. Or is there more to the story than that?

  Is Mines to become another Hoch or Keating? Or will he join the legion of “also-published” authors who have their day and are gone? Only time and the reader can tell.

  It had snowed in the night, and more was predicted by evening. The cold that had accompanied it penetrated closed windows and doors, trying to get at the sickly heat inside.

  I had come upstairs about ten to collect her breakfast tray and listen to the usual recitation of mid-morning maladies. After twenty years of a ritual like this, the ear develops a selective deafness. It hears without listening.

  It was remarkable, then, that I caught it. Just a trivial little observation. A single chord in a symphony of blabber like:

  “And another thing. That new nurse Mrs. Fletcher is not suitable. Not suitable at all. My evening milk was cold again last night. And,” she continued, drawing the bedding around her, “she spent the entire night in the sitting room around the corner. What does she have in there? A sailor?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Mother,” I answered, watching her parched, puckered lips open and close.

  She tossed her white head contemptuously and buried it in the morning paper.

  “She’s no better than the others. What’s wrong with people nowadays? Pride in working doesn’t interest them any more.”

  Mother could give any banality the force of a Supreme Court judgment.

  “I suppose I will have to let her go after the holidays,” she concluded.

  I was shifting uncomfortably in my place at the end of the bed.

  “Now, here’s something. Vitamins that kill people. Some sort of plant food. Carried off one unfortunate already.”

  There was a certain glee in her thin, screechy voice. Mother got a big kick out of stories about other people ‘s misfortunes. The Jonestown disaster had her walking on air for weeks.

  She looked back at me and shook her head dramatically. “It’s getting so a person can’t take a glass of water without worrying about what’s in it.”

  She laid the paper aside for a quiet moment of cosmic contemplation, as she stared meaningfully off into space. This familiar gesture of social concern had, by now, reached such a level of unsurpassed fraudulency that it deserved to be preserved in the Smithsonian.

  “As if I didn’t have enough to worry about, what with this terrible dizziness and weakness I suffer from. And my arthritis—and bad circulation.” the thought made her stir in the mound of pillows. “You know, it hasn’t been easy for me.”

  I wanted to tell her she could probably still take on an entire football team single-handed, but I suppressed the thought.

  “The worst of all has been my allergies.”

  I knew we’d get around to them. We always did.

  “There are so many things I don’t tolerate. Why if it wasn’t for all my allergies, I’d have been up and around years ago. I must be so very careful. I don’t react to things like normal people.”

  She sighed with heartfelt self-pity.

  “I shall never forget that awful attack I had after Dr Snavely gave me the penicillin injection.”

  I was sure she was going to recite the Great Event all over again, highlighting every gasp and welt and bead of sweat, but luckily I was spared.

  Her recall of this fabled episode was confined to making her watery blue eyes project more than their usual amount of bogus suffering.

  The tray was beginning to feel like lead. My arms ached to get out of there.

  “I guess there’s no use trying to hide it. I am feeling poorly today. I’ve asked for Miss Livesey to send for Dr. Snavely.”

  She never let up. Not once in eighty years.

  “She told me,” I said, reassuringly. “He’ll be by about 3.”

  “I don’t know where I’d be if it weren’t for him. He is the only doctor in town decent enough to make house calls.”

  I wanted to add that he was the only doctor in town with time to make house calls. Bernard M. Snavely, M. D. was a rare medical specimen— a doctor who outlives his practice. Five years ago he’d closed his office on Beecher Street and returned to the comforts of the Chesterton Club where he passed his final hours playing poker, smoking cigars and downing healthy shots of Corby’s whi
skey. Concerns of public health no longer troubled him.

  It is true, that between hands, he did administer to the needs of a few contemporaries like Mother. But as these last patients passed on, he took grateful solice in the uninterrupted company of Kings and Queens, panatellas, and those comforting shots of Corby’s restorative.

  I have heard from those in a position to know that Dr. Snavely’s retirement had a salutory effect on the health of the community. At the end, his trade had become all tricks. Whatever he had once known of the substance of medicine was long since forgotten.

  But Mother, of course, would have none other.

  “I’m very reluctant to complain,” I realized she was saying, “but the Cream of Wheat had lumps in it. I’ve told Miss Livesey what havoc they wreak with my dentures.”

  As she closed her eyes to savor this havoc more fully, I whisked the paper off the bed and stepped quickly out into the hall.

  I avoided looking in the hall mirror as I passed. The things I had seen there recently had upset me. Scared me, if you want to know the truth.

  Thin wisps of colorless hair over long expanses of pale scalp, puffy creases of skin beneath my eyes, spidery little blood vessels around my nose —I realized that time was eating away at me.

  I’d planned so carefully for some good years—a studio apartment in New York, a box at the Met, stimulating friends whose interests extended beyond the livestock report. And I’d assumed that, by now, I’d be enjoying them.

  When I came home from college after father died, it was just to be for a few months, until mother had a chance to get back on her feet. But somehow it went on and on.

  At first, I didn’t notice that time was passing. Then suddenly it was almost all gone. What had made it really painful was the realization that time was making me look like her.

  I was terrified. Panicked. I had to do something. All that money Dad had left would be squandered on nurses and medical care. I was having nightmares about being left here, poor, alone and dying in a town I’d always hated.

  I was desperate for a way out.

  “How is she?” Molly Livesey’s brogue purred as she took the tray I’d brought into the kitchen.

  “She said there were lumps in the Cream of Wheat. They irritate her dentures.”

  Molly’s eyes flared for a moment. “That woman hasn’t got a grateful bone in her body. If she were my mother, I’d have done something to irritate her dentures long ago, and in no uncertain terms.”

  She threw her head back in defiance.

  “She’s just sick and afraid,” I said in a deliberately bland voice. “We have to try and understand.”

  She let out a laugh that sounded like a snort and carried the tray over to the sink.

  I took the paper and a fresh cup of coffee and retired to the dining room and the inner satisfaction that acknowledged martyrdom brings.

  The article about the plant food vitamins was the sort of bilge newspapers pass off as “human interest” and bury among the clothing ads on page eighteen.

  The problem had come to light following the sudden death of a child in Georgia. Apparently the mother had discovered her sleeping through her favorite television show and immediately suspected something was wrong. Paramedics were dispatched, but, by the time the child reached the hospital, she was dead.

  An autopsy disclosed nothing. Then a playmate recalled seeing the child eating a pellet from a planter in the hall. The pellet was checked and found to be Mullen’s African Violet Vitamins, a commonly used product that has been on the market for years. Investigators discovered the pellet contained succinyl-choline-alginate, a substance similar to one used in anesthesia.

  Once ingested, this unpronounceable drug set off a series of chemical reactions that slowly paralyzed the diaphragm. The: victim becomes drowsy, falls asleep and suddenly ceases breathing. Death follows in two to three hours.

  Investigators said that since the pellet had no taste, it gave no warning of its lethal properties. As it was later metabolized into a number of harmless by-products, even after death, it was virtually untraceable, unless one knew what to look for.

  Naturally, consumer advocates were outraged, and the FDA was ordering Mullen’s African Violet Vitamins off the market. An agency spokesman refused to speculate about other deaths, saying only that he found it hard to believe any responsible adult would take plant vitamins.

  I put the paper down and took a long sip of coffee. After ten years of disappointing books and toiletry items, Mother was finally going to get the kind of Christmas present she’d always dreamed of — the biggest funeral this town had ever seen.

  About two, I made my run to the flower shop across town. The entrance to the shopping mall was backed up for two blocks, and hordes of last minute shoppers were everywhere. Everywhere, that is, but Eldon Stillwell’s forgotten white frame shop across the street.

  There everything was predictably quiet. Only a splattering of red poinsettias awaiting purchase gave any sense of time.

  I looked around casually and finally selected an unexceptional specimen from the shelf of African violets.

  “How’s the old lady?” Eldon wanted to know as I set the plant on the chipped linoleum counter.

  “Good as can be expected,” I answered safely.

  The long, porous face nodded as the purchase was rung up.

  “You know,” I began innocently, “we’ve had such rotten luck lately with African violets. I wonder if there isn’t some sort of plant food or fertilizer you might recommend.”

  “Look over there,” he said, indicating a dusty shelf in the back of the room.

  I went over and picked up the yellowed carton of Mullen’s Vitamins I had spotted earlier.

  And that was that.

  It had hardly been much of a calculated risk. Eldon Stillwell, of uncertain health and less certain store hours, lived in the backwater of human events. It was common knowledge that he had not so much as glanced at a paper since that unfortunate Mr. Nixon was hounded out of office by lackeys of the Left Wing Press.

  The chances of his seeing the article were nonexistent. And who would tell him? I’ll bet I was the only other person in the store all day.

  The next challenge was getting the stuff into Mother’s evening milk. I’d have to distract Mrs. Fletcher, who always prepared it. Maybe I could get her out of the room by pretending to hear Mother call. Maybe somebody at the door.

  Then a stroke of genius. I’d tell her I’d read there was a Lawrence Welk special on the TV. She wouldn’t be able to get at the set fast enough. And I’d have the milk all to myself.

  The African violet, box, receipt and bag went into the trash barrel in the garage, stuffed down on the bottom beneath the garbage. The tube of pellets went into my pocket.

  So far, so good.

  “Oh, am I glad to see you,” Molly began, as I came in the back door to the kitchen. “Dr. Snavely called. He won’t be able to come over until early evening. Morris Murchison’s had another heart attack. He’s gone over to the hospital with him.”

  “That’s too bad,” I answered vaguely.

  “You better believe it,” she huffed, waving a spatula in the air. “Your mother had a fit when I told her. One thing she’s never been able to understand is other people getting sick when she’s not feeling well.”

  She was waving the spatula all over the place. “Why, when she found out Morris Murcheson was taking Dr. Snavely away from her, I thought she’d go over there and finish him off herself.”

  “Now, Mother’s not like that,” I said in my best Jimmy Stewart voice.

  “You go up and talk to her. I got better things to do than go up and down stairs all day. Why, if I had any sense left in me, I’d leave right now!”

  The spatula came down with a wallop against the wooden table.

  Ten years ago Mary Margaret Livesey made the mistake of taking herself seriously. She quit and went to work for a relentlessly bland couple named Cerillo who’d come to town to manage t
he local RCA plant. That lasted two months. When she discovered this distressingly sensible couple would give her nothing to complain about, she came back claiming “mother needed her.”

  Mother never needed anyone. Except, perhaps, for an occasional odd job.

  Morris Murchison’s heart provided a minor delay, but it just meant more time for careful planning. Another hour or two wouldn’t matter.

  By six o’clock, the minor delay had become a major inconvenience. I was nervous, excited and impatient to act. Anticipation had overwhelmed me.

  I tried several things to distract my thinking. None of them worked.

  The wait was driving me crazy. Dr. Snavely should have come and gone long ago.

  By seven o’clock my nerves were shot. I needed a couple of drinks to settle myself. Still no doctor.

  I thought of trying to get him on the phone. But, no, that was not good. No need to seem impatient or overwrought on the phone. Someone might notice, and wonder later on.

  “I’m going now,” Molly announced, appearing in the doorway dressed like Sir Edmund Hilary. The metal clips on her boots had rattled noisily as she clomped across the floor. “Hope he gets here soon. That Fletcher woman’s been here an hour and your mother’s already made a meal out of her.”

  She finished tying her scarf and stomped to the front door.

  “Well, good night. See you, Monday,” she called.

  I watched her go down the front walk to her car. Powdery flakes were falling into gusts of wind that danced them across the frozen ground and slammed them into trees and houses. Another cold night. I wouldn’t miss it in New York.

  I looked at the clock again and then at my hands. Nothing much I could do but fix myself another drink.

  After three and a half hours of television I couldn’t begin to remember as I was seeing it, I got up from the chair and looked out the window again. Snow was coming down in truckloads.