Mom Meets Her Maker

by James Yaffe

  No, that wasn’t accurate. What worried me was something that hadn’t happened tonight. Old Abernathy, that crazy prophet on the street corner, didn’t he tell me, when I gave him breakfast this morning, that he’d be in touch with me tonight? Didn’t he say he’d find me in the crowd, while the Christmas tree was being lit up, and talk to me some more about what he knew?

  So where was he? Why didn’t he talk to me tonight? Why didn’t I even catch a glimpse of him in the crowd, during the tree-lighting ceremony?

  I could think of a lot of perfectly plausible answers. He could’ve been blind drunk in his hotel room. He could’ve forgot about me completely. He was such a nut, how could you expect him to follow through on anything he said he’d do? Even so, I knew I couldn’t go home yet, not until I’d been to see that crazy old man.

  I went faster than the speed limit, which was very odd since I kept telling myself there was nothing to be anxious about. Three blocks from the hotel, I found myself behind a big moving van that was inching along but was so wide you couldn’t get around it.

  On its bumper was a familiar sticker: “Honk Twice if You Love Jesus.”

  I honked four or five times, and as angrily as I could.

  A large hand appeared from the driver’s window of the van. Its middle finger was raised in a classic gesture which has pretty much the same meaning all over the Western world. That meaning is not “Merry Christmas.”

  Finally I got to the Hotel Cochran, a five-story building across the street from the seedy little downtown park, Manitou Park, which is built around the statue of General William Henry Harrison Wagner on horseback; the general was the founder of Mesa Grande, near the end of the nineteenth century. It’s hard to imagine what the General would have thought if he’d known about the drug-dealing and other nefarious activities that went on at his horse’s feet a hundred years later.

  I parked in front of the hotel, with its neon sign letting the world know that this was “HO EL COC RA.” It’s been a fleabag for as long as I’ve lived in Mesa Grande, though I’ve heard that it once saw better days. The stone steps leading up to the front door were chipped in many places, a definite safety hazard in the dark. The light bulb over the front doorway didn’t help much; it was so low in wattage that it hardly managed to illuminate more than itself.

  Inside was what the management hopefully called the “lobby,” a dark, musty-smelling little room with a couple of chairs at one end and a dingy desk at the other end. The old clerk behind the desk looked like one of the victims in a Dracula movie. Having sucked all the blood they could out of him, the vampires had apparently, in a paroxysm of desperate hunger, started in on the lobby chairs; there were deep rips in the arms of both of them, and the stuffing was coming out.

  I went up to the desk and asked the clerk if Mr. Abernathy was in.

  “Old Man Jesus?” said the clerk, his voice so hoarse and depleted that it might have been coming from the next room. “Ain’t seen him tonight.”

  “He hasn’t come in yet?”

  “Never went out. Went up to his room around four in the afternoon, been there ever since.”

  “He didn’t go out for dinner?”

  “Nothing peculiar about that. Lots of nights he don’t have dinner. Drinks his dinner up there, if you know what I mean. Room is a damn pigsty too!”

  “Call up and tell him I want to see him,” I said.

  “You think we got phones in the rooms? You think this is the Richelieu?” A dry grating chuckle came out of him. “I’ll go up and knock on his door.”

  “I can do that myself. What’s his room number?”

  For a second the clerk looked as if he wasn’t going to tell me. Vague thoughts about the dignity of the establishment and the privacy of its clientele might have been chasing through his head. Before he could commit himself to such delusions of grandeur, I flashed my badge at him. Yes, I have a badge, and it gives me the right to go anywhere that the regular police can go. That was part of the arrangement when the City Council established a public defender’s office.

  So the clerk took a quick look at it now and muttered, “Room twenty-three, second floor at the head of the stairs.”

  I climbed the stairs, the elevator in the Hotel Cochran having been out of order since the end of World War II. I found myself in a hallway that was even dimmer than the lobby. It had a sweet pungent smell to it, like the stuff you kill mosquitoes with. They sprayed these halls with it every few weeks, I supposed, on the theory that it was cheaper than actually vacuuming the carpets, giving the walls a new paint job, and evicting all guests who refused to get deloused.

  I knocked on the door of room twenty-three. I got no answer. Somewhere halfway between my conscious and subconscious mind, I think I didn’t expect to.

  I tried the door. It wasn’t locked, which didn’t surprise me either. I pushed the door, and it creaked open slowly. I took a couple of steps into the room. The ceiling light was on—the bulb shone palely through a fly-specked glass globe—and some streaks of moonlight filtered through the only window. It was enough to show me three or four piles of newspapers on the floor and a bundle of rags on the bed.

  Then I moved closer and saw that the bundle of rags was Luke Abernathy, and the chances were he wouldn’t be getting up again.

  I heard the faintest rustling sound behind me, and before I could turn around the entire weight of the world’s woes and mankind’s suffering crashed down on top of my head.

  I wasn’t knocked unconscious. In spite of what you see on television and read in private-eye books, it’s not so easy to get knocked unconscious. I fell down, I was on my knees, but I wasn’t out like a light, as the saying goes. In fact, what I was mainly aware of was too damn much light, flickering at me from all directions, especially from inside my head. And also dizziness, everything spinning around, giving me a powerful urge to throw up. It took me awhile to get that urge under control. When I did, the lights stopped bombarding me, the spinning in my head slowed up, and finally I recognized the ceiling I was staring up at.

  The crack on my head may not have knocked me unconscious, but it served its purpose just as efficiently as if it had. By the time I staggered to my feet and out to the hall, nobody was in sight and no sounds of receding footsteps could be heard. I propped myself up against the railing on the stairs and yelled my lungs out for the clerk.

  The first yell or two came out as squeaks, but pretty soon my voice got back its old resonance. The clerk came running up the stairs.

  “Who just left?” I cried at him, maybe even grabbing him by the shoulders.

  “Nobody! I didn’t see nobody!” His face was contorted with fear. Of me, I realized. I must have looked like hell.

  “Is there any way out of here except through the lobby?”

  “The fire escape. There’s a window at the end of every hall, and there’s a fire escape out there.”

  I ran down the hall to the window, knowing perfectly well what I was going to find. The window was open, and big surprise, the fire escape was empty. And nothing in the alley below.

  By the time I got back to the clerk, he had seen what was to be seen through the doorway of room twenty-three.

  “He’s dead, ain’t he? He finally did it. They all do it sooner or later. Good riddance is what I say. The world’s better off without them. They’re better off without themselves.”

  His gabbling went on, while I stepped back into the room and up to the bed to take a closer look at the body. The bloodshot old eyes were wide open, staring, and the mouth was twisted. The bony wrist felt cold and stiff. On the rickety bed table was a glass with a few mouthfuls of pale yellowish liquid in it. On the floor was a wine bottle.

  I told the clerk to go downstairs and call the cops from his switchboard, and then to come right up again. While he was out of the room, I took out my handkerchief and used it to pick up the glass. I sniffed at it. I recognized that smell right away. Then, bending down, I did the same with the bottle. It was still hal
f full of liquid, and that smell was even stronger. The label said “Chablis,” from some vineyard in California. Reasonably expensive stuff.

  The clerk came back, but still didn’t walk through the door. I was in no mood to torture people, so I went to him out in the hallway. “Anybody else living on this floor?” I said.

  “Three, four other fellows.”

  “Any of them in their rooms now?”

  “They all went out. I seen them all go, earlier tonight. Different times.”

  “Where’d they go, do you know?”

  He shrugged. “Couple of them has families somewheres. Couple of them went out drinking. It’s Christmas Eve, Saturday night, lots of places going to be open late.”

  I jerked my thumb at the bed. “Anybody come to see him tonight?”

  “Only you.”

  “How long you been on duty at the desk?”

  “Since three o’clock. I saw him come in, nobody come to see him. You want to call me a liar?”

  He didn’t say this angrily or even defensively. It was more or less a simple statement of fact, something that happened to him so often he had come to take it for granted.

  “When he came in—around four, you said? Did you happen to notice, was he carrying a bottle with him?”

  “Mighta been,” he said. “He was carrying a white paper bag. Yeah, from the shape of it, a bottle coulda been in it.”

  “If somebody got out by the fire escape, could somebody get in that way too?”

  “There’s inside locks on the windows, they’re supposed to keep people out. It’s a long time since they worked though. Mostly they’re rusted and you can’t keep them closed.”

  I returned to the room and looked around more carefully than before. I walked the whole length and width of the floor, peered under the bed, poked at the piles of old newspapers, checked in the tiny closet, looked inside the wastebasket. I saw nothing that struck me as out of the ordinary, that I could possibly connect with the murder.

  I heard sirens coming down the street and took another quick look around the room; this would be my last chance before the buffalo herd descended. Still nothing that caught my attention. I heard loud clumpings from the stairs. I was out in the hall again, humming to myself idly, when they arrived.

  The rest was routine stuff. I was hustled downstairs to the lobby, and a lot of questions were thrown at me, and I answered them all three or four times. The last time from assistant DA George Wolkowicz, looking bleary-eyed and mad as hell because he’d been pulled out of his Christmas sleep. But the word had gone out that the dead man was his chief witness in the Meyer case, so how could he roll over in bed and tell them it could wait until morning?

  “So what do you think happened here?” Wolkowicz finally bothered to notice me.

  “You smelled the glass and the bottle? Don’t quote me on it, but your Medical Examiner is going to turn up a first-class case of cyanide poisoning.”

  “And there’s a million ways for people to get hold of the stuff. It’s used for gardening, photography, printing, killing mice—” He peered at the bottle. “This doesn’t look like the usual cheap rotgut these rummies go in for.”

  “Maybe somebody gave it to him for a Christmas present.”

  “We’ll send it down to the lab, there might be fingerprints. Not much chance though. The killer must’ve wiped it clean before he gave it to the old man.”

  Then Wolkowicz’s face hardened up. “Very convenient him dying like this. Seeing as he was our main witness against your client for the Candy murder.” He narrowed his eyes. “What the hell are you doing here anyway? We didn’t make it public yet, who our witness was.”

  “Things get around,” I said.

  “If there’s some kind of leak in my office—”

  Wolkowicz’s eyebrows were beginning to look vicious, so I quickly changed the subject. “Our client couldn’t have done this, he’s been in jail all night. Unless he slipped out while your guards weren’t looking.”

  “Your client’s whereabouts are unknown till nine P.M. The old man brought this bottle back to the hotel with him at four.”

  “And our client was keeping out of the way of the cops all day. You think he went into a liquor store and picked up a bottle of wine? And took the chance of being recognized?”

  “Maybe your client isn’t too bright,” Wolkowicz said. “The Ivy Leagues are full of brilliant geniuses who have trouble balancing their bank accounts and remembering their shoe sizes. Besides, even if nobody identifies him, it doesn’t mean a thing. There are hundreds of liquor stores in this town, and a lot of them do big business, and lots of wine gets bought the day before Christmas, so what’s the chance the clerk will remember one customer? Also, he could’ve bought that bottle a long time ago, he could’ve brought it with him from the East when he started his vacation, his folks could’ve had it sitting around the house.”

  “And what about Abernathy—you think he just accepted a bottle from the man he’s testifying against in a murder trial? Whoever gave him that stuff, it had to be somebody he thought he could trust.”

  “He was an old rummy. Anybody who gave him free booze he’d trust them.”

  “Then what about the character who slugged me?” I said. “That wasn’t Roger Meyer, you have to give me that.”

  “I’m giving it to you,” Wolkowicz said. “Roger Meyer definitely didn’t slug you.” He paused and I didn’t like his grin one bit. “If anybody did.”

  Shortly afterwards he let me go. On the way home my head began to ache in a big way. I had been holding that particular pain at bay for the last hour or so, I realized, because I had to keep my mind on more urgent matters. But now it engulfed me, and I practically couldn’t see straight as I stumbled through the front door of my house.

  My last thought, as I threw myself on my bed, was that Mom was going to be mad because I hadn’t called her.

  Christmas Day

  Christmas morning dawned bright and clear. I didn’t see it dawning, as a matter of fact, but I heard about it on the radio news at ten o’clock or thereabouts. That’s when I was awakened by two phone calls, one right after the other, so if there were still any shreds of sleep left in me after the first one, the second one took care of them neatly.

  The first call was from Ann. “What’s this I read in the paper about you finding bodies? And the bodies of prosecution witnesses at that? Don’t you believe in sharing these exciting experiences with the folks at your office?”

  “I finished having this exciting experience around two in the morning,” I said. “Did you want me to call you then? I’ll keep that in mind for the future.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to come on as the heavy boss. It’s something of a shock, though, to wake up on Christmas morning and see your client’s name in the headlines, with strong hints that he might be charged with a second murder. Not exactly what I’m used to finding in my stocking.”

  I filled her in as best I could and asked her if she wanted to get together with me today. She said it wouldn’t be necessary. She had intended to spend this glorious Christmas day scrounging around for a judge who might hear her request for Roger Meyer’s bail. This most recent murder didn’t give her much hope though. “Check in around six,” she said, “I’ll be home or in the office. I’ll let you know if anything has to be done.”

  I had just barely hung up on Ann when the phone rang again. I wasn’t surprised to hear Mom’s voice, sounding concerned and motherly.

  “You shouldn’t blame yourself, darling,” she said. “According to the paper he was dead before the tree-lighting ceremony last night. So there’s nothing you could’ve done for him, even if you’d thought about it sooner.”

  “I wasn’t letting it worry me, Mom,” I said.

  And I wasn’t. I long ago stopped feeling guilty about the crimes I might’ve prevented if I had happened to get to the scene sooner. What I always tell myself is, it’s the criminals who commit the crimes, not me. Without such an attitude,
how could I have survived in my line of work all these years?

  “So good,” Mom said. “As long as it’s not weighing on your mind, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened to you? And incidentally, before you get started, didn’t you promise you’d call me up last night no matter how late?”

  “I knew you didn’t want me to wake you up at two in the morning, Mom.”

  “Now he decides for people what they want and what they don’t! All right, I’m a mother, I forgive. So about last night please?”

  I went through it for her in detail. When I got to the part about being hit on the head, she broke in, “You’re all right? You went to the doctor? He took some X-rays?”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” I said. “I hardly even feel it this morning. I don’t need any doctor or X-rays.”

  “This is what you always say. Always you have to prove what a tough guy you are! Since you were a little boy, I couldn’t get you to put on your rubbers in the rain—”

  “Let me go on with what happened, Mom.” I hurried on with my story.

  At the end of it, after a long pause, she said, “So I’m sure you’re noticing what’s peculiar about all this?”

  “The old man getting killed? But the reason for that is pretty clear, isn’t it? He saw something outside Candy’s house which he didn’t tell the DA or me about. Maybe he saw somebody besides Roger go in and out the front door, and maybe he was trying a little blackmail on that person—you said he was getting money from somewhere. So he tried to get some more last night, and this person decided to pay him off for good, by giving him a Christmas bottle of wine.”

  “Absolutely, this is clear. But there’s one thing that isn’t so clear.”

  “Which is?”

  “Why did you get hit on the head?”

  “I don’t see what’s so peculiar about that. I stumbled in on the murderer—”