Cynthia Manson (ed)

by Merry Murder

  “Oh yes.” He reached down and put a wooden lazy tongs on top of the counter.

  “I got it for you, Grandma.” Debbie said, “for your arthritis, so you don’t have to bend down. I was going to save it for under the tree, but you looked so sad...”

  God bless you, Deborah. I said in my heart, that’s the answer. I put my fingers in the scissor grip and extended the tongs. They were only about three feet long, not long enough, and they were already beginning to bend under their own weight. No way anyone, not even Mildred Ungaric, could use them to steal the moon bear. Then I knew. For sure. I turned around and there it was. hanging on the top shelf. I turned back to Mr. Wong and said, casually, “What do you call that thing grocers use to get cans from the top shelf? The long stickhandle with the grippers at the end?”

  “Don’t know. In Chinese I say. ‘Get can high shelf. ‘ “

  “Doesn’t matter. Why did you steal the bear back? Decided to sell it to a museum or something?”

  “‘No. Why I steal? If I want sell, I no give.” He was puzzled, not insulted. “Somebody steal moon bear?”

  He was right. But so was I. At least I knew how it was stolen. You didn’t need a “get can high shelf.” All the thief needed was a long thing with a hook on the end. Or a noose. Like a broomstick. Or a fishing rod. Anything that would reach from where you were standing to the top of the back row so you could get the bear without knocking over the shelves or the other toys. It had to be Mildred Ungaric; she might be mean, but she wasn’t stupid. Any woman had enough long sticks in her kitchen, and enough string and hooks to make a bear-stealer, though she’d look awful funny walking down the street carrying one of those. But it didn’t have to be that way. There was something in the firehouse that anyone could use, one of those long poles with the hooks on the end they break your windows with when you have a fire. All you’d have to do is get that hook under the string that held the number tag around the moon bear’s neck and do it quietly enough not to wake Levi Porter. Which meant that anyone in town could have stolen the moon bear.

  But who would? It would be like stealing from poor little Petrina herself. Mildred was mean, but even she wouldn’t do that. Homer was nasty; maybe he accused me to cover up for himself. Mr. Wong might have changed his mind, in spite of what he said; you don’t give away a sixty-year-old childhood memory like that without regrets. Levi Porter was in the best position to do it; there was only his word that he slept all through the night and he has eight kids he can hardly feed. Heck, anyone in town could have done it. All I knew was that I didn’t.

  So who stole the moon bear?

  That night I made a special supper for Carrie, and Deborah served. There’s nothing a waitress enjoys so much on her time off as being served. I know; there was a time I waitressed myself. After supper, Carrie put Deborah to bed and read to her, watched TV for a while, then got ready to turn in herself. There’s really nothing for a young woman to do in Pitman unless she’s the kind that runs around with the truckers that stop by, and Carrie wasn’t that type. She had made one mistake, trusted one boy, but that could have happened to anybody. And she did what was right and was raising Deborah to be a pride to us all.

  I stayed up and sat in my rocker, trying to think of who would steal that bear, but there was no way to find that out. At least it wasn’t a kid, a little kid, who had done it; those firemen’s poles are heavy. Of course it could have been a teenager, but what would a teenager want with a funny-looking little bear like that? There were plenty of better toys in the lower rows to tempt a teenager, toys that anyone could take in a second with no trouble at all. But none of them had been stolen. No, it wasn’t a teenager; I was pretty sure of that.

  Finally, I went to sleep. Or to bed, at least. I must have been awake for half the night and didn’t come up with anything. But I did know one thing I had to do.

  That night being the last night before Christmas Eve, they were going to hold the auction for Petrina in the firehouse. I didn’t want to get there too early; no point in making Deborah feel bad seeing all the other presents bought up and knowing she wasn’t going to get her moon bear. But I did want her to know it wasn’t just idle talk when I promised I’d get her bear back.

  Debbie and I waited until the last toy was auctioned off and Porter announced the total. Four thousand, three hundred seventy-two dollars and fifty cents. More than we had expected and more than enough to send the Rozovskis to New York. Then I stood up and said, “I bid eighteen dollars, cash, for the little black bear. Number 273.”

  Homer looked embarrassed. “Please, Mrs. Slowinski, you know we don’t have that bear anymore.

  “I just want to make sure, Mr. Curtis, that when I find that bear, it’s mine. Mine and Deborah’s. So you can just add eighteen dollars to your total, Mr. Porter, and when that bear turns up. it’s mine.” Now if anyone was seen with the bear, everybody’d know whose it was. And what’s more, if the thief had a guilty conscience. he’d know where to return the bear.

  That night I stayed in my rocking chair again, rocking and thinking, thinking and rocking. I was sure I was on the right track. Why would anyone want to take the moon bear? That had to be the way to find the thief; to figure out why anyone would take the bear. But as much as I rocked, much as I thought, I was stuck right there. Finally, after midnight, I gave up. There was no way to figure it out. Maybe if I slept on it... Only trouble was. tomorrow was Christmas Eve, and even if I figured out who took the bear, there was no way I could get it back in time to put it under the tree so Debbie would find it when she woke up Christmas morning. For all I knew, the bear was in Pittsburgh by now, or even back in China. Maybe I shouldn’t have warned the thief by making such a fuss when I bought the missing bear.

  Going to bed didn’t help. I lay awake, thinking of everything that had happened, from the time we first stood behind the firetrucks and saw the bear, to the time in Mr. Wong’s store when I figured out how the bear had been stolen. Then all of a sudden it was clear. I knew who had stolen the bear. That is I knew how it had been stolen and that told me who had stolen it which told me how. which ... What really happened was I knew it all, all at once. Of course. I didn’t know where the bear was, not exactly, but I’d get to that eventually. One thing I had to remember was not to tell Deborah what I had figured out. Not that I was wrong— I wasn’t wrong: everything fit too perfectly—but I might not be able to get the bear back. After all, how hard would it be to destroy the bear, to burn it or throw it in the dump, rather than go to jail?

  The next morning Deborah woke me. “It’s all right, Grandma.” she said. “I didn’t really want that old moon bear. I really wanted a wetting doll. Or a plain doll. So don’t cry.” I wasn’t aware I was crying, but I guess I was. Whatever else I had done in my life, whatever else Carrie had done, to bring to life, to bring up such a sweet wonderful human being, a girl like this, one to be so proud of, that made up for everything. I only wished Jake could have been here with me to see her. And Wesley Sladen, the fool, to see what he’d missed.

  I didn’t say anything during breakfast—we always let Carrie sleep late because of her hours but right after we washed up, I dressed Deborah warmly. “We’re going for a long walk.” I told her. She took my hand and we started out.

  I went to the garage where he worked and motioned Levi Porter to come out. He came, wiping his hands on a rag. Without hesitating, I told him what I had to tell him. “You stole the teddy bear. You swiveled the ladder on the ladder truck around, pointing in the right direction, and turned the winch until the ladder extended over the bear. Then you crawled out on the flat ladder and stole the bear. After you put everything back where it was before, you went to sleep.”

  Well, he didn’t bat an eye, just nodded his head. “Yep, that’s the way it was,” he said, not even saying he was sorry. “I figured you knew something when you bought the missing bear. Nobody throws away eighteen dollars for nothing.” Deborah just stared up at him, not understanding how a human being could do
such a thing to her. She took my hand for comfort, keeping me between her and Shorty Porter.

  “Well, that’s my bear,” I said. “I bought it for Deborah; she had her heart set on it.” He wasn’t a bit moved. “She loved that bear. Porter. You broke her heart.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Miz Sophie,” he said, “I really didn’t want to hurt anybody. I didn’t know about Debbie when I stole the bear.”

  “Well, the least you could do is give it back. If you do, I might consider, just consider, not setting the law on you.” I didn’t really want to put a man with eight children in jail and, up till now, he’d been a pretty good citizen, but I wasn’t about to show him that. “So you just go get it, Mr. Porter. Right now, and hop to it.”

  “Okay, Miz Sophie, but it ain’t here. We’ll have to drive over.” He stuck his head in the shop and told Ed Mahaffey that he had to go someplace, be back soon, and we got in his pickup truck.

  I wasn’t paying attention to where we were going and when he stopped, my heart stopped too. Petrina was lying on the couch in the living room, clutching the moon bear to her skinny little chest. Irma was just standing there wondering what had brought us. “It’s about the teddy bear.” Levi Porter apologized. “It belongs to Debbie. I have to take it back.”

  We went over to the couch. “You see.” he explained to me, “on opening night, Petrina fell in love with the bear. I wanted to get it for her, but I didn’t have any money left. So I took it. figuring it wasn’t really stealing; everything there was for Petrina anyway. If I’d knowed about Debbie. I would’ve worked out something else, maybe.”

  He leaned over the couch and gently, very gently, took the moon bear out of Petrina’s hands. “I’m sorry, honey,” he told the thin little girl, “it’s really Debbie’s. I’ll get you a different bear soon.” The sad little girl let the bear slip slowly out of her hands, not resisting, but not really letting go either. She said nothing, so used to hurt, so used to disappointment, so used to having everything slip away from her, but her soft dark eyes filled with tears as Shorty took the bear. I could have sworn that the moon bear’s purple glass eyes looked full of pain, too.

  Shorty put the bear gently into Debbie’s arms and she cradled the bear closely to her. She put her face next to the bear’s and kissed him and whispered something to him that I didn’t catch, my hearing not being what it used to be. Then she went over to the couch and put the bear back into Petrina’s hands. “He likes you better,” she said. “He wants to stay with you. He loves you.”

  We stood there for a moment, all of us, silent. Petrina clutched the bear to her, tightly, lovingly, and almost smiled. Irma started crying and I might’ve too, a little. Shorty picked Deborah up and kissed her like she was his own. “You’re blessed.” he said to me. “From heaven.”

  He drove us home, and on the way back I asked Debbie what she said to the bear. “I was just telling him his name.” she said innocently, “and he said it was exactly right.”

  “What is his name?” I asked.

  “Oh, that was my name for him, Grandma. Petrina told him her name: he has a different name now,” and that’s all she would say about it.

  I invited Shorty in but he couldn’t stay: had to get back to the garage. If he took too long—well, there were plenty of good mechanics out of work. He promised he’d get Deborah another gift for Christmas, but he couldn’t do it in time for tonight. I told him not to worry; I’d work out something.

  When we got home. I got started making cookies with chocolate sprinkles, the kind Deborah likes. She helped me. After a while, when the first batch of cookies was baking, her cheeks powdered with flour and her pretty face turned away, she said, quietly, “It’s all right not to get a present for Christmas. As long as you know somebody wanted to give it to you and spent all her money to get it.”

  My heart was so full I couldn’t say anything for a while. Then I lifted her onto my lap and hugged her to my heart. “Oh, Debbie my love, you’ll understand when you’re older, but you’ve just gotten the best Christmas present of all: the chance to make a little child happy.”

  I held her away and looked into her wise, innocent eyes and wondered if, maybe, she already understood that.

  MYSTERY FOR CHRISTMAS – Anthony Boucher

  That was why the Benson jewel robbery was solved—because Aram Melekian was too much for Mr. Quilter’s temper.

  His almost invisible eyebrows soared, and the scalp of his close-cropped head twitched angrily. “Damme!” said Mr. Quilter. and in that mild and archaic oath there was more compressed fury than in paragraphs of uncensored profanity. “So you, sir, are the untrammeled creative artist, and I am a drudging, hampering hack!”

  Aram Melekian tilted his hat a trifle more jauntily. “That’s the size of it, brother. And if you hamper this untrammeled opus any more. Metropolis Pictures is going to be suing its youngest genius for breach of contract.”

  Mr. Quilter rose to his full lean height. “I’ve seen them come and go,” he announced; “and there hasn’t been a one of them, sir, who failed to learn something from me. What is so creative about pouring out the full vigor of your young life? The creative task is mine, molding that vigor, shaping it to some end.”

  “Go play with your blue pencil,” Melekian suggested. “I’ve got a dream coming on.”

  “Because I have never produced anything myself, you young men jeer at me. You never see that your successful screen plays are more my effort than your inspiration.” Mr. Quilter’s thin frame was aquiver.

  “Then what do you need us for?”

  “What—Damme, sir, what indeed? Ha!” said Mr. Quilter loudly. “I’ll show you. I’ll pick the first man off the street that has life and a story in him. What more do you contribute? And through me he’ll turn out a job that will sell. If I do this, sir, then will you consent to the revisions I’ve asked of you?”

  “Go lay an egg,” said Aram Melekian. “And I’ve no doubt you will.”

  Mr. Quilter stalked out of the studio with high dreams. He saw the horny-handed son of toil out of whom he had coaxed a masterpiece signing a contract with F. X. He saw a discomfited Armenian genius in the background busily devouring his own words. He saw himself freed of his own sense of frustration, proving at last that his was the significant part of writing.

  He felt a bumping shock and the squealing of brakes. The next thing he saw was the asphalt paving.

  Mr. Quilter rose to his feet undecided whether to curse the driver for knocking him down or bless him for stopping so miraculously short of danger. The young man in the brown suit was so disarmingly concerned that the latter choice was inevitable.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” the young man blurted. “Are you hurt? It’s this bad wing of mine. I guess.” His left arm was in a sling.

  “Nothing at all, sir. My fault. I was preoccupied...”

  They stood awkwardly for a moment, each striving for a phrase that was not mere politeness. Then they both spoke at once.

  “You came out of that studio,” the young man said. “Do you” (his tone was awed) “do you work there?”

  And Mr. Quilter had spotted a sheaf of eight and a half by eleven paper protruding from the young man’s pocket. “Are you a writer, sir? Is that a manuscript?”

  The young man shuffled and came near blushing. “Naw. I’m not a writer. I’m a policeman. But I’m going to be a writer. This is a story I was trying to tell about what happened to me— But are you a writer? In there?”

  Mr. Quilter’s eyes were aglow under their invisible brows. “I, sir,” he announced proudly, “am what makes writers tick. Are you interested?”

  He was also, he might have added, what makes detectives tick. But he did not know that yet.

  The Christmas trees were lighting up in front yards and in windows as Officer Tom Smith turned his rickety Model A onto the side street where Mr. Quilter lived. Hollywood is full of these quiet streets, where ordinary people live and move and have their being, and are happy or unha
ppy as chance wills, but both in a normal and unspectacular way. This is really Hollywood— the Hollywood that patronizes the twenty-cent fourth-run houses and crowds the stores on the Boulevard on Dollar Day.

  To Mr. Quilter, saturated at the studio with the other Hollywood, this was always a relief. Kids were playing ball in the evening sun, radios were tuning in to Amos and Andy, and from the small houses came either the smell of cooking or the clatter of dish-washing.

  And the Christmas trees, he knew, had been decorated not for the benefit of the photographers from the fan magazines, but because the children liked them and they looked warm and friendly from the street.

  “Gosh, Mr. Quilter,” Tom Smith was saying, “this is sure a swell break for me. You know, I’m a good copper. But to be honest I don’t know as I’m very bright. And that’s why I want to write, because maybe that way I can train myself to be and then I won’t be a plain patrolman all my life. And besides, this writing, it kind of itches-like inside you.”

  “Cacoëthes scribencli.” observed Mr. Quilter, not unkindly. “You see, sir, you have hit, in your fumbling way. on one of the classic expressions for your condition.”

  “Now that’s what I mean. You know what I mean even when I don’t say it. Between us, Mr. Quilter...”

  Mr. Quilter, his long thin legs outdistancing even the policeman’s, led the way into his bungalow and on down the hall to a room which at first glance contained nothing but thousands of books. Mr. Quilter waved at them. “Here, sir, is assembled every helpful fact that mortal need know. But I cannot breathe life into these dry bones. Books are not written from books. But I can provide bones, and correctly articulated, for the life which you, sir— But here is a chair. And a reading lamp. Now, sir, let me hear your story.”

  Tom Smith shifted uncomfortably on the chair. “The trouble is,” he confessed. “it hasn’t got an ending.”

  Mr. Quilter beamed. “When I have heard it, I shall demonstrate to you. sir, the one ending it inevitably must have.”