by Merry Murder
“Don’t you get it, J? There isn’t a single Keep Out sign on that outside door. The workmen even forgot to lock it. Someone could walk in here and fall straight down to Broadway!”
“Oh, come on, Charlie, this place is off the beaten path—no one’s going to be coming this way. Stop worrying.”
“Yes, but—”
“No buts, Charlie. Just tell one of the security guards. My God, you drag me all the way out here just to see this. Jesus Christ, I’ll bet I could even walk across one of these steel beams. The workmen do it every day.”
It was uncanny. Charlie knew that was exactly what J would say. It was part of the macho, daredevil reputation he had cultivated so carefully. “Hey, wait a minute, J,” he said.
“No. Serious. Watch me walk across this beam right here. It can’t be more than twenty feet long. And I’ll do it with a drink in each hand.”
“Come on, J, don’t be crazy.”
But J had already taken his first tentative step on the beam—with Charlie directly behind him.
It was all so simple. Now all Charlie had to do was give J the tiniest of shoves in the back, watch him stagger and plunge over the side, and it would be all over.
As J continued to move along the beam, he seemed to grow more confident. Charlie continued to follow a few steps behind, his right arm outstretched. It was now or never. Suddenly he made his move. But J moved a couple of quick steps faster and Charlie missed J’s back by an inch. Instead, he felt himself slipping over the side. He gasped. Then all he remembered was falling.
The hospital room was so quiet you could barely hear a murmur from the corridor outside.
On the single bed there lay what looked like a dead body. Every inch was covered in a rubbery casing and yards and yards of white gauze. All you could see of what was underneath was a little round hole where the mouth was supposed to be and another opening where a blood-shot blue eye stared up at the ceiling. Charlie Evanston.
The door opened slightly, admitting J, followed by one of Charlie’s doctors.
J shuddered. He always did, every time he’d visited over the past six months. He turned to the doctor. “How’s he doing today?”
“About the same. He tries to talk a little now and then.”
“Can he hear me yet? Can he understand?”
“We think so. But don’t try and get anything out of him.”
“Yes. I know.” He bent over the bed. “Charlie. Charlie. It’s me, J. I just wanted you to know I’m here. And I want to thank you again—I guess I’ll be thanking you for the rest of my life—for reaching out and trying to save me at that damn Christmas party.”
The blue eye blinked. A tear began to tremble on the edge.
“I was a fool. Only a fool would have tried to do what I did. And you tried to stop me. I felt you grab my jacket and try to hold me back. Then you took the fall for me.”
The blue eye stared.
“So what I came to say—what I hope you can understand—is that no matter how long it takes you’re going to get the best care we can find. Just get well. Everything’s going to be okay.”
The blue eye continued to look at J without blinking.
“And, Charlie, here’s the best news of all. The agency’s just picked up three big accounts. Over a hundred million.”
A light breeze blew the curtains from the window.
“So today the Board asked me to come up here and give you a special bonus. Not a Christmas bonus—more like Purple Heart. You deserve it, Charlie. You saved the old man’s life, you bastard!”
Charlie tried to nod, but it was impossible.
“And just wait till you come back,” J said enthusiastically. “You’re a hero, Charlie! We’ve got all kinds of great things waiting for you. All kinds of plans. It’s going to be a whole new ballgame, Charlie! Imagine!”
Yeah, thought Charlie. Imagine.
KELSO’S CHRISTMAS – Malcolm McClintick
Someone had murdered a Santa Claus.
The body, rotund and clad in the traditional red suit, lay in a corner behind the gift wrap section, in the basement, hidden from the view of passing customers by a counter and stacks of cardboard boxes. He still wore his long white beard and mustache, but the hat had come off and lay a foot from his head, revealing black hair with a bald spot on top.
George Kelso looked down at the body, then at Detective Sergeant Meyer. It was ten a. m., three days before Christmas, in one of the larger downtown department stores.
“Okay,” Meyer said, “let’s get this area cleared so the lab boys can get to work.” He sounded tired. Kelso understood that it wasn’t fatigue, but depression. Every year at Christmas Meyer, a small dark Jewish man, became depressed and usually withdrawn. It was no good talking to him about it, it was something Meyer had to live with and work out for himself, at least until he became willing to confide in his associates at the police department.
“I was supposed to go shopping this afternoon with Susan,” Kelso said to nobody in particular. “I suppose that’s out of the question now.”
“I suppose it is,” Meyer replied. “All right, Kelso, why don’t you take the offices upstairs and I’ll check with the clerks. The other guys are talking to customers to see if anybody noticed anything unusual.”
“I’ll go talk to the business staff,” Kelso agreed. When Meyer was in his Christmas funk, it was best to agree with whatever he said. The store’s music system was playing “Winter Wonderland” over the noise and confusion of shoppers, and a few feet away, a little boy was screaming and trying to kick his mother, who looked flustered.
Kelso headed for the elevators.
Kelso himself became somewhat depressed at Christmas, but not for the same reasons as Meyer. For one thing, he found himself constantly thrown in with relatives at this time of year, and none of them especially liked him. Being unable to understand what had possessed him to seek a career as a police detective, they tended to regard him with suspicion and hostility. One of his more enlightened uncles had once referred to Kelso behind his back (but within easy hearing distance) as “that fascist,” and a younger niece had often called him a pig. He had been forbidden to bring his gun to the various family dinners, though it was the last thing he would have brought, and whenever he entered a room everyone stopped talking and stared as if, he thought, expecting him to make an arrest.
For another, Christmas jarred his nerves. He had been brought up in a deeply religious family and the season had been the highlight of his year. It had seemed magical, with its aura of good cheer, its feeling of universal peace. Then he’d grown into adulthood to find all of that shattered by the reality of global conflict, mass murders, tough cynicism, and his own rapidly fading belief in anything magical. Ultimately, he’d come to view Christmas as an elaborate hoax perpetrated on a gullible public by department store managers, advertising executives, and toy manufacturers.
And now someone had killed Santa Claus.
But the dead man wasn’t really Santa Claus. Kelso rode up to the eighth floor executive offices, going over the victim’s particulars in his mind. Arnold Wundt, fifty-five, in charge of accounting, divorced, wife and kids on the west coast, quiet and bookish, nondrinker, nonsmoker, rarely dated, few friends. Who would want to kill such a man? Someone had wanted to.
Someone, at about nine thirty that morning, according to the coroner’s man, had cornered Arnold Wundt behind the gift wrapping counter and shoved a long thin knife directly into his plump body, angling it upward from just below his ribs and penetrating his heart, killing him almost instantly. That someone had left the knife in the bloodstained corpse and was now back at work, or shopping for presents, or on a plane bound for the Bahamas. It was anybody’s guess.
“May I help you, sir?”
Kelso had entered the manager’s outer office and stood looking down at a receptionist’s desk, suddenly realizing where he was, as if he’d awakened abruptly from a dream. He found his unlit pipe in one hand, his overcoat in t
he other.
“Sergeant Kelso.” he said. “Police department. I wonder if I could talk to Mr. Anderson?”
“Oh, is it about the murder?” The girl was under twenty-five, blonde, cheerful, blue-eyed, slightly plump. She was the kind of healthy, well-fed girl who’d have been a cheerleader at some midwestern university. Ohio State, Kelso thought. Or Purdue.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, noticing a gold band on her ring finger.
A big, healthy smile. “Just a minute, sergeant.” She got up and went through a door behind her desk, returned almost immediately with another smile. “Go right in. Mr. Anderson’s out right now, but his assistant, Mr. Briggs, will help you.”
“Thanks.”
Mr. Briggs was short, probably five seven or so, heavy, with oversized glasses that greatly magnified his round, staring eyes, making him look like some sort of surprised bug. His wide lips were fixed in a permanent smile. A surprised, happy bug. He held a large sandwich, trying to stuff oversized bites of it into his wide mouth. There were reddish stains on the sleeves of his white shirt, and a piece of lettuce on his pants leg.
“Stupid cafeteria,” he said around a mouthful, and dabbed with a napkin at his sleeve. “They always get too much ketchup on these things. I must’ve told them a hundred times.” He swallowed, finally, and glared. “Can’t finish it. Too messy.” He wrapped the remains in a paper napkin and dropped it into a wastebasket, then held out a small pale hand. “Glad to meet you, Sergeant Kelsy.”
“Kelso,” he corrected, and sighed.
“Right. Kelso. Glad to meet you. Been shopping, sergeant? We’ve got some terrific deals on suits.” The bug cast a critical eye at Kelso’s battered corduroy suit. “Fix you right up. No? Well, I guess it’s business, isn’t it? Terrible about poor Wundt.”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Briggs.” Kelso took out his notebook and ballpoint, putting away his pipe and dropping his overcoat onto a chair. “Could you tell me—
“Listen, sergeant.” The bug’s manner became suddenly confidential. He hurried across the office to the door, seemed to make certain it was tightly closed, and scurried back behind the polished desk. “I’d better tell you something. I don’t know how much it’s got to do with poor Wundt, but you’d better know about it. Sergeant—” Briggs glanced left and right in a comic imitation of some movie character about to reveal The Big Secret “—someone in this store’s been embezzling money.”
The words alone were normal enough; Kelso had encountered numerous embezzlers. It was the exaggerated way in which Briggs had spoken the words—his pop-eyed stare, his stage whisper, his air of a little kid confiding something about men from Mars to his best friend.
“Embezzling?” Kelso scribbled in his notebook. Fortunately Briggs couldn’t see it, because Kelso had written: “Comic book character.”
“Embezzling, sergeant. Somebody’s been skimming money right off the top. It amounts to over a hundred thousand to date. And not only that, I think I know who it was.”
Kelso allowed a theatrical pause before asking, “Who?”
Briggs leaned closer, looking immensely satisfied with himself, and whispered loudly: “Arnold Wundt.”
“Wundt?” Kelso frowned, not even pretending surprise.
“Right. Listen, sergeant. Wundt was an accountant, and a good one. He was, in fact, in charge of accounting. But as the assistant manager, and I’ve got a degree in accounting myself—” he cleared his throat loudly “—I’m not only qualified but also duty-bound to check Wundt’s work. And I caught him at it, sergeant. Now, if you ask me, someone else caught him at it, too. Someone who maybe tried to blackmail him and then, when he couldn’t bleed him any more, got rid of him.”
Kelso nodded slowly, as if considering what Briggs had said.
The little bug was a waste of time. It was too hot in the office and he was hungry for lunch.
“You don’t happen to know where Mr. Anderson is, do you?” he asked, trying to sound polite.
“I think he was going to meet with Wundt about something,” Briggs said, smiling his bug-smile. “I haven’t seen him since about nine thirty, when he left to go downstairs. Come to think of it, he said he was on his way to gift wrap. Yes, I’m certain. Gift wrap. About nine thirty.” Briggs seemed to emphasize the last words, and gave Kelso a meaningful look.
Suddenly Kelso realized what Briggs reminded him of. Not a bug at all, but a toy he’d gotten one year for Christmas, a rubber or plastic likeness of Froggy the Gremlin, pop eyes, leering smile. Briggs was Froggy the Gremlin with oversized glasses. And probably about as bright.
“I appreciate your help,” Kelso told him, trying not to sound sarcastic. “Well, have a nice day.”
“Merry Christmas, sergeant,” said Froggy. “A very merry Christmas.”
Kelso winced and left the office. The blonde cheerleader beamed at him and said, “Merry Christmas, sergeant.”
“Same to you,” he replied, as though returning an insult, and hurried for the elevators.
“I wasn’t able to find out a damn thing,” Detective Sergeant Meyer said. “As far as anybody knows. Wundt reported to his office in accounting this morning at nine sharp, as usual. He works alone. Nobody saw him or noticed him again till the gift wrap girl found his body behind her counter at a quarter to ten, when she was coming back from the ladies’ room.” The small detective shrugged. “That’s it. Nobody saw anything, nobody knows anything. Everybody liked Wundt, but not very well. Nobody disliked him. He was a nothing, a zero.”
“He was a Santa Claus,” said Kelso.
They sat in the store’s cafeteria, the noon crowd chattering and munching around them. Meyer glared at his meatloaf and said:
“Yeah, he was a Santa Claus. Why can’t people make meatloaf any more? My grandmother used to make delicious meatloaf. This stuff is still red in the center. Don’t they cook it?”
“I thought you only ate kosher.”
“Nuts. I eat anything. Jewish food happens to taste better, but that doesn’t mean I can’t eat what I want. I’m enlightened.”
“Ah.” Kelso nodded. “I wonder if Arnold Wundt’s playing Santa had anything to do with his murder.”
“He was scheduled to fill in for the regular Santa this morning,” Meyer said. “The store’s been having Santa in a booth for the kids every morning at ten and every afternoon at two and five, each shopping day till Christmas. What a zoo. I’m glad I don’t have kids. All my friends with kids are raising schizophrenics. All of them have split personalities—half Jewish, half Christian. I tell you, it’s hell having a kid in this country if you’re a Jew at Christmas.”
“Schizophrenic doesn’t mean split personality,” Kelso pointed out. “I’ve taken some psych courses. It means—”
“Forget what it means.” Meyer stabbed at his meatloaf.
Over the hubbub drifted the faint sounds of “Sleigh Ride.” At a nearby table two little girls sang “Jingle Bells,” egged on by their overweight mother, who seemed to think her mission was to entertain the other shoppers with her offspring and their whining voices.
“Who was supposed to have been Santa this morning?” Kelso asked.
“Huh? Oh, you mean whose place did Wundt take?” Meyer thought for a moment. “The assistant manager. Guy named Briggs.”
“Froggy the Gremlin,” Kelso murmured.
“What?”
“Nothing. So Briggs was supposed to have been Santa Claus.”
“I’m taking this meatloaf back. It’s inedible. You’d think with all their peace on earth and good will they could cook a piece of meatloaf enough to make it edible.” Meyer got up and carried his plate through the milling crowd to the food line, and returned a few minutes later with the same plate, scowling.
“What happened?” Kelso asked.
“They told me to eat it,” he said. “They told me I ordered meatloaf and I got meatloaf. They told me Merry Christmas.”
“Greetings of the season,” Kelso told hi
m.
Meyer muttered something under his breath. The two little girls sang “Deck the Halls” at the top of their lungs.
Meyer became convinced that the murderer was the gift wrap girl, a tall brunette named Claudia Collins. She stood several inches taller than Meyer, something which, Kelso knew, infuriated him; she was sullen, even while wrapping customers’ gifts, which infuriated everybody; and she was the only employee who would admit to having been in or near the gift wrap area at or about the time of the murder, nine thirty that morning.
“I’m going to question her some more,” Meyer announced as he and Kelso left the cafeteria. “I’m not letting some dumb broad spoil my holiday. If she stabbed that accountant, I’ll get it out of her.”
“By the way,” Kelso said, resisting the urge to light his pipe. “When I talked to Briggs this morning, he accused Arnold Wundt of embezzling over a hundred thousand dollars from the store.”
Meyer shot him a dark look. “You’re kidding. How would Briggs know that?”
“He says he’s got an accounting degree, and checked Wundt’s work.”
“Huh.” Meyer’s wheels turned. They stopped turning. “Claudia Collins probably found out about Wundt’s embezzling. She probably tried to extort some money from him. He pulled a knife on her, and she managed to stab him with it. Well, I’m going to find her. You check around the store. Keep your eyes and ears open, and let me know if you hear anything else.”
“Have a good time,” Kelso said.
Meyer nodded solemnly, as though it had been a serious wish. “I will.”
They parted. Kelso watched the detective shove his way into the crowd until it engulfed him; then someone grabbed his arm.
“George!”
He turned. Susan Overstreet’s wide brown eyes smiled at him. She was running one hand through wavy blonde hair and using the other to hold a shopping bag crammed with packages.
“Hi.”
“Isn’t this hectic? I’ve already got five of the things on my list. Listen, go with me to the children’s department, up on three, so we can find something for Peggy and Timmy. Then—”
