Secret Santa

by Cynthia Reese

  “Okay. Bye, honey.”

  Neil’s blazing vista of lights welcomed Charli home. It was after eight-thirty so the music had shut off, but the lights would stay on until midnight, then come back on promptly at 5:55 a.m. to greet the morning working stiffs. She sat in the car for a long moment and stared at his Christmas display.

  Meticulous. Detailed. There was not a bulb out, and even Rudolf, previously on the roof, had been set up in his new quarters on the last few square feet of real estate on Neil’s front lawn.

  If he puts half as much effort into investigating the donation at the clinic that he puts into his Christmas lights, I’m in trouble.

  Charli had thought her angst would be behind her. She was rid of the money. She hadn’t spent it on herself. So why didn’t she feel better?

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. Maybe if she’d looked harder at figuring out a way to wire the money or mail the money to the bank to be deposited to the clinic—but, no. In this post 9/11 world, large sums of money were suspicious, and cash doubly so. There simply hadn’t been any other way.

  You could have told the truth.

  That boat had sailed. She’d given up that chance when she’d anonymously donated the cash instead of going to the police.

  One of her professor’s favorite mantras came back to her: “Fix it or forget it, or better yet, do both.” Her prof had not been a big fan of self-flagellation. He’d hammered the quote into their heads, trying to get them not to sink into “the seductive swamp of self-loathing,” he’d called it.

  Right now Charli felt neck-deep in a swamp. A cold one. The chill of the night air had robbed the car’s interior of its heat. She grabbed her briefcase and the piles of paperwork she still needed to go through and heaved herself out of the car. She felt like a pack animal, what with all the stuff she carted back and forth to the office.

  Slam the door with her foot. Juggle the strap of her briefcase. Feel for her iPhone—yep, it was there. Fish out her house key. Avoid tripping on the steps—

  The sound of a car’s squealing brakes got her attention right before the headlights bore into her. Squinting into the glare, Charli saw a black-and-white police car turn into her drive.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HER HEART THUDDED in her chest. The car door swung open with a loud squeak, and the car’s suspension groaned. Someone in uniform stepped out. She couldn’t quite make out his face as the figure was backlit with all of Neil’s Christmas lights. He hitched up his gun belt and limped toward Charli. His right foot came down quickly, then his weight shifted to the left, then the quick right, then the left. Neuropathy from diabetes? Flat feet? He is a cop.

  “Dr. Prescott?”

  She jerked her gaze above his ankles to his face, still shadowed by his hat. “Yes? Is something wrong?” She dropped her keys. Drat her numb fingers! Bending down, she scrounged around on the concrete for them. As she did, she heard the uneven thud of his footsteps carry through the cold night air.

  Her fingers found the chilled metal of her key ring. She snatched it up and rose to a standing position. The cop had swept off his hat in deference—or maybe it was to scratch an itch, because he was rubbing sausagelike fingers across a bald pate that gleamed.

  Good gracious. This member of Brevis’s finest was a dead ringer for Mr. Clean—well, how Mr. Clean would look with a luxurious, over-the-top handlebar moustache. And he was bigger. And burlier.

  “I’m Chief Hawkins with the Brevis P.D. Just needed to follow up.”

  Charli gulped. Chief? This was not the kind grandfatherly chief she remembered. This fellow must have been hired since she’d been away from Brevis. “Follow up on what, sir? I’ve been seeing patients all day, and I am dead on my feet. Can we possibly talk about this tomorrow?”

  “Well, no can do on that. I prefer to interview witnesses when their memories are fresh.”

  “Fresh about what? Is this to do with one of my patients?”

  “Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to alarm you. No, no. This is about that donation. At the clinic. Louredes said you were one of the last ones to visit yesterday. So I figured...”

  Charli started to put the key in the door. She hesitated. Had she put away her dad’s notebooks? Or were they locked up? She thought she’d put every one of them back into the desk, except for the one she’d been reading at bedtime the night before. If she let in the chief, then wouldn’t he have implicit permission to poke around?

  I haven’t committed a crime. Not exactly.

  Chief Hawkins stood there, as patient as an oak tree, waiting for her response.

  “I’m sorry,” Charli told him. “I couldn’t tell you anything about that donation. I thought it was pushed in the mail slot?” Okay, if you don’t invite the man in out of this freezing cold, he’s going to be even more suspicious. Charli stuck the key in the door and turned it. “Won’t you come in?”

  “I believe I will. You know, these are some record lows. If you’ve got any plants out, you’d better get ’em in tonight.”

  The chief closed the gap to the steps in a couple of uneven strides. Charli let him in and realized she didn’t even have so much as a doughnut to offer the man. She dumped her briefcase and the pile of folders onto the pine dresser. She worked her way out of her coat, her gloves and her hat.

  “I’m sorry, but I haven’t been grocery shopping, so I can’t offer you much. I can make some coffee.”

  “Coffee’d be great,” he said. He settled into the chair Neil had sat in a few nights previously. Neil had graced the chair a lot more than Mr. Clean here did.

  Charli started in on the coffee preparations. In her anxious haste, she put one too many measures of coffee in the basket.

  Oops. Hope he likes it strong enough to wake the dead. She scooped out what she could in as an unobtrusive manner as possible. She was wired as a coat hanger as it was, and drinking this lethal brew would screw up any chance at sleep she had.

  “So what do you think I could tell you about that donation, anyway?” she asked as she dumped as much of the extra coffee back into the container as she could.

  “I figured you might be able to tell me if you saw anything suspicious. Ya know, anybody hanging around. And I had something particular that I was wanting to ask you.”

  “Well, I’m honored, then,” she said, and realized too late it came out flippant. “I’m sorry. I’m so tired I’m punchy. You’ll have to forgive me.”

  “Punchy myself. One of my guys up and left, and so we’ve been working killer overtime. Mayor’s not happy about it, but what do you do?”

  The coffee burbled into the carafe, and its strong aroma swept through the tiny kitchen. Charli plunked the sugar bowl onto the table with a teaspoon from the drawer. The chief sat in the chair, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes narrowed.

  He knows it was me. He’s going to ask me where I found the money. And I don’t have a clue what to tell him. Desperate to escape his penetrating gaze, she jerked open the fridge.

  “You’ll want cream, right?” The carton of half-and-half sat beside the Greek yogurt in the otherwise bare refrigerator, now that she’d washed and returned the Tupperware. Taking a sniff of the half-and-half, she shuddered. “I’m sorry. That one is a dead soldier,” she told him as she closed the carton and tossed it in the garbage. “I think I may have some nondairy creamer....”

  Back to her cabinets, where she rooted around, at last coming up with a microscopic jar of the fake stuff.

  “Don’t hang out here much, do you,” he observed.

  “Like I said, I’m always busy with patients. Tonight was supposed to be an early night.”

  What am I supposed to say? To hide her confusion and anxiety, she whirled back around to the cupboard. “We’ll need cups, won’t we?”

  Can he tell I’m nervous? Oh, yeah, the clank of the
cups in her hand probably told him she was a trembling wreck. She set them down on the counter by the coffeemaker before she could drop them on the floor. At last the coffee finished brewing, and she poured two cups.

  “Well, now,” the chief said as Charli set his mug before him and took a seat across from him. He beamed, causing the tips of his moustache to flex upward and revealing a healthy set of chompers. “Thank you kindly for the coffee.” Digging in the teaspoon, he added three heaping spoons of sugar and stirred briskly. Charli gawked at the amount of sugar he’d put into his coffee.

  He took a sip. “Whooo-wee, but you like it strong, don’t you?” Taking the sugar spoon in hand, he dumped another small mountain of white crystals into his cup.

  “Uh...”

  “That’s my kind of coffee.”

  The small talk was killing her. She was five seconds from blurting out the truth. Was this his secret interrogation weapon, to sit back and wait for a person’s nerves to do his job for him?

  It’s working. Give me a boil on a backside to drain any day. I am so not cut out for a life of crime.

  He took another sip, smacked his lips and dabbed his moustache with a napkin. “Well, now. About all this money.”

  “It was a lot, wasn’t it,” she murmured. Her coffee mug felt warm as she gripped it tightly with her fingers to steady it.

  “Yep. One hundred fifteen thousand, one hundred seventy-six dollars. That is a lot of dough.”

  “But it’s not a crime to donate money, right? So the clinic should be able to use it.” She waited for his answer as he crouched over his mug and took another deep draft of coffee.

  “That is some fine coffee. Let me guess, imported? You doctors, you like the expensive stuff, don’t you? I’ll bet it’s fresh ground beans.”

  “No. No. Just from the grocery store. Out of a container.” And about a third too strong.

  The chief frowned. “This stuff? From the grocery store?”

  “From the grocery store,” Charli concurred. She set her cup down, hard enough to slosh the coffee. He didn’t seem to notice.

  She repeated her earlier question. “So it’s not a crime, right? To donate cash?”

  “Nope. Kind of hinky. But not a crime.”

  She relaxed. “Oh, good—”

  “Unless the money was the proceeds of a criminal enterprise. Say drugs. Or a prostitution ring. Cash, well, it worries me.”

  He didn’t look worried. He looked implacable, his forehead smooth, his moustache working back and forth as he sipped his coffee. He drained the cup and stuck it out to her. “Don’t mind if I do.”

  Charli sprang up. “Oh, sure, have some more.” It glugged into the chief’s cup like black tar.

  His cup refilled, she settled back into her chair. Surely now the questions would come.

  They didn’t.

  “So how do you find out?” she asked. “About the money?”

  The chief turned a meaty palm upward. “Don’t rightly know, but don’t tell anybody I told you that. It’s above my pay grade, for sure. There’s all sorts of forensic stuff people expect you to do these days—the other day, somebody wanted me to fingerprint their car after it got vandalized. Mind you, it was raining that night, and the window was broken out with a brick.” He shook his head. “But still, just to shut ’em up, I had to get out my fingerprint kit and dust that brick. A brick! Course there were no prints to speak of on it. And they didn’t believe me when I told ’em that without specialized methods, we weren’t gonna be able to get any fingerprints off their car. I mean, my lift tape won’t even stick to wet metal.”

  “Oh. So what will happen?” she asked. Her pulse slowed at least ten points. This was going to be okay. He wasn’t going to trouble himself with an unsolvable case.

  The chief frowned and shrugged. “They turned it in to their insurance company and—oh! You mean about the money. Well, I guess I’ll do what I always do when I got a case that’s hinky and I don’t have the resources. I’ll call in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. They’ll come down, print the money, all that.”

  Charli choked in surprise, and hoped he hadn’t seen the reaction for what it was—a confession that she had anything to do with the money. “The GBI?” Her heart felt as though it might be going into v-fib any minute as it thumped way up into her throat.

  Print the money? Her father’s fingerprints—her fingerprints—were probably on that money. Had her dad ever been fingerprinted in a database that was still searchable?

  She was pretty sure her own fingerprints weren’t lurking in the state’s database—any time her fingerprints had been taken for background checks, she’d always been assured that they were deleted afterward.

  But her father’s?

  Too late now.

  “Not that they’ll turn up anything useful. Do you know how hard it is to fingerprint money? Especially old money?” Chief Hawkins laughed loudly, his white teeth on display, his chest shaking behind the tightly stretched white polyester uniform shirt he wore. “CSI. Bet you feel about all those doctor shows like I feel about CSI.”

  Charli kept her mouth closed and her fingers tightly laced together.

  The teeth disappeared and the moustache’s handlebars once again pointed down. “So you didn’t see anything, huh?” The question caught Charli by surprise.

  She swallowed. Her throat was dry now, in addition to housing a runaway pulse. “No. No, I didn’t see anything that evening. Nothing suspicious.”

  He lifted his chin, drew his brows together and scrutinized her. “Why’d you stop by?”

  “I—uh, sir?”

  “You have a patient there or something? You work for the clinic sometimes?”

  “Not exactly.” At least she was prepared for this one. “I was updating them on Luke Chatham, the little boy who got hurt at the fair. He was their patient, but I treated him.”

  “Sad thing, about that boy. He’s doing better, though. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s all? That’s all you talked about?”

  She swallowed. Surely this man knew something. Why else would he be in her kitchen, drinking the vilest coffee ever perked? “I’d helped them out a few days ago, and they’d wanted me to volunteer some more. I—I was letting them know I hadn’t forgotten them.”

  He set the coffee aside and steepled his fingers. The chief gave her a hard stare. “Feeling guilty, are you?”

  “Sir?” Had her voice come out as choked as it had sounded to her?

  “About not helping them more? I wouldn’t. They’re always coming by the police station with all manner of fundraisers. Sometimes they’re peddling something, sometimes they flat out ask for money. They’ll hit you up before too long. Mark my words.”

  Charli breathed out as slowly as she dared. “I expect so,” she managed to get out with as little squeaking as possible.

  “And you didn’t notice anything?” he asked again.

  “No.” That was true.

  “Nobody around?”

  Charli shook her head.

  “Did you happen to notice the bin under the mail slot? I mean, whether it was empty?”

  “Sir?”

  “Well, we got this video, and it shows somebody doing something, but I can’t assume that it really was the person who donated the money. Not unless I can rule out whether that bin was empty at the close of business. Louredes can’t say for sure, but she thinks it was. They don’t check it before they leave. So how about it?”

  “I—I didn’t pay attention,” Charli said. She debated on whether to offer a red herring of a clue—after all, she could describe the envelope to a T.

  But no. She’d stick with the truth, as far as she could.

  “Hmm.” He pursed his lips, hardly visible behind that extravagant m
oustache. For a moment, he sat there. He rubbed his palm over his scalp. “Here’s what I want to know,” the chief suddenly burst out. “I’ve wanted to ask you this since I got in the squad car and headed over here.”

  Her fingers wanted to clench into fists. She forced them to relax. The fabric of her tweed slacks was nubby and rough to her flattened palms.

  “Yes?” Here it came, some question she could not answer, the one answer that would give her away.

  “Can you look at my big toe? It’s killing me...been killing me for days. I got this ingrown toenail so bad I can hardly walk on it, and the wife is threatening to make me go to her podiatrist.”

  “Your big toe?” The whiplash change from the money to the chief’s big toe momentarily floored her.

  “Yeah.” The chief nodded. “And that guy—well, he’s slow as Christmas, and I figured you could get the job done here.”

  “Oh.” This was it? The thing he’d wanted to ask her? Was this the reason he’d chosen to come himself, to hit her up for complimentary medical care?

  He must have taken her silence as a no because he levered himself from the chair and retrieved his hat.

  “Aw, forget it,” he said. “It’s probably not ethical for you to treat me at home, huh? With all this overtime, I can’t take off to go to that guy—”

  “No. That’s okay, Chief. I understand.” Charli didn’t hesitate. She moved off her chair and pulled it close to serve as an impromptu exam table. “You sit right back down and take your shoe and sock off. I’d be glad to look at your ingrown toenail.”

  At least it’s not a boil on his backside.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “GOT ANY MORE of this week’s papers, Neil? We’ve sold out, and people are asking for more.”

  Raucous background noise nearly drowned out Ida Cunningham’s words over the phone connection. Neil figured the morning round-up session at Ida’s Gas-n-Go had come to order. In addition to gas, lottery tickets, cigarettes, soft drinks and any kind of junk food that ever called for preservation with sodium benzoate, Ida ran a short-order kitchen out of the convenience store and had a couple of booths in the corner where the old-timers gathered.