Murder Most Merry

by ed. Abigail Browining

  “Oh, lord, yes, of course.” Preen was cracking dangerously. “If my old man gets to hear of this I—oh, well, I might as well go and crash.”

  “I thought so.” Campion sounded content. “Your father has a reputation to consider. So has our young friend Groome. You’d better hand it over.”

  “What?”

  “Since you force me to be vulgar whatever it was you were attempting to use as blackmail, my precious young friend,” he said. “Whatever it may be, in fact, that you hold over young Groome and were trying to use in your attempt to force him to let you have a look at a confidential government report concerning the orders which certain aircraft firms were likely to receive in the next six months. In your position you could have made pretty good use of them, couldn’t you? Frankly, I haven’t the faintest idea what this incriminating document may be. When I was young, objectionably wealthy youths accepted I. O. U. ‘s from their poorer companions, but now that’s gone out of fashion. What’s the modern equivalent? An R. D. check, I suppose?”

  Preen said nothing. He put his hand in an inner pocket and drew out an envelope which he handed over without a word. Campion examined the slip of pink paper within by the light of a pencil torch.

  “You kept it for quite a time before trying to cash it, didn’t you?” he said. “Dear me. that’s rather an old trick and it was never admired. Young men who are careless with their accounts have been caught out like that before. It simply wouldn’t have looked good to his legal-minded old man, I take it? You two seem to be hampered by your respective papas’ integrity. Yes, well, you can go now.”

  Preen hesitated, opened his mouth to protest, but thought better of it. Lance looked after his retreating figure for some little time before he returned to his friend.

  “Who wrote that blinking note?” he demanded.

  “He did, of course.” said Campion brutally. “He wanted to see the report but was making absolutely sure that young Groome took all the risks of being found with it.”

  “Preen wrote the note,” Lance repeated blankly.

  “Well, naturally,” said Campion absently. “That was obvious as soon as the report appeared in the picture. He was the only man in the place with the necessary special information to make use of it.”

  Lance made no comment. He pulled his coat collar more closely about his throat and stuffed his hands into his pockets.

  All the same the artist was not quite satisfied, for, later still, when Campion was sitting in his dressing gown writing a note at one of the little escritoires which Florence so thoughtfully provided in her guest bedrooms, he came padding in again and stood warming himself before the fire.

  “Why?” he demanded suddenly. “Why did I get the invitation?”

  “Oh, that was a question of luggage,” Campion spoke over his shoulder.

  “That bothered me at first, but as soon as we fixed it onto Preen that little mystery became blindingly clear. Do you remember falling into the carriage this afternoon? Where did you put your elegant piece of gent’s natty suitcasing? Over young Groome’s head. Preen saw it from the corridor and assumed that the chap was sitting under his own bag! He sent his own man over here with the note, told him not to ask for Peter by name but to follow the nice new pigskin suitcase upstairs.”

  Lance nodded regretfully. “Very likely,” he said sadly. “Funny thing. I was sure it was the girl.”

  After a while he came over to the desk. Campion put down his pen and indicated the written sheet.

  “Dear Groome,” it ran, “I enclose a little matter that I should burn forthwith. The package you left in the inglenook is still there, right at the back on the left-hand side, cunningly concealed under a pile of logs. It has not been seen by anyone who could possibly understand it. If you nipped over very early this morning you could return it to its appointed place without any trouble. If I may venture a word of advice, it is never worth it.”

  The author grimaced. “It’s a bit avuncular,” he admitted awkwardly, “but what else can I do? His light is still on, poor chap. I thought I’d stick it under his door.”

  Lance was grinning wickedly. “That’s fine,” he murmured. “The old man does his stuff for reckless youth. There’s just the signature now and that ought to be as obvious as everything else has been to you. I’ll write it for you. ‘Merry Christmas. Love from Santa Claus.’ “ “You win,” said Mr. Campion.

  CHRISTMAS COP – Thomas Larry Adcock

  By the second week of December, when they light up the giant fir tree behind the statue of a golden Prometheus overlooking the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center, Christmas in New York has got you by the throat.

  Close to five hundred street-corner Santas (temporarily sober and none too happy about it) have been ringing bells since the day after Thanksgiving; the support pillars on Macy’s main selling floor have been dolled up like candy canes since Hallowe’en; the tipping season arrives in the person of your apartment-house super, all smiles and open-palmed and suddenly available to fix the leaky pipes you’ve complained about since July; total strangers insist not only that you have a nice day but that you be of good cheer on top of it; and your Con Ed bill says HAPPY HOLIDAYS at the top of the page in a festive red-and-green dot-matrix.

  In addition, New York in December is crawling with boosters, dippers, yokers, smash-and-grabbers, bindlestiffs on the mope, aggressive pros offering special holiday rates to guys cruising around at dusk in station wagons with Jersey plates, pigeon droppers and assorted other bunco artists, purveyors of all manner of dubious gift items, and entrepreneurs of the informal branch of the pharmaceutical trade. My job is to try and prevent at least some of these fine upstanding perpetrators from scoring against at least some of their natural Yuletide prey—the seasonal hordes of out-of-towners, big-ticket shoppers along Fifth Avenue, blue-haired Wednesday matinee ladies, and wide-eyed suburban matrons lined up outside Radio City Music Hall with big, snatchable shoulder bags full of credit cards.

  I’m your friendly neighborhood plainclothesman. Very plain clothes. The guy in the grungy overcoat and watch cap and jeans and beat-up shoes and a week’s growth of black beard shambling along the street carrying something in a brown paper bag—that ubiquitous New York bum you hurry past every day while holding your breath—might be me.

  The name is Neil Hockaday, but everybody calls me Hock, my fellow cops and my snitches alike. And that’s no pint of muscatel in my paper bag, it’s my point-to-point shortwave radio. I work out of a boroughwide outfit called Street Crimes Unit-Manhattan, which is better known as the befitting S. C. U. M. patrol.

  For twelve years, I’ve been a cop, the last three on S. C. U. M. patrol, which is a prestige assignment despite the way we dress on the job. In three years, I’ve made exactly twice the collars I did in my first nine riding around in precinct squad cars taking calls from sector dispatch. It’s all going to add up nicely when I go for my gold shield someday. Meanwhile, I appreciate being able to work pretty much unsupervised, which tells you I’m at least a half honest cop in a city I figure to be about three-quarters crooked.

  Sometimes I do a little bellyaching about the department—and who doesn’t complain along about halfway through the second cold one after shift? —but mainly I enjoy the work I do. What I like about it most is how I’m always up against the elements of chance and surprise, one way or another.

  That’s something you can’t say about most careers these days. Not even a cop’s, really. Believe it or not, you have plenty of tedium if you’re a uniform sealed up in a blue-and-white all day, even in New York. But the way my job plays, I’m out there on the street mostly alone and it’s an hour-by-hour proposition: fifty-eight minutes of walking around with my pores open so I don’t miss anything and two minutes of surprise.

  No matter what, I’ve got to be ready because surprise comes in several degrees of seriousness. And when it does, it comes out of absolutely nowhere.

  On the twenty-fourth of December, I wasn’t ready.

/>   To me, it was a day like any other. That was wishful thinking, of course. To a holiday-crazed town, it was Christmas Eve and the big payoff was on deck—everybody out there with kids and wives and roast turkeys and plenty of money was anxious to let the rest of us know how happy they were.

  Under the circumstances, it was just as well that I’d pulled duty. I wouldn’t have had anyplace to go besides the corner pub, as it happened—or, if I could stand it, the easy chair in front of my old Philco for a day of Christmas in Connecticut followed by Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street followed by A Christmas Carol followed by March of the Wooden Soldiers followed by Midnight Mass live from St. Patrick’s.

  Every year since my divorce five years ago, I’d dropped by my ex-wife’s place out in Queens for Christmas Eve. I’d bring champagne, oysters, an expensive gift, and high hopes of spending the night. But this year she’d wrecked my plans. She telephoned around the twentieth to tell me about this new boyfriend of hers—some guy who wasn’t a cop and whose name sounded like a respiratory disease. Flummong—and how he was taking her out to some rectangular state in the Middle West to meet his parents, who grow wheat. Swell.

  So on the twenty-fourth, I got up at the crack of noon and decided that the only thing that mattered was business. Catching bad guys on the final, frantic shopping day—that was the ticket. I reheated some coffee from the day before, then poured some into a mug after I picked out something small, brown, and dead. I also ate a week-old piece of babka and said. “Bah, humbug!” right out loud.

  I put on my quilted longjohns and strapped a lightweight. 32 automatic Baretta Puma around my left ankle. Then I pulled on a pair of faded grey corduroys with holes in the knees, a black turtleneck sweater with bleach stains to wear over my beige bulletproof vest and my patrolman’s badge on a chain, a New York Knicks navy-blue stocking cap with a red ball on top, and Army-surplus boots. The brown-paper bag for my PTP I’d saved from the past Sunday when I’d gotten bagels down on Essex Street and shaved last.

  I strapped on my shoulder holster and packed away the heavy piece, my . 44 Charter Arms Bulldog. Then I topped off my ensemble with an olive-drab officer’s greatcoat that had seen lots of action in maybe the Korean War. One of the side pockets was slashed open. Moths and bayonet tips had made holes in other places. I dropped a pair of nickel-plated NYPD bracelets into the good pocket.

  By half past the hour, I was in the Bleecker Street subway station near where I live in the East Village. I dropped a quarter into a telephone on the platform and told the desk sergeant at Midtown South to be a good guy and check me off for the one o’clock muster. A panhandler with better clothes than mine and a neatly printed plywood sandwich sign hanging around his shoulders caught my eye. The sign read, TRYING TO RAISE $1,000,000 FOR WINE RESEARCH. I gave him a buck and caught the uptown D train.

  When I got out at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, the weather had turned cold and clammy. The sky had a smudgy grey overcast to it. It would be the kind of afternoon when everything in Manhattan looks like a black-and-white snapshot. It wasn’t very Christmaslike, which suited me fine.

  Across the way, in a triangle of curbed land that breaks up the Broadway and Sixth Avenue traffic flow at the south end of Herald Square, winos stood around in a circle at the foot of a statue of Horace Greeley. Greeley’s limed shoulders were mottled by frozen bird dung and one granite arm was forever pointed toward the westward promise. I thought about my ex and the Flummong guy. The winos coughed, their foul breath hanging in frosted lumps of exhaled air, and awaited a ritual opening of a large economy-sized bottle of Thunderbird. The leader broke the seal and poured a few drops on the ground, which is a gesture of respect to mates recently dead or imprisoned. Then he took a healthy swallow and passed it along.

  On the other side of the statue, a couple of dozen more guys carrying the stick (living on the street, that is) reclined on benches or were curled up over heating grates. All were in proper position to protect their stash in the event of sleep: money along one side of their hat brims, one hand below as a sort of pillow. The only way they could be robbed was if someone came along and cut off their hands, which has happened.

  Crowds of last-minute shoppers jammed the sidewalks everywhere. Those who had to pass the bums (and me) did so quickly, out of fear and disgust, even at this time of goodwill toward men. It’s a curious thing how so many comfortable middle-class folks believe vagrants and derelicts are dangerous, especially when you consider that the only people who have caused them any serious harm have been other comfortable middle-class folks with nice suits and offices and lawyers.

  Across Broadway, beyond the bottle gang around the stone Greeley, I recognized a mope I’d busted about a year ago for boosting out of a flash clothes joint on West Fourteenth street. He was a scared kid of sixteen and lucky I’d gotten to him first. The store goons would have broken his thumbs. He was an Irish kid who went by the street name Whiteboy and he had nobody. We have lots of kids like Whiteboy in New York, and other cities, too. But we don’t much want to know about them.

  Now he leaned against a Florsheim display window, smoking a cigarette and scoping out the straight crowd around Macy’s and Gimbels. Whiteboy, so far as I knew, was a moderately successful small-fry shoplifter, purse snatcher, and pickpocket.

  I decided to stay put and watch him watch the swarm of possible marks until he got up enough nerve to move on somebody he figured would give him the biggest return for the smallest risk, like any good businessman. I moved back against a wall and stuck out my hand and asked passers-by for spare change. (This is not exactly regulation, but it guarantees that nobody will look at my face and it happens to be how I cover the monthly alimony check. ) A smiling young fellow in a camel topcoat, the sort of guy who might be a Jaycee from some town up in Rockland County, pressed paper on me and whispered, “Bless you, brother.” I looked down and saw that he’d given me a circular from the Church of Scientology in the size, color, and shape of a dollar bill.

  When I looked up again, Whiteboy was crossing Broadway. He tossed his cigarette into the street and concentrated on the ripe prospect of a mink-draped fat lady on the outside of a small mob shoving its way into Gimbels. She had a black patent-leather purse dangling from a rhinestone-studded strap clutched in her hand. Whiteboy could pluck it from her pudgy fingers so fast and gently she’d be in third-floor housewares before she noticed.

  I followed after him when he passed me. Then, sure enough, he made the snatch. I started running down the Broadway bus lane toward him. Whiteboy must have lost his touch because the fat lady turned and pointed at him and hollered “Thief!” She stepped right in front of me and I banged into her and she shrieked at me. “Whyn’t you sober up and get a job, you bum you?”

  Whiteboy whirled around and looked at me full in the face. He made me. Then he started running, too.

  He darted through the thicket of yellow taxicabs, cars, and vans and zigzagged his way toward Greeley’s statue. There was nothing I could do but chase him on foot. Taking a shot in such a congestion of traffic and pedestrians would get me up on IAD charges just as sure as if I’d stolen the fat lady’s purse myself.

  Then a funny thing happened.

  Just as I closed in on Whiteboy, all those bums lying around on the little curbed triangle suddenly got up and blocked me as neatly as a line of zone defensemen for the Jets. Eight or ten big, groggy guys fell all over me and I lost Whiteboy.

  I couldn’t have been more frustrated. A second collar on a guy like Whiteboy would have put him away for two years’ hard time, minimum. Not to mention how it would get me a nice commendation letter for my personal file. But in this business, you can’t spend too much time crying over a job that didn’t come off. So I headed east on Thirty-second toward Fifth Avenue.

  At mid-block. I stopped to help a young woman in a raggedy coat with four bulging shopping bags and three shivering kids. She set the bags on the damp sidewalk and rubbed her bare hands as I neared her. Two girls and a boy, t
he oldest maybe seven, huddled around her. “How much farther?” one of the girls asked.

  I didn’t hear an answer. I walked up and asked the woman, “Where you headed, lady?” She looked away, embarrassed because of the tears in her eyes. She was small and slender, with light-brown skin and black hair pulled straight back from her face and held with a rubber band. A gust of dry wind knifed through the air.

  “Could you help me?” she finally asked. “I’m just going up to the hotel at the corner. These bags are cutting my hands.”

  She meant the Martinique. It’s a big dark hulk of a hotel, possibly grand back in the days when Herald Square was nearly glamorous. Now it’s peeling and forbidding and full of people who have lost their way for a lot of different reasons—most of them women and children. When welfare families can’t pay the rent anymore and haven’t any place to go, the city puts them up “temporarily” at the Martinique. It’s a stupid deal even by New York’s high standards of senselessness. The daily hotel rate amounts to a monthly tab of about two grand for one room and an illegal hotplate, which is maybe ten times the rent on the apartment the family just lost.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  She didn’t hesitate, but there was a shyness to her voice. “Frances. What’s yours?”

  “Hock.” I picked up her bags, two in each hand. “Hurry up, it’s going to snow,” I said. The bags were full of children’s clothes, a plastic radio, some storybooks, and canned food. I hoped they wouldn’t break from the sidewalk dampness.

  Frances and her kids followed me and I suppose we looked like a line of shabby ducks walking along. A teenage girl in one of those second-hand men’s tweed overcoats you’d never find at the Goodwill took our picture with a Nikon equipped with a telephoto lens.

  I led the way into the hotel and set the bags down at the admitting desk. Frances’s three kids ran off to join a bunch of other kids who were watching a couple of old coots with no teeth struggling with a skinny spruce tree at the entry of what used to be the dining room. Now it was dusty and had no tables, just a few graffiti-covered vending machines.