2Golden garland

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "What are you doing for Christmas? Working?"

  "No. Not this year. I called the supervisor today. I'm going to take a few days off. Go up to Chicago."

  "Sounds like a good idea." She spoke so cautiously that he could almost see the red light in her mind.

  "Maybe, maybe not. I think you were right, though. There are more issues than Effinger."

  "I am? I said that? When?"

  "In one of your usual glancing moments of brilliant insight too dazzling for you to see yourself."

  "You mock me, Hamlet."

  "You need it."

  "I don t like men with too many secrets."

  "Oh, I think you know that mine are pretty pedestrian. But you are having a good time there, despite urban blight, and Louie's fine?"

  "In his element! Speaking of ham. And--"

  Now she hesitated. Saving the worst till last, Matt thought. What could have gone wrong?

  "There's been a murder. At the advertising agency. But don't worry. Louie and Kit and I are on the case. Gotta go now; Kit and I are having brunch at the Russian Tea Room, and if you don't get there on time they send you to Siberia or something. Have a Merry Christmas despite yourself, Matt, please! I miss you."

  And she hung up.

  Sometimes he thought that Kinsella should have her. Would serve him right.

  Chapter 24

  Rudy the Red-nosed Pothead

  Kit hung up from calling a string of names in her personal phone directory, a volume so fat and crammed with odd bits of paper that it was held together by a rubber band.

  "I'd much rather have chatted on the phone half the morning with the darling Mister Devine in Las Vegas, than do this."

  "He called; not me. Besides, our conversation didn't last that long. You still exhausted your list, didn't you?"

  Kit nodded, then took off her jazzy metallic-framed glasses to rub her eyes.

  "Don't you do this," she warned Temple. "Rubbing is bound to give you premature bags under the eyes. Will knock you right out of parts you're too old for. But I am burnt out. All those tiny little numbers to read and dial, and not a bit of useful information."

  "You still think like a professional actress, Auntie. You can always have your author photo digitally retouched, so who cares how many bags you have?"

  "I do," her aunt said so sharply that the dozing Louie beside Temple growled.

  Kit growled right back, then redonned her glasses to scan the disorganized book's contents.

  "I might have to take up the stage again," she added. "What with the publishing fallout."

  "There's a publishing fallout?"

  "Yes. Kind of like the Age of Aquarius for book people. Major realignment of all the communication media to see what form of word and picture will survive the millennium. Why? You plan on breaking into publishing anytime soon?"

  "No . . . but I have a friend who might have a book to market soon."

  "Fiction?"

  "No. Expose, I guess."

  "Of anybody famous?"

  "No. Only slightly notorious."

  "Notorious is almost as good as famous these days. A notorious former Vegas mobster, perhaps? I'm available to ghostwrite the right project."

  "No gangsters. Just. . . international terrorism."

  "Wow." Kit took off her glasses again to rest her eyes, which looked only reasonably baggy for her age. "Any chance you'll name names? Subject? Writer?"

  Temple shook her head. "I shouldn't have mentioned it."

  "Probably not. Get my hopes up, will you? I'd hate being a detective! This is so boring and it got us nowhere."

  "You say you know every employment agency in New York that would handle holiday Santas?"

  "Well, the ones worth knowing about. There may be some outfit down in the Bowery . . ."

  Temple stroked Louie's satin ears. "Then we know something. The dead Santa wasn't hired through a legitimate agency."

  "Colby, Janos and Renaldi wouldn't know of any other kind of agency. They are big time, Temple. A major agency in this town, and that is something to crow from the chimney tops."

  "Chimney. A fatal chimney. A fake, fatal chimney. What a bizarre way to kill somebody! Why that way?"

  "It's dramatic."

  "Life is not a cabaret, Kit, contrary to the song. Most killers don't look for an innovative way out that would thrill the heart of the Bard of Avon, or even Andrew Lloyd Webber. The last thing a killer wants is a murder that calls attention to itself."

  "Why not? Maybe that was the point. I certainly wouldn't push someone I wanted to kill in front of a cab. So ... shoddy and unimaginative. Nobody would ever suspect anything, especially with the traffic in New York. And look at this scenario. It's perfect. A roomful of witnesses, nobody near the body, the whole thing concealed behind painted bricks. It's like a magic show. Except that at the end of an act, the corpse would jump up and we'd all shout, 'It's alive!' "

  Temple sat forward, causing Louie to slide into the space at her back. "But he did jump up, didn't he? The supposed corpse, I mean? He wasn't dead. He made a dramatic resurrection in front of everybody."

  "Colby, you mean."

  Temple nodded. "I'm beginning to wonder about Louie's behavior too."

  "You should." Kit's narrowed eyes drilled through the sleeping cat's Rubenesque form.

  "He's so perceptive," Temple said. "When I think about it, he was remarkably friendly to the Santa Claus we found in the empty conference room. I thought he had dashed in there on some quirky feline mission, but now I wonder."

  "You think Louie knew someone was in there?"

  "Probably. I sensed some movement, and he's a cat. Cats survive by sensing movement. But I think it was more than that."

  "More than cat and mouse?"

  "I think that Louie knew the guy in the Santa suit too."

  "Louie knew him! Right. Our chief witness is a cat. An out-of-town cat, whose chief experience of Manhattan is being toted to and fro in a purple parachute. Who would Louie know in the Big Apple?"

  Temple was stumped. "Only you."

  "On-ly youuuuu," Kit crooned back, trouper that she was. "Only . . . rouuuuuu."

  "Rouuu? Oh. Rouuuu-dy! Your friend who answered the door. No!"

  "Maybe he saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus."

  "You mean, at the advertising agency. He . . . saw something he shouldn't have when he came early for the gig, and got killed for it?"

  Kit was paging through her address book, her agile fingers scattering slips of paper right and left like huge snowflakes. "Shiii-shi-ite. Rudy doesn't have a phone listing. Can't afford a phone."

  "Can't afford a phone, in New York? That's like being deaf and blind in Macy's."

  Kit nodded solemnly. "Poor Rudy. That's why we all helped him. He had some dump farther down in the East Village, where it hasn't become fashionable yet. A rent-controlled place he qualified for years ago." Kit shut her book, like a Bible she had suddenly realized was a bad translation. "A lot of people live like that in New York. On the verge. The edge. You never notice them, until they die."

  "Rudy is not dead, Kit! He was a Macy's Santa just a couple nights ago. High-profile Santas like that don't go jelly-belly up. They come back to ho-ho-ho again. Have you got a street address on him?"

  "Yeah, but it's no place you and I would care to go after dark."

  "We'll bring Louie. People seem to give me a wide berth when I'm loaded with Louie." Temple held out a hand. "The book, please."

  The cab driver kept wanting to take them to Houston--not pro-nounced Hue-ston, like the very big city in Texas, but House-ton, like the very bad street in New York City.

  Temple knew enough to quail at the street name, but Kit was implacable. She repeated the address, and ended up directing the cabby.

  The street the cab stopped on was narrow, shadowed, empty, lined with tall trucks and scary as hell.

  The cab driver managed to convey that he was loath to leave the ladies off here, even though he did not speak Englis
h.

  Temple worried when a New York City cab driver had an attack of conscience about letting a passenger off.

  They exited the vehicle, the driver begging and pleading with them until they broached the building's iron-railed door.

  No security system was in place to make entrance difficult.

  Kit breezed in ahead of Temple, her long faux-fur coat brushing the peeling woodwork.

  "Sixth floor," she said with brio, marching over a carpet of smashed trash to a paint-pocked metal elevator door scratched with incomprehensible obscenities.

  "Kit--"

  "Hush. In New York, attitude is everything."

  The lobby felt as icy as the outside air. Temple clutched Louie to her bosom in his carrier, glad to have some concealed weapons nearby even if they were only claws.

  When the elevator creaked open the scarred outer doors, an odor of cat box nearly knocked them off their feet. Actually, the odor was not cat box, but--Louie forgive her!--it was better to think of it as an animal odor rather than human.

  Kit swept onto the putrid car like a czarina in sable and pushed the button for the sixth floor with the tip of her leather glove.

  Her head was high.

  "Think of England, dear," she advised.

  "Why the Hades should I think of England when I'm in the heart of Hell's Kitchen or someplace? I will think of. . . Boys' Town."

  "Spencer Tracy," Kit said soothingly. "In a Roman collar."

  "A blond Spencer Tracy in a Roman collar," Temple corrected as the rickety elevator lurched upward with suspicious fits and starts.

  "Spencer Tracy was silver-haired in that movie," Kit corrected.

  "You have your Sthpen-ther Tra-thy, and I'll have mine," Temple said between gritted teeth. It was hard to speak clearly while breathing through your mouth.

  Midnight Louie cried in protest, but then, he had no holy figures to invoke for protection.

  Then Louie hissed. It sounded remarkably like "Baaasst!"

  "I think that Louie's saying that Spencer Tracy was a bastard," Temple said.

  "Louie knows nothing about it," Kit replied. "Tracy couldn't divorce his wife to marry Katharine Hepburn because he was a devout Catholic. One of Hollywood's few off-screen tragedies."

  "Devout Catholics are the pits," Temple said.

  "I happen to admire Spencer Tracy. He was a fabulous actor."

  "But I bet he wouldn't be caught dead in this dump."

  "That was Bette Davis. Now, please, constrain yourself. We're almost there."

  Kit was right. The elevator soon stopped. The ruined doors took their time about deciding to open.

  Temple streaked out, Louie in her arms. Kit followed, glasses perched on her nose.

  "We should have brought a flashlight," she noted.

  The hall lay before them, more smelled than seen, a stew of hotplate cookery, unclean corridors and bathrooms too far from rooms.

  "I suppose you don't have vintage buildings of this age in Las Vegas," Kit said.

  "Only the Blue Mermaid Motel."

  "The Blue Mermaid. What an evocative name. It should be used in a play."

  "Where are we going?"

  "To Rudy's flat."

  "How will we find it?"

  Kit sighed. Her faux fur brushed Temple's wrist. "I have a number, which I cannot see. Perhaps we will meet a kindly guide on the way."

  "Perhaps we will meet a housing inspector."

  "Not in New York City! Onward."

  Finally, finding no sense to the numbering system, by dint of approaching innumerable doors and by process of elimination and the curt direction of disturbed residents, Kit and Temple stood before one narrow door.

  "What if he's home?" Temple asked. "Won't he be mortified that we hunted him down?"

  "He may be, but we will not be." Kit was still doing her Empress of all the Russias impersonation. "We are merely visiting an old friend for the holidays. We'll take him out for cheese blintzes or something. Look, Temple. If rent control ever phases out, this place will be snapped up, rehabbed like my building and become one of the finest addresses in lower Manhattan. Consider our visit. . . premature."

  "Consider poor Rudy the renter an endangered species."

  "Rent control has allowed a fringe person like him to have a home all these years. At least he'll have a couple years to look for new accommodations."

  "If he isn't dead already."

  "Temple, please! I've been trying not to think of that. I guess we have to knock. There's no doorbell."

  "You're wearing the leather gloves."

  Kit lifted her chin again, and her fist, and rapped three times.

  Knock three times . . . no answer

  Several more attempts were answered only by silence.

  Louie had, by then, had it. He meowed in an angry tone, then wriggled his head and forelegs free of the bag. Two black cat paws pushed on the door.

  And it opened.

  "What a natural!" Kit slipped past Louie into the dark beyond. "Remember to say the cat did it, if anyone should ask."

  Inside they were accosted by a pair of assertive odors: ancient, brittle newsprint and mildew. Temple and Louie sneezed in tandem. Somewhere in the dark, Kit scrabbled for a light switch.

  "This reminds me of the conference room." Temple whispered, rather than whistled, in the dark. "And look what happened there."

  Her answer was a soft click. A wan puddle of light spread on the ceiling like a stain.

  Kit was a huge, humped figure vanishing into her own shadow down a dim hallway. "Wait here, Temple. Rudy! It's Kit Carlson. Merry Christmas! Are you home?"

  Temple waited. "Louie, it's so cold in here. Don't they have heat?"

  Midnight Louie wriggled in his carrier, but he didn't try to leap to the floor. Temple figured his nose told him what had been on that floor, and he wasn't going to follow an act like that!

  "Temple!" Kit's voice from far down the hall sounded clogged. "I've found a flashlight."

  Temple ventured down the dark hallway, cheered by a wavering comet of light at the end of the tunnel. The odor of stale Oriental food grew. She figured a tiny kitchenette lurked behind an ajar door. Another open door floated by; beyond it, she glimpsed piles of papers and books.

  Kit's flashlight took wild stabs at illuminating parts of a tiny room at the hall's very end.

  "This place is laid out like a classic railroad flat," Kit said. "Narrow and cubbyholed and homely. I don't suppose you're old enough to remember the Box-car Kids books?"

  Temple couldn't respond before Kit answered herself. "No, of course not. Too young. Railroad flats. A boon from an indifferent housing authority and time itself. A rent-controlled throwback, a hidden refuse heap, but its residents' own. Rudy lived here. Smell the stale pot."

  "Lived?"

  "He's not here now, and I haven't seen any sign of a Santa suit about the place. I know he had his own outfit. Look at those baskets." Her flashlight sketched a mattress on the floor surrounded by wicker laundry baskets full of papers. "You wonder if he collected them for warmth, or content. We had no idea how he lived, we old actors lending him the occasional hand. We remembered him tall and slender and as limber as a weeping willow. He had a fantastic talent for mime. That made him a great street beggar later. Looked so pathetic. When we got him cleaned up a few years ago, and lined up regular jobs, he always showed up. And always came back to here, the place he'd gotten years ago. Do you think he's really dead, Temple? Or just... out on the town in his Santa suit doing another gig?"

  "I don't know. Maybe we should come back by daylight to find out if he's come back here. Or maybe we should call the precinct and ask to see the body, sans everything."

  Kit snapped off the flashlight. "I was afraid of that."

  For a long moment, in the utter dark, she thought of Rudy.

  Chapter 25

  A Very Bad Joint

  I have not been in a down-at-the-heels dive like this in ages.

  I am sorry to rep
ort that people live in places across this great land in which I would not kennel a dog . . . and my opinion of dogs is well known. I am also sorry to report that there were times in my not-so-recent past when I would have been happy to have such a joint to cut the wind.

  Speaking of joints, I am surprised that my two lady friends have not commented on the roaches around this place. I refer both to the six-legged variety, which skitter away from the flashlight beam as if it were a laser-sword from Star Wars and they were Darth Vader (given some people's belief in reincarnation, they could be), and the shriveled brown butt-ends of marijuana cigarettes. I would think that Miss Kit Carlson, given her vaunted flower-child lifestyle in the decade of the sixties, would have more than a passing acquaintance with such storied leftovers of the era.

  In fact, I pat one atop a dresser so it rolls on the floor. Miss Temple gives the object the distracted frown of one who is concentrating so hard on holding her breath so as to avoid noxious odors that all her other senses are on vacation. Miss Kit favors me with a dirty look, and casually kicks the roach out of sight under the dresser.

  Maybe she does not wish to further scandalize her niece, or is worried about Rudy's reputation, which is like locking the barn door after Native Dancer is out and has gone cantering on to greater glory. So while the ersatz Snoop Sisters debate the state of the missing resident's health, I am pretty convinced that he was the dead guy in the sky at the advertising agency's Christmas party.

  What a way to go! Strung up like a stocking and cut down like a lump of coal. At least the condemned man had a last cigarette, from the odor my nose detected going up the chimney. He had a lot of previous ones in this place here, although the butts are cold and dead as a smoked mackerel.

  Of course, if I now know for sure who met his Maker in a chimney, I do not know why. A guy from this side of Skid Row would hardly be worth killing for love or money. So it comes down to the current theory among the amateur set: Rudy was an unintended victim. Brent Colby, Jr., had been so successfully mum about using a shill in a Santa suit this year that this poor dude swung in his stead.