Christmas Stalkings (8 page)

Antony Nettleton came out of his office, locking the door carefully behind him. He was the very last to leave and it wouldn’t be opened again till the New Year. It was Christmas Eve. Tonight he would be driving up to Cumberland with his family to join his brother for a good old-fashioned English country Christmas. It was a prospect which filled him with genuine pleasure. He loved this time of year. “The holly and the ivy,” he whistled as he walked down the dimly lit corridor . . . “The holly bears the crown . . . The rising of the sun, And the running of the deer . . .”

Suddenly the corridor light went off, plunging him in total darkness.

“What the hell . . . ?” he cried.

It only lasted a split second. Out of the dark came light, no dim strip this but a dazzling beam, blinding him more than the darkness.

He held his hand up before his face, but it was no use, he could see nothing. Then the whispering started.

“Hi there, Mr. Nettleton. Mr. Antony Nettleton. Tony. Got a message for you from brother Ambrose. Message is, it didn’t work out. Your trouble was, you tried to fix something that was never really broken, all
because Miss Negus told you that this guy she’d hired to look into her little bit of bother had a reputation for finding more than he was looking for.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Who is this?” he demanded.

“Two years Miss Negus has been having her worries. Three years since you became a coordinator of the United Appeal Fund for those occasions like Christmas when all the charities pull together and share out proportionately. One year to check it was possible, then straight in. It was a great idea, Tony. Ten percent creamed off across the board, all receipts to you, all accounts through your firm. If only you’d stuck to the biggies, Tony, the ones whose computers talk to your computers. Computers don’t get nosy. But you had to include Miss Negus’s little outfit too, and she works with an abacus. She smelled something wrong and told you she smelled it, because she never dreamed it could have anything to do with the United Appeal Fund, specially not when it was run by little Tony Nettleton, who’d once been in her class. Now I’m sure SPADA’s income would be right up to the mark from now on in, but this year you thought it best to get rid of this dumb private dick till the big Christmas haul was done. So when Ambrose comes visiting and tells you about his lampers, you say, ‘Hey, brother, do me a favor, get this black boy out of my hair, hire him to look into it’ Mistake, man. All the black boy was doing was catching cold watching old ladies with collecting boxes.”

“Is that you, Sixsmith? It is you, isn’t it? What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”

“They call it lamping, man. You’re fixed there, can’t move, can’t think, can hardly breathe. There you stay
till the lurchers come and finish you off Can you hear the lurchers, Tony?”

“What do you want? Switch that thing off and let’s talk!”

“Talk? What about, Tony? About charity? About Christmas? About the time of gifts? How generous are you feeling, Tony? Let’s hear some figures.”

Nettleton let out a sigh, almost of relief.

“I knew we could talk,” he said. “What do you want? A thousand? A percentage? I’ve got the figures here. Let’s sit down and look at them. Only, for God’s sake, switch off the bloody light!”

“Okay, Tony, if that’s what you want”

The beam died. The ceiling light came back on.

There were five figures standing there, not the one Nettleton expected. Two of them were in uniform. A third, in a gray suit, snapped his fingers and said, “Fetch him,” as if sending in a pair of collies. The two constables advanced. One took his arm, the other removed his briefcase from his nerveless fingers. Then they led him away.

As he passed the two remaining figures, he said in a small child’s voice, “Sorry, Miss Negus.” He didn’t even look at Joe Sixsmith.

“I was so wrong about him,” said the woman as they went out into the street. “My nose must be failing.”

Above the buildings a bright moon was shining. Sixsmith looked up at it and smiled.

“They say Scotch is good for a failing nose, Miss Negus. There’s a nice pub round the corner.”

“Why not?” she said. “I was, after all, right about you.”

In the pub they were singing carols. “The Holly and the Ivy.”

“But I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, he looked so utterly helpless in that light. Do they really catch deer that way? How vile.”

“The rising of the sun, And the running of the deer ...”

“Yes. Vile for a deer,” agreed Joe Sixsmith.

But just about right for a rat.

Tough female detectives have been hitting the headlines lately, and they don’t come any tougher than Liz Peters, PI. She’s the spiciest Christmas cookie you’ll meet this season: smart as Grey Poupon mustard, quick as a tigress, and twice as mean to tangle with . . . but maybe with a bit of pussycat underneath?

You may have previously met this versatile writer under one of her other personae: as Barbara Mertz, Ph.D., whose works on Egyptology have become standard classics; as Barbara Michaels, best-selling author of expertly crafted suspense novels; or as Elizabeth Peters, whose eruditely hilarious traditional mysteries have put more zing into history than Cleopatra ever dared to. Yes, she does love chocolate, cats, dogs, kids, and antique hatpins, not necessarily in that order. Yes, she’s a feisty lady who’s ready to fight for what she believes in. No, she’s not taking on any private-eye work at this time .
. .
pity, but not even a Grand Master can do everything at once.

I did not have a hangover. Those rumors about me aren’t true; they are spread by people who are jealous of my ability to handle the hard stuff. The truth is, I can polish off three giant-sized Hershey bars before bedtime and wake clear-eyed as a baby.

AH the same, I wasn’t at my best that morning. When I put my pants on, one leg at a time (I always do it that way), my heel caught in the hem, and then the zipper jammed and I broke a fingernail trying to free it. The weather was lousy—gray and bleak and dripping cold rain that didn’t have the guts to turn into snow. On Christmas Eve, yet. You’d think that the Big Gal Up There would have the decency to provide a white Christmas. I didn’t count on it. I don’t count on. much.

My office was pretty depressing too. The velvety bloom on the flat surfaces wasn’t the winter light. It was dust. My cleaning woman hadn’t shown up that week.

I work out of my house because it’s more convenient; I mean, hauling a word processor and printer around with you gets to be a drag. I’m a mystery writer. It’s a dirty job, and nobody really has to do it. I do it because it’s preferable to jobs like embalming and mucking out stables. They say a writer’s life is a lonely one. That’s a crock of doo-doo. I’ve got enough of a rep so that people come to me. Too darned many of them, but then that’s the way it goes in my business. Too darned many people. You could say the same thing about the world in general, if you were philosophically inclined. Which I am.

You might ask why, if my profession is that of writer, I call myself a PI. (You might ask, but you might not get an answer. It’s nobody’s business what I call myself.) The truth is, I don’t know how I got myself into this private-investigating sideline. It sure as heck wasn’t for the money. Everybody knows Pis can’t make a living; look at their clothes, their
scrungy
living quarters, their beat-up cars. Some of the gals can’t even afford to buy a hat. So why did I do it? Simple. Because it was there—the dirt, the filth, the injustice, the pain. All of suffering humanity, bleeding and hurting and crying for help. When one of them bled on my rug, I had to do something. I mean, what the heck, that rug set me back a bundle. It’s an antique Bokhara. I should let people bleed all over it?

I have to admit it wasn’t a pretty sight that morning. Dust, dog hairs, cigarette ashes, and a few other disgusting objects (including the dogs themselves) dulled its deep-crimson sheen. After a cup of the brew, with all the trimmings—that’s how I drink it, and if people want to make something of it, let them—my eyeballs felt a little less like hard-boiled eggs. I lit a cigarette. What the heck, you only die once. My desk squatted there like an archaeological mound, layers-deep in the accumulated garbage of living. I had to step over a couple of bodies to get to it. There was another limp carcass on my chair. When I moved it, it bit me. So what was one more scar? I’m covered with them. That’s the way it goes in my business. Cats are only one of the hazards. The dogs are no picnic either. They don’t bite, but I keep falling over them.

I sat down on the chair and lit a cigarette. The blank screen of the word processor stared at me like the eye of a dead Cyclops. My stomach twisted like a
hanged
man spinning on the end of a rope. Shucks, I thought. Here we go again. I forced my fingers onto the keyboard. It was like that every morning. It never got easier, it never would. There are no words. That was the trouble—no words. At least not in what passes for my brain. But somehow I had to come up with a few thousand of them, spell them right, put them into the guts of the machine and hope they came out making sense. That’s my job. There are worse ones— performing autopsies and cleaning litter boxes, for example. But at 9
a.m.
on a dreary winter morning on a mean street in Maryland, with dust and cat hairs clogging my sinuses and a couple of dogs scratching fleas, and my head as empty as Dan Quayle’s, I couldn’t think of one. I lit a cigarette.

The coffee cup was
scummed
with cold froth and the ashtray was a reeking heap of butts when I came out of my stupor to see that there were words on the screen in front of me. They seemed to be spelled right, too. I wondered, vaguely, what had interrupted the creative flow—and then I heard the footsteps. Heavy, halting steps, coming nearer and nearer, down the dim hallways of the house, inexorably approaching. . .-. I looked at the dogs. They’re supposed to bark when somebody comes to the door. They never do. If I hadn’t heard them snoring I’d have thought they were dead.

Closer and closer came the footsteps. Slower and slower. He was deliberately prolonging the suspense, making me wait. I took one hand off the keyboard and pushed the shining waves of thick bronze hair away from my brow.

The lamp on the desk beside me cast a bright pool of light across the keyboard, but the rest of the room was dark with winter shadows. He was a darker shadow, bulky and silent. I lit a cigarette.

“Hey, Jaz,” I said. “Got time for some—”

He didn’t. He was a big man. When he hit the floor he raised a cloud of dust that fogged the lamplight and my sinuses. Got to call that cleaning woman, I mused between sneezes. She was Jaz’s cousin, or grandmother, or something. He’d found her for me. He was always doing things like that for me. He always had time for some . . .

I got to my feet and looked over the desk. He lay face down, unmoving. A film of gray covered his thick black hair. I know what death looks like. I’ve dealt with it . . . how many times? Forty, fifty times, maybe more. I can handle it. But I found myself thinking I was glad he’d fallen forward, so I couldn’t see his face—the strong white teeth bared, not in his friendly grin but in a final grimace of pain, the soft brown eyes fixed and staring and filmed with dog hairs . . . Call me sentimental, if you want, but dusty eyeballs still get to me.

As I stood there, fighting those softer feelings that hide deep inside all us mystery writers who moon-light as private investigators, despite our efforts to build a tough shell so we can deal with the sick, disgusting, hideous realities of life without losing our integrity or our nerve and go on with our jobs of removing an occasional small piece of filthy slime from the world so it’s a better place, if only infinitesimally so . . . Anyhow, after I had wiped my eyes on my sleeve, a little spark of light winked at me from the center of his broad back.

I had to push the dogs away before I could kneel beside him. They’re so doggone stupid. They couldn’t even tell he was dead. They were nudging him, wanting him to get up and play, as he always did.

It could have been a jeweled decoration or medal, if it had been on his chest instead of his back. The colorless stones glimmered palely in the dusky room. They weren’t diamonds or even rhinestones. They were glass. I should know. I had only paid ten bucks for the hatpin. I collect hatpins. Just one of my little weaknesses. The last time I’d seen this particular specimen ... I couldn’t remember when it was. Had it been in the porcelain holder with the others, the last time I looked? Trouble was, I hadn’t really looked. You don’t look at familiar objects, things that have been in their places for weeks or months or years. You just assume they’re there, the way they always have been. I recognized it, though—the head of it, I mean—and I knew only too well what the rest of it was like. Ten inches of polished metal, rigid and deadly. In Victorian days they passed laws limiting the length of the pins women used to hold those enormous hats in place. Ironic, I thought, lighting another cigarette. Men turn purple with outrage when some legislator tries to keep them from stockpiling Uzis, but a woman couldn’t even own a lousy hatpin . . .