Cynthia Manson (ed) (55 page)

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 the 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.”