Murder Most Merry (25 page)

“All right,” Michelle agreed, and her mother nodded, gripping her hands together.

“I had no idea what the five gifts meant until I glimpsed those old alphabet books in your room, Michelle. I imagine your dad used to read to you from those when you were learning the alphabet.” Michelle nodded silently. “Those books always use simple objects or animals to stand for the letters. Many of them start out ‘A is for Apple.” “

Her mother took it up. “Of course! ‘B is for Bus, ‘ ‘R is for Raven, ‘ ‘A is for Apple’—but then there was the photo of me.”

“Mother?” Nick said.” ‘M is for Mother, ‘ ‘P is for Pig. ‘ “

“Bramp?” Michelle laughed. “What does that mean?”

“That stumped me, too, until I remembered it wasn’t just any bus. It had a greyhound on the side. ‘G is for Greyhound. ‘ That would give us gramp.”

“Gramp,” Florence Beaufeld said.

“Gramp!” her daughter repeated. “You mean Grandpa? The money was to come from him?”

“Obviously out of the question,” Nick agreed. “He’d never act as a channel for your father’s money, not when he opposed the whole thing so vigorously. He even hired me in the hope of learning the location of the money before you found it.”

“But gramp certainly means grandfather,” Florence pointed out. “It has no other meaning that I know of.”

“True enough. But remember that your former husband was limiting himself to a five-letter word by using this system of symbolic Christmas gifts. The word had to be completed by today, a month before Michelle’s eighteenth birthday. If gramp stands for grandfather, could the word grandfather itself signify something other than Michelle’s flesh-and-blood grandfather?”

He saw the light dawn on Michelle’s face first. “The grandfather clock!”

Nick smiled. “Let’s take a look.”

In the base of the clock, below the window where the pendulum swung, they found the package. Inside were neatly banded packages of hundred-dollar bills.

Florence Beaufeld stood up, breathing hard. “There’s close to a half million dollars here.”

“He couldn’t risk entering this apartment too many times, so he hid the money in advance. If you hadn’t found it, he’d probably have found a way to give you a more obvious hint.”

“You mean Dan has been in this apartment?”

Nick nodded. “For the last five Christmas Eves.”

“But—”

She was interrupted by the buzzer, and the doorman’s voice announced the arrival of Mr. Simpson’s car.

“Go on,” Nick urged them. “I’ll catch you up on the rest later.”

It was shortly before midnight when Nick stepped from the shadows near the building and intercepted the man walking quickly toward the entrance. “Larry?”

The night-security man turned to stare at Nick. “You’re the fellow who was asking all those questions.”

“That’s right. I finally got some answers. You’re Dan Beaufeld, aren’t

you?”

“I—”

“There’s no point in denying it. I’ve seen your picture. You shaved off your moustache, but otherwise you look pretty much the same.”

“Where did I slip up? Or was it just the photo?” There was a tone of resignation in his voice.

“There were other things. If Dan Beaufeld was leaving those Christmas gifts himself, he had to have a way into the apartment. A building employee seemed likely in view of the tight security, and one of the security men seemed most likely. There are master keys in the security desk and it would have been easy for you to have one duplicated. The gifts were always left shortly before midnight on Christmas Eve, and that implied someone who might start work on the midnight shift. You couldn’t leave your post after midnight. Last night as I was leaving, you told me you’d been here just over four years—enough to cover the last five Christmases. You also said old-timers got the day and evening shifts, yet the day security man told me he’s only been here a year. That made me wonder if you preferred the midnight shift so you’d be less likely to be seen and recognized by people who might know you. Of course you spent most of your time in Florida, even before the divorce, and without the moustache it was doubtful any of the other employees or residents would recognize you. On those occasions when Michelle or her mother came in after midnight, you could simply hide your face behind a newspaper or bend down behind the TV monitors.”

“I had to be close to her,” Dan Beaufeld admitted. “I had to watch my daughter growing up, even if it meant risking arrest. I’d see her going off to school or to parties, watching from across the street, and that was enough.

Working here made me feel close to them both. Michelle had a custom of hanging up her Christmas stocking, so I started leaving the gifts every year to let her know I was near and to prepare her for the money she’d get when she turned eighteen.”

“I knew the maid let herself out around ten o’clock, and Florence never bothered to relatch the chain lock until bedtime. I entered with my master key, making certain they weren’t in the downstairs rooms, and left the gift in the stocking before midnight. Last year I had to come back twice because they were sitting by the fireplace, but usually Florence was out at someone’s Christmas party and it was all clear.”

“Last night you left the money, too—in the grandfather clock.”

Beaufeld grinned. “So they read the clues properly.”

“It’s drug money, isn’t it?”

“Some of it, but I’m out of that now. I used some fake ID to start a new life, a clean life.”

“Charles Simpson still wants you in prison.”

Dan Beaufeld took a deep breath. “Sometimes I think about turning myself in. Some of the crimes are beyond the statute of limitations now, and a lawyer told me that if I surrendered I’d probably get off with a lenient sentence.”

“Why don’t you talk it over with Florence and Michelle? They don’t want your money, they want you. They’re waiting up there for you now.”

Dan Beaufeld turned his eyes skyward, toward the lighted windows he must have looked at hundreds of times before. “What are
you
getting out of this?” he asked.

Nick Velvet, who had serious doubts about collecting his fee from Charles Simpson, merely answered, “I don’t need to get anything out of this one. It’s Christmas.”

THE CHRISTMAS BEAR – Herbert Resnicow

“Up there, Grandma,” Debbie pointed, all excited, tugging at my skirt, “in the top row. Against the wall. See?” I’m not really her grandma, but at six and a half the idea of a great-grandmother is hard to understand. All her little friends have grandmothers, so she has a grandmother. When she’s a little older, I’ll tell her the whole story.

The firehouse was crowded this Friday night, not like the usual weekend where the volunteer firemen explain to their wives that they have to polish the old pumper and the second-hand ladder truck. They give the equipment a quick lick-and-a-promise and then sit down to an uninterrupted evening of pinochle. Not that there’s all that much to do in Pitman anyway—we’re over fifty miles from Pittsburgh, even if anyone could afford to pay city prices for what the big city offers—but still, a man’s first thought has to be of his wife and family. Lord knows I’ve seen too much of the opposite in my own generation and all the pain and trouble it caused, and mine could’ve given lessons in devotion to this new generation that seems to be interested only in fun. What they call fun.

Still, they weren’t all bad. Even Homer Curtis, who was the worst boy of his day. always full of mischief and very disrespectful, didn’t turn out all that bad. That was after he got married, of course: not before. He was just voted fire chief and, to give him credit, this whole Rozovski affair was his idea, may God bless him.

Little Petrina Rozovski—she’s only four years old and she’s always been small for her age—her grandfather was shift foreman over my Jake in the mine while we were courting. We married young in those days because there was no future and you grabbed what happiness you could and that’s how I came to be the youngest great-grandmother in the county, only sixty-seven, though that big horse-faced Mildred Ungaric keeps telling everybody I’m over seventy. Poor Petrina has to have a liver transplant, and soon. Real soon. You wouldn’t believe what that costs, even if you could find the right liver in the first place. Seventy-five thousand dollars, and it could go to a lot more than that, depending. There isn’t that much money in the whole county.

There was talk about going to the government—as if the government’s got any way to just give money for things like this or to make somebody give her baby’s liver to a poor little girl—or holding a raffle, or something, but none of the ideas was worth a tinker’s dam. Then Homer, God bless him, had this inspiration. The volunteer firemen—they do it every year—collect toys for the poor children, which, these days, is half the town, to make sure every child gets
some
present for Christmas. And we all, even if we can’t afford it, we all give something. Then one of them dresses up as Santa Claus and they all get on the ladder truck and, on Christmas Eve, they ride through the town giving out the presents. There’s a box for everyone, so nobody knows who’s getting a present, but the boxes for the families where the father is still working just have a candy bar in them or something like that. And for the littlest kids, they put Santa on top of the ladder and two guys turn the winch and lift him up to the roof as though he’s going to go down the chimney and the kids’ eyes get all round and everybody feels the way a kid should on Christmas Eve.

We had a town meeting to discuss the matter. “Raffles are no good,” Homer declared, “because one person wins and everybody else loses. This year we’re going to have an auction where everybody wins. Everybody who can will give a good toy—it can be used, but it’s got to be good—in addition to what they give for the poor kids. Then the firemen will auction off those extra toys and the idea of that auction is to pay as
much
as possible instead of as little.” That was sort of like the Indian potlatches they used to have around here that my grandfather told me about. Well, you can imagine the opposition to that one. But Homer overrode them all. Skinny as he is, when he stands up and raises his voice—he’s the tallest man in town by far—he usually gets his way. Except with his wife, and that’s as it should be. “Anyway,” he pointed out, “it’s a painless way of getting the donations Rozovski needs to get a liver transplant for Petrina.”

Shorty Porter, who never backed water for anyone, told Homer, “Your brain ain’t getting enough oxygen up there. Even if every family in town bought something for ten dollars on the average, with only twelve hundred families in town, we’d be short at least sixty-three thousand dollars, not to mention what it would cost for Irma Rozovski to stay in a motel near the hospital. And not everybody in town can pay more than what the present he bids on is worth. So you better figure on getting a lot less than twelve thousand, Homer, and what good that’ll do, I fail to see.” Levi Porter always had a good head for figures. One of these days we ought to make him mayor, if he could take the time off from busting his butt in his little back yard farm which, with his brood, he really can’t.

“I never said,” Homer replied, “that we were going to raise enough money this way to take care of the operation and everything. The beauty of my plan is... I figure we’ll raise about four thousand. Right, Shorty?”

“That’s about what I figured,” Shorty admitted.

“We give the money to Hank and Irma and they take Petrina to New York. They take her to a TV station, to one of those news reporters who are always looking for ways to help people. We have a real problem here, a real emergency, and Petrina. with that sweet little face and her big brown eyes, once she appears on TV, her problems are over. If only ten percent of the people in the U. S. send in one cent each, that’s all, just one cent, we’d get two hundred fifty thousand dollars. That would cover everything and leave plenty over to set up an office, right here in Pitman, for a clearing house for livers for all the poor little kids in that fix. And the publicity would remind some poor unfortunate mother that her child— children are dying in accidents every day and nobody knows who or where, healthy children—her child’s liver could help save the life of a poor little girl.”

Even Shorty had to admit it made sense. “And to top it all.” Homer added, “if we do get enough money to set up a liver clearing house, we’ve brought a job to Pitman, for which I’d like to nominate Irma Rozovski, to make up for what she’s gone through. And if it works out that way, maybe even two jobs, so Hank can have some work too.” Well, that was the clincher. We all agreed and that’s how it came about that I was standing in front of the display of the auction presents in the firehouse on the Friday night before Christmas week while Deborah was tugging and pointing at that funny-looking teddy bear, all excited, like I’d never seen her before.