Murder Most Merry (53 page)

She twisted out of John’s grasp and hurried to the door. “Maybe he made it on Wall Street!”

There was a long silence. “Maybe he did,” Mr. Bridgewright said.

“Several hundred thousand,” John added with awe in his voice.

At the coffee machine that noon Paula touched Herb’s arm. “Would you be willing to give a poor girl like me a little advice, Herb?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Advice. You know—good ideas from your storehouse of wisdom.”

“Certainly,” he said doubtfully.

“What percent of a portfolio should a small investor have in stocks?”

Herb backed away as if she had been making demands on him in a foreign language. “I don’t understand.”

By Christmas Eve most people had concluded that there had been a misunderstanding. Dot said that Herb was probably giving his mother “ten towels and a dollar.”

“Weird present!” Jan said.

“But he can afford it,” Dot said.

But Paula, who wouldn’t let go, cornered him by the drinking fountain. “Is your mother’s present all ready, Herb?” she said.

“All but the signature.”

“Won’t she be surprised by such a large sum of money?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. She’s used to it.” And then Herb smiled. Nobody had seen him really smile before, but they were sure it made him look roguish.

So as Christmas passed, Sue noticed that people’s attitude toward Herb had begun to change. His fearful movements around the bank were clear signs of the secretiveness that had made him his money. His near baldness reminded them of the complete baldness of a TV star. His bow tie was like that of a famous lawyer who had been in the news. His tea drinking was a sign of international tastes.

“How are you doing today, Herb honey?” Paula said each morning.

Jan put forward the theory that Herb was a gambler. “He couldn’t admit to it and still work in a bank, could he?”

Once Sue met Herb by the candy machine in the basement. “I’m sorry for how the others are treating you,” she said. “I feel like I started all this.”

“I don’t mind really. Sue, although I don’t understand a lot that they say to me. John asked me today what I thought of a copper kettle in the third. I don’t know anything about kettles.”

“I wish I could make it up to you in some way,” she said. “Maybe dinner. How about New Year’s?” Then she realized that she was doing exactly what she was apologizing for.

“I appreciate the offer, but I’ll have to check with my mother. She usually has some friends over, and she might need me.” He had a surprised, cornered look on his face.

Sue wasn’t sure she wanted to go out with Herb—she was certain she wasn’t going to mention the possibility to anyone—but he was kind and polite, characteristics that made him a good deal more attractive than John Franks or Mr. Bridgewright.

Instead of the gambler’s image fading, it grew, along with that of the Wizard of Wall Street and the fortunate heir. Only Mr. Bridgewright scoffed at the entire question. Later Sue figured that he would have continued to pay no attention if it hadn’t been for her.

“I just want to give you one last opportunity to go out with me on New Year’s, Susie,” he said after calling her into his office.

“No, thank you. I have a date already.” And then before she could clamp her mouth shut, she said, “With Herb!”

The word got around the bank fast. Paula said that Herb might not be much to look at and that his mother might be a millstone, but money made up for a lot of faults.

“We never took you for the greedy type,” Dot teased.

“I’m not going out with him for his money.”

“With a man like him, what else is there?” Paula said.

“I kind of feel sorry for him.”

“You’ll feel sorry for him all right when he starts giving you diamonds.”

For the next two days, Sue noticed Mr. Bridgewright standing at the door to his office watching Herb. When Herb left his window for the men’s room. Bridgewright would make a mark in a notebook. Jan noticed, too. “The man goes to the john more than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

John whispered the conclusion first: “Embezzlement!”

“What an awful thing to say,” Sue said.

“First thing you know he’ll figure out a way to steal thousands at once, and he’ll be off to South America,” Paula said.

John laughed. “I can just picture him in a hotel room in Rio wishing he could understand what they were saying on TV.”

“Are you serious?” Sue demanded.

“Bridgewright is,” John said.

“He can’t be.”

“I expect the examiners to swoop down at any moment.”

The next afternoon, December 31st, Bridgewright stepped over to Herb’s cash drawer at the end of the day. “We’re going to have someone else check your drawer tonight, Mr. Cubbey,” he said. A grim-faced young man in a gray suit stood at his elbow.

“Certainly,” Herb said in a voice filled with surprise.

“And Mr. Hamilton wants to see you in his office immediately.” Mr. Hamilton was the bank president.

“Yes, sir.” Herb walked a few steps away and stood looking out the plate glass window at the bustle on Main Street. Sue could see his shoulders slump in defeat.

Mr. Bridgewright came over to her. “Well. Miss Rigney, we’re going to be at the bottom of the Herbert Cubbey case soon enough. Mr. Hamilton has been informed. We’ve played games far too long.”

“I don’t think Herb even knows what game we’re playing.” Sue said.

She went to where Herb stood and squeezed his arm. “Whatever happens, Herb, I know you’re innocent.”

“Am I in some sort of trouble?” He seemed terribly afraid, and she wanted to mother him.

“They say you stole the money.”

“What money?”

“The ten thousand dollars you gave your mother for Christmas.”

He swallowed hard. “You didn’t really think I had all that money?”

“You said you did.”

“If I did have that much, I’d take you out on New Year s to the best restaurant in town. You’d have flowers, and we’d drink champagne and dance all night.”

“It doesn’t take that much money to have a good time,” Sue said. “I already lied and told Mr. Bridgewright we were going out.”

“All right then,” he said, straightening his shoulders. “We’ll make some plans when we get back from talking to Mr. Hamilton. Will you come along with me?”

Sue followed him to the elevator.

“Could I have the opportunity to explain?” Herb said to President Hamilton.

“I expect you’d like one, Cubbey,” Hamilton said. He was a short, heavy man with bushy eyebrows. “You should anyway! I’m an old man, so I don’t need to be subtle. No time for it. So let’s hear it. Bridgewright tells me you’ve been giving away thousands of dollars and the only explanation is you’ve got your hand in the till.”

“I’ve honestly accounted for every cent that I’ve handled.”

“Thought so. What about the gift?”

“I wrote my mother a check for ten thousand dollars at Christmas. I never should have told anyone.”

“How’s that again?”

“We haven’t had much since my father passed away, so we pretend. Every year we write each other large checks. This year she gave me a check for two thousand. The year before I wrote one for five thousand, and she gave me one for eight thousand.
Checks
that is. We sit around and talk about what we’d like to buy until midnight, and then we burn the checks in the fireplace. We’ve always had a good time doing it. It must sound strange to outsiders.”

Mr. Hamilton chuckled. “It’s unusual, that’s for sure, but not a bad idea. You get the pleasure of the money without the cost, which is not bad management at all. Not bad at all. Shows a good deal more sense than Mr. Bridgewright just exhibited.”

“Do you have any further questions, sir?”

“Why hasn’t an honest, imaginative young man like you received a promotion recently? Who’s running this bank anyway? That’s what I’d like to know.”

BELIEVING IN SANTA – Ron Goulart

As it turned out. he didn’t get a chance to murder anybody. He did make an impressive comeback, revitalizing his faltering career and saying goodbye to most of his financial worries. But in spite of all that, there are times when Oscar Sayler feels sad about not having been able to knock off his former wife.

Twenty-five years ago Oscar had been loved by millions of children. Well, actually, they adored his dummy, Screwy Santa, but they tolerated Oscar. For several seasons his early morning kid show was the most popular in the country, outpulling Captain Kangaroo and all the other competition. Multitudes of kids, and their parents, doted on Oscar’s comic version of Santa Claus and tried to live by the show’s perennial closing line—”Gang, try to act like it was Christmas every day!”

For the past decade and more, though, Oscar hadn’t been doing all that well. In early December of last year, when he got the fateful phone call from the New York talent agency, he was scraping by on the $25, 000 a year he earned from the one commercial voice job he’d been able to come up with lately. Oscar lived alone in a one-bedroom condo in a never-finished complex in New Beckford, Connecticut. He was fifty-five—well, fifty-seven actually— and he didn’t look all that awful.

Since he’d given up drinking, his face was no longer especially puffy and it had lost that lobsterish tinge. His hair, which was nearly all his own, still had a nice luster to it. There was, really, no reason why he couldn’t appear on television again.

When the agent called him at a few minutes after four p.m. on a bleak, chill Monday afternoon, Oscar was flat on his back in his small tan living room. He’d vowed to complete two dozen situps every day.

He crawled over to the phone on the coffee table. “Hello?”

“Is your son there?”

Oscar pulled himself up onto the sofa arm. resting the phone on his knees. “Don’t have a son. My daughter, however, is the noted television actress Tish Sale, who stars in the
Intensive Care
soap opera, and hasn’t set foot across dear old Dad’s threshold for three, possibly four—”

“Spare me,” requested the youthful, nasal voice. “You must be Oscar Sayler then. You sounded so old that I mistook you for your father.”

“Nope, my dad sounded like this—’How about a little nip after dinner, my boy?’ Much more throaty and with a quaver. Who the hell are you, by the way?”

“Vince Mxyzptlk. I’m with Mimi Warnicker & Associates, the crackerjack talent agency.”

“Oops.” Oscar sat on a cushion and straightened up. “That’s a powerful outfit.”

“You bet your ass it is,” agreed the young agent. “You’re not represented at the moment, are you?”

“No, because I find I can get all the acting jobs I want without—”

“C’mon, Oscar, old buddy, you ain’t exactly rolling in work right now,” cut in Vince disdainfully. “In fact, your only gig is doing the voice of the infected toe in those godawful Dr. Frankel’s Foot Balm radio spots.” He made a scornful noise.

“I do a very convincing itching toe, Vince. Fact is, there’s talk of—”

“Listen. I can get you tons of work. Talk shows, commercials, lectures, TV parts, eventually some plum movie work. But first you—”

“How exactly are—”

“But first you have got to win your way back into the hearts and minds of the public.”

“Just how do I accomplish that, Vince?”

“You just have to sit there with that lamebrained dummy on your knee.”

“Screwy Santa? Hell, nobody’s been interested in him for years.”

“Let me do the talking for a bit, okay? Here’s what’s under way,” continued the agent. “
Have a Good Day, USA!,
which has just become the top morning talk and news show, is planning a six-minute nostalgia segment for this Friday. The theme is ‘Whatever happened to our favorite kids’ shows?’ Something they calculate’ll have a tremendous appeal for the Boomers and Busters who make up their pea-brained audience. So far they’ve signed that old duffer who used to be Captain Buckeroo and—”

“Kangaroo.”

“Oscar, are you more interested in heckling me than in making an impressive comeback? Would you prefer to go on living in squalor in that rural crackerbox, to voice tripe for Dr. Frankel throughout the few remaining years of your shabby life?”