The Twelve Crimes of Christmas (32 page)

“Think the gypsy did it, Doc?”

“Who else? He was alone up here with Wigger.”

Sheriff Lens scratched his thinning hair. “But
why kill him? God knows, Wigger was a friend o’ theirs.”

There was a sound from below, and Eustace Carey’s
head emerged through the open trap door. “I just heard about the parson,” he
said. “What happened?”

“He was showin’ the gypsies the view from up
here. They all came down except Lowara, an’ I guess he musta hid in here. We
saw Parson Wigger down by the front door, lookin’ out at the gypsies gettin’
ready to leave, and I wanted to talk to him. He seemed to run away from us,
almost, an’ bolted the steeple door after him. By the time Doc Sam and I got up
here, he was dead, with the gypsy’s knife in his chest.”

“No one else was up here?”

“No one.”

Carey walked over to the west side of the
belfry, where the wind-driven snow covered the floor. “There are footprints
here.”

“He had a lot of gypsies up here lookin’ at the
view. Footprints don’t mean a thing.” Sheriff Lens walked over to the open trap
door.

Suddenly I remembered something. “Sheriff, we
both agree that Wigger looked as if he was running away from you. What was it
you were so anxious to see him about?”

Sheriff Lens grunted. “Don’t make no
difference, now that he’s dead,” he replied, and started down the stairs.

The next mornin’ at my office I was surprised
to find April waitin’ for me. It was a Saturday, and I’d told her she needn’t
come in. I’d stopped by mainly to pick up the mail and make sure no one had
left a message for me. Most of my regular patients called me at home if they
needed me on a weekend, but there was always the chance of an emergency.

But this time the emergency wasn’t the sort I
expected. “Dr. Sam, I’ve got that gypsy woman, Volga, in your office. She came
to me early this morning’ and she’s just sick about her husband bein’ arrested.
Can’t you talk to her?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Volga was waitin’ inside, her face streaked
with tears, her eyes full of despair. “Oh, Dr. Hawthorne, you must help him! I
know he is innocent! He could not kill Parson Wigger like that—the parson was
our friend.”

“Calm down, now,” I said, taking her hands. “We’ll
do what we can to help him.”

“Will you go to the jail? Some say he will be
lynched!”

“That can’t happen here,” I insisted. But my
mind went back to an incident in Northmont history, after the Civil War, when a
black man traveling with a gypsy woman had indeed been lynched. “Anyway, I’ll
go talk to him.”

I left her in April’s care and walked the three
blocks through snowy streets to the town jail. Sheriff Lens was there with an
unexpected visitor—Minnie Haskins.

“Hello, Minnie. Not a very pleasant Christmas
for the town, is it?”

“It sure ain’t, Dr. Sam.”

“You visitin’ the prisoner?”

“I’m tryin’ to find out when they’ll be off my
land. I was out there to the caravan this mornin’, and all they’d say was that
Carranza was their leader. They couldn’t go till Carranza told
’em
to.”

“I thought you give them permission to stay.”

“Well, that was before they killed Parson
Wigger,” she replied, reflecting the view of the townspeople.

“I’d like to speak with the prisoner,” I told
Sheriff Lens.

“That’s a bit irregular.”

“Come on, Sheriff.”

He made a face and got out the keys to the cell
block. We found the gypsy sitting on the edge of his metal bunk, staring into
space. He roused himself when he saw me, somehow sensing a friend. “Doctor,
have you come to deliver me from this place?”

“Five minutes,” Sheriff Lens said, locking me
in the cell with Lowara.

“I’ve come, Carranza, because your wife Volga
asked me to. But if I’m going to help you, I have to know everything that
happened in the belfry yesterday.”

“I told the truth. I did not kill Parson
Wigger.”

“What were you doing there? Why didn’t you
leave with Volga and the others?”

He brushed back the long raven hair that
covered his ears. “Is it for a
gadjo
like yourself to
understand? I stayed behind because I felt a kinship for this man, this parson
who had taken the
roms
unto himself. I wanted to speak with him in
private.”

“And what happened?”

“He went down after the others had left the
belfry and stood in the doorway, looking after them. Then he came back
upstairs, quite quickly. I heard him throw the bolt on the door below, as if he
feared someone might follow him. When he came up through the trap door my back
was turned. I never saw what did it. I only heard a slow gasp, as of a deep
sigh, and turned in time to see him falling backward to the floor.”

“You saw no one else?”

“There was no one to see.”

“Could he have been stabbed earlier?” I asked. “Down
in the church?”

“He could not have climbed those steps with the
knife in him,” Lowara said, shaking his head. “It would have killed him at
once.”

“What about the knife? You admit that jeweled
dagger is yours?”

He shrugged. “It is mine. I wore it yesterday
beneath my coat. But in the crowd after services I was jostled. The knife was
taken from me.”

“Without your realizing it? That’s hard to
believe.”

“It is true, nevertheless.”

“Why would anyone want to kill Parson Wigger?”
I
asked.

He smiled and opened his hands to me. “So a
gypsy would be blamed for it,” he said, as if that was the most logical reason
in the world.

The snow stopped falling as I walked back to
the church. In my pocket, neatly wrapped in newspaper, was the jeweled dagger
that had killed Parson Wigger. The sheriff had given up any hope of finding
fingerprints on the corded hilt with its imitation ruby, and had allowed me to
borrow it to conduct an experiment.

It had occurred to me that the knife could have
been thrown or propelled from some distance away, and that it might be slender
enough to pass through the chicken-wire barricade. To test my theory I entered
the unguarded church and climbed once more to the belfry in the steeple.

But I was wrong.

True, the knife could be worked through the
wire with some difficulty, but coming at it straight ahead or even at an angle,
the width of the crosspiece—the hilt guard—kept it from passing through. It
simply could not have been thrown or propelled from outside.

Which left me with Carranza Lowara once more.

The only possible murderer.

Had he lied?

Remembering that moment when Sheriff Lens and I
found him standin’ over the body, rememberin’ the terror written across his
face, I somehow couldn’t believe it.

I went back downstairs and walked around the
pews, hopin’ some flash of illumination would light up my mind. Finally I
stuffed the dagger back in my coat pocket and went outside. It was as I took a
short cut across the snow-covered side yard that somethin’ caught my eye, as
white as the snow and half buried in it.

I pulled it free and saw that it was a white
surplice like the one Parson Wigger had worn during the Christmas service.
There was a dark red stain on it, and a tear about an inch long.

I stood there holding it in my hand, and then
turned to stare up at the steeple that towered above me.

“I reckon we gotta ship the gypsy over to the
county seat,” Sheriff Lens was saying when I returned to the jail and placed
the dagger carefully back on his desk.

“Why’s that, Sheriff?”

“Eustace Carey says there’s talk o’ lynchin’. I
know damn well they won’t do it, but I can’t take no chances. It happened fifty
years ago and it can happen again.”

I sat down opposite him. “Sheriff, there’s somethin’
you’ve got to tell me. That man’s life may depend on it. You sought out Parson
Wigger on Christmas Day for some reason. It was somethin’ that couldn’t even
wait till after the holiday.”

Sheriff Lens looked uneasy. “I told you—it don’t
matter now.”

“But don’t you see it
does
matter—now more than ever?”

The sheriff got to his feet and moved to the
window. Across the square we could see a small group of men watching the jail.
That must have decided him. “Mebbe you’re right, Doc. I’m too old to keep
secrets, anyway. You see, the Hartford police sent through a report suggesting
I question Parson Wigger. Seems he wasn’t no real parson at all.”

“What?”

“He’d been passin’ himself off as a parson down
Hartford way for two years, till somebody checked his background and they run
him outta town. Some said he was runnin’ a giant con game, while others thought
he was more interested in the parish wives. Whatever the truth, his background
was mighty shady.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Like I said, the man’s dead now. Why blacken
his character? He never did no harm in Northmont.”

The door opened and Eustace Carey came bargin’
in, followed by a half-dozen other local businessmen. “We want to talk,
Sheriff. There’s ugly words goin’ around. Even if you keep that one safe, there
might be an attempt to burn the gypsy wagons.”

I knew then that I had to speak out. “Wait a
minute,” I said. “Settle down, and I’ll tell you what really happened to Parson
Wigger. He wasn’t killed by the gypsy, and he wasn’t killed by any invisible
demon, unless you count the demon within himself.”

“What do you mean by that?” Carey demanded.

I told them what I’d just learned from Sheriff
Lens. “Don’t you see? Don’t you all see? The parson was standin’ there in the
doorway and he saw us comin’ for him. It was the sight of the sheriff that
frightened him, that told him the jig was up. Why else would he run into the
church and up the belfry stairs, boltin’ the door behind him? It was fear that
drove him up there, fear of Sheriff Lens and the truth.”

“But who killed him?”

“When he heard that bolt break, when he heard us
on, the stairs and realized his masquerade was about to be uncovered, he took
the gypsy’s dagger and plunged it into his own chest. There was never any
invisible murderer or any impossible crime. Parson Wigger killed himself.”

It took a lot more talkin’ after that, of
course, to convince them it was the only possible solution. You see, I had to
get Carranza out of his cell and demonstrate that he couldn’t have stabbed the
parson with his right hand because of that old arm injury. Then I showed, from
the angle of the wound, that it had to be done by a right-handed person—unless
he’d stabbed himself.

“There was no one else up there,” I argued. “If
Carranza Lowara didn’t kill him, he must have killed himself. It’s as simple as
that.”

They released Lowara the next mornin’, and
Sheriff Lens drove him out to the gypsy encampment in the town’s only police
car. I watched them go, standin’ in the doorway of my office, and April said, “Can’t
you close that door, Dr. Sam? Now that you’ve solved another case can’t you let
the poor man go home in peace?”

“I have something else that must be done,
April,” I told her. “See you later.”

I got into the Runabout and drove out over the
snow-rutted roads to Minnie Haskins’ place. I didn’t stop at the farmhouse but
continued out around the back till I reached the gypsy encampment. When Volga
saw the car she came runnin’ across the snow to meet me.

“How can we ever thank you, Dr. Hawthorne? You
have saved my husband from certain imprisonment and even death!”

“Go get him right now and I’ll tell you how you
can thank me.”

I stood and waited by the car, venturing no
closer to the wagons, where I could see little Tene playing in the snow.
Presently Carranza joined me with Volga trailing him.