The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “We arrived on the scene within minutes and found a tan Ford sedan parked in the alley with its engine going. The subject of the call was moving slowly down the alley, away from the car, a small woman in her mid to late thirties. She was in a dazed condition with abrasions on her face and arms. Her party dress was rumpled and torn.

  “She didn’t seem to understand who we were at first. I thought she might have been stoned, but it was more like shock. Then she seemed to get the drift and said, ‘I’m the one you want, officers. I killed Theo Daken.’

  “Around that time, John Gilfoyle poked his nose into her car. He shouted something to me about a big Santa Claus dummy on the backseat. Then he took a better look and saw the blood. He ran back to our car to call in the troops.”

  “Did Victoria Douglas make any effort to escape?” Mad Dog asked.

  “No. She was too far out of it. I don’t know how she was able to drive the car.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “Nothing,” I answered. “I had to get her name from the identification cards in her purse.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Gilfoyle and I were helping her to our vehicle when the newspaper guys showed up. I don’t know how the heck they got there that fast. I put Miss Douglas in the back of our vehicle and helped Gilfoyle pull the photographers away from the body. But they got their pictures. And the people of Los Angeles got their dead Santa for Christmas.”

  Norman Daken opened his mouth, but decided against whatever he was going to say. I remembered what he was like back then, sitting in the courtroom, in obvious pain. Thinner, more hair. Women might even have found him handsome. Not now. Unlike Warren, to whom the years had been more than kind, Daken resembled an over-the-hill Pillsbury Doughboy.

  Mad Dog turned to Rafferty. “You took charge of the Daken case personally, Mr. Rafferty. Care to say why?”

  “Because it was a …” he began, shouting. Then, realizing that his voice was being carried on an open radio line, he started again, considerably more constrained. “Because it was a circus. There was this crazy woman who’d used a blunt instrument on Santa Claus. Not just any Santa, but a Santa who was an old pal of the governor’s. And a damn fine man.” This last was said with a glance at Norman Daken. “And my chief wanted action. That’s why I took charge.”

  “Even though there was this tremendous pressure, you feel that the police did all that they could in investigating the murder?”

  “Absolutely. It was handled by the book.”

  “Mr. Bloodworth.” Mad Dog shifted back to me. “According to an account printed at the time of Victoria Douglas’s trial, you felt that maybe the detectives on the case had missed a few bets.”

  “Bloodworth was a cop on the beat,” Rafferty squealed. “His opinion is worth bupkis.”

  “It wasn’t just my opinion,” I said. “Ferd Loomis, one of the investigating officers, agreed with me.”

  “Ferd Loomis was a soak,” Rafferty growled. “That’s why he took early retirement and why he wound up eating his Colt.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” I said. “All I know is what he told me. He said that the officers sent to secure the crime scene were greener than I was and they let reporters in before the lab boys got there. Not only that, a hotel bellboy was collecting tips to sneak curious guests into the room.

  “All the evidence—the glass statue that was the supposed murder weapon, wiped clean of fingerprints, the dead man’s clothes, the bloody pillow—was polluted by a stream of gawkers wandering through.”

  “But the evidence was allowed, wasn’t it?” Mad Dog asked with the assurance of a man who’d read the trial transcripts. He wanted to lay it out clearly for the radio audience. When no one replied, he specified, “Mr. Newgate, you were Miss Douglas’s lawyer.”

  “Judge Fogle allowed the evidence,” Newgate said flatly. “I objected and was overruled. It was highly irregular. I don’t know what made Fogle rule the way he did. Since he’s been senile for nearly fifteen years, I don’t suppose I ever will.”

  “What was the motive for the murder?” Mad Dog asked, like a man who already knew the answer.

  Rafferty didn’t mind responding. “According to our investigation, Victoria Douglas had been having an affair with Daken. We figured he broke it off that night.”

  “Sort of a ‘Merry Christmas, Honey, Get Lost’ approach?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Why not? He dumped her. And then made the big mistake of falling asleep on the bed. She picked up one of those satellite statues and beaned him with it. Then she hit him a few more times to be sure and lugged him down to her car.”

  “Without one witness seeing her,” I said.

  Rafferty shook his head as if I were the biggest dufus in the world. “She took the freight elevator or the stairs. My God, Bloodworth. The suite was only on the third floor.”

  Mad Dog was vastly amused by our interchange. The others were expressionless. Landy Thorpe winked at me.

  I realized that I probably wasn’t going to be plugging my book that night. But maybe this was better. As I said, I’d never felt right about the trial. And even if nothing came of this re-examination, it was getting under Rafferty’s hide.

  I said, “When we found Victoria Douglas, she looked like she’d been roughed up. But that wasn’t mentioned at the trial.”

  “You can muss yourself up pretty bad swinging a heavy statue fifteen or twenty times with all your might,” Rafferty explained.

  “Then there’s her size. She weighed about one hundred twenty-five pounds. Daken weighed twice that. How’d she get him down the stairs?”

  “Maybe she rolled him down.” Rafferty’s little eyes flickered toward Norman Daken, ready to apologize for his crudeness. But Daken seemed to have adapted a posture of disbelief that the discussion had anything to do with him. He stared at his microphone as if he were waiting for it to suddenly dance a jig. The fingers of his right hand idly brushed his cheek where the birthmark was.

  “Anyways,” Rafferty said, “crazy people sometimes have the strength of ten.”

  “Which brings us to you, Dr. Varney,” Mad Dog announced, getting back into the act. “The defense used your testimony to legitimize its insanity plea. But was Miss Douglas truly insane?”

  “That was my opinion,” Dr. Varney said, huffily.

  “You came to this conclusion because of tests?”

  “She refused to take part in tests,” Dr. Varney said.

  “Then it was her answers to questions?” Mad Dog inquired.

  “She wouldn’t answer questions. She wouldn’t talk at all, except to repeat what she’d said to the police, that she’d killed Daken.”

  “Then how could you form a definite conclusion?”

  “My God, man! All one had to do was see pictures of the corpse. It was determined that she’d hit him at least twenty times, most of the blows after he was dead.”

  Norman Daken closed his eyes tight.

  “Ah,” Mad Dog said, not noticing Norman, or choosing to ignore him. “But suppose she’d hit him only once? One fatal blow?”

  Dr. Varney frowned. “I decline to speculate on what might have been. I was faced with what really did happen.”

  “So now we’ve come to the beauty part of the story,” Mad Dog said, blue eyes sparkling. “What really did happen?” He lowered his hand to the floor and snapped his fingers. The ancient cur, Dougie Dog, rose up on creaky bones and padded toward him. “But first, a word from Mad Dog’s own mutt about Wet Veggies.”

  Mad Dog lowered the mike and Dougie Dog gave out with a very laid-back but musical bark. Greg, the engineer, followed the bark with a taped commercial for a dog food that consisted of vegetables “simmering in savory meat sauce.” I was getting a little peckish, myself.

  Gabriel Warren tapped Victor Newgate on the arm and asked, “How many laws is our friend Mad Dog breaking by keeping us here against our will?”

  “Enough to keep him off the radio for quite a few ye
ars, I’d think,” Newgate replied.

  “C’mon, guys,” Mad Dog told them. “Aren’t you even the least bit interested in where we’re headed?”

  Norman Daken’s eyes moved to the picture window where Greg was staring at the clock and Sylvia Redfern was looking at us with concern. His fingers continued their nervous brushing of his cheek near the birthmark. “Where are we headed?” he asked, so softly I could barely hear him.

  “Thirty years ago, I would have been interested,” Warren said dryly. “Today, I couldn’t care less. It’s old news.”

  Dougie Dog put his paws on his master’s leg and made a little begging sound. Mad Dog reached into his jacket pocket and found a biscuit that he placed in the animal’s open mouth. “Good old boy,” he said.

  “Family dog?” I asked.

  Mad Dog smiled at me and his clear blue eyes didn’t blink. “Yes,” he said. “Fact is, he was given to me by my mother when I moved out on my own.”

  “You can sit there and talk about dogs all you want,” Dr. Varney said. “But I am definitely not going to let you get by with …”

  “Awoooo, awoooo,” Mad Dog interrupted. “We’re back again, discussing the thirty-year-old murder of industrialist Theodore Daken. You were saying, Dr. Varney?”

  “Nothing, actually.”

  “We were getting to a description of what really happened in the murder room that night.”

  “What happened is public record,” Rafferty said. “The verdict was in three decades ago. Case closed. Some of you guys like to play around with stuff like this, but you can’t change history.”

  “Things do happen to make us doubt the accuracy of history books, however. Look at all the fuss over Columbus. Or the crusades. Or maybe a murder case that wasn’t murder at all.”

  “What the devil’s that mean?” Rafferty asked.

  “This really is quite absurd,” Gabriel Warren said flatly. “Why Victoria Douglas killed Theo Daken three decades ago is an intriguing question, but its answer will solve none of today’s problems. We should be discussing the murders that take place every seven hours in this city, or the bank robberies that take place on an average of one every other day.”

  “That’s what I thought we were here to talk about,” Victor Newgate added.

  “We can discuss crime in L.A. for the next year and not come up with any concrete answers,” Mad Dog said. “But tonight, it’s possible that we will actually be able to conclude what really happened to Theodore Daken. Isn’t that worth an hour of your time?”

  “You’re going to solve the Daken murder?” Rafferty asked sneeringly.

  “Actually, I was hoping to leave the solving to Mr. Bloodworth.”

  “Huh?” I replied. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mad Dog. But I’m not exactly Sherlock Holmes. I’m just a guy who plods from one point to another.”

  “Plod away, then.”

  “The world turns over a few times in thirty years, and its secrets get buried deeper and deeper. Too deep to uncover in an hour.”

  “Suppose we make it a little easier?” Mad Dog said.

  I thought I knew where he was headed. I pointed at the empty chair at the table. “If Victoria Douglas were to come out of hiding and join us, that might make it easier.”

  The others didn’t think much of that idea. They eyed the chair suspiciously. “She’s still a wanted woman,” Rafferty said. “And it’d be my duty to perform a citizen’s arrest and send her back where she belongs.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mad Dog said. “The chair’s not for her. Is it, Miss Thorp?”

  We all turned to Landy expectantly. “Victoria Douglas is dead,” she stated flatly. It was the first sentence she’d spoken since we all sat down and it more than made up for her silence. “She died of a heart attack nearly six months ago in the Northern California town of Yreka, where her neighbors knew her as Violet Dunn. Knew and loved her, I should add.”

  The others seemed to relax. Then Landy added, “But before she died, we had many long talks together.”

  “What kind of talks?” Gabriel Warren asked.

  “Talks that I’m using in an article on Victoria Douglas for my magazine.”

  Dr. Varney exclaimed, “I told you about it, Gabriel. Someone phoned my office.”

  “N-nobody called me,” Norman Daken said.

  “You’re on my list,” Landy told him. “We’re just starting the major research. I’ll be calling each of you.”

  Warren stared at her appraisingly. Rafferty seemed amused. “So, honey, on these long talks you supposedly had,” he asked, “did she happen to mention anything about the murder?”

  Landy stared at him. “She told me that she killed Theodore Daken in self-defense. It was she who fell asleep that night. She was not used to alcohol and had had too much champagne. When she awoke, Daken was beside her on the bed in his underwear, trying to remove her clothes.

  “She called out, but everyone else had gone. She tried to push him away and he slapped her across the face. Struggle seemed useless. He was a big, powerful man. Her hand found the statue somehow and she brought it down against his skull. Then she blacked out. She doesn’t remember hitting him more than once.”

  “Doesn’t remember? That’s damn convenient,” Rafferty said. “No wonder she didn’t try that yarn on us at the time.”

  “She might have,” Mad Dog informed us, “if she’d taken the stand at her trial.”

  Newgate waved a dismissive hand. “She would have hurt her case immensely. It was my feeling that, in light of the grisly aspects of the situation, she was better off with an insanity plea. She could only have hurt that defense by taking the stand.”

  “She told me she did mention self-defense at her first parole hearing,” Landy said.

  “And, alas, as I feared, they didn’t believe her,” Newgate said. “I suppose that’s what pushed her into making her initial escape.”

  “How did you come to be her lawyer, Newgate?” I asked.

  He stared at me as if he didn’t feel he had to waste his time responding. But we were on radio, so he replied, “I’d met her socially.”

  “You mean you’d dated her?” I asked.

  “No. But, from time to time, I had lunch with her and … other employees of Altadine. The firm I was working for did quite a lot of business with the company.”

  “Did Daken sit in on these lunches?” I asked.

  “The old man? Hardly,” Newgate replied with a smile. “He was the CEO. We were a few rungs down.”

  “Who else would be there?” Mad Dog wondered.

  Newgate brushed the question away with an angry hand. “I don’t really know. An assortment of people.”

  “Mr. Warren?” I asked.

  “I was part of the crowd,” Warren said. “Eager young execs and pretty women who worked for the company. Victoria Douglas included. There was nothing sinister about it. Nothing particularly significant, either.”

  “According to testimony from a woman named Joan Lapeer,” Mad Dog said, “Miss Douglas had been Theodore Daken’s girlfriend. Did she confirm that, Miss Thorp?”

  “Victoria told me that Joan Lapeer had been Altadine’s office manager before her. Theodore Daken fired the woman and hired Victoria. Joan Lapeer was so bitter that she spread the word that Daken had wanted to hire his girlfriend.”

  “Then there was no truth to it?”

  “None,” Landy said. “Victoria told me she’d only met Daken once or twice before she went to work for Altadine.”

  “Met him where?” I asked.

  “Joan Lapeer was a very lazy, very incompetent worker,” Gabriel Warren suddenly announced. Norman Daken looked up from the table at him, without expression.

  “So she lied about Victoria Douglas’s involvement with Theodore Daken,” Mad Dog said.

  “Miss Douglas said he asked her out a few times,” Landy told us. “But she always refused.”

  “Because he was her boss?” Mad Dog asked.

  “Or a fat s
lob, or …?”

  “Because she was involved with someone else,” Landy said.

  “Who?”

  Landy shook her head. “She wouldn’t name him. She said it was the one oath she would never break.”

  “She used the word, ‘oath’?” I asked.

  “Precisely.”

  “Is he our mystery guest?” I asked Mad Dog, indicating the empty chair.

  “No,” he said, turning toward Greg in the booth. “But this might be a good time to cut to a commercial.” He nodded, let out one of his wails and Greg responded to the cue with a spot announcement for a holiday lawn fertilizer, “The perfect gift for the gardener around your home.”

  “How much longer are you going to hold us here against our will?” Warren demanded.

  “The old clock on the wall says another nineteen minutes.”

  “This is going to turn into a very expensive hour,” Warren said.

  “Why don’t you just make your point,” lawyer Newgate said to our host, “and be done with it? Why must we put up with all this cat-and-mouse routine?”

  “That’s how radio works,” Mad Dog replied. “We have to build to a conclusion.” He leaned toward me. “Are you willing to give us a wrap-up, Mr. Bloodworth, of what you think happened that night?”

  “I wouldn’t want to go on record with any heavy speculation. You don’t seem to care about these litigious bozos, but I personally would just as soon stay clear of courtrooms.”

  “No need to mention any names,” he said. “Just give us …”

  He paused, some sixth sense informing him that the commercial had ended and he was about to go back on the air. He let out a howl and said, “Welcome back to the doghouse. Private Detective Leo Bloodworth is about to give us his version of what happened back at that hotel thirty years ago.”

  “Well,” I said. “I’ll take Victoria Douglas’s word for it that she acted in self-defense. That would explain her battered condition. But if the guy attacked her and she repelled him, why wouldn’t she just stay there and call the cops?”

  “Because she panicked?” Landy speculated.

  “When you panic, you run away. But Rafferty and his detectives tell us she didn’t do that. Their scenario has her hanging around the suite and finally taking the body with her when she left. Why would she do that?”