The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “The dame was crazy.” Rafferty was almost beside himself.

  I replied, “She’s just killed a man. She’s confused. She decides to take the dead guy with her? Nobody’s that crazy. Wouldn’t it have been much more natural for her to just run away? Probably down the service stairs?”

  “That’s your trouble, Bloodworth,” Rafferty said. “You refuse to believe what your eyes tell you. You saw her with the stiff … ah, the poor guy’s body.”

  “That was later. What I think is that she ran away to the one person she trusted—the guy she was in love with. She told him what had happened in the hotel suite. He told her he’d help her, but she had to promise to keep him out of it, no matter what.

  “They went back to the hotel in her car, parking it near the service exit. Maybe they went up together. Maybe he told her to stay in the car. He, or the both of ’em got Daken’s body down in the service elevator. They put it in the back of Victoria Douglas’s car. By then, she was in no condition to drive. So the boyfriend drove to the alley off Wilshire. And here’s where it gets a little foggy. For some reason the boyfriend ran out on her and left her to face the music all alone. And true to her promise, her ‘oath,’ she refused to name him. Even though it made her look like a crazy woman.”

  “Wait a minute, Bloodworth,” Rafferty blustered. “If it didn’t make sense for her to move the body, why did he decide to do it?”

  “Because there would be less scandal if Daken were found beaten to death in an alley wearing a Santa Claus suit than if he turned up dead in a hotel room in his skivvies.”

  “You’re saying that Theodore Daken was moved to salvage his reputation?” Mad Dog asked.

  “And that of his company’s,” I said. “I assume Douglas’s boyfriend was an executive at Altadine …”

  “Why?” Mad Dog asked.

  “That’s one way Victoria Douglas would have met Daken once or twice before he hired her. It’s also how she would have known about the job opening. For all we know, the boyfriend could have closed the deal with Daken for her to come aboard. Anyway, he was the one who was trying to downplay any scandal.”

  “Only it didn’t work,” Mad Dog said.

  “And I bet the guy next in line to the presidency, Gabriel Warren, had quite a job on his hands keeping Altadine’s investors high on the company.” I looked at him.

  “You’re right about one thing,” he said. “It would have been quite a lot easier if Theo’s death had been minus the sordid details. But as bad as it got, I managed.”

  “I’ll bet you did,” I said.

  “Wait a minute!” Landy interrupted. “This was a company Christmas party. If Victoria’s lover had been an Altadine exec, would he have just gone off, leaving his girlfriend passed out and easy prey for Daken?”

  “I think the guy left the party early, before she was in any danger,” I said, looking at Warren.

  “Would you care to take a guess at the name of Victoria Douglas’s lover, Mr. Bloodworth?” Mad Dog asked.

  I continued staring at Gabriel Warren. “Like I said, somebody who left the party early. Somebody who wanted to squelch the scandal. But when that didn’t happen, he was shrewd enough to know when to cut and run. Somebody smooth and savvy and well-connected enough to know how to push enough buttons, once Victoria Douglas was on the spot, to keep himself clear of the fallout.”

  “How would he do that?” Mad Dog asked. Warren glared at me.

  “By pressuring a high-ranking police officer to disregard a few facts that didn’t jibe with the official story of how Daken died. By getting a defense lawyer to plead his client insane and keep her off the stand, just to make sure his name didn’t come up in testimony. By convincing a judge to bend a few rules. All to keep one of America’s great corporations flying high. Because, surely, if one more guy at the top of Altadine had got caught by that tar baby, the company might never have recovered.”

  “You’re not going to name him?” Mad Dog asked.

  “He knows who he is,” I said, nodding at Warren.

  I was hoping to get the guy to do something. Like snarl. Or show his fangs. When he didn’t, I said, “It just occurred to me that maybe Victoria Douglas didn’t really kill Theodore Daken at all. She told Miss Thorp that she didn’t remember hitting him more than once. Suppose that wasn’t enough to do the job, though she thought it was. Suppose the boyfriend went up to that hotel room, saw Daken on the bed sleeping off that nonfatal whack and picked up the statue and finished the job, wiping the weapon clean. Then he had an even stronger reason for wanting Victoria Douglas to keep quiet about his participation in the removal of the body. What do you think, Warren?”

  “You’re making a big mistake,” he hissed. I shrugged.

  “This may be the perfect time to bring in our mystery guest,” Mad Dog said. And almost at once, the door opened and a wizened old man entered. He looked like he was a hundred-and-one, his khaki pants flapping against his legs, his bright red windbreaker hanging on his bony frame. A plaid cap with a pom-pom covered his bald pate at a jaunty angle.

  The door slammed behind him and he turned and looked at it for a second.

  “We’ve just been joined by Mr. Samuel J. Kleinmetz,” Mad Dog informed his listening audience, which included me. “Mr. Kleinmetz, would you please take this chair?”

  As the old duffer shuffled to the chair, Mad Dog said, “Mr. Kleinmetz was working that night before Christmas Eve, thirty years ago. What was your occupation, sir?”

  The old man was easing himself onto the chair. “Eh?”

  “Occupation.”

  “Nothing,” he said, louder than necessary, sending Greg jumping for his dials. “Been retired for fifteen years. Used to drive a cab, though. Beverly Hills Cab. Drove a Mercedes. Leather seats. Wonderful radio. Worked all the best hotels …”

  “Good enough,” Mad Dog said, stemming the man’s flow. “You were working the night …”

  “The night the woman killed Christmas?” the old man finished. “Sure. I worked six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. I was working that night, absolutely.”

  “In the Wilshire district?”

  “That’s where I used to park and wait,” the old man said. He squinted his eyes in delight, staring at the microphone. “This is working?” he asked.

  “I hope it is,” Mad Dog told him. “On that night, you picked up a passenger not far from where they later found the body of Theodore Daken?”

  “The guy in the Santa Claus suit, yeah. I guess it was minutes before. The paper said they found the guy at about ten-thirty. I picked up my fare at maybe ten-twenty …”

  “How the devil can he remember that?” Gabriel Warren snapped. “It was thirty years ago.”

  “There are days you remember,” the old man said. “I can remember the morning I woke up to hear the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. I can tell you everything that happened that day. And the day that great young president John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated by that Oswald creep. And the night the woman killed Christmas.”

  “We showed Mr. Steinmetz photographs of the members of the executive board of Altadine taken that year,” Mad Dog said. “He identified his passenger. We then showed him a photograph of that same man today. Would you tell us if he’s in this room tonight?”

  “Sure.” Sam Steinmetz looked across the table in the direction of Gabriel Warren, and I could feel a smug grin forming on my face. “That’s him right there.”

  My smug grin froze. Steinmetz was pointing a bony finger at Norman Daken. “You didn’t have to show me all those pictures. He’s changed a lot, but I’d have known him right away, as soon as I saw that red dot on his face. Never seen one quite like it before or since.”

  Daken looked more relaxed than he had all evening. “So many years ago,” he said, almost wistfully. “I’d almost forgotten. As if anyone could.”

  “Don’t say a word, Norman,” Gabriel Warren cautioned.

  “No more, Gabe. I don’t want to hold it in any longer
. My father and I … we had our disagreements. He thought I was weak. I suppose I am. I loved Victoria.”

  I looked from him to the engineer booth. Both Greg and Sylvia Redfern were totally caught up in the tableau in the studio. Her expression was impossible to read, but her blue eyes looked kind and sympathetic.

  “I think that’s why he felt he had to have her,” Norman continued. “Because I loved her. And he ruined it all for us. I never blamed her. It wasn’t her fault, poor woman. She fought him and knocked him unconscious. She didn’t hate him, you see. Not like I did.”

  Warren was scowling at him. “What the devil are …”

  “Bloodworth was right. I killed him, Gabe. I thought you knew that.”

  “You thought I … How could …?” Warren was having trouble articulating.

  Norman Daken gave him a pitying smile. “He wanted you to be his son. I guess you felt that way, too.”

  “I would never have …”

  “That’s what was so beautiful about it, Gabe. You fixed it so that I stayed clear of it.”

  “I was trying to save the company,” Warren said. “But if I’d known …”

  “Well, now you do,” Norman Daken told him. “You did everything you could to keep Altadine going. I, on the other hand …”

  He didn’t finish his sentence. I said, “I always wondered who reported Victoria Douglas to the police that night. And who called the reporters. That was you, wasn’t it, Norman? You left that poor woman in the alley and went off to call the cops.”

  “I’m sorry I hurt Vicki so,” he said. “I told her that she would never go to prison and I lived up to that. Thanks to Gabe’s influence.”

  “But she wasn’t exactly free,” I said.

  “No,” Norman agreed. “But I had to make that sacrifice, if my father’s reputation was to be thoroughly destroyed.” He looked at Mad Dog hopefully. “Maybe now, thanks to you, he’ll be dragged through the mud again.”

  Station KPLA-FM went off the air early that night, even though the police made short work of their task. They came, they saw, they escorted Norman off to be booked. As they explained, there was no statute of limitations on murder, not that he really wanted one.

  As for the crimes Warren and his associates may have committed, the police were less certain of their footing. So that foursome left on their own recognizance. Even if it turned out to be too late to nail them for railroading Victoria Douglas, they probably wouldn’t be suing Mad Dog or myself. And I doubted I’d be seeing Warren’s name on any ballots in the near future.

  When they’d all departed, leaving only Mad Dog, Landy, Dougie Dog, and myself in the main studio, I asked, “Are you both her children?”

  “Just me,” Mad Dog admitted, grinning. “What tipped you?”

  “Dougie Dog, for one,” I said, looking at the drooping mongrel. “The family hound, you said. Dougie. Douglas. And then, there’s your nickname. Mad Dog. Madison Douglas?”

  “Nope. Just Charlie Douglas. The ‘mad’ is, well, they said she was mad and what happened to her made me pretty angry. My dad worked at the hospital where Mom spent her first three years. He helped her escape. When she was sent back, I was raised by my paternal grandparents.”

  “And you kept her name?”

  “It’s mine, too. They never married officially. How could they? Anyway, figuring out that I was her son, that was good detecting.”

  “It’s the least I could do after picking the wrong murderer,” I said.

  “We didn’t know about the murder,” Landy said. “Poor Victoria always thought she’d killed Daken.”

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Just a friend of the family?”

  “As I said, I’m a journalist. I happened to rent a house next door to Victoria’s a few years ago. We became friends and eventually she opened up to me about who she was. I think she hoped Charlie and I might get together.”

  “And you did.”

  They both smiled.

  The dog rose to its feet, yawning, and dragged itself to the door and out of the studio.

  “And you two decided to clear Victoria’s name,” I said.

  “Right again,” Charlie “Mad Dog” Douglas said. “Thanks for the help.”

  I stood up and picked my book from the table. “I didn’t sell many of these tonight,” I said.

  “Come on back,” he offered.

  “It’s too bad your mother passed away without ever learning the truth about that night. But I guess it’s just as well that she won’t have to go through the ordeal of Norman’s trial.”

  They both nodded solemnly.

  I left them and wandered out into the corridor. A light was on in the greenroom. As I passed, I saw Sylvia Redfern sitting on the couch, reading a book. Dougie Dog was curled up at her feet, sleeping peacefully. Her eyes, blue as a lagoon, blue as Mad Dog’s, suddenly looked up and caught me staring at her. She smiled.

  “Goodnight, Mr. Bloodworth,” she said. “Thanks for everything.”

  I told her it was my pleasure and wished her a very merry Christmas.

  “It will be,” she replied, “the merriest in years.”

  SISTER BESSIE

  Cyril Hare

  BORN ALFRED ALEXANDER GORDON CLARK, the author was bound by family tradition to become a lawyer, which he did, beginning his practice in 1924. He worked in Hare Court and had a residence in Cyril Mansions, providing him with the names he used for his nom de plume. After writing some comic sketches for Punch, he produced Tenant for Death, his first detective novel, in 1937, and wrote two others before creating his most popular series character, barrister Francis Pettigrew, in Tragedy at Law (1942). He was not prolific, partly due to the fact that he never learned to use a typewriter and so wrote in longhand, but mainly due to what he described as his “constitutional and incurable indolence.” “Sister Bessie” was first published in the December 23, 1948, issue of The Weekly Standard.

  Sister Bessie

  CYRIL HARE

  At Christmas-time we gladly greet

  Each old familiar face.

  At Christmas-time we hope to meet

  At th’ old familiar place.

  Five hundred loving greetings, dear,

  From you to me

  To welcome in the glad New Year

  I look to see!

  HILDA TRENT TURNED THE CHRISTMAS card over with her carefully manicured fingers as she read the idiotic lines aloud.

  “Did you ever hear anything so completely palsied?” she asked her husband. “I wonder who on earth they can get to write the stuff. Timothy, do you know anybody called Leech?”

  “Leech?”

  “Yes—that’s what it says: ‘From your old Leech.’ Must be a friend of yours. The only Leach I ever knew spelt her name with an a and this one has two e’s.” She looked at the envelope. “Yes, it was addressed to you. Who is the old Leech?” She flicked the card across the breakfast-table.

  Timothy stared hard at the rhyme and the scrawled message beneath it.

  “I haven’t the least idea,” he said slowly.

  As he spoke he was taking in, with a sense of cold misery, the fact that the printed message on the card had been neatly altered by hand. The word “Five” was in ink. The original, poet no doubt, had been content with “A hundred loving greetings.”

  “Put it on the mantelpiece with the others,” said his wife. “There’s a nice paunchy robin on the outside.”

  “Damn it, no!” In a sudden access of rage he tore the card in two and flung the pieces into the fire.

  It was silly of him, he reflected as he travelled up to the City half an hour later, to break out in that way in front of Hilda; but she would put it down to the nervous strain about which she was always pestering him to take medical advice. Not for all the gold in the Bank of England could he have stood the sight of that damnable jingle on his dining-room mantelpiece. The insolence of it! The cool, calculated devilry! All the way to London the train wheels beat out the maddening rhythm:

&n
bsp; At Christmas-time we gladly greet …

  And he had thought that the last payment had seen the end of it. He had returned from James’s funeral triumphant in the certain belief that he had attended the burial of the bloodsucker who called himself “Leech.” But he was wrong, it seemed.

  Five hundred loving greetings, dear …

  Five hundred! Last year it had been three, and that had been bad enough. It had meant selling out some holdings at an awkward moment. And now five hundred, with the market in its present state! How in the name of all that was horrible was he going to raise the money?

  He would raise it, of course. He would have to. The sickening, familiar routine would be gone through again. The cash in Treasury notes would be packed in an unobstrusive parcel and left in the cloakroom at Waterloo. Next day he would park his car as usual in the railway yard at his local station. Beneath the windscreen wiper—“the old familiar place”—would be tucked the cloakroom ticket. When he came down again from work in the evening the ticket would be gone. And that would be that—till next time. It was the way that Leech preferred it and he had no option but to comply.

  The one certain thing that Trent knew about the identity of his blackmailer was that he—or could it be she?—was a member of his family. His family! Thank heaven, they were no true kindred of his. So far as he knew he had no blood relation alive. But “his” family they had been, ever since, when he was a tiny, ailing boy, his father had married the gentle, ineffective Mary Grigson, with her long trail of soft, useless children. And when the influenza epidemic of 1919 carried off John Trent he had been left to be brought up as one of that clinging, grasping clan. He had got on in the world, made money, married money, but he had never got away from the “Grigsons.” Save for his stepmother, to whom he grudgingly acknowledged that he owed his start in life, how he loathed them all! But “his” family they remained, expecting to be treated with brotherly affection, demanding his presence at family reunions, especially at Christmas-time.