Mistletoe Mysteries

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “One of the women,” I observed.

  “Lara Navogard, going home without her husband.”

  “But first stopping at the Tolstoys’ house for her son.”

  Simon shook his head. “She’s going right home. The children must be having their own party.”

  “Why were you looking at Kolyada’s white cape so intently?”

  “I was thinking that anyone could wear it, even a large child. A cape is a garment of complete concealment.”

  “You sleep on it, Simon,” I told him, sliding behind the wheel of my car. “Will we be seeing you for dinner tomorrow?”

  Suddenly he was pulling me out of the car. “Of course—they’re all alike!”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Hurry, my friend! We have not a moment to lose.”

  “What’re all alike, Simon?” I asked, hurrying after him through the snow. “White capes?”

  “No—the houses!”

  “What?”

  But he kept on going in silence, as fast as I’d ever seen him move. We must have reached the Navogard house not three minutes after Lara had entered it. Simon tried the front door and it was unlocked, probably in anticipation of her son’s or husband’s return. But the downstairs was dark.

  “She must have gone up,” I suggested.

  “No,” Simon said at once. “The kitchen—”

  I was right behind him going in. We saw the figure in white, outlined against the glow from the outside snow. “Kolyada again,” Simon murmured. “And this time is the last.”

  She moved, and so did he, fastening his arms around her. Then he called over his shoulder to me. “The freezer—quickly!”

  I switched on the ceiling light and found the big freezer door and yanked it open. Lara Navogard was inside, unconscious, her body folded to fit the space where the shelves had been removed.

  “She’s alive!” I told Simon.

  He pulled the mask from Kolyada’s face and it was Marta Frazier again, only this time her face was twisted into a murderous rage.

  Shelly had cooked a traditional Christmas dinner for the following day, and while we sat around the table I filled her in on the Kolyada affair. “The whole thing sounds weird!” she said, scooping mashed potatoes from the bowl. “Are you telling me she killed her own father the same way, by stuffing his body into the kitchen freezer?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Simon Ark told her. “The date should have told me her motive from the beginning. We knew her mother had been killed in an auto accident last Christmas morning, and that her father had been driving. There were certainly hints that Professor Trevitz drank a great deal at parties, and we know last year’s faculty party was at the Navogard home, when they were still in their old house some distance away. It’s reasonable to assume that Mrs. Trevitz—Marta’s mother—died in an auto accident on the way home from the Christmas Eve party last year, and that the professor was driving the car while drunk or at least impaired.”

  “She killed her father because he had caused her mother’s death a year ago.”

  “Exactly! And she tried to kill Lara Navogard because she’d given the party. After hearing Lara speak tonight about her rekindled friendship with Trevitz, Marta might even have imagined she had an additional motive.”

  “But what was all this business with the elf maiden Kolyada?” Shelly asked.

  Simon Ark sighed. “First we must realize that the woman has serious mental problems. Perhaps she imagined herself to be Kolyada. Certainly by delivering those gifts each evening in the week before Christmas she accomplished two things. She learned the layout of the other houses, while managing to steal a spare key to the Navogard back door, and established Kolyada as a familiar neighborhood figure. If she was seen cutting through the backyards or entering her father’s house, no one would call the police. The houses, all originally dormitories, were the same on the outside, and the kitchens were identical. All had the restaurant-size refrigerator and freezer that Lenore Rodgers mentioned to us.”

  “She got her father in there and then out again after he was dead?”

  “He was a small man, remember, and though she was small too, the impetus of her rage must have given her strength. She hit him with something that afternoon, knocking him out, and then put him in the freezer. When she returned in the evening she dragged the body into the living room and seated him in his chair. The rigor mortis of the body caused it to be bent over as we found it. Of course he died of suffocation in the airtight freezer before the cold killed him. Lara Navogard would have died the same way.”

  “How did you know all this?”

  “I didn’t, until it was almost too late. But then I remembered the Trevitz kitchen when we entered it, with ice cream melting in the sink and metal racks on the counter. They’d been removed from the freezer, of course, to make room for the professor’s body. Last night she made these arrangements at Lara’s home before coming to the party. Then when Lara left, Marta went out the back door and across the yards. She was already waiting in the kitchen when Lara entered it. If you think back to that moment we entered the Trevitz house, my friend, there were scuff marks on the living room carpet from dragging the body, and what we took to be a touch to the cheek was Marta arranging the body in the chair as best she could. No wonder she ran out in a panic, not knowing how much we’d witnessed.”

  “She still might have found the body after someone else killed him,” I suggested.

  But Simon shook his head. “We had heard that Kolyada rang the doorbell at each house, yet she rang no bell at her father’s house. We saw her walk right in. She didn’t ring first because she knew there was no one alive to answer the door. Even more important, Kolyada’s basket of gifts was left on the kitchen counter. Why, if she was taking it to her father? Because she needed both hands to drag his body out of the freezer and across the floor to the chair.”

  “Why did she go through all that trouble to freeze the body?” Shelly asked.

  “The human mind is always a strange thing,” Simon admitted. “Somehow, for her, it must have been a return to the past, to Russia in the days when her mother was still alive.”

  But we talked no more about the touch of Kolyada. It was Christmas, after all.

  AARON ELKINS

  DUTCH TREAT

  When it comes to writing mystery novels, 1987 Edgar Award winner Aaron Elkins manages just fine. Where short stories are concerned, though, he suggests the reader may wish to think of this as a collector’s item. Aaron has never tried one before and found out as many other writers had that they’re by no means so easy as the reader might think. This one gave him such a tussle that he says it may well be his last. The idea came to this Washington State writer while he was crossing Puget Sound on a ferryboat. Evidently ferryboats in fog can be risky in ways that a person might not expect.

  “I believe it’s closed, Frank. Were it open, surely there’d be some sign of activity. It’s Christmas Eve, after all, and you can’t expect—”

  He was cut short by Fundy’s snort of laughter. “Were it open,” he mimicked with his execrable version of an English accent. “Oh, I say, old chap. Cheerio. Indubitably.”

  Claude Fleming clenched his teeth and smiled politely. As a senior attorney with Whatcom, Bennis, Fistule and Sissey, he had long ago learned to bear fools (i.e., clients) gladly, or at least courteously. This restraint had been put to its most severe test in the seven months since Franklin J. Fundy had retained the firm to represent him in the endless disputes in which he was involved. Claude had been flattered when Ian Whatcom had assigned him to Fundy’s affairs and had approached the responsibility with enthusiasm.

  Who, after all, had not seen “Funnie Frankie Fundy” on television hawking his own chain of major-appliance discount stores? Who could avoid seeing him? Funnie Frankie was an inspiring example of entrepreneurial daring and success, a man who had built a hole-in-the-wall household appliance store in Tacoma into a chain of sixty-six giant, warehousel
ike retail outlets in forty-nine cities across the country.

  His commercials were rightly regarded by students of the genre as classics of boorish vulgarity, skillfully geared to the lowest taste level of the American buying public. Why this level should be disproportionately represented among purchasers of large appliances (and exceeded only by purchasers of used cars) was a phenomenon not yet fully understood as far as Claude could make out. In any event, Funnie Frankie’s ads had everything: pies in the face; pratfalls; washing machines done in with sledge hammers, automobile crushers, and, in one memorable but quickly yanked instance, an AK-47 assault rifle.

  Claude had looked forward to his first meeting with the creator of this empire and the shrewd originator of the Funnie Frankie persona. To his surprise, however, there was no persona. There was just Funnie Frankie Fundy, the same offscreen as on: coarse, ignorant, and unremittingly offensive.

  “Beards give me the creeps” had been his first words when Mr. Whatcom had introduced them. “I’m not working with any beards.”

  “I’ve had it a long time, Mr. Fundy,” Claude had replied with the first of many stiff smiles that were to come. “I’d hate to take it off.”

  “Hey, I’m broad-minded,” Fundy had said. “You don’t have to cut it off. Just don’t wear it when you’re around me, that’s all.”

  “Of course he won’t, Mr. Fundy,” Mr. Whatcom had simpered with a meaningful glance at Claude.

  And so the lovely, beautifully trimmed ginger beard had had to go. Ah, well, that was business; he no longer minded it so much. What he did mind was Fundy’s blithe assumption that he could intrude on Claude’s personal time whenever he chose. That he resented. Right now, for example—a dreary four P.M. on the day before Christmas—Claude would much rather have been comfortably at home than standing across the street from a brightly lit but obviously closed art gallery in Seattle’s rainy, windswept Pioneer Square.

  But Fundy had telephoned Mr. Whatcom at home to demand help with an urgent personal problem: He’d meant to get his wife a new painting for Christmas, but he’d forgotten all about it. Now, at the last minute, he wanted to go looking for one at the downtown art galleries, but he needed someone along who was a lawyer and who knew something about art besides. Otherwise he was sure those Jews and Armenians or Iranians or whatever the hell they were would rob him blind. So how about shaking out that English guy that sounds like Ronald Colman—Claude Whats-hisname; he likes art—and telling him to get his ass down to Pioneer Square.

  This English business was getting under Claude’s skin, too. He was as American as Fundy. He did not sound like Ronald Colman. He spoke correctly and literately, that was all; the welcome product of a decent education at Andover, Dartmouth, and Harvard. This he had discreetly explained, but it had made no impression. As far as Funnie Frankie was concerned, if you used three-syllable words and threw in an occasional subjunctive, then you had to be English.

  “Let’s check the place out anyway,” Fundy said, and they crossed First Avenue to the apparently deserted Suffield Gallery. “Clarice’ll kill me if I don’t get her something. And I’m not talking some lousy box of candy.”

  The gallery was open. That was another irritating thing about Fundy; the number of times he was right about little things he had no business being right about. When they stepped in a man in his sixties stuck his head around a partition at the back, looking surprised. “Well, hello.” He emerged, in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, holding a cordless screwdriver in his hand; a slight man with a dewlapped throat and a small, cigar-shaped mustache that seemed to be tickling his nose. “I wasn’t expecting … I was just … that is, may I help you?”

  “That’s okay, we’re just looking,” Fundy said with a salesman’s hard-eyed suspicion of other salesmen.

  “Well, that’s fine,” the man said amiably, with something like relief. “Then I’ll just get back to my uncrating.” He disappeared around the partition, twitching his upper lip like a rabbit. Once more his face popped back. “Oh, I’m Theodore Suffield. Just call if you have any questions.”

  “Yeah, you bet,” Fundy said, and took his first good look at what was hanging on the gallery walls.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, “what kind of crap is this?”

  Claude put his finger to his lips. “He’s right on the other side of the partition,” he mouthed. Not that he didn’t agree with Fundy, which was probably a first. The Suffield Gallery’s collection tended toward the very abstract, the very bright, and the very improvisational: spatters of yellow, streaks of brilliant white, splots of blue, globby crimson footprints (footprints?).

  Fundy bent to look at the printed card on the wall next to a big canvas with four tarry blobs of purple on a field of blinding white. “Chows Number Nine?” he said, scowling.

  Claude looked too. CHAOS #9, it said. He sighed and held his tongue. Chows. If it weren’t so pathetic it would be funny.

  Underneath the painting was a tiny white cardboard rectangle. Fundy bent to that too. “They want 9,200 bucks for this?”

  “It looks like it,” Claude said, more quietly, but only slightly less incredulously.

  “I wouldn’t pay 9,200 cents for this crap,” Fundy said.

  When Claude winced and raised his finger to his mouth again, Fundy shrugged his irritation. “Hey, what do I care if he hears me?”

  He walked around the partition at the back of the room. Claude followed. Suffield was on his knees, surrounded by a litter of cartons, packing materials, and crates. Three small paintings stood on the floor, tipped against the burlap-covered walls. At their approach, Suffield, who was unscrewing the bracing at the corner of a crate, looked up and smiled pleasantly at Fundy. “Find anything you like?”

  “No. You got any pictures with people in them? Clarice likes people. You know, kids, clowns? Dogs, even. Puppies.”

  “Puppies?” Suffield’s pale blue eyes were perplexed. “Well, as you see, we do specialize in mainstream Abstract Expressionism, although we’re beginning to get into the Russian Constructivists as well.” He smiled wanly. “Not too much in the way of recognizable people, I’m afraid. If you’re interested in something more representational, you might try Frieda Weitzmann just down the street, near Yesler.”

  “Everybody else is closed. That’s why we came in here,” Fundy said with his usual tact.

  “Well, then,” Suffield said without visible offense, “you might—”

  “What about that one?” Fundy pointed at one of the three paintings leaning against the wall, an age-darkened portrait of a scraggly bearded man in a wide-brimmed cavalier’s hat, firmly clutching a pewter mug of red wine. Not his first mugful of the day either, from the loose-lipped, devil-may-care grin on his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Suffield said without looking at it. “You see, these are all from an estate sale in Denver. Nineteenth-century English watercolorists, mostly. I have a client who collects them, and I was acting for her on a contingency basis.”

  “How much?” Fundy said.

  “No, no, you misunderstand. These aren’t for sale, at least not until my client exercises her right of first refusal. There’s an ethical consideration here, an obligation on me to—”

  “How much?” Fundy demanded, not the man to be put off with ethical considerations.

  Suffield shook his head, kindly but firmly. “No, really, I’m sorry.”

  “But that particular picture isn’t a nineteenth-century English watercolor,” Claude pointed out smoothly, “so perhaps your obligation doesn’t hold.” Fundy was paying the firm’s standard $200-per-hour fee for his services, so he might as well get his money’s worth.

  “Not a nineteenth-century …” Anxiously, Suffield turned his head to look at the picture. His expression cleared at once. “Oh, yes, of course; I’d forgotten. There were a few other odds and ends included in the collection. I bid on the entire lot, you see, and a few of these came with it. They’re Dutch; seventeenth century.” His eyes softened as he continued t
o look at the paintings. “It’s hardly my field, but they are handsome little things, aren’t they?”

  “They certainly are,” Claude said sincerely.

  Fundy actually jabbed him in the side with an elbow while the proprietor continued to gaze warmly on the paintings. This, Claude assumed, was Funnie Frankie’s characteristically obnoxious way of pointing out that it was not sharp business practice to tell a buyer you liked what he was selling.

  “You know,” Suffield said, brightening, “you’re quite right. It’s only the English paintings I’m obliged to hold for my client. If you’re interested in this …” He stood up, wincing as his knees straightened, and went to the painting. He picked it up, set it carefully on a small shelf jutting from the wall, and turned on a shaded wall lamp. Then he admired the picture some more. Claude noticed for the first time that it was painted on a panel, not a canvas.

  “How much?” said Fundy, who was good at sticking to a subject when he wanted to.

  Suffield’s eyelids whirred briefly. His nose twitched. He was doing some rapid calculation, possibly along the lines of just how much Fundy might be good for.

  “Ahum,” the older man said, “The, ah, price on this one is $15,900.” He scratched his mustache.

  “Jesus,” Fundy said, “that’s a pretty small picture for 16,000 bucks. It’s all dirty too.”

  But he didn’t sound as if he were dismissing the idea, something Suffield was quick to notice. “Oh, I’ll have it cleaned for you, of course, at no extra charge. That will brighten it up wonderfully.” He gestured at it. “It looks as if it’s had a few too many coats of varnish over the years, doesn’t it? Hm, unless I’m mistaken, this is the original frame.”

  He turned the panel over. “Seems to be some sort of—what is it, a brand?—on the back.” Thoughtfully he fingered the mark. “Interesting.”

  Why, he really doesn’t know anything about Dutch painting, Claude thought. Of course it was a brand, seared onto the wood with a branding iron and looking just like something that belonged on the flank of a steer: an interlocked G and L. It was the trademark of the panel maker; what would come to be called a “brand name” in a later age.