AHMM, January-February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  They went out of the kitchen and into the hall, Leo shuffling along in the lead, Mr. Bar Harbor limping behind him. He had a firm hold on Leo's collar and was pressing the gun barrel into Leo's neck.

  Leo stepped through the office door and stopped.

  "What's the problem?” Bar Harbor said.

  "I just thought of something. How do I know you aren't gonna shoot me the minute I show you where the money is?"

  "You don't. It'll be a surprise."

  "I'm too old for surprises."

  "Get at it, or you won't grow any older."

  Leo reluctantly shuffled forward. He took the filing cabinet between his hands and dragged it out from the wall.

  There, exposed to the eyes of his visitor, was the security wall insert, the brass of the lock cylinder bright against the drab gray paint of the door.

  "Well,” said Bar Harbor. “That's interesting. Why don't you open it up?"

  Leo obediently pulled out his keys. He thumbed through them for the one he needed, inserted it into the lock, and stopped.

  "Well?” Bar Harbor said.

  "It won't turn,” Leo said. “Sometimes it jams."

  "Well, unjam it then."

  "I'm trying."

  Leo moved the key in and out, jiggled it, and cursed.

  "It's not cooperating."

  "You're stalling."

  "I'm not stalling. This happens all the time. I told you that."

  "Get out of the way,” Bar Harbor said.

  He shoved Leo roughly into the chair behind the desk. Keeping the gun loosely aimed with his left hand, he took the key in his right. He dropped it, felt around on the floor for it, got it into the lock this time, and gave it a twist. The door popped open.

  A sawed-off shotgun cuts a wide swath. The Marlin had practically no barrel at all. It's shot pattern spread out rapidly, took Bar Harbor full in the chest, and hurled him backwards. It knocked him across the small room and left him lying on his back, half in and half out of the doorway.

  For a long time Leo stayed in the chair. His head and face ached. His wrists burned. His gut felt like there was a piece of razor wire moving around inside it. His ears rang from the boom of the gun. There was a body in the kitchen, a body in the hall. All that cash lying out on the table. A compromising car parked outside the door. A room that badly needed cleaning. All this and he still had that ledger entry to take care of.

  Nothing was easy.

  He got up, stepped over Mr. Bar Harbor, went into the living room, and sat down in his chair. He began to massage his temples. He would sit here awhile and give his eyes a rest. Just a minute or two, no more than that.

  Copyright © 2006 Jas. R. Petrin

  * * * *

  Mysterious meetings and readerly rendezvous are available in the Readers Forum at www.TheMysteryPlace.com.

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  THE CHRISTMAS CLUB by GILBERT M. STACK

  * * * *

  Hank Blaustein

  * * * *

  They found Carol Potts dead on the ice, her cracked skull leaking blood across the frozen sidewalk.

  She was a little old lady who worked as a secretary at my university. I didn't really know her. I certainly had no real reason to want her dead. At the time, I thought talk of killing her was just a sick joke. After her accident, I wasn't so certain.

  It all began two months earlier at the president's Christmas party. Unfortunately, it didn't end there.

  * * * *

  When I first saw Janice and Harry at the Christmas party, they were already deep into their complaints, and their wine. It was an annual event—in more ways than the obvious one—and I'd been looking forward to it for weeks. We made a lot of vague promises during the course of a year to “get together soon,” but the president's Christmas party was the only date we could count on each other to keep. It was just habit, I guess.

  I lifted my “Christmas ale” in greeting as I approached them. It was a slightly nauseating blend of holiday spices mixed into a fermented base. The president had a new one for each party, and I did my patriotic duty each year and sampled ten or twelve bottles. Janice and Harry always insisted the wine was much better. That was probably true, but as I didn't like wine—a serious failing in an academic—I always chose to suffer through the holiday surprise.

  Janice and Harry toasted me in my turn. “You're late,” Harry told me.

  "I know. I was cleaning up another of Brad's little problems."

  Janice and Harry groaned good-naturedly. Brad Norton was my associate dean and not the sort of person who bred goodwill among our future alumni or his colleagues. Brad was lazy and he was mean. The sort of man who delighted in rigidly enforcing rules that were always intended to be bent and broken.

  "One of our seniors just missed two finals because her parents were in a car crash. She rushed home to be with them without filing a request for deferred examinations. Brad wasn't going to let her make up the tests."

  Janice's eyes were wide over her wineglass. “That's terrible—even by our standards!"

  I grinned. I couldn't help it. This was an egregious example of the utter inhumanity of my favorite subject. “I know. Fortunately for the girl, Brad took advantage of this party to sneak out of the office early and go home, leaving me with the opportunity to clean up behind him."

  "Saint Douglas to the rescue!” Harry saluted me with his glass before upending it and draining its contents. When he finished, Harry asked: “So was her family badly hurt?"

  "Not hurt at all,” I admitted. “Turns out the accident was little more than a fender bender."

  "A fender bender?” Janice repeated.

  "Yes, the girl is a little high-strung, and she convinced herself that her parents weren't telling her everything, so she raced off home to make certain they were okay."

  "Or to put off taking two finals she wasn't ready for."

  "Harry, I am astounded by your cynicism. That is precisely what Brad said to her. I, on the other hand, have more faith in my fellow man."

  "Or just enjoy stepping on Brad's toes,” Harry observed.

  "There is that,” I agreed before contentedly draining my ale. “Never miss an opportunity to stick it to old Brad. Honestly, he's the worst employee in the whole university. The only thing that motivates him to do some work is the opportunity to be cruel to somebody. If Brad were murdered on his way home tonight, the police would literally have dozens of suspects to investigate."

  "Brad may be the worst associate dean in the university,” Harry argued, “but he's far from the worst employee."

  "Oh please,” Janice interrupted, a look of mock disgust on her face, “don't tell me you think Carol is the worst."

  "She is!” Harry protested. “She's worse than incompetent; she willfully causes trouble."

  "If we're going to talk about Carol, I need another beer,” I told them.

  "And I need a cigarette,” Janice added. “Why don't we break for a moment and reconvene on the balcony?"

  Harry agreed, eyeing a passing tray of hors d'oeuvres.

  I snagged another Christmas ale, then precariously balanced two glasses of red wine as I made my way out to the balcony. Brad, Carol, and Sam Warren in Janice's Human Resources Department were the three most frequent topics of our all too infrequent conversations. They were quite simply the worst—in both basic competence and attitude—employees in the university. And we three should know. We'd been stuck in the middle management of our respective departments for more than forty years between us.

  I was the youngster of the group—forty-eight years old. I got my assistant dean position after two failed years looking for a tenure-track job in an English department—any English department. That was eight years ago. At the time, I told myself that the assistant dean job was a temporary move while I polished my credentials, but only one article had since escaped my computer, and I now accepted that I was in the administration for life.

  Harry worked in Enrollment as associate dire
ctor of academic records. Carol Potts was a secretary in his department, serving Harry and three other people. She was so bad at her job that Harry's vice president had finally agreed to hire a second secretary to do Carol's work for her. Universities, I had found, simply didn't like to fire people, especially not little old ladies who belonged to the clerical union.

  Sam Warren was the payroll supervisor, one of four people responsible for getting everyone in the university paid. What's worse, he was the supervisor of the three competent people, one of whom was Janice. How a man as lazy as Sam could ever have obtained such a promotion was beyond my ability to fathom, but he had gotten it, and there he would remain until he retired or some idiot promoted him again.

  Janice was nearly done with her cigarette by the time I made it out onto the balcony. She put the filtered end to her lips for one last lengthy drag, then flicked the glowing butt over the edge of the balcony to fall to the sidewalk ten stories below.

  She took one of the wineglasses from me and treated herself to a long drink. She shivered when she paused for air. “I think I need another cigarette."

  I didn't smoke, but standing on that balcony, I was ready to start. It was only twenty degrees without the frigid wind, but with those brutal gusts it felt like ten below.

  Janice handed me back her glass and huddled close to my chest while she struggled to light her cigarette. She was very thin in an unattractive sort of way. Gaunt or hollow could both be used to accurately describe her. Add her usual smear of garish makeup and she was anything but conventionally attractive, but it was nice to have her standing so close to me, even if it was only to light her cigarette.

  Harry emerged from the party, an entire tray of stuffed mushrooms in his hands. He stood next to me to help block the wind, and Janice was finally able to light up. “Been waiting all this time?” he asked her in surprise.

  "I lit the first one while I was still inside,” she answered, then grinned at his surprise. “It earned me a couple of hostile stares, but I knew I'd never get it lit out here by myself."

  Harry started to set his tray down on the balcony railing, but stopped when a new gust of wind buffeted him. Reconsidering, he crouched to place the tray on the floor, then straightened to claim his glass of wine from me.

  "Five will get you ten,” I told him, “that this wind still flips your tray over."

  "I don't really care,” he told me. “There are plenty more mushrooms where these came from."

  And Harry meant it. He really didn't care if the tray flipped, ruined the mushrooms, and made a mess. It was one of the things I really liked about him. He didn't really care what people thought of him.

  Harry was anything but hairy. In fact, at nearly sixty he was almost completely bald. Only his bushy gray eyebrows showed evidence that he once had lots of hair. Now only a few white wispy strands stuck out of the rest of his head. He neither combed nor shaved these few remaining hairs. He honestly didn't care what they looked like.

  In dress, he showed the same lack of self-consciousness. His tweed jackets had been out of style since before I started college, but Harry wore them every day, just the same. He was a free spirit, and I was glad to call him my friend.

  "So as I was saying—” Harry picked up the earlier conversation.

  I crouched down to snatch a couple of the mushrooms while Harry talked. The story would be new, but I had heard it all before. It was what we talked about every time we got together.

  "Carol got onto Jean's computer and erased a couple of folders."

  "You're not serious!” Janice was too surprised to conceal her astonishment, scoring a few points for Harry in the my-colleague-is-worse-than-yours competition.

  "I am serious!” Harry assured us. “One of the documents was an important database Jean had been developing to help us track what proportion of our students’ credits are earned at other universities. Carol has been loudly complaining that a database isn't a safe way to store the data, and now she seems to think she's been proved right."

  "Unbelievable!” I said. “This is so far over the line. Can they prove she did it?"

  "She was seen working on Jean's computer about an hour before Jean found the folders missing."

  "So they've actually got grounds to fire her,” Janice said after taking another long, warming drag on her cigarette.

  "I think so,” Harry agreed, “but the VP isn't going to pursue the matter. He won't even confront Carol over it. All he says is ‘No harm, no foul’ and ‘it must have been an accident.’”

  "No harm?” I asked. “What about the deleted documents?"

  "Well,” Harry began, “it turns out that Carol doesn't know very much about PCs—no surprise there."

  "What do you mean?” I prompted him.

  "It appears that Carol thought that pushing delete or dragging a folder into the trash bin was the same thing as erasing the file."

  "She didn't empty the trash,” Janice guessed.

  "On the nose,” Harry agreed.

  "So it's all over?” I asked.

  "Not quite,” Harry answered. He paused in his telling to crouch, set down his empty wineglass, and pick up a handful of mushrooms. “Jean is furious. She was already angry about having to do all of the work in the department while Carol talks to her friends on the phone, but this incident is proving to be the proverbial straw. When we get back from Christmas break, she'll be looking for a transfer to another department."

  "That's really a shame,” I said, “but I hope she finds something."

  "She will!” Janice confirmed. “She's got a good reputation. Anyone with an opening would be happy to snap her up."

  "I need another glass of wine,” Harry said. As he turned toward the door to the lounge, a particularly vicious gust of wind flipped over his forgotten tray, spilling the remaining mushrooms across the balcony.

  * * * *

  "It's really a shame the university can't get rid of these people,” Harry commented, holding his second glass of wine since leaving the balcony. The first hadn't quite lasted ten seconds.

  "It really is hard to get rid of them,” Janice said. She had refilled her wineglass as well. “You have to take the time to document the failures, warn the employee verbally and in writing, show that you've tried to counsel her, and help her bring her job skills up to par. Remember, even if the union agrees with you to fire her—and they might in a case like Carol's—you are still going to wind up in court. When a little old lady loses her job to a younger worker, it just looks bad for the employer."

  "Sounds like she has to die for Harry to be rid of her,” I joked.

  Janice nodded seriously. “Death or retirement, I'd say."

  "I'm never going to be rid of her then,” Harry complained. “Carol is never going to retire, and she'll live to be one hundred and two."

  "At least you don't report to her,” Janice observed.

  "I sense a Sam story coming,” I said.

  "He just doesn't actually care if anyone gets paid,” Janice complained. “Or at least he doesn't until the director comes down on him about all the complaints. Then it's the wrath of God for Teri, Bill, and me, when the whole problem could have been avoided if he'd stop coming in late, taking two hour lunches, and leaving early."

  "I've never understood how people can go to work without working,” Harry said.

  "He's got us to do his work for him,” Janice complained, “and us to take the blame."

  "It really is a shame there isn't a way to just get rid of them,” I said. “The university, not to mention ourselves, would be better off all around."

  "Death or retirement,” Janice repeated.

  "What we need,” Harry said, a huge grin splitting his face, is a way to, shall we say, encourage death or retirement."

  "Well, you can't force someone to retire,” I reminded him.

  Harry raised a glass in mock toast. “Death it is!"

  "How many glasses have you had?” Janice asked him, clearly not taking him seriously.

>   Harry took another long sip. “Obviously not enough yet, but I'm going to tell you my idea anyway. What we need—for the good of the university—is a way to remove rotten employees. Since the deans and the VPs aren't willing to take the legal route to fire them, I think we need an extra-legal method."

  "I believe the word you're looking for is illegal,” I told him.

  "Exactly,” Harry agreed. “So what the university needs is a few dedicated employees who see the larger picture. Say three people who between them have the experience to identify these troublesome individuals and the loyalty and commitment to the greater good to do something about them."

  "Three people like us?” Janice asked, eyes twinkling.

  "Exactly! Three hardworking individuals who know each other but aren't that strongly connected most of the year. In fact, the only place they can really count on getting together is the president's annual Christmas party."

  "You could call the three ‘the Christmas Club,'” I suggested.

  "Oh, very good, Doug,” Harry applauded. “Now since none of these individuals wish to have trouble with a cold and callous criminal justice system, it would be very important that any actual deaths resulting from the club's activities appear to be accidents."

  Janice was really getting into the spirit of things. “They'd also have to occur off university property. It wouldn't help the university if it got rid of a worthless employee but got hit with a million-dollar lawsuit from the deceased's family."

  "Right you are, Janice,” Harry agreed. “And to further lessen personal risk, no member of the club should resolve the problem he or she brought to the club's attention. The club would have to take a lesson from Strangers on a Train. In our example, that means that I would take care of Doug's problem, Janice would take care of Carol, and Doug would take care of Sam."

  "Let the lady kill the lady?” Janice asked, arching an eyebrow in mock protest.

  "You cannot expect a gentleman like Doug to murder a lady,” Harry insisted.

  "I need another drink,” I announced.

  "Refills,” Harry and Janice said simultaneously and handed me their empty glasses.