Holiday Grind

by Cleo Coyle

  “It’s Clare. Call me back as soon as you have the chance . . .”

  I was tempted to say more, but Mike was on the job now. If he wasn’t picking up, there was a good reason. He could very well be at a crime scene of his own.

  After getting the commendation last spring for taking down a major West Side dealer of prescription drugs—a case I helped him solve—his superiors asked him to continue heading up the “OD Squad,” the nickname for a city-wide task force recently formed out of the Sixth Precinct to document criminality in cases of narcotic drug overdoses.

  Tonight he was overseeing an operation in Queens, which meant, even if he had picked up, he would still be an hour’s drive away.

  I wasn’t the one who’d been shot in this alley; I was perfectly okay, and the police were on their way. A hysterical message from me wouldn’t do either of us any good. So I ended the call, closed my eyes to gain some objectivity, and shifted the beam to illuminate Alf’s wound.

  Judging from the scorch marks on the breast of the velvet Santa suit, Alf had been shot at point-blank range. The lapel pocket was turned inside out—no doubt when the mugger rifled Alf’s pockets. The killer had ripped open Alf’s costume, too, using so much force that one of the big white Traveling Santa suit’s signature buttons was ripped off.

  I passed my flashlight over the nearby snow, but I didn’t see the button. I did, however, see Alf’s blood. There was so much of it pooled around him, it was impossible to miss. Its warmth had even melted the snow around it, forming a gory pile of pinkish slush.

  I stilled, realizing something for the first time: Alf’s blood hasn’t frozen solid yet. In weather like this, that could only mean one thing: He was shot very recently.

  About then I noticed my hands were shaking. I was upset about Alf, of course, and beginning to feel very cold, but I knew something else was making me shiver.

  I reminded myself that the perpetrator of this horrible crime was gone. I’d called out to Alf enough times that anyone lurking in the shadows would have been scared away. And that single trail of footprints I’d noticed coming out of the alley was heading away from the scene and toward the river. That had to be a trail of the killer’s prints, I thought.

  But what if they aren’t?

  There was a slim possibility that Alf’s murderer was demented enough to hang around the crime scene. The shooter could be lurking in the shadows, watching me right now. I swallowed hard and hit another button on my speed dial.

  Matt answered on the first ring. “Clare! Where are you? You left without me—”

  “It’s Alf. I found him lying in the snow. Someone shot him. He’s dead.”

  Matt’s breath caught.

  “I’m not hurt,” I quickly added. “I’m just waiting for the police.”

  “Where, Clare? What street?”

  I told him.

  “I’m on my way!”

  I closed the phone and glanced down at Alf’s body. Still kneeling in the snow, I collapsed back on my calves. The tears came then. Hearing myself tell Matt what had happened made it all personal again. My new friend was dead.

  Someone had mugged and murdered Santa Claus!

  For a flashing moment something far less serious but just as ugly rose out of my memories . . .

  After Matt and I had divorced, I’d raised my daughter in a modest home in the Jersey suburbs. Matt’s mother always came to join us for the first and last nights of Chanukah as well as Christmas dinner, and Matt always made it, too. For most of the season, however, Joy and I were on our own doing the baking, decorating, and holiday card writing.

  By the time Joy was twelve, we’d developed our own little girls’ club traditions, like buying a tree the first week in December. We put up our front-yard lights and decorations together on the same day, too, and one of my favorite displays was a plastic Santa. He was four feet tall and had a big red light for a nose. Chipped and fading, he was nevertheless a beloved piece of sentimental kitsch from my childhood front yard—and not just the yard of my late grandmother. My four-foot Santa with the glowing nose had started out his life in my family’s yard when it had still been a family, before my mother had left my dad and me to run away with some passing salesman to Florida (all the explanation I’d ever gotten).

  Joy had grown fond of that funny little Santa, too. She loved the red glow of his nose, strong enough to cast a bit of festive color through her bedroom window during the dark December nights.

  Unfortunately, on one of those nights—the longest of the year—a foursome of local punks got drunk enough and mean enough to want to kill Christmas. They set about smashing holiday decorations all over town. One of their victims was our much-beloved Santa. I can still recall the morning I had to comfort my tearful daughter, while trying to explain the unexplainable to a little girl.

  A decade later, kneeling in the snow, I was the one who felt like a little girl, needing the unexplainable explained to me. I said a prayer for Alf, but it answered nothing. In fact, talking to God only turned my feelings of grief and shock into an onslaught of other emotions.

  How could this happen to a good man like Alf?! Do you hear me, God?! What are you going to do about it?!

  Tears welled and spilled. I swiped them away; when my vision cleared, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Right in front of me were more footprints in the snow.

  I noted the size and shape of the prints and played my flashlight on the sole of Alf’s slightly pointy boots. The prints in the snow were identical. Standing up, I used my little flashlight to illuminate this new trail of Alf’s pointy boot prints. Oddly, they were coming out of the courtyard.

  What in the world?

  The killer’s rounder-toed prints stopped in the snow next to Alf’s body, then backtracked out to the street again. That meant Alf was coming out of this building’s courtyard and through its side alley when the killer mugged and shot him.

  But that made no sense for a street robbery. A mugger would have confronted Alf on the sidewalk, taken his donation box, and (God help me) forced Santa into the alley at gunpoint to prevent him from identifying the criminal in a lineup. But the marks left behind in the snow didn’t tell a story like that. According to the boot prints, Alf came into this alley alone, went back into the courtyard for some reason, and met his killer on his way out again.

  Why would Alf go into this dark courtyard alone? Why was Alf even on this desolate street during a snowstorm?

  I knew at once that the detectives assigned to this case needed to see these prints. But where were they?!

  I glanced skyward. The fat white flakes were falling even harder now. If the police didn’t arrive soon, this evidence would be completely covered. I listened for the sound of a siren but heard nothing. Worried the prints would be obliterated by the weather, I moved farther into the alley to track them myself.

  Inside a minute, I’d followed Alf’s footprints through the alley’s shadows and all the way into the snow-covered courtyard. The prints appeared to pause in the middle of the small yard, and I got the impression Alf had stood here for a moment, shifting from left to right, as if studying something.

  But what were you studying, Alf?

  His prints moved from this spot to the back wall of the building, where another gray metal Dumpster stood with three blue plastic recycling bins lined up beside it. I noticed a steel door to the building near these bins, but Alf clearly wasn’t interested in going through this service entrance because his prints deliberately bypassed the door, heading instead for the far end of the blue bins.

  I moved my flashlight beam around the snow-covered ground and saw his prints ending near an empty wooden crate. The snow was pretty scraped up in the area, but it was clear to me, following the scrape marks, that the crate had been dragged from a pile a few yards away and placed next to these blue bins.

  Why would Alf do that?

  I stepped back a moment to consider the question and realized that the building’s fire escape stairs—high
off the ground—would be reachable if someone were able to boost himself up using these recycling bins.

  Alf must have paused in the middle of this courtyard to consider how to get up on the fire escape. He pulled that crate over to use it as a step. Then he climbed onto the recycling bins and most likely onto the fire escape.

  I stared up at the tangle of iron grilles looming over me and wondered why Alf Glockner would climb an icy set of outdoor stairs in the middle of a winter snowstorm. If you asked me, Alf was too chubby to be a part-time cat burglar, and far from the sort of person I’d peg for a peeping Tom.

  Just then, I became aware of a high-pitched wail in the distance. An emergency siren! Finally! A police car was approaching from the street I’d left. I checked my watch and realized with a start that less than six minutes had passed since my 911 call. Given the state I was in, it only seemed like hours. Still, I was glad I’d had the time to investigate. Now I was more than ready to give my statement to the detectives, show them what I’d found.

  That’s when I heard the voices.

  “Police!”

  “Freeze!”

  Men were shouting between buildings from the other side of the courtyard.

  “NYPD!”

  “Stop, police!”

  Frost-crusted snow crunched behind me. As I turned to see who was coming, a hooded figure rocketed across the small, dark yard. I tried to make out the person’s face, but I didn’t have more than a nanosecond before the figure slammed into me.

  The impact tore me off my feet. I flew through the air, and two seconds later I knew what a blitzed quarterback felt like when he hit Astroturf.

  FIVE

  “MS. Cosi? You okay? Ms. Cosi?”

  The voice sounded earnest, youthful, and familiar. I blinked against the flashlight’s glare. A silhouette formed in my blurred vision. Narrow shoulders blocked the falling snow. The young man bent down to the icy ground beside me, and that’s when I noticed the nickel-plated badge pinned to the dark blue uniform.

  “Officer Langley?” I whispered. He and his partner, Demetrios, were regular customers at the Blend. (Langley was a latte man; Demetrios, double espressos.)

  “You really took a tumble,” Langley said.

  Still flat on my back in the snow, I felt an icy clammi ness creeping over me. Slush was trickling down the back of my parka, and I tried to sit up. Officer Langley gently restrained me.

  “Don’t move, Ms. Cosi. An ambulance is on the way.”

  “You’re kidding, right? ’Cause I’m freezing down here!” I sat up—then clutched my ribs. “Ouch.” I moaned.

  “You shouldn’t move until the paramedics check you out,” Langley said. But I refused to remain on the frigid ground any longer, and the young cop gave up trying to fight me.

  With a sigh of defeat, Langley helped me up. Loose strands of my shoulder-length hair were hanging in my face. As I brushed them away, a wind blast knifed through the courtyard. I groaned from the cold and noticed Langley shiver as he spoke into his police radio. Under his uniform’s hat, the man’s fair complexion blanched pastier than an albino thrown into a meat locker. After this long in the cold, I figured my own olive skin tone had gone nearly as pale.

  Teeth close to chattering, I flipped up my hood and asked, “What happened?”

  “We were chasing a suspect, Ms. Cosi. You got in the way.”

  “Oh my God!” I cried, my chill suddenly forgotten. “You saw the killer? Did you catch him? Did he tell you why he shot poor Alf?”

  Confused, the officer gave me a sidelong glance. “There’s no killer, Ms. Cosi. Just a mugger. We were chasing a purse snatcher, that’s all, and—”

  “Langley!”

  The deep, harsh call came from the side of the building where I’d found Alf’s body.

  “Where the hell is he? Langley!”

  We moved across the courtyard and up to the mouth of the alley. My eyes widened at the small army of police and crime-scene officers now gathering around Alf’s corpse. Two uniformed men began spooling out a roll of yellow police tape to cordon off the area around the metal Dumpster.

  “Yo! Langley,” the man called again.

  “Over here, Detective!” Langley waved.

  A male figure broke away from the pack and moved toward us up the alley. “Give me the rundown,” he demanded from the shadows.

  “Me and Demetrios heard a scream on Perry Street,” Langley explained. “A woman was being robbed. We pursued the perpetrator through that alley over there.” He gestured to the other side of the courtyard. “The perp fled through this yard, where he ran down Ms. Cosi here. I stopped to help her while Demetrios continued the chase with officers Wu and Gomez, also from the Sixth—”

  “Those guys are after a shooter, Langley,” the detective said, still veiled by the darkness. “We got a DOA by the Dumpster over there.”

  Langley tensed and exchanged a glance with me.

  That’s when the detective finally stepped out of the shadows. Most detectives I’d met wore suits, ties, and overcoats. This guy wore cowboy boots and a Yankees jacket, and his head was covered by a red, white, and blue bandanna—an urban fashion statement my shaved-headed barista, Dante, once informed me was a “do-rag.”

  “Some female called the dead guy in, then took a hike,” the detective said.

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but that female would be me.”

  The detective appraised me with eyes as cold and gray as the dimly lit snow. I returned the courtesy.

  The man was average height—which is to say at least seven inches taller then my five two—early thirties, maybe a little older. His skin was dusky, his features betraying a mixed heritage of what might have been Hispanic, Italian, and possibly Russian; in other words, a typical New Yorker. With one gloveless hand, he scratched his chin’s dark brown stubble.

  “You know this woman, Langley?” he said, shoving a square of nicotine gum between his lips.

  Langley nodded. “She manages the Village Blend on Hudson.”

  “So you’re that coffee lady I’ve heard about,” the detective said, working his jaw. “Never been in your place. My drink’s Red Bull.”

  “My name is Clare Cosi,” I replied.

  “And you found jolly old St. Stiff over there?”

  “His name’s Glockner, Alfred Glockner.”

  The detective paused a moment and studied me again. “You knew the victim?”

  I nodded.

  “Sorry.” He glanced away then back again. “I didn’t realize you knew him. Sorry for your loss.” His tone was sincere—or at least he’d blunted its street edge enough to make it sound that way. “Did you witness anything suspicious, Mrs. Cosi? Hear a shot? See the man who mugged your friend—”

  “It’s Ms. Cosi, Detective—what’s your name?”

  “Franco. Sergeant Emmanuel Franco.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure he was mugged, Sergeant Franco. Or if he was, I’m not so sure something else wasn’t happening, too—”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’d like you to look at these footprints I found in the snow—”

  “Why didn’t you stay close to the victim like the 911 operator asked?” Franco continued as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

  “I’m trying to tell you. After I found the body, I followed Alf Glockner’s boot prints, and I’m thinking it doesn’t add up to a mugging.”

  Sergeant Franco glanced around the snow. “What prints are you talking about?”

  “Follow me. They’re right over here—”

  It was still snowing as I led Franco and Langley into the center of the courtyard, but the heavy downfall had once again tapered off into light flurries. I pushed back the hood of my white parka in order to see better. It didn’t help.

  “Where are they?” the detective asked.

  “They were right here.”

  Officer Langley scanned the ground with his flashlight, but the clean trail of prints I’d followed had been obliterated by t
he mugger, the policemen chasing him, even Langley when he’d stopped to help me.

  “Do you see any evidence of the victims’ footprints here, Officer Langley?” Franco asked evenly.

  “No, Sergeant,” Langley replied. “Sorry, Ms. Cosi.”

  Franco shifted his attention to me. “What is it you think you saw, Coffee Lady?”

  “I didn’t think I saw anything. There were footprints here. Alf’s prints. I saw them. It looked to me like he pulled that wooden crate over to those garbage bins—” I pointed. “Then I’m deducing he climbed them to get onto the fire escape for some reason.”

  Franco exchanged a glance with Langley. “So it’s St. Nick the Cat Burglar, now?” he said. His expression remained neutral, but his tone was obviously flip.

  “Just look for yourself,” I said tightly.

  Franco held my gaze a moment, saw that my glare was dead serious, and, with a sigh of obvious male annoyance, flipped on his flashlight. He walked over to the crate and examined the box and the ground. He took a long look at the bins and finally the fire escape above them. As he walked back to me and Langley, an electronically garbled voice interrupted us. Franco lifted his radio to his ear, listened for a moment, and cursed a blue streak. Finally, he turned to Langley.

  “Four of you in pursuit and you still manage to lose that perp!”

  Langley sheepishly shrugged.

  “Fine. You and your partner can do some overtime.” He shook his head. “Me and Charlie aren’t going to be the only ones bracing local skells all night to find an ‘armed and dangerous’ stupid enough to actually pull the trigger—”

  “Excuse me, Sergeant, but what makes you think the mugger these men were pursuing is the same person who killed Alf? I found Alf’s body before the mugger ran through here.”

  Franco faced me, his denim-covered legs braced in the slippery snow. “Ms. Cosi, some scumbags work in teams. Some move from street to street in the same area, targeting victims. This perp hid Santa’s body pretty well from anyone passing on the street—it’s clear the shooter didn’t expect his victim to be found anytime soon, which would mean he was free and clear to keep looking for victims nearby. As to your friend here, his pockets were turned out, his wallet is missing, and the money box on his little green wagon was looted. Two and two is four. The motive here was obviously robbery—”