Murder Most Merry

by ed. Abigail Browining

  We stood there for a moment, all of us, silent. Petrina clutched the bear to her, tightly, lovingly, and almost smiled. Irma started crying and I might’ve too, a little. Shorty picked Deborah up and kissed her like she was his own. “You’re blessed.” he said to me. “From heaven.”

  He drove us home, and on the way back I asked Debbie what she said to the bear. “I was just telling him his name.” she said innocently, “and he said it was exactly right.”

  “What is his name?” I asked.

  “Oh, that was my name for him, Grandma. Petrina told him her name: he has a different name now,” and that’s all she would say about it.

  I invited Shorty in but he couldn’t stay: had to get back to the garage. If he took too long—well, there were plenty of good mechanics out of work. He promised he’d get Deborah another gift for Christmas, but he couldn’t do it in time for tonight. I told him not to worry; I’d work out something.

  When we got home. I got started making cookies with chocolate sprinkles, the kind Deborah likes. She helped me. After a while, when the first batch of cookies was baking, her cheeks powdered with flour and her pretty face turned away, she said, quietly, “It’s all right not to get a present for Christmas. As long as you know somebody wanted to give it to you and spent all her money to get it.”

  My heart was so full I couldn’t say anything for a while. Then I lifted her onto my lap and hugged her to my heart. “Oh, Debbie my love, you’ll understand when you’re older, but you’ve just gotten the best Christmas present of all: the chance to make a little child happy.”

  I held her away and looked into her wise, innocent eyes and wondered if, maybe, she already understood that.

  THE SHAPE OF THE NIGHTMARE – Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

  On the afternoon of the second day before Christmas, just before the terror swept the airport, Loren Mensing was studying the dispirited and weaving line in front of the ticket counter and wishing fervently that he were somewhere else.

  He had turned in his exam grades at the law school, said goodbye to the handful of December graduates among his students, and wasted three days moping, with the dread of spending the holidays alone again festering inside him like an untreated wound. The high-rise apartment building he’d lived in for years was being converted to condominiums, dozens of tenants had moved out and dozens more had flown south for the holidays, and the isolation in the building reinforced his sense of being alone in the world.

  He had called a travel agent and booked passage on a week-long Caribbean cruise where, if he was lucky, he might find someone as seasonally lonely as he was himself. A Love Boat fantasy that he tried desperately to make himself believe. He drove to the airport through swirling snow that froze to ice on the Volkswagen’s windshield. He checked his bags, went through security at the lower level, and was lounging near the departure gate for Flight 317, nonstop to Miami, when he heard his name over a microphone.

  And learned that he’d been bumped.

  “I’m very sorry. Mr. Mensing.” The passenger service rep seemed to look bored, solicitous, and in charge all at once. “We have to overbook flights because so many reserved-seat holders don’t cancel but don’t show up either. Today everyone showed up! You have a right to compensatory cash payment plus a half-fare coupon for the next Miami flight.” His racing fingers leafed through the schedule book. “Which departs in just five hours. If you’ll take this form to the counter on the upper level they’ll write you a fresh ticket.”

  If he took the next flight he’d miss connections with the excursion ship. He kept his rage under control, detached himself from the horde of travelers at the departure gate, and stalked back upstairs to find a supervisor and demand a seat on the flight he was scheduled to take. When he saw the length of the line at the upper level he almost decided to go home and forget the cruise altogether.

  A large metropolitan airport two days before Christmas. Men, women, children, bundled in overcoats and mufflers and down jackets and snowcaps, pushing and jostling and shuffling in the interminable lines that wove and shifted in front of the ticket counters like multicolored snakes. Thousands of voices merging into an earsplitting hum. View through panoramic windows of snow sifting through the gray afternoon, of autos and trucks and taxis crawling to a halt. Honeyed robot voices breaking into the recorded Christmas carols to make flight announcements no one could hear clearly.

  Loren was standing apart from the line, trying to decide whether to join it or surrender his fantasy and go home, when it happened.

  He heard a voice bellowing something through the wall of noise in the huge terminal. “Bon! Bonreem!” That was what it sounded like in the chaos. It was coming from a man standing to one side of the line like himself. A short sandy-haired man wearing jeans and a down jacket and red ski cap, shouting the syllables in a kind of fury. “Bonreem!”

  A man standing in the line turned his head to the right, toward the source of the shout, as if he were hearing something that related to him. A woman in a tan all-weather coat with a rain hood, just behind the man in the line, began to turn her head in the same direction.

  The sandy-haired man dropped into a combat crouch, drew a pistol from the pocket of his down jacket, and fired four times at the two who were turning. In the bedlam of the airport the shots sounded no louder than coughs. The next second the face of the man in the line was blown apart. Someone screamed. Then everyone screamed. The man with the shattered face fell to the tiled floor, his fingers still moving, clutching air. The line in front of the ticket counter dissolved into a kaleidoscope of figures running, fainting, shrieking. Instinctively Loren dropped to the floor.

  The killer raced for the exit doors, stumbled over Loren’s outstretched feet, fell on one knee, hard, cried out in pain, picked himself up, and kept running. John Wilkes Booth flashed through Loren’s mind. He saw uniformed figures racing toward them, city and airport police, pistols drawn. Two of them blocked the exit doors. The killer wheeled left, stumbled down the main concourse out of sight, police rushing after him.

  In the distance Loren heard more screams, then one final shot.

  The public-address system was still playing “White Christmas.”

  At first they put Loren in with the other witnesses, all of them herded into a large auditorium away from the public areas of the airport. Administrative people brought in doughnuts and urns of coffee on wheeled carts. The witnesses sat or stood in small knots—friends, family groups, total strangers, talking compulsively and pacing and clinging to each other. A few stood or sat alone. Loren was one of them. He was still stunned and he knew no one there to talk to.

  After a while he pulled out of shock and looked around the room at the other loners. An old man with a wispy white mustache, probably a widower on his way to visit grandchildren for Christmas. A thin dour man with a cleft chin who blinked continually behind steel-rimmed glasses as if the sun were shining in his eyes. In a folding chair in a corner of the auditorium he saw the woman in the tan hooded coat, her head bowed, eyes indrawn, hugging herself and trying not to shudder. He started to get out of his chair and move toward her.

  Another woman flung back the swing doors of the auditorium and stood in the entranceway, a tall fortyish woman in a pantsuit, her hair worn long and straight and liberally streaked with gray. “Loren Mensing?” she called out. Her strong voice cut through the hubbub of helpless little conversations in the vast room. “Is there a Loren Mensing here?”

  Loren raised his hand and the woman came over to him. “I’m Gene Holt,” she said. “Sergeant Holt, city police, Homicide. You’re wanted in the conference room.”

  He followed her to a room down the hall with a long oak table in the center, flanked by chairs. The air was thick with smoke from cigarettes and a few pipes. He counted at least twenty men in the room—airport police, local police, several in plainclothes. The man at the head of the conference table stood up and beckoned. “Lou Belford,” he introduced himself. “Special Agent in charge of
the F. B. I, office for the area. The locals just told me you’re a sort of detective yourself in an oddball way.”

  “I used to be deputy legal adviser on police matters for the mayor’s office,” Loren said. “A part-time position. I teach law for a living.”

  “And you’ve helped crack some weird cases, right?”

  “I’ve helped a few times,” Loren conceded.

  “Well, we’ve got a weird one here, Professor,” Belford grunted. “And you’re our star witness. Tell me what you saw.”

  As Loren told his story Belford scrawled notes on a pad. “It all fits,” he said finally. “The guy tripped over your feet and hurt his knee. When he saw he couldn’t get out the front exit he headed for the side doors that lead to the underground parking ramps. If he hadn’t stumbled over you he could have made it out of the building. Bad luck for him.”

  “You caught him then? Who was he. and why did he kill that man?”

  “We didn’t catch him,” Belford said. “Cornered him in the gift shop. He saw he was trapped and ate his gun. One shot, right through the mouth. Dead on the spot.”

  Loren clenched his teeth.

  “He wasn’t carrying ID.” Belford went on, “but we made him a while ago. His name was Frank Wilt. Vietnam vet, unemployed for the last three years. He couldn’t hold a job, claimed his head and body were all screwed up from exposure to that Agent Orange stuff they used in the war. The VA couldn’t do a thing to help him.”

  “The man he killed worked for the Veterans Administration?” Loren guessed.

  “No, no.” Belford shook his head impatiently. “Wilt was obviously desperate for money. It looks as if he took a contract to waste somebody. We just learned he put twenty-five hundred dollars in a bank account Monday. That part of the case is easy. It’s the other end we need help with.”

  “Other end? You mean the victim?” Loren’s mind sped to a conclusion from the one fact he knew for certain. “So that’s why the F. B. I. are involved! Murder in an airport isn’t a Federal crime, and neither is murder by a veteran. So there must be something special about the victim.” He leaned forward, elbows on the conference table. “Who was he?”

  “The accountant who testified against Lo Scalzo and Pollin in New York last year,” Belford said. “John Graham. We gave him and his family new identities under the Witness Relocation Program. They’ve been living in the city for eighteen months. And now. Professor, we’ve got an exam for you. Question one: How did the mob find out who and where Graham was? Question two: Why did they hire a broken-down vet to waste him instead of sending in a professional hit man?”

  Loren had a sudden memory of one of his own law-school professors who had delighted in posing impossible riddles in class. The recollection made him distinctly uncomfortable.

  He stayed with the investigators well into the evening, helping Lieutenant Krauzer of Homicide and Sergeant Holt and the F. B. I. agents interrogate all the actual and possible witnesses. Shortly before midnight, bone-weary and almost numb with the cold, he excused himself, trudged out into the public area of the airport, retrieved his luggage, and grabbed a tasteless snack in the terminal coffee shop. He found his VW in the underground parking garage and drove through hard-packed snow back to his high-rise.

  He was unlocking his apartment door when he heard footsteps behind him and whirled, then relaxed. It was the woman, the one in the tan hooded coat who had been standing in the line directly behind John Graham at the time of the murder. “Please let me in, Mr. Mensing,” she said. Her voice was soft but filled with desperation, her face taut with tension and fatigue. Loren was afraid she’d collapse at any moment. “Come on in,” he nodded. “You need a drink worse than I do.”

  Ten minutes later they were sitting on the low-backed blue couch, facing the night panorama of the city studded with diamond lights, a pot of coffee, a bottle of brandy, and a plate of cheese and crackers on the cocktail table in front of them. Slowly the warmth, the drinks, and the presence of someone she could trust dissipated the tightness from the woman. Loren guessed that she was about thirty, and that not too long ago she had been lovely.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I haven’t eaten since early this morning, I mean yesterday morning.”

  “Let me make you a real meal.” Loren got up from the couch. “I don’t have much in the refrigerator but I think I could manage some scrambled eggs.”

  “No.” She reached out with her hand to stop him. “Maybe later. I’d like to talk now if you don’t mind. You may want to kick me out when I’m through.” She gave a nervous high-pitched giggle, and Loren sat down again and held her hand, which still felt all but frozen.

  “My name is Donna,” she began. “Donna Keever. That’s my maiden name. I’m married. No, I was married. My husband died just about a year ago. His name was Greene, Charles Greene.” Her eyes filled with tears. “It was a year ago last week,” she mumbled. “You must have read about it.”

  Loren groped in the tangle of his memory. Yes. that was it, last year’s Christmas heartbreak story in the media. Charles Greene and his six-year-old daughter had been driving home from gift shopping, going west on U. S. 47, when a car traveling east on the same highway hit a rut. The eastbound lane at that point was slightly higher than the westbound because of the shape of a hill on which U. S. 47 was built. The eastbound auto had bounced up into the air, literally flown across the median, and landed nose first on top of Greene’s car. Then it had bounced off, flown over the roofs of other passing cars, and landed in the ditch at the side of the highway. Greene, his child, and the other driver, who turned out to be driving on an expired license and with his blood full of alcohol, all died instantly. “I remember.” Loren said softly.

  “I was ill that day,” Donna Greene said, “or I’d have been shopping with Chuck and Cindy. That’s the only reason I’m still alive while my family’s dead. Isn’t life wonderful?”

  “It was just chance,” Loren told her. “You can’t feel guilty about it and ruin the rest of your life.”

  “No!” Her voice rose to the pitch of a scream. “It wasn’t chance. That accident didn’t just happen. Someone wanted to kill Chuck or Cindy or me. Or all of us!”

  She broke then, and Loren held her while she sobbed. When she could talk again he asked her the obvious question. “Have you told the police what you think?”

  “Not the police, not the lawyer who’s handling the wrongful death claim for me, not anyone. It was only last week that I knew. A burglar broke into my house a week ago Monday night, came into my bedroom. He was wearing a stocking mask and he—he put his hands on me. I screamed my head off and scared him away. The police said it was just a burglar, but I knew. That man was going to kill me! The police think I’m exaggerating, that I’m still crazy with grief because of the accident.”

  “How about family? Friends? Have you told them of your suspicions?”

  “My parents and Chuck’s are all dead. My older brother ran away from home about fifteen years ago. when I was fifteen and he was twenty, and no one’s heard from him since. I don’t work, I don’t have a boyfriend and I just couldn’t go to my women friends with something like this.”

  “What made you come to me?” he asked gently.

  “Out at the airport auditorium, when that policewoman or whatever she was paged you, I recognized your name. I’ve read how you’ve helped people in trouble. When they let me go I looked up where you live in the phone book and came up here to wait for you.”

  “Why were you at the airport?’

  “I had to get away. If I stayed here I knew that burglar would come back and kill me, if I didn’t kill myself first. And I was right! You were there, you saw-that man. that gunman standing a few feet from me and he called my name. Donna Greene, and I started to turn and he shot at me and hit the man next to me in the line. Oh, God, somebody, help me!” She broke again, terror and despair poured out of her, and Loren held her and made comforting sounds while his mind raced.

  Yes. t
he two names, John Graham and Donna Greene, sounded just enough alike that in the crowded terminal, with noises assaulting the ears from every side, both of them might have thought their name was being called and turned. To Loren, less than a dozen feet away, the name had sounded like “Bonreem.” But which of the two had Frank Wilt been paid to kill? If Donna was right, the double-barreled question posed by Agent Belford became meaningless. And if she was the intended victim, what would the person who had hired Wilt do next?

  All the time he was soothing Donna Greene he fought with himself. “Don’t get involved again,” something inside told him. “The last time you saved someone he went out later and killed a bunch of innocent people. This time you’re already partly responsible for Wilt’s death. And for all you know this woman may be a raving paranoid.”

  And then all at once he knew what to do. something that would reconcile the conflicting emotions within him and make his Christmas a lot brighter too. He waited until Donna was under control again before he explained.

  “I’ve been thinking.” he said. “I don’t think I’m qualified to judge whether you’re right or wrong about being the target at the airport. But I know someone who is—a woman private detective up in Capital City named Val Tremaine. She’s fantastically good at her work. I’m going to ask her to come down and spend a couple of days on your case, getting to know you, talking with you, forming judgments. You’ll like her. Her husband died young too and she had to start life over.” He disengaged himself gently and rose to his feet. “I’ll make the call from my study. You’ll be all right?”

  “I’m better now. I just needed someone I could open up to who wouldn’t treat me like a fool or a lunatic. Look, Mr. Mensing, I’m not a charity case. My lawyer is suing the estate of that other driver for three million dollars. He was rich, his attorneys already offered to settle for three-quarters of a million. I’m not asking you or your detective friend to work for nothing.”