by Carla Coupe
“Now, take it easy!” he heard Detective Craddock saying. “We’ve been looking for you for five or six months. You were foolish to come back to town so soon, Canderon. We’ll take a little trip to headquarters now. As for your friend—”
But Canderon’s companion had darted into the crowd and disappeared.
“Probably somebody else that’s wanted badly,” Craddock said. “Come along, Canderon!”
The detective scattered the immediate crowd with a few growls and led his prisoner away. Thubway Tham slipped after them. Confound it! Craddock had spoiled things now! What fate was it that had brought Craddock there just at the wrong minute? Was Thubway Tham to lose his chance for revenge?
Craddock, he knew, was bound for a patrol box on the next corner, there to flash a message for the wagon. There seemed little chance for Thubway Tham to do anything.
Tham remembered that roll of bills in the man’s pocket. He wanted the roll. He wanted the hundred dollars, and he wanted Conderon’s hundred also, by way of profit and revenge. And the presence of Craddock spoiled things!
“Yeth, the thimp!” Tham said growlingly to himself. “Why couldn’t he have found hith man a few minuteth later? Thith ith what I get for givin’ him a Chrithtmath prethent!”
Detective Craddock went directly to the patrol box, paying no attention to the low mouthings of the prisoner. Tham followed a few feet behind. Curious ones stopped to turn and stare. They came to the patrol box, and Craddock sent in his call and waited.
Thubway Tham was desperate now. His chance to get that roll of bills was lost, he told himself. Craddock, even as he thought this, turned and saw him and grinned.
“Why, hello, Tham,” he said.
“Hello, yourthelf!” Tham replied, stepping nearer, “Made a catch, did you?”
“I certainly have, Tham. Mr. Canderon, here, is badly wanted for swindling women and children. Better take a lesson from this, Tham, and lead a straight and honest life. If you don’t, I’ll be taking you in like this one of these days.”
“Yeth?” Tham said. “Maybe tho and maybe not. Tho thith bird hath been swindlin’ women, hath he? He lookth like that thort of a cuth. I hope he getth twenty yearth!”
“Tham, wishing bad luck to a brother in crime?”
“He ith no brother of crime of mine,” Tham declared stoutly. “I don’t care if you hang him!”
“Yes, he’ll get a few years to think it over,” Craddock replied, chuckling. “He’ll eat his Christmas dinner in jail, Tham. You be careful that you don’t.”
The prisoner had regarded Thubway Tham with amazement at first, and now he turned his face away from the curious throng and looked down the street. Tham stepped a little closer.
“Craddock, lay off that thtuff!” he said in low tones. “Callin’ me a crook in front of all thethe folkth? Wonder you wouldn’t make them go on about their buthineth!”
Detective Craddock turned quickly to see that the crowd was growing denser and pressing closer. A patrolman came charging through it.
“Need any help, Craddock?” he asked.
“Just send these people about their business,” Craddock said.
The patrolman whirled toward the crowd and brandished an arm, meaning that he expected an instant dispersal of the mob. Craddock watched him at the work.
But Mr. Canderon at that moment decided that he did not wish to eat his Christmas dinner in jail if it could be avoided. While Craddock’s back was turned, Canderon gave a quick spring forward, knocked Craddock to his knees, and jerked himself free.
Craddock’s yell as he struggled to get to his feet caused the patrolman to turn and rush to the rescue. But Thubway Tham had acted already.
Tham saw his chance. He hurled himself forward and thrust out a leg. Mr. Canderon crashed to the pavement, and Tham, with a flying leap, was a-straddle him. There was a sharp, fierce tussle. And then Craddock and the patrolman were at the scene, a blackjack descended, and Mr. Canderon passed out momentarily.
And then Tham got to his feet and started brushing his clothes. The “wagon” arrived, and the prisoner was turned over. Detective Craddock stepped up to Thubway Tham and slapped him on the shoulder.
“Thanks, Tham!” he said. “Good work! I must be growing careless. But I am rather surprised that you’d help an officer against a crook.”
“But there are crookth and crookth,” Thubway Tham recited.
“He might have escaped in the crowd. You certainly bowled him over.”
“I tripped him,” Tham explained.
“A good job, too! Tham, I appreciate it! And that reminds me—I won’t be able to see you tomorrow, because when I reported an hour ago I got orders to go to Philadelphia tomorrow and bring back a prisoner. Hot way to spend Christmas.”
“Tough luck,” Tham commented.
“But you’re going to have a Christmas present from me, old-timer! Here is a five-dollar bill. You buy yourself something you really want and tell me about it later.”
“Yeth, but—” Tham began.
“Go on and take it, or you’ll make me feel mean. And I want to be square with you so, in case I get the chance to land you, I can do it with an easy conscience.”
Tham accepted the bill. “Thanks, Craddock!” he said. “Buthineth ith exthellent thith evenin’.”
Craddock waved his hand and went down the street. Thubway Tham, chuckling, walked rapidly in the other direction. He had the five Craddock had given him, and the five Canderon had given him for returning the purse—and the two hundred he had lifted from the latter’s pocket as they had wrestled across the walk.
Before Thubway Tham went to his room that night he made a little journey to the home of the man whose wallet he was carrying. Tham returned the wallet and with it the one hundred and five dollars it had contained when its owner entered the subway. Joy was in Tham’s heart, for he had made glad the heart of another.
“Merry Chrithtmath!” Thubway Tham said with a happy smile as he hurried toward the lodging house of Nosey Moore. “Merry Chrithtmath! I’ll thay that it ith!”
_______________
Johnston McCulley is best known as the creator of Zorro, although he wrote more than fifty novels, numerous short stories, and screenplays for both television and movies. He wrote more than 110 stories about Thubway Tham over a 50-year period. Tham’s adventures have been collected in two volumes by Wildside Press, Adventures of Thubway Tham and Tales of Thubway Tham.
DEATH WILL TRIM YOUR TREE, by Elizabeth Zelvin
I sat on the floor in Jimmy and Barbara’s living room with a pile of blinking electrical spaghetti in my lap and ground my teeth. For this I’d stayed sober for 357 days and changed my whole life? Cursing the malevolence of circuitry, I began to disentangle the single strand of tiny bulbs that I’d finally gotten to light up all at the same time from the rest.
“Think of it as a meditation,” Barbara said, perky as one of Santa’s elves.
“You wanna take over?”
“I can’t. I’m making latkes.” Barbara does Chanukah along with Christmas. She showed me puppy eyes soft with regret. Her feminism flies south at this time of year. Women cook. Men wrestle with the frigging lights.
“Why don’t you run over to Broadway and pick up some that work?” Jimmy suggested. Computer geniuses supervise.
I growled low in my throat, sounding more like a pit bull than I expected. Jimmy took it in stride.
“These lights are obsolete, anyhow,” he said. “With the new ones, if one bulb goes out, the rest stay on. Replace the one, and you’re back in business.”
“Thank you for sharing.”
I didn’t bother asking so how come we were still using the old ones. I knew the answer: Barbara never throws anything out. I picked bits of last year’s tinsel off my sweater, grabbed my down vest off the back of a chair, and headed for the door.
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“Bruce!” Barbara called after me. “While you’re at it, pick up a pint of sour cream.”
I could pretend I hadn’t heard. But I’d probably get the sour cream. As people were always telling me, AA interferes not only with your drinking but also with such cherished traits as surliness and willingness to disappoint people.
I headed for Manny’s Hardware over on Broadway. Manny was long gone, but the hole in the wall he’d founded in 1923 still carried everything you could possibly need, from the oddball size of screw to a giant silver samovar that had been sitting there for years. Or maybe they kept selling and replacing it, one samovar at a time.
In spite of its eight million people, New York is a small town. In the old days, I knew someone in every bar I stumbled into. Now, wherever I went, I saw someone from the program. AA meetings are better lit than bars, so the faces stayed with me.
At Manny’s, I recognized the clerk.
“Hi, Tim.” I read the name off his shirt, greeting him as I would have at a meeting.
He nodded, giving me a half-smile to acknowledge that he knew me too but wasn’t about to break my anonymity by saying so. We said, “What’s happening?” and “Not much,” and then we were ready to talk hardware. I described the kind of lights I needed. He said they’d been flying off the shelves, but he still had a few boxes in stock. They never don’t have what you need at Manny’s.
“Give me a minute,” he said. “I’ll go in the back and get them.”
Tim opened a door in the wall behind the counter. I could see a stockroom bigger than the shop. A half-open door in the rear offered a glimpse of one of those hidden New York back yards that visitors don’t even know exist. The tall, narrow space was lined with ceiling-high gray metal shelves crammed with merchandise and towers of giant brown boxes. He’d have a job finding one carton.
“I may be a while. I know we’ve got ’em, though.”
“No problem.”
Tim sketched a salute and dove into the storeroom, closing the door behind him.
I browsed the shelves for a while, decided I didn’t need a set of Phillips head screwdrivers or a non-stick pizza stone, and went out front for a smoke. The faint jingle of Salvation Army Santa Claus bells served as background music. The even fainter scent of pine trees from Maine and Canada stacked three deep on wooden scaffolding down the street provided ambience. I drifted off, thinking about nothing in particular. I was far away when a female voice broke into my reverie.
“They’re not closed, are they? If I don’t find red and gold tinsel, I’ll have a panic attack.”
New Yorkers.
I dropped the butt I held pinched between my fingers. Grinding it out with the toe of my shoe, I realized I’d stood there long enough to suck up and crush out four cigarettes.
“No, it’s open. The clerk went out back to find something for me.”
I held the door, which clanged the way shop doors do, and let her precede me into the store. She was a tall, thin woman with a white streak bisecting jet black hair like Cruella de Vil, bundled up in a faux fur coat with matching trim on her faux leather gloves. She lugged a bulging Zabar’s shopping bag in each hand.
“Yoohoo!” She bumped her way through the narrow aisle to the counter. “Can I get some service here?”
Tim did not appear.
“He’s been gone for a while,” I said. “Maybe I should go back there and take a look.”
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I love Manny’s. I could browse in here forever.”
Her eyes lit up as she spotted a cut-glass punch bowl on the highest shelf. I’d better get Tim back out here, or she’d be asking me to get it down for her.
I ducked under a hinged flap in the counter top, then opened the stockroom door.
“Tim?” I called. “You’ve got a customer.”
No answer. I marched down the narrow aisle toward the rear door. An open carton blocked the way. Christmas lights. I straddled it and proceeded to the door. It wasn’t ajar any more, though a strip of thin winter light still filtered in. I pushed it open with my shoulder and stepped out into the yard.
Tim lay sprawled face down on the concrete, to one side and a few yards beyond the back door. If he was dead, I didn’t want to touch the body. I’d rather keep my DNA to myself. But if he wasn’t dead, and I failed to help, I’d feel guilty. No more Jack Daniel’s to help me blow it off, either. I took a cautious stroll around him, hands in my pockets. The far side of his head, crumpled like a ball of paper, lay in an ooze of blood and brains. Too late for CPR, then.
I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths until the desire to throw up subsided. I’d better call 911. To tell the truth, I would rather have walked away. But for the new me, that was not an option. As I drew my cell phone from my pocket, I looked around the yard. No handy two-by-four coated with blood and gray matter in sight. Tim had fallen onto concrete. The area wasn’t exactly a garbage dump. But recent litterers had left six cigarette butts, seven pop tops, and three candy wrappers within a foot of his outstretched hand.
I would have picked the litter up, out of respect for the abandoned body. But I didn’t think the police would appreciate it. I’d better make my call from out front, with the lady customer as witness. While I was at it, I could scoop up my own butts, hopefully before the cops got there. Taking one last look at the body, I saw a familiar-looking bronze coin half hidden by the sprawl of his hip. He’d gone outside wearing only a white T shirt and faded jeans. They’d pulled apart when he fell. I could see a bit of pale skin in between. It looked smooth and vulnerable.
I squatted and fished the coin out with my thumb and forefinger: a medallion with the AA triangle and “3 months” on one side, the Serenity Prayer engraved so small that I had to squint to read it on the other. The bronze was antiqued, so it wasn’t shiny. But it didn’t look worn, not as if it had been hanging out in somebody’s pocket for years. These “chips” were cherished in the fellowship. The only way you could get one was by staying sober for ninety days. Or stealing it off a corpse. I tucked the chip into the pocket of my jeans.
I went back into the store and out the front. Cruella was still there. I broke the news and said I’d call 911.
“I live right around the corner,” she said. She looked longingly at the pile of shiny housewares and appliances she’d selected from Manny’s shelves and piled on the counter by the cash register. “Do you think it would be okay if I pop back home and get my holiday goodies into the fridge before they spoil? I could come back.”
“Please don’t go,” I said. “The cops might take a dim view of your leaving. And I would really appreciate it if you’d tell them you saw me go behind the counter only a few minutes before I found—before I called the police.”
“When you put it that way—oh, why not?” She put the Zabar’s bags gently down on the sidewalk and flexed her fingers. “I’ll stay. It’s Christmas.”
Shortly after that, the uniformed cops arrived, then two detectives, crime scene folks, and a parade of snoopy Upper West Siders who didn’t want to miss the excitement. It knocked the warm fuzzies from Cruella being nice right out of me. When the detectives asked if I’d known Tim outside the store, I lied. They took my address and told me where to report to be fingerprinted. Then they shooed me off the scene along with the nosy neighbors.
When I got back to Jimmy and Barbara’s, I told them what had happened and showed them the ninety-day chip.
“It’s evidence, Bruce!” Barbara’s voice soared into a shocked squeak. She kind of lost the moral high ground when she added, “Couldn’t you have picked up those lights while you were at it?”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist, peanut,” Jimmy said. “I’ll order some online.”
“Why did you take it, Bruce?” Barbara said. “Here, have some latkes.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I had some kind
of goofy idea of protecting AA. I didn’t want cops busting into every meeting in the city to ask questions.”
“They’ll figure out he was in AA sooner or later,” Jimmy said. “The guy had a job and an apartment. At the very least, they’ll find a meeting list.”
“Okay, so AA was part of his life. But a chip on the scene makes it part of his death. I didn’t want them getting the wrong idea.”
“Maybe it’s the right idea,” Barbara said. “Maybe somebody in the program killed him.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Lots of people carry their anniversary coins on them all the time.”
“It wasn’t his coin,” Jimmy said.
“How do you know?” Barbara asked.
“You knew Tim?” I asked. Why was I surprised? Jimmy knew everyone.
“I go to the hardware store now and then,” he said. “I knew Tim from meetings. If he was alone in the store, we’d talk.”
“Still, how do you know it wasn’t his chip?”
“He didn’t have ninety days,” Jimmy said. “Last week, I went into Manny’s to get the new Christmas tree stand.”
“Bruce didn’t even notice the stand,” Barbara said.
“Yes, I did. I noticed the tree didn’t fall down this year. Yet. Go on, Jimmy.”
“I asked Tim if he wanted to qualify at the Thursday step meeting. He said, and I quote, ‘I don’t have the clean time. I’m only seventy-two days back from a slip.’”
“Then the chip must have belonged to the murderer,” Barbara said. “Bruce, you should have left it there.”
Oops.
In the next couple of weeks, with some reluctant help from Jimmy and overenthusiastic help from Barbara, I trolled the twelve-step programs for gossip that might suggest a motive for Tim’s death. Tim was a well-known chronic relapser. He’d get a few months together and then pick up. So far, he’d managed not to lose the job at Manny’s. But the slips meant that he was perennially on Step One, admitting he was powerless over alcohol. He could put dealing with all his other shortcomings on hold. Like cheating on his girlfriend, Suzanne, whose tearful share I heard one night at a meeting.