Марджери Аллингем - Mystery for Christmas and Other Stories

There was a small smile on her face. Slowly her head began to bob up and down. “I had a feeling you did,” she said. “But you haven’t answered me. Does the turkey taste the same way it did then?”

I spoke the truth. “No, Mama, it doesn’t. It’s very good.”

She was laughing like a madwoman. Everyone at the table looked embarrassed and there was nowhere for me to hide. “Is this a private joke between you and your mother?” the man at my right asked me. But I couldn’t answer. Because my mother had reached across the table and shoved her hand into the turkey’s cavity, obscenely pulling out gobs of stuffing and flinging it at me.

“Don’t you know why the turkey tasted strange? Can’t you guess why, Sonny? Can’t you guess what I hid in the stuffing so those dam fool cops wouldn’t find it? Can’t you guess, Sonny? Can’t you?”

Someone had murdered a Santa Claus.

The body, rotund and clad in the traditional red suit, lay in a corner behind the gift wrap section, in the basement, hidden from the view of passing customers by a counter and stacks of cardboard boxes. He still wore his long white beard and mustache, but the hat had come off and lay a foot from his head, revealing black hair with a bald spot on top.

George Kelso looked down at the body, then at Detective Sergeant Meyer. It was ten A.M., three days before Christmas, in one of the larger downtown department stores.

“Okay,” Meyer said, “let’s get this area cleared so the lab boys can get to work.” He sounded tired. Kelso understood that it wasn’t fatigue, but depression. Every year at Christmas Meyer, a small dark Jewish man, became depressed and usually withdrawn. It was no good talking to him about it, it was something Meyer had to live with and work out for himself, at least until he became willing to confide in his associates at the police department.

“I was supposed to go shopping this afternoon with Susan,” Kelso said to nobody in particular. “I suppose that’s out of the question now.”

“I suppose it is,” Meyer replied. “All right, Kelso, why don’t you take the offices upstairs and I’ll check with the clerks. The other guys are talking to customers to see if anybody noticed anything unusual.”

“I’ll go talk to the business staff,” Kelso agreed. When Meyer was in his Christmas funk, it was best to agree with whatever he said. The store’s music system was playing “Winter Wonderland” over the noise and confusion of shoppers, and a few feet away, a little boy was screaming and trying to kick his mother, who looked flustered.

Kelso headed for the elevators.

Kelso himself became somewhat depressed at Christmas, but not for the same reasons as Meyer. For one thing, he found himself constantly thrown in with relatives at this time of year, and none of them especially liked him. Being unable to understand what had possessed him to seek a career as a police detective, they tended to regard him with suspicion and hostility. One of his more enlightened uncles had once referred to Kelso behind his back (but within easy hearing distance) as “that fascist,” and a younger niece had often called him a pig. He had been forbidden to bring his gun to the various family dinners, though it was the last thing he would have brought, and whenever he entered a room everyone stopped talking and stared as if, he thought, expecting him to make an arrest.

For another, Christmas jarred his nerves. He had been brought up in a deeply religious family and the season had been the highlight of his year. It had seemed magical, with its aura of good cheer, its feeling of universal peace. Then he’d grown into adulthood to find all of that shattered by the reality of global conflict, mass murders, tough cynicism, and his own rapidly fading belief in anything magical. Ultimately, had come to view Christmas as an elaborate hoax perpetrated on a gullible public by department store managers, advertising executives, and toy manufacturers.

And now someone had killed Santa Claus.

But the dead man wasn’t really Santa Claus. Kelso rode up to the eighth floor executive offices, going over the victim’s particulars in his mind. Arnold Wundt, fifty-five, in charge of accounting, divorced, wife and kids on the west coast, quiet and bookish, nondrinker, nonsmoker, rarely dated, few friends. Who would want to kill such a man? Someone had wanted to.

Someone, at about nine thirty that morning, according to the coroner’s man, had cornered Arnold Wundt behind the gift wrapping counter and shoved a long thin knife directly into his plump body, angling it upward from just below his ribs and penetrating his heart, killing him almost instantly. That someone had left the knife in the bloodstained corpse and was now back at work, or shopping for presents, or on a plane bound for the Bahamas. It was anybody’s guess.

“May I help you, sir?”

Kelso had entered the manager’s outer office and stood looking down at a receptionist’s desk, suddenly realizing where he was, as if he’d awakened abruptly from a dream. He found his unlit pipe in one hand, his overcoat in the other.

“Sergeant Kelso,” he said. “Police department. I wonder if I could talk to Mr. Anderson?”

“Oh, is it about the murder?” The girl was under twenty-five, blonde, cheerful, blue-eyed, slightly plump. She was the kind of healthy, well-fed girl who’d have been a cheerleader at some midwestern university. Ohio State, Kelso thought. Or Purdue.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, noticing a gold band on her ring finger.

A big, healthy smile. “Just a minute, sergeant.” She got up and went through a door behind her desk, returned almost immediately with another smile. “Go right in. Mr. Anderson’s out right now, but his assistant, Mr. Briggs, will help you.”

“Thanks.”

Mr. Briggs was short, probably five seven or so, heavy, with oversized glasses that greatly magnified his round, staring eyes, making him look like some sort of surprised bug. His wide lips were fixed in a permanent smile. A surprised, happy bug. He held a large sandwich, trying to stuff oversized bites of it into his wide mouth. There were reddish stains on the sleeves of his white shirt, and a piece of lettuce on his pants leg.

“Stupid cafeteria,” he said around a mouthful, and dabbed with a napkin at his sleeve. “They always get too much ketchup on these things. I must’ve told them a hundred times.” He swallowed, finally, and glared. “Can’t finish it. Too messy.” He wrapped the remains in a paper napkin and dropped it into a wastebasket, then held out a small pale hand. “Glad to meet you, Sergeant Kelsy.”

“Kelso,” he corrected, and sighed.

“Right. Kelso. Glad to meet you. Been shopping, sergeant? We’ve got some terrific deals on suits.” The bug cast a critical eye at Kelso’s battered corduroy suit. “Fix you right up. No? Well, I guess it’s business, isn’t it? Terrible about poor Wundt.”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Briggs.” Kelso took out his notebook and ballpoint, putting away his pipe and dropping his overcoat onto a chair. “Could you tell me—”

“Listen, sergeant.” The bug’s manner became suddenly confidential. He hurried across the office to the door, seemed to make certain it was tightly closed, and scurried back behind the polished desk. “I’d better tell you something. I don’t know how much it’s got to do with poor Wundt, but you’d better know about it. Sergeant—” Briggs glanced left and right in a comic imitation of some movie character about to reveal The Big Secret “—someone in this store’s been embezzling money.”

The words alone were normal enough; Kelso had encountered numerous embezzlers. It was the exaggerated way in which Briggs had spoken the words — his pop-eyed stare, his stage whisper, his air of a little kid confiding something about men from Mars to his best friend.