John Betancourt - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006

“So I’ve got some bugs to work out,” admitted Gibbie.

Mason moved on. “Ever meet Roy Reilly who disappeared last year?”

“The balloon guy? Sure. We Dickens-doers are a tight-knit group. The Carolers Club, that’s what we call ourselves. Come January when the season’s over we rent a hall and throw ourselves a shindig. ‘Eeffoc Moor,’ that’s our battle cry.”

“‘Eeffoc Moor?’” Mason raised both eyebrows suspiciously.

“Look,” said Gibbie, “young Charles Dickens used to hang out at this London restaurant where one of the doors had an oval glass in it that said ‘Coffee Room.’ Dickens wrote that from the inside it read ‘Moor Eeffoc.’ You might say it’s the Carolers Club’s ‘inside’ joke. Get it?” Mason looked like he didn’t. “Me,” continued Gibbie, “I always thought Dickens’s Eeffoc Moor would be one great place to live. I get tired of the city sometimes. You know what I mean? There are days when I could use a whole plateful of sky.”

Mason was losing interest.

“Okay, sure, I knew Reilly,” said Gibbie again. “Hey, you try reading Dickens and shaping those sausage balloons at the same time. You can bet the squeaking rubber set a lot of teeth on edge. Reilly’s Ghost of Christmas Past wasn’t bad and his Marley doorknocker was great. So what’s with Reilly?”

“We’ve found his remains,” said Mason. “Could somebody be trying to kill you people off? Maybe there’s a murderer stalking this Eeffoc Moor of yours.”

“Hooper, Napier, Reilly,” counted Gibbie. “Boy, wouldn’t that be something? Maybe I’ll have to pick up and move to Swen, Vermont.”

When Mason blinked Gibbie explained, “There was another wonderful moor, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Remember? She worked for this TV news department, right? From the outside the glass door read TV NEWS. From inside it said SWEN, Vermont, which I always thought must be a very nice place to live too.”

Mason looked at Gibbie for a long moment before handing him his card. “Give me a call if anything else comes to mind,” he said, adding, “anything connected to our murder investigation.”

On a free afternoon a couple of days later Gibbie decided to have a fireside chat, as he called his family meetings with the puppets on the mantel. Admitting how threadbare the costumes his mother had made for them had become, Gibbie said he hoped this year he’d get far enough ahead to have new ones made. Using their many voices, he staged a discussion where they talked about what kind of new costumes they’d like. Then, as always, he closed the meeting by picking up Tiny Tim by his head and having him utter his blessing.

Later that same day Sammy called. He’d arranged a trip to Atlantic City for six of the dozen workhorses on his Dickens list to do their stuff at six casinos. Gibbie hadn’t been included, being in Sammy’s bad books since the Kinky Carol business. But Grayson Reed, one of the chosen, had chickened out, spooked by Lamar Hooper’s murder. The gig was Gibbie’s if he got over to Sammy’s apartment building chop-chop. Sammy warned him he wasn’t going to wait around.

There wasn’t much time. After a quick shower, Gibbie swept his hand puppets into a shopping bag with a collective “break a leg” for good luck and headed crosstown. The security man in the lobby knew him and pointed to the door to the underground garage. Gibbie hurried down, reaching the foot of the stairs in time to see Sammy’s SUV roll up the ramp to the street. He didn’t run after it. Sammy wasn’t going to stop. Gibbie stepped out of the light. He didn’t even want to give Sammy the satisfaction of seeing him standing there in his rearview mirror.

As Gibbie hugged his shopping bag in the shadows, he saw a strange shape on the cement floor in the SUV’s parking space. Now it sat up, then stood, a man in overalls. Though his hair and beard had turned quite gray, Gibbie recognized Bosley Heck, one of the founders of the Carolers Club.

Heck, a man obsessed with Dickens, worked for ten months of the year every year at a variety of jobs — auto mechanic, locksmith, electrician. But come November he put everything aside, spread on his English accent, got into his Dickens outfit, and read “A Christmas Carol” until the holidays’ very last gasp.

The Carolers jokingly called Heck The Dickens, for the man was a purist whose every word, bit of theatrical business, and detail of his costume down to the cashmere-checked pantaloons he wore and the two small roses, one white, one red, in his buttonhole, he could document from contemporary accounts and photographs of the author.

Gibbie watched as Heck picked up the creeper he’d been lying on and went up the ramp to wait by the garage door, intending, Gibbie was sure, to slip out as he’d slipped in with the next arriving or departing car.

Gibbie hurried back up the stairs and gave a shake of his head to the security man. Out on the street he heard the mild drum roll of the garage door as a car entered. Now ahead of him on the sidewalk he saw a figure carrying a creeper. Gibbie followed after him.

Bosley Heck had been a towering presence in the business when Gibbie was starting out. The man regarded his rival Dickens impersonators with a courtly, if wary eye, as an old dog might view a pack of romping puppies. When the puppeteer introduced himself and described his act, Heck had welcomed him with a gracious “The more the merrier.” But Gibbie suspected Heck regarded acts like his own with contempt.

Some say Heck’s descent into madness coincided with Vera Vail’s off-Broadway success in Desperate Housewife, the Mrs. Bob Cratchit Monologues, a strident feminist retelling of the Dickens story. Others blame the arrival in New York of Cornelius O’Kelly, the Dublin Nightingale, and his Christmas at the O’Carrolls, an evening of Irish readings, clog dancing, and song where he accompanied himself on the electronic keyboard. (His “O Tiny Tim, the pipes, the pipes are calling” left no dry eye in the house. His “The Irish Heavyweight’s Promise,” where a pug-ugly swears in a letter to his referee father, “I’ll be home for Christmas. You can count on me,” was no less memorable.)

However Heck’s madness began, he came to believe he was, in fact, Charles Dickens besieged all about by impostors and upstarts bent on turning his Christmas classic into a three-ring circus. His behavior became increasingly erratic until one night during a reading Heck got stuck on the first “Bah! humbug.” He couldn’t get beyond “Bah,” repeating it again and again until the audience started shouting it back at him. Finally someone came out from behind the curtain and led a “bahing” and bewildered Heck offstage.

The man had ended up in a mental institution. Gibbie could imagine how he’d gotten back onto the street. Recently with medical costs rising, the state started returning non-violent inmates into the community, counting on improved drugs and local facilities to care for them.

Gibbie followed Heck down an alley alongside one of the few remaining Mexican restaurants on the Bowery. The man hid his creeper among the garbage cans and went in the back door. Through a window Gibbie watched him punch a time clock and take his place at a large dishwashing machine.

Gibbie went home. Tomorrow he would call Lieutenant Mason, mention missing his ride to Atlantic City, and say he saw Bosley Heck on the street outside Sammy’s apartment building carrying a creeper. He’d tell Mason he only put two and two together when he read in the morning paper about Sammy’s terrible accident.

As far as Gibbie was concerned, the booking agent would be no great loss. A man who called his dozen Dickens workhorses “The Twelve Drays of Christmas” certainly deserved to die. As for the other five in the vehicle, Gibbie told himself he’d had no actual hand in the accident. Whittle, whittle.