Carol-Lynn Waugh - The Twelve Crimes of Christmas

“Silence!” Carranza ordered. Then, turning to me, he asked, “Why do you say these things?”

“Well, I proved for myself that you didn’t kill Wigger. But I didn’t for a minute believe that such a man would kill himself simply because the sheriff wanted to talk to him. And yet he had run away from us. That was the key to it-the key to the crime and the key to the impossibility. I was lookin’ around in the churchyard, and in a snowbank I found this.” I drew the bloodstained surplice from under my coat.

“And what does that prove?”

“See the tear made by the knife goin’ in? And the blood? Parson Wigger had to be wearin’ this when he was stabbed. Yet Sheriff Lens and I saw him without it in the church doorway. Are we to believe he went up to the belfry, put on his surplice, stabbed himself, removed it somehow, stuck the knife back in his chest and died-all while we were breakin’ in the door? Of course not!

“So what is the only other possibility? If the body in the belfry was Wigger’s, then the person we saw in the doorway was not Wigger. He fled from us simply because if Sheriff Lens and I had gotten any closer we’d have known he was not Wigger.”

Volga’s face had drained of all color, and she stared silently as I spoke. “If not Wigger, then who? Well, the man in the cassock ran up into the belfry. We were right behind him and we found two persons up there-the dead Wigger and the live Lowara. If the man in the cassock was not Wigger-and I’ve shown he wasn’t-then he had to be you, Carranza.”

“A good guess.”

“More than that. I’d noticed earlier you were both the same size. At a distance your main distinguishing feature was your black hair and mustache. But I remembered that day two weeks ago when I was out here and noticed your earrings under your short hair. When I visited your cell, your hair was long enough to cover your ears. It couldn’t have grown that fast in two weeks, so I knew you were wearing wigs. If the hair was false, the mustache could be too-mere props to add to your gypsy image. A bit of deception for the gadjo.”

“You have proved I was Wigger for a fleeting moment. You have not proved Volga killed him.”

“Well, what did you accomplish by posing as Wigger? From a distance, with our vision blurred by the falling snow, the sheriff and I saw only a tall man in a black cassock, wearing Wigger’s thick glasses. If we hadn’t come after you we’d have gone away convinced that Wigger was still alive after Volga and the others had left the church. You did make two little slip-ups, though. When you turned away from us in the church doorway you bumped into the frame because you weren’t used to his thick glasses. And yesterday in the cell you told me how Wigger had stood in the doorway-something you couldn’t have seen if you’d really been in the belfry all that time, as you said.”

“That does not implicate Volga!” the gypsy insisted.

“Obviously you weren’t doing this to protect yourself, because it gave you no alibi. No one saw you leave the church. The only possible purpose of your brief impersonation was to shield another person-the real killer. Then I remembered that Volga was the last gypsy to leave the church. She’d been alone in there with Wigger, she was your wife, and she was the most likely person to be carrying your little dagger. Where? In your stocking top, Volga?”

She covered her face with her hands. “He-he tried to-”

“I know. Wigger wasn’t a real parson, and he’d been in trouble before because of his interest in parish wives. He tried to attack you up there, didn’t he? You were only a handsome gypsy woman to him. He knew you could never tell. You fought back, and your hand found the dagger you always carried. You stabbed him up there and killed him, and then you found Carranza in the church and told him what you’d done.”

“It would have been a gypsy’s word against a parson’s reputation,” Carranza said. “They would never believe her. I sent her back with the wagon and tried to make it look as if he was still alive.”

I nodded. “You put on his cassock because at a distance the bloody rip in the cassock wouldn’t show on the black cloth. But you couldn’t wear the white surplice without the blood showing. You barely had time to get the cassock back on Wigger’s body, stuff the surplice through the chicken wire, and push it out so it wouldn’t be found in the belfry. You couldn’t put that back on the body because you hadn’t been wearing it downstairs.”

Carranza Lowara sighed. “It was hard work with my weak hand. I got the cassock back on the body just as the lock gave way. Will you call the sheriff now?”

I watched his son playing with the other gypsies and wondered if I had the right to judge. Finally I said, “Pack up your wagons and be gone from here by nightfall. Never come near Northmont again.”

“But-” Carranza began.

“Wigger was not a good man, but maybe he wasn’t bad enough to deserve what he got. I don’t know. I only know if you stay around here I might change my mind.”

Volga came to me. “Now I owe you more than ever.”

“Go. It’s only a Christmas present I’m giving you. Go, before it fades like the melting snow.”

And within an hour the wagons were on the road, heading south this time. Maybe they’d had enough of our New England winter.

“I never told anyone that story,” Dr. Sam Hawthorne concluded. “It was the first time I took justice into my own hands, and I never knew if I did right or not. No, the gypsies didn’t come back. I never saw them again.”

He emptied the last of the brandy and stood up. “It was in the spring of ’twenty-six that a famous French criminal sought shelter in Northmont. He was called the Eel because of his fantastic escapes. But I’ll save that story till next time. Another-ah-libation before you go?”

Stanley Ellin writes slowly. He averages one short story a year, reworking his plots and phrases until they are perfect. From the beginning they have been winners. His first seven short stories won prizes in the annual contests of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Three Edgars (two for best short story, one for best novel of the year) and Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière continue the tradition. Both his shorter works and his novels have been adapted for television and films.

As a child I had been vastly impressed by the Boerum house. It was fairly new then, and glossy; a gigantic pile of Victorian rickrack, fretwork, and stained glass, flung together in such chaotic profusion that it was hard to encompass in one glance. Standing before it this early Christmas Eve, however, I could find no echo of that youthful impression. The gloss was long since gone; woodwork, glass, metal, all were merged to a dreary gray, and the shades behind the windows were drawn completely so that the house seemed to present a dozen blindly staring eyes to the passerby.

When I rapped my stick sharply on the door, Celia opened it.

“There is a doorbell right at hand,” she said. She was still wearing the long out-moded and badly wrinkled black dress she must have dragged from her mother’s trunk, and she looked, more than ever, the image of old Katrin in her later years: the scrawny body, the tightly compressed lips, the colorless hair drawn back hard enough to pull every wrinkle out of her forehead. She reminded me of a steel trap ready to snap down on anyone who touched her incautiously.

I said, “I am aware that the doorbell has been disconnected, Celia,” and walked past her into the hallway. Without turning my head, I knew that she was glaring at me; then she sniffed once, hard and dry, and flung the door shut. Instantly we were in a murky dimness that made the smell of dry rot about me stick in my throat. I fumbled for the wall switch, but Celia said sharply, “No! This is not the time for lights.”