Abigail Browining - Murder Most Merry

“I may have. But first I’d like to see a picture of your father. A snapshot, anything.”

“I threw them all away after the divorce,” Florence said.

“I have one,” Michelle told him and went off to get it. She returned with a snapshot of a handsome man with a moustache and a broad grin, squinting into the camera.

Nick studied it for a moment and nodded. “Now I can tell you about the gifts. It’s just a theory, but I think it’s correct. Here’s my proposition. If I’m right, you give me the stocking and the latest gift to deliver to your grandfather.”

“All right,” Michelle agreed, and her mother nodded, gripping her hands together.

“I had no idea what the five gifts meant until I glimpsed those old alphabet books in your room, Michelle. I imagine your dad used to read to you from those when you were learning the alphabet.” Michelle nodded silently. “Those books always use simple objects or animals to stand for the letters. Many of them start out ‘A is for Apple.” “

Her mother took it up. “Of course! ‘B is for Bus, ‘ ‘R is for Raven, ‘ ‘A is for Apple’—but then there was the photo of me.”

“Mother?” Nick said.” ‘M is for Mother, ‘ ‘P is for Pig. ‘ “

“Bramp?” Michelle laughed. “What does that mean?”

“That stumped me, too, until I remembered it wasn’t just any bus. It had a greyhound on the side. ‘G is for Greyhound. ‘ That would give us gramp.”

“Gramp,” Florence Beaufeld said.

“Gramp!” her daughter repeated. “You mean Grandpa? The money was to come from him?”

“Obviously out of the question,” Nick agreed. “He’d never act as a channel for your father’s money, not when he opposed the whole thing so vigorously. He even hired me in the hope of learning the location of the money before you found it.”

“But gramp certainly means grandfather,” Florence pointed out. “It has no other meaning that I know of.”

“True enough. But remember that your former husband was limiting himself to a five-letter word by using this system of symbolic Christmas gifts. The word had to be completed by today, a month before Michelle’s eighteenth birthday. If gramp stands for grandfather, could the word grandfather itself signify something other than Michelle’s flesh-and-blood grandfather?”

He saw the light dawn on Michelle’s face first. “The grandfather clock!”

Nick smiled. “Let’s take a look.”

In the base of the clock, below the window where the pendulum swung, they found the package. Inside were neatly banded packages of hundred-dollar bills.

Florence Beaufeld stood up, breathing hard. “There’s close to a half million dollars here.”

“He couldn’t risk entering this apartment too many times, so he hid the money in advance. If you hadn’t found it, he’d probably have found a way to give you a more obvious hint.”

“You mean Dan has been in this apartment?”

Nick nodded. “For the last five Christmas Eves.”

“But—”

She was interrupted by the buzzer, and the doorman’s voice announced the arrival of Mr. Simpson’s car.

“Go on,” Nick urged them. “I’ll catch you up on the rest later.”

It was shortly before midnight when Nick stepped from the shadows near the building and intercepted the man walking quickly toward the entrance. “Larry?”

The night-security man turned to stare at Nick. “You’re the fellow who was asking all those questions.”

“That’s right. I finally got some answers. You’re Dan Beaufeld, aren’t

you?”

“I—”

“There’s no point in denying it. I’ve seen your picture. You shaved off your moustache, but otherwise you look pretty much the same.”

“Where did I slip up? Or was it just the photo?” There was a tone of resignation in his voice.

“There were other things. If Dan Beaufeld was leaving those Christmas gifts himself, he had to have a way into the apartment. A building employee seemed likely in view of the tight security, and one of the security men seemed most likely. There are master keys in the security desk and it would have been easy for you to have one duplicated. The gifts were always left shortly before midnight on Christmas Eve, and that implied someone who might start work on the midnight shift. You couldn’t leave your post after midnight. Last night as I was leaving, you told me you’d been here just over four years—enough to cover the last five Christmases. You also said old-timers got the day and evening shifts, yet the day security man told me he’s only been here a year. That made me wonder if you preferred the midnight shift so you’d be less likely to be seen and recognized by people who might know you. Of course you spent most of your time in Florida, even before the divorce, and without the moustache it was doubtful any of the other employees or residents would recognize you. On those occasions when Michelle or her mother came in after midnight, you could simply hide your face behind a newspaper or bend down behind the TV monitors.”

“I had to be close to her,” Dan Beaufeld admitted. “I had to watch my daughter growing up, even if it meant risking arrest. I’d see her going off to school or to parties, watching from across the street, and that was enough.

Working here made me feel close to them both. Michelle had a custom of hanging up her Christmas stocking, so I started leaving the gifts every year to let her know I was near and to prepare her for the money she’d get when she turned eighteen.”

“I knew the maid let herself out around ten o’clock, and Florence never bothered to relatch the chain lock until bedtime. I entered with my master key, making certain they weren’t in the downstairs rooms, and left the gift in the stocking before midnight. Last year I had to come back twice because they were sitting by the fireplace, but usually Florence was out at someone’s Christmas party and it was all clear.”

“Last night you left the money, too—in the grandfather clock.”

Beaufeld grinned. “So they read the clues properly.”

“It’s drug money, isn’t it?”

“Some of it, but I’m out of that now. I used some fake ID to start a new life, a clean life.”

“Charles Simpson still wants you in prison.”

Dan Beaufeld took a deep breath. “Sometimes I think about turning myself in. Some of the crimes are beyond the statute of limitations now, and a lawyer told me that if I surrendered I’d probably get off with a lenient sentence.”

“Why don’t you talk it over with Florence and Michelle? They don’t want your money, they want you. They’re waiting up there for you now.”

Dan Beaufeld turned his eyes skyward, toward the lighted windows he must have looked at hundreds of times before. “What are you getting out of this?” he asked.

Nick Velvet, who had serious doubts about collecting his fee from Charles Simpson, merely answered, “I don’t need to get anything out of this one. It’s Christmas.”

THE CHRISTMAS BEAR – Herbert Resnicow

“Up there, Grandma,” Debbie pointed, all excited, tugging at my skirt, “in the top row. Against the wall. See?” I’m not really her grandma, but at six and a half the idea of a great-grandmother is hard to understand. All her little friends have grandmothers, so she has a grandmother. When she’s a little older, I’ll tell her the whole story.

The firehouse was crowded this Friday night, not like the usual weekend where the volunteer firemen explain to their wives that they have to polish the old pumper and the second-hand ladder truck. They give the equipment a quick lick-and-a-promise and then sit down to an uninterrupted evening of pinochle. Not that there’s all that much to do in Pitman anyway—we’re over fifty miles from Pittsburgh, even if anyone could afford to pay city prices for what the big city offers—but still, a man’s first thought has to be of his wife and family. Lord knows I’ve seen too much of the opposite in my own generation and all the pain and trouble it caused, and mine could’ve given lessons in devotion to this new generation that seems to be interested only in fun. What they call fun.