The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Part 85

The door slammed behind him and he turned and looked at it for a second.

"We've just been joined by Mr. Samuel J. Kleinmetz," Mad Dog informed his listening audience, which included me. "Mr. Kleinmetz, would you please take this chair?"

As the old duffer shuffled to the chair, Mad Dog said, "Mr. Kleinmetz was working that night before Christmas Eve, thirty years ago. What was your occupation, sir?"

The old man was easing himself onto the chair. "Eh?"

"Occupation."

"Nothing," he said, louder than necessary, sending Greg jumping for his dials. "Been retired for fifteen years. Used to drive a cab, though. Beverly Hills Cab. Drove a Mercedes. Leather seats. Wonderful radio. Worked all the best hotels ..."

"Good enough," Mad Dog said, stemming the man's flow. "You were working the night ..."

"The night the woman killed Christmas?" the old man finished. "Sure. I worked six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. I was working that night, absolutely."

"In the Wils.h.i.+re district?"

"That's where I used to park and wait," the old man said. He squinted his eyes in delight, staring at the microphone. "This is working?" he asked.

"I hope it is," Mad Dog told him. "On that night, you picked up a pa.s.senger not far from where they later found the body of Theodore Daken?"

"The guy in the Santa Claus suit, yeah. I guess it was minutes before. The paper said they found the guy at about ten-thirty. I picked up my fare at maybe ten-twenty ..."

"How the devil can he remember that?" Gabriel Warren snapped. "It was thirty years ago."

"There are days you remember," the old man said. "I can remember the morning I woke up to hear the j.a.ps bombed Pearl Harbor. I can tell you everything that happened that day. And the day that great young president John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a.s.sa.s.sinated by that Oswald creep. And the night the woman killed Christmas."

"We showed Mr. Steinmetz photographs of the members of the executive board of Altadine taken that year," Mad Dog said. "He identified his pa.s.senger. We then showed him a photograph of that same man today. Would you tell us if he's in this room tonight?"

"Sure." Sam Steinmetz looked across the table in the direction of Gabriel Warren, and I could feel a smug grin forming on my face. "That's him right there."

My smug grin froze. Steinmetz was pointing a bony finger at Norman Daken. "You didn't have to show me all those pictures. He's changed a lot, but I'd have known him right away, as soon as I saw that red dot on his face. Never seen one quite like it before or since."

Daken looked more relaxed than he had all evening. "So many years ago," he said, almost wistfully. "I'd almost forgotten. As if anyone could."

"Don't say a word, Norman," Gabriel Warren cautioned.

"No more, Gabe. I don't want to hold it in any longer. My father and I ... we had our disagreements. He thought I was weak. I suppose I am. I loved Victoria."

I looked from him to the engineer booth. Both Greg and Sylvia Redfern were totally caught up in the tableau in the studio. Her expression was impossible to read, but her blue eyes looked kind and sympathetic.

"I think that's why he felt he had to have her," Norman continued. "Because I loved her. And he ruined it all for us. I never blamed her. It wasn't her fault, poor woman. She fought him and knocked him unconscious. She didn't hate him, you see. Not like I did."

Warren was scowling at him. "What the devil are ..."

"Bloodworth was right. I killed him, Gabe. I thought you knew that."

"You thought I ... How could ...?" Warren was having trouble articulating.

Norman Daken gave him a pitying smile. "He wanted you to be his son. I guess you felt that way, too."

"I would never have ..."

"That's what was so beautiful about it, Gabe. You fixed it so that I stayed clear of it."

"I was trying to save the company," Warren said. "But if I'd known ..."

"Well, now you do," Norman Daken told him. "You did everything you could to keep Altadine going. I, on the other hand ..."

He didn't finish his sentence. I said, "I always wondered who reported Victoria Douglas to the police that night. And who called the reporters. That was you, wasn't it, Norman? You left that poor woman in the alley and went off to call the cops."

"I'm sorry I hurt Vicki so," he said. "I told her that she would never go to prison and I lived up to that. Thanks to Gabe's influence."

"But she wasn't exactly free," I said.

"No," Norman agreed. "But I had to make that sacrifice, if my father's reputation was to be thoroughly destroyed." He looked at Mad Dog hopefully. "Maybe now, thanks to you, he'll be dragged through the mud again."

Station KPLA-FM went off the air early that night, even though the police made short work of their task. They came, they saw, they escorted Norman off to be booked. As they explained, there was no statute of limitations on murder, not that he really wanted one.

As for the crimes Warren and his a.s.sociates may have committed, the police were less certain of their footing. So that foursome left on their own recognizance. Even if it turned out to be too late to nail them for railroading Victoria Douglas, they probably wouldn't be suing Mad Dog or myself. And I doubted I'd be seeing Warren's name on any ballots in the near future.

When they'd all departed, leaving only Mad Dog, Landy, Dougie Dog, and myself in the main studio, I asked, "Are you both her children?"

"Just me," Mad Dog admitted, grinning. "What tipped you?"

"Dougie Dog, for one," I said, looking at the drooping mongrel. "The family hound, you said. Dougie. Douglas. And then, there's your nickname. Mad Dog. Madison Douglas?"

"Nope. Just Charlie Douglas. The 'mad' is, well, they said she was mad and what happened to her made me pretty angry. My dad worked at the hospital where Mom spent her first three years. He helped her escape. When she was sent back, I was raised by my paternal grandparents."

"And you kept her name?"

"It's mine, too. They never married officially. How could they? Anyway, figuring out that I was her son, that was good detecting."

"It's the least I could do after picking the wrong murderer," I said.

"We didn't know about the murder," Landy said. "Poor Victoria always thought she'd killed Daken."

"Who are you?" I asked. "Just a friend of the family?"

"As I said, I'm a journalist. I happened to rent a house next door to Victoria's a few years ago. We became friends and eventually she opened up to me about who she was. I think she hoped Charlie and I might get together."

"And you did."

They both smiled.

The dog rose to its feet, yawning, and dragged itself to the door and out of the studio.

"And you two decided to clear Victoria's name," I said.

"Right again," Charlie "Mad Dog" Douglas said. "Thanks for the help."

I stood up and picked my book from the table. "I didn't sell many of these tonight," I said.

"Come on back," he offered.

"It's too bad your mother pa.s.sed away without ever learning the truth about that night. But I guess it's just as well that she won't have to go through the ordeal of Norman's trial."

They both nodded solemnly.

I left them and wandered out into the corridor. A light was on in the greenroom. As I pa.s.sed, I saw Sylvia Redfern sitting on the couch, reading a book. Dougie Dog was curled up at her feet, sleeping peacefully. Her eyes, blue as a lagoon, blue as Mad Dog's, suddenly looked up and caught me staring at her. She smiled.

"Goodnight, Mr. Bloodworth," she said. "Thanks for everything."

I told her it was my pleasure and wished her a very merry Christmas.

"It will be," she replied, "the merriest in years."

SISTER BESSIE.

Cyril Hare.

BORN ALFRED ALEXANDER GORDON CLARK, the author was bound by family tradition to become a lawyer, which he did, beginning his practice in 1924. He worked in Hare Court and had a residence in Cyril Mansions, providing him with the names he used for his nom de plume. After writing some comic sketches for Punch, he produced Tenant for Death, his first detective novel, in 1937, and wrote two others before creating his most popular series character, barrister Francis Pettigrew, in Tragedy at Law (1942). He was not prolific, partly due to the fact that he never learned to use a typewriter and so wrote in longhand, but mainly due to what he described as his "const.i.tutional and incurable indolence." "Sister Bessie" was first published in the December 23, 1948, issue of The Weekly Standard.

Sister Bessie.

CYRIL HARE.

At Christmas-time we gladly greet Each old familiar face.

At Christmas-time we hope to meet At th' old familiar place.

Five hundred loving greetings, dear, From you to me To welcome in the glad New Year.

I look to see!.

HILDA TRENT TURNED THE CHRISTMAS card over with her carefully manicured fingers as she read the idiotic lines aloud.

"Did you ever hear anything so completely palsied?" she asked her husband. "I wonder who on earth they can get to write the stuff. Timothy, do you know anybody called Leech?"

"Leech?"

"Yes-that's what it says: 'From your old Leech.' Must be a friend of yours. The only Leach I ever knew spelt her name with an a and this one has two e's." She looked at the envelope. "Yes, it was addressed to you. Who is the old Leech?" She flicked the card across the breakfast-table.

Timothy stared hard at the rhyme and the scrawled message beneath it.

"I haven't the least idea," he said slowly.

As he spoke he was taking in, with a sense of cold misery, the fact that the printed message on the card had been neatly altered by hand. The word "Five" was in ink. The original, poet no doubt, had been content with "A hundred loving greetings."

"Put it on the mantelpiece with the others," said his wife. "There's a nice paunchy robin on the outside."

"d.a.m.n it, no!" In a sudden access of rage he tore the card in two and flung the pieces into the fire.

It was silly of him, he reflected as he travelled up to the City half an hour later, to break out in that way in front of Hilda; but she would put it down to the nervous strain about which she was always pestering him to take medical advice. Not for all the gold in the Bank of England could he have stood the sight of that d.a.m.nable jingle on his dining-room mantelpiece. The insolence of it! The cool, calculated devilry! All the way to London the train wheels beat out the maddening rhythm: At Christmas-time we gladly greet ...

And he had thought that the last payment had seen the end of it. He had returned from James's funeral triumphant in the certain belief that he had attended the burial of the bloodsucker who called himself "Leech." But he was wrong, it seemed.

Five hundred loving greetings, dear ...

Five hundred! Last year it had been three, and that had been bad enough. It had meant selling out some holdings at an awkward moment. And now five hundred, with the market in its present state! How in the name of all that was horrible was he going to raise the money?

He would raise it, of course. He would have to. The sickening, familiar routine would be gone through again. The cash in Treasury notes would be packed in an un.o.bstrusive parcel and left in the cloakroom at Waterloo. Next day he would park his car as usual in the railway yard at his local station. Beneath the windscreen wiper-"the old familiar place"-would be tucked the cloakroom ticket. When he came down again from work in the evening the ticket would be gone. And that would be that-till next time. It was the way that Leech preferred it and he had no option but to comply.

The one certain thing that Trent knew about the ident.i.ty of his blackmailer was that he-or could it be she?-was a member of his family. His family! Thank heaven, they were no true kindred of his. So far as he knew he had no blood relation alive. But "his" family they had been, ever since, when he was a tiny, ailing boy, his father had married the gentle, ineffective Mary Grigson, with her long trail of soft, useless children. And when the influenza epidemic of 1919 carried off John Trent he had been left to be brought up as one of that clinging, grasping clan. He had got on in the world, made money, married money, but he had never got away from the "Grigsons." Save for his stepmother, to whom he grudgingly acknowledged that he owed his start in life, how he loathed them all! But "his" family they remained, expecting to be treated with brotherly affection, demanding his presence at family reunions, especially at Christmas-time.

At Christmas-time we hope to meet ...

He put down his paper unread and stared forlornly out of the carriage window. It was at Christmas-time, four years before, that the whole thing started-at his stepmother's Christmas Eve party, just such a boring family function as the one he would have to attend in a few days' time. There had been some silly games to amuse the children-Blind Man's Buff and Musical Chairs-and in the course of them his wallet must have slipped fom his pocket. He discovered the loss next morning, went round to the house and retrieved it. But when it came into his hands again there was one item missing from its contents. Just one. A letter, quite short and explicit, signed in a name that had about then become fairly notorious in connection with an unsavoury enquiry into certain large-scale dealings in government securities. How he could have been fool enough to keep it a moment longer than was necessary!... but it was no good going back on that.

And then the messages from Leech had begun. Leech had the letter. Leech considered it his duty to send it to the princ.i.p.al of Trent's firm, who was also Trent's father-in-law. But, meanwhile, Leech was a trifle short of money, and for a small consideration ... So it had begun, and so, year in and year out, it had gone on.

He had been so sure that it was James! That seedy, unsuccessful stock-jobber, with his gambling debts and his inordinate thirst for whisky, had seemed the very stuff of which blackmailers are made. But he had got rid of James last February, and here was Leech again, hungrier than ever. Trent s.h.i.+fted uneasily in his seat. "Got rid of him" was hardly the right way to put it. One must be fair to oneself. He had merely a.s.sisted James to get rid of his worthless self. He had done no more than ask James to dinner at his club, fill him up with whisky, and leave him to drive home on a foggy night with the roads treacherous with frost. There had been an unfortunate incident on the Kingston bypa.s.s, and that was the end of James-and, incidentally, of two perfect strangers who had happened to be on the road at the same time. Forget it! The point was that the dinner-and the whisky-had been a dead loss. He would not make the same mistake again. This Christmas Eve he intended to make sure who his persecutor was. Once he knew, there would be no half measures.

Revelation came at him midway through Mrs. John Trent's party-at the very moment, in fact, when the presents were being distributed from the Christmas tree, when the room was bathed in the soft radiance of coloured candles and noisy with the "Oohs!" and "Aahs!" of excited children and with the rustle of hastily unfolded paper parcels. It was so simple, and so unexpected, that he could have laughed aloud. Appropriately enough, it was his own contribution to the party that was responsible. For some time past it had been his unwritten duty, as the prosperous member of the family, to present his stepmother with some delicacy to help out the straitened resources of her house in providing a feast worthy of the occasion. This year, his gift had taken the form of half a dozen bottles of champagne-part of a consignment which he suspected of being corked. That champagne, acting on a head unused to anything stronger than lemonade, was enough to loosen Bessie's tongue for one fatal instant.

Bessie! Of all people, faded, spinsterish Bessie! Bessie, with her woolwork and her charities-Bessie with her large, stupid, appealing eyes and her air of frustration, that put you in mind of a bud frosted just before it could come into flower! And yet, when you came to think of it, it was natural enough. Probably, of all the Grigson tribe, he disliked her the most. He felt for her all the loathing one must naturally feel for a person one has treated badly; and he had been simple enough to believe that she did not resent it.

She was just his own age, and from the moment that he had been introduced into the family had const.i.tuted herself his protector against the unkindness of his elder stepbrother. She had been, in her revoltingly sentimental phrase, his "own special sister." As they grew up, the roles were reversed, and she became his protegee, the admiring spectator of early struggles. Then it had become pretty clear that she and everybody else expected him to marry her. He had considered the idea quite seriously for some time. She was pretty enough in those days, and, as the phrase went, wors.h.i.+pped the ground he trod on. But he had had the good sense to see in time that he must look elsewhere if he wanted to make his way in the world. His engagement to Hilda had been a blow to Bessie. Her old-maidish look and her absorption in good works dated from then. But she had been sweetly forgiving-to all appearances. Now, as he stood there under the mistletoe, with a ridiculous paper cap on his head, he marvelled how he could have been so easily deceived. As though, after all, anyone could have written that Christmas card but a woman!

Bessie was smiling at him still-smiling with the confidential air of the mildly tipsy, her upturned s.h.i.+ny nose glowing pink in the candle-light. She had a.s.sumed a slightly puzzled expression, as though trying to recollect what she had said. Timothy smiled back and raised his gla.s.s to her. He was stone-cold sober, and he could remind her of her words when the occasion arose.

"My present for you, Timothy, is in the post. You'll get it tomorrow, I expect. I thought you'd like a change from those horrid Christmas cards!"

And the words had been accompanied with an unmistakable wink.

"Uncle Timothy!" One of James's bouncing girls jumped up at him and gave him a smacking kiss. He put her down with a grin and tickled her ribs as he did so. He suddenly felt light-hearted and on good terms with all the world-one woman excepted. He moved away from the mistletoe and strolled round the room, exchanging pleasantries with all the family. He could look them in the face now without a qualm. He clicked gla.s.ses with Roger, the prematurely aged, overworked GP. No need to worry now whether his money was going in that direction! He slapped Peter on the back and endured patiently five minutes' confidential chat on the difficulties of the motor-car business in these days. To Marjorie, James's window, looking wan and ever so brave in her made-over black frock, he spoke just the right words of blended sympathy and cheer. He even found in his pockets some half-crowns for his great, hulking step-nephews. Then he was standing by his stepmother near the fireplace, whence she presided quietly over the noisy, cheerful scene, beaming gentle good nature from her faded blue eyes.

"A delightful evening," he said, and meant it.

"Thanks to you, Timothy, in great part," she replied. "You have always been so good to us."

Wonderful what a little doubtful champagne would do! He would have given a lot to see her face if he were to say: "I suppose you are not aware that your youngest daughter, who is just now pulling a cracker with that ugly little boy of Peter's, is blackmailing me and that I shortly intend to stop her mouth for good?"