Murder Most Merry (22 page)

I didn’t hear an answer. I walked up and asked the woman, “Where you headed, lady?” She looked away, embarrassed because of the tears in her eyes. She was small and slender, with light-brown skin and black hair pulled straight back from her face and held with a rubber band. A gust of dry wind knifed through the air.

“Could you help me?” she finally asked. “I’m just going up to the hotel at the corner. These bags are cutting my hands.”

She meant the Martinique. It’s a big dark hulk of a hotel, possibly grand back in the days when Herald Square was nearly glamorous. Now it’s peeling and forbidding and full of people who have lost their way for a lot of different reasons—most of them women and children. When welfare families can’t pay the rent anymore and haven’t any place to go, the city puts them up “temporarily” at the Martinique. It’s a stupid deal even by New York’s high standards of senselessness. The daily hotel rate amounts to a monthly tab of about two grand for one room and an illegal hotplate, which is maybe ten times the rent on the apartment the family just lost.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

She didn’t hesitate, but there was a shyness to her voice. “Frances. What’s yours?”

“Hock.” I picked up her bags, two in each hand. “Hurry up, it’s going to snow,” I said. The bags were full of children’s clothes, a plastic radio, some storybooks, and canned food. I hoped they wouldn’t break from the sidewalk dampness.

Frances and her kids followed me and I suppose we looked like a line of shabby ducks walking along. A teenage girl in one of those second-hand men’s tweed overcoats you’d never find at the Goodwill took our picture with a Nikon equipped with a telephoto lens.

I led the way into the hotel and set the bags down at the admitting desk. Frances’s three kids ran off to join a bunch of other kids who were watching a couple of old coots with no teeth struggling with a skinny spruce tree at the entry of what used to be the dining room. Now it was dusty and had no tables, just a few graffiti-covered vending machines.

Frances grabbed my arm when I tried to leave her. “It’s not much. I know that. But maybe you can use it all the same.” She let me go, then put out a hand like she wanted to shake. I slipped off my glove and took hold of her small, bone-chilled fingers. She passed me two dimes. “Thanks, and happy Christmas.”

She looked awfully brave and awfully heartsick, too. Most down-and-outers look like that, but people who eat regularly and know where their next dollar will likely come from make the mistake of thinking they’re stupid and confused, or maybe shiftless or crazy.

I tried to refuse the tip, but she wouldn’t have any of that. Her eyes misted up again. So I went back out to the street, where it was starting to snow.

The few hours I had left until the evening darkness were not productive. Which is not to say there wasn’t enough business for me. Anyone who thinks crooks are nabbed sooner or later by us sharp-witted, hard-working cops probably also thinks there’s a tooth fairy. Police files everywhere bulge with unfinished business. That’s because cops are pretty much like everybody else in a world that’s not especially efficient. Some days we’re inattentive or lazy or hungover—or in my case on Christmas Eve, preoccupied with the thought that loneliness is all it’s cracked up to be.

For about an hour after leaving Frances and the kids at the Martinique, I tailed a mope with a big canvas laundry sack, which is the ideal equipment when you’re hauling off valuables from a place where nobody happens to be home. I was practically to the Hudson River before I realized the perp had made me a long time back and was just having fun giving me a walk-around on a raw, snowy day. Perps can be cocky like that sometimes. Even though I was ninety-nine percent sure he had a set of lock picks on him, I didn’t have probable cause for a frisk.

I also wasted a couple of hours shadowing a guy in a very uptown cashmere coat and silk muffler. He had a set of California teeth and perfect sandy-blond hair. Most people in New York would figure him for a nice simple TV anchorman or maybe a GQ model. I had him pegged for a shoulder-bag bus dipper, which is a minor criminal art that can be learned by anyone who isn’t moronic or crippled in a single afternoon. Most of its practitioners seem to be guys who are too handsome. All you have to do is hang around people waiting for buses or getting off buses, quietly reach into their bags, and pick out wallets.

I read this one pretty easily when I noticed how he passed up a half empty Madison Avenue bus opposite B. Altman’s in favor of the next one, which was overloaded with chattering Lenox Hill matrons who would never in a thousand years think such a nice young man with nice hair and a dimple in his chin and so well dressed was a thief.

Back and forth I went with this character, clear up to Fifty-ninth Street, then by foot over to Fifth Avenue and back down into the low Forties. When I finally showed him my tin and spread him against the base of one of the cement lions outside the New York Public Library to pat him down, I only found cash on him. This dipper was brighter than he looked. Somewhere along the line, he’d ditched the wallets and pocketed only the bills and I never once saw the slide. I felt fairly brainless right about then and the crowd of onlookers that cheered when I let him go didn’t help me any.

So I hid out in the Burger King at Fifth and Thirty-eighth for my dinner hour. There aren’t too many places that could be more depressing for a holiday meal. The lighting was so oppressively even that I felt I was inside an ice cube. There was a plastic Christmas tree with plastic ornaments chained to a wall so nobody could steal it, with dummy gifts beneath it. The gifts were strung together with vinyl cord and likewise chained to the wall. I happened to be the only customer in the place, so a kid with a bad complexion and a broom decided to sweep up around my table.

To square my pad for the night, I figured I had to make some sort of bust, even a Mickey Mouse. So after my festive meal (Whopper, fries, Sprite, and a toasted thing with something hot and gummy inside it). I walked down to Thirty-third Street and collared a working girl in a white fake-fox stole, fishnet hose, and a red-leather skirt. She was all alone on stroll, a freelance, and looked like she could use a hot meal and a nice dry cell. So I took her through the drill. The paperwork burned up everything but the last thirty minutes of my tour.

When I left the station house on West Thirty-fifth, the snow had become wet and heavy and most of midtown Manhattan was lost in a quiet white haze. I heard the occasional swish of a car going through a pothole puddle. Plumes of steam hissed here and there, like geysers from the subterranean. Everybody seemed to have vanished and the lights of the city had gone off, save for the gauzy red-and-green beacon at the top of the Empire State Building. It was rounding toward nine o’clock and it was Christmas Eve and New York seemed settled down for a long winter’s nap.

There was just one thing wrong with the picture. And that was the sight of Whiteboy. I spotted him on Broadway again, lumbering down the mostly blackened, empty street with a big bag on his back like he was St. Nicholas himself.

I stayed out of sight and tailed him slowly back a few blocks to where I’d lost him in the first place, to the statue of Greeley. I had a clear view of him as he set down his bag on a bench and talked to the same bunch of grey, shapeless winos who’d cut me off the chase. Just as before, they passed a bottle. Only this time Whiteboy gave it to them. After everyone had a nice jolt, they talked quickly for a couple of minutes, like they had someplace important to go.

I hung back in the darkness under some scaffolding. Snow fell between the cracks of planks above me and piled on my shoulders as I stood there trying to figure out their act. It didn’t take me long.

When they started moving from the statue over to Thirty-second Street, every one of them with a bag slung over his shoulder, I hung back a little. But my crisis of conscience didn’t last long. I followed Whiteboy and his unlikely crew of elves—and wasn’t much surprised to find the blond shoulder-bag dipper with the cashmere coat when we got to where we were all going. Which was the Martinique. By now, the spindly little spruce I’d felt sorry for that afternoon was full of bright lights and tinsel and had a star on top. The same old coots I’d seen when I helped Frances and her kids there were standing around playing with about a hundred more hungry-looking kids.

Whiteboy and his helpers went up to the tree and plopped down all the bags. The kids crowded around them. They were quiet about it, though. These were kids who didn’t have much experience with Norman Rockwell Christmases, so they didn’t know it was an occasion to whoop it up.

Frances saw me standing in the dimly lit doorway. I must have been a sight, covered in snow and tired from walking my post most of eight hours. “Hock!” she called merrily.

And then Whiteboy spun around like he had before and his jaw dropped open. He and the pretty guy stepped away from the crowd of kids and mothers and the few broken-down men and walked quickly over to me. The kids looked like they expected all along that their party would be busted up. Frances knew she’d done something very wrong hailing me like she had, but how could she know I was a cop?

“We’re having a little Christmas party here. Hock. Anything illegal about that?” Whiteboy was a cool one. He’d grown tougher and smarter in a year and talked to me like we’d just had a lovely chat the other day. We’d have to make some sort of deal. Whiteboy and me. and we both knew it.

“Who’s your partner?” I asked him. I looked at the pretty guy in cashmere who wasn’t saying anything just yet.

“Call him Slick.”

“I like it,” I said. “Where’d you and Slick get all the stuff in the bags?”

“Everything’s bought and paid for, Hock. You got nothing to worry about.”

“When you’re cute, you’re irritating. Whiteboy. You know I can’t turn around on this empty-handed.”

Then Slick spoke up. “What you got on us, anyways? I’ve just about had my fill of police harassment today, Officer. I was cooperative earlier, but I don’t intend to cooperate a second time.”

I ignored him and addressed Whiteboy. “Tell your friend Slick how we all appreciate discretion and good manners on both sides of the game.”

Whiteboy smiled and Slick’s face grew a little red.

“Let’s just say for the sake of conversation,” Whiteboy suggested, “that Slick and me came by a whole lot of money some way or other we’re unwilling to disclose since that would tend to incriminate us. And then let’s say we used that money to buy a whole lot of stuff for those kids back of us. And let’s say we got cash receipts for everything in the bags. Where’s that leave us, Officer Hockaday?”

“It leaves you with one leg up, temporarily. Which can be a very uncomfortable way of standing. Let’s just say that I’m likely to be hard on your butts from now on.”

“Well, that’s about right. Just the way I see it.” He lit a cigarette, a Dunhill. Then he turned back a cuff and looked at his wristwatch, the kind of piece that cost him plenty of either nerve or money. Whiteboy was moving up well for himself.

“You’re off duty now, aren’t you. Hock? And wouldn’t you be just about out of overtime allowance for the year?”

“Whiteboy, you better start giving me something besides lip. That is, unless you want forty-eight hours up at Riker’s on suspicion. You better believe there isn’t a judge in this whole city on straight time or overtime or any kind of time tonight or tomorrow to take any bail application from you.”

Whiteboy smiled again. “Yeah, well, I figure the least I owe you is to help you see this thing my way. Think of it like a special tax, you know? Around this time of year, I figure the folks who can spare something ought to be taxed. So maybe that’s what happened, see? Just taxation.”

“Same scam as the one Robin Hood ran?”

“Yeah, something like that. Only Slick and me ain’t about to start living out of town in some forest.”

“You owe me something more, Whiteboy.”

“What?”

“From now on. you and Slick are my two newest snitches. And I’ll be expecting regular news.”

There is such a thing as honor among thieves. This is every bit as true as the honor among Congressmen you read about in the newspapers all the time. But when enlightened self-interest rears its ugly head, it’s also true that rules of gallantry are off.

“Okay, Hock, why not?” Whiteboy shook my hand. Slick did, too, and when he smiled his chin dimple spread flat. Then the three of us went over to the Christmas tree and everybody there seemed relieved.

We started pulling merchandise out of the bags and handing things over to disbelieving kids and their parents. Everything was the best that money could buy. too. Slick’s taste in things was top-drawer. And just like Whiteboy said, there were sales slips for it all. which meant that this would be a time when nobody could take anything away from these people.

I came across a pair of ladies’ black-leather gloves from Lord & Taylor, with grey-rabbit-fur lining. These I put aside until all the kids had something, then I gave them to Frances before I went home for the night. She kissed me on the cheek and wished me a happy Christmas again.

THE THEFT OF THE CHRISTMAS STOCKING – Edward D. Hoch