Murder Most Merry (31 page)

“Yeah? What’s it like?” McKee’s voice took on an edge of excitement. “I mean for the guy who did the shooting? How’d he feel about it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. But I’ll tell you how he looked. He looked as though he was going to be sick to his stomach, as though he should’ve been but couldn’t be.”

“Oh,” McKee said. He sounded disappointed. “How about the guy that was shot? What’d he do? I’ve never seen a guy shot.”

“Him?” I said. “Oh. he screamed.”

“Screamed?”

“Yeah. Did you ever hear a child scream when it’s had a door slammed on its fingers? That’s how he screamed. He got shot in the groin.”

“Oh, I see,” McKee said, but he didn’t sound as though he really did. I thought that McKee was going to be what they called a good cop—a nice, sane, completely insensitive type guy. For the millionth time I told myself that I ought to get out. Not after tonight’s tour, not next month, next week, tomorrow, but right now. It would be the best Christmas present in the world I could give myself and my family. And at the same time I knew I never would do that. I didn’t know exactly why. Fear of not being able to make a living outside: fear of winding up a burden to everybody in my old age the way my father was— those were some reasons but not the whole thing. If I talk about how after being a cop so long it gets in your blood no matter how you hate it, that sounds phony. And it would sound even worse if I said one reason I stuck was in hopes that I could make up for some of the others, that I could do some good sometimes.

“If I get to shoot Bogen,” McKee said, “he won’t scream.”

“Why not?”

“You know how I shoot. At close range like that, I’ll put one right through his eyes.”

“Sure, you will,” I told him. “Except that you won’t have the chance. We’ll get him, quietly. We don’t want any shooting in a neighborhood like this on Christmas Eve.”

Then we saw the lights of the next bus stop up at the corner. A man and a woman got off. The woman turned up the avenue. The man. medium height but very thin, and his arms loaded with packages, started up the street.

“Here he comes,” I said. “Get out of the car, McKee.”

We both got out, one on each side. The man walking toward us from the corner couldn’t see us. The street was heavily shaded by strings of Australian pine planted along the walk.

“McKee.” I said. “You know what the orders are. When we get up to him. Thrasher will reach him first and shove his gun into Bogen’s back. Then you grab his hands and get the cuffs on him fast. I’ll be back a few steps covering you. Mortell will be behind Thrasher, covering him. You got it?”

“Right.” McKee said.

We kept walking, first hurrying a little, then slowing down some, so that we’d come up to Bogen, who was walking toward us, just right, before he reached the house where his family were but not before he’d passed Mortell and Thrasher’s car.

When we were only a few yards from Bogen, he passed through an open space, where the thin slice of moon filtered down through tree branches. Bogen wore no hat, just a sport jacket and shirt and slacks. He was carrying about six packages, none of them very large but all of them wrapped with gaudily colored paper, foil, and ribbon. Bogen’s hair was crew cut instead of long the way it was in police pictures and he’d grown a mustache: but none of that was much of a disguise.

Just then he saw us and hesitated in his stride. Then he stopped. Thrasher, right behind him, almost bumped into him. I heard Thrasher’s bull-froggy voice say: “Drop those packages and put your hands up. Bogen. Right now!”

He dropped the packages. They tumbled about his feet on the sidewalk and two of them split open. A toy racing car was in one of them. It must have been still slightly wound up because when it broke out of the package, the little motor whirred and the tiny toy car spurted across the sidewalk two or three feet. From the other package, a small doll fell and lay on its back on the sidewalk, its big. painted eyes staring upward. It was what they call a picture doll, I think: anyhow, it was dressed like a bride. From one of the other packages a liquid began to trickle out onto the sidewalk and I figured that had been a bottle of Christmas wine for Bogen and his wife.

But when Bogen dropped the packages he didn’t raise his hands. He spun around and the sound of his elbow hitting Thrasher s face was a sickening one. Then I heard Thrasher’s gun go off as he squeezed the trigger in a reflex action, but the flash from his gun was pointed at the sky.

I raised my own gun just as Bogen reached inside his jacket but I never got to use it. McKee used his. Bogen’s head went back as though somebody had jolted him under the chin with the heel of a hand. He staggered backward, twisted, and fell.

I went up to Bogen with my flash. The bullet from McKee’s gun had entered Bogen’s right eye and there was nothing there now but a horrible hole. I moved the flash beam just for a moment, I couldn’t resist it, to McKee’s face. The kid looked very white but his eyes were bright with excitement and he didn’t look sick at all. He kept licking his lips, nervously. He kept saying: “He’s dead. You don’t have to be worrying about him, now. He’s dead.”

Front door lights began to go on then in nearby houses and people began coming out of them. Mortell shouted to them: “Go on back inside. There’s nothing to see. Police business. Go on back inside.”

Of course, most of them didn’t do that. They came and looked, although we didn’t let them get near the body. Thrasher radioed back to headquarters. Mortell told me: “Tim, go tell his wife. And tell her she’ll have to come down and make final identification for us.”

“Me?” I said. “Why don’t you send McKee? He’s not the sensitive type. Or why don’t you go? This whole cute little bit was your idea, anyhow, lieutenant, remember?”

“Are you disobeying an order?”

Then I thought of something. “No,” I told him. “It’s all right. I’ll go.”

I left them and went to the house where Bogen’s wife and kids lived. When she opened the door, I could see past her into the cheaply, plainly furnished living room that somehow didn’t look that way now, in the glow from the decorated tree. I could see the presents placed neatly around the tree. And peering around a corner of a bedroom, I saw the eyes, big with awe, of a little girl about six and a boy about two years older.

Mrs. Bogen saw me standing there and looked a little frightened. “Yes?” she said. “What is it?”

I thought about the newspapers, then. I thought: “What’s the use? It’ll be in the newspapers tomorrow, anyhow.” Then I remembered that it would be Christmas Day; there wouldn’t
be
any newspapers published tomorrow, and few people would bother about turning on radios or television sets.

“Don’t be alarmed,” I told her, then. “I’m just letting the people in the neighborhood know what happened. We surprised a burglar at work, ma’am, and he ran down this street. We caught up with him here and had to shoot him. But it’s all over now. We don’t want anyone coming out, creating any more disturbance, so just go back to bed, will you please?”

Her mouth and eyes opened very wide. “Who—who was it?” she said in a small, hollow voice.

“Nobody important.” I said. “Some young hood.”

“Oh.” she said then and I could see the relief come over her face and I knew then that my hunch had been right and Bogen hadn’t let her know he was coming; he’d wanted to surprise her. Otherwise she would have put two and two together.

I told her good night and turned away and heard her shut the door softly behind me.

When I went back to Mortell I said: “Poor Bogen. He walked into the trap for nothing. His folks aren’t even home. I asked one of the neighbors and she said they’d gone to Mrs. Bogen’s mother’s and wouldn’t be back until the day after Christmas.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Mortell said, watching the men from the morgue wagon loading Bogen onto a basket.

“Yes.” I said. I wondered what Mortell would do to me when he learned what I’d done and he undoubtedly would, eventually. Right then I didn’t much care. The big thing was that Mrs. Bogen and those kids were going to have their Christmas as scheduled. Even when I came back and told her what had happened, the day after tomorrow, it wouldn’t take away the other.

Maybe it wasn’t very much that I’d given them but it was something and I felt a little better. Not much, but a little.

SANTA’S WAY – James Powell

Lieutenant Field parked behind the Animal Protective League van. The night was cold, the stars so bright he could almost taste them. Warmer constellations of tree lights decorated the dark living rooms on both sides of the street. Field turned up his coat collar. Then he followed the footprints in the snow across the lawn and up to the front door of the house where a uniformed officer stood shuffling his feet against the weather.

Captain Fountain was on the telephone in the front hallway and listening so hard he didn’t notice Field come in. “Yes, Commissioner,” he said. “Yes, sir, Commissioner.” Then he laid a hand over the mouthpiece, looked up at a light fixture on the ceiling, and demanded, “Why me, Lord? Why me?” (The department took a dim view of men talking to themselves on duty. So Fountain always addressed furniture or fixtures. He confided much to urinals. They all knew how hard-done-by Fountain was.) Turning to repeat his question to the hatrack he saw Field. “Sorry to bring you out on this of all nights, Roy,” he said. He pointed into the living room and added cryptically, “Check out the fireplace, why don’t you?” Then he went back to listening.

Field crossed to the cold hearth. There were runs of blood down the sides of the flue. Large, red, star-shaped spatters decorated the ashes.

A woman’s muffled voice said, “I heard somebody coming down the chimney.” A blonde in her late thirties sitting in a wing chair in the corner, her face buried in a handkerchief. She looked up at Field with red-rimmed eyes. “After I called you people I even shouted up and told him you were on your way. But he kept on coming.”

Captain Fountain was off the telephone. From the doorway he said, “So Miss Doreen Moore here stuck her pistol up the flue and fired away.”

“Ka-pow, ka-pow, ka-pow,” said the woman, making her hand into a pistol and, in Field’s opinion, mimicking the recoil quite well. But he didn’t quite grasp the situation until men emerged from the darkness on the other side of the picture window and reached up to steady eight tiny reindeer being lowered down from the roof in a large sling.

“Oh, no!” said Field.

“Oh, yes,” said Fountain. “Come see for yourself.”

Field followed him upstairs to the third-floor attic where the grim-faced Animal Protective League people, their job done, were backing down the ladder from the trap door in the roof.

Field and Fountain stood out on the sloping shingles under the stars. Christmas music came from the radio in the dashboard of the pickle-dish sleigh straddling the ridge of the roof. Close at hand was Santa, both elbows on the lip of the chimney, his body below the armpits and most of his beard out of sight down the hole. He was quite dead. The apples in his cheeks were Granny Smiths, green and hard.

Only the week before Field had watched the PBS documentary “Santa’s Way.” Its final minutes were still fresh in his mind. Santa in an old tweed jacket sat at his desk at the Toy Works backed by a window that looked right down onto the factory floor busy with elves. Mrs. Claus, her eyes on her knitting, smiled and nodded at his words and rocked nearby. “Starting out all we could afford to leave was a candy cane and an orange,” Santa had said. “The elves made the candy canes and it was up to me to beg or borrow the oranges. Well, one day the United Fruit people said. ‘Old timer, you make it a Chiquita banana and we’ll supply them free and make a sizable donation to the elf scholarship fund.’ But commercializing Christmas wasn’t Santa’s way. So we made do with the orange. And look at us now.” He lowered his hairy white head modestly. “The Toy Works is running three shifts making sleds and dolls and your paint boxes with your yellows, blues, and reds. The new cargo dirigible lets us restock the sleigh in flight.” Santa gave the camera a sadder look. “Mind you, there’s a down side,” he acknowledged. “We’ve strip-mined and deforested the hell out of the North Pole for the sticks and lumps of coal we give our naughty little clients. And our bond rating isn’t as good as it used to be. Still, when the bankers say. ‘Why not charge a little something, a token payment for each toy?’ I always answer, ‘That isn’t Santa’s way.’ ”

An urgent voice from the sleigh radio intruded on Field’s remembering. “We interrupt this program for a news bulletin,” it said. “Santa is dead. We repeat. Santa is dead. The jolly old gentleman was shot several times in the chimney earlier this evening. More details when they are available.” At that late hour all good little boys and girls were in bed. Otherwise, Field knew, the announcer would’ve said. “Antasay is eadday,” and continued in pig Latin.