Cynthia Manson (ed) (18 page)

“Don’t you touch me! Don’t you lay a
hand on me!” Mother’s handbag was open and she was fumbling for something in
it. He slapped her hard across the face. Then I heard the
pop
and the
professor was clutching at his chest. Through his fingers little streams of
blood began to form.

Mom was holding a tiny pearl-handled
pistol in her hand, the kind Kay Francis used to carry around in a beaded bag.
My God, I remember saying to myself, I just saw Mommy killing Santa Claus.

I turned tail and ran. I bolted up
the stairs and into the front of the house, where the other kids who couldn’t
possibly have heard what had gone on in the basement were busy choosing up
sides for a game called Kill the Hostess. I joined in and there wasn’t a peep
out of Mom for at least half an hour.

I began to wonder if maybe I had
been hallucinating, if maybe I hadn’t seen Mom slay the professor. I left the
other kids and—out of curiosity and I suppose a little anxiety—I went to the
kitchen.

You’ve got to hand it to Mom (you
might as well, she’d take it anyway): the turkey was in the oven, roasting
away. She had prepared the salad. Vegetables were simmering, timed to be ready
when the turkey was finished roasting. She was topping a sweet-potato pie with
little round marshmallows. She looked up when I came in and asked, “Enjoying
yourself, Sonny?”

I couldn’t resist asking her. “When
is Santa Claus coming with his bag of presents for us?”

“Good Lord, when indeed! Now, where
could Santa be, do you suppose?”

Dead as a doornail in the testing
room, I should have responded, but instead I said, “Shucks, Mom, it beats me.”

She thought for a moment and then
said brightly, “I’ll bet he’s downstairs working on a new formula. Go down and
tell him it’s time he put in his appearance.”

Can you top that? Sending her son
into the basement to discover the body of the man she’d just assassinated?

Well, I dutifully discovered the
body and started yelling my head off, deciding that was the wisest course under
the circumstances. Mom and the kids came running. When they saw the body, the
kids began shrieking, me shrieking the loudest so that maybe Mom would be proud
of me, and Mom hurried and phoned the police.

What ensued after the police arrived
was sheer genius on my mother’s part. I don’t remember the detective’s name—by
now he must be in that Big Squadroom in the Sky—but I’m sure if he was ever
given an I. Q. test he must have ended up owing them about fifty points. Mom
was saying hysterically, “Oh, my God, to think there was a murderer in the
house while I was in the kitchen preparing our Christmas dinner and the
children were in the parlor playing guessing games!” She carried the monologue
for about ten minutes until the medical examiner came into the kitchen to tell
the detective the professor had been done in by a bullet to the heart.

“Any sign of the weapon?” asked the
detective.

“It’s not my job to look for one.”
replied the examiner testily.

So others were dispatched to look
for a weapon. Knowing Mom, it wouldn’t be in her handbag, but where, I
wondered, could she have stashed it? I stopped in mid-wonder when I heard her
say, “It might have been Laurette.”

“Who’s she?” asked the detective.

Mom folded her hands, managing to
look virtuous and sound scornful. “She was the professor’s girl friend, if you
know what I mean. He broke it off with her last week and she wasn’t about to
let him off so easy. She’s been phoning and making threats, and this morning he
told me she might be coming around to give him his Christmas present.” She
added darkly, “That Christmas present was called—
death!”

“Did you see her here today?” the
detective asked. Mom said she hadn’t. He asked us all if we’d seen a strange
lady come into the house. I was tempted to tell him the only strange lady I saw
come into the house was my mother, but I thought of that formula and how
wealthy we’d become and I became a truly loving son.

“She could have come in by the
cellar door,” I volunteered.

It was the first time I saw my
mother look at me with love and admiration. “It’s on the other side of the
house, and with all the noise we were making—”

“And I had the radio on in the
kitchen, listening to the
Make Believe Ballroom
,” was the fuel Mother
added to the fire I had ignited. The arson was successful. The police finally
left—without finding the weapon—taking the body with them, and Mom proceeded
with Christmas dinner as though killing a man was an everyday occurrence.

The dinner was delicious, although
some of us kids noted the turkey had a slightly strange taste to it.

“Turkey can be gamey.” Mama
trilled—and within the next six months she was on her way to becoming one of
the most powerful names in the cosmetics industry.

I remained a bachelor. I worked
alongside Mother and her associates and watched as, one by one over the years,
she got rid of all of them. She destroyed the Sibonay people in Mexico by
proving falsely and at great cost, that they were the front for a dope-running
operation. She thought it would be fun if I could become a mayor of New York
City, but a psychic told me to forget about it and go into junk bonds—which I
did and suffered staggering losses. (The psychic died a mysterious death, which
she obviously hadn’t foretold herself.)

Year after year, Christmas after
Christmas, I was sorely tempted to tell Mama I saw her kill Santa Claus. Year
after year, Christmas after Christmas, I was aching to know where she had
hidden the weapon.

And then I found out. It was
Christmas Day fourteen years ago.

The doctors, after numerous tests,
had assured me that Mom was showing signs of Alzheimer’s. Such as when applying
lipstick, she ended up covering her chin with rouge. And wearing three dresses
at the same time. And filing her shoes and accessories in the deep freeze. It
was sad, really, even for a murderess who deserved no mercy. Yet she insisted
on cooking the Christmas dinner herself that year.

“It’s going to be just like that
Christmas Day when we had that wonderful dinner with the neighborhood kiddies,”
she said. “And Professor Tester dressed up as Santa Claus and brought in that
big bag of games and toys. And he gave me the wonderful gift of the exclusive
rights to the formula for the Desiree Rejuvenating Lotion.”

There were twenty for dinner and,
believe it or not, Mother cooked it impeccably. The servants were a bit
nervous, but the guests were too drunk to notice. Then, while eating the
turkey, Mother asked me across the table. “Does the turkey taste the same way
it did way back when, Sonny?”

And then I remembered how the turkey
had tasted that day forty years ago when Mama had said something about turkey
sometimes tasting gamey. I looked at her and, ill or not, there was mockery in
her eyes. It was then that I said to her, not knowing if she would understand
what I meant: “Mama. I saw what you did.”

There was a small smile on her face.
Slowly her head began to bob up and down. “I had a feeling you did,” she said.
“But you haven’t answered me. Does the turkey taste the same way it did then?”

I spoke the truth. “No. Mama, it
doesn’t. It’s very good.”

She was laughing like a madwoman.
Everyone at the table looked embarrassed and there was nowhere for me to hide.
“Is this a private joke between you and your mother?” the man at my right asked
me. But I couldn’t answer. Because my mother had reached across the table and
shoved her hand into the turkey’s cavity, obscenely pulling out gobs of
stuffing and flinging it at me.

“Don’t you know why the turkey
tasted strange? Can’t you guess why. Sonny? Can’t you guess what I hid in the
stuffing so those damn fool cops wouldn’t find it? Can’t you guess, Sonny?
Can’t you?”

The police in the first prowl car on
the scene got out a tarpaulin. A traffic policeman threw it over the body and
herded the crowd back. They moved uneasily in the gray slush. Some of them
looked up from time to time.

In the newspaper picture the window
would be marked with a bold X. A dotted line would descend from the X to the
spot where the covered body now lay. Some of the spectators, laden with
tinsel-and evergreen-decorated packages, turned away, suppressing a nameless
guilt.

But the curious stayed on. Across
the street, in the window of a department store, a vast mechanical Santa rocked
back and forth, slapping a mechanical hand against a padded thigh, roaring
forever, “Whaw haw ho ho ho. Whaw haw ho ho ho.” The slapping hand had worn the
red plush from the padded thigh.

The ambulance arrived, with a brisk
intern to make out the DOA. Sawdust was shoveled onto the sidewalk, then pushed
off into the sewer drain. Wet snow fell into the city. And there was nothing
else to see. The corner Santa, a leathery man with a pinched, blue nose, began
to ring his hand bell again.

Daniel Fowler, one of the young
Assistant District Attorneys, was at his desk when the call came through from
Lieutenant Shinn of the Detective Squad. “Dan? This is Gil. You heard about the
Garrity girl yet?”

For a moment the name meant nothing,
and then suddenly he remembered: Loreen Garrity was the witness in the Sheridan
City Loan Company case. She had made positive identification of two of the
three kids who had tried to pull that holdup, and the case was on the calendar
for February. Provided the kids didn’t confess before it came up, Dan was going
to prosecute. He had the Garrity girl’s statement, and her promise to appear.

“What about her, Gil?” he asked.

“She took a high dive out of her
office window—about an hour ago. Seventeen stories, and right into the
Christmas rush. How come she didn’t land on somebody, we’ll never know. Connie
Wyant is handling it. He remembered she figured in the loan-company deal, and
he told me. Look, Dan. She was a big girl, and she tried hard not to go out
that window. She was shoved. That’s how come Connie has it. Nice Christmas
present for him.”

“Nice Christmas present for the lads
who pushed over the loan company, too,” Dan said grimly. “Without her there’s
no case. Tell Connie that. It ought to give him the right line.”

Dan Fowler set aside the brief he
was working on and walked down the hall. The District Attorney’s secretary was
at her desk. “Boss busy. Jane?”

She was a small girl with wide, gray
eyes, a mass of dark hair, a soft mouth. She raised one eyebrow and looked at
him speculatively. “I could be bribed, you know.”

He looked around with exaggerated
caution, went around her desk on tiptoe, bent and kissed her upraised lips. He
smiled down at her. “People are beginning to talk,” he whispered, not getting
it as light as he meant it to be.

She tilted her head to one side,
frowned, and said, “What is it, Dan?”

He sat on the corner of her desk and
took her hands in his. and he told her about the big. dark-haired, swaggering
woman who had gone out the window. He knew Jane would want to know. He had
regretted bringing Jane in on the case, but he had had the unhappy hunch that
Garrity might sell out, if the offer was high enough. And so he had enlisted
Jane, depending on her intuition. He had taken the two of them to lunch, and
had invented an excuse to duck out and leave them alone.

Afterward, Jane had said. “I guess I
don’t really like her, Dan. She was suspicious of me, of course, and she’s a
terribly vital sort of person. But I would say that she’ll be willing to
testify. And I don’t think she’ll sell out.”

Now as he told her about the girl,
he saw the sudden tears of sympathy in her gray eyes. “Oh. Dan! How dreadful!
You’d better tell the boss right away. That Vince Servius must have hired
somebody to do it.”

“Easy, lady.” he said softly.

He touched her dark hair with his
fingertips, smiled at her, and crossed to the door of the inner office, opened
it and went in.

Jim Heglon, the District Attorney,
was a narrow-faced man with glasses that had heavy frames. He had a
professional look, a dry wit, and a driving energy.

“Every time I see you, Dan, I have
to conceal my annoyance,” Heglon said. “You’re going to cart away the best
secretary I ever had.”

“Maybe I’ll keep her working for a
while. Keep her out of trouble.”

“Excellent! And speaking of
trouble—”

“Does it show, Jim?” Dan sat on the
arm of a heavy leather chair which faced Heglon’s desk. “I do have some.
Remember the Sheridan City Loan case?”

“Vaguely. Give me an outline.”

“October. Five o’clock one
afternoon, just as the loan office was closing. Three punks tried to knock it
over. Two of them, Castrella and Kelly, are eighteen. The leader, Johnny
Servius, is nineteen. Johnny is Vince Servius’s kid brother.

“They went into the loan company
wearing masks and waving guns. The manager had more guts than sense. He was
loading the safe. He saw them and slammed the door and spun the knob. They beat
on him. but he convinced them it was a time lock, which it wasn’t. They took
fifteen dollars out of his pants, and four dollars from the girl behind the
counter and took off.