Murder Most Merry

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.

Still, they weren’t all bad. Even Homer Curtis, who was the worst boy of his day. always full of mischief and very disrespectful, didn’t turn out all that bad. That was after he got married, of course: not before. He was just voted fire chief and, to give him credit, this whole Rozovski affair was his idea, may God bless him.

Little Petrina Rozovski—she’s only four years old and she’s always been small for her age—her grandfather was shift foreman over my Jake in the mine while we were courting. We married young in those days because there was no future and you grabbed what happiness you could and that’s how I came to be the youngest great- grandmother in the county, only sixty-seven, though that big horse-faced Mildred Ungaric keeps telling everybody I’m over seventy. Poor Petrina has to have a liver transplant, and soon. Real soon. You wouldn’t believe what that costs, even if you could find the right liver in the first place. Seventy-five thousand dollars, and it could go to a lot more than that, depending. There isn’t that much money in the whole county.

There was talk about going to the government—as if the government’s got any way to just give money for things like this or to make somebody give her baby’s liver to a poor little girl—or holding a raffle, or something, but none of the ideas was worth a tinker’s dam. Then Homer, God bless him, had this inspiration. The volunteer firemen—they do it every year—collect toys for the poor children, which, these days, is half the town, to make sure every child gets some present for Christmas. And we all, even if we can’t afford it, we all give something. Then one of them dresses up as Santa Claus and they all get on the ladder truck and, on Christmas Eve, they ride through the town giving out the presents. There’s a box for everyone, so nobody knows who’s getting a present, but the boxes for the families where the father is still working just have a candy bar in them or something like that. And for the littlest kids, they put Santa on top of the ladder and two guys turn the winch and lift him up to the roof as though he’s going to go down the chimney and the kids’ eyes get all round and everybody feels the way a kid should on Christmas Eve.

We had a town meeting to discuss the matter. “Raffles are no good,” Homer declared, “because one person wins and everybody else loses. This year we’re going to have an auction where everybody wins. Everybody who can will give a good toy—it can be used, but it’s got to be good—in addition to what they give for the poor kids. Then the firemen will auction off those extra toys and the idea of that auction is to pay as much as possible instead of as little.” That was sort of like the Indian potlatches they used to have around here that my grandfather told me about. Well, you can imagine the opposition to that one. But Homer overrode them all. Skinny as he is, when he stands up and raises his voice—he’s the tallest man in town by far—he usually gets his way. Except with his wife, and that’s as it should be. “Anyway,” he pointed out, “it’s a painless way of getting the donations Rozovski needs to get a liver transplant for Petrina.”

Shorty Porter, who never backed water for anyone, told Homer, “Your brain ain’t getting enough oxygen up there. Even if every family in town bought something for ten dollars on the average, with only twelve hundred families in town, we’d be short at least sixty-three thousand dollars, not to mention what it would cost for Irma Rozovski to stay in a motel near the hospital. And not everybody in town can pay more than what the present he bids on is worth. So you better figure on getting a lot less than twelve thousand, Homer, and what good that’ll do, I fail to see.” Levi Porter always had a good head for figures. One of these days we ought to make him mayor, if he could take the time off from busting his butt in his little back yard farm which, with his brood, he really can’t.

“I never said,” Homer replied, “that we were going to raise enough money this way to take care of the operation and everything. The beauty of my plan is... I figure we’ll raise about four thousand. Right, Shorty?”

“That’s about what I figured,” Shorty admitted.

“We give the money to Hank and Irma and they take Petrina to New York. They take her to a TV station, to one of those news reporters who are always looking for ways to help people. We have a real problem here, a real emergency, and Petrina. with that sweet little face and her big brown eyes, once she appears on TV, her problems are over. If only ten percent of the people in the U. S. send in one cent each, that’s all, just one cent, we’d get two hundred fifty thousand dollars. That would cover everything and leave plenty over to set up an office, right here in Pitman, for a clearing house for livers for all the poor little kids in that fix. And the publicity would remind some poor unfortunate mother that her child— children are dying in accidents every day and nobody knows who or where, healthy children—her child’s liver could help save the life of a poor little girl.”

Even Shorty had to admit it made sense. “And to top it all.” Homer added, “if we do get enough money to set up a liver clearing house, we’ve brought a job to Pitman, for which I’d like to nominate Irma Rozovski, to make up for what she’s gone through. And if it works out that way, maybe even two jobs, so Hank can have some work too.” Well, that was the clincher. We all agreed and that’s how it came about that I was standing in front of the display of the auction presents in the firehouse on the Friday night before Christmas week while Deborah was tugging and pointing at that funny-looking teddy bear, all excited, like I’d never seen her before.

Deborah’s a sad little girl. Not that she doesn’t have reason, what with her father running off just before the wedding and leaving Caroline in trouble; I never did like that Wesley Sladen in the first place. The Social Security doesn’t give enough to support three on. and nobody around here’s about to marry a girl going on twenty-nine with another mouth to feed, and I’m too old to earn much money, so Carrie’s working as a waitress at the Highway Rest. But thanks to my Jake, we have a roof over our heads and we always will. My father was against my marrying him. I was born a Horvath, and my father wanted me to marry a nice Hungarian boy, not a damn foreigner, but I was of age and my mother was on my side and Jake and I got married in St. Anselm’s and I wore a white gown, and I had a right to, not like it is today.

That was in ‘41 and before the year was out we were in the war. Jake volunteered and. not knowing I was pregnant, I didn’t stop him. He was a good man, made sergeant, always sent every penny home. With me working in the factory, I even put a little away. After Marian was born, the foreman was nice enough to give me work to do at home on my sewing machine, so it was all right. Jake had taken out the full G. I. insurance and, when it happened, we got ten thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. I bought the house, which cost almost two thousand dollars, and put the rest away for the bad times.

My daughter grew up to be a beautiful girl and she married a nice boy, John Brodzowski, but when Caroline was born, complications set in and Marian never made it out of the hospital. I took care of John and the baby for six months until John, who had been drinking, hit a tree going seventy. The police said it was an accident. I knew better but I kept my mouth shut because we needed the insurance.

So here we were, quiet little Deborah pulling at me and pointing at that teddy bear, all excited, and smiling for the first time I can remember. “That’s what I want, Grandma,” she begged. “He’s my bear.”

“You have a teddy bear,” I told her. “We can’t afford another one. I just brought you to the firehouse to look at all the nice things.”