Murder Most Merry

“What money?”

“The ten thousand dollars you gave your mother for Christmas.”

He swallowed hard. “You didn’t really think I had all that money?”

“You said you did.”

“If I did have that much, I’d take you out on New Year s to the best restaurant in town. You’d have flowers, and we’d drink champagne and dance all night.”

“It doesn’t take that much money to have a good time,” Sue said. “I already lied and told Mr. Bridgewright we were going out.”

“All right then,” he said, straightening his shoulders. “We’ll make some plans when we get back from talking to Mr. Hamilton. Will you come along with me?”

Sue followed him to the elevator.

“Could I have the opportunity to explain?” Herb said to President Hamilton.

“I expect you’d like one, Cubbey,” Hamilton said. He was a short, heavy man with bushy eyebrows. “You should anyway! I’m an old man, so I don’t need to be subtle. No time for it. So let’s hear it. Bridgewright tells me you’ve been giving away thousands of dollars and the only explanation is you’ve got your hand in the till.”

“I’ve honestly accounted for every cent that I’ve handled.”

“Thought so. What about the gift?”

“I wrote my mother a check for ten thousand dollars at Christmas. I never should have told anyone.”

“How’s that again?”

“We haven’t had much since my father passed away, so we pretend. Every year we write each other large checks. This year she gave me a check for two thousand. The year before I wrote one for five thousand, and she gave me one for eight thousand. Checks that is. We sit around and talk about what we’d like to buy until midnight, and then we burn the checks in the fireplace. We’ve always had a good time doing it. It must sound strange to outsiders.”

Mr. Hamilton chuckled. “It’s unusual, that’s for sure, but not a bad idea. You get the pleasure of the money without the cost, which is not bad management at all. Not bad at all. Shows a good deal more sense than Mr. Bridgewright just exhibited.”

“Do you have any further questions, sir?”

“Why hasn’t an honest, imaginative young man like you received a promotion recently? Who’s running this bank anyway? That’s what I’d like to know.”

BELIEVING IN SANTA – Ron Goulart

As it turned out. he didn’t get a chance to murder anybody. He did make an impressive comeback, revitalizing his faltering career and saying goodbye to most of his financial worries. But in spite of all that, there are times when Oscar Sayler feels sad about not having been able to knock off his former wife.

Twenty-five years ago Oscar had been loved by millions of children. Well, actually, they adored his dummy, Screwy Santa, but they tolerated Oscar. For several seasons his early morning kid show was the most popular in the country, outpulling Captain Kangaroo and all the other competition. Multitudes of kids, and their parents, doted on Oscar’s comic version of Santa Claus and tried to live by the show’s perennial closing line—”Gang, try to act like it was Christmas every day!”

For the past decade and more, though, Oscar hadn’t been doing all that well. In early December of last year, when he got the fateful phone call from the New York talent agency, he was scraping by on the $25, 000 a year he earned from the one commercial voice job he’d been able to come up with lately. Oscar lived alone in a one- bedroom condo in a never-finished complex in New Beckford, Connecticut. He was fifty-five—well, fifty-seven actually— and he didn’t look all that awful.

Since he’d given up drinking, his face was no longer especially puffy and it had lost that lobsterish tinge. His hair, which was nearly all his own, still had a nice luster to it. There was, really, no reason why he couldn’t appear on television again.

When the agent called him at a few minutes after four p.m. on a bleak, chill Monday afternoon, Oscar was flat on his back in his small tan living room. He’d vowed to complete two dozen situps every day.

He crawled over to the phone on the coffee table. “Hello?”

“Is your son there?”

Oscar pulled himself up onto the sofa arm. resting the phone on his knees. “Don’t have a son. My daughter, however, is the noted television actress Tish Sale, who stars in the Intensive Care soap opera, and hasn’t set foot across dear old Dad’s threshold for three, possibly four—”

“Spare me,” requested the youthful, nasal voice. “You must be Oscar Sayler then. You sounded so old that I mistook you for your father.”

“Nope, my dad sounded like this—’How about a little nip after dinner, my boy?’ Much more throaty and with a quaver. Who the hell are you, by the way?”

“Vince Mxyzptlk. I’m with Mimi Warnicker & Associates, the crackerjack talent agency.”

“Oops.” Oscar sat on a cushion and straightened up. “That’s a powerful outfit.”

“You bet your ass it is,” agreed the young agent. “You’re not represented at the moment, are you?”

“No, because I find I can get all the acting jobs I want without—”

“C’mon, Oscar, old buddy, you ain’t exactly rolling in work right now,” cut in Vince disdainfully. “In fact, your only gig is doing the voice of the infected toe in those godawful Dr. Frankel’s Foot Balm radio spots.” He made a scornful noise.

“I do a very convincing itching toe, Vince. Fact is, there’s talk of—”

“Listen. I can get you tons of work. Talk shows, commercials, lectures, TV parts, eventually some plum movie work. But first you—”

“How exactly are—”

“But first you have got to win your way back into the hearts and minds of the public.”

“Just how do I accomplish that, Vince?”

“You just have to sit there with that lamebrained dummy on your knee.”

“Screwy Santa? Hell, nobody’s been interested in him for years.”

“Let me do the talking for a bit, okay? Here’s what’s under way,” continued the agent. “Have a Good Day, USA!, which has just become the top morning talk and news show, is planning a six-minute nostalgia segment for this Friday. The theme is ‘Whatever happened to our favorite kids’ shows?’ Something they calculate’ll have a tremendous appeal for the Boomers and Busters who make up their pea-brained audience. So far they’ve signed that old duffer who used to be Captain Buckeroo and—”

“Kangaroo.”

“Oscar, are you more interested in heckling me than in making an impressive comeback? Would you prefer to go on living in squalor in that rural crackerbox, to voice tripe for Dr. Frankel throughout the few remaining years of your shabby life?”

“Okay, but his name is Captain Kangaroo, not—”

“Attend to me, Oscar. I assured Liz, who’s putting this segment together, that I’d dig you up, wipe off the cobwebs, and have you there bright and early Friday. Can you drag yourself into Manhattan and meet me at the Consolidated Broadcasting headquarters building on Fifty-third no later than six a.m.?”

“Sure, that’s no problem.”

“Most importantly, can you bring that dimwitted dummy?”

Without more than a fraction of a second of hesitation Oscar answered. “Of course, yeah, absolutely.” It didn’t seem the right time to tell Mxyzptlk that his former wife, who currently loathed him and had ousted him eleven long years ago from the mansion they once shared, had retained custody of the only existing Screwy Santa dummy in the world. “We’ll both see you on Friday, Vince.”

It commenced snowing at dusk, a paltry, low-budget snow that didn’t look as though it was up to blanketing the condo-complex grounds and masking its raw ugliness.

Glancing at his wristwatch once more. Oscar punched out his daughter’s New York City number.

After four rings there came a twanging noise. “Merry Christmas,” said Tish in her sexiest voice. “I’m not able