The Twelve Crimes of Christmas (33 page)

“I owe you my thanks,” he said. “My freedom.”

I was starin’ out across the snowy fields. “I
owe you somethin’ too. You taught me something about the different types of
deception—deception as it is practiced by the
gadjo
and by the
rom.”

As I spoke I reached out and yanked at his long
black hair. It came away in my hand, and Volga gasped. He was almost bald
without the wig, and seemed at least ten years older. I stripped the mustache
from his upper lip too, and he made no effort to stop me.

“All right, Doctor,” he said. “A little
deception. Will you have me arrested again because I wear a wig and false
mustache? Will you say after all that I killed Parson Wigger?”

I shook my head. “No, Carranza. This doesn’t
tell me that you killed Wigger. But it does tell me that Volga killed him.”

She gasped again, and fell back as if I’d
struck her. “This man is a demon!” she told her husband. “How could he know?”

“Silence!” Carranza ordered. Then, turning to
me, he asked, “Why do you say these things?”

“Well, I proved for myself that you didn’t kill
Wigger. But I didn’t for a minute believe that such a man would kill himself
simply because the sheriff wanted to talk to him. And yet he had run away from
us. That was the key to it—the key to the crime and the key to the
impossibility. I was lookin’ around in the churchyard, and in a snowbank I
found this.” I drew the bloodstained surplice from under my coat.

“And what does that prove?”

“See the tear made by the knife goin’ in? And
the blood? Parson Wigger had to be wearin’ this when he was stabbed. Yet
Sheriff Lens and I saw him without it in the church doorway. Are we to believe
he went up to the belfry, put on his surplice, stabbed himself, removed it
somehow, stuck the knife back in his chest and died—all while we were breakin’
in the door? Of course not!

“So what is the only other possibility? If the
body in the belfry was Wigger’s, then the person we saw in the doorway was
not
Wigger. He fled from us simply because if Sheriff Lens and I had gotten any
closer we’d have known he was not Wigger.”

Volga’s face had drained of all color, and she
stared silently as I spoke. “If not Wigger, then who? Well, the man in the
cassock ran up into the belfry. We were right behind him and we found two
persons up there—the dead Wigger and the live Lowara. If the man in the cassock
was not Wigger—and I’ve shown he wasn’t—then he had to be you, Carranza.”

“A good guess.”

“More than that. I’d noticed earlier you were
both the same size. At a distance your main distinguishing feature was your
black hair and mustache. But I remembered that day two weeks ago when I was out
here and noticed your earrings under your short hair. When I visited your cell,
your hair was long enough to cover your ears. It couldn’t have grown that fast
in two weeks, so I knew you were wearing wigs. If the hair was false, the
mustache could be too—mere props to add to your gypsy image. A bit of deception
for the
gadjo.”

“You have proved I was Wigger for a fleeting
moment. You have not proved Volga killed him.”

“Well, what did you accomplish by posing as
Wigger? From a distance, with our vision blurred by the falling snow, the
sheriff and I saw only a tall man in a black cassock, wearing Wigger’s thick
glasses. If we hadn’t come after you we’d have gone away convinced that Wigger
was still alive after Volga and the others had left the church. You did make
two little slip-ups, though. When you turned away from us in the church doorway
you bumped into the frame because you weren’t used to his thick glasses. And yesterday
in the cell you told me how Wigger had stood in the doorway—something you
couldn’t have seen if you’d really been in the belfry all that time, as you
said.”

“That does not implicate Volga!” the gypsy
insisted.

“Obviously you weren’t doing this to protect
yourself, because it gave you no alibi. No one saw you leave the church. The
only possible purpose of your brief impersonation was to shield another person—the
real killer. Then I remembered that Volga was the last gypsy to leave the
church. She’d been alone in there with Wigger, she was your wife, and she was
the most likely person to be carrying your little dagger. Where? In your
stocking top, Volga?”

She covered her face with her hands. “He—he
tried to—”

“I know. Wigger wasn’t a real parson, and he’d
been in trouble before because of his interest in parish wives. He tried to
attack you up there, didn’t he? You were only a handsome gypsy woman to him. He
knew you could never tell. You fought back, and your hand found the dagger you
always carried. You stabbed him up there and killed him, and then you found Carranza
in the church and told him what you’d done.”

“It would have been a gypsy’s word against a
parson’s reputation,” Carranza said. “They would never believe her. I sent her
back with the wagon and tried to make it look as if he was still alive.”

I nodded. “You put on his cassock because at a
distance the bloody rip in the cassock wouldn’t show on the black cloth. But
you couldn’t wear the white surplice without the blood showing. You barely had
time to get the cassock back on Wigger’s body, stuff the surplice through the
chicken wire, and push it out so it wouldn’t be found in the belfry. You couldn’t
put that back on the body because you hadn’t been wearing it downstairs.”

Carranza Lowara sighed. “It was hard work with
my weak hand. I got the cassock back on the body just as the lock gave way.
Will you call the sheriff now?”

I watched his son playing with the other
gypsies and wondered if I had the right to judge. Finally I said, “Pack up your
wagons and be gone from here by nightfall. Never come near Northmont again.”

“But—” Carranza began.

“Wigger was not a good man, but maybe he wasn’t
bad enough to deserve what he got. I don’t know. I only know if you stay around
here I might change my mind.”

Volga came to me. “Now I owe you more than
ever.”

“Go. It’s only a Christmas present I’m giving
you. Go, before it fades like the melting snow.”

And within an hour the wagons were on the road,
heading south this time. Maybe they’d had enough of our New England winter.

“I never told anyone that story,” Dr. Sam
Hawthorne concluded. “It was the first time I took justice into my own hands,
and I never knew if I did right or not. No, the gypsies didn’t come back. I
never saw them again.”

He emptied the last of the brandy and stood up.
“It was in the spring of ’twenty-six that a famous French criminal sought
shelter in Northmont. He was called the Eel because of his fantastic escapes.
But I’ll save that story till next time. Another—ah—libation before you go?”

DEATH ON CHRISTMAS
EVE

by Stanley Ellin

Stanley Ellin writes slowly.
He averages one short story a year, reworking his plots and phrases until they
are perfect. From the beginning they have been winners. His first seven short
stories won prizes in the annual contests of
Ellery Queen’s Mystery
Magazine.
Three
Edgars (two for best short story, one for best novel of the year) and
Le Grand Prix de Littérature
Policière
continue the tradition. Both his shorter works and his novels have been adapted
for television and films.

As a child I had been vastly impressed by the
Boerum house. It was fairly new then, and glossy; a gigantic pile of Victorian
rickrack, fretwork, and stained glass, flung together in such chaotic profusion
that it was hard to encompass in one glance. Standing before it this early
Christmas Eve, however, I could find no echo of that youthful impression. The
gloss was long since gone; woodwork, glass, metal, all were merged to a dreary
gray, and the shades behind the windows were drawn completely so that the house
seemed to present a dozen blindly staring eyes to the passerby.

When I rapped my stick sharply on the door,
Celia opened it.

“There is a doorbell right at hand,” she said.
She was still wearing the long out-moded and badly wrinkled black dress she
must have dragged from her mother’s trunk, and she looked, more than ever, the
image of old Katrin in her later years: the scrawny body, the tightly
compressed lips, the colorless hair drawn back hard enough to pull every
wrinkle out of her forehead. She reminded me of a steel trap ready to snap down
on anyone who touched her incautiously.

I said, “I am aware that the doorbell has been
disconnected, Celia,” and walked past her into the hallway. Without turning my
head, I knew that she was glaring at me; then she sniffed once, hard and dry, and
flung the door shut. Instantly we were in a murky dimness that made the smell
of dry rot about me stick in my throat. I fumbled for the wall switch, but
Celia said sharply, “No! This is not the time for lights.”

I turned to the white blur of her face, which
was all I could see of her. “Celia,” I said, “spare me the dramatics.”

“There has been a death in this house. You know
that.”

“I have good reason to,” I said, “but your
performance now does not impress me.”

“She was my own brother’s wife. She was very
dear to me.

I took a step toward her in the murk and rested
my stick on her shoulder. “Celia,” I said, “as your family’s lawyer, let me
give you a word of advice. The inquest is over and done with, and you’ve been
cleared. But nobody believed a word of your precious sentiments then, and
nobody ever will. Keep that in mind, Celia.”

She jerked away so sharply that the stick
almost fell from my hand. “Is that what you have come to tell me?” she said.

I said, “I came because I knew your brother
would want to see me today. And if you don’t mind my saying so, I suggest that
you keep to yourself while I talk to him. I don’t want any scenes.”

“Then keep away from him yourself!” she cried. “He
was at the inquest. He saw them clear my name. In a little while he will forget
the evil he thinks of me. Keep away from him so that he can forget.”

She was at her infuriating worst, and to break
the spell I started up the dark stairway, one hand warily on the balustrade.
But I heard her follow eagerly behind, and in some eerie way it seemed as if
she were not addressing me, but answering the groaning of the stairs under our
feet.

“When he comes to me,” she said, “I will
forgive him. At first I was not sure, but now I know. I prayed for guidance,
and I was told that life is too short for hatred. So when he comes to me I will
forgive him.”

I reached the head of the stairway and almost
went sprawling. I swore in annoyance as I righted myself. “If you’re not going
to use lights, Celia, you should, at least, keep the way clear. Why don’t you
get that stuff out of here?”

“Ah,” she said, “those are all poor Jessie’s
belongings. It hurts Charlie so to see anything of hers, I knew this would be
the best thing to do—to throw all her things out.”

Then a note of alarm entered her voice. “But
you won’t tell Charlie, will you? You won’t tell him?” she said, and kept
repeating it on a higher and higher note as I moved away from her, so that when
I entered Charlie’s room and closed the door behind me it almost sounded as if
I had left a bat chittering behind me.

As in the rest of the house, the shades in
Charlie’s room were drawn to their full length. But a single bulb in the
chandelier overhead dazzled me momentarily, and I had to look twice before I
saw Charlie sprawled out on his bed with an arm flung over his eyes. Then he
slowly came to his feet and peered at me.

“Well,” he said at last, nodding toward the
door, “she didn’t give you any light to come up, did she?”

“No,” I said, “but I know the way.”

“She’s like a mole,” he said. “Gets around
better in the dark than I do in the light. She’d rather have it that way too.
Otherwise she might look into a mirror and be scared of what she sees there.”

“Yes,” I said, “she seems to be taking it very
hard.”

He laughed short and sharp as a sea-lion
barking. “That’s because she’s still got the fear in her. All you get out of
her now is how she loved Jessie, and how sorry she is. Maybe she figures if she
says it enough, people might get to believe it. But give her a little time and
she’ll be the same old Celia again.”