“Judge, put down the gun and call Sergeant Detective Smith.”
“You broke into our house, and I—”
“I walked in, the doors were open. And what motive would I have for harming either of you?”
“You’re working for that monster, that—”
“Judge, private investigators don’t kill complaining witnesses. We interview them, dig around a little, even figure some things out.”
“What... things?”
I’d finally broken through. Maybe. “Your daughter became pregnant all right, but not by rape and not by Devonne Tinch.”
Hamilton’s eyes told me this wasn’t news to her, and I hoped that would make the difference.
I said, “My money’s on a certain quarterback, from a tryst about two months ago. But when Lisabeth discovered she was pregnant last week, she’d have had to decide what to do about it. Since your daughter’s underage, she’d also have to get her parents’ permission. Not exactly likely, given your husband’s ‘pro-life’ placards in the family room downstairs. There’s a procedure Lisabeth could have followed to get a court-approved abortion without parental permission, but your daughter would probably fear that one of your judicial colleagues would leak the news to her mother. Unless, of course, the pregnancy was the result of a rape, which would let Lisabeth go the parental route and make it ‘acceptable,’ family relations-wise.”
“That Tinch monster raped my daughter.”
“No good, Judge. Lisabeth knew she’d need to give you an extreme case to guarantee the abortion, and so she chose an anonymous somebody from another race as the unwilling donor. Ah, correction: My client ‘donated’ voluntarily enough; he just didn’t know that Gloria would bring the used condom to your daughter, who smeared the contents on her clothes before going to the police.”
“That... is... absurd.”
“Then why aren’t you asking your daughter to deny it?”
No response.
I said, “Devonne was in Calem thanks to METCO, but he never revealed the juvenile offense that put his DNA into the Registry’s database. He didn’t tell his girlfriend, either, so given Lisabeth’s and Gloria’s long friendship, he was the perfect donor, as the two girls probably thought any ‘black’ DNA specimen would back up the rape charge, and, by Lisabeth claiming not to recognize — or even be able to identify — her ‘masked attacker,’ the abortion happens quietly with that grudging but understandable parental permission. Only Devonne’s DNA was ‘matched,’ and I’m guessing Gloria went ballistic as the news reports played out and she realized what she’d conspired to do. She confronted your daughter in the schoolyard this afternoon.”
Time to play my last card. “And then Gloria went ballistic with you.”
Her Honor shook her head. “You’re out of your mind.”
“At first, I liked your husband for it. He seemed to have the temper and certainly the strength. But he was off with son Kenny at that soccer game, right? And when Gloria decided she couldn’t convince Lisabeth to tell the truth, she did the most rational thing in the world: Gloria turned to her friend’s mother — who’s even a judge — to right a terrible wrong.”
Willa Hamilton’s hands dropped, the gun following the right one to her side, and not very gracefully, she slumped into a miserable sitting position on the thick carpet. “Gloria came here, demanding — demanding — that I call the police, the jail, everybody in sight, to exonerate her boyfriend. I tried to reason with her in our family room downstairs, to tell her we might be able to resolve it all quietly, but she screamed back that ‘my Devonne’ isn’t ‘jailing’ quietly. She started to storm out of the room, by the tiled steps, and I grabbed her, just to spin her around and talk sense to her. But she stumbled — those stupid laces at the bottom of her sweatpants — and she fell backwards and hard onto the edge of... The sound her head made...”
Speaking of sounds, I’d been so focused on Willa Hamilton and her gun that I hadn’t registered that her daughter wasn’t crying anymore. Just as I looked to the bed, Mrs. Hamilton said, “Then I wrapped poor Gloria in a shower curtain, and I drove to the park.”
That’s when Lisabeth sprang like a leopard from the bed and onto her mother, screaming and tearing at her hand for the revolver.
I’d just managed to pin the daughter’s hands behind her and scoop up the gun when her mother said in an anguished voice, “Honey, I didn’t want to kill Gloria, but once her life was already gone, I didn’t want anybody else’s life to join hers.”
I thought about the tiled step and Mrs. Carson’s parable from Cuba.
“Two birds with one stone.”
“What?” said Willa Hamilton.
I shook the cartridges out of the revolver’s cylinder. “Skip it.”
Red Christmas
by Steve Hockensmith
Once upon a time in an enchanted land far away...
(or, to be a bit more precise, on December 24, 1980, at eleven twenty-seven P.M., at the North Pole.)
Jingle the elf noticed a peculiar package under the workshop’s massive Christmas tree. There were dozens of boxes nestled around it: gifts to and from Santa, Mrs. Claus, the elves, the reindeer, and Rumpity-Tump the Icicle Man, who worked for the Clauses chasing away National Geographic photographers and cleaning out the deer stables.
But this particular present stood out from the rest for a very special reason.
“Jeez,” Jingle said. “That’s gotta be the crappiest-looking thing I’ve ever seen under Santa’s tree.”
And indeed it was. The wrapping paper was crinkled and smudged, and the bow-work was shockingly shoddy, the beautiful red ribbon mangled and smeared with inky black fingerprints.
Jingle shook his head in disgust. “Looks like the guys down in Wrapping started pounding the glogg before the Old Man even took off.”
“Dishgushting,” said Jingle’s brother Jangle, who’d had a few snorts of glogg himself. “We oughta shay shomething to the foreman. Ish there a name on the tag?”
Jingle moved closer to the package. It was big — almost as big as Jingle himself. He found the tag buried under a long loop of loosely tied ribbon.
“ ‘To Santa,’ ” he read aloud. “ ‘From R. with love.’ ”
“ ‘R.,’ huh? Maybe it’sh from Rudolph.”
“Doesn’t look like it’s been in a deer stall,” Jingle said, peering at the wrapping paper. “I mean, it’s got stains on it, but not... you know...”
“Yeah, I shee what you mean,” Jangle agreed.
(Despite Rumpity-Tump’s best efforts, the deer stables were far from pristine.)
“Well, whoever ‘R.’ is, he’s not one of the guys in Cards, Tags & Notes,” Jingle announced. “The handwriting’s terrible.”
He tried to pick up the box and give it a test shake, but it was so heavy he could only lift one corner. Something inside the box shifted with a muffled tinkle, and the edge along the floor turned dark and glistening.
“It’s leaking.”
“Oopsh,” Jangle said. “You broke it. Shanta’sh gonna be pished.”
“I didn’t break it. Whatever it is, it was already...”
Jingle’s words choked to a stop as a sour-sweet smell reached his nose. It was the scent of gingerbread and peppermint and magic, with an undertone of paint and glue and sweat.
Elf blood.
Since Jingle’s reflexes hadn’t been dulled by glogg, he was the one to start screaming first. Jangle quickly joined in, though. The two elves scrambled out from under the tree and dashed shrieking through the hallways of Santa’s castle. Santa himself had been airborne nearly an hour, so there was only one person they could turn to.