Alarmed now, I approached Alf’s sleigh along the slippery sidewalk. The structures on this street were mostly brick, their ground-floor windows either curtained or shuttered, emitting little light. The sleigh had been left at the mouth of a narrow alley between two seven-story apartment buildings—twin century-old warehouses that had been gutted and remodeled into high-priced lofts.
Reaching the sleigh, I finally saw that Alf’s plastic cash box was broken open, only a few coins left inside. More coins were on the ground, making little round sinkholes in the snow. There were footprints in the powder—two sets of prints. Both led away from the sleigh, into the alley. Only one set of footprints came out again. They continued down the sidewalk in the direction of the river.
Those can’t be Alf’s footprints, I decided. Why would he head toward the river and leave his sleigh behind?
I decided to follow the other tracks of footprints in the snow, the ones leading into the shadowy alley. I had to make sure Alf wasn’t lying at the end of those prints, hurt, bleeding, even unconscious.
I couldn’t see much as I moved toward the narrow passage between the buildings, just a gunmetal gray garbage Dumpster. But as I moved farther in, I realized the alley eventually opened up into a snow-covered courtyard.
“Alf?” I called. A wind gust suddenly howled, swallowing my voice. I called out again, stronger this time, but there was no reply, no movement.
I dug into my pocket and pulled out my keychain flashlight. The beam was weak, but it was better than the dingy dark. I stepped forward, paralleling the two sets of snow prints that led into the alley. Both sets of tracks were larger than my own small boots, and I took care not to disturb either one.
As my flashlight beam glanced along the white surface, a flash of cheery red color suddenly made me stop. I pulled the light back and saw the Santa hat.
“Hello!” I shouted, more urgently than before. “Alf! Are you here?”
Again no one answered.
I stooped to pick up the hat, and that’s when I saw the shiny black boots. They were sticking out from behind the gray Dumpster.
For a moment, I stood still as a gravestone, staring at Alf’s boots, vaguely aware of St. Luke’s bells ringing the hour. The church wasn’t far—not physically—but in that frozen flicker of time those clear, innocent, beautifully pure peals sounded as if they were coming from another world.
A second later I was down, kneeling over my red-suited friend sprawled in the snow. “Alf, can you hear me? Alf!”
He couldn’t. Choking back a scream, I realized Alfred Glockner was dead.
Four
In the frigid air, my breath was still forming little pearl-colored clouds. No steam was coming from Alf’s lips or nose because there was no surviving the gaping hole in his chest or the amount of lost blood pooled around his body.
Despite the clear evidence, I went through the motions, checking for any way to help him. I played the flashlight across his wide, unfocused eyes, looking for a reaction. There was none. His wrist had no pulse; neither did his neck.
I pulled out my cell and dialed 911. The call was answered immediately by a female operator who took down all the information. She told me to remain at the scene in order to speak with the investigating officers. Finally, the woman asked if I wanted to stay on the phone with her until the officers arrived.
“No,” I said. “I need the line.”
I was still kneeling, the cold, wet snow soaking through the legs of my jeans. I didn’t care. I hit speed dial. When I heard the reassuring timbre of Detective Mike Quinn’s gravelly voice, I started ranting—only to realize I was talking to his prerecorded message telling me to leave my name and number. When the tone sounded, I took a breath.
“It’s Clare. Call me back as soon as you have the chance...”
I was tempted to say more, but Mike was on the job now. If he wasn’t picking up, there was a good reason. He could very well be at a crime scene of his own.
After getting the commendation last spring for taking down a major West Side dealer of prescription drugs—a case I helped him solve—his superiors asked him to continue heading up the “OD Squad,” the nickname for a city-wide task force recently formed out of the Sixth Precinct to document criminality in cases of narcotic drug overdoses.
Tonight he was overseeing an operation in Queens, which meant, even if he had picked up, he would still be an hour’s drive away.
I wasn’t the one who’d been shot in this alley; I was perfectly okay, and the police were on their way. A hysterical message from me wouldn’t do either of us any good. So I ended the call, closed my eyes to gain some objectivity, and shifted the beam to illuminate Alf’s wound.
Judging from the scorch marks on the breast of the velvet Santa suit, Alf had been shot at point-blank range. The lapel pocket was turned inside out—no doubt when the mugger rifled Alf’s pockets. The killer had ripped open Alf’s costume, too, using so much force that one of the big white Traveling Santa suit’s signature buttons was ripped off.
I passed my flashlight over the nearby snow, but I didn’t see the button. I did, however, see Alf’s blood. There was so much of it pooled around him, it was impossible to miss. Its warmth had even melted the snow around it, forming a gory pile of pinkish slush.
I stilled, realizing something for the first time: Alf’s blood hasn’t frozen solid yet. In weather like this, that could only mean one thing: He was shot very recently.
About then I noticed my hands were shaking. I was upset about Alf, of course, and beginning to feel very cold, but I knew something else was making me shiver.
I reminded myself that the perpetrator of this horrible crime was gone. I’d called out to Alf enough times that anyone lurking in the shadows would have been scared away. And that single trail of footprints I’d noticed coming out of the alley was heading away from the scene and toward the river. That had to be a trail of the killer’s prints, I thought.
But what if they aren’t?
There was a slim possibility that Alf’s murderer was demented enough to hang around the crime scene. The shooter could be lurking in the shadows, watching me right now. I swallowed hard and hit another button on my speed dial.
Matt answered on the first ring. “Clare! Where are you? You left without me—”
“It’s Alf. I found him lying in the snow. Someone shot him. He’s dead.”
Matt’s breath caught.
“I’m not hurt,” I quickly added. “I’m just waiting for the police.”
“Where, Clare? What street?”
I told him.
“I’m on my way!”
I closed the phone and glanced down at Alf’s body. Still kneeling in the snow, I collapsed back on my calves. The tears came then. Hearing myself tell Matt what had happened made it all personal again. My new friend was dead.
Someone had mugged and murdered Santa Claus!
For a flashing moment something far less serious but just as ugly rose out of my memories...
After Matt and I had divorced, I’d raised my daughter in a modest home in the Jersey suburbs. Matt’s mother always came to join us for the first and last nights of Chanukah as well as Christmas dinner, and Matt always made it, too. For most of the season, however, Joy and I were on our own doing the baking, decorating, and holiday card writing.
By the time Joy was twelve, we’d developed our own little girls’ club traditions, like buying a tree the first week in December. We put up our front-yard lights and decorations together on the same day, too, and one of my favorite displays was a plastic Santa. He was four feet tall and had a big red light for a nose. Chipped and fading, he was nevertheless a beloved piece of sentimental kitsch from my childhood front yard—and not just the yard of my late grandmother. My four-foot Santa with the glowing nose had started out his life in my family’s yard when it had still been a family, before my mother had left my dad and me to run away with some passing salesman to Florida (all the explanation I’d ever gotten).