“I’ll phone the station house!”
“Go ahead. Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...”
Art stopped at nine because Duross had moved to the table and was fingering the boxes. As he drew away with one in his hand Art demanded, “Gimme.” Duross hesitated but passed the box over, and after a glance at the address Art ripped the tape off, opened the flap of the box, took out a wad of tissue paper, and then a ring box. From that he removed a ring, yellow gold, with a large greenish stone. Helen Lauro made a noise in her throat. Koenig let out a grunt, evidently meant for applause. Duross made a grab, not for the ring but for the box on which he had put an address, and missed.
“It stuck out as plain as your nose,” Art told him, “but of course my going for the boxes was just a good guess. Did you pay sixty-two bucks for this?”
Duross’s lips parted, but no words came. Apparently he had none. He nodded, not vigorously.
Art turned to the girl. “Look, Miss Lauro. You say you’re through here. You ought to have something to remember it by. You could make some trouble for Mr. Duross for the dirty trick he tried to play on you, and if you lay off I expect he’d like to show his appreciation by giving you this ring. Wouldn’t you, Mr. Duross?”
Duross managed to get it out. “Sure I would.”
“Shall I give it to her for you?”
“Sure.” Duross’s jaw worked. “Go ahead.”
Art held out the ring and the girl took it, but not looking at it because she was gazing incredulously at him. It was a gaze so intense as to disconcert him, and he covered up by turning to Duross and proffering the box with an address on it.
“Here,” he said, “you can have this. Next time you cook up a plan for getting credit with your wife for buying her a ring, and collecting from the insurance company for its cost, and sending the ring to a girl friend — ail in one neat little operation — don’t do it. And don’t forget you gave Miss Lauro that ring before witnesses.”
Duross gulped and nodded.
Koenig spoke. “Your name is not Hippie, officer, it’s Santa Claus. You have given her the ring she would have given her life for, you have given him an out on a charge of attempted fraud, and you have given me a crossoff on a claim. That’s the ticket! That’s the old yuletide spirit! Merry Christmas!”
“Nuts,” Art said contemptuously, and turned and marched from the room, down the stairs, and out to the sidewalk. As he headed in the direction of the station house he decided that he would tone it down a little in his report. Getting a name for being tough was okay, but not too damn tough. That insurance guy sure was dumb, calling him Santa Claus — him, Art Hippie, feeling as he did about Christmas.
Which reminded him, Christmas Eve would be a swell time for the murder.
Whatever Became of Ebenezer Scrooge?
by Tom Tolnay
So Ebenezer Scrooge, that squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner was led into the past, the present, and the future by three apparitions on Christmas Eve, and the horrors that he witnessed, which were his own life and death, convinced him that he’d better repent or else. Not merely in word, but in deed, for his fears of moral retribution were profound. Next morning, while still in his nightcap, he rewarded a boy handsomely to run to the poulterer’s and have a turkey the size of Tiny Tim sent to the humble home of the Cratchit family. After consuming a bowl of gruel and a cup of tea with more relish than such feeble fare justified, he brushed the coal dust from his cuffs and went off on a cold, clear, Christmas Day to join his nephew Fred and family at their holiday feast. Scrooge delighted the children with gifts in his hard-as-flint fists and astonished the grownups with a steady smile on his bloodless face. He tasted of the spiced wassail and joined in the carols in bold voice and bounced their son and daughter upon his knee. It was like old times, with the kind of merriment he had enjoyed so unashamedly at Fezziwig’s establishment. (Those were the days when he was a mere apprentice with Dick Wilkins, good old Dick Wilkins, who had been very attached to him — long before Ebenezer’s soul had been twisted into an ugly thing by the connivances of commerce.) Later that night, when the cheer had simmered down, and the fire had withdrawn its flames, and a slab of clouds had blocked out the stars, and a cold mist was pressing against the windows, Ebenezer Scrooge, with a wave of his hand, alighted from the glowing doorway of his nephew’s home and headed into the gloom of nineteenth century London. It was that sort of penetrating gloom which of times follows hard on the heels of a frolicsome occasion, the way the brightest and most pleasant of rooms becomes dank and dreary when plunged into the bitter darkness of a winter’s night. It was the gloom of death itself.
Ebenezer stepped cautiously through the slippery skin of snow that had settled upon the cobblestones, for he was mortal and, as he had reminded the Ghost of Christmas Past, liable to fall. It was feet-stamping cold, and his breath crystallized with each exhalation. The bleakness was so concentrated it seemed to muffle the sputtering gas lamps along his route, but it did not extinguish the gladness in Scrooge’s heart, which radiated on the fuel of his recent salvation. So altered was his attitude that as he walked in the direction of his chambers, he kept an expectant eye out for a carriage to carry him forth. Not since he’d been young and wasteful had he hired a carriage; on this particular evening, however, he felt a strong desire to be accompanied by the happy clacking of hoofs and to impress the cabman with a generosity befitting the season. Scrooge spotted a few such conveyances, shiny through the frozen mists, one of them with holly wound in the spokes of its great wheels. But each was loaded with people and packages and the sounds of mirth, hurrying on toward yet another festivity in celebration of the birth of Christ. By the time he came upon a carriage that was free — a young couple was laughing as they stepped down from the sturdy black vehicle, its springs jouncing from the quick loss of weight — Scrooge had already covered three-quarters of the distance to his rooms. And though the air was as harsh as a rasp, he decided to complete his journey by foot. It seemed more trouble to get in and out of the carriage than the short trip warranted. Besides, a long walk on Christmas night was good for the heart and satisfying to the soul, and a man of business in his time of life had to be attentive to both.
The windows of the low brick houses were gleaming with candles and oil lamps, and the scent of baked breads and sweetmeats wafted over the streets. A few men and women wrapped in green and red scarves bobbed past him on the narrow walk. “Merry Christmas!” said they, raising their hats or saluting, though he did not recognize any of them. Scrooge fingered the brim of his tall hat and smiled as best he could, his cracked face aching from having crowded thirty years of smiling into a single day. What the ghosts had demonstrated to him the previous evening appeared to be decidedly true: There was joy, perhaps even a certain profit, to be collected from being pleasant, from being charitable to others.
Not everyone on that particular London street, on that particular Christmas night, was unknown to Ebenezer Scrooge. Hurrying along on the opposite walk was one Jonathan Wurdlewart, who had business with the firm of Scrooge & Marley. Indeed, his loan was due that very night. And when Wurdlewart spotted a gray-faced old man in a tall black hat moving slowly but with a distinct delight in his step, greeting people as they passed, the debtor ducked into an alley and stared out from the shadows. “It can’t be,” Wurdlewart muttered, rubbing his tired eyes, “it just can’t be.” After the old man had passed, and the debtor saw that it was indeed Scrooge himself, he cursed him under his breath as a hypocrite as well as a usurer. For a long while Wurdlewart remained in the shadows, as if pondering what course of action to take. At last he began moving in the direction Scrooge had gone.