I minced and squeaked through another cluster of adults, all of whom were singing in accompaniment to the song now playing over the loudspeakers. The song, of all damn things, was “Here Comes Santa Claus.”
Waters may not have heard the song, but its message got through to him just the same. He saw me bearing down on him from thirty feet away and understood immediately what my intentions were. His expression turned panicky; he tried to tear loose from the obese woman’s grip. She hung on with all the tenacity of a bulldog.
I was ten feet from getting my bulldog hands on him when he proceeded to transform the Gala Family Christmas Charity Benefit from fun and frolic into chaos.
He let go of Ronnie’s wrist, shouted, “Run, kid!” and then with his free hand he sucker-punched the obese woman on the uppermost of her chins. She not only released his jacket, she backpedaled into a lurching swoon that upset three other merrymakers and sent all four of them to the floor in a wild tangle of arms and legs. Voices rose in sudden alarm; somebody screamed like a fire siren going off. Bodies scattered out of harm’s way. And Markey Waters went racing toward freedom.
I gave chase, dodging and juking and squeaking. I wouldn’t have caught him except that while he was looking back over his shoulder to see how close I was, he tripped over something — his own feet, maybe — and down he went in a sprawl. I reached him just as he scrambled up again. I laid both hands on him and growled, “This is as far as you go, Waters,” whereupon he kicked me in the shin and yanked free.
I yelled, he staggered off, I limped after him. Shouts and shrieks echoed through the gym; so did the thunder of running feet and thudding bodies as more of the party animals stampeded. A woman came rushing out from inside the farthest of the food booths, got in Markey’s path, and caused him to veer sideways to keep from plowing into her. That in turn allowed me to catch up to him in front of the booth. I clapped a hand on his shoulder this time, spun him around — and he smacked me in the chops with something warm and soggy that had been sitting on the booth’s serving counter.
A meat pie.
He hit me in the face with a pie.
That was the last indignity in a night of indignities. Playing Santa Claus was bad enough; playing Lou Costello to a thief s Bud Abbott was intolerable. I roared; I pawed at my eyes and scraped off beef gravy and false whiskers and white wig; I lunged and caught Waters again before he could escape; I wrapped my arms around him. It was my intention to twist him around and get him into a crippling hammerlock, but he was stronger than he looked. So instead we performed a kind of crazy, lurching bear-hug dance for a few seconds. That came to an end — predictably — when we banged into one of the booth supports and the whole front framework collapsed in a welter of wood and bunting and pie and paper plates and plastic utensils, with us in the middle of it all.
Markey squirmed out from underneath me, feebly, and tried to crawl away through the wreckage. I disentangled myself from some of the bunting, lunged at his legs, hung on when he tried to kick loose. And then crawled on top of him, flipped him over on his back, fended off a couple of ineffectual blows, and did some effectual things to his head until he stopped struggling and decided to become unconscious.
I sat astraddle him, panting and puffing and wiping gravy out of my eyes and nose. The tumult, I realized then, had subsided somewhat behind me. I could hear the loudspeakers again — the song playing now was “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” — and I could hear voices lifted tentatively nearby. Just before a newspaper photographer came hurrying up and snapped a picture of me and my catch, just before a horrified Kerry and a couple of tardy security guards arrived, I heard two voices in particular speaking in awed tones.
“My God,” one of them said, “what happened?”
“I dunno,” the other one said. “But it sure looks like Santa Claus went berserk.”
There were three of us in the football coach’s office at the rear of the gym: Markey Waters and me and one of the security guards. It was fifteen minutes later and we were waiting for the arrival of San Francisco’s finest. Waters was dejected and resigned, the guard was pretending not to be amused, and I was in a foul humor thanks to a combination of acute embarrassment, some bruises and contusions, and the fact that I had no choice but to keep on wearing the gravy-stained remnants of the Santa Claus suit. It was what I’d come here in; my own clothes were in Kerry’s apartment.
On the desk between Waters and me was a diamond-and-sapphire brooch, a fancy platinum cigarette case, and a gold money clip containing three crisp fifty-dollar bills. We had found all three items nestled companionably inside Markey’s jacket pocket. I prodded the brooch with a finger, which prompted the guard to say, “Nice haul. The brooch alone must be worth a couple of grand.”
I didn’t say anything. Neither did Markey.
The owner of the gold clip and the three fifties had reported them missing to Security just before Waters and I staged our minor riot; the owners of the brooch and cigarette case hadn’t made themselves known yet, which was something of a tribute to Markey’s light-fingered talents — talents that would soon land him back in the slammer on another grand larceny rap.
He had had his chin resting on his chest; now he raised it and looked at me. “My kid,” he said, as if he’d just remembered he had one. “He get away?”
“No. One of the other guards nabbed him out front.”
“Just as well. Where is he?”
“Being held close by. He’s okay.”
Markey let out a heavy breath. “I shouldn’t of brought him along,” he said.
“So why did you?”
“It’s Christmas and the papers said this shindig was for kids, too. Ronnie and me don’t get out together much since his mother ran out on us two years ago.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And besides, you figured it would be easier to make your scores if you had a kid along as camouflage.”
He shrugged. “You, though — I sure didn’t figure on somebody like you being here. What in hell’s a private dick doing dressed up in a Santa Claus suit?”
“I’ve been asking myself that question all night.”
“I mean, how can you figure a thing like that?” Markey said. “Ronnie comes running up, he says it’s not really Santa up there and the guy pretending to be Santa threatened him, said he’d shove a pillow down the kid’s throat. What am I supposed to do? I’d done a good night’s work, I wanted to get out of here while the getting was good, but I couldn’t let some jerk get away with threatening my kid, could I? I mean, I’m a father, too, right?” He let out another heavy breath. “I wish I wasn’t a father,” he said.
I said, “What about the wallet, Markey?”
“Huh?”
“The wallet and the two hundred in cash that was in it.”
“Huh?”
“This stuff here isn’t all you swiped tonight. You also got a wallet belonging to a Mrs. Randolph Simmons. It wasn’t on you and neither was the two hundred. What’d you do with them?”
“I never scored a wallet,” he said. “Not tonight.”
“Markey...”
“I swear it. The other stuff, sure, you got me on that. But I’m telling you, I didn’t score a wallet tonight.”
I scowled at him. But his denial had the ring of truth; he had no reason to lie about the wallet. Well, then? Had Mrs. Simmons lost it after all? If that was the case, then I’d gone chasing after Waters for no good reason except that he was a convicted felon. I felt the embarrassment warming my face again. What if he hadn’t dipped anybody tonight? I’d have looked like an even bigger fool than I did right now...