Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006

A Tale of Too Much Dickens by James Powell

It was the best of The New York Times. It was the worst of The New York Times. First Mel Gibbie read of the brutal murder of his associate Lamar Hooper. This he considered the “best” part, for performing Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” over the holidays had become a very crowded field. The “worst” came in the newspaper’s Arts and Entertainment section. Hollywood’s big animated movie this season was going to be SpongeBob Cratchit’s A SquarePants Christmas. Gibbie already knew Ice-Stravaganza productions planned touring companies of Cheapskates on Skates: the Ebenezer Scrooge Story. And last night, though it was still only November, the Late Show with David Letterman featured Fast Freddy Farmer with the big clock ticking in his two minute version of the Dickens classic, a lickety-split slurry of words punctuated with every “Bah Humbug!” and Tiny Tim’s “God bless us every one” jockeyed around to the end for the big finale.

Gibbie uttered a groan worthy of Jacob Marley’s ghost. Soon, he feared, the world would tire of “A Christmas Carol,” meaning a world tired of Mel Gibbie. He threw the newspaper aside, rose, and stood in front of the gas logs burning in his modest fireplace. Lined up on the mantel were the hand puppets he used in his telling of the story. Since the death of his mother these puppets, the Cratchits in particular, had become his family. He’d told them many times that he only endured his hectic holiday schedule of one-night stands and matinees to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Now he told them again.

Then Gibbie got an idea. He and Hooper belonged to the Carolers Club, as the Dickens-doers called themselves. Suppose the murderer was a Caroler too, someone trying to whittle down the competition? (Gibbie was surprised he hadn’t thought of doing that himself. Not that he could ever commit murder. Why? The naked hand puppet of self-reproach knew why. “Because you’re a gutless wonder, Gibbie,” it whispered in his ear.)

Well, gutless wonder or not, maybe Gibbie could do a little whittling too. If a Caroler killed Hooper and Gibbie figured out who, he could tip off the police. That’d be one more competitor out of the way. He sat back down and opened the newspaper.

Hooper had been a Dickens imitator, one of the crowd who wore Victorian outfits and laid on a bit of an English accent for the job. His booking agent came by his shabby Woodside apartment in Queens after Hooper missed a scheduled reading in Stamford the night before. He found his client’s door ajar and the man on the floor bludgeoned to death with the ivory-headed walking stick he used in his act. The cane had a battery-powered light in the head for flagging down taxis. Hooper’d put in a green bulb, and when he did Marley’s ghost or the various spirits of Christmas, he’d hold the head of the cane under his chin and snap on the light to great effect.

Gibbie read the newspaper account of the murder. When he got to the part about the police finding a star made of folded paper at the crime scene he smiled. “Not a star,” he told himself, “a snowflake.” Now he had his man. Bolton Sharpe, a new kid on the Dickens-doers block, carried a colorful stack of origami paper to the podium. As he recited the story, he folded the paper into various props: Scrooge’s nightcap, Marley’s chains and moneyboxes, and of course, Tiny Tim’s crutch. Sharpe’s encore was a dazzling display of high-speed origami folding. Reciting the thirty words the Inuit have for snow, he made a snowflake for each, no two alike, and threw them out into the audience. By season’s end his fingers were thick with adhesive bandages, for paper cuts were a hazard of his business.

As Gibbie reached for the phone to call the police there was a knock on his door. The man standing in the hall displayed a badge. “Mr. Gibbie,” he said, “I’m Lieutenant Mason. I’ve some questions regarding the murder of Lamar Hooper. May I come in?”

Gibbie stepped back in surprise and gestured the man inside.

“I understand you knew the victim,” said Mason.

“So did Bolton Sharpe,” blurted Gibbie.

The detective raised an eyebrow.

The puppeteer quickly explained, “That paper star at the crime scene was an origami snowflake from Sharpe’s act.”

“We know,” nodded Mason. “It had his name written on it. So we looked him up. Now Forensics tells us Hooper was murdered yesterday evening between six and seven. At that time Mr. Sharpe was entertaining the kids at Children’s Hospital. A freebie. A real nice guy, Mr. Sharpe. Real generous with his time. He told us sometimes the audience brought up snowflakes afterwards for him to autograph. Said maybe somebody was out to frame him for Hooper’s murder. And, oh, he mentioned seeing you at one of his performances last year.”

“Just checking out the competition.”

Mason worked his eyebrow again. “Mr. Gibbie, can you tell me where you were yesterday evening between six and seven?”

Blushing, Gibbie jerked his head toward the puppets on the mantel and begged in a whisper, “Can we keep it down? All right, so I was doing a bachelor party. ‘A Christmas with Kinky Carol.’ ”

“Obscene hand puppets?” asked Mason in a disapproving whisper.

“Look,” pleaded Gibbie under his breath, “last month when Billy Napier took a swan dive out his apartment window, Sammy, my booking agent, said if I bought Billy’s stuff from his old lady he’d find me work. Work I need. So I did. I gave the act a try. But it wasn’t up my alley. I didn’t have Billy’s dirty little laugh. So I told Sammy to count me out. He wasn’t happy about that. I only did yesterday’s gig because Sammy’d already booked it.” Gibbie got his appointment calendar and showed it to Mason.

“Okay,” said the policeman, “so while we’re at it, what were you doing on October 11 around eight P.M.?” When Gibbie looked puzzled, Mason explained, “Hooper’s murder has us reconsidering some other cases. We suspect Napier’s swan dive might have had an assist.”

Gibbie thumbed back through the calendar until he found the date. “Okay, here we are. I was trying out this Halloween act. Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’ I’m the Headless Horseman with a coat up over my head. I use this jack-o’-lantern under my arm to narrate the thing. My Bob Cratchit does Ichabod Crane with putty to make his nose long and snipey, and Mrs. Cratchit is plumped out and rouged up to play Katrina Van Tassel.”

Mason looked skeptical.

“So I’ve got some bugs to work out,” admitted Gibbie.

Mason moved on. “Ever meet Roy Reilly who disappeared last year?”

“The balloon guy? Sure. We Dickens-doers are a tight-knit group. The Carolers Club, that’s what we call ourselves. Come January when the season’s over we rent a hall and throw ourselves a shindig. ‘Eeffoc Moor,’ that’s our battle cry.”

“‘Eeffoc Moor?’” Mason raised both eyebrows suspiciously.

“Look,” said Gibbie, “young Charles Dickens used to hang out at this London restaurant where one of the doors had an oval glass in it that said ‘Coffee Room.’ Dickens wrote that from the inside it read ‘Moor Eeffoc.’ You might say it’s the Carolers Club’s ‘inside’ joke. Get it?” Mason looked like he didn’t. “Me,” continued Gibbie, “I always thought Dickens’s Eeffoc Moor would be one great place to live. I get tired of the city sometimes. You know what I mean? There are days when I could use a whole plateful of sky.”

Mason was losing interest.

“Okay, sure, I knew Reilly,” said Gibbie again. “Hey, you try reading Dickens and shaping those sausage balloons at the same time. You can bet the squeaking rubber set a lot of teeth on edge. Reilly’s Ghost of Christmas Past wasn’t bad and his Marley doorknocker was great. So what’s with Reilly?”

“We’ve found his remains,” said Mason. “Could somebody be trying to kill you people off? Maybe there’s a murderer stalking this Eeffoc Moor of yours.”

“Hooper, Napier, Reilly,” counted Gibbie. “Boy, wouldn’t that be something? Maybe I’ll have to pick up and move to Swen, Vermont.”

When Mason blinked Gibbie explained, “There was another wonderful moor, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Remember? She worked for this TV news department, right? From the outside the glass door read TV NEWS. From inside it said SWEN, Vermont, which I always thought must be a very nice place to live too.”

Mason looked at Gibbie for a long moment before handing him his card. “Give me a call if anything else comes to mind,” he said, adding, “anything connected to our murder investigation.”

On a free afternoon a couple of days later Gibbie decided to have a fireside chat, as he called his family meetings with the puppets on the mantel. Admitting how threadbare the costumes his mother had made for them had become, Gibbie said he hoped this year he’d get far enough ahead to have new ones made. Using their many voices, he staged a discussion where they talked about what kind of new costumes they’d like. Then, as always, he closed the meeting by picking up Tiny Tim by his head and having him utter his blessing.

Later that same day Sammy called. He’d arranged a trip to Atlantic City for six of the dozen workhorses on his Dickens list to do their stuff at six casinos. Gibbie hadn’t been included, being in Sammy’s bad books since the Kinky Carol business. But Grayson Reed, one of the chosen, had chickened out, spooked by Lamar Hooper’s murder. The gig was Gibbie’s if he got over to Sammy’s apartment building chop-chop. Sammy warned him he wasn’t going to wait around.

There wasn’t much time. After a quick shower, Gibbie swept his hand puppets into a shopping bag with a collective “break a leg” for good luck and headed crosstown. The security man in the lobby knew him and pointed to the door to the underground garage. Gibbie hurried down, reaching the foot of the stairs in time to see Sammy’s SUV roll up the ramp to the street. He didn’t run after it. Sammy wasn’t going to stop. Gibbie stepped out of the light. He didn’t even want to give Sammy the satisfaction of seeing him standing there in his rearview mirror.

As Gibbie hugged his shopping bag in the shadows, he saw a strange shape on the cement floor in the SUV’s parking space. Now it sat up, then stood, a man in overalls. Though his hair and beard had turned quite gray, Gibbie recognized Bosley Heck, one of the founders of the Carolers Club.

Heck, a man obsessed with Dickens, worked for ten months of the year every year at a variety of jobs — auto mechanic, locksmith, electrician. But come November he put everything aside, spread on his English accent, got into his Dickens outfit, and read “A Christmas Carol” until the holidays’ very last gasp.

The Carolers jokingly called Heck The Dickens, for the man was a purist whose every word, bit of theatrical business, and detail of his costume down to the cashmere-checked pantaloons he wore and the two small roses, one white, one red, in his buttonhole, he could document from contemporary accounts and photographs of the author.

Gibbie watched as Heck picked up the creeper he’d been lying on and went up the ramp to wait by the garage door, intending, Gibbie was sure, to slip out as he’d slipped in with the next arriving or departing car.

Gibbie hurried back up the stairs and gave a shake of his head to the security man. Out on the street he heard the mild drum roll of the garage door as a car entered. Now ahead of him on the sidewalk he saw a figure carrying a creeper. Gibbie followed after him.

Bosley Heck had been a towering presence in the business when Gibbie was starting out. The man regarded his rival Dickens impersonators with a courtly, if wary eye, as an old dog might view a pack of romping puppies. When the puppeteer introduced himself and described his act, Heck had welcomed him with a gracious “The more the merrier.” But Gibbie suspected Heck regarded acts like his own with contempt.

Some say Heck’s descent into madness coincided with Vera Vail’s off-Broadway success in Desperate Housewife, the Mrs. Bob Cratchit Monologues, a strident feminist retelling of the Dickens story. Others blame the arrival in New York of Cornelius O’Kelly, the Dublin Nightingale, and his Christmas at the O’Carrolls, an evening of Irish readings, clog dancing, and song where he accompanied himself on the electronic keyboard. (His “O Tiny Tim, the pipes, the pipes are calling” left no dry eye in the house. His “The Irish Heavyweight’s Promise,” where a pug-ugly swears in a letter to his referee father, “I’ll be home for Christmas. You can count on me,” was no less memorable.)

However Heck’s madness began, he came to believe he was, in fact, Charles Dickens besieged all about by impostors and upstarts bent on turning his Christmas classic into a three-ring circus. His behavior became increasingly erratic until one night during a reading Heck got stuck on the first “Bah! humbug.” He couldn’t get beyond “Bah,” repeating it again and again until the audience started shouting it back at him. Finally someone came out from behind the curtain and led a “bahing” and bewildered Heck offstage.

The man had ended up in a mental institution. Gibbie could imagine how he’d gotten back onto the street. Recently with medical costs rising, the state started returning non-violent inmates into the community, counting on improved drugs and local facilities to care for them.

Gibbie followed Heck down an alley alongside one of the few remaining Mexican restaurants on the Bowery. The man hid his creeper among the garbage cans and went in the back door. Through a window Gibbie watched him punch a time clock and take his place at a large dishwashing machine.

Gibbie went home. Tomorrow he would call Lieutenant Mason, mention missing his ride to Atlantic City, and say he saw Bosley Heck on the street outside Sammy’s apartment building carrying a creeper. He’d tell Mason he only put two and two together when he read in the morning paper about Sammy’s terrible accident.

As far as Gibbie was concerned, the booking agent would be no great loss. A man who called his dozen Dickens workhorses “The Twelve Drays of Christmas” certainly deserved to die. As for the other five in the vehicle, Gibbie told himself he’d had no actual hand in the accident. Whittle, whittle.

Later that afternoon, when Sammy’s SUV careened off the highway to explode in a ball of fire, Lieutenant Mason suspected more Carolers Club foul play. He hurried to the booking agent’s widow. When he learned that Grayson Reed, a Dickens imitator known for his wardrobe of fancy vests, had been slated for the Atlantic City trip but canceled at the last minute, Mason thought he had his man.

Grayson Reed had just heard on TV about the accident and his own close brush with death. He was cowering in a dark corner of his apartment when Mason arrived with two uniformed officers. Mason knocked. Then he identified himself and knocked again before ordering his men to break down the door. Reed panicked and tried to flee down the fire escape. At the open window Mason called for him to stop. When Reed did not, Mason shot him as he clattered down the iron steps.

Gibbie set the newspaper aside the next morning, unsure what to do. Clearly Mason thought he’d killed the Carolers Club murderer. And maybe he had. The police lieutenant was a professional, after all. Maybe there was some innocent explanation for why Heck was under the SUV. Maybe Sammy had hired him to fix something. Gibbie saw no need to rush into things. If the killings stopped, then Mason was right. Gibbie nodded to himself, pleased with his logic.

Besides he now had his hands full working night and day to help the Widow Sammy fill the gigs her late husband had booked. More work meant more money. Now Gibbie’s fireside chats turned to talk of getting medical help for Tiny Tim, finding good women’s colleges for Belinda and Martha Cratchit, and getting Master Peter into West Point.

A week later, Fast Freddy Farmer was pushed from a subway platform in front of an express train, and the story started going around that someone was trying to kill off the Carolers Club. Gibbie knew that someone as Heck. But he was willing to take his chances now. Overnight the crowds picked up, meaning more money, since the performers got a cut of the gate.

Those who came hoping to see a murder right before their eyes were not disappointed. First Cornelius O’Kelly, the Dublin Nightingale, was electrified by a loose connection as he plugged in the amplifier at the start of his act. He did a smart little Irish jig before falling backwards off the stage, dead as a doornail. Then Vera Vail, Mrs. Bob Cratchit, paused in mid monologue to take a sip of water and slumped over dead. (The police had checked the carafe on the dais for poison but not the rim of the glass she drank from.)

With the Carolers Club members dropping like flies around him, Gibbie suddenly felt himself alive and exhilarated. The immense game of Russian roulette he was playing with Heck was the most exciting thing he had ever done. Even when Bolton Sharpe died onstage in a blizzard of Inuit words and paper snowflakes — the police discovered edges of the snowflake origami paper had been dipped in curare — Gibbie soldiered on. “Who’s the gutless wonder now?” he asked the naked hand puppet of self-reproach, but received no reply.

The Carolers Club murders, the hot news item that Christmas, got Gibbie an invitation to appear on the Late Show with David Letterman. The program began with a film clip shot in Gibbie’s apartment with the non-Cratchit puppets lined up on the mantel. Gibbie introduced them and had Scrooge, Marley’s ghost, the ghosts of the three Christmases, and Scrooge’s Cousin Fred wish Letterman a merry, merry Christmas in their various voices.

After the film clip the puppeteer joined his host in front of the cameras. He wore Tiny Tim on his right hand and Bob Cratchit on his left, with the rest of the family peeking from his jacket pockets. He and the puppets sported black armbands all round. Gibbie delivered a brief eulogy to the Carolers Club dead and ended with the club’s battle cry of “Eeffoc Moor.” Then, sitting down with Letterman, he explained about Dickens’s coffee room. When he segued into Mary Tyler Moore’s Swen, Vermont, the studio audience went “Aww!” Then Tiny Tim gave his blessing and the studio audience went “Aww!” again. Letterman asked him to come back next Christmas.

The following day Gibbie got a phone call about his ad in the Carolers Club newsletter offering Billy Napier’s Kinky Carol puppets for sale. He didn’t recognize the voice. But the person was prepared to pay Gibbie’s price if the goods were as filthy as specified. They agreed to meet at the bus terminal where Gibbie kept Napier’s stuff in a locker. (He’d never for a moment considered bringing it back to the apartment with his puppet family.) Gibbie waited for an hour before remembering he’d never heard Bosley Heck’s voice plain, without the laid-on English accent.

He hurried back to his apartment, whose atmosphere now had an alien charge to it. Had Heck been there? Gibbie crossed to the mantel. Was his puppet family cowering? Had Heck dared to threaten them? Well, Gibbie would put a quick stop to that. He telephoned Mason. He said he’d just seen Bosley Heck, a ghost from the Carolers Club’s past, washing dishes in a Mexican restaurant in the Bowery. Mason understood and thanked Gibbie for the information.

Hanging up, Gibbie called a fireside chat. “That was Lieutenant Mason I was talking to. You remember him, right?” He made the puppet voices assure him they did. “Well, you’re all safe now. Mr. Heck’ll never threaten you again. I see now I shouldn’t have stood by and let him murder everybody like that. Well, none of us is perfect, right? Remember, you’re my family. I did it all for you.”

Time for Tiny Tim’s blessing. But when Gibbie reached for the puppet it recoiled as if from his touch. It moved. It was alive. Gibbie turned white. No! A live Tiny Tim could just as well say, “God bless us every one, except you, Mel Gibbie, you bastard!” Gibbie had to get control of his world again. With a curse he jammed his hand inside the puppet.

Heck surrendered peacefully when the police arrested him at the Mexican restaurant. The man confessed to his crimes, insisting the murders were a far, far better thing than he had ever done. He would spend the rest of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Mason came round to tell Gibbie the news. When the puppeteer didn’t answer his knock he grew concerned and hunted up the super. Let into the apartment, Mason found Gibbie dead, face down on the floor before the fireplace. He was wearing Tiny Tim, now grown immense, for Gibbie’s hand had swollen up so large it split the puppet down the back.

When Forensics told him of the six-inch Mexican scorpion they found inside the hand puppet, Mason recalled that the restaurant where Heck washed dishes had once been raided on a tip they were holding cockfights in the basement. Instead, the police discovered a room where shouting bettors crowded around a tabletop arena or stood on chairs in back with rented binoculars to watch pair after pair of virulent scorpions fight to the death.