Murder Most Merry

THE SHAPE OF THE NIGHTMARE – Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

On the afternoon of the second day before Christmas, just before the terror swept the airport, Loren Mensing was studying the dispirited and weaving line in front of the ticket counter and wishing fervently that he were somewhere else.

He had turned in his exam grades at the law school, said goodbye to the handful of December graduates among his students, and wasted three days moping, with the dread of spending the holidays alone again festering inside him like an untreated wound. The high-rise apartment building he’d lived in for years was being converted to condominiums, dozens of tenants had moved out and dozens more had flown south for the holidays, and the isolation in the building reinforced his sense of being alone in the world.

He had called a travel agent and booked passage on a week-long Caribbean cruise where, if he was lucky, he might find someone as seasonally lonely as he was himself. A Love Boat fantasy that he tried desperately to make himself believe. He drove to the airport through swirling snow that froze to ice on the Volkswagen’s windshield. He checked his bags, went through security at the lower level, and was lounging near the departure gate for Flight 317, nonstop to Miami, when he heard his name over a microphone.

And learned that he’d been bumped.

“I’m very sorry. Mr. Mensing.” The passenger service rep seemed to look bored, solicitous, and in charge all at once. “We have to overbook flights because so many reserved-seat holders don’t cancel but don’t show up either. Today everyone showed up! You have a right to compensatory cash payment plus a half-fare coupon for the next Miami flight.” His racing fingers leafed through the schedule book. “Which departs in just five hours. If you’ll take this form to the counter on the upper level they’ll write you a fresh ticket.”

If he took the next flight he’d miss connections with the excursion ship. He kept his rage under control, detached himself from the horde of travelers at the departure gate, and stalked back upstairs to find a supervisor and demand a seat on the flight he was scheduled to take. When he saw the length of the line at the upper level he almost decided to go home and forget the cruise altogether.

A large metropolitan airport two days before Christmas. Men, women, children, bundled in overcoats and mufflers and down jackets and snowcaps, pushing and jostling and shuffling in the interminable lines that wove and shifted in front of the ticket counters like multicolored snakes. Thousands of voices merging into an earsplitting hum. View through panoramic windows of snow sifting through the gray afternoon, of autos and trucks and taxis crawling to a halt. Honeyed robot voices breaking into the recorded Christmas carols to make flight announcements no one could hear clearly.

Loren was standing apart from the line, trying to decide whether to join it or surrender his fantasy and go home, when it happened.

He heard a voice bellowing something through the wall of noise in the huge terminal. “Bon! Bonreem!” That was what it sounded like in the chaos. It was coming from a man standing to one side of the line like himself. A short sandy-haired man wearing jeans and a down jacket and red ski cap, shouting the syllables in a kind of fury. “Bonreem!”

A man standing in the line turned his head to the right, toward the source of the shout, as if he were hearing something that related to him. A woman in a tan all-weather coat with a rain hood, just behind the man in the line, began to turn her head in the same direction.

The sandy-haired man dropped into a combat crouch, drew a pistol from the pocket of his down jacket, and fired four times at the two who were turning. In the bedlam of the airport the shots sounded no louder than coughs. The next second the face of the man in the line was blown apart. Someone screamed. Then everyone screamed. The man with the shattered face fell to the tiled floor, his fingers still moving, clutching air. The line in front of the ticket counter dissolved into a kaleidoscope of figures running, fainting, shrieking. Instinctively Loren dropped to the floor.

The killer raced for the exit doors, stumbled over Loren’s outstretched feet, fell on one knee, hard, cried out in pain, picked himself up, and kept running. John Wilkes Booth flashed through Loren’s mind. He saw uniformed figures racing toward them, city and airport police, pistols drawn. Two of them blocked the exit doors. The killer wheeled left, stumbled down the main concourse out of sight, police rushing after him.

In the distance Loren heard more screams, then one final shot.

The public-address system was still playing “White Christmas.”

At first they put Loren in with the other witnesses, all of them herded into a large auditorium away from the public areas of the airport. Administrative people brought in doughnuts and urns of coffee on wheeled carts. The witnesses sat or stood in small knots—friends, family groups, total strangers, talking compulsively and pacing and clinging to each other. A few stood or sat alone. Loren was one of them. He was still stunned and he knew no one there to talk to.

After a while he pulled out of shock and looked around the room at the other loners. An old man with a wispy white mustache, probably a widower on his way to visit grandchildren for Christmas. A thin dour man with a cleft chin who blinked continually behind steel-rimmed glasses as if the sun were shining in his eyes. In a folding chair in a corner of the auditorium he saw the woman in the tan hooded coat, her head bowed, eyes indrawn, hugging herself and trying not to shudder. He started to get out of his chair and move toward her.

Another woman flung back the swing doors of the auditorium and stood in the entranceway, a tall fortyish woman in a pantsuit, her hair worn long and straight and liberally streaked with gray. “Loren Mensing?” she called out. Her strong voice cut through the hubbub of helpless little conversations in the vast room. “Is there a Loren Mensing here?”

Loren raised his hand and the woman came over to him. “I’m Gene Holt,” she said. “Sergeant Holt, city police, Homicide. You’re wanted in the conference room.”

He followed her to a room down the hall with a long oak table in the center, flanked by chairs. The air was thick with smoke from cigarettes and a few pipes. He counted at least twenty men in the room—airport police, local police, several in plainclothes. The man at the head of the conference table stood up and beckoned. “Lou Belford,” he introduced himself. “Special Agent in charge of the F. B. I, office for the area. The locals just told me you’re a sort of detective yourself in an oddball way.”

“I used to be deputy legal adviser on police matters for the mayor’s office,” Loren said. “A part-time position. I teach law for a living.”

“And you’ve helped crack some weird cases, right?”

“I’ve helped a few times,” Loren conceded.

“Well, we’ve got a weird one here, Professor,” Belford grunted. “And you’re our star witness. Tell me what you saw.”

As Loren told his story Belford scrawled notes on a pad. “It all fits,” he said finally. “The guy tripped over your feet and hurt his knee. When he saw he couldn’t get out the front exit he headed for the side doors that lead to the underground parking ramps. If he hadn’t stumbled over you he could have made it out of the building. Bad luck for him.”

“You caught him then? Who was he. and why did he kill that man?”

“We didn’t catch him,” Belford said. “Cornered him in the gift shop. He saw he was trapped and ate his gun. One shot, right through the mouth. Dead on the spot.”

Loren clenched his teeth.

“He wasn’t carrying ID.” Belford went on, “but we made him a while ago. His name was Frank Wilt. Vietnam vet, unemployed for the last three years. He couldn’t hold a job, claimed his head and body were all screwed up from exposure to that Agent Orange stuff they used in the war. The VA couldn’t do a thing to help him.”

“The man he killed worked for the Veterans Administration?” Loren guessed.

“No, no.” Belford shook his head impatiently. “Wilt was obviously desperate for money. It looks as if he took a contract to waste somebody. We just learned he put twenty-five hundred dollars in a bank account Monday. That part of the case is easy. It’s the other end we need help with.”

“Other end? You mean the victim?” Loren’s mind sped to a conclusion from the one fact he knew for certain. “So that’s why the F. B. I. are involved! Murder in an airport isn’t a Federal crime, and neither is murder by a veteran. So there must be something special about the victim.” He leaned forward, elbows on the conference table. “Who was he?”

“The accountant who testified against Lo Scalzo and Pollin in New York last year,” Belford said. “John Graham. We gave him and his family new identities under the Witness Relocation Program. They’ve been living in the city for eighteen months. And now. Professor, we’ve got an exam for you. Question one: How did the mob find out who and where Graham was? Question two: Why did they hire a broken-down vet to waste him instead of sending in a professional hit man?”

Loren had a sudden memory of one of his own law-school professors who had delighted in posing impossible riddles in class. The recollection made him distinctly uncomfortable.

He stayed with the investigators well into the evening, helping Lieutenant Krauzer of Homicide and Sergeant Holt and the F. B. I. agents interrogate all the actual and possible witnesses. Shortly before midnight, bone-weary and almost numb with the cold, he excused himself, trudged out into the public area of the airport, retrieved his luggage, and grabbed a tasteless snack in the terminal coffee shop. He found his VW in the underground parking garage and drove through hard-packed snow back to his high-rise.

He was unlocking his apartment door when he heard footsteps behind him and whirled, then relaxed. It was the woman, the one in the tan hooded coat who had been standing in the line directly behind John Graham at the time of the murder. “Please let me in, Mr. Mensing,” she said. Her voice was soft but filled with desperation, her face taut with tension and fatigue. Loren was afraid she’d collapse at any moment. “Come on in,” he nodded. “You need a drink worse than I do.”

Ten minutes later they were sitting on the low-backed blue couch, facing the night panorama of the city studded with diamond lights, a pot of coffee, a bottle of brandy, and a plate of cheese and crackers on the cocktail table in front of them. Slowly the warmth, the drinks, and the presence of someone she could trust dissipated the tightness from the woman. Loren guessed that she was about thirty, and that not too long ago she had been lovely.

“Thank you,” she said. “I haven’t eaten since early this morning, I mean yesterday morning.”

“Let me make you a real meal.” Loren got up from the couch. “I don’t have much in the refrigerator but I think I could manage some scrambled eggs.”

“No.” She reached out with her hand to stop him. “Maybe later. I’d like to talk now if you don’t mind. You may want to kick me out when I’m through.” She gave a nervous high-pitched giggle, and Loren sat down again and held her hand, which still felt all but frozen.

“My name is Donna,” she began. “Donna Keever. That’s my maiden name. I’m married. No, I was married. My husband died just about a year ago. His name was Greene, Charles Greene.” Her eyes filled with tears. “It was a year ago last week,” she mumbled. “You must have read about it.”

Loren groped in the tangle of his memory. Yes. that was it, last year’s Christmas heartbreak story in the media. Charles Greene and his six-year-old daughter had been driving home from gift shopping, going west on U. S. 47, when a car traveling east on the same highway hit a rut. The eastbound lane at that point was slightly higher than the westbound because of the shape of a hill on which U. S. 47 was built. The eastbound auto had bounced up into the air, literally flown across the median, and landed nose first on top of Greene’s car. Then it had bounced off, flown over the roofs of other passing cars, and landed in the ditch at the side of the highway. Greene, his child, and the other driver, who turned out to be driving on an expired license and with his blood full of alcohol, all died instantly. “I remember.” Loren said softly.

“I was ill that day,” Donna Greene said, “or I’d have been shopping with Chuck and Cindy. That’s the only reason I’m still alive while my family’s dead. Isn’t life wonderful?”

“It was just chance,” Loren told her. “You can’t feel guilty about it and ruin the rest of your life.”

“No!” Her voice rose to the pitch of a scream. “It wasn’t chance. That accident didn’t just happen. Someone wanted to kill Chuck or Cindy or me. Or all of us!”

She broke then, and Loren held her while she sobbed. When she could talk again he asked her the obvious question. “Have you told the police what you think?”

“Not the police, not the lawyer who’s handling the wrongful death claim for me, not anyone. It was only last week that I knew. A burglar broke into my house a week ago Monday night, came into my bedroom. He was wearing a stocking mask and he—he put his hands on me. I screamed my head off and scared him away. The police said it was just a burglar, but I knew. That man was going to kill me! The police think I’m exaggerating, that I’m still crazy with grief because of the accident.”

“How about family? Friends? Have you told them of your suspicions?”

“My parents and Chuck’s are all dead. My older brother ran away from home about fifteen years ago. when I was fifteen and he was twenty, and no one’s heard from him since. I don’t work, I don’t have a boyfriend and I just couldn’t go to my women friends with something like this.”

“What made you come to me?” he asked gently.

“Out at the airport auditorium, when that policewoman or whatever she was paged you, I recognized your name. I’ve read how you’ve helped people in trouble. When they let me go I looked up where you live in the phone book and came up here to wait for you.”

“Why were you at the airport?’

“I had to get away. If I stayed here I knew that burglar would come back and kill me, if I didn’t kill myself first. And I was right! You were there, you saw-that man. that gunman standing a few feet from me and he called my name. Donna Greene, and I started to turn and he shot at me and hit the man next to me in the line. Oh, God, somebody, help me!” She broke again, terror and despair poured out of her, and Loren held her and made comforting sounds while his mind raced.

Yes. the two names, John Graham and Donna Greene, sounded just enough alike that in the crowded terminal, with noises assaulting the ears from every side, both of them might have thought their name was being called and turned. To Loren, less than a dozen feet away, the name had sounded like “Bonreem.” But which of the two had Frank Wilt been paid to kill? If Donna was right, the double-barreled question posed by Agent Belford became meaningless. And if she was the intended victim, what would the person who had hired Wilt do next?

All the time he was soothing Donna Greene he fought with himself. “Don’t get involved again,” something inside told him. “The last time you saved someone he went out later and killed a bunch of innocent people. This time you’re already partly responsible for Wilt’s death. And for all you know this woman may be a raving paranoid.”

And then all at once he knew what to do. something that would reconcile the conflicting emotions within him and make his Christmas a lot brighter too. He waited until Donna was under control again before he explained.

“I’ve been thinking.” he said. “I don’t think I’m qualified to judge whether you’re right or wrong about being the target at the airport. But I know someone who is—a woman private detective up in Capital City named Val Tremaine. She’s fantastically good at her work. I’m going to ask her to come down and spend a couple of days on your case, getting to know you, talking with you, forming judgments. You’ll like her. Her husband died young too and she had to start life over.” He disengaged himself gently and rose to his feet. “I’ll make the call from my study. You’ll be all right?”

“I’m better now. I just needed someone I could open up to who wouldn’t treat me like a fool or a lunatic. Look, Mr. Mensing, I’m not a charity case. My lawyer is suing the estate of that other driver for three million dollars. He was rich, his attorneys already offered to settle for three-quarters of a million. I’m not asking you or your detective friend to work for nothing.”

“Don’t worry about money now,” Loren said, and went down the inner hall to the second bedroom that was fixed up as his study, closing the door behind him. He had to check his address book for the number of Val’s house, the lovely house nestled on the side of a mountain forty miles from the capital’s center, the house she had built as therapy after her husband had died. God, had it been that long since he’d called her? He wondered what had made their relationship taper off, his choice or hers or just the natural drifting of two people who cared deeply for each other but were hundreds of miles apart. He hoped she wouldn’t mind his calling in the middle of the night. He hoped very much that she’d be alone.

On the fourth ring she answered, her voice heavy with sleep and bewilderment and a touch of anger.

“Hi, Val, it’s me... Yes, much too long. I’ve missed you too. Want to make up for lost time?” He told her about his involvement in the airport murder which she’d heard reported on the evening’s TV newscasts, and about the riddle of the intended target which Donna Greene had dropped in his lap. “So if you haven’t any other plans for the holidays, why not spend Christmas here? Check her story, be her bodyguard if she needs one, help her start functioning again. Take her to the police with me if you believe she’s right.” He knew better than to hold out the prospect of a substantial fee. That wasn’t the way Val operated.

“You’ve got yourself a guest,” she said. “You know, I was going to invite you up to my place for Christmas but—well, I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

“I’d have come,” he told her softly. If she had invited him he wouldn’t have been at the airport this afternoon, and maybe Frank Wilt would be alive and able to tell who had hired him, and maybe Donna Greene would be dead. Chance.

I’ll have to get someone to run the office and I’ll need an hour to pack. No way I can get a plane reservation this time of year, so I’ll drive. See you around, oh, say eight in the morning if I don’t get stuck in the snow.”

“I hope you like quiche for breakfast.” Loren said.

* * *

A soft rapping on the front door jerked him out of a doze on the blue couch. Sullen gray light filling the living room told him it was morning. His watch on the end table read 7:14. “Yes?” he called in the door’s direction.

“Me.” He recognized Val’s voice, undid the deadbolt and the chain lock. The second she was inside with her suitcase he kissed her. It was their first kiss in months and they both made it last. Then they just looked at each other. Val’s cheeks were red from the cold and her eyes showed the strain of a long drive through snow-haunted darkness. She was beautiful as ever.

“I missed you,” he whispered. “Mrs. Greene’s asleep in the bedroom.”

They talked quietly in the kitchen while they grated some cheddar, cut a strip of pepper and an onion and ham slices into bits, beat two eggs in cream and melted butter, poured the ingredients into a ready-made pie crust, seasoned them with salt and nutmeg, and popped the quiche into the oven. Loren reported on the murder and Donna’s story as the aroma of hot melted cheese filled the kitchen.

“The first step isn’t hard to figure,” Val said, cutting the quiche into thirds as Loren poured orange juice and coffee. “She’ll have to look at pictures of Wilt and tell us if he was her Monday-night burglar. If she identifies him we’ll know she was the target at the airport.”

“But if she can’t identify him,” Loren pointed out, “it’s not conclusive the other way. Maybe two guys were after her, maybe she didn’t get a good look at the burglar... We do make a delicious quiche, partner.”

“And I’m glad we saved a third of it for our client,” Val said, “because the minute she gets up I’m borrowing your bed. I can’t take sleepless nights the way I used to.”

They left Val asleep and drove downtown through the snow in Loren’s VW and entered the office of the homicide detail a little after eleven. Lieutenant Krauzer was in his cubicle, and from his rumpled red-eyed look he’d been working through the night. He was a balding soft-spoken overweight man in his fifties who never seemed to react to anything but. like a human sponge, absorbed whatever came before him.

The lieutenant listened to Loren’s story and to Donna Greene’s, then picked up his phone handset, and twirled the dial. “Gene, you still have the Wilt photos? Yeah, bring them in, please.”

“We’ve learned a bunch about Frank Wilt since you hung it up last night. Professor,” Krauzer said. “He spent most of his time in bars, one joint in particular that’s owned by a guy with mob connections. That could explain how he was hired for the hit if the target was John Graham, but it doesn’t explain why. Damn it, the mob just doesn’t pay washed-up vets to waste a top man on their hit list.

“Your story reads better on that score, Mrs. Greene. An amateur hires Wilt for a private killing. He messes it up at your house last week and runs. He follows you to the airport yesterday, tries again, and messes it up again, because the guy next to you in line happened to have a name that sounds a little like yours, turned faster than you did. and took the bullets meant for you. But, ma’am, you just can’t ask me to believe that there’s a plot to wipe out your family, because there’s no way on earth the freak accident that killed your husband and daughter could have been anything but—”

A knock sounded on the cubicle door and a woman entered. Loren recognized her as Sergeant Holt from last night. She placed a sheaf of photos on Krauzer’s desk and left after the lieutenant thanked her. Loren handed the pictures to Donna and watched her face as she squinted and studied the shots with intense deliberation. In the outer office phones were ringing constantly, voices rising and falling, doors slamming, and in the street Loren heard the wail of sirens. Violent crime seemed to thrive on holidays.

There was a hunted look in Donna Greene’s eyes when she handed the photos back to Krauzer. “I can’t tell.” she said in almost a whisper. “I think the burglar was taller but with that stocking mask he wore and in the dark I couldn’t see his face well enough to be sure. Oh, I’m sorry!” She began to cry again and Loren reached out for her. Krauzer lifted the phone and a minute later Sergeant Holt came back in, put her arm around the other woman, and led her away.

Leaving Loren alone with Krauzer and free to ask the lieutenant for a large

favor.

The Homicide specialist kept shaking his head sadly. “I can’t spare the personnel to put a twenty-four-hour watch on her. Professor. Not short-handed the way we are around Christmas. Not without more proof she’s really in danger. I like the lady, I think she was totally honest with us, and I know she’s scared half to death, but—”

“But she’s paranoid?” Loren broke in. “Like all the dissidents in the Sixties and Seventies who thought the government was persecuting them? Look, suppose she’s right the way they were right?”

“Then you’ve got Val Tremaine to protect her,” Krauzer said, “and we both know they don’t come better.” He gave Loren a bleak but knowing smile. “Go on, get out of here with your harem, and have a merry Christmas. Call me if something should happen.”

If something should happen...

He decided to let Val sleep at the apartment and take Donna shopping so that he and his unexpected guests could have some sort of Christmas. After weaving through downtown streets in a crazy-quilt pattern to throw off any possible followers, he swung the VW onto the Interstate and drove out to the tri-leveled Cherrywood Mall. On the day before Christmas there was more safety among the crowds of frantic last-minute shoppers than behind fortress walls.

The excursion seemed to take Donna out of herself, erase some of the hunted look from her eyes. It was after four and their arms were full of brightly wrapped packages when they slipped into a dark quiet bar on the mall’s third level.

“Feeling better?” Loren asked as they sipped Alexanders.

“Much.” She smiled hesitantly in the dimness. “Mr. Mensing. these are the happiest few hours I’ve had since, well, since last year. I can never repay you. You’ve even made me begin to feel different about everything that’s happened to me.”

“Different how?”

“I’ve decided it wasn’t just blind chance that I didn’t go in the car with Chuck and Cindy that day and that the man next to me was shot and not me. I think I’m meant to live awhile yet. And. oh. God. there’s so much I’ve got to do after the holidays to put my life back in order. The house is a hopeless mess and the tires on my car are getting bald and I need a new will—Chuck and I had mutual wills, we each left everything to the other—and, you know, I may start dating again.” She looked into her glass and then into Loren’s eyes. “You’re, ah, not available, right?”

“I’m honestly not sure,” Loren said. “Val and I have been out of touch for months and we’ve been sort of preoccupied since she got in this morning.” He paused, blinked behind his glasses, bewildered as he habitually was by the thought that any young woman could find a bear-bodied, unaggressive, overly learned intellectual in his late thirties even slightly desirable. “But look. However that turns out, I’m your friend. Val and I both are.”

“To friendship,” she said as they touched glasses. “To a new life.”

It was the strangest Christmas Eve he’d ever spent. To an outsider it would have seemed that an exotic fantasy had become real—a man and two lovely women, a high-rise well stocked with food and drink. As night fell and with it fresh snow, Loren made a bowl of hot mulled wine and played the new recording of the Dvorak Piano Quintet No. 5 that he’d bought as his Christmas present to himself. Later he turned on the radio to an FM station and they listened to traditional carols as he gave Val and Donna the gifts he’d purchased at Cherrywood. Their squeals of delight warmed him more than the wine.

Part of him felt relaxed and at peace and part of him stayed alert like an animal in fear of predators. But as midnight approached he found it harder and harder to believe there was danger. Not with the snow outside turning to ice as it fell, not behind the deadbolt and chain lock in a haven twenty stories high.

A little after 12:30 they exchanged good-night kisses and Loren surrendered his bedroom to the women. When they’d closed the door behind them he made a last ritual concession to security by tugging the massive blue couch over against the front door before arranging its cushions on the living-room rug in a makeshift bed.

He was fitting a spare sheet over the couch cushions when Val came back, her blonde hair falling soft and loose over the shoulders of the floor-length caftan he’d given her for Christmas. She smiled and helped him smooth the sheets. “Now you’ll sleep better,” she said. “I feel like a toad kicking you out of your bed on Christmas Eve.”

“Can’t be helped. Donna’s asleep?”

“Out like a light. You were right to serve decaffeinated coffee.” She sat on a sheet-draped cushion. “And thanks to that nap I had before the sergeant dropped by, I’m not tired in the least—”

“Sergeant?” Loren asked. He was suddenly alert.

Her face dropped slightly. “Oh, rats, I wasn’t supposed to tell you. Lieutenant Krauzer sent a man over this afternoon just in case Donna was in danger. He came while you were shopping, showed me his ID, looked this place over, and set up a stakeout in 20-B, the vacant apartment across the hall. He said not to tell you and Donna so you’d act natural and not scare any suspects away. But it’s good to know Sergeant Holt is standing guard.”

Loren leaped to his feet. “Sergeant who?” he shouted.

“Gene Holt, Lieutenant Krauzer’s assistant. He’s been in 20-B since midafternoon. The couple that lives there is in Florida—”

“Describe him.” Loren’s face was white, and wet fear crawled down his spine.

“A tall man in his middle thirties, thin face, cleft chin. He wears glasses and blinks a lot as if his eyes were weak.”

In that moment Loren saw the shape of the nightmare. “That’s it,” he muttered. and stood there frozen with understanding. He could hear clocks ticking, the night stirrings of the building, the plock-plock of icy snow falling on the outdoor furniture on his balcony. Every sound was magnified now, transformed into menace.

Val shook his shoulders, fear twisting her own face. “Loren, what in God’s name is the matter?”

“Sergeant Gene Holt.” Loren told her, “is a woman. And now I know who Weak Eyes is too.”

“He had a badge and identification!” she protested.

“And if you know the right document forger you can have stuff like that made to order while you wait.” He pushed her aside, headed for the phone on a stand in the corner. “I’m calling Krauzer and getting some real cops here.”

The phone exploded into sound before he’d crossed the room and he jumped as if shot. A second ring, a third. He picked it up as if it were a cobra, forced it to his ear. Silence. Then a voice, smooth, low, calm. “Unfortunately. Professor, I can’t let you call for reinforcements,” it said.

Loren slammed the phone down, held it in its cradle for a count of ten, then lifted the handset. He didn’t hear a dial tone. He punched the hook furiously. Still no dial tone. He whirled to Val. “Him.” he whispered. “He must have planted a bug here while he was pretending to check the place out for security. He heard every word we said all evening and was just waiting for all of us to go to bed. We can’t phone outside—he’s tying up the line by keeping the phone in 20-B off the hook.”

“We can phone for help from one of the other apartments on this floor!”

“We can’t. 20-C moved out when the building converted to condo and 20-D’s out of town. Besides, he’s at the front door of 20-B. If you try to go out in the hall he’s got you.”

“Let’s get out on the balcony and scream for help!”

“Who’d hear us in that storm?”

Val swung around, raced down the inner hall to the bedroom. Loren knew why. To throw on street clothes and get her gun. If she’d brought one with her. Loren hadn’t asked.

The phone shrilled again. Loren stared at it as if hypnotized. He let it ring six times, nine. Over the rings he heard Donna’s sobs of terror from the bedroom. Oh, God, if only it were Krauzer on the other end, or Belford the F. B. I. man. or anyone in the world except Weak Eyes, anyone Loren could ask to call the police! On the twelfth ring he picked up the receiver.

“Mensing.” the low calm voice said, “I have just placed a charge of plastic explosive on the outside of your door. You have two minutes to take down that barricade I heard you put up and send Donna across the hall. Do that and you and Tremaine live.”

Loren slammed the phone down. Val in a dark gray jumpsuit ran back into the living room. There was no gun in her hand. Loren almost cried out with frustration. “Donna’s in your closet,” she whispered. “I pushed the dresser against the door.”

Loren nodded, held her close, and spoke feverishly into her ear. Time slipped away into nothingness. Val went down the inner hall, turning off lights, opened the fusebox, and cut the master switch. The apartment was pitch-dark now. Loren found the hall closet, put on rubbers, and his heaviest overcoat. Then he tugged the couch away from the front door, undid the deadbolt and chain, and ran across the room.

He slipped on the couch cushions in the middle of the floor and pain shot through his ankle. He bit down on his lower lip, hobbled the rest of the way across the room, threw open the door leading to his balcony. Sudden cold stunned him, made him shake uncontrollably as he stood outside, behind the curtained balcony door, and watched through the thin elongated crack.

The front door was flung back and Weak Eyes leaped in, using a combat crouch like Wilt at the airport. In his hand there was a gun. His eyes focused on the patch of light across the dark room, the light coming from the balcony. He stalked across the room like a wolf. Loren tensed, waiting. Yes, he was close enough to the balcony now, time for Val to make her move.

There she went, crawling across the wall-to-wall carpet in the dark, all but invisible in her jumpsuit, making the front door and then for the firestairs.

Weak Eyes heard nothing, didn’t turn. He kicked the balcony door all the way open, looked down the long balcony. There was nothing to see but a white-painted cast-iron outdoor table and three matching chairs. He took a cautious step out onto the balcony, his eyes trying to pierce the deeper shadows at the far end.

Loren brought the fourth iron chair down hard on the back of the killer’s neck. Weak Eyes howled, flung his arms up for balance. The gun flew out of his hand into the slush. He skidded halfway down the balcony, his belly slammed into the outdoor table.

Loren kept hitting him with the chair until Weak Eyes wasn’t moving. It was all Loren could do to keep from hurling him over the balcony rail and down twenty stories to the street.

Loren was still standing there, his teeth chattering in the cold, his ankle throbbing, sweat pouring down him, when a few minutes later Val and two uniformed patrolmen rushed out to the balcony.

“What a world,” Lieutenant Krauzer grunted eight hours later. “Her own brother.”

Weak Eyes was in a cell, Donna had been taken to the hospital under sedation, and they were gathered in Loren’s apartment. He sat on the blue couch with his right leg raised on a kitchen chair and the ankle bandaged tightly. Val sat on a hassock at his side, refilling his coffee cup, handing him tissues when he sneezed. Outside. Christmas morning dawned in shades of smoky gray.

“It had to be her brother,” Loren said. “Once Val described the fake Gene Holt it all clicked, because I remembered seeing a man of that exact description in the airport auditorium after the Graham murder. And then I remembered three things Donna had mentioned in passing: that she and her late husband had had mutual wills, that she hadn’t gotten around to making a new will yet, and that her wrongful-death suit against the driver of the car that killed her family was going to net her a lot of money.

“Now suppose she’d been killed by that burglar, or at the airport? Who would have wound up with that money? Obviously if she died intestate it would go to her next of kin. Who’s her next of kin? Her parents are dead, her only child is dead—but she had a brother who dropped out of sight fifteen years ago.

“Now the picture clears up,” he went on. “Charles and Cindy Greene die in a tragic accident that gets heavy coverage in the media. Wherever he was at the time. Donna’s brother hears of it, sees huge financial possibilities, comes to the city quietly, and begins shadowing her. He satisfied himself that the wrongful-death action is going to produce big money and that his sister hasn’t made out a new will. He had to get rid of her before she does. He looks around—the forged ID and bugging equipment and plastique show he has underworld connections—and hires Frank Wilt for the hit.

“Wilt breaks into her house a week ago Monday night and bungles the job. Brother gives him another chance. Wilt follows her to the airport, makes his move—and by blind chance a man with a name similar to Donna’s is next to her in line, turns faster than she does, and dies instead of her.

“Brother has gone to the airport too, as a backup in case Wilt blew it again. He and Donna are both rounded up as witnesses and taken to the auditorium but either she doesn’t see him in the crowd or just doesn’t recognize him after fifteen years. When she’s let go he follows her to my place and works out a plan to kill her here, doing the job himself this time. He reads the newspaper stories about the airport murder, picks up the name of Sergeant Gene Holt, and uses it as his cover identity but makes the big mistake of assuming from the name that the sergeant is a man.”

“And that bit of chauvinism’s going to cost him twenty years in the slam.” Krauzer yawned and lumbered wearily to his feet. “Well, if you’ll excuse me it’s Christmas morning and I’ve got grandkids to play Santy for.” He winked broadly at Val. “Remember he’s a sick man and needs his rest.”

When he had let himself out Val slid off the hassock to sit on the floor. “Funny,” Loren said as he ran his hand through her hair. “The way Christmas turned out isn’t anything like what I either was afraid of or hoping for. I can’t walk, I haven’t slept in two nights, I’ve got the chills, but all in all I feel good. The crazy way this world goes. I’ll be damned if I know if it’s all chance or if it’s meant.”

“I’ll take the world either way if you’re part of it,” Val told him softly.