Christmas Stalkings Page 16

  “Oh, didn’t I mention that it was going to be a costume party? I always think costume parties are so much more festive than—er—non-costume parties. And I’d like to know what happened to my spear!” He rummaged in the closet. “Oh, there it is. It looks as if somebody had been sticking things with it If that housekeeper of yours—”

  “Don’t you dare say anything about the spear to Michelle. She’s going to be upset enough about those feathers you’ve gotten all over the bed.”

  The costume was ridiculous. Peter was ridiculous. He had looked a fool in it when he’d been young— well, younger—and still had his waistline and most of his hair. Now . . . Susan didn’t like to think of how he would appear in it. But what did she care? He probably wouldn’t look any more ridiculous than many of the others.

  “I’ve asked all the guests to dress up in the costumes of their specialties,” Peter went on. “For instance, Dr. Nestor will be an Ojibway chief and Dr. Rappaport a Mongolian tribesman. Dr. Kimmelman says she’s coming as an Egyptian of the Middle Period. I don’t know what Dr. Pastore will do—he’s a bone man, you know—but I expect he’ll think of something.”

  “He could come as a fossil,” Susan suggested. “Which means he can just come as he is. What is Mr. Zimwi going to come as? Some sort of native garb? Which wouldn’t exactly be a costume, would it?”

  There was a pause. “He’s coming as Santa Claus,” Peter said.

  She thought she must have heard wrong. “You mean he’s going as some mythological Mazigazian figure with a similar name? Or a similar function?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “You don’t mean he’s coming as our Santa Claus, old Saint Nick, red suit, bag of gifts, ho, ho, ho? You don’t mean that.”

  Peter said he did mean it. “Ever since his days at missionary school, Matthew told me, he’s dreamed of being Santa Claus at a Christmas party but he never had the chance before. You’ll have to admit he’s the right shape for it. Strange, isn’t it, that obesity, which is otherwise regarded by Americans as equivalent to, say, leprosy or pediculosis, is considered not only acceptable but endearing when it comes to Santa Claus? Now among the Magugu of Lower Gambogia—”

  “Forget the Magugu. You’re not going to stand there and tell me that Mr. Zimwi is going to be Santa Claus at this party of yours?”

  “Why not?”

  Susan was shocked. How dared the Monster of Mazigaziland dream of impersonating one of this culture’s most cherished icons? And how dared Peter abet him in this act of sacrilege? She had been wrong to think that once Matthew Zimwi was deposed, he was powerless to commit any more significant atrocities. It would be the greatest atrocity of all if he were allowed to go through with this. That was when she decided that, holidays or no holidays, it was her moral duty to put an end to Matthew Zimwi.

  Ever since the renovations on the building had begun, Susan had dropped in from time to time to keep an eye on things, more to establish her authority than in the mistaken belief that this would expedite the proceedings. Now she’d started coming in almost every day. “I am not going to let Mr. Zimwi’s presence affect the work on the building,” she told Peter. “I’m anxious that as much as possible gets done before the holidays, and, if it incommodes Mr. Zimwi—or the Foundation—that’s too bad.”

  “It won’t incommode him. In fact, I’m sure he’d be delighted to see you if you stopped by for a chat. He has to stay shut up in the apartment while the workmen are around, and it’s pretty lonely now that his bodyguards have quit. He has nothing to do but sit and watch television.”

  Almost, Susan thought, Zimwi was paying for his sins.

  “Dr. Froehlich and I both drop in whenever we can,” Peter added, “but we’re very busy with the preparations for the party, and, of course, with the Foundation’s work.”

  “Oh, his bodyguards have quit, have they?” She could have coped with bodyguards, but this would make things much easier.

  “I told him that in this country you’re not allowed to kick your employees, but I couldn’t get the concept across. I’ve been trying to get replacements, but it’s very difficult this time of the year, when bodyguards are so much in demand, what with all the parties and meetings and demonstrations. If worst comes to worst, we’ll just have to make do with the regular security guards we’ve always laid on for the occasion. They’ll stay downstairs, so he won’t have a chance to—”

  “Impress them with his cultural differences?” Susan suggested.

  “If you like to put it that way. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s Foundation work to be done.”

  Peter went off in the direction of his office, which was on the second floor. As soon as the door had closed behind him, Susan nipped up to the third floor. The apartment did not occupy the whole of that floor. On the other side of the hallway that bisected it was a large room which the previous owner had planned to use for the overflow of exhibits from his art gallery, a project cut short by his untimely death. Susan had not made it available to the Foundation because she felt that two floors were quite sufficient for the Foundation’s purposes. In fact, two floors were more than enough for its purposes, which, as far as she could see, were to keep Peter happy and occupied. Sometimes she wondered why it was necessary to keep Peter happy and occupied. She was beginning to wonder why it was necessary to keep Peter at all.

  Although Peter had never gone to the extent of formally taking possession of the room, little by little he had moved in some pottery here, some shrunken heads there, until most of his collections were stacked in heaps against the wall. “Just temporary,” he kept assuring her, “until I’ve arranged suitably secure display cabinets for them. They’re much too valuable to put down in the basement. Not as valuable as those paintings of yours, of course, at least not in monetary terms, but to an anthropologist they’re priceless.”

  Susan hadn’t really objected to his commandeering the room, but she had spoken out on the subject of the Zimwi tapestry. Actually it wasn’t a tapestry but a loosely woven hanging made of a variety of native materials and depicting a variety of natives engaged in gross activities. It offended her from both an aesthetic and a moral standpoint. Also, even after all this time, it smelled. “Why did you have to put it up there? Why not in your offices?”

  “It’s the only wall space large enough to accommodate it.”

  “The wall isn’t large enough to accommodate it. You’ve had to hang it over the door.”

  “That was deliberate,” said Peter. “By concealing the fact that there is a door, I’ve put temptation out of the way of my colleagues. There are archaeologists wandering about the place all the time and, although I am sorry to have to say this, some of them are very light-fingered. Once you start robbing tombs, you’re capable of anything. I know the door is always kept locked, but some of those fellows are adept lock-pickers.”

  The lock presented no obstacle to Susan because, as owner of the building, she possessed keys to all the doors, including the little one in the rear that opened onto the back stairs. Her idea was to come into the room via the back door, open the front door, shoot Zimwi through his own hanging—a. bit of poetic justice there—then depart via the back stairs.

  First she examined the hanging from the back to see whether its interstices would be large enough for her to both see and shoot through. She didn’t think they would suffice, so she came around to the front to see if it would be possible to enlarge some of the openings into out-and-out holes without making the alterations too noticeable.

  Suddenly the floor behind her seemed to shake and she heard a rumbling sound. She turned. There stood Matthew Zimwi in the considerable flesh. He had, Susan thought, gained weight; she would judge him now to be at least four hundred pounds on the hoof. He also seemed to have grown; he looked more like ten feet tall rather than a simple six feet six, but that could be her imagination. In his bright-yellow silk robe, which she took at first to be some sort of ceremonial attire, then recognized as a dressing gown, he
was an awesome sight.

  “Dr. Froehlich,” he said, “I am most displeased.”

  “Dr. Froehlich!” she repeated angrily. “I am not—” Susan bit off the disclaimer she was about to make. No doubt to him all white women looked alike. Let him take her for Dr. Froehlich. Then Peter need never know she’d been snooping around up here.

  “Why are you displeased, Mr. Zimwi?” she asked, trying to make her voice dulcet and Froehlich-like. “Isn’t everything to your satisfaction?”

  “Nothing is to my satisfaction. There is no one to attend to my needs. I am forced to draw my own bath and dress myself. The food is bad. There is no more whiskey. And I was promised women.” He looked at Susan appraisingly. “Young women. I am very disappointed in Dr. Franklin. Very disappointed, indeed.”

  “Dr. Franklin will be sorry to hear that. I’m sure he has done his best”

  “I am sure he has not. He thinks that because I am no longer in power, I am of no account, but Matthew Zimwi will always be of account. Tell him that.”

  “I’ll give Dr. Franklin your message,” she said, showing all her teeth in an approximation of the Froehlich simper.

  He turned and waddled away without so much as a thank-you. Pig, she thought

  That evening when she and Peter were having a simple dinner for two at the Quilted Qiraffe, he told her about the arrangements he had made for the party. He was very proud of them. “The guests will be arriving at eight and there will be food and music and general jollification.”

  “Music?” Music was always good for drowning out the sound of a shot. “Will there be dancing?”

  “Yes, anthropologists are particularly fond of dancing. They spend so much of their time observing, they welcome a chance to participate in their own tribal steps. Just records, of course. Nothing extravagant.”

  “Just records!” Susan was outraged. “I don’t want to encourage you into extravagance, but you don’t want to go too far in the other direction. How would it look for a party at the Melville Foundation to have canned music? Chintzy! No, you must have an orchestra, Peter—a good loud one with plenty of percussion. And how many guests did you say you were having?”

  “Fifty, well, maybe sixty. Since there’s going to be a buffet rather than a sit-down dinner, I figured I could keep the guest list flexible.”

  It would be impractical, she had realized, for her to retreat to her basement lair after she had polished off Zimwi, because the police were likely to search the whole place; they were always so officious after a murder. She would have to wear a costume and disappear into the crowd of guests, in which case the bigger the crowd, the better. “Have a hundred,” she said. “A hundred’s such a nice round number.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” he said. “Well, a hundred it shall be.”

  “Will Mr. Zimwi be dressed as Santa Claus on the receiving line?”

  “No, as I’ve said, this will be quite informal. Besides, I don’t want to spoil the surprise. There isn’t going to be a receiving line. In fact, he won’t make his appearance until it’s time for Santa Claus to arrive— around nine or so. I’ll come down first, make a short speech, and tell the guests of the treat they have in store, after which Dr. Froehlich has planned to play a few bars of stirring music on the piano. However, if there’s to be an orchestra, then the orchestra will give him a fanfare and play a march, possibly the national anthem of Mazigaziland, provided they can learn it at such short notice. Matthew will make his entrance and make another speech, which I hope will be equally short. Like most dictators, he does tend to be rather long-winded, since he’s used to a captive audience. After that, he will join in the festivities. What do you think?”

  “It sounds very . . . well-planned.”

  “You seem to be taking quite an interest. Are you sure you don’t want to act as hostess after all? It’s always been a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, you know.”

  After which they had their short exchange on the subject of wild horses and he returned to the Foundation while she went to the apartment to ponder on her choice of costume.

  Susan decided to go as Annie Oakley. That way she could carry her gun openly in the holster; otherwise she’d need to wear a costume that included a handbag, and the only one she could think of was a suffragette, which she didn’t much care for. She had a happy thought. She would provide herself with a water pistol. On her way back from the shoot she would substitute it for the real gun, just in case the police got snoopy. It was these little details, she thought, that really counted.

  Now it was Christmas Eve, and so far everything had gone smoothly. At half past eight, Susan started putting on her costume. At a quarter to nine, she unlocked the door of her retreat and emerged into the main body of the basement. Above her she could hear the strains of music and what sounded like a herd of cattle stampeding. No need for her to move quietly; she could have fired off a cannon down there and no one would hear.

  She opened the door to the back stairs and recoiled as her nose was hit by a pungent odor of cooking. Obviously Glorious Foods had not been engaged to do the catering. The door to the kitchen stood open, and she could hear voices. She hesitated. She had not counted on having to pass an open door. If anyone inside looked out, she told herself, all they would see was an errant guest. If they accosted her, she would identify herself, say she had come to surprise Peter, and go out and join the party; then either try to sneak up the back stairs from the second floor or give up her plans entirely.

  If, however, the denizens of the kitchen merely observed her passing, but made no move to stop or speak to her, she would proceed with her plans, bearing in mind that later they might remember having seen a guest where no guest should have been. Pity she hadn’t had a contingency costume to change into, but really she couldn’t be expected to think of everything.

  The contingency didn’t arise. When Susan tiptoed past the kitchen, the people inside, glimpsed only hazily through clouds of steam, were so engaged in argument that they would not, she fancied, have noticed a troupe of orangutans tap-dancing their way upstairs.

  The door to the second floor was shut, as it should have been. She climbed to the third floor, opened the door to the back hall, and unlocked the back door to the big room. She crossed the room and unlocked the door behind the hanging.

  By this time, Susan figured, Peter should be in the apartment with Zimwi, helping him put on his Santa suit. She listened, but all she could hear was the distant strains of the orchestra. Then, over the music, she could hear the clomp, clomp of footsteps coming closer. According to plan, this should be Peter, but it sounded more like Frankenstein’s monster. Through the holes in the hanging she could see a figure approaching. But it was the wrong figure. Instead of pallid white skin with feathers, red plush with whiskers. Santa Claus was coming first. They must have changed the order. Why? Didn’t Zimwi want Peter to introduce him? Didn’t Peter want to introduce Zimwi? Had something happened to Peter? Had Zimwi, in a fit of pique at the inadequacy of the hospitality offered him, done something violent to Peter?

  She would worry about Peter later. Right now she must act fast or miss her chance of cutting Zimwi down before he got out of range. She lifted her gun, aimed it, and hesitated. There was something wrong with Santa Claus as Santa Claus. He seemed strangely shrunken. The red plush hung around him in great flopping folds. Pillows had been pushed inside in an effort to remedy his lack of girth; instead, they called attention to their presence by slipping and sliding in a manner that was almost obscene. Could Matthew Zimwi have lost a couple of hundred pounds in the last two days? But that wouldn’t explain why his boots didn’t fit, or why the face above the white beard was equally white. And why was he wearing gold-rimmed spectacles? Matthew Zimwi did not wear gold-rimmed spectacles. Santa Claus did not wear gold-rimmed spectacles. But Peter Franklin wore gold-rimmed spectacles.

  It was Peter who was approaching in the Santa Claus suit. She did not lower her gun. What a host of problems would be removed if she
fired now. No more unwanted guests, no more intrusions on her privacy, no more screams from her manager about the Foundation’s excessive disbursements. Best of all, no more Dr. Froehlich.

  “Who’s that behind the tapestry?” Peter demanded. “Come out, I see you.”

  She had made the holes too big. But it didn’t matter. She could still shoot him, she thought, and make her escape as planned, possibly pausing at the apartment to shoot Zimwi as she left. Perhaps she could pot Dr. Froehlich on her way out and make a clean sweep.

  It was a great temptation. But the Melvilles had been brought up to resist temptation. She lowered the gun and came out from behind the hanging.

  “Susan! What on earth are you doing with that toy pistol? I hope you’re not planning to squirt me with water. If I get spots on the plush, I might not get back the full deposit for the costume.”

  “I wanted to surprise you,” she said, putting the gun in her holster with a sigh of regret.

  “It’s not like you to play such childish tricks. What if I had been Matthew?”

  “I wouldn’t have come out. I was watching through the holes in the hanging, and when I saw the Santa suit I thought at first it was Mr. Zimwi. Where is he, anyway?”

  “Dead to the world,” Peter said. “Don’t get alarmed; he’s just dead drunk. I’ve been trying to keep him sober, but somehow he got hold of a couple of bottles of whiskey—bribed one of the workmen, I wouldn’t be surprised. Can’t have Santa Claus staggering downstairs, I told him. I thought maybe we could wait and I could sober him up with a little coffee, but he kept insisting he was going to be Santa Claus right away and nobody was going to stop him. He picked up my spear. I was afraid he was going to attack me with it. Then—”

  “You tore it from his grasp?” Perhaps she had misjudged Peter.

  “Not exactly.”

  Still she gave him the benefit of the doubt “You knocked him out?”