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.
Fallen
by Joan Druett
There had most surely been a lot of death on the old Nantucket whaleship Paths of Duty.
It all began when the second mate dropped dead.
Two hours earlier, the lookout’s sharp eyes had glimpsed a pod of whales just after the sun had risen, though the light was glittering blindingly on the surface of the mid-Atlantic sea. “There blows!” he’d howled, and the decks of the small and elderly Nantucket whaleship Paths of Duty came alive with excitement. Captain Smith raced to the highest part of the mainmast, took a long look through his spyglass, and then came racing down again, bawling orders for the four whaleboats to be lowered.
Wiki Coffin, who belonged to the second mate’s boat, went to the waist deck, where that particular whaleboat hung in the davits, and within seconds was joined by the other three oarsmen of the second mate’s boat’s crew. With no more than a nod and a grunt, the second mate hurried up and jumped into the boat while it was still swinging, quickly followed by his harpooner, a Portuguese from the islands of the Azores, far off the coast of Portugal. His name was Miguel Dalgardo, and he was new to the crew, having been shipped at Fayal, three weeks before. Wiki and the remaining three lowered the boat into the sea, and when it hit the waves they jumped down into it and took up their oars.
The second mate was also new to the ship, having been shipped at Fayal at the same time as Miguel. The old hands watched him warily, because this was the first time they had raised whales since he had come on board, and as he was over sixty, far too old for the whaling trade, they fully expected him to let them down. However, he stood like a gnarled warrior at his great steering oar as he sang out encouragement, and the boat pulsed on toward the spouting whales.