NAUGHTY.

Nine Tales of Christmas Crime.

by Steve Hockensmith.

INTRODUCTION.

Reading this collection, you might get the impression that I don't like Christmas. Murder, robbery, drugs, desperation-it's not very holly jolly, is it? But the truth is I love Christmas! It's my favorite time of year. That's why I keep dragging it through the mud of human degradation. There's no season I'd rather write about.

Well, that's not the only reason I've written about Christmas so often. To be honest, if Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k Mystery Magazine had annual Arbor Day issues, you might be reading The Roots of All Evil: Nine Tales of Woodland Crime. Once upon a time, you see, I wrote quite a bit for EQMM and AHMM, and I learned something useful: Come May or June, when they're starting to put together their holiday issues, it's not a bad idea to shoot a Christmas story their way. Not a bad idea at all.

Every tale in this collection originally appeared in either Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k, in fact. The first to be published was "I Killed Santa Claus," which popped up in EQMM 10 years ago. (I'm going out of my way to mention that to establish that the story predates both the current ubiquity of cell phones and the film Bad Santa. So there. No sniping on those fronts, if you please.) The latest (and best, in my opinion) is "Hidden Gifts," which appeared in EQMM in late 2007. I haven't written a Christmas story since then. I simply haven't had time.

The desire, though-that I've had. I still dearly love the sound of jingle bells and Christmas carols and snow crunching underfoot. Yet whenever I hear them now, I want to mix in distant sirens and screams and gunfire.

And laughter. Yours, I hope. The characters you're about to encounter might not be having happy holidays themselves, but I certainly hope yours are a little merrier for having met them.

Steve Hockensmith.

Alameda, Calif.

November 2010.

FRUITCAKE.

Ethel Queenan decided on murder when she saw Connie Sandrelli sitting on Santa's lap.

Connie was an attractive woman, if you were one of those wolves who goes in for loose blouses and tight slacks and lots of hair. And she was a young woman-just sixty-five. Ever since she moved into the Always Sunny Trailer Park in Clearwater, Florida, the men there had been falling all over each other to drive her to the grocery store, show her how to play shuffleboard, mow the lawn around her mobile home, whatever she wanted whenever she snapped her relatively wrinkle-free, non-arthritic fingers.

The problem was, there weren't enough men to go around. Each year, five or six Always Sunny wives became Always Sunny widows, while the husband-to-widower conversion rate was much slower. As a result, the compet.i.tion for available men was fierce. And Santa belonged to Ethel-whether he liked it or not.

Ethel's husband Ralph had pa.s.sed two years before. He died the way he'd lived-cursing and drunk. Enraged by a fourth-quarter fumble during an Indiana University football game, he threw his beer at the television, then kicked in the screen when a Kentucky linebacker ran the ball in for a touchdown. A lightning bolt of electricity ran up his Reebok and flash-fried Ralph Queenan where he stood.

Ethel considered her husband a martyr to Indiana collegiate athletics and even wrote the president of the university asking him to name a hall or a scholarship after Ralph. She never received a response. That made her so mad she threw every one of their Indiana University sweatshirts and jackets and baseball caps and plastic cups and commemorative coins and Christmas tree ornaments into Ralph's Weber grill, doused the mound with an entire can of lighter fluid and tossed in a lit match.

The resulting burst of flame singed off her eyebrows and set her neighbor's lemon tree on fire. The trailer park smelled like scorched lemon meringue pie for a month.

Despite her devotion to Ralph's memory, Ethel had been not-so-patiently waiting to replace her husband from the moment the paramedics carted away his charbroiled carca.s.s. She'd watched with growing fury as other widows-hussies, all of them, even the ones she'd once considered friends-s.n.a.t.c.hed up each new widower as soon as he came on the market.

Ethel was at a temporary disadvantage, having no eyebrows and all. But even after they grew back bushier than ever, romance continued to bloom for others, not for her. She finally took a stand, rising up at a Fourth of July barbecue to declare, "I've waited long enough! The next single man in this park is mine! Mine!"

"The next single man" turned out to be Bud Schmidt, a retired postal worker from Duluth, Minnesota. He wasn't Ethel's type. With his pale skin and concave chest and bulbous gut balanced on spindly little legs, he looked nothing whatsoever like her dream man, Ricardo Montalban. But he fit her number-one requirement well enough: He was still breathing.

There are many unwritten laws in Florida's retiree-packed trailer parks and condo a.s.sociations, and one of them is the four-week rule-a month-long moratorium on courting a widow or widower after the Dearly Departed has been laid to rest. Ethel made her move on Bud the day after his wife died.

First, she brought him a cake. The next day, she brought him Jell-O salad. The day after that, it was tuna ca.s.serole. And on the fourth day, she pulled out the big guns, making her intentions clear to one and all: She brought Bud Schmidt a baked ham.

All of Always Sunny was soon abuzz about Ethel's scandalous behavior. Whenever she walked by, the men cracked wise, shouting out things like "Hey, Ethel-just so's you know, I'm a meatloaf man myself!" The women, on the other hand, would stop talking altogether, letting her pa.s.s by as silently as a snake slithering across the road.

It bothered Ethel, but it didn't stop her. Only one person's opinion mattered. And when she dropped by Bud's mobile home with a new dish every day, he seemed . . . well, not exactly pleased, but not displeased, either. He would just smile, thank her politely and shut his door without saying the words Ethel longed to hear: "Why don't you come on in and help me eat this?" The only thing that ever changed was the size of Bud's gut, which was slowly growing from a cute little pot into a fifty-gallon tub, and Ethel's every outing ended the same way: with her shuffling back to her trailer to leaf through her Betty Crocker cookbook in search of the magic recipe that would convince The Chosen One's stomach to say "open sesame" to his heart.

Ethel had worked all the way through the Meats and Poultry sections and was just making her first cautious foray into the hitherto uncharted realm of Fish & Sh.e.l.lfish when Connie Sandrelli came on the scene. She was a widow from Rhode Island. She was alone. She was pretty. And, much worse, she could cook.

Chicken cacciatore. Eggplant pasta torte. Risotto. Gnocchi. Ravioli. It was a far cry from the fried chicken and chili mac and pigs in blankets that had, till then, been the backbone of Always Sunny's weekly pot-luck dinners.

Ethel found Connie's strange, gloppy-looking contributions pretentious, disquieting, unwholesome. Yet everyone else oohed and ahhed and asked for more. Especially the men. Especially the man. Bud.

"Mighty good," he said to Connie as he scooped up his third helping of lasagna in Always Sunny's "recreation hall." "My. Teee. Good."

"Why, thank you, Bud," Connie said. "I've got a whole other pan back in my trailer. I'll bring you over a plate tomorrow, if you like."

"Dandy. Dannn. Dee."

Ethel overheard it all, thanks to a hearing aid turned up so high she could make out the wet, s...o...b..ry mastication of baked beans and cole slaw twenty feet off. She'd been lingering at the food table, hovering over the untouched salmon loaf she'd brought to the pot-luck. It hadn't turned out at all like the picture in the cookbook, that loaf. It looked like a roll of fibergla.s.s insulation coated in gravel.

Betty Crocker had let her down. Life was letting her down.

And Connie Sandrelli-she'd crossed her.

The woman should've done some research, asked around, respected seniority. But no. Connie had jumped Ethel's claim. Soon she was bringing Bud new food nearly every day: cioppino and baked ziti and all kinds of supposedly Italian food that Ethel had never seen in a Chef Boyardee can.

Ethel retaliated by upgrading to a more expensive cookbook.

Bud's bulging stomach went from tub to barrel.

The culinary brawl raged for weeks with no clear victor. Always Sunny's oddsmakers pegged the outcome as even money: Connie had youth and looks on her side, Ethel had raw determination.

The Christmas party changed everything. As always, it was the highlight of the trailer park's social calendar. Everyone gathered in the rec hall for caroling and eggnog and presents. And Santa Claus, of course.

It was obvious who should suit up as St. Nick. There was only one man in the park whose belly really did shake like jelly when he laughed.

So an hour into the party, Bud Schmidt ho-ho-hoed his way through the door in the park's ancient red suit and cotton ball beard. And he wasn't alone. Santa Claus had a helper this year. Connie Sandrelli.

She was wearing a Santa hat and black boots and a red frock that didn't quite reach her knees. Ethel thought she looked like an elf hooker. She was helping Bud hand out all the dime store gifts in his sack. She even brought one to a fuming Ethel.

Connie smiled as she handed Ethel the little brightly wrapped package, but all Ethel saw were fangs. She didn't bother to open the gift. She wrapped it in her paper napkin and left it sitting next to her plate like something unpleasant she'd picked out of her food.

And then, the presents distributed, Santa took his place on his "throne"-a metal folding chair at the front of the hall.

"Ho ho ho! Who wants to come and sit on Santa's knee?" He turned to Connie. "How about my little elf first?"

Connie hesitated, blushing.

"Come on!" Bud patted his lap. "Come here and tell old Santa what you want for Christmas!"

There were shouts from the audience-"Yeah!" and "Go, Connie!" and "Ignore that dirty old man!" Ethel barely fought back the urge to screech "Don't you dare, you cheap floozy!"

Connie grinned at the crowd for a moment before taking her place on Santa's lap. There were a few cheers.

"So what can Santa Claus pull out of his sack for you, little girl?" Bud boomed.

Connie whispered in his ear.

Bud waggled his eyebrows and gave out a hearty "Ho ho hoooo!" And then he kissed her.

Some people laughed. Some people applauded. And one person walked out of the room, went to her trailer and began plotting Connie Sandrelli's demise.

Ethel scoured her trailer for instruments of death. Soon she had a.s.sembled on her kitchen table a pistol (for shooting), a steak knife and knitting needles (for stabbing), a hammer and a scorched bust of former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight (for bludgeoning), a pillow and a plastic Winn-Dixie bag (for smothering), a toaster (for dropping into a water-filled bathtub) and a fruitcake (for eating-Ethel was hungry).

The pistol wouldn't work because Ethel couldn't find any bullets: Ralph had hidden them somewhere, though he refused to explain why. He just said it was "a precaution." The steak knife, knitting needles, hammer, bust, pillow and bag were out due to Ethel's arthritis. Some nights, she could barely get her dentures out. A life-or-death struggle with a woman five years her junior definitely seemed like a bad idea.

That left the toaster. Ethel sat at the table for fifteen minutes, chewing on her fruitcake, running various scenarios through her mind. But no matter how she imagined it, she couldn't quite see a toaster attack panning out. She'd have to wait until Connie was taking a bath, break into her trailer, creep into the bathroom and plug the toaster in without being noticed-and then hope that the electrical cord was long enough to reach the tub.

No, she needed something easier. Something less risky. More sneaky.

She took another bite of fruitcake. Her false teeth clamped down hard on something brittle. It crunched. She cursed.

The cake had come from the grocery store, that was the problem. Those big chains put all kinds of crazy things in their fruitcakes-candy and cherries and whatnot. You never knew what you were going to bite into.

Ethel stopped chewing.

Her chief weapon in the war for Bud Schmidt had been food. Why change strategy now?

The next day, she baked a fruitcake.

Ethel Queenan's Christmas Surprise Fruitcake

1 cup diced candied orange peel

1 cup diced candied lemon peel.

2 cups diced citron.

3 cups raisins, chopped

1/2 cup two-year-old leftover red wine from back of fridge

1/2 cup amaretto (because brandy is too expensive and what's the difference, really?)

1/2 cup peppermint schnapps (because it's been sitting around forever so why not use it?)

3 cups flour

3 teaspoons cinnamon

6 teaspoons nutmeg