Naughty Nine Tales of Christmas Crime (8 page)

Inside the package he found a small bottle of mouthwash, a tin of Altoids, a tube of "extra-strength super-mint" toothpaste and a brochure entitled "Overcoming Halitosis: Five Steps to a Fresher You."

Bigelow brought his hand up to his mouth, puffed into it, then sucked in deeply through his nose. Yes, O.K., maybe there was a little staleness there. But he'd had another vente latte on his way to work that morning. Surely his breath would freshen itself up over time. He didn't have halitosis—did he?

No! He wasn't going to let some anonymous peon psych him out. He was going to march out of his office and lay a serious smackdown on . . . whoever.

He started for the door, hoping a brilliant plan would form in his mind before he reached the other side. Instead, the door opened and Marcy leaned in.

"Crowley's here," she said.

Bigelow froze. "So early?"

"Well, it is after 11."

Bigelow swiveled around and hurried back to his desk. He snatched up the phone and started making calls he'd been putting off for days. When Crowley dropped by a few minutes later, Bigelow was on the line with a printer's rep.

Bigelow held up a "just-a-sec" finger as Crowley took a seat.

"Don't give me that!" Bigelow barked, even though he and the rep had been having a perfectly pleasant conversation about the weather just a moment before. "That last cover looked like mud!"

"What?" the rep said, perplexed by the sudden abuse.

"Alright then! That's better!" Bigelow slammed the phone down and shook his head. "Those Lantern Graphics guys—you have to ride their asses every step of the way. So what can I do you for, boss?"

Crowley kicked his tiny feet up on the edge of Bigelow's desk and shrugged his muscle-bound shoulders. "What's goin' on?"

Bigelow passed a hand over the clutter on his desk like one of those models on
The Price Is Right
who specialize in gesturing seductively over cars and boxes of Turtle Wax.

"Same ol' same ol," he said. "How 'bout with you?"

"I caught the new
Matrix
flick Saturday."

"Oh yeah? What did you think?"

And they were off.

This was how Bigelow really earned his salary—yakking with Crowley. Sometimes he thought it was much, much harder than a real job.

He'd known Crowley since high school, when his now-pumped up boss had been a 101 pound pipsqueak with braces and thick glasses and bad hair. The hair had never improved, but the braces and the glasses eventually went away, as did Crowley's pipsqueak status. During his college years, Crowley had discovered competition bodybuilding, and he eventually dropped out to devote himself to the "sport" full-time. He didn't get far, his crowning glory being fourth place in the Tri-State Mr. Olympus Muscle Show. But he didn't retire from competition with nothing to show for it. For one thing, he now had a body that would do Vin Diesel proud, even if his face would still send Howdy Doody running for plastic surgery. More importantly, he'd laid the foundation for his future empire by publishing a monthly newsletter called
Muscle Men
.

The newsletter's circulation grew and grew, making a particularly large jump after a marketing consultant convinced Crowley to change the name to something that didn't sound like a guide to local leather bars. So
Muscle Men
became
Muscles Now!
. It also became a magazine. And it made Crowley rich enough to start magazines devoted to the two other great loves of his life: movies and antique Mason jars. (
Jars Now!
became
Antiques Now!
after one disastrous issue.)

When Crowley's company grew large enough to require an office manager, he'd hired his old high school buddy Bigelow, who'd been handing out pictures from behind the desk at a Wal-Mart Photo Developing Center. Through a tenacious campaign of butt-kissing and back-stabbing, Bigelow had risen to circulation assistant, then circulation manager, then director of circulation and finally, after one more carefully orchestrated character assassination, director of circulation and production.

Of course, he wasn't through rising yet, as there was one more director-level position that naturally belonged on his résumé. But for every chance he got to slag off Sandberg, he had to endure 20 minutes of talk about weightlifting and a brutal
30
minutes about Mason jars. The only relief came when he and Crowley talked about movies, but even then he was hemmed in and frustrated. Once upon a time he could—and would—tell Crowley he was an idiot to think that
Return of the Jedi
was the best
Star Wars
movie and
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
was better than
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. But that had been in high school. These days, Crowley could say
Attack of the Clones
was better than
Citizen Kane
and Bigelow would have to nod thoughtfully and say, "Yeah. That lightsaber duel with Count Dooku was
sweet
."

And even that simple, if irritating, act of yes-man boot-licking seemed to be beyond Bigelow just now. As Crowley droned on and on about how many "reps" he'd managed in the gym that morning, Bigelow's mind wandered the hallways of the Now! office, stopping at the desks of his seven suspects. Five of them would be easy to deal with. They were designers and editors, mere bugs to be squashed beneath his managerial boot heel. But what if his Secret Santa was Peter Jarry, the comptroller? Maybe Jarry had noticed the charges for pay-per-view porn and room-service filet mignon that always piled up on Bigelow's bill when he went on company trips. Maybe he even knew those company trips were completely bogus, as Bigelow only insisted on doing personal press checks for
Antiques Now!
, which was printed at a plant 25 miles from Disney World.

Or perhaps it was Sandberg. He couldn't be as innocent as he appeared. His image was squeaky clean—never gossiped, worked hard, took care of his staff, blah blah blah, exactly the kind of goody two-shoes b.s. that reminded Bigelow what a fraud he himself truly was.

It had to be an act. Or maybe Sandberg had simply seen the writing on the wall, toughened up and launched a pre-emptive strike. He could be trying to throw Bigelow off, psych him out.

Well, if that was his plan, he . . . .

"Bro, are you even listening to me?"

Bigelow blinked away the pleasing vision of Sandberg roasting over a barbecue pit.

"Of course," he said. "And I couldn't agree more."

What he'd agree with, he soon found out, was that Atlas Strong Shoulder Jars might indeed replace Ball Perfect Mason Jars as the most popular fruit jar collectibles in their class. Seemingly satisfied that Bigelow would back him up on this controversial assertion, Crowley plowed on. But Bigelow had the uncomfortable feeling that the publisher was watching him closely now, looking for signs that he wasn't paying attention. Bigelow overcompensated by laughing a little too uproariously at Crowley's strained pun on the phrase "Ball Perfect" and becoming a little too incensed when his boss described attempts to pass off irradiated selenium jars as amber.

Mercifully, Crowley eventually drifted off jars and onto business. That gave Bigelow the opportunity to insert not one, not two, but three separate digs at Sandberg into the conversation before Crowley finally arose—nearly two hours after he sat down—and went off to his own office to look over dummy covers and sign checks.

Bigelow felt drained by the meeting, but he had no choice. With Crowley hanging around the rest of the day, he actually had to stay in his office and at least keep up the appearance of diligence. He made half-hearted progress on his in-box (which was more progress than he usually made), all the while trying to figure out how to strip Santa of his secret.

In the end, he could only come up with one solution. He'd always hated logic puzzles and guessing games. No one was going to tell him, and he didn't want to ask. He didn't have a spycam or a fingerprinting kit. He didn't know how to rig a grenade with a trip-wire and he wasn't sure where to get a grenade or a trip-wire even if he did.

He would have to rely on simple snooping. And with nearly everyone working extra late to hit their deadlines, that wouldn't be an option today.

So Bigelow somehow stuck it out to five o'clock, and then he went home. He took Bantha for her pre-bedtime walk at 8:30, when he was usually popping in his second DVD of the evening. He was under the covers by 9.

But though he fell asleep quickly, that horrible
Ho! Ho! Ho!
haunted his dreams, as did a giant bottle of Scope that lumbered after him like Frankenstein's monster, chasing him through one Starbucks after another.

When the alarm went off at 5 a.m., he felt like he hadn't slept at all.

Thursday, December 18

It was a new experience for Bigelow—being the first one at work. He didn't like it. The office was quiet and dark, not the bright, bustling place where people other than himself were always hustling to and fro accomplishing things. The stillness was something he couldn't quite accept, and he moved through the hallways half-expecting someone to pop out of the shadows and shout, "Bigelow! What the hell are you doing here?"

But he managed a smile when he stepped into his office. There was no gift on his desk. He was the one Ho! Ho! Ho!-ing now. Whoever his Secret Santa was, he'd beat him in that morning. And now Santa was about to see who had the real claws.

Jarry's office was the closest, so Bigelow started there. It took him 10 minutes to go through every desk drawer and filing cabinet. He found nothing more incriminating than a shot glass and a bottle of Jim Beam. They wouldn't help him solve his mystery, but they were illuminating discoveries nonetheless. Bigelow began to wonder why he'd never done this before.

Chris McCoy, the editor of
DVD Now!
, was next. His cubicle posed more of a challenge, as it was overflowing with proofs and plastic sleeves stuffed with slides. Bigelow was careful not to get anything out of order, for though McCoy's work area looked like utter chaos, his magazine never missed a deadline, and Bigelow had to assume there was some kind of system involved even if it escaped his powers of detection.

He found a stash of snacks in one drawer, and he reached in and pulled out a variety pack of Quaker Oats granola bars. He'd been so anxious to get to the office, he hadn't stopped off for coffee and doughnuts that morning, and all this sneaking around was making him hungry. He sorted through the granola bars until he found what he was looking for—a S'mores bar. He took one and then, after a moment's reflection, a Chocolate Chip and a Cookies'n'Cream for later. Then he started to put the box back.

He stopped, suddenly gripping the box so hard one corner caved in. In the drawer was a small, folded slip of white paper that had been buried underneath the granola bars. It looked just like the one he'd pulled out of Marcy's Santa hat the week before. Bigelow picked it up and unfolded it. Written on it were two words.

"JOYCE STARR."

Bigelow grinned. He was down to six suspects now. And he knew exactly which one he wanted to focus on next. He put the slip of paper and the granola bars back in place, then he headed to the office of Alex Sandberg.

Which was locked. It was such a shock to Bigelow he stood there jiggling the door handle for half a minute before he finally accepted the infuriating fact of it. He stood there a while longer, staring through the glass at Sandberg's desk like a Victorian waif pressing his soot-covered nose against a pastry shop window.

What kind of paranoid jerk locks his office door? What did Sandberg have to be worried about? What did he have to hide?

Bigelow gave the door a kick before moving on to the cubicle of
DVD Now!
's art director, Tom or Tim Somebody. Bigelow barely knew the guy, usually thinking of him only as "the designer with the pierced nose" . . . when he thought of him at all. He couldn't imagine Tom or Tim hating him as much as his Secret Santa obviously did, and he stopped his snooping mid-drawer to return to Sandberg's office and squander a few more seconds struggling with the door-handle. When he went back to Tom/Tim's desk, he resumed his searching without enthusiasm, certain now that the answers he sought were on the other side of that locked door.

Pierced Nose Guy's cube yielded nothing of use, though Bigelow had been reminded of his name, having seen it on a credit card bill he'd come across: Todd Hubble. He also discovered that Todd owed MasterCard $539.32, and that $142 of it was going to "The Hottie Hook-Up Hotline." That discovery should've brought Bigelow some kind of twisted chuckle, but it didn't. He couldn't stop thinking about what he might find in
Sandberg's
desk, and everything else now seemed like a waste of time.

He was able to eliminate another suspect when he moved on to the next cubicle, this one belonging to
DVD Now!
's associate editor, whom Bigelow knew as Curt the Kid with Freckles. Tucked away behind a stack of reference books was a bar of pink soap-on-a-rope shaped like a Teletubby. A red ribbon had been taped to the package.

It was a lame gift, but not an evil one. And there was no HO! HO! HO! wrapping paper in sight.

So Freckled Curt was off the hook, and there were still two more cubes to go. Bigelow began putting the soap and books back in place.

"Yo, Curt!" a voice called out. "You made it in pretty . . . oh."

Bigelow spun around to find Chris McCoy standing behind him, a look of embarrassed shock on his face.

"I came in early and I wanted to take a look at the proof of your masthead but I couldn't find it so I went looking for it but I still don't know where it is so maybe you'll go get it for me because there's just one little thing I need to check," Bigelow said, the syllables coming out so fast and choked-throat-guttural they almost sounded like one impossibly long German word.

Bigelow watched McCoy's gaze move from his face to the mess on Freckle Boy's desk to the granola bars bulging out of his pocket and finally to something just below his mouth. Bigelow reached up and felt a smudge of half-melted S'more chocolate on his lower lip.