By Albert Tucher
“So Clemson never told you about his Santa gig?” Detective Tillotson asked.
“Well, I hadn’t seen him in a couple of months.”
Tillotson’s visits had a script. He wore a groove into his chair at her kitchen table, while she poured coffee into him and told him what he needed to know. He also spoke up for her with other cops all over the far north of New Jersey, but she never saw that part.
Tillotson’s visits had a script. He wore a groove into his chair at her kitchen table, while she poured coffee into him and told him what he needed to know. He also spoke up for her with other cops all over the far north of New Jersey, but she never saw that part.
Diana carried the pot from the gas range to the table and refilled his cup for the fourth time. Someday she hoped to discover his upper limit.
“But maybe there are things a guy won’t even tell a hooker,” she said as she took her seat across from Tillotson. “His coke habit, stealing from his clients, prison time, those he’ll talk about. But not playing Santa.”
“How about his clients?”
“You’re thinking one of them killed him?”
“Ponzi schemes tend to piss people off. And the killer was definitely pissed. Three shots to the face, all up close and personal. In his mall Santa suit, no less.”
“That’s cold. He didn’t change out of it after work?”
“We learned he was heading to a private party.”
“Anyway, he didn’t talk about the clients. Professional ethics, I guess.”
She paused.
“Which, when you think about it, is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever said.”
Tillotson didn’t comment, for which she owed him. It made her feel worse she had nothing for him.
“What does his wife say?” she asked.
“Not much. Being married to him taught her to shut up with the cops.”
“So she’s still a suspect.”
“Definitely.”
He put his cup down and studied her.
“I know that Jersey girl look of yours. Don’t go looking for trouble. Just keep your eyes and ears open.”
“You know me.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
***
The Lexus turned left into a parking space, cutting off Diana’s route to her Taurus. A woman climbed out of the driver’s seat and approached.
In Diana’s experience, two kinds of women haunted motel lots—hookers and wives. The wives came in two flavors—cheating and vengeful.
A woman in a luxury car was a wife, but which kind?
The fifty-ish brunette would turn her share of heads. Diana sometimes wondered about clients married to women like this, but she didn’t wonder too hard. It might jinx her business.
“I’m Miriam Clemson. Do you have time for coffee?”
Diana didn’t, really, but she also didn’t have it in her to turn down the naked appeal on the woman’s face.
“Okay.”
She led the way to the coffee shop attached to the King Motel. Diana had always bypassed it before. Hookers didn’t hang around after a date.
“Seat yourself,” read the sign at the register. Diana chose a booth away from the plate-glass window. The woman slid in across from her. Miriam had about three inches on Diana’s five feet five, but seated she looked no taller.
A tired waitress poured coffee without asking, and left.
“Now I don’t know where to start,” said Miriam from her side of the booth.
She ignored her coffee and started twisting her paper napkin. Diana decided to encourage her with a question she needed answered anyway.
“You know who I am. How does that happen?”
“I had you checked out. You have a good reputation.”
This wasn’t the first time a wife had vetted her and let her go about her business.
“I’m sounding like my marriage was a business partnership, which I guess it was. Not that I was involved in what sent him to prison. But we raised our daughter and lived our lives.”
“You’re getting by. Financially, I mean.”
“I’m a physician. My practice keeps us going.”
“You’ve stuck with him.”
“I don’t know why. No, that’s wrong. I didn’t know to begin with. I do now.”
Diana waited.
“Everybody I knew told me to divorce him and move on. But I realize now I was hoping he would come out changed. And he did. That’s the amazing thing. You probably noticed he hadn’t called you in a while.”
“There can be lots of reasons for that.”
The woman smiled.
“What do you charge?”
“Two-fifty an hour. Why?”
“I’m guessing men talk to you about things they can’t tell anyone else.”
“That’s true.”
“And here I am doing it. I should write you a check.”
“Since we’re guessing—he did the Santa Claus thing to show your daughter he was different?”
“She’s long past believing in Santa, but she understood the gesture. He would never have done it before.”
Miriam closed her eyes, but the tears squeezed out.
“I was getting my husband back. And just realizing that I wanted him, when somebody took him away again.”
Diana glanced at her watch. She had a three P.M. date at the Savoy Motel, two miles south, back toward her cozy rented Cape Cod home in Driscoll. Time to go. She slid out of the booth and looked down at Miriam.
“So you didn’t kill him.”
Miriam didn’t seem to hear.
***
Diana arrived five minutes late. Sussex County was mostly bedroom communities now, except for her declining hometown of Driscoll. The biggest clue to the area’s rural past was its network of inadequate two-lane highways. This time of year everyone hit them at once.
The coffee shop conversation kept playing in her mind as she parked and climbed out of her Taurus. She couldn’t let that go on, because the clients paid her to listen as well as go through the motions. This next man demanded a lot of her attention. He always spent five minutes on top of her, leaving the rest of the hour for complaining.
“I fucking hate this time of year.”
“Winter?”
“Christmas,” he said. “I’d hate it if they put it in July.”
He turned on his side and reached out to stroke her dark blonde hair. His hand kept going down her naked back. He often commented on her tawny coloring, but today his holiday grievance preempted everything.
“What’s your take?”
“Christmas is my busy season.”
“No shit.”
“Sometimes it feels like I break even on Black Friday. And then I work every day for the rest of the year.”
“Wait, including Christmas Day?”
“Some guys have nobody but me.”
“You just made my point for me. Ever seen Christmas make anybody happy?”
“Well, kids waiting in line for Santa.”
“Take a closer look sometime. Christmas is Ground Zero for misery.”
The phrase started rolling around Diana’s brain like a pinball. As soon as she got home, she called Tillotson.
“I’ve been thinking.”
It was what he wanted to hear, even if it came a little late this time.
“I’ll be over,” he said.
Soon he was sipping coffee. Some people might object to a cop showing up at a hooker's home all hours of the day or night, but that was their problem.
“Any of his clients pan out?” she asked.
“We cleared them all.”
“The wife, too. I talked to her.”
“You did?”
His look said they would discuss that later.
“So,” she said, “what if the problem wasn’t Jack Clemons? What if it was Santa Claus?”
She told him about her last client.
“You think this guy did it?”
“No, but he got me thinking. Suppose the holiday cheer made somebody snap and take it out on the nearest Santa.”
“Meaning at the mall.”
He gave her a look she had seen many times, the one that said she might be right, and he hated it.
“It fits the evidence.”
“And if I’m right, he might not even be done.”
“Great. What the hell do we do about that?”
“Could you put a cop in there? You know, a decoy.”
“That’s a tough sell to the brass.”
His cell phone rang. She watched his face, and a gut punch of adrenaline told her what he was hearing. He disconnected and looked at her.
“I guess it just got easier,” she said.
