The Case Before Christmas: Chapter XIX

"You know," Ben said, "I am honestly really glad that you said that. I was starting to suspect that you might have been covering up some sort of conspiracy, but that really puts my mind to rest."

"Ben," said Hugh.

"Not now, Hugh. You see, I was stabbed a few times today, so my mind isn't working quite perfectly, and I guess because of that I'd actually managed to convince myself that something was going on."

"Ben."

"Shhh. As I was saying, I had suspicions up the wall, and I wasn't far off making some sort of statement about it. Nothing too forward, perhaps just a subtle circumulocutious query on a monogrammed card to be mailed back at your convenience, but I definitely would have -"

"He's telling us he masterminded a conspiracy."

"What? No he isn't, he's saying exactly the opposite."

"Yeah, but he's saying it so precisely that he's actually suggesting the opposite."

"What do you mean? I specify the things I'm not doing all the time."
"And people tend to avoid you."
"I put people at ease! Nobody ever thinks I'm poisoning their drinks or hiding razors in their food after I offer it to them!"

"People switch their dishes with you as soon as you're out of the room!"
"If it helps," Hogart said helpfully, "I am hiding something."
"So by your logic, he clearly isn't hiding anything," Ben said, waving an irritated arm at the mayoral mystery sitting opposite them.

"That time, I'm pretty sure he was being straightforward," Hugh responded, his patience truly awe-inspiring.

"Make up your mind!" Ben retorted in turn.

"If I were in a position where I was unable to say anything without fear of immediate stabbing," Hogart interjected, choosing his words carefully, "I would certainly wish you to stop with this babble and attend to the significant gaps in my conversation."

"It's lucky that's not an issue, then," Ben said, followed shortly by "Oh, you mean-"

"I also am glad," Hugh responded, hand clenched firmly betwixt Ben's moving lips, "that no such difficulty besets us. After all, how could any potentially-listening relatives possibly hear us?"

"Indeed," Hogart replied. "There are certainly no secret passages behind yon suspicious painting of flowers, two of which have centers about the same distance apart as that between a person's eyes."

Ben took the initiative for once and poked several holes in the painting, provoking several "Oof"s before one protracted "Aaagh" and a certain degree of what can only be described as "Clumsily-staggering-away noises".

"So, gossip!" he said, returning to the table. "Why's your son a nut and how can we get out of this ridiculous scenario for once and for all?"

"Well," Hogart replied, "My idiot son Stephven, the waste of flesh who hired you, was somehow able to become the sole inheritor of my partner in ownership of Die Olige Dame, one Lawrence P. Klausmeyer. Apparently Larry had a weird sense of humour when it came to selecting inheritors, or Stephven was particularly pleasing at one of the club's stop-ins, or something, I don't care."

"Understood," Hugh replied, yawn stifled.

"Anyway, my son became my partner and within weeks brought the company almost to ruins."
"What? How did he do that?" Ben asked, mentally scanning his calendar for things which might have led the agency to their similar plight.

"By following the rules, of course!" He started by kicking out all of the people he could find who didn't have German as their first language! Do you know how many people speak native German in Frankston? We were just lucky he's not bright enough to recognise a fake German either, or we would never be able to get people into those chains. Most nights we wouldn't even be able to assemble a flesh pyramid, the way he wanted to run things."
"I had one of those," Ben said. "Quite a mouthful. I'd had my fill before even sitting down."
"Different pyramid," Hugh said hurriedly. "How did this lead to everyone being stabbed?"

"Well," Hogart continued, "I needed to find something relating to the will that I could use to cheat my son out of his inheritance as soon as possible. Lawrence had made the thing air-tight, as far as I could see, so I asked Freeman to take a look and see if he could work anything out. He was on day-release at the time, you see, and the doctors didn't expect him back for a few hours."

"But he didn't find anything?" Ben prodded.

"He found something, just not anything that would let us undo Larry's will. No, he looked through a couple of other legal papers I had lying around and saw that if Stephven were to die or be incarcerated, the power of attorney would be held by Freeman, basically giving him power over the whole estate."

"And then what?"
"Freeman decided to stab him. He's a bright kid, but startlingly unimaginative. At that age when boys only have one thing on their mind, you know?"

"Girls?" Hugh asked.

"Homicide," Hogart replied.

"You totally stole that line," Ben muttered into his teacup.

"Anyway, Hillary and I managed to talk him out of it. It would be much better for everyone involved if Stephven was just sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit for our personal gain. I'm sure you understand."

"All too well," Ben said.

Hugh gave him a look, despite having thought much the same thing.

"We had it all set up," Hogart reminisced. "Hillary had spiked his tea, I had conspired with a couple of the evicted members to get some suspicious letters planted on his person to suggest that he was consorting with the right sort of people to indicate a little sexual harassment as well as a touch of unlawful discrimination, and Freeman was going to plant some of the knives he'd stabbed people with on his sleeping body just to seal the deal."

"What happened?" Hugh asked.

"Hmm. Let's see. Freeman was in there with a few knives and a helpless sleeping person lying there. What do you think happened?"

"Okay, stupid question. What happened next?"

"We tried to hide the evidence of the crime. Of course Freeman had decided to record the whole thing before stabbing his brother and then dropped part of the page, and we didn't get all of the knives before you two showed up, ut we did a good job."

"Why did you cover for him?" Ben asked, deciding to wander over to a convenient couch and flop himself artlessly upon it.

"Firstly, he's my son, and that's what you're meant to do, isn't it? Secondly, of course, have you met him? He has a way of pointing out to you exactly what you should do if you don't want to get stabbed."

"Ahh," Hugh nodded. "He means 'pointing' as in 'gesturing with a knife'."

"Ahh," Ben nodded sagely.

"Anyway, Stephven of course wakes up, and not being able to put two and two together and get the same result the sixth time over, he was at a loss as to who could have stabbed him. So he does the first thing anyone with more adventurousness than brains would and asks the first private detectives he sees in the phone book to work it out for him."

"We're in the phone book?" Hugh asked.

"We're first in the phone book?" Ben asked, possibly even more confused.

"You see, the thing about Stephven is, he's an idiot," Hogart continued affectionately. "he opened the Yellow Pages to a random page and called the first people he found a number for, which as far as I can tell was the cabbage department of the Safeway stock-purchasing division. They moved out months ago, and you happened to take their office, as I'm sure you know."

"You know," Hugh said, "that explains so much of the smell."

"So we should probably go and tell Stephven that his blue-eyed baby brother did it?" Ben asked, edging as subtly as he could towards the door, evading the notice of absolutely nobody.

"Well, there is one other problem," Hogart said, gesturing in Ben's general direction.

"What?" Ben asked, looking around himself. It took a few moments until he turned enough to see Freeman standing behind him, knife in hand and red bloodshot veins in eye. "Oh! Hi!"

"Hello," Freeman said. "You realise of course that now I can't possibly let you go."

"Oh, sure you can," Ben said. "What are we going to do, get ourselves into some sort of position where the police would take our word for anything and then tell them?"

"What you're going to do," Freeman replied, raising his knife, "is die."

All in all, most of the people present had to admit, it was a pretty good line.

"Oh, there's one thing you should know before you do this," Ben said, gesturing behind Freeman.

Freeman took a little while to turn as well, which was all to the good, because by the time he'd realised nothing was there and turned back to face the duo, they had long since scarpered out the other door, leaving nought but a terrified mayor, a mostly consumed pot of tea and a few half-eaten biscuits to meet his wrath.

"And, aside from an entertaining interval where Ben tried to fly a helicopter without knowing how they worked and I almost strangled him with the tube from his own IV, that's more or less everything we've been up to," Hugh told Stephven, back in the office.

"And that whole part where you ate those dubious mushrooms after we crashlanded and I had to give you a piggyback home while you ranted about how many zebra finches had been found guilty of plotting against you during your regime as fairy queen," Ben added.

"Now it all makes sense!" Stephven cried, leaping out of his chair and pacing the room excitedly. "Of course it was Freeman! Why didn't I think of him myself?"

"Maybe the blood loss?" Ben suggested. "It makes you think some weird stuff. Y'know, I thought your father, may he rest in peace, was up to something because not enough oxygen was getting to my brain?"

"May he rest in peace," Stephven echoed. "Yes, this is exactly the answer I was looking for! And now, with my father's legacy as well as Larry's in my keeping, I can finally give Freeman the punishment he deserves!"

"Which is...?" Hugh nudged.

"A slap on the wrist and a token contribution to society," Stephven said dismissively. "I'm sure just knowing that stabbing people is frowned upon will be enough to bring him into line."

"Speaking of contributions," Ben suggested, would you like to become our first paying customer?"
"He means our first one this month," Hugh added hurriedly.

"Ahhh, of course," Stephven said. "So that's fifty a day for the last..."

"Four years," Ben interjected, stepping up to accept the money.

"Sounds right," Stephven said. "Here you go!"

Were silence the opposite of sound rather than its absence, Hugh's stunned lack of speech would have broken several peacekeeping ordnances a state over.

"What will you do now?" Ben asked, accepting the money gracefully.

"Oh, I have enormous plans for Die Olige Dame," Stephven announced, smiling broadly. "We're going to dispense with all the disturbing kinky stuff and replace the whole thing with a themed stageshow, like at Hunchbax or what have you. Still authentic native Germans only, of course. I've hired an authentic German to translate what they're saying for me, so it should be even easier to weed them out! The club will become even more profitable!"

Stephven chose this moment to make his exit from the office, trailing grim portents behind him like a lingering fart.

"Well, that was unexpectedly fortunate," Hugh said to Ben, as the latter counted their earnings. "I'm amazed you convinced him to pay us for four years instead of a few weeks!"

"Not really," Ben said. "I guess he can't count, either. But hey, it's enough to pay rent and food for the month."

"You know what that means," Hugh said, grinning. And for once, Ben did.

"Merry Christmas, Ben!"

"Merry Christmas, Hugh!"

"Might I say you cooked this turkey wonderfully?"

"Oh, thank you. Try the potatoes, by the way, I cooked them according to an old family recipe."
"What's your secret?"
"I put them in an oven."

"Uh... huh."

"What did you do to get this crackling so crispy, by the way?"

"Well, when I put the ham in the oven, I... bwurgh."

"Bwurgh?"

"What did you use to stuff this turkey, out of curiosity?"

"Well, I didn't want to waste the money we had a second time, so..."

"What did I just put in my mouth with this meat?"
"... mince pies and chocolate coins."

A long pause.

"...It's delicious."

"Really?"

"Sure. Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas!"

"And a happy new year."

"God bless us, every-"

"Don't push it."

THE END