Legacies

2.

"Oh, no," Alicia said as she rounded the corner and saw the police cars in front of the Center. "What now?"

She had her donut and coffee from the hospital cafe in one hand, the fat Sunday Times in the other. She usually spent the rest of Sunday morning at the Center. They still had kids coming in for their treatments, just like every other day, but it was a lot less intense than the rest of the week—nowhere near as many phone calls, for one thing—so she used it to catch up on her paperwork.

She had also planned to devote some of today to figuring out her next step in the saga of the will and the house that supposedly belonged to her but no one wanted to let her have.

But now…

Just inside the front door she nearly collided with two cops, one white, one black, talking to Raymond. Raymond. He was devoted to the Center, but he rarely if ever showed up on Sunday.

"Oh, Alicia!" he said. "There you are! Isn't it wonderful?"

"Isn't what wonderful?"

"Didn't anyone tell you? The toys! The toys are back!"

Suddenly Alicia wanted to cry. She turned to the pair of policemen. Raymond introduced her. She wanted to hug them.

"You found them? Already? That's… that's wonderful!" Better than wonderful—fantastic was the word.

"I guess you could say we found them," the black cop said, scratching his buzz-cut head. His name tag read POMUS. "If you can call opening up a truck parked on the sidewalk by your front door really 'finding' them."

"Wait a minute," Alicia said. "Back up just a bit. What truck?"

"A panel truck, Alicia," Raymond said. "Filled with the toys. The police think it was the same one used to haul them away. Someone drove it up on the sidewalk last night and left it there."

"Any idea who it was?" she asked, although she had a pretty good idea of the answer.

The white cop—SCHWARTZ on his tag—grinned. "According to the guy tied to the bumper, it was Santa Claus himself."

"Guy tied to what?"

They went on to explain about the man they'd found lashed to the front of the toy-filled truck. Someone had "knocked the crap out of him," as Officer Pomus put it, and taped some rubber antlers to his head. The battered man admitted to the theft and swore that his assailant had been Santa Claus—even admitted to shooting Santa, rambling on about shooting him in the heart without killing him.

"But of course, you can't kill Santa," Officer Schwartz said, grinning.

"He's obviously a user and he sounds like an EDP, so we don't know what to believe," Officer Pomus added. "We've got him up on Bellevue's flight deck now, under observation."

"Flight deck?"

"You know—the psych ward. Sooner or later, we'll get the straight story out of him."

"And throw the book at him, I hope."

"Oh, yeah," Pomus said. "No question about that. But he's already had worse than a book thrown at him." He grinned. "A lot worse."

"Yeah," Officer Schwartz said. "Someone worked him over real good before dropping him here. The creep seemed almost glad to be arrested."

After they were gone, Alicia and Raymond went to the storeroom and inspected the gifts. Except for a little wrinkling of the paper and an occasional bumped corner, most were in the same condition as before the theft. She told Raymond to get hold of a locksmith—she didn't care that it was Sunday—and have him secure that door, even if it meant putting a bar across it.

Then she went to her office and sipped her coffee, lukewarm by now, and thought about that nothing-special-looking man named Jack—"Just Jack" Niedermeyer.

On Friday afternoon he'd said he'd see what he could do. Thirty-six hours later, the gifts were back and the thief in custody.

A man who could do that just might be able to solve her other problem.

Alicia looked up a number in her computer's directory and began dialing.