Killed on the Ice Read online

  Helena Speir was a big, strong woman, and when she lashed out and smacked Wendy, the sound of the blow echoed around that whole circular corridor. Wendy bent sideways to forty-five degrees, then snapped back vertical.

  I figured I was about to have to step between two angry women, but it didn’t turn out that way. Wendy and her stepmother stood in identical attitudes. Each of them stood staring, with a hand to her face; Wendy in pain, Helena Speir shocked by what she had done.

  Then it was my turn to be shocked. The stepmother turned a face red with anger on me. “This is your fault!” she hissed.

  I have faced some bum raps in my life, but this one took the trophy. For one thing, I also thought it was imprudent on Wendy’s part to be putting her life in my hands on such a short acquaintance and one night’s intimacy.

  I was going to say so, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I had seduced her little girl. (Wendy said, in a deadly voice, that she was not a little girl.) I was a fortune hunter attempting to cut myself in for a piece of Wendy’s money and fame; the money and fame she (Helena Speir) had worked and sacrificed so long to see that she attained. And more, even less justified.

  Finally, Wendy said, “That does it,” and hauled me off. It was just as well. I have a temper that needs to be kept under tight control, and it was beginning to slip. I was maybe three seconds from saying something I was going to regret.

  As we walked back to the office/control room to rejoin the police, Wendy’s stepmother yelled after me that I hadn’t heard the last of this. I was sure I hadn’t.

  When she finally gave up and left, I took Wendy aside and asked her how her face felt.

  “It stings. Not as bad as she used to be.”

  “She used to beat you?” I could feel my temper sliding away again.

  “Oh, she didn’t beat me,” Wendy began. Then she made a face that had more anger and pain in it than the one she wore when the blow landed. “Oh, screw her. Yes, she did beat me. Or at least she hit me. She hasn’t done it for years. She went to a shrink after the divorce from that bastard Speir, and she never did it any more.”

  “Until now,” I said.

  Wendy took my hand. “Matt, look, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. She never used a wire coat hanger on me or anything. It was just like she did this time, a smack across the face or two.”

  “Oh,” I said. “A mere bagatelle, right? When did she do it?”

  “When I didn’t want to practice. She used to say I should be happy I was small and graceful and pretty, and not big and clumsy the way she was. That it was a sin not to develop my gifts; that it was an insult to her, but I was wasting things she’d kill for.”

  “Come on, I’ll get them to get a cop to take you home.”

  “I’m staying with you,” she insisted.

  “Yes, you are staying with me. But only because I think you’re twit enough to insist on no cops even if I say no.”

  “I want to be with you. I trust you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You keep saying you’re not a child, but you sure keep acting like one.” Wendy opened her mouth. “Quiet,” I said. I reached into my pocket and took out my keys. “I can’t leave until the ADA lets me go. We’ll get a cop to see you to my place—I’m better than nothing, I guess.”

  “A little,” she conceded.

  “Okay, then. My apartment—”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t your apartment.”

  “A technicality. My apartment, my rules. Got that?”

  “Yes.” She looked as if she wanted to say something else, but the look on my face convinced her not to.

  “Good. Now. The cop will take you home. I will have called the doorman to let him know you’re coming. The cop will accompany you to the apartment and check the place out. You will lock the door, and bolt it, and you will let no one in but me. Then you will play with Spot. I’ll walk him tonight. His dog food is under the sink. Should I repeat any of that?”

  She said it wasn’t necessary. I raised my hand to knock on the door, but before I could, Wendy said, “Matt?”

  “What is it?”

  “You’re really taking this seriously, aren’t you?”

  “Can’t afford not to.”

  “Matt, I’m scared.” Her eyes seconded the statement. “We’ll get him. Or her. Just be careful.”

  “I will. I’m sorry to be such a pill.”

  I couldn’t deny she was being a pill, so I just smiled at her and went inside and got her sent home.

  “Now here he is, America’s Top Trader, TV’s Big Dealer...”

  —Jay Stewart, Let’s Make a Deal (ABC)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TWO HOURS LATER, I left the Garden and stepped into the cold air. The sky was pitch dark and overcast, but of course it never gets very dark in New York, unless Con Edison screws up. Right now, happy crowds were converging on the arena to line up for tonight’s Ice-Travaganza. I wondered how many would want their money back after they found out Wendy wouldn’t be appearing tonight. I decided probably not many. The Christmas spirit and all that—give the understudy a chance.

  The Christmas spirit was all around me that night. People were smiling, noticing each other. Not everybody, of course; there is a class of New Yorker who becomes mute if he doesn’t call somebody an asshole every twenty seconds. But there were enough happy people walking decorated streets, carrying packages, under the black sky and the orangey sodium vapor lamps. Enough to make a difference.

  I was not one of them, and it bothered me. I think that was the thing that I disliked most about this case—it was screwing up my Christmas. Christmas is the time I try to set aside to let the real me come out. What I like to think is the real me, the undisillusioned, unsophisticated kid who used to feel like smiling all year round. At least that’s the way I look to myself through the lens of Christmastime nostalgia.

  But that kid was nowhere in sight, this year. Here it was, December 23 (and pushing 7 P.M. at that), and I hadn’t had a glimpse of him. I was hoping he’d show up, but I wasn’t optimistic. Somehow, I don’t think that kid would get much of a kick out of dead people and murder suspects. He might enjoy taking care of a damsel in distress, as long as the shit didn’t get too thick. Maybe I’d find him back at the apartment with Wendy, but I doubted it.

  I might as well have stayed with Wendy all along, as far as progress in the case was concerned. Max Brother had gotten back one hundred percent of his aplomb and had contributed nothing new except that he had made the movie deal for Bea before they ever became intimate. He said. I’d just as soon flip a coin for the truth of that one. A woman can be grateful for something an agent or a producer’s done, but in show biz, it’s not unheard of for gratitude to go through a sort of time warp, and arrive before the deed that’s going to cause it.

  Brother, as usual, had pressing business matters to attend to, especially in the wake of this “terrible, terrible, thing,” and he was going to have to fight off his own “great personal sadness” and put things together again. The Frying Nun excused him, but before I left, I thought I caught him giving me (of all people) the old hairy eyeball. He was gone before I could get any clue why.

  Ivan Danov was next, exploding all over the place, with waterworks to go with the usual pyrotechnics.

  “It is terrible!” he sobbed. That word was getting a real workout. “Doubly terrible!”

  The Frying Nun seemed intimidated, or maybe only repelled by all this unbridled emotion. Whatever the reason, she lay back and let Lieutenant Martin handle the questioning.

  “How’s that, Mr. Danov?”

  Danov didn’t insist on his constitutional rights before answering.

  “Well, it is a horror that poor Beatrice is dead. She was a fine skater; it was a crime her training had to end. She would have been a creditable international skater—certainly one of the ten or twenty best in the world.”

  “Gold medal material?”

  “Bah! She was a beautiful girl; she had talen
t. But a gold medal? Never, as long as Wendy was alive.”

  There are sentences that get bigger after they’re uttered. This one expanded into a dead silence big enough to fill the whole Garden.

  Danov began to sob again. “But that is the other thing! I have heard this...this vandal wanted to kill Wendy! My Wendy, whom I have molded into the finest skater alive!”

  He stood up. “It must not happen!” he declaimed. He had one hand across his chest and the other in the air. The pose made him look like a statue.

  “Cobb!” he yelled, as though he had just invented a name for me. “They tell me you have become responsible for Wendy’s safety!”

  “Reluctantly,” I admitted. I was glad I wasn’t counting on secrecy for Wendy’s protection. Gossip travels fast, but this was ridiculous. I decided Helena Speir was stopping people on the street and telling them that I had abducted her child.

  Danov walked up to me, held his angular face about five inches from mine, and said, “If any harm comes to her, if she suffers so much as a bruise, you will answer to Danov!”

  After a scene like that, mere questioning was an anticlimax, especially since Danov swore up and down that no one had tampered with Wendy’s bag in his presence. Was he a fool? Would he not have noticed?

  It went on like that. After a while, the cops got tired and let him go. He repeated his warning to me before he left.

  When the door closed behind him, Livia Goosens said, “You’ll answer to much more than Danov if anything happens to the girl, Cobb.”

  “Up yours,” I said suavely. “What the hell was I supposed to do?”

  “Convince her she needs professional protection,” the ADA said.

  “I’m working on it, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I suggest you continue to do so, Mr. Cobb. Her safety is in your hands.”

  Didn’t I know it. The ADA smiled a superior smile and said she was going back to her office to await the arrival of other witnesses, namely Carla Dinkover and Al St. John. I was more or less ordered to find St. John, which I promised to do. I’d call the Network and have him beeped (see how he liked it), but not until I was home.

  Lieutenant Martin looked at me and shook his head. “I don’t know, Matty,” he said. “Most guys are content just to bring home puppy dogs.”

  Rivetz laughed. I told them I already had a puppy dog, and left.

  An afternoon that begins with my watching someone die and ends with my trading feeble quips with the police is not one that’s likely to inspire me with the Christmas spirit.

  It is, in fact, the kind of afternoon that makes me downright nasty; that’s why I was taking a stroll before heading uptown. Wendy was going to be a big enough pain to deal with when I was in full control of myself.

  A hand grabbed my shoulder. It wasn’t a blow, or even the kind of arm a cop puts on you when he wants your attention. It was something more than a tap, but that’s all.

  I didn’t care. Visions of Harris Brophy danced in my head. Granted this was Thirty-fourth Street in the early evening and not West Tenth late at night, I wasn’t about to stand still for a going over with a wrench, if that’s what the person had in mind.

  I ducked and spun to my left, knocking the arm away with my left forearm. At the same time, I launched a punch with my right fist, which I stopped about an eighth of an inch from the throat of Max Brother.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, dropping my hands. “What the hell do you want?”

  Brother’s face was wild. “Cobb, what are you nuts? That punch landed, I would have been dead.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t like to fight, so I try to get them over in a hurry. Besides, I’m jumpy. There’s a killer or two running around. Did you follow me?”

  Brother nodded. “I waited around in the bookstore near the Garden. I almost didn’t spot you. I followed you because I didn’t want the police to see us talking.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “I have something to tell you. In confidence.”

  “Well, that’s great. Only how do you know the police don’t have a tail on you?”

  He turned white. In the unnatural light of the street lamp, he looked like a corpse. “Why...why should they do that?”

  “Use your brain. You are present at the scene of one sensational murder; then your girlfriend gets killed in another. And you had the opportunity to switch the jars.”

  “But I didn’t do it,” he insisted.

  “The cops like to be convinced.”

  It’s amazing how, in times of stress, people fall back on doing whatever it is they do for a living. Right now, Brother was trying to negotiate with me.

  “But Cobb,” he said. Mr. Consensus. “I don’t mean to get personal, but just for the sake of argument, what you’ve said about me could apply to you, too, with just a few changes. You were on the scene of Dinkover’s murder. You found the body, in fact. And your girlfriend—or at least the girl you spent the night with...”

  I wondered if there was anybody in the United States who didn’t know that yet.

  “...was the target of the second murder. You can’t deny poor Bea was killed by mistake.”

  The epithet had the sound of permanence to it. It encapsulated her and dismissed her in one breath. From now on, Max Brother would never speak of her except with the words “Poor Bea.”

  “Besides,” he went on, “you had more opportunity to switch those bottles than anybody.”

  “Absolutely right,” I said. “How do you know the cops don’t have a tail on me?”

  Brother started looking around him as if his head were mounted on a balance wheel. “Do you think they have?”

  “No,” I said, and Brother let out about a bushel of air. “When it looked as if I was going to deck you, your tail or mine would probably have intervened. But what’s the big secret?”

  “I have to be absolutely sure we’re not overheard.”

  “Why? Why come to me?”

  “You seem to be an honest man.” To my surprise, Brother smiled. It wasn’t his business smile, either. “In my line of work, you don’t meet too many. Besides, you seem to have pull with the cops.” He smiled again. “Listen to me. Slipping back to the city and the streets. I’ve trained myself to say things like ‘influence with the police’ instead.”

  I was fully aware that this might be a ploy. The “come on, no secrets, we’re all friends here” approach is ancient. Still, he did it well, and I was a lot more disposed to hear what he had to say. Besides, I was getting pretty curious.

  “Cobb, I mean this. I’ve been sitting on something hot, and I’m getting scorched. I’m going to put my life in your hands.”

  “That’s swell,” I said, “but I make you no promises. If I hush up something that hot, my life is in your hands.”

  Brother nodded. “Sure, I can appreciate that. But you will help me if you can?”

  “No promises.”

  “All right, all right. Where can we go to talk?”

  “Let’s go Christmas shopping.”

  It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. I took him to Herald Square, where Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas, for you out-of-towners) and Broadway cross at Thirty-fourth Street. It’s the world’s busiest intersection, and at Christmas, it’s even busier. We went inside Macy’s, which is the World’s Largest Store under one roof, a whole block’s worth of an eight-story building, every inch of it crammed with shoppers.

  A big department store is a great place to find out if you’ve got a tail. If you’re in a big hurry, you can do something dramatic, like fight your way up the down escalator. Otherwise, you can work a few tricks with the elevators. In general, though, because of the masses of bodies, and the difficulty of getting anywhere, it’s impossible for someone to follow you without your knowledge if you just know what to look for.

  There didn’t seem to be anybody following us, which made the whole trip unnecessary. I didn’t mind, though—I still had some Christmas shopping to do.


  In the book department, I got a book about famous con men for Harris. It’s boring to be in a hospital, especially after you start getting well. There was a book about eagles; I picked it up and looked at it, but it wasn’t much help, unless Dinkover had been trying to tell us he had been killed by a real eagle, which I doubted.

  As long as I was at it, I took a look at one of those huge one-volume encyclopedias for the article about flags. I learned that the study of flags is called vexillology; that the usual proportions for a flag are ten by nineteen; and that the “stars and stripes” are more properly called “mullets and barrulets.” I didn’t learn anything about the case.

  I also hadn’t learned, yet, what Brother had on his mind. As we went to the checkout, I said, “You wanted to talk to me, but I’m not hearing anything.”

  “There are all these people around,” he protested.

  “Speak quietly, and don’t mention any names. Nobody will pay the slightest attention. Christmas shopping is a pretty absorbing experience.”

  Brother didn’t like it, but he didn’t have much choice, aside from forgetting the whole thing. I didn’t think he’d do that. He swallowed a couple of times, looked around, then began.

  “I let him in,” he said.

  “What?!” I practically screamed it. Five thousand harried Christmas shoppers got unabsorbed enough to gawk at me. So much for telling Brother to be cool.

  I had to try to redeem myself. “Why, that’s wonderful, Max,” I gushed. “You’ll have to tell me all about it.” Heads looked away; we were just a couple of businessmen sharing some good news. Much more quietly, I said, “Tell me all about it, Max.”

  “I knew we shouldn’t have done it here.” He was nervous again.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “God almighty, Cobb. No. I got a phone call from Di—”

  “No names.”

  “From the old man that afternoon. He told me to fix one of the exit doors so he could get in and talk to Wendy. He told me to push a button on the door that would keep it from latching.”