Killed on the Ice Page 13

  It was interesting Dinkover should have known the construction of the doors at the Blades Club well enough to give that kind of instruction.

  But that wasn’t the most interesting part. “The old man called you and told you to do this, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why the hell did you do it?”

  Brother swallowed again, then brushed at a head of hair that needed no brushing. “That’s the hard part.”

  I wanted to laugh. “The hard part is coming up? Listen, do you know what would happen to you if you told Lieutenant Martin what you’ve told me so far?”

  “I’d be arrested for murder,” he said. It was about halfway to a question, as though Brother cherished a small foolish hope he might be wrong.

  “At least,” I told him. “Why did you let him in? Did you know what was going to happen?”

  Brother was irritated. “Cobb, do you think I would be telling you this if I was involved in Din—I mean in what happened to the old man? To anybody?” By anybody, he meant Poor Bea. “I’d be running for my life; turning state’s evidence; trying to tough it out.

  “I’m scared, Cobb. I’ve got to figure out some way to get this case solved without ruining my life.”

  “Good. You keep figuring. Meanwhile, you are going to answer my question right now, or I am bringing you to the nearest cop. Now. For the third and last time, why did you let him in?”

  “He blackmailed me into it.”

  “Over what?”

  “Coke.”

  “I’m warning you, Brother.”

  “I’m telling you the truth!”

  “How the hell can he be blackmailing you over cocaine? It was on the cover of People magazine, for Christ’s sake. Besides, I thought you kicked it.”

  “I did.” The agent sounded bitter.

  “Well? Sounds like something you’d want spread around. Not much blackmail potential there.”

  “Look, Cobb, you don’t understand.”

  “No argument on that.” It was my turn to pay for the book. I paid cash, and the girl behind the counter seemed grateful enough to faint.

  “This is nice,” she said. “All day, punching buttons, and I’m getting a fat wrist from the embossing machine. Merry Christmas.”

  I smiled at her and took my package. The smile was to make up for the dirty look Max Brother gave her. He had no patience for pleasantries now that he’d started to talk.

  “Can we get out of here now?” he demanded.

  “One more stop,” I said, and we headed for the escalator. “Keep talking.”

  “All right, it was on the cover of a magazine. Do you remember what it was all about?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You and your ex-wife are having a custody fight over your daughter.” Brother’s ex-wife was also an agent; there had been jokes about how it was the first time in the history of show business that two agents had agreed in advance to be screwed by each other. When they’d decided to split up, that joke took on a whole new meaning. Both husband and wife were used to looking for an edge, used to getting it. It looked like the winner would be decided on the basis of Who Gets The Kid, and the fight was still going on. A California judge had awarded custody to Mrs. Brother, but Max had vowed never to give up.

  “Yeah, my daughter. I have to get her back, Cobb; that bitch I was married to is no good for her. I have to.”

  I had no idea of the Brothers’ relative merits as parents; it just seemed to me that the main reason Brother wanted custody was to prove he was tougher than his wife was.

  “The only thing is,” Brother continued, “these goddam lawyers cost a fortune; I was overextended, badly. I needed cash in a hurry, so I did something stupid.”

  “Meddle with a client’s money?” I was ragging him. I knew what he was leading up to.

  “Of course not. What do you think I am, a crook?” He looked almost hurt. “I was just in a bind; my clients are my life. I sell them out, I’m a dead man.”

  It was easy to see Brother was serious. His life was built around being a Big Shot, being the man rich and famous people came to for advice. He’d come too far to want to blow it.

  It was making it difficult to say what he wanted to say. The hell of it was, I already knew.

  Brother worked on it. For the first time since the book department, he looked to see who was in earshot. He lowered his voice even further. “I sold some cocaine,” he said.

  I nodded. “In April,” I told him. I told him the names of the director and actress he sold it to, as well.

  “You son of a bitch!” he hissed. “You’ve been stringing me along the whole time.”

  “Not the whole time,” I argued. “Just a few minutes. I wanted to see if you’d come across with some cock and bull story, or maybe confess to something I didn’t know about.”

  “But this was secret. Tomb secret. How did you find out?” Sweat was beginning to break out on his forehead. If I knew, and the blackmailer knew, how secret could it all be?

  “I found out because Shorty Stack filed a report on you when the Network was thinking about making the deal for Wendy’s special.”

  “Oh, God,” Brother said. “I should have known.”

  Shorty Stack was assistant vice-president, Special Projects, West Coast. He functioned with a large degree in autonomy, and he caused a certain amount of fear. Shorty had begun as a legman for Louella Parsons, until a certain studio decided he was too dangerous to be allowed to run loose. It was said that Shorty Stack must be under every bed in Hollywood. They hired him to find out things before they got into gossip columns and to stop them before they did. He was the most feared man in Hollywood, even though few people had seen him or even knew what he looked like. He was supposed to be working for me, but I’d never laid eyes on him, either.

  Shorty went to work for the Network when the studio he’d worked for reduced its operations drastically in the late sixties. Times were more tolerant, so Shorty didn’t have the impact he used to, but his name was still enough to bring a reaction of awe, fear, or hatred, depending on the state of the hearer’s conscience. The only reason he didn’t have my job was that he refused to leave California under any circumstances.

  “Who have you told about this?” Brother demanded. He grabbed my sleeve and said it again.

  “Relax, for crying out loud. I haven’t told anybody outside my own staff. No reason to.”

  “You could have told me that you knew, at least.”

  “Look, I know you’re upset, but try to use your head. There was no reason to mention it. For one thing, if the Network refused to do business with anybody who’d ever taken part in a drug deal, there’d be nothing on the air but test patterns. For another thing, even if we wanted to, we didn’t have any evidence. Shorty hears things, that’s all. He has people he believes. There was nothing that would be useful in a court.”

  “Screw that. Who knows what’s going to influence a judge? That guy is nuts. Look, it’s a matter of image, all right? I was a big coke head; I stopped using it; now I’m a hero. If it comes out that after I stopped using it, I turn around and score a big deal on it, what am I? A cynical sleaze.”

  It was hard to resist looking at him and saying, “Well?” But I managed.

  “You saw what happened to De Lorean, didn’t you? That could have been me. It still could.”

  “Yes, it could.”

  “And this goddam blackmailer. How did he find out?”

  “That’s not important; if Shorty found out, anybody could. From here, it looks like the blackmailer was the killer.” I didn’t tell him that this also made it look as if the killer had to be one of the party at the Blades Club last night. “You want the killer caught.”

  “I want my kid.”

  I made a purchase, paid for it, and led Brother out of the store onto Sixth Avenue. He took a deep breath of the cold air, than another one. He had the look of a man who’s just clawed his way out of a plastic bag.

  “You want the murderer caught,�
� I said again.

  “Of course I do. Don’t you think I’m human at all? Poor Bea was a great kid. But I can’t bring her back.”

  My turn to take a deep breath. I did it so I wouldn’t break his jaw. “Did it ever occur to you,” I said quietly, “that if you had been straight with the police, Bea might not have gone anywhere?”

  “I want my daughter, Cobb. I can’t let this get out.”

  “I made no promises. The cops have to know. But I think I know how to minimize the grief for you.”

  Christmas had just come for Max Brother. You could see it in his face. “There’s no limit to what I would owe you if you could help me, Cobb. None.”

  “Just tell me about the phone call.”

  “Reach out and touch someone.”

  —Bell Telephone commercial

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I HANDED WENDY A package and said, “Here, Merry Christmas.”

  She said what people always say in that situation: “For me?”

  “Of course for you. Spot gets his present Christmas morning; my mother makes him some special turkey giblet dog food.”

  “That’s sweet,” Wendy said. “Matt, where have you been? I was beginning to worry about you.”

  “I’ve been talking with your manager, not about business.”

  “Oh. About the case?” I nodded. “You have to tell me about this. Right?”

  “I don’t know about have to. I think I will; you deserve to know about it. Did I get any calls?”

  “Your mother called. Lieutenant Martin, too. He sounded angry.” I told her it figured. She held up the package. “Should I open this now or wait?”

  It wasn’t unprecedented for my mother to call me and have a woman answer the phone, but it always led to some interesting reactions. I could hardly wait. “Go ahead and open it,” I said. “What did my mother want?”

  “She left the message on the tape,” Wendy said. “Something about church. A lot of stuff. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to answer the phone.”

  “That was smart,” I said.

  “You don’t have to act so surprised.”

  I smiled at her. “Don’t I? After you spurned police protection?”

  “I’m sorry, Matt. Dammit, I—I don’t know what I’m doing any more. Maybe it was dumb—it just felt better this way. I’m safe now, right?”

  “I think so.”

  Wendy looked wretched. “Matt, I swear to God, I never hurt anybody in my life. It’s not fair that somebody wants to kill me. And Bea. Bea was the closest thing to a friend I had. She never hurt anybody either.”

  I joined her on the couch and put my arm around her. She sat looking at her hands.

  It was Spot who saved the day. Spot has such a fascination with bags and boxes, I sometimes think he must be part cat. Somehow, in his sniffing around, he’d managed to get his head caught in the bag Wendy’s present had been in. Now he was running around, shaking his head violently, trying to get it off. Wendy laughed at him in spite of herself.

  “The Unknown Dog,” I said, and Wendy laughed harder. I went to check out my phone messages while Wendy finished opening her gift.

  My mother was getting pretty insistent about my showing up in church dressed and shaved and with my ears open ten o’clock Christmas morning to hear my sister solo with the choir. It would also be nice, she said, if I received communion, but that was a bargaining ploy.

  It was a pleasure to be able to call her up and tell her that I would be there at the appointed time. The way things looked now, it would be a lot easier to catch the real thing than go to a rehearsal the day before, the way I’d originally planned.

  Everything was sweetness and light in the family when I hung up and returned to Wendy. My houseguest was holding a light blue garment against her body. She looked pleased, but puzzled.

  “I guess it will fit,” she said, “and I do need a nightgown, I guess, if I’m going to be staying here, but why flannel?”

  “I like flannel,” I told her. “I think it’s much sexier than the sheer stuff.”

  “You’re weird.”

  “Also, it’s December. Cold sometimes, even in a luxury apartment.”

  “Weird and practical,” Wendy said. “What a combination. But thanks, Matt.” She gave me a kiss. “I don’t have anything for you.”

  “Not necessary. Look, I have to call Lieutenant Martin, then I’ll tell you about Brother.”

  I never got a chance to. The switchboard man at Headquarters was altogether too eager to patch me through to the lieutenant, and the lieutenant yelled so loud, it practically made the phone superfluous.

  “At last!” he said. “I was afraid everybody connected with this goddam case had disappeared.”

  “I told you I’d call you as soon as I got home.”

  “Yeah, you told me. You also told me you’d put me in touch with your man, St. John. The bimbo at the Network switchboard won’t even beep him for me.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “It’s his day off. Only I can reach him.”

  “Well?” Before I could answer (not that I could say much—it had slipped my mind), the lieutenant went on. “Not only that, but I couldn’t reach you. We haven’t been able to get in touch with Mrs. Dinkover—I’ll tell you more about that in a second—and that goddam agent has vanished.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Ah?” Lieutenant Martin echoed. “Ah? Matty, why do you want to make an old man exasperated? Do you know something about where Brother is?”

  “I know everything about where Brother is. I took him there.”

  “This better be good,” the lieutenant warned.

  “You may not like this,” I said.

  “I already don’t like it. What did you do? Put him on a plane to the Mato Grosso?”

  “I brought him to the Drug Enforcement Agency. He’s going to talk to them about cocaine.” I told him Max Brother’s story, concluding with how I decided the only way to keep Brother from getting destroyed by the publicity that would follow the revelation that he had been the one who let Dinkover into the Blades Club would be to get a government agency to protect him. Ralph Goodrum at the DEA had said he would be delighted to hear anything Brother cared to tell him about coke traffic, especially anything about who the big suppliers to the Hollywood scene might be. When I left, they were even making noises to use Brother to set up a sting operation, if they liked what they heard.

  Lieutenant Martin didn’t like what he heard. “Matty,” he said. He sounded too shocked even to yell at me. “I can’t believe you did this. This is the first thing that resembles a break in the case. Brother let him in—is this straight? Brother really told you he let him in?”

  “With his own lips.”

  “Then how in hell could you give the son of a bitch to the goddam Feds?! This could bust the case wide open!”

  “Not unless Brother is the killer.”

  “Not unless Brother is the killer! Jesus H. Moses, Matty, if the Frying Nun wasn’t such a tight ass, he could probably be indicted on that alone!”

  “Ralph Goodrum promised me Brother would be there all night and available any time you wanted to talk to him.”

  “Who cares what he promised you? I haven’t trusted a federal official since 1944.”

  “What happened in 1944?”

  “I was drafted.”

  “Good point. Why don’t you call Goodrum right away and let him make you a promise, too?”

  “I will, as soon as we hang up here. Now listen, Matty. I’m going to let this go for now, but we’re gonna have a long talk, real soon. Now, here’s what I want you to do. You get on the phone to the Network, and you tell that uppity wench on the switchboard to beep your man, St. John, and you and him both meet me at this address.” He gave me the number of a building on Fifth Avenue.

  “Where’s that?” I asked.

  “Dinkover’s apartment.”

  “Oh,” I said. I remembered Wendy had thought that Dinkover was a neighbor of
mine. Actually, it turned out he had lived on the park, but on the other side of it. Almost directly across as it turned out.

  “Your wish is my command, of course...”

  “Bullshit,” the lieutenant said, giving it the standard New York City street pronunciation.

  “...But why are we going there?”

  “You’re going there because I want to talk to St. John and kick your treacherous behind, and I have to do it in person, and that’s where I’m going to be. I’m going to be there because Goosens has managed to convince herself that the widow Dinkover has taken a run-out powder.”

  “Careful, Mr. M., you’re dating yourself.” He made a noise. “Do you know why she thinks so?”

  “Nobody answers the phone in the Dinkover apartment. Nobody answers the door. The doorman says nobody’s gone in or out of the building, at least past him. So if anybody came or went, they sneaked it. The ADA doesn’t like it.”

  “I wouldn’t think you’d be too crazy about it yourself. Couldn’t your men have gotten the super to let them in?”

  “It’s legal enough, but between the press being on us because everybody involved is so famous, and being picked at by the Frying Nun, we’re walking on eggs around here. We put in for a warrant to go inside, should come through any second—we’ll be super legal this way. Covering our ass. Hell of a way to do police work. You just be there, you hear?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Your pal, too.”

  “Right.”

  “I heard a lot of that.” Wendy was standing right behind me.

  “Sneak up on me like that again, and I’m going to put a bell around your neck.”

  “I wanted to know what was keeping you.”

  “All right, it doesn’t matter. I said I’d tell you, anyway. You just startled me for a second.”

  “Max was dealing in drugs?”

  “Coke,” I said.

  “That’s a drug,” she said, and I certainly couldn’t argue with her. “I think I will fire him. I don’t need that kind of thing anywhere near my career. Or my life.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Basically, I agree with you.”

  “You don’t sound like it.”