Killed on the Ice Read online

  “Not because I’m not against coke. In the last couple of years, I’ve seen fortunes, careers, and lives sucked up nostrils.”

  “What’s the problem, then?”

  “I sort of made an implied promise to Brother not to screw his life up more than necessary. He was in deep trouble, and he came to me. He may have helped solve the case. He solved part of it, at least.”

  “I didn’t hear about that.”

  I told her. Her face was an interesting study as she listened. It went by subtle gradations from blank astonishment to red-hot anger, passing through denial, disbelief, and pain on the way.

  When I finished, Wendy worked and sputtered for a few seconds before she could make words, and she made a few unladylike ones before saying, “Dammit, I am going to fire him. May I use the phone?”

  “Will you let me talk for a minute?”

  “Are you going to try to talk me out of this? It won’t work. He could go to jail for this—who knows how it could make me look?”

  “Your image,” I said.

  “If my image is going to be messed up, I’m the one who’s going to do it,” she said. “Besides, it’s more than that. He betrayed me, Matt. He knew how much I hated Dinkover, but he opened the door for him. I’ll never forgive Max for that—the only way I’ll ever forgive him is if he really did kill the old bastard!”

  “Shut up and listen for a minute,” I said. Wendy scowled but subsided. “For one thing, Brother is being kept company right now at the DEA—Lieutenant Martin is the only outsider who’s going to get a chance to talk to him.”

  “I’ll call Network News and tell them,” Wendy said. “I’ll get the message across.”

  I ignored her. “For another thing, if Brother knows what’s good for him, he’s at this very moment spilling information that can put a serious crimp in the cocaine traffic. He can’t do them any good if you disgrace him at this moment.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there is a good chance he will wind up dead within days.”

  “Give me a break, Matt.”

  “Try it, if you want him really punished.” Wendy pouted but said nothing. “For a third thing,” I went on, “he was blackmailed into letting Dinkover in. The way Brother saw it, he had no choice.”

  “You wouldn’t have knuckled under,” Wendy said.

  “No, but Brother isn’t as good a person as I am,” I said. Wendy didn’t even smile. “That was a joke,” I told her.

  “Ha, ha,” she said, obliging me. “What do you want me to do, Matt?” she said. “Let him get away with it?”

  “I don’t want anybody to get away with anything. What I want you to do is a little blackmailing of your own.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means the next time you can get to Brother, you tell him he’s through, but you’re willing to make it look amicable. He should take it like a lamb, contract or no contract. If he doesn’t, you promise to take the case to the papers. That way you get rid of him without destroying him in the process.”

  “It sounds better than he deserves,” she said.

  “Yeah, but granting mercy is a luxury few people are in a position to experience. You might enjoy it.”

  Now she smiled. “All right, I’ll give it a try.” She scratched her chin. “You know, Max did do an awful lot for me. Financially, anyway. And that ex-wife of his is a real bitch...”

  “I didn’t ask you to forgive him, for God’s sake,” I protested.

  “Don’t worry. I’m just trying to convince myself that going easy on him is a good idea.”

  “Keep working on it,” I told her. “I have to make a phone call.” I picked up the receiver.

  “Are you going out again? I heard something about that, too.” When I told her she’d heard right, she said, “I wish you didn’t have to.”

  “So do I,” I told her, then turned and punched phone buttons.

  When the Network night operator called, I told her to beep Al St. John for me, which she did with an alacrity that would have made Lieutenant Martin cry. I told her to have him call me when he reached her, then hung up the phone to wait.

  Wendy had left the room while I dialed. I called to her, and she called back that she’d rejoin me in a few minutes.

  The phone rang. I picked it up and told Al the bad news. He said Good Lord. “Bea Dunney is dead? Bea Dunney?” His voice cracked with the surprise of it.

  “The cops have been trying to reach you at your place all day. I told you to get some sleep.”

  “I did,” he said, “but I unplugged the phone. It still makes a ring the caller can hear when you do that, you know. After I woke up, I went to the movies. I didn’t even look at a newspaper or anything. I was watching the movie when the beeper went off.”

  “I’m glad I finally reached you.”

  He still couldn’t get over it. “Bea Dunney, Good Lord. Who would want to kill her?”

  “Who would want to kill Wendy Ichimi?” I said it softly; Wendy had the knack for hearing things.

  Al took this big, too. “Has something happened to Wendy, too?”

  “No but just by luck. I’ll tell you about it when I see you.” I told him the police wanted to see us and gave him the address.

  “Do you think this has something to do with the Dinkover case?”

  I threw up my hands, then realized that was a pretty stupid way to communicate over the phone. “Who knows?” I said. “The cops think it might be, because they haven’t been able to get in touch with the widow.”

  “What do you think, Matt?”

  “I’m off thinking for a while,” I told him. “There was a time I was convinced Harris’s mugging had something to do with this. Then I went crazy over eagle stuff. I haven’t been able to stop that, no matter how stupid it seems. Napoleon used eagles to symbolize his empire. I thought of that one this morning.”

  I could hear the smile in Al’s voice. “You mean now we’re looking for a Polish-American football player who—”

  “Knock it off, Al, I’m not in the mood.” Al wasn’t noted for his sense of humor, but that topic really set him off. “I just want to point out where thinking has gotten me so far. I’ll tell you more about the whole thing later. Now let’s get over to Mrs. Dinkover’s, it’s getting late.”

  I hung up and went to the living room to find Wendy. She was wearing the nightgown I’d given her. She stood up and twirled around and said, “Ta-da,” in a musical voice. “How do you like it?”

  “What I like is you in it.” That, of course, is the reason flannel is so much better than the other stuff. Soft fabric clings to soft flesh, revealing forms, leaving you to imagine the details. Or remember them. Either way is good.

  “I just want to give you some incentive to hurry back,” she said.

  “Mission accomplished,” I told her.

  “Good,” she said. She came to me and put her arms around me and kissed me. “Be careful, Matt,” she said.

  “You, too,” I said sternly. I made her repeat the drill about not answering the phone and not opening the door for anybody but me. “Don’t worry, Matt,” she said. “I’m not that brave.”

  “You’re brave,” I told her, “letting me see you in that nightgown.” She laughed, a very sexy laugh. We kissed again, and I left. I waited in the hall until I heard her throw the bolt and lock all the locks.

  “Only a matter of time before people find out...”

  —Christopher George, The Immortal (ABC)

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I STEPPED OUTSIDE TO discover it had started to snow, and I smiled. We’d have a white Christmas, the first one since I couldn’t remember when. Snow does something to New York. Yeah, I know, it snarls traffic and turns the city wet and disgusting gray with oily slush. But that all comes later; I’m talking about what happens while the snow is falling. It quiets the city, somehow, and softens the hard edges of the concrete. It’s as if Nature wanted to show us no matter how big we build them, she
can top them.

  Snow also makes it difficult to walk in leather shoes. As I crossed the street, I had to walk flatfooted and plant my feet carefully. Just, I reminded myself grimly, as I had had to do when I crossed the ice toward Dinkover and the flag.

  Snow does something else to New York—it makes the cabs disappear. I stood on the east side of Central Park West for a good six minutes waiting for one to come by.

  The one I finally got was driven by a recent immigrant from Colombia, recent enough so that this was the first snow he’d ever seen. I could deduce all this from what he said: “Look at the snow, man. This never happen in Colombia.”

  It was an equally safe deduction that someone had impressed on him the idea that you should drive carefully in the snow. He kept both hands on the wheel and no feet on the accelerator. If that cab had been going any slower, it would have been backing up.

  I think I may have propelled the taxi more with will power than the driver did with gasoline, but we eventually made it up to Eighty-first Street, across the Park, and down Fifth Avenue to the Dinkovers’ building.

  And after all that delay, I was astonished to find I was the first one there. I parked under the awning out of the snow to wait. Through the glass, the doorman gave me a suspicious look, but apparently I looked respectable enough to leave alone for a while. I smiled and waved at him and told him Merry Christmas, but it didn’t seem to help.

  I looked at snowflakes falling past a streetlamp to pass the time. The wind was blowing at just the right angle to make the illusion possible. You may have seen it yourself. You look at the flakes coming at you, lit up like stars, and suddenly they are stars, and they’re not falling anymore, you are rising, soaring, zooming off. I discovered it when I was a kid, and got dismissed as a lunatic by a lot of people until I got Grover Balland to try it. Grover was the toughest kid in the neighborhood, and once he saw it, everybody was willing to try. And since it really works, I was suddenly a hero.

  “Daydreaming?” said Al St. John.

  I jumped. “Yes,” I said, “that’s exactly what I was doing.” I toyed with the idea of telling him he could fly through space but decided against it. “How long have you been here?”

  “Just got here. I took the Lexington Avenue subway and walked west. Um, I don’t want to get out of line, Matt, but where are the cops?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” I said.

  “You know Lieutenant Martin better than I do...” he began.

  I smiled. “Sometimes I know Lieutenant Martin better than he does.”

  “Well, is this the kind of thing he might do as a joke?”

  I shook my head. “No way. He can be a joker, all right, but he doesn’t joke about police work. The fact that he’s not here yet can mean only one of two things. Either he’s been delayed, by the weather or something else, or I screwed up his instructions.”

  That was the moment the lieutenant’s unmarked car pulled up, accompanied by a blue and white unit and a wagon from the lab. Cops began to pile out of the vehicles. ADA Goosens emerged from the back seat of the lieutenant’s car with a look on her face that said somebody is going to be sent to Mother Superior over this.

  I don’t know if it was the cops or the look on the Frying Nun’s face, but something made the doorman decide it was time to come out. Before he could open his mouth, Lieutenant Martin reached inside his topcoat and pulled out a legal document. The doorman gave it a quick look, then pulled the door open and said, “This way, officers.”

  Livia Goosens led the way. Al and I followed with Lieutenant Martin.

  “About time,” I said pleasantly.

  “If you’re gonna be a clown,” he said, “wear your goddamn makeup. There was a delay with the warrant. Then the Frying Nun got uppity with the judge, and we almost didn’t get it at all.”

  He turned to Al. “St. John, where in hell have you been?”

  Al filled him in, concluding, “And when Matt reached me, I headed right here. I don’t even know what this is all about.”

  “That’s okay—Cobb didn’t tell you?” He looked at the two of us, trying to see in our faces if we had cooked something up. Apparently he convinced himself. “Bea Dunney was killed.”

  “I know that much, but that’s all.”

  “That’s okay, then. Your answers are that much more likely to be unbiased.”

  The elevator was done in gray enamel with white spots. Riding in it felt uncomfortably like being inside an oven.

  When everyone was assembled in the carpeted white hallway on the ninth floor, the Frying Nun cleared her throat and told Rivetz he might begin.

  Rivetz, who was going to begin the second the lieutenant got there in any case, gave her a dirty look and walked to the door. He knocked loudly, five times, then paused, then again five times.

  “Mrs. Dinkover,” he said. “This is the police. We have a warrant to enter and search the premises.” He did some more knocking and some more yelling, with no response.

  I noted with interest that Rivetz stood off to the side of the door itself while he was doing all this. It’s a pleasure to watch a professional at work. This was the way it was supposed to be done. Maybe Carla Nelson Dinkover was not the most likely type to shoot a cop through a closed door, but too many cops had been shot by unlikely types for him to do it any other way.

  Rivetz finished yelling, then looked a question at the lieutenant, who nodded in return. Rivetz stepped aside, and two muscular uniformed cops stepped up to the door.

  Rivetz grinned at me. “Might as well let the young backs do the work, right?”

  I learned something in the next few minutes. When the police have a warrant, and the desire to get in someplace, you can bet your grandmother’s hearing aid they will get in. If they can’t pick the lock (and very few people in burglary-conscious New York have pickable locks), they’ll kick in the door. If you have a floor-lock deadbolt, and they can’t kick in the door, they’ll bust it open with an axe. That’s what they did to the door of the Dinkover apartment. I don’t know what they would have done if it had been a metal door too strong for an axe. Use a blowtorch, I guess. Dynamite.

  Once the door gave in to the axe, Rivetz stuck his head through the opening and yelled again.

  “Christ,” I said, “if she didn’t hear Officer Bunyan here chopping down the door, she must be dead.”

  The Frying Nun looked disgusted and told me to hold my tongue. I was tempted to take her literally and grab it with my hand. I get little urges like that sometimes—some kind of modified death wish. I usually manage to suppress them.

  They dusted doorknobs for prints, then Rivetz reached through the hole in the door and unlocked it. Cops drew their guns and walked in, led by the Frying Nun. Nobody told me I had to stay out, so I gestured to Al St. John, and he and I brought up the rear. With six cops in front of us, we were the safest men in New York, unless we got attacked from behind.

  The door opened into a hallway that ran the length of the apartment, with rooms opening off it on either side. Cops were opening doors, each time doing a condensed version of the routine Rivetz had gone through on the outside. I was looking at pictures.

  The hallway walls were filled with pictures, both sides, from hip level to way above my head. It was hard to see wallpaper between them, there were so many. All of Dr. Paul Dinkover. A young Dinkover with Jung; Dinkover with Einstein; Dinkover with Dr. Spock; Dinkover with Jerry Rubin; an angry Dinkover exchanging rude gestures with Nelson Rockefeller.

  “I’m surprised he hung that one up,” I said to Al.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Scandalous. Dr. Dinkover reverting to symbolic behavior.”

  It was a big apartment. Farther down, the hallway turned a corner, and the cops were working there now. Not wishing to press my luck, I stayed and looked at pictures.

  There was one picture I looked at a long time. It was one of the smaller pictures, an old glossy black and white snapshot. It showed Dr. Dinkover with his arm around a
smaller man, an Oriental man. In his other arm, Dinkover holds a little girl, also Oriental. The men are smiling, the girl is not. She is reaching with both arms across Dinkover’s body toward the other man, who doesn’t see her. If that’s not a picture of Henry Ichimi and Wendy, I decided, I will eat it. I could find out for sure, of course, by asking Wendy. I didn’t think that was much of an idea, though.

  About then, one of the cops reported finding a fully equipped darkroom. That cleared up a few minor mysteries. Carla Dinkover had been a journalist—no reason why she shouldn’t have been interested in photography as well. It also explained the gallery. She had probably taken a lot of these pictures, and, on the evidence of the darkroom, developed them as well.

  Al St. John had a frightened look on his face.

  “What’s the matter?” I demanded.

  “Is anything wrong? You look like you’re in pain.”

  “Pain?”

  “You know. It’s the look you get before you get—get a big idea.”

  That was interesting. I’d never known I did that. “Very perceptive of you. I am getting an idea. The pain is because I don’t like it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whoever killed Bea Dunney—whoever was trying to kill Wendy—used DMSO mixed with cyanide.”

  “So?”

  “So I heard the cops speculating on the most likely source of cyanide. Photographic chemicals.”

  “Oh,” Al said. “Ohh. And you think—”

  I was about to tell him I didn’t know what to think when we were interrupted by a cop’s voice from around the corner.

  “Lieutenant! Ms. Goosens! Over here.”

  I heard footsteps and grumbling. Then I heard a curse from Lieutenant Martin and a shriek from the Frying Nun. The shriek was kind of endearing—made her seem more human.

  A split second later, I realized my brain had only thought that to disguise from me the fact that I had secretly decided to go see what the fuss was about. I told Al to wait, then strode through that long hallway, and not one cop said a word about it. Maybe Ms. Goosens was right about my hanging around too much.