Killed on the Ice Page 15

  I was even more inclined to agree with her when I rounded the corner and reached the room.

  It was a study, the leather chair and book-lined wall kind. A rack of pipes. That kind of place. The only modern touch was the IBM personal computer on the desk. Dinkover (and/or his wife—she was a writer, too) undoubtedly used it as a word processor, because there was a top-quality daisy wheel printer with it and, next to that, a neat stack of paper perforated for a drive wheel.

  And on the floor was the body of Carla Nelson Dinkover. There was a wet spot on the dark blue plush carpeting and an empty glass near her hand, but on the whole she had died much more neatly than her husband had.

  It was still ugly. Her body was still youthful, still looked as if it could spring out of that awkward and ungraceful position any time, and be back charming and alluring as ever. But her face would never charm anyone again. For one thing, the reason they call it cyanide is that it turns you blue. From asphyxiation, as your muscles cease to make your lungs and heart work.

  Lieutenant Martin told Rivetz to call the morgue.

  “For God’s sake—be careful out there!”

  —Michael Conrad, Hill Street Blues (NBC)

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE NOTE HAD BEEN written on the computer; it was still attached to the stack that had been threaded through the printer.

  “...sorry for the trouble I caused,” it said in part, “but there was nothing else I could do. I loved Paul Dinkover, but Paul Dinkover was a mind, a mind that will come to be recognized as the greatest of this century. That mind was slipping away from him. There is nothing sadder than the senility of a great man. I could not watch him struggle uselessly against dotage, incontinence, death. I owed it to the man I loved to do it now, to save him that losing battle.”

  All in all, it was quite a document. It told us that Mrs. Dinkover had accompanied her husband to the Blades Club that night; how he had let her in after Max Brother had admitted him; how she took the knife and did it. She chose the Blades Club, the printout said, because she wanted to embarrass Wendy Ichimi.

  There was a whole lot of stuff about Wendy. How she had become an obsession with the old man. How he had tried to lead her to a sane life, how she had refused to let go of the unhealthy and alien symbols by which she tried to be American, and how she hated him for it. How, in the end, she had laughed at him.

  “I decided embarrassing her would not be enough. Being involved in a murder investigation would be inconvenient, nothing more. My work would not be finished as long as she remained alive. I am firmly convinced that concern for this insensitive wretch caused Paul’s condition to deteriorate. She has deprived mankind of his genius; for that, I have killed her.”

  The note concluded by saying Mrs. Dinkover had erased the computer memory and destroyed all the copies of her husband’s manuscript. It was gibberish, the note said, and would tarnish the great man’s reputation. Finally, it had some instructions for the disposition of the estate.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Well, what?” Lieutenant Martin countered, pushing me away. “You know I hate it when you read over my shoulder.”

  “Bullshit,” I said amiably. “You’ve known I was here all along. You wanted me to read the note. If you didn’t, you would have shoved me off right away. Or, more likely, you would have left me twiddling my thumbs in the parlor with Al St. John, the way I’ve been doing for three hours. I might as well be under arrest.”

  To be fair, I hadn’t spent the whole three hours twiddling my thumbs. I spent a fair amount of time answering questions for the Frying Nun. She seemed to be convinced that I had known what they were going to find here. She didn’t go so far as to suggest that I had arranged it. I spent some time listening to them question Al St. John about the possible switching of the DMSO this morning, but no one seemed to have his heart much in that operation. Al couldn’t tell them much anyway, except it was perfectly possible for Mrs. Dinkover to have done that, and we knew that already.

  For the second time that day, I watched lab boys coming and going. And, after pleading failed, reason foundered, and threats got pretty nasty, I was allowed to call Wendy. I wasn’t allowed to tell her anything (“Something’s come up; I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, bye.”), but at least she knew I was alive. A moral victory.

  I’d gone back to twiddling; after a while Lieutenant Martin sent for me with some hot air about wanting to look at the death room to make sure they got the position of the body right. When I got there, he mumbled something, then cleared the decks for me to see the note.

  Now he was giving me a look pregnant, as the saying goes, with meaning, without actually giving birth to anything intelligible.

  “Don’t you ever, Matty,” he said, “tell anybody I showed you that note. You can think what you like, and I can’t pull it out of your head or anything, but you were never supposed to see it.”

  “Got you, Mr. M.,” I said.

  He was foxy, now. “But seeing as how you have read it,” he said, “what do you think?”

  I raised a brow. “I think it’s pretty irrelevant what I think.”

  “Don’t be modest, boy.”

  I shrugged. “It’s my nature,” I told him and pretended not to notice when he snorted. “Besides,” I went on, “it doesn’t make any difference. Even as we speak, the Frying Nun is out in the hallway telling reporters from all the papers, and I hope the Network, that this wraps up the case.”

  “She’s not.” The lieutenant’s jaw had dropped so far it looked as if he would have to push it back into place with his hands.

  “Sony. I take it you think she’s being a little premature.”

  He made a noise. “Yeah, a little. Do I have to line it out for you?”

  “I don’t think so. I saw a few holes in the computer paper note that weren’t made with a punch. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  By golly, the lieutenant did push his jaw back in place with his hand, in the act of rubbing his chin to help him think. “That’s the question all right. What can I do about it?”

  “Bitch to the commissioner,” I suggested.

  “Hell, I’ve done that already; don’t do any good.” He smacked his fist into his palm. “Dammit, if she wasn’t such a smart goddam lawyer, she wouldn’t brown me off so much when she does these things.”

  He started walking around the room, using some arcane cop radar to avoid the taped outline on the floor without even looking down.

  “I can’t run out there and tell the reporters she’s full of what the birds eat,” he said. “Much as I’d like to. Wouldn’t do any good anyway, except make us both look foolish.”

  “ ‘COPS AND DA BICKER ON SHRINK WIDOW SUICIDE,’ ” I said.

  “Exactly.” The lieutenant sighed. “All I can do is let her rave, and keep the case open on my own.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Taking a nice long hard look at the suicide here. If that’s what it is.”

  “If that’s what it is,” I echoed. “Can I go home?”

  The lieutenant laughed at that. “Sure, if the case is wrapped up, who needs you? You know, Matty, the bitch of it is, all the objections we see could easily be explained away. No reason the Frying Nun can’t be one hundred percent right. But go on, get the hell out of here. Take your pal with you.”

  I rose to go. The lieutenant said, “Keep in touch, Matty.”

  I said, “Didn’t you get my Christmas card?” and left him.

  In the elevator on the way downstairs, Al St. John and I decided it would be impossible to find two cabs on a night like this and damn near impossible to find even one. We’d walk uptown through the snow and take the bus across the park on Seventy-ninth Street—then he could get a subway and I would walk down Central Park West home.

  I turned up my collar. The snow made cold kisses on my face. I stuck my gloveless hands deep in my pockets against the chill. I kept telling myself it meant a white Christmas, but it wasn’t en
ough. I had to talk to keep my mind off my misery.

  I briefed Al about the contents of the note, gave him a minute or two to digest it, then asked him what he thought.

  “It stinks,” he said. It was still snow-quiet in the city. Al’s voice sounded strange, as if we were in some sort of echo-deadening room.

  Time to play Devil’s advocate. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Well, in the first place, why did she do a suicide note on the computer?”

  “Why not? It was in the house. Her husband used it; maybe she did too.”

  “It’s convenient, though, isn’t it, Matt? They can compare handwriting; and they can even tell from the touch on a typewriter—even an electric—exactly who did the typing. But Good Lord, Matt, everything that comes out of a daisy wheel printer is going to look exactly the same.”

  I looked at him. That was one I hadn’t even thought of. “Good work,” I told him. “If there were a habitual misspelling, or an obvious stylistic quirk, we might get an indication. But it wouldn’t be legal evidence. Okay, what else?”

  “If she had easy access to so much poison, why did she have to stab her husband? If what the note says is right, she killed him out of love. Why did she choose such a painful way of doing it?”

  We crossed Seventy-ninth Street and stood under the bus shelter on the corner. I looked down the street for the bus, but visibility in the snow was near zero.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Okay, Matt, how about this? How did she know Wendy used DMSO? She had to know that in order to switch the bottles, but how could she have found out?”

  “It’s no secret,” I said, playing Devil’s advocate again.

  “It’s not exactly common knowledge. And how did she turn up at Brother’s office? If Carla Dinkover was the killer, her story of an anonymous phone call falls apart.”

  “Maybe she was following Wendy, just waiting for a chance to switch bottles—this is assuming she knew, of course—and barged into Brother’s office because she’d seen the rest going in and wanted a handy group of suspects. Or maybe she didn’t do anything at Brother’s office; she showed up there as a red herring, then made the switch in the crowd outside the Garden.”

  “Good Lord, Matt, you don’t really believe that?”

  “Good Lord, Al, of course I don’t. I have all your objections and more. But the lieutenant’s right—the objections don’t have to mean anything. What’s keeping the damn bus?”

  I turned and looked down the road again. I started nibbling my thumb until my hand got too cold, then I shoved it back in my pocket.

  Al said, “Maybe we just missed one before we got here,” and I grunted noncommittally. Then he said, “What did I miss?”

  A car skidded quietly out of control into the intersection, like something in a slow-motion comedy. The driver regained control, and the car moved on.

  “What did I miss, Matt?”

  “Nothing, except the M-17 bus,” I told him.

  Just then the big black-windowed bus pulled up as if answering to its name. I realized with a shock of embarrassment that I didn’t have exact change, a faux pas a native New Yorker should never commit, but Al made up the difference, and we got on, moving to a seat in the rear. We were pretty much alone—apparently most people had decided to stay home, or maybe get to where they were going by ski.

  “It can’t be nothing,” Al said.

  “What can’t be nothing?” I caught my reflection in the dark-tinted glass across the bus. I looked like the world’s most unfortunate dandruff sufferer; I began brushing fat snowflakes from my hair.

  “What I missed about that note. You said you had all my objections and more.”

  “So what?”

  “If you have more objections, I must have missed something, right?”

  I shook my head. More snow came off. “Not at all,” I said. “You weren’t there when Mrs. Dinkover gave me the big sell about her husband’s forthcoming masterwork, how the part he’d already finished—the introduction and the stuff about religious symbolism—would make a Third Testament in and of themselves. Except that she led one to believe her husband’s book would make the previous two testaments obsolete.

  “This,” I said, “is the drivel she supposedly burned and bulk-erased from the computer this afternoon.”

  “Maybe she was stringing you along, Matt. Putting up a good front.”

  “Your turn to play Devil’s advocate now, huh?”

  He grinned. “I guess so. But I mean it. If she’d already killed her husband, she would naturally have been putting on an act.”

  “Maybe so, but if she were, she had no reason to commit suicide. She was the greatest actress who ever lived. She glowed with fervor, Al, it was incredible. She had me convinced the book would be great, and I was hardly a Dinkover fan.

  “And you should have seen her with her ‘who let my husband in’ business. All she had to do was parade that in front of a jury, and they would have believed anything. She was fanatically devoted to her husband.”

  “Exactly,” Al said.

  The bus fishtailed a little on the curviest part of the traverse across the Park. The bus driver called back a cheerful, “Sorry!” and slowed down a little.

  “Let me finish,” I said to Al. “She was fanatically devoted to her husband, but with him gone, the fanaticism was transferred to his work and to finding out who killed him. If I’m wrong about that, I’ll go live in a cave and eat berries.”

  “Well,” Al said, “only you know what she looked and acted like.”

  We rode in silence until the bus stopped for a light at the corner of Central Park West and Eighty-first Street (the traverse doesn’t go straight through the park, it curves a little), when I said to Al, “You want to know what’s really driving me nuts?”

  “The fact that you still have to go home and walk the dog?”

  “Great!” I said. I had forgotten all about that. That meant I had to stay in these cold wet shoes a little longer. Al started to smile. “Laugh and you die,” I told him.

  He laughed, but I was too miserable to kill him. The light changed; the bus crossed the intersection and stopped. Al and I got off the bus and stood in the snow.

  “There’s something else driving me nuts,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “All right. Say the note we found is gospel. Say Dinkover was losing the battle with Father Time, and his wife couldn’t stand to watch. Say she knifed him and got Bea Dunney in an attempt at Wendy—” I had a sudden thought and broke off.

  “Here’s another objection,” I said. “Carla Dinkover decided she was going to punch her own ticket when her work was done, right?”

  “That’s the theory,” Al said.

  “Okay. Why didn’t she wait until the job was done, for God’s sake? All she had to do was listen to the radio; we’ve got two all-news stations. She could have taken her choice. As soon as she hears Wendy’s gone, then she could gargle cyanide. If it misfired, as it did, she’d be alive to fight another day.”

  “You’re right,” Al said. “But go on with what you were saying.”

  “Yeah. All right, say she was overconfident. We can concede every little thing we want, but when we do, we’re left with one little question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why did he go for the flag?” I said. “Why did he go for the flag? Why did he grab the goddamn eagle?”

  Al said nothing. He looked stunned. The way I felt.

  “Got any answers?” I asked.

  “Maybe...maybe it was just an anti-government thing, like the lieutenant thought.”

  I smiled a sad smile. “The lieutenant never thought that, and you don’t either, any more than I do.”

  “You are so right,” he said.

  I told him I’d see him tomorrow. I watched him walk around the newsstand to the subway entrance, then turned and headed downtown.

  This was worse than the walk to the bus stop had been, because I was hea
ding into the wind, and the snow was hitting me in the face. It’s amazing how something that looks so soft and fluffy can be so gritty when it lands in your eye.

  I kept my head down and tried to keep my mind off my troubles by trying to decide how I was going to talk Wendy into doing what I wanted her to do. This was a particularly absorbing topic, because I still wasn’t sure what I wanted her to do.

  Because now I was trusting my instincts. I wasn’t buying that computer-generated suicide note. Somebody had set this all up, killing Mrs. Dinkover by poisoning her drink. The note was supposed to be the ribbon on the nice neat package for the police.

  It would be a tempting package. This was a high-publicity case; the cops were getting a lot of flak. Even if they weren’t too crazy about all the details, that confession would make a nice out. It would even, I realized, make a nice smoke screen—pretend to have accepted the story the note offered, then carry on a nice, trouble-free investigation.

  That, I decided, was probably what the Frying Nun had had in mind. She was too smart to have gone for the note so quickly otherwise. I gave her a grudging mental apology, then forgot her. She wasn’t my problem.

  My problem was, what’s the safest thing for Wendy to do? If the killer was finished (and the note made it look that way), the best thing to do would be to get things back to normal immediately. Let him (or her) feel safe, and maybe he would be content to stay retired. If we were to act as if we didn’t believe the note, he might get scared, and scared people are dangerous people. Especially ones who have shown three times they don’t mind knocking off somebody inconvenient.

  But. On the other hand. What if the killer considers Wendy unfinished business? What if he decides the note was a nice try, but it would have to be sacrificed to get the job done? Then it would be madness to let Wendy skate tomorrow. Criminal. There would be no excuse for it.

  Unless you wanted to set a trap.

  I stopped in my tracks and shook myself. Where the hell had that one come from? I wanted to slap myself in the face—sure, it rankled that we were no closer to our pal than we were when he horned in on Network business to kill Dinkover, but that didn’t give me the right to get so brave all of a sudden with Wendy’s pretty neck.