Killed on the Ice Read online

  Rivetz came down heavy on the step, though it didn’t take a degree in ethnology to realize that small, light brown Wendy, with her delicate Oriental features, had no actual blood relationship to big, pink, corn-fed Helena Speir. Mrs. Speir was white-haired and handsome, and she had strong gray eyes that she kept turning toward her stepdaughter. Her look was unadulterated motherly concern, blood or no blood.

  “...Beatrice Dunney, another skater in the show...” Bea Dunney was a blonde, six inches taller than Wendy and probably thirty pounds heavier, but somehow she seemed a lot more vulnerable at the moment. It was probably fatigue—she was probably pretty under most circumstances, but now her blue eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and her fair skin was blotched with red. The expression she wore, an embarrassed I’m-only-here-by-accident-don’t-mind-me half-smile, didn’t help. I knew from experience that cops tend to get peeved by that attitude, and it didn’t improve her looks much either.

  Her expression only wavered for a second, when Rivetz referred to her as “another skater.” Then her mouth got tight and rueful, and her eyes flashed something that wasn’t joy.

  “...and Cobb you know,” Rivetz concluded.

  The lieutenant grunted. “Thanks. All right, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Detective Lieutenant Martin, and I’ll be investigating this case. Does everyone know what happened here tonight?”

  There were nods. Ivan Danov grumbled something that sounded like “Of course.”

  “All right,” the lieutenant said again, “then the first thing I want to know is—”

  Wendy Ichimi spoke for the first time in my presence since I’d found the body. “What I want to know is what he was even doing here!” She tossed her head, making the highlights dance in her shiny black hair.

  That was another part of Wendy’s appeal. Her big almond eyes and tiny turned-up nose and her mouth, which was small and round and made her look as if she were in a perpetual state of surprise, were beautiful and exotic and spoke of the Mysterious East. At the same time, her voice and gestures and attitudes were pure California Girl. It was an intriguing combination.

  “Now, Wendy,” Max Brother said. He was undoubtedly the handsomest man in the building. With his expensively styled hair and his sleepy dark eyes, he looked like a silent movie star. He was probably fifteen years older than he looked, which would make him fifty. His well-publicized bout with cocaine hadn’t left a mark on him. Brother was this era’s super agent. They come along every once in a while, short but handsome guys from New York who break into the business as singers or comics or chorus boys and hang on for a while because what they lack in talent, they make up in drive. Eventually, they realize that drive itself is a pretty valuable commodity, and they start using it on behalf of someone who has talent. Anybody. Brother’s specialty was girl nightclub singers and rock groups. Wendy was his first athlete, but he wasn’t doing badly by her at all, if the contract he’d gotten out of the Network was any indication.

  “Now what, Max?” Wendy demanded. “All I want to know is how that slimy old bastard got in here when I told him this afternoon I never wanted to see him again!”

  “Oh, Wendy,” her stepmother said, chagrined by either the language or the sentiment, I couldn’t tell which.

  Max Brother smiled at Wendy, but there was anger in his eyes. “I just think we should let the lieutenant and his men do their job.” It came out “theya jawb.” Max had conquered his New York accent for the most part, but apparently it would sneak back in times of stress. “I’m sure they’re better at asking questions about this sort of thing than we are.”

  He shot the lieutenant a quick grin that was intended to include him in the Society for Getting Silly Young Girls to Butt Out, but Mr. M. wasn’t interested.

  “I don’t think Miss Ichimi is doing so bad for a beginner. Let’s try to get her question answered. Who did let Dr. Dinkover in here tonight?”

  Silence.

  The lieutenant let it go on for a long time, looking at each of us in turn. I was slightly put out at being included in his dirty look since I’d already told him I didn’t let Dinkover into the Blades Club, but I figured he just wanted to make things fair.

  The silence went on. Finally, the lieutenant said, “Look. This Dr. Dinkover was famous for a lot of things, but picking locks wasn’t among them. So somebody let him in. I’m going to find out who. Now the easy way is if you tell me. The hard way is unpleasant for everybody, especially for the one who let him in, because when I have to do things the hard way, I get angry.

  “Now, I’m going to ask one more time, without prejudice as the lawyers say.”

  “Lawyers!” Ivan Danov exploded. In the few days I’d known him, I’d come to learn that he literally never spoke except in explosions, as if he had to let the words pile up in him to a critical mass before they could force themselves past the barrier of a foreign language.

  “Lawyers!” he said again. “Why do we not have lawyers? Why have we not heard our rights? I demand my rights. I demand the rights of my friends. I demand the rights of my students. I demand them in the name of Democracy! Why do you think, in my old age, I have defected from Russia? For Freedom! I would think you, a black man, would have the knowledge of what oppression means—”

  The lieutenant did a little exploding himself. “Quiet!” Danov shut up but only to gather air for a new explosion. “Look, Mr. Danov, this is a field investigation. Nobody’s been arrested. Nobody’s been singled out as a suspect. That’s a popular misconception. If you are innocent, it’s your duty to assist in the investigation. Did you let him in? Do you know who did?”

  Danov was a tall, lanky man with sparse silver hair. He had won three gold medals for Russia during the fifties and sixties, then retired to coaching. All had been fine until Soviet athletic authorities decided that Danov’s most promising pupil, who happened to be a Jew, was not quite right and for his own good had to be sent off to one of Russia’s famous “sanitariums” until he was cured, or until it rained up instead of down, whichever came last.

  Danov had never been interested in politics, but he knew skating, and knew he was the best. He defected to the United States in protest, he had told the press, “of this crime against Sport, of this crime against Danov!”

  “First I will hear my rights!” he insisted.

  Lieutenant Martin sighed. “All right, Rivetz, read him his rights.”

  Rivetz was very good at dirty looks, and he used an especially potent one on Danov as he recited the Miranda Warnings, but it was all wasted. The skating coach spent the time nodding at the rest of us, satisfied in the knowledge that he had struck a blow for Freedom.

  Rivetz got to the end of his little spiel, asking Danov if he understood all of it. Danov said of course. The lieutenant asked again if Danov had let the victim in.

  “No,” Danov said.

  The lieutenant scraped his upper lip against his lower teeth. “Why didn’t you just say so? You weren’t about to incriminate yourself with that statement.”

  “Right is right,” Danov said.

  “It sure is. Right is definitely right.” The lieutenant gave me another dirty look, as though I were personally responsible for his troubles. I shrugged.

  “Okay,” Lieutenant Martin said. “You’ve all given statements to the detectives—we’ll be asking you to sign them sometime tomorrow when we get them all typed up for you. If you need to leave town any time soon, check with us first, all right?”

  Max Brother was about to get huffy, then thought better of it.

  Lieutenant Martin said, “Cobb, I know these are busy people. When I want to speak to any of them, I’ll work through you.”

  I nodded.

  “All right then. You can go ho—”

  The lieutenant was being nice, or at least circumspect. He could have kept us a lot longer and been a lot rougher on us, and he probably would have if it weren’t for the fame and money of the victim and the suspects. Still, there we were, one phoneme from being dismissed, when Wend
y’s stepmother opened her mouth.

  “Lieutenant,” she said. “Lieutenant, I was just thinking...”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Well, I was just thinking, how did Mr. Cobb get in here tonight?” That got me a whole lot of dirty looks.

  “Drizzle, drazzle, drozzle, drome,

  Time for this one to go home.”

  —Sandy Becker, Tutor the Turtle (syndicated)

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I MEAN,” HELENA SPEIR went on, “here we are, puzzling over how Paul got inside—”

  My turn to interrupt. “Paul?”

  In spite of everything, Wendy smiled. Mrs. Speir ignored me.

  “—but Mr. Cobb arrived only when we were about ready to go, after Wendy and Beatrice had finished and were off the ice, and how did he get in? The caretaker couldn’t have—I saw him go into his office.”

  She paused for breath. “I don’t mean to imply anything,” she said, implying plenty, “but if there was no difficulty for Mr. Cobb to get in, there shouldn’t have been any for Paul.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Speir, but Cobb’s entry has already been accounted for.”

  Mrs. Speir started to get a little red. “Well, I was just trying to help.”

  “Mr. M., mind if I explain? I still have to work with these people.” He nodded. “I have a key,” I told them. I pointed at Rivetz, who held up a plastic thing that looked like a credit card. “A magnetic strip thing. Since there’s only one attendant here late at night, and he’s got a lot to do, the rink gives out keys to regular members who are planning to use the facilities at those times. When we made the deal to use the place for Miss Ichimi’s special, they gave the Network a few of them.”

  Now Mrs. Speir got very red. “Oh, Mr. Cobb, I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to imply...It’s not likely Paul had one of these, is it?”

  “Not unless he belonged to the club,” I said. But it got me thinking. I’d kept one of the Network keys; Ed Argiulo, who was directing Wendy’s show, had another; and the third had been given to Harris Brophy. And Harris was missing.

  The lieutenant sighed again, his biggest one of the night, and this time he did manage to let us go home. Or, rather, he let us go. It was pushing 3:30 A.M., but I had a lot to do before I could go home.

  The first thing I had to do was see the ladies back to their hotel; they were staying at the Statler, which is right across the street from Madison Square Garden. Max Brother, it seemed, was going directly to his office in order to be able to deal with the press. Danov was staying with friends in the city. Lieutenant Martin had me escorted to a phone to call for a couple of cabs. It would be impossible to hail one on the street in that neighborhood at that time of night.

  As soon as we got settled in the cab, Helena Speir apologized again for, as she put it, “embarrassing me.”

  I told her not to mention it. “From the way you spoke of him, I gather you knew Dr. Dinkover.”

  “Yes, Paul was a close friend of Henry’s—Wendy’s father—at the University.”

  I knew Wendy’s father had been a hotshot mathematician, but this was the first I’d heard of any connection between him and Dinkover. I was trying to think of an inoffensive way to follow this up, but Wendy interrupted.

  “Anybody have a cigarette?” she asked.

  In my work I meet a lot of people whose entire livelihood depends on their ability to breathe and/or speak properly. Singers. Disc jockeys. Actors. Athletes. Dancers. I’m no longer surprised at the number of these people who smoke. Appalled, yes, but not surprised.

  Bea Dunney dug a pack out of her purse and gave it to Wendy. The champion lit it, took a drag, looked at me with a wicked smile, and said, “You won’t tell on me, will you, Mr. Cobb? I have to maintain a positive image for all the little skaters out there. And to the moms and dads who pay to take them to the ice shows.”

  I told her her secret was safe with me. She said good, then turned and leaned her forehead against the window as if the rest of us didn’t exist.

  The cab made a U-turn on Broadway, something that is possible only very late at night, and stopped in front of the hotel. I paid and tipped the driver on behalf of the Network.

  I ushered the ladies inside and walked them to the elevator. They kept assuring me I didn’t have to go to all that trouble, but I told them I had wanted to come inside to make a phone call. Mrs. Speir said I could make the call from the suite she and Wendy shared, and I took her up on it. I had been hoping she’d make the offer. It wasn’t that the Network was too cheap to spend a dime on a phone call; it was the fact that I had already found one messy corpse this morning, and it was stimulating my imagination. I had visions of a bloody-handed fiend waiting behind the door of Wendy’s room, and I didn’t like them.

  I also figured it would be an opportunity for me to fill in the blanks about Dinkover’s background as it concerned Wendy’s late father.

  I was wrong about that part of it. We dropped Bea Dunney at her floor, and I watched unobtrusively until she was safely into her room before I let the doors close. Then we proceeded upstairs, where I made sure Wendy and her mother would be safe. I always feel a little foolish when it turns out I’ve been worrying over nothing, but I feel a lot foolish on those occasions when it turns out I’ve failed to worry over something.

  Then I made my phone call. I had remembered (at last) about the Network’s trying to beep me all those years ago while I had been crossing the ice toward Dinkover’s body.

  “Special Projects, St. John,” said a voice.

  “Al?” I said, “Matt Cobb. Listen, we’ve got a—”

  “Matt?” St. John said. “Where have you been? Shirley must have beeped you twelve times before she left, and I tried a few times myself before I gave up.”

  “My beeper was in my coat, and my coat was in another room.”

  “Good Lord, Matt,” he said. Al St. John was a blond Ivy League type who’d joined the Network about the same time I became head of Special Projects. He was full of questions about the TV business, and suggestions about how we could improve operations in the department. He was very smart—he was about three inches from a Ph.D. in psychology—but I always had a hard time forgetting he wasn’t a kid dressed up. It wasn’t only the way he looked, it was the way he talked. All his expletives were out of boys literature. “Good Lord” was about as irreverent as he got. That and “Judas Priest.” I had never actually heard him say “Great Scott” or “Holy Smoke,” but I figured it was just a matter of time.

  “Good Lord, Matt,” he said again. “If you don’t keep the beeper with you, it can’t do any good.” I think he got off on having a beeper.

  “Mea culpa,” I said. “Now, where did Shirley go?” I wanted to know the answer, all right, but I was dreading it just the same. Shirley Arnstein was a former congressional staffer, plain in a pleasant sort of way, and very shy, except when it came to her work. She was devoted to the Network with an almost religious zeal. She was the only person I never had to apologize to for assigning her for a week of overnight duty. She loved it. If she were the only one there, she wouldn’t have to worry about sharing any of the work. It would have to have been something drastic to make her walk out in the middle of a shift.

  “She’s at the hospital, Matt.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Not her, Harris. The last I heard from Shirley, he was still unconscious. Or rather unconscious again. He came to long enough at one point to tell the people in the emergency room he’d been mugged and to call the Network. Shirley was working the graveyard shift so she heard the news first. She tried to get you—”

  “I was busy.”

  “—but you didn’t answer. So she beeped me. I’m surprised she waited for me to get here before she left. You know how she feels about Harris.”

  I nodded, realized that was stupid over the phone, and said, “Yes.” Shirley Arnstein’s devotion to duty was equaled only by her devotion to Harris Brophy, a fact Harris only noticed when
he had nothing else on the agenda. It was not the healthiest of situations, and I’d often thought that someday it was going to cause me trouble. I remember thinking this could be it, if Shirley went off the rails over it.

  I got the address of the hospital from Al and told him to hold the fort until further notice. Then I gave him a quick briefing on the evening’s other disaster.

  “Good Lord,” he said. “It’s hitting the fan from both directions, isn’t it? What do I tell the press, Matt?”

  The press, for God’s sake. “You tell them nothing. Come on, Al, you know better than that. This is just a terrible coincidence, Dinkover had nothing to do with the Network; the police will tell them anything they want to know.”

  “I figured that would be it. Never hurts to make sure.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “You’re right, Al, I’m just tired. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  “Wear your beeper,” he said.

  In spite of fatigue and everything else, I had to smile. “You got it.”

  After I hung up, Wendy, who had been pretending not to listen, asked me if everything was okay.

  “No,” I said.

  “Was that about Harris? Mr. Brophy?”

  “Yes. Apparently, someone has beaten him up pretty badly.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. He was nice.”

  “I’m on my way to the hospital now. I’ll tell him you said so, if he’s up to hearing it.”

  She didn’t say anything else, so I figured it was okay to go. I was almost out the door when I heard her voice behind me. “Mr. Cobb?” I turned to look at her.

  “I want to talk to you. Tomorrow sometime, okay? The ice show matinee is over a little past three. Can you meet me at the Garden.”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll try.”

  “Thank you. And, Mr. Cobb?” I stopped again. “No matter what you think from the way I acted tonight, I’m not really a bitch.”

  I told her I’d take her word for it and left.

  “...as we open the door to the Treasure House.”