Killed on the Ice Page 3

  —Bob Keeshan, Captain Kangaroo (CBS)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I’D NEVER SEEN SHIRLEY Arnstein like this before. Her eyes were red from crying. When she saw me, she forgot her usual shyness, ran to me, held me, and started to irrigate my shoulder.

  That’s supposed to be a pleasant sensation for a man, and to let you in on a little secret, it usually is, but only if you have some idea of what the hell you’re supposed to do to make things better.

  In this case, when I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure what the problem was yet, it was more than a little uncomfortable. I gave Shirley an avuncular pat on the back and made noises that were the functional equivalent of “there, there.”

  Then I spoiled everything by asking how Harris was.

  Shirley pulled away as if I’d hit her, and for the first time, I thought oh God, he’s dead.

  With an effort it was painful to watch, Shirley Arnstein caught herself on the brink of hysterics. I stood there looking at her for what must have been a half minute while she took deep breaths with her eyes closed. She was pressing her knuckles into her temples, hard, as if she wanted to keep her head from coming apart. I wished she’d stop.

  Finally, she did. In a clear, perfectly normal voice, she said, “They’re operating on him, Matt. They have to relieve the pressure on his spine. Something like that. Or he may wind up paralyzed. He might anyway. Or he might even die.”

  Shirley’s face had already died. It looked white and waxy, like the little bottles they used to sell cheap syrup drinks in.

  “He’s not going to die,” I said.

  “I want to believe that.”

  “He’s too ornery.” Shirley didn’t say anything, but she shook her head and looked sad. She thinks Harris is badly misunderstood by everybody but her.

  I spent the next forty minutes or so tracking down Harris’s belongings. The operating room people sent me to the emergency room, who sent me to the admitting office, who sent me back to the emergency room, who sent me to security, who, to the salvation of what remained of my sanity, turned out to have the stuff. They’d kept it because the police were sending someone from the lab to pick it up. The plan, I suppose, was to vacuum it and see if they could pull something out of it that would help identify the attacker. I got a look at it, and from what I could see, all they were likely to vacuum out of Harris’s clothes was a lot of dried blood.

  That was all I could tell from five feet. The head of security, a mustached giant with a nasty-looking .357 magnum on his belt and a nameplate on his chest that read Cernak, wouldn’t let me get any closer.

  “Anybody touches that stuff,” he explained, “it’s my ass.” He prodded the point home with a finger the size of a hammer handle. I was sure I’d go home later and find little oval bruises on my chest.

  I explained to Cernak that I certainly didn’t want it to be his ass, but that I was aflame with curiosity about my friend’s belongings.

  “How about letting me look a little closer, Cernak, that’s all I ask. There’s one specific thing I want to see.”

  “No way, man.” He had large, very sensitive brown eyes. Dedicated. Unyielding.

  “Cernak,” I said. It never occurred to me to call him Mr. Cernak or to find out what his first name was. The name suited him, as if he were the title character in a barbarian movie—Cernak! Son of the Fire God. That kind of thing.

  “Cernak,” I said again. “I understand you’re doing your job, and I won’t bother you any more about touching or looking at Mr. Brophy’s things.”

  “That’s good.” He looked down at me. I’m no shrimp, but Cernak looked down at me a long way. “I’m glad to hear it. You were beginning to bug me.”

  “Will you answer a couple of questions for me?”

  He took off his cap and brushed a few errant black curls back into place. “I might have been a lot more willing to do that if you didn’t come on so strong in the first place...”

  I recognized the tone in his voice that said he was leading up to a deal. It’s a sad fact of life that to do the work of the Department of Special Projects, I have to cross a lot of palms with Network silver, but I had never figured the honest-eyed Cernak as a bribe seeker. I had mixed emotions. I was glad to see I had a chance to make some progress, which had been damned scarce tonight, but I was disappointed in Cernak.

  “The thing is,” he went on, “if I answer the wrong kind of question, it’s my ass.”

  I was very tired. “If it’s your ass, don’t answer, all right?”

  Cernak shrugged massively. He did everything massively. “Okay, ask away, but afterwards, you gotta do something for me.”

  “Of course,” I said. “The first thing I want to know is who undressed the patient?”

  “Emergency room orderlies. Routine mugging, you know how that goes. Cops and me watched them; the cops like a witness when a patient says something, and this guy was starting to babble about that time, so they had me sit in. None of these emergency room orderlies speaks English too good. Not many of the doctors, either, come to that. Also, they didn’t undress him, exactly. ’Cause of his head. They cut the clothes off of him.”

  I took another glimpse at the bloody rags. “Yeah, I could have figured that myself, if I’d thought about it.” Still, I was running in luck. Cernak had seen Harris brought in; he could tell me of his own knowledge what I wanted to know.

  “What did he have in his pockets?”

  Cernak looked at me.

  “What did he have in his pockets?” I asked again.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think, goddammit, that as big as you are, I’m going to take a swing at your nose in about five seconds.”

  He laughed at me. I’m six feet two inches tall and close to the condition I was in when I played basketball. I’m not used to being laughed at when I suggest I’m going to take some sort of physical action, but the Son of the Fire God laughed, and I wasn’t even surprised.

  “Come on, man,” he said, still laughing. “I said it was a routine mugging. A little more vicious than usual, maybe, but routine. They don’t leave anything behind in somebody’s pockets but lint, know what I mean?”

  I knew what he meant, but I wanted to make sure. “No wallet?” I said. “No keys? No credit cards?” The key to the Blades Club looked like a credit card.

  “Nope. If he had a wad of Kleenex to blow his nose, they got that, too. Satisfied?” I nodded. “Good,” Cernak said. “Now you got to do something for me.”

  I started to reach for my wallet, but the Son of the Fire God renewed my faith in human nature. He confused me, first, though.

  “You work for the Network, right? I want you to tell me if Cathy is going to marry that son-of-a-bitch Atherton.”

  I said something intelligent, like “Huh?”

  “On Agony of Love, man. The soap opera. I work on the night shift, so the soaps are my favorite shows. Let me tell you, Cathy is driving me crazy. She’s way too good for that bastard. If I was her...”

  I told him what he wanted to know. He shook my hand and thanked me profusely. I got back upstairs just in time to hear a doctor tell Shirley that Harris was going to live, but that we’d just have to wait to find out what, if any, permanent damage had been done. The attack had been very methodical. Three blows with a pipe or something similar, all delivered to strategic areas (head, ribs, and knee), all designed to leave Harris incapacitated for a long period. The doctor said that if a concerned passerby hadn’t called an ambulance as soon as he had, Harris would be dead. Now the doctor thought he was going to be all right.

  Shirley started to cry again, happy tears this time. I let her cry while I dealt with a functionary who wanted to know if Harris had Blue Cross.

  The next thing on the agenda was a trip to Harris’s apartment. I had to decide whether to take Shirley with me. It might be a bit much for her to take; on the other hand, getting back to work, especially on something that hit her hard and personally, might be just wha
t she needed.

  “Shirley,” I said, “we’ve got work to do.”

  “Wh—what, Matt?”

  “Harris’s place. The mugger got his wallet and his keys—that means he knows where Harris lives and had the means to get in.”

  “Oh, God, you’re right! Let’s go, maybe he’s still there.” That proved Shirley was taking this personally—ordinarily she’d suggest we go by the book and ask the police to check it out. This time, her voice and expression promised a nasty experience for the mugger if we found him in.

  Not that it was likely, of course—hours had passed, and any thief who had intended to follow up his assault on Harris Brophy’s person with one on his possessions was long gone by now.

  Shirley had grabbed a Network car to come to the hospital, one of our fleet of luxurious but totally impractical black-on-the-outside, white-on-the-inside land yachts. We crossed the parking lot just in time for me to chase a budding young car thief away from it (that’s one of the reasons they’re impractical—car thieves find them irresistible, and Special Projects has to waste time chasing about one a month), got inside, and headed downtown and west to Harris’s apartment.

  On the way, I asked Shirley if she had a key to the place. She blushed. I had to keep my eyes on the road, so I got only a glimpse, but I could feel the heat of it. She practically glowed in the dim interior of the car.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was just wondering if I’d have to bring the super in on this or what.”

  “No, Matt, it’s okay. I do have one.”

  “That saves a little trouble.”

  About ten blocks and half a minute later, Shirley said, “But I’ve never used it before,” as though there’d been no pause at all. “I—I was always afraid I’d barge in on him with some other girl. So I stayed away.” She looked at her hands.

  “We’re here,” I said. “Give me the keys.” She fumbled in her purse and handed them over. “Which ones are they?” I asked, because Shirley carried more keys with her, it seemed, than Captain Kangaroo.

  She sorted out Harris’s front-door key and outside key from the rest. Then I asked her which was which.

  Shirley looked miserable. “I don’t know, I’ve never used them.”

  “Okay,” I said, “it probably doesn’t matter.” That was true; it probably wouldn’t. The only way it would make a difference would be if Harris’s playmate actually were still inside the apartment with a pipe or a monkey wrench or whatever the hell it was he’d rearranged Harris’s bones with. In that case, my jingling keys until I sounded like Santa and his reindeer paying an early call would give him plenty of time to prepare a reception for me. Probably not milk and cookies.

  The night—or rather the morning (false dawn was already lighting the sky to the east)—was cold and clear. I put my gloves on, but I left my overcoat unbuttoned, for better freedom of movement.

  “Shirley, if I make a noise like I’m in trouble, or if I don’t come out in five minutes, drive like hell and get all the cops you can find.”

  “I’m coming in with you,” she said. It was the first time in memory she had openly defied an order from the vice-president in charge of Special Projects.

  “You are coming in as soon as I find out if it’s safe. Don’t worry about it, it’s probably nothing.”

  Shirley didn’t like it much, but habit won out, and she nodded. I got out of the car.

  Harris Brophy had a floor-through apartment in a converted warehouse in the far West Village, a neighborhood bounded by Fourteenth Street on the north, the Hudson River on the west, and Ninth Avenue on the east. It was, by statistics, one of the safest neighborhoods in Manhattan. These were the same kind of statistics that would give a safe-neighborhood rating to the Sea of Tranquility, i.e., statistics that show practically nobody lives there. It was very spooky to be standing on a sidewalk in New York City and see no automobiles, hear no noises but some honking out on the river. I shivered, and not just from the December cold.

  I walked up to Harris’s building and took a look at the lock. The first thing I realized was that I had been a jerk to put my gloves on, because I had to take them off to work the key. The second thing I realized was that the brand of key matched up with the brand of lock (both Rabsons—you work Special Projects, you learn about good locks), so that knowing which one to use to get in would be easy after all.

  Taking great care to keep the rest of Shirley’s keys from making noise, I opened the door and stepped in. The hallway was well lit, but silent. Harris had the second floor. I tiptoed upstairs, walking well to the wall side. The building was newly renovated, and new stairs aren’t supposed to squeak, but why take chances?

  Somewhere in the building a phone was ringing. I froze and listened. It rang three times, then stopped, answered, no doubt, by an irate tenant whose first words would be, “Do you know what time it is?”

  I walked to the door with the discreet peephole with “H. Brophy” written underneath, put my ear to the door, and listened. Nothing. I left it there, snuggled up to the metal of the door. Still nothing.

  Carefully, like a gentle lover, I eased the key into the lock. I turned it so slowly, my wrist began to ache. I heard the faint click as the tumblers eased back. That was good; a new lock, well oiled. Then, all at once, I wrenched the knob around and rammed the door with my shoulder. The door shot open into a blackened room. I didn’t waste any time being a silhouette in the doorway for whoever might be waiting in the blackness. Instead, I kept low and let my momentum take me into a sliding dive across the floor.

  It was supposed to be a sliding dive. I didn’t slide too far because of what I landed on, something that was knobby and sharp and crunched under me.

  My first thought was that it was a booby trap, but after a few seconds I realized that while I wasn’t exactly comfortable, I was at least still alive. More important, nobody had tried to jump on me and finish me off.

  I sighed. Another precaution that turned out to have been a foolish one. I got to my feet to the sound of more crunching. Something that felt like glass sliced into my hand. Maybe I should have kept my gloves on after all.

  I cursed and brought my hand to my mouth, to suck the wound. I spit out a piece of glass and continued to rise, more carefully this time. As I did so, my imagination got taken with the notion that this was the booby trap, that the glass that had cut me was from a test tube that had been stolen just that morning from some secret government laboratory, and it had held plague bacillus that I had even now loosed on the unsuspecting metropolis.

  I cursed again and told myself to stop it. I found a light and turned it on.

  Chaos. Someone had trashed Harris’s apartment but good. Chairs and tables had been overturned, the contents of drawers strewn everywhere. I’d never been there before and had no mental inventory of Harris’s belongings, but I would bet at least half of the Network’s profits for the year nearly concluded that he had owned a stereo system and a television set. Both were gone.

  What I had fallen on and smashed was a Christmas tree, a little Scotch pine that the thief had apparently knocked over in his haste. I saw now that my overcoat was encrusted across the chest with pieces of colored glass from shattered ornaments. They looked like a row of military decorations.

  I stood there looking at the tree for a few seconds, then went downstairs to get Shirley.

  She took one look at the room and began to cry again.

  “Shirley, I’m sorry, but you’ve been here a lot, right?”

  “Y-yes. But I never used the key Harris gave me.”

  “All right, I’m not saying you did. All I want to know is what’s missing.”

  Give Shirley a job and she does it. Still sniffling occasionally, she turned slowly, giving the place a good once over. “Well, there’s the TV and the stereo and the tape machine. And his coin collection.”

  “Coin collection?”

  She pointed to a blank spot on the wall. “Harris has a collection of Indian head pennies. Since he
was little. He had it framed, you know? It’s worth almost ten thousand dollars, Harris said.”

  I sucked more blood out of my hand and thought, you learn something new every day. Harris had never struck me as the coin collecting type. He’d never struck me as the Christmas tree type, either, but Shirley explained that next.

  “Oh, Matt, he put the tree up for me. You know, I get mad at Harris for being so...so detached, for being, I don’t know, like a transient in his own life, for being contemptuous of anything sentimental or even human...

  “I was mad at him today, for flirting with that shameless Japanese girl. Right in front of me. Not that I have any claim on him, but damn him, he knows how I feel!”

  Shirley wasn’t even looking at me. She was just saying it to get it said. It had the sound of something she’d been holding onto for a long time.

  “He called me,” she went on. “Wanted me to come here tonight. Said he had a surprise for me. It must have been the tree.”

  I thought it figured Harris would put up a Christmas tree as a surprise for a Jewish girl, but at least it was human and sentimental and a step in the right direction.

  “He wanted me to come here,” Shirley said again, “but I wouldn’t. I said I had to work late, but that was just an excuse. I was still mad, that’s all. And now, now...”

  Shirley was close to losing it again, but the ringing of a telephone somewhere in the apartment cut her off.

  “Is this the party to whom I am speaking?”

  —Lily Tomlin, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I PUT MY GLOVES back on before looking for the phone. The police would eventually dust this place for prints. It wouldn’t do them any good, but far be it from me to spoil routine. What I did spoil was the gloves themselves, since only too late did I realize I would be making the inside of the left one a bloody, disgusting mess. It’s little touches like this that make life so rewarding.

  Anyway, the phone was under a pile of Harris’s clothes, and I got to it just as it rang the third time.