Killed on the Ice Page 5

  “And what’s the stuff that sounds like a sneeze?”

  “Ashuk. That’s a thin pasta stuffed with scallions, with yogurt and a meat sauce on it. The sauce is the best part. They give you pita to wipe up what’s left.”

  “I know what pita is.” She drummed fingers on the table. “This would be interesting music to skate to,” she said. “Yes, Mr. Cobb, that sounds fine.”

  I told her to call me Matt, and she agreed on the condition I call her Wendy. That taken care of, I gave the waitress our order.

  “Okay, Wendy. The next decision is up to you. Is this a show biz lunch or a people lunch?”

  She tilted her head. “What’s the difference?”

  “In a show biz lunch, we could be making a billion-dollar deal, but we wouldn’t say a word about it until dessert. A people lunch, you just tell me what’s on your mind, and I react.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I know what you mean. Max has got to be the world champion at show biz lunches.”

  I nodded. “If it’s not Max, it’s some other agent.”

  “Let’s make it a people lunch, then.”

  “Fine with me. I was a people, before I went to work for the Network.”

  “You’re still a people as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Nice of you to say so.” The waitress came with the sambusa. I took one, dipped it into the yogurt mixture. Wendy did the same, caught a drip of yogurt on her tongue before it could fall into her lap, took a bite, and smiled.

  “This is good. Now I have two reasons to be grateful to you.”

  “Two?”

  She nodded grimly. “Look, Mr. Cobb—”

  “Matt.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot. Look, Matt. I’m afraid.”

  “Of what?” I asked. I wasn’t sarcastic; I just wanted to know.

  “I don’t know. Bad publicity. The police. The way Dinkover dragged himself over to that eagle. Nightmares. Maybe I’m afraid the killing isn’t over.”

  I froze with a sambusa at my lips. I put it down slowly and looked into Wendy’s almond eyes. “Do you know something?”

  “I don’t know anything!” She frowned, and looked at me helplessly. “I used to think I’d be happy when Dinkover died. I hated him, you know.”

  “I could see you weren’t too broken up about his death last night.”

  “Oh, I was terrible about that. I was so afraid. I get bitchy when I’m afraid.”

  “You must have been petrified.”

  She smiled. “Thanks a lot.” Then, serious again, she said, “But I was, Matt. The idea that somebody had been around the rink. How do we know it was Dinkover the killer was after?”

  “Got me,” I said. “How do we know the waitress isn’t a spy from the Ice Capades? I mean, is just a formless dread, not that I blame you if it is, or have you actually been threatened or something?”

  “Oh, threatened,” she said, dismissing it with a graceful hand. “Everybody famous gets threatened. It got pretty bad before the Olympics, you know. A lot of people are still fighting World War II.”

  She gasped and put a hand to her mouth and looked so generally horrified, I thought she’d swallowed the wrong way. That was all I needed—GOLD MEDAL WINNER CHOKES ON EXOTIC FOOD WHILE TV EXEC LOOKS ON. I was about to leap the table and execute the Heimlich maneuver when Wendy spoke.

  “My God,” she breathed, “listen to me. That’s him talking. I’m beginning to sound like him.”

  “Who? Dinkover?”

  She nodded.

  “He killed my father, you know.” She said it in the same tones a child coming home from his first Sunday school class would say, “God made the world.” A basic article of faith, not to be questioned.

  I questioned it anyway.

  “I mean it, he tormented us. All of us. He made my father’s life hell. He made my life hell. He pretended to be our friend all the while, but he was killing us.”

  Wendy paused while the waitress brought the ashuk. I had her refill our water glasses; Wendy took a long drink and began to speak again.

  She began by telling me about her father. Henry Ichimi had been a shy and sensitive man, a second-generation American who had spent his teen years behind barbed wire in a detention camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.

  “I wonder what that must have been like,” Wendy said. “I don’t want to know, I just wonder. I’ll tell you this, though, Matt, it must have done something to him. He tried to deny his heritage. You know, I never found out until after he was dead that my father spoke fluent Japanese. He never spoke it around the house, not even to my mother.

  “That was another thing. Shows how mixed up my father was. He left college to join the army to fight in Korea—you know my father was a math professor?”

  I told her I’d heard it somewhere.

  “Yeah, well he didn’t get his degree or start to teach for a long time—he was in the army until 1955, and then what did he do but come home with a Japanese wife.

  “It must have been pretty bizarre for her, don’t you think? I mean, they were married for six years before I was born, and my mother still didn’t speak very good English when I started to learn to speak.

  “My mother had a tough pregnancy with me—she’d had two miscarriages earlier—and she never really got over giving birth. She died when I was four, and her memory comes in pretty hazy these days. Poor, uncomfortable-looking woman, trying to be a good little Japanese wife to a man who was trying hard to pretend he wasn’t Japanese at all. Do you know what I remember best about her?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know how old I was. I bet I wasn’t three years old yet. But I remember my mother trying to teach me a few words of Japanese; I remember the way she stood there and took it when my father reamed her out—in English—when he caught her at it.”

  There were tears on her face. “I wish I could remember what those damned words were. I—I’m sorry.” She wiped her eyes with a corner of her napkin.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “my mother died. Daddy was miserable over it, but he got a promotion at the university and got involved in his work, and before long he’d met Helena. She was teaching Spanish when they met. They married two years later.

  “She’s a good woman, Matt, she really is. In a way, I owe her a lot—hell, I owe her everything. She’s the one who started me skating. She’s always been there when I needed her, even during her marriage to Speir—boy, what a creep he was. I just wish I could...”

  There was a long pause which led me to wonder what Wendy just wished she could. The conclusion could be anything from the natural “...show her how grateful I am,” to “...love her,” to “...get her to buy me a salami sandwich,” or something even more ridiculous. Life is full of these irritating little unsolved mysteries.

  Wendy shook it off. “Anyway, it looked like my father had a good shot at being happy at last. He was the head of the math department at a great American university, respect from American colleagues included. He had an American wife. His daughter was starting to show prowess in a sport. That’s a great American way for parents to get happy.”

  “You were about six at the time, right? You’ve done a lot of thinking about this since.”

  Wendy rolled her eyes and made a noise that was halfway between a laugh and a choke.

  “Oh, yes. Quite a bit of thinking.

  “Because this was the situation Dinkover moved in on. Not right away—about a year or so later. And he went to work on my father. And on me.”

  To hear Wendy tell it, Dr. Paul Dinkover had been a graduate summa cum laude from the Iago School for Fiendish Manipulators. He’d first approached the Ichimis in the name of Science—he wanted to test bright children like Wendy to see how well they adjusted to their intelligence, he said. Over months and years, he had preyed on Henry Ichimi’s fears and frustrations. Into discussions on Jungian symbolism (something that fascinated Wendy’s father) Dinkover would slip questions. Didn’t it bother him that people talked behind
his back about him and his white wife? Did he ever worry that he became department chairman because he would be a visible minority member in an important position and thus would make the school look good? Or did it occur to him that, with that having happened, he had probably gone as far as he would ever go? How could he trust a society who had locked its citizens up only for the crime of being of Japanese descent? And did he really think it couldn’t happen again?

  “Daddy became impossible to live with, Matt. The older I got, the worse he was. I could never have any friends—they were either sucking up to me because I was the best young skater in the state, or they were patronizing me because I was Japanese.

  “And nobody could say a word against Dinkover, even after he moved on and started traveling for his anti-war stuff. ‘He’s a psychiatrist,’ Daddy would say. ‘He knows about these things.’ He’d pay little visits, as if to give my father’s paranoia a booster shot.

  “Helena saw what was happening; she used to tell him what Dinkover was doing to him. He wouldn’t listen, and I sided with him. In those days, I did. I never realized what the real problem was until after my father killed himself.”

  She took another drink of water.

  “Do you know what hara-kiri means, Matt? It means ‘belly-cutting.’ At the last minute, my father decided to reassert his ethnic identity.

  “Helena found the body. I don’t think I could have stood it—I’d be in a nuthouse now if I’d been the one. He left a note. Nobody’s seen the note outside of me and Helena and the local cops. What it mostly said was that he loved me and he was ‘grateful to Paul Dinkover for his friendship and guidance.’

  “When I heard that, that’s when it all came to me. That’s when I first realized all the things I’ve just been telling you. Dinkover guided my father, all right. He guided him to death.”

  I remember thinking that Wendy, in her grief, had oversimplified the matter. She’d probably transferred a lot of her own guilt onto Dinkover, too. And I don’t think anybody commits suicide just because someone hits the right keys to make him depressed. Still, of all the things I’d heard about the late Dr. Dinkover, I’d never heard he was famous for his sensitivity toward the feelings of others.

  Wendy read my mind. “He lived on the feelings of others, Matt. He was a vampire. He did know how the human mind worked; he knew how to kick out all the supports a person had built; and I swear, Matt, he liked to hear the crash.”

  “And I suppose your father is not the only person he did it to.”

  “My father is the only one I could name for certain, but I could suggest a few others.”

  “For instance?”

  “For instance his first wife. Don’t you think he set her up before he waltzed off with that younger woman? And wait till you meet her.”

  I wondered why Wendy thought I might meet Mrs. Dinkover, but I didn’t get a chance to ask her; she was still speeding along.

  “And what about Velda Delinski, June Lathen, John Free, and Cyril Guzick?”

  “Who are they?”

  “The Landover Four.”

  “Oh. Yes, I can see your point. Dinkover egged them into doing something ‘important’ for the anti-war movement—”

  “Yeah. The war stank, but believe me, Dinkover stank worse. He used things. He used the legitimate protest to feed his habit.”

  “—and they wind up in a federal pen on a felony murder rap when they tapped the guard at the records site a little too hard.”

  “John Free wound up dead,” Wendy told me. “He was stabbed to death in a fight over a bar of soap last month.”

  “Yeah, I read about that, too. Remind me I never want to go to prison.”

  “Sometime prison comes to you,” Wendy said. Her voice sounded very old. “That’s how I felt when he cornered me in your office that afternoon.”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” I said.

  “My God. All right, yesterday. There I was, between shows, just coming up to meet my bodyguard—how is Harris, by the way?”

  “I don’t know. I should have called the hospital when I got up, but I didn’t. He’s going to live, they said last night.”

  “I’m glad. This is just more terribleness for you to deal with.”

  “I’m used to it,” I said.

  “But anyway, there I am, and in comes this...this man—I mean, how did he even know I was there?—and he just comes out and tells me I have to help him with his new project. I have to help him.”

  Wendy started to tremble, especially her hands. She took out a cigarette, put it in her mouth, then missed it three times with her lighter before she finally got it started.

  She took a deep drag and said, “I was so stunned. I just stood there looking at him, like a bird in front of a snake or whatever it is. I was blinking my eyes hoping he’d go away. I don’t even know what he was talking about. I just remember you made him go away. That’s the other thing I have to be grateful to you about.”

  He had been talking to her about bilingual education, a project, in my opinion, designed to keep the downtrodden sentenced to a life in ghettos. That way, they form a captive constituency, cut off from most forms of education or enlightenment, and the people who prevent their assimilation remain in power as their only spokesmen.

  Sorry. I’ll get off my hobby horse. It really doesn’t matter what I think of the issue. I only mention it because if Dinkover hadn’t picked one of my pet peeves to harangue an obviously distraught Wendy, I probably would have been more polite, and Wendy wouldn’t have been grateful to me.

  Dinkover’s plan was something like this. He would get somebody to hold a hearing, or a town meeting, or something like that, and Wendy would get up and say what he would tell her to say, to the effect that her life was empty, that she felt worthless as a person despite her fame, because she was cut off from her Japanese heritage and stuck only with the corrupt, plastic, evil American one. This was supposed to go over real big coming from a gold medal winner.

  Judging from what Wendy had told me this afternoon, the old Master Manipulator had lost his touch with age. I mean, it’s great keeping in touch with an ethnic heritage—you should hear what “Cobb” was before Ellis Island people shortened it for my great-grandfather—and maybe Wendy regretted not being more knowledgeable about her own.

  But it would be hard to think of an appeal from that old man to that young woman less likely to work than that one.

  I sat there listening to it, and the whole thing was incredible. There was Dinkover, tall, old, dignified in a fanatical kind of way, shaking a liver-spotted finger in Wendy’s face as she stood at my side.

  “Look at you,” he said. “You’re one of the most famous Japanese Americans alive, yet look at you. You don’t know how to read Japanese. You don’t know how to write Japanese. You don’t know how to speak Japanese!”

  Being very helpful, I put my hand on his arm and said sincerely, “But, boy, she really knows how to look Japanese, doesn’t she?”

  It brought down the house. Harris laughed. Jazz laughed. Shirley, who’d been moping because of Harris’s flirtation with Wendy, laughed. Wendy went into hysterics. Even Al St. John risked a chuckle.

  Dinkover didn’t like being laughed at. He’d turned an angry red and tightened his lips as if to shout but thought better of it. He’d straightened his tie, spun on his heel, and stormed from the office, walking very quickly and heavily for an old man.

  And that was the last I had seen of him until I found his body on the ice.

  We were quiet for a while, mopping up the last of the yogurt and tomato sauce with pita. The waitress came and took our plates away. I asked Wendy if she wanted any dessert or coffee.

  “No thanks, I’ve probably eaten too much already. I have to skate again tonight.”

  I started making arrangements for the Network to pick up the lunch tab. Wendy patted her lips with a napkin and said, “God, I wish I’d known you could chase Dinkover away by laughing at him. That was the first time I’d ever see
n him chased away before he was ready to go. He was so...so relentless. Once he thought of something, he usually never gave up.”

  I nodded. “Right up until the end,” I said. “It took somebody pretty relentless to make it across that ice.”

  “When he went for the eagle, you mean.”

  We were outside now. Wendy would have walked right on, but I asked her to wait while I untied Spot.

  “Oh, poor puppy. I forgot all about him.”

  “He didn’t mind. I took peeks through the window. He had all the girls in the East Village making a fuss over him while we were inside.”

  I reached into my pocket for my gloves, then cursed when I remembered I didn’t have any.

  “What’s the matter?” Wendy asked.

  “Nothing. But why do you say he went for the eagle? You said it twice.”

  “Well, he had it in his hand, didn’t he? I didn’t see the body—thank God—but that’s what all the newspapers said. Wasn’t it?”

  “I only got a bleary-eyed look at them before I went to bed,” I told her, “but it seemed to me the emphasis was on the flag. The irony of it and all that.”

  “I’m sure they mentioned the eagle.”

  Spot was loose now. I asked Wendy if she wanted to take a little walk. She said sure, and we turned east, back toward Second Avenue.

  “I’m sure they did. What I’m wondering about is why you latched onto it.”

  “I don’t know. It’s just what stuck in my mind.”

  “I only ask because it’s sort of perched in my mind, too, and I’m damned if I know why.”

  Then we talked about other things, everyday things like how she liked New York (a lot), and how she wanted to retire from skating, or at least from traveling, in another year or so. She asked me about myself, and pretended to be impressed when she heard that I’d been an NCAA division II second-team basketball All-American, and things like that.

  It was nice, walking along through the cold with the pretty, bright, unique individual at my side. I was just reflecting how pleasant it all was.

  When hell broke loose.