Killed on the Ice Read online

  “So don’t be surprised if someday, somewhere, some time when you least expect it...”

  —Allen Funt, Candid Camera (CBS)

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS that it was a Mafia hit. A big black car squealed up to the curb next to us. Wendy jumped into me, startled. Spot ran toward the car, snarling, waiting for me to give him the kill command.

  The door to the car jumped open, as if pushed by the loud voice that came from within.

  “There she is! There is my pupil! And the tall hoodlum with the dog has kidnapped her! I demand you summon the police! No! There is no time! We will seize them and yell for the police!”

  It went on that way, a series of explosions like a car with no muffler. They got louder as the owner of the voice got out of the car. He was dressed magnificently in a sable jacket and one of those Russian hats, which was appropriate, because this was Ivan Danov.

  “Oh, Mr. Danov,” Wendy said. If it’s possible to gasp and laugh, that’s what Wendy was doing.

  “Do not fear; this is America. You will be rescued! Police! Police!”

  I was somewhat taken aback by the dramatic entry, but I was beginning to put things together. This wasn’t a Mafia car; it belonged to that other sinister, all-pervasive influence in American life: The Network.

  “Relax, Mr. Danov. Consider yourself to have made a citizen’s arrest. Let’s get in the car, Wendy.”

  “You!” Danov said. He had fought his way out of the car at last, but we spun him around and put him right back in again, this time in the back seat. Wendy gave me a conspiratorial look and climbed in there with him. That left me the front seat and the companionship of Al St. John.

  Al’s boyish face said he was disappointed in me, but his voice was apologetic. “I’m sorry I had to hunt you down like this, Matt, but the Mad Russian there was all set to call the cops.”

  I was finding out for the first time that the Mad Russian could talk in something less than a shout—right now he was chewing out Wendy in a hissing whisper that sounded like a clothesline whipping in a gale. Every once in a while, I would catch a phrase, like you know you must report to me after every performance” or “...leave me to think you are lying dead in a filthy street!”

  Wendy took it all indulgently; apparently this wasn’t the first time she and her coach had played out a scene like this. She caught me looking at her in the rearview mirror and winked.

  I tuned out and gave my full attention to Al. “You did the right thing,” I told him. “I just want to know how you found me.”

  “I talked to Bea Dunney—Wendy’s friend in the show—”

  “I know who she is.”

  “Oh, right, I’d forgotten. Anyway, I spoke to her, and she said she thought you were taking Miss Ichimi out to lunch, that she wanted to talk to you. It was a long shot, but I remembered where you’d taken me for lunch when I first came to work for the Network; I figured it was a favorite place of yours and that you might be there. What I really wanted to do was to get Mr. Danov—” he lowered his voice, “to get Mr. Danov in a car and away from telephones. He was really getting crazy, Matt.”

  “I’ll have to hang around with you more, Al.”

  “Why’s that?” It was hard to tell if he liked the idea or not.

  “Your hunches pay off.”

  “But...um...Matt...I, well, Good Lord, I wouldn’t have needed to get a hunch if you’d remember to keep your beeper with you!”

  His face was flushed with real anger, and I wanted to laugh at him, but I didn’t, for two reasons. One, I’d been trying to loosen him up since he’d come to work for me, and this was the first sign of success there’d been, and two, he was right. I promised him I’d try harder in the future—no, by God, that I would absolutely carry my beeper about at all times, so there.

  I asked him how Harris was.

  “No change. Shirley called from the hospital, but I think more because she needed company than because she had any news.”

  “She doesn’t take it easy, she’s going to wind up in the hospital.”

  We dropped Wendy and Danov at the hotel. Danov thanked us with a grunt—about halfway there, he’d stopped abusing Wendy and gone into a sulk. Wendy walked around to my window and knocked on it. When I rolled it down she said, “Come see the show tonight.”

  I thought it over for a second. “I will if I can. I don’t know how long the cops are going to keep me.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m only on in the last half hour. Come if you can make it. I’ll leave word at the box office. You come, too, Al.”

  Al smiled at her. “I’m working tonight. I’ll take in a matinee sometime.”

  “Sure, I can arrange that,” she said. “See you tonight, Matt, maybe. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

  My brain told me it was time to pay a call on Lieutenant Martin, and my watch confirmed it. I gave myself a silent cheer, then told Al to turn the car around and head back south.

  “I want to introduce you to my police friends,” I said.

  “Why?” he demanded. His voice cracked with it. He didn’t even say good Lord.

  “You’ve worked here long enough for it to happen,” I told him. “It’s really kind of a fluke you haven’t had to deal with the police before now. Besides, with Harris laid up and Shirley...preoccupied, you are it as far as the department goes. I can’t pull Kolaski or Smith off the Poland thing can I? Of course not.”

  “Well, sure, Matt, I’m honored in a way. Just a little surprised.”

  “Where’s your ambition? I’m not going to live forever, you know.”

  He looked at me strangely. “What kind of talk is that, for crying out loud?”

  “Silly,” I conceded. “But I may retire, and not at age sixty-five, either. I can get weary of this job sometimes. Besides, maybe I just want to keep you around in case you have another hunch. What could an eagle mean?”

  Al looked out the windshield and kept driving.

  “Yo,” I said. “Hello there. Earth, calling Al St. John. Come in, Al.”

  He showed me a sheepish smile. “I thought you were just thinking out loud. You do that a lot, you know.”

  “As a matter of fact, I didn’t. Hazard of living alone, I guess. But no, I wasn’t thinking out loud. I was wondering if you had any hunches about eagles.”

  “I thought he was...I thought Dinkover went after the flag. Sort of a final gesture of contempt. Isn’t that what the cops think?”

  “Don’t spread this around, but the cops have been known to be wrong. Now I’m thinking out loud. I don’t know if the cops are wrong or not. Wendy Ichimi seems to have convinced herself it’s the eagle that’s important; I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything to it.”

  Al shrugged, but he was willing to play. “It could be a name, or part of a name. Egelton, Egelman, something like that. Maybe.”

  “Maybe. It’s something to check out.” I scratched my head. “The trouble is, eagles are symbolic of so many things. Banks. Condensed milk.”

  “Lots of countries, too. Including this one. Maybe it was the eagle, Matt, but it could still be a gesture of contempt. With his dying breath, he pulls down the flag and the eagle. Two symbols for the price of one, you know what I mean?”

  “It’s a point, but let’s not close the deal completely, yet.” Al was silent. I looked at him, saw him making a face with tight lips. I remember resenting it, telling him that this job involved imagination as much as anything else, and he might as well keep in practice.

  “It just seems like such a waste of time.”

  “A great advertising man once said fifty percent of everything he did was wasted—unfortunately, it was impossible to tell which fifty percent.

  “Come on, now. The United States is symbolized by an eagle. Poland. Who else?”

  “Nazi Germany. There’s a possibility. God knows a Nazi, or anybody right-wing, would have reason to kill Dinkover.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “only trouble is, to Dinkover, ever
ybody to the right of Ho Chi Minh was a Nazi.” I sighed. “I think ancient Rome used an eagle, too.”

  Al grunted.

  “Well,” I said, “that simplifies matters. We’re looking for a Polish American Nazi from ancient Rome. I guess we can put this little exercise in the wasted fifty percent, huh?”

  Al grinned. “Here’s headquarters,” he said.

  “Okay, but I’ll keep thinking about it. Maybe Wendy will remember why she thought of it.”

  Lieutenant Martin was sitting at his desk, hunched over a messy Reuben sandwich, trying to keep corned beef juice, sauerkraut, melted Swiss cheese, and Russian dressing from dripping on his pants.

  “Why don’t you put the wrapping paper on your lap,” I suggested, “instead of giving yourself a hunchback?”

  He took another bite and looked up past his eyebrows at me. It was a dirty look, but he moved the shiny white paper to his lap and sat up.

  “How’s the sandwich?” I asked.

  “It’s delicious. And I have the added pleasure of watching my arteries harden before my very eyes. I ought to have you arrested.”

  “Well,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting a fatted calf or anything, but this is a little extreme.”

  “The charge is being too goddam contrary to be allowed to run around loose. When I want to talk to you, you’re nowhere around. Now that I finally get two seconds to take a break and have something to eat, you show up early.”

  “I could leave again.”

  “Right. Then I’d get a postcard from Sydney, Australia, telling me you’ll talk to me when you get back. No, Matty, why don’t you just hang around for a while? Now that I know where you are. Rivetz will be back with the lab reports in a minute, maybe there’ll be something there to help.” That was supposed to be funny. Something about police work makes men sardonic.

  He took another bite and chewed. After a few seconds, he gestured at Al with a finger shiny with drippings. “Does your friend here talk, or am I supposed to think he’s just a hallucination?”

  “Oh. I’m sorry, I’m forgetting my manners.”

  Just then, Rivetz walked in, giving forth with a snort as he did so. Whether at the idea of my manners, or the idea of manners in general, I’ve never been able to decide.

  “I ignore extraneous noises,” I said. “Lieutenant, Rivetz, this is Al St. John, of my Special Projects gang. I wanted him to see the police in their native habitat.”

  “Ha,” the lieutenant said. Rivetz snorted again. They told Al they were glad to meet him. The lieutenant said he hoped they’d see more of him, especially if it meant seeing less of me.

  “Has he driven you crazy yet?” Mr. M. asked. “He’s been doing it to me for twenty-four years now.”

  I was glad to see all this. Lieutenant Martin only goes out of his way to insult me when he’s in a particularly good mood.

  “He usually has a dog with him,” the lieutenant said.

  “We left him downstairs. Any results on the case?”

  He asked me why I wanted to know.

  “You seem so full of whatever it is you tend to get full of.”

  “Thank you, I think. No, I’m full of what I’m full of because I just fixed up two of the most obnoxious women on the planet with each other, getting them out of my nappy hair for at least one glorious night.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Mrs. Paul Dinkover. Matty, that woman should be the hemorrhoid poster child. She’s been giving the department a pain in the ass since early this morning.”

  “Has she been here?”

  “Three times. In between, she’s been talking to the media. Don’t you watch your own Network, for God’s sake?”

  “I’ve been busy. Who’d you foist her off on?”

  “The Frying Nun.”

  I smiled at the thought. It was a tribute to Livia Goosens, who had abandoned the convent for law school, and who was now an assistant district attorney, that she had acquired her nickname despite the lack of a capital punishment law in New York. She brought to the law all the knuckle-smashing implacability she’d used in teaching Catholic school. It hadn’t made her loved in either place. It had, however, given her an eighty-nine percent conviction record and a rep big enough, it seemed, to have her put in charge of the Dinkover prosecution, when and if Lieutenant Martin gave her somebody to prosecute.

  It made for an interesting picture, and I told the lieutenant so. “Only one thing. What if they team up?”

  A look of genuine fear came to his face, then passed. “No, they’re both too ornery. Jesus, Matty, don’t say things like that while I’m eating.”

  Rivetz’s instinct told him the byplay had run its course. He cleared his throat and said, “I got the lab results here. Took a look at them on the way over.”

  “I figured you would. Anything?”

  “Nothing on Dinkover, except the killer is one cold son of a bitch. The way the medical examiner figures it, our little playmate stuck the knife in—big hunting knife, blade two inches across. Untraceable, of course.”

  “I thought it was a big one when I saw the handle,” I said.

  “Well, you were right,” Rivetz said irritably. He hates to be interrupted. “The killer stuck in the knife right below the belly button, then held it there while Dinkover sliced himself down on it with his own weight. Right up to the sternum.”

  “Cold and strong,” Martin said. “Dinkover was old, but he was no flyweight. Sounds like we’re looking for a man.”

  “A woman could do it, if she wanted to badly enough,” I said.

  “She could hold the knife in both hands,” Al St. John offered. It was the first thing he’d said since pleased to meet you.

  The lieutenant sighed. “Yeah, actually, I thought of that myself. Thirty-six years on the force, and I’m still hoping someday I’ll find something easy. Rivetz, tomorrow, call the lab and ask them about this.”

  “Right,” Rivetz said. He took out a little pad and made a note. “The rest of it is routine, except, of course, for that crawl across the ice. Berkowitz at the lab says there’s no doubt Dinkover did his own crawling. He also says it’s the goddamnedest thing he’s ever seen.”

  This seemed as good a time as any to bring up the eagle business. I summed up my talk with Wendy and explained about my hunch. “After all,” I concluded, “she’d known him practically all her life—he even did some sort of half-assed analysis of her when she was a little girl. I figure if she thinks the eagle, and not the flag, is the important part, there might be something to it.”

  They thought I was nuts, but they were willing to play. This proved two things: that even a cop likes a change of pace from the normal routine of investigation; and that the normal routine (stoolies, legwork, lab work, and the rest) had so far availed them, as the saying goes, nought.

  They came up with a lot of the stuff Al and I had already discussed, then the lieutenant said, “The Philadelphia Eagles. Maybe he was trying to tell us the killer was a football player.”

  “A hockey player would be more appropriate to the setting. Too bad there’s no hockey team called the Eagles,” I said.

  Rivetz was sarcastic. “Yeah, too bad. That would narrow it down to maybe a million people, most of them Canadians. Cobb, are we supposed to buy it that Dinkover crawled across the ice to leave us a clue to his killer’s identity? That it wasn’t just for some fanatic political bullshit?”

  “I haven’t come out and said so, but that’s the general idea. It happens all the time in mystery stories. Have you read Ellery Queen?”

  “It don’t happen much in real life, but suppose this is it—Dinkover was weird enough for me to believe he’d do it—suppose he was telling us the killer was somebody named Flagg; that it didn’t have anything to do with an eagle at all?”

  “I think you should check it out.”

  Rivetz looked sheepish. “Well, actually we are.” He cleared his throat. “But about this eagle stuff. You were in the army weren’t you?”

&nb
sp; I looked at Rivetz with new respect. He had more imagination than I had ever given him credit for. “Right. The army. A bird colonel. A lieutenant colonel wears a silver oak leaf; a full colonel wears an eagle. A navy captain, too.”

  “Yeah,” the lieutenant put in, “and when it’s payday, that’s when the eagle shits. Hell, a lot of government employees still use that term.”

  Al St. John was trying not to laugh. I heard little noises escape from him, and I finally asked him what was so funny.

  “I’m sorry, Matt,” he said. “I just keep adding it up. Good Lord, now we’re looking for a Polish American Nazi from ancient Rome, who was a paymaster in the army with the rank of colonel, or in the navy with the rank of captain, who plays professional football.”

  I looked around the room. Everybody was grinning. I joined in; I guessed it was pretty funny, at that.

  “Some people think I’m weird. I’m not really weird—unless you’re picky.”

  —Jim Stafford, The Jim Stafford Show (ABC)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I MULLED OVER WHAT Rivetz had told me about the break-in at Harris’s apartment, while the desk sergeant played with Spot. The burglar there had been the weirdest combination of pro and madman any of us had ever heard of. He knew just what to steal and, as far as we could tell, had gotten away cleanly. Why, then, had he hit the place like a MIRV warhead?

  The desk sergeant didn’t want Spot to leave—the Samoyed hadn’t exhausted his bag of tricks yet. I made a deal with him. Spot would do one more trick, his most spectacular, then the sergeant would let us go.

  “Okay, boy, here we go.” I put out both my hands, palms up. Spot’s grin got wider. He knew what I had in mind, and he’s an incurable showoff. He pranced over to me as I backed up into the middle of the room. This trick takes plenty of space.

  Spot put one forepaw, then the other, on my hands. His brown eyes were shiny, and he was panting with excitement. “Ready?” I said. “One, two three, hup!” With hup, I lifted my arms at the same instant Spot gave a spring with his hind legs. The Samoyed went whirling backward, then spiked all four paws in a perfect landing after one of his best backflips ever.