Killed on the Ice Page 7

  The sergeant applauded and said Spot was smarter than half the cops they had around there.

  A voice behind me said, “Very amusing.” I could feel the smile slide from my face, like an egg from a greased pan. I turned and faced Livia Goosens, the Frying Nun.

  “How fortunate to find you here, Mr. Cobb.” She had a nice voice, deep and well modulated. In appearance, she was formidable. She was tall and heavy-boned, and her face was always red, as if yesterday had been her first day at the beach. She had gray hair that she wore in a kind of corrugated ponytail.

  I had once heard a policewoman say ADA Goosens had a “strong face,” that “she wouldn’t look so bad if she would only Do Something with herself.”

  That may well be true, I’m no expert. One thing I did know—Livia Goosens was never going to Do Anything with herself. She had too much fun (or whatever it was she had) Doing Things with other people.

  Right now, she was Doing Something with me.

  “Is this your attempt to raise morale among city employees, Mr. Cobb? By performing animal acts for policemen?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “how do you like it? Tomorrow, I bring my sea lions.”

  She forebore to comment. “Please remain here a few moments; there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Goosens, but I really have to run along—”

  “Mr. Cobb.” She said it in such a way that the air seemed to be filled with unspoken syllables, all of them accusatory. I felt obliged to stay and face the music. I turned to Al, introduced him, and told him to beat it to the Network, or he’d be late for his shift. Then I asked Ms. Goosens what she wanted.

  She smiled at me. It was a smile that had spelled doom for hundreds of lawbreakers. I was happy to realize I hadn’t broken any laws lately. At least no big ones.

  “It’s not what I want,” the Frying Nun modulated. She was practically purring. “You have been asked for. Specifically. And since you seem to be some sort of adjunct to the police department—”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, Ms. Goosens.”

  “How modest of you. Rest assured, Mr. Cobb, that all my attempts to get you out from underfoot of the law-enforcement operations of the City of New York are met with just that attitude, if not those precise words.”

  She did this thing with her teeth and lips that was either scorn with a large portion of smug, or smug with a goodly percentage of scorn. Smug won out when I failed to come up with a response.

  “Seriously, Cobb.” Now that she’d put me in my place, I no longer had to be called “mister.” “Seriously, do you think that you have no special privileges around here? That any citizen off the street may stroll into any police building and chat about a pending investigation with the officers in charge?”

  By God, I know a rhetorical question when I hear one. I kept my mouth shut.

  “I assure you, that is not the case. If you tried to do these sorts of things with the district attorney’s office, you would face a rude awakening, Cobb. A rude awakening.”

  “Well, Goosens,” I said. As long as we were dispensing with the honorifics, what the hell. “Thanks for the warning. I promise never to try to do these sorts of things with the district attorney’s office. Cross my heart.”

  “You are amazing, Cobb. Do you ever succeed in amusing anyone with your foolishness?”

  I was getting really tired of this woman. “My antics have been known to raise a chortle or two. What’s the point? My dog is getting hungry.”

  I wished Lieutenant Martin was there to see her reaction. For the first time, the Frying Nun had been Taken Aback. She was used to people staying intimidated. Little did she know that she was dealing with a man who had been thrown out of Catholic School in the fourth grade for asserting himself against a bossy nun.

  I’ll say this for her, she recovered quickly. She just licked her lips and went on. “My point is this: Since you usurp some of the privileges of a law-enforcement professional, you must be ready to assume some of the duties of a law-enforcement professional.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Is that all? What’s the matter, you have a car you want towed or something?”

  “Or something. There is a concerned citizen you must listen to. Her complaint concerns you especially. Mrs. Dinkover!”

  The sharp tones of her hail were like little acupuncture needles numbing my ego. I’d been set up.

  Caria Nelson Dinkover (I presumed) stepped out from behind a pillar. God knows how Ms. Goosens got her to stay there. While she was still walking over to us, the DA’s lady called out, “This is Cobb, Mrs. Dinkover. I hope he can satisfy you. I’m leaving now, late for mumble mumble,” and she was gone.

  I had to admit to a certain admiration for her. Like Lieutenant Martin, she had foisted off one problem on another, in this case, Carla Dinkover on me. The Frying Nun wins again.

  I didn’t brood on it. Instead, I watched the widow walk toward me. I did not stare but only because I told myself I mustn’t. I knew for a fact that Carla Dinkover was about the same age Livia Goosens, i.e., pushing fifty. The difference was, Mrs. Dinkover Did Something with herself.

  Lots of things. Like, she exercised a lot. That was a mature figure, but what a mature figure. She kept her hair blond—nature or chemistry made it the color of a good yellow cake, the kind with extra egg yolk. It was shoulder length and bouncy, parted on the side. Her face was made up to feature her intelligent brown eyes. She wore a bright red dress that, unlike some brightly colored clothes, called attention to her figure instead of to itself.

  There was nothing about her that made a person think, wow, she looks young, or boy, for a lady pushing fifty, she’s well preserved, or anything like that. She just looked right; she seemed to be saying, “This is exactly what I am.” What she was was damned attractive.

  She put out a hand. As I took it, she said, “I doubt you can, Mr. Cobb.”

  “Doubt I can what, Mrs. Dinkover?”

  “Satisfy me.”

  She was smiling. Maybe she was just being nice, but I had the impression that smile was daring me to make something of it.

  I took her up on it. “If you didn’t think so, why did you want to see me?”

  “There’s always a chance. Come, Mr. Cobb, there must be more convenient places to talk than Police Headquarters.”

  “I’ve frequently thought so,” I said. “Would you like to get a cup of coffee? There’s a place near here.”

  “A drink would be better. It’s been a long day. You wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen in a saloon with me, would you, Mr. Cobb?”

  “No. But then, I’m not in mourning.”

  She looked surprised for a moment, then smiled—a real smile, no dare in it this time.

  “Oh, you mean this?” She indicated her dress with a graceful sweep of her hand. “Don’t get the wrong idea; my husband was a great man, and I loved him very deeply. I mean to see his killer gets what he deserves. The world has been deprived of one of its finest minds.”

  That reads like something she felt she ought to say, but there was nothing in her voice or attitude to make me feel she was anything but sincere.

  “But my husband’s mind—his whole life, really—was devoted to freeing people from the tyranny of symbols. He tried to get the human race to see beyond flags, beyond skin colors. To get to the reality of things. That was where he broke with Jung. If I were to run around today in black from head to toe, it wouldn’t change the reality a bit. Yesterday Paul was alive. Today he’s dead. The black is only a mindless symbol of the event.”

  “So you counter-symbolize things by wearing the brightest color you could lay your hands on.”

  She stared at me as if I had a bad word written in the middle of my forehead. At last, she said, “Touché. You see how insidious this whole business can be. I listened to the man who wrote the gospel on getting to the truth behind the symbol for over twenty years, helping him write it, in fact, and here I am, falling into the same mindless behavior he l
oathed.”

  I told her to excuse herself; she’d been upset.

  She laughed. “I think I’ll take you up on that. At least, symbolic or not, it’s given me something to think about.”

  I took her to a bar nearby, a place called the Wet Whistle. Being in the shadow of headquarters, it was inevitably a cop hangout. It was decorated with pictures of famous detectives, real and fictional. We took a table under the stern eyes of Inspector Thomas Byrnes, a cruel and efficient cop who was also an efficient and unabashed grafter. Mrs. Dinkover asked who he was; I told her, adding it had taken Theodore Roosevelt to drive him out of office.

  “Things don’t change, do they?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cruel. Corrupt.”

  “Not so loud,” I told her. “There are more cops within earshot here than there ever were at headquarters. Besides, some of my best friends happen to be policemen.”

  “So Miss Goosens told me.”

  The waiter came to take our order. Mrs. Dinkover ordered Wild Turkey 101 proof straight up, water back. I ordered the same on the rocks.

  She smiled at me again. “Bourbon drinkers are so rare these days.”

  “A good American drink,” I said.

  “Patriotic symbolism, Mr. Cobb?”

  I took a sip of iced bourbon. It cooled the front of my mouth and warmed the back. “That’s right,” I said. “Also, I like it.”

  She lifted her glass. “Also you like it,” she said. “As my husband might have told you, that’s the important part. To the reality behind the symbol.” She sipped her drink; I took another pull at mine.

  I was all set to call Lieutenant Martin a liar the next time I saw him. This woman had been so far from obnoxious I started to wonder whether we had been introduced to the same Mrs. Dinkover.

  Then she showed me. “Mr. Cobb,” she said sweetly, “who invited my husband to the skating rink last night? Who let him in?”

  “I wish I knew,” I said.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  I took another sip of bourbon. “You’re right, it isn’t. I was an English major in college, and you’re right. Here is an answer. I don’t know.”

  Now I found out what was so obnoxious about Carla Nelson Dinkover. She had these little membranes in her ear canals that filtered out anything she didn’t want to hear. She was always charming, she was always calm, but she never conceded I didn’t know who’d let the old man in.

  She kept saying things like, “Surely you can’t think I’m that naive, can you, Mr. Cobb?” and similar cajoleries. It was a skill that had probably stood her in good stead in her journalism days, but it’s wasted if the cajolee is truly ignorant of what she’s trying to find out.

  I called her attention to this, but no good. The filters.

  Then she switched tactics. She told me things about the people who were there last night. “Helena Andersen—”

  “Mrs. Speir?”

  “Yes, but Paul always referred to her by her maiden name and I fell into the habit as well. She and Paul had an affair, you know. Before he met me, of course.” She said it with perfect confidence that after a man had tied up with her, the thought of having an affair would never cross his mind. I could see her point.

  “He introduced Helena to Henry Ichimi, in fact, but I suspect Helena never really got over Paul.”

  “So she killed him? At that time, in that place?”

  “Don’t let’s get ahead of ourselves. We’re discussing who let him in.”

  “Oh, I forgot.”

  “Somehow, Mr. Cobb, I doubt you forget much. Then there’s the agent, Max Brother.”

  “I didn’t know he even knew your husband.”

  “He didn’t. They only met for the first time yesterday afternoon in your office.”

  “Then why would he get your husband out to the rink?”

  “It’s a fact that Wendy Ichimi is unhappy with Max Brother as an agent.”

  “It’s a rumor,” I said. I’d heard it, but the contracts he’d negotiated about Wendy’s show for the Network were ironclad, and that was all Special Projects had to know about it.

  “There was an argument, though between Helena Ander—Speir and Brother about his handling of Wendy’s career.”

  “How do you come to know this?”

  “Mutual friends from California. Paul and I have kept in touch with old faculty. A friend of Paul’s and mine was out to lunch with Helena when Max Brother entered the restaurant. Helena apparently couldn’t hold herself back. There was quite a scene.”

  “What does this have to do with your husband, though?”

  “Perhaps Brother wanted Paul to use his influence on Wendy to keep her from firing him.”

  “Perhaps,” I conceded, being generous. “But there are two things wrong with it. One, Brother is an ace negotiator. He’s probably got a contract with Wendy God couldn’t find a loophole in. Two, and I mean no offense here, even if Brother were in danger, I doubt he’d ask your husband to use his influence. I don’t mean to be offensive, here, but your husband had the same influence on Wendy Ichimi a camphor flake has on a moth. One whiff and get me out of here.”

  “I know she reacts negatively to Paul. Did react, I mean. It’s only been a day, sometimes I forget Paul is...

  “But Wendy only acted that way because she knows my husband was right. If there weren’t any truth in what Paul said, Wendy wouldn’t be afraid to hear it.”

  “Why don’t we just let her make her own accommodations with her own life, Mrs. Dinkover?”

  “She’s running from the truth!”

  “She’s running from your husband’s truth. And whose business is it but Wendy’s, anyway?”

  “So that’s how you see it,” she said. I nodded. “What are you running from Mr. Cobb?”

  I looked at my watch for effect. “You, unfortunately, Mrs. Dinkover. I have an appointment uptown.”

  “I’m going uptown, too. Perhaps you could drop me off.”

  Sure, I thought, thereby giving her more time to bend my ear in the cab. I suppressed a sigh and said I’d be delighted.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Madison Square Garden. I’m going to see the ice show. Wendy may be pigheaded and spoiled, but she skates like an angel.”

  “Good evening, everybody, and welcome to the World’s Most Famous Arena.”

  —John Condon, Madison Square Garden Presents (MSG Cablevision)

  CHAPTER NINE

  I LEANED OVER A railing in the orange section of Madison Square Garden, looking, as it turned out, in a straight line over the head of Carla Dinkover about thirty rows away, watching Bea Dunney skate. The blond skater had looked tired and washed out the night before, but now she was glowing.

  Since she wasn’t a star, she didn’t get just to go out and skate. She was in a comedy bit, a take off on old-time melodramas. Bea shared the spotlight with two male skaters, a mustachioed villain in a hammertail coat, and a heroic lumberjack type. The lumberjack was the weakest of the three, not through any fault of his own. Male skaters tend not to run to bulk, and lumberjacks do, so there was a credibility problem.

  Still, the crowd loved it. The arena, a big hatbox of a building, was about two-thirds full, not bad for the middle of Christmas week. The crowd was mostly kids, it seemed, but there was a higher percentage of adults than I would have expected.

  There was a bit of slapstick now as the villain tried to tie Bea up and put her across the railroad tracks. Splits and slides and some really amazing combinations of positions. More than that, it was well timed and funny. It was easy to see that Wendy’s friend was a skillful skater with more than a little talent for physical comedy.

  The melodrama skit ended, to be replaced with one of those high-kicking precision-type numbers, which I could live without. I took a walk.

  I walked out to a concourse, then took an escalator up to the mezzanine level. It turned out that Wendy had arranged for more than a ticket for me
; she’d gotten me something that was practically a carte blanche. I decided to use it to check in on some Network business.

  The Network was going to great trouble and no little expense to do a little temporary remodeling at the Garden. Any one floor of an arena like this one tends to be built on the circle-within-a-circle plan. The outside circle is just a wall; within the other one is the arena itself. Nestled in the inside wall are concession stands, rest rooms, medical aid stations, and offices.

  The Network was installing broadcast equipment in one of the offices, which was going to be used in taping Wendy’s performance on Christmas Eve. There was plenty of TV equipment in the building already, of course—Madison Square Garden runs its own nationwide cable TV Network—but this was experimental stuff. Some genius (or a group of them) at Network Labs had designed a new system that would draw less power and, more important, use less light, while showing equally sharp pictures. If nothing else, it would save the Network money if this sort of thing could be adapted to our own studios. If you think your light bill is outrageous, get a load of the Network’s someday. It’s always taken an incredible amount of light to get a TV show on the air—that “hot lights” business is true—and color takes three times as much light as black and white does. All that would change if the system worked the way Network Labs promised it would.

  I couldn’t see any reason it shouldn’t. Ickx of Belgium had done the new asymmetrical lenses, and Torahido of Japan had done all the solid state stuff. What was in it for the Garden was an early crack at the new system at a big discount, when and if it went into production.

  I walked around to the room, used my big-shot key (I had keys to all Network facilities at the Garden) to open the door, and took a look around. It looked exactly like an office that had been converted to a makeshift control room, with consoles on tables, and a few desks and potted palms moved casually around the room.

  I turned off the light, locked the door again, and went back into the arena just as they announced Wendy.

  The crowd, who had been good-naturedly noisy during the whole performance, suddenly shut up. This was what they had been waiting for. Me too.