Killed on the Ice Read online

  The arena went dark. Then, a blue spotlight shone at one end of the ice. The gate opened, and Wendy Ichimi appeared. Her face was solemn, as if to tell the world that what was coming up was important. She wore an outfit of white silk, embroidered, or embossed, or whatever the hell you call it, with flowers, also in white silk. The blue light made it all seem somehow whiter than white. At the same time the light darkened Wendy’s skin. The contrast was striking.

  She skated rapidly to the center of the rink, then stopped on a dime and made a deep curtsey, arms, legs, everything as graceful as a ballerina’s. The applause was tremendous, then the crowd fell back into silence.

  Wendy began her routine. I hadn’t agreed with much Carla Nelson Dinkover had said to me that evening, but she was right about one thing—Wendy did skate like an angel. It would be natural, maybe even inevitable, for a skater’s performance to slip once the days of competition were over, when it was show biz instead of sport, and she has to go out and do it twice a day.

  There wasn’t a trace of that in Wendy. She soared and spun and glided with the same grace, determination, and delicate power I’d seen her display as I sat in front of my television set watching her win the gold medal.

  I started watching her with a TV man’s eye—I want a camera at ice level when she dips into her Hamill Camel, to catch the way her hair falls across her face; we’d better have a long shot for that combination, to show what a distance this little person covers in one bound, that sort of thing. After about twenty seconds, I forgot all about it and let my eyes and mind fly with her.

  The music was great, too, Neil Diamond’s “Walk on Water,” pretty, dramatic, and appropriate. I wondered who had chosen it.

  The crowd stayed silent through the routine, not even clapping along with the fast parts of the music, as skating crowds are known to do. The spotlight changed color, from blue, to green, to red, and finally to a dazzling white. It followed her so closely that it looked as if she was giving off the light, glowing with her own incandescence in the darkened arena.

  Finally, she did some double toe loops, then went into a spin that looked as if it were going to last forever. She almost teased the audience with it, using her arms to control her speed, spinning fast, then more slowly, then so slowly that you were sure she was going to stop; then suddenly pulling her arms in and spinning so fast she was just a dazzle of black hair and white costume and bronze legs and flashing silvery blades.

  Finally she stopped. And the crowd went crazy. Including me. I had to tell myself to start breathing again.

  With the applause, Wendy smiled for the first time, and that was dazzling, too.

  It was easy to tell she loved it, that she was getting off on the idea that she, for a few minutes at least, owned the minds and emotions of thousands of strangers.

  Wendy quartered the arena and curtseyed deeply four times. She skated off to more applause. The announcer now said it was time for the grand finale, featuring the entire company, but I didn’t stay to see it. It would be another chance to see Wendy skate, briefly at least, but I wanted to get around to the athletes entrance. With the pass Wendy had left me had been a note asking me to meet her after the show. A quick look at the crowd showed me that Carla Dinkover was leaving early, too. I doubted she had an appointment with Wendy, but she might have had an idea of her own. That made me doubly eager to be at my station, in case there was a scene brewing.

  It was a madhouse outside, as it always is after an event at the Garden. Seventh Avenue is a wide street, but you could walk across it on the yellow roofs of taxicabs immobilized in traffic.

  It was much colder than it had been that afternoon, and there was more moisture in the air. I allowed myself to hope we might have snow for Christmas. I’m not that crazy about snow in February, which is the only month in which New York has seen snow for years, but I love it in late December. Mr. Nostalgia. It seems like there was always a white Christmas when I was a kid, but the year before, Christmas day had been sixty-three degrees and foggy. That was like no Christmas at all.

  I got some suspicious looks from some of the skaters as they began to leave the building; after all, this made twice in one day they’d seen me hanging around. I was beginning to feel like a stage-door Johnny.

  There was no sign of Carla Dinkover, for which I was thankful. I figured if she hadn’t shown up by now, she never would, so I left my vantage point for a place near the wall that was less obvious and also out of the wind.

  I spent some time trying to understand the doctor’s widow. On the one hand, twenty years my senior or not, she was a flirt, and a damned skillful one, too. With all the necessary equipment. On the other hand, she was a True Believer in her husband and his cause. Before I left her at the Garden on the way home to drop off Spot, she’d spent the whole taxi ride telling me that the real tragedy of her husband’s death had been that he wouldn’t get to finish his book.

  It was to be his magnum opus, the one that was going to return him to his former best-selling glory and influence. The one, she said, that might get the human race on the way to seeing reality instead of its deceptive reflections. As she spoke, her voice was hoarse with frustration that now it would never happen.

  It was to have been called “God’s Image—Man’s Image,” and it was planned on a mammoth scale, along the lines of half a million words, of which only the first two chapters, a fifty-thousand-word overview, and about forty thousand words on religious symbolism, had been finished. I said that that much could probably be published, and she agreed, but it was small consolation. He had been so wrapped up in the project; he’d been putting his thoughts in order for more than three years now...

  And that was about where we were when we’d gotten to the Garden.

  I thought about it some more, shaking my head. I supposed it wasn’t out of the question for a woman to be an incredible come-on artist at the same time she played Saint Paul to her husband’s Christ, but I had a hard time making it add up. And if she had been faking either of those two roles tonight, Carla Dinkover was more than a good actress, she was downright dangerous.

  I was still puzzling over it when a voice said, “Mr. Cobb?”

  I looked up to see Bea Dunney. “What are you doing here?” she said.

  I grinned at her. “Freezing,” I said.

  “I would guess so, standing here in the cold with no gloves on.”

  I stuck my hands deeper in my pocket and made a mental note to replace the gloves I’d ruined with blood at Harris’s place. Which reminded me, I’d have to check up on Harris tonight, maybe go see him at the hospital tomorrow.

  “You have a point,” I conceded. “I saw you skate tonight; I was very impressed.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. It’s nice to be recognized. It used to be I was the only one who knew I was a good skater. I’m glad Max got me this featured spot.”

  “Max Brother? He’s your agent, too?”

  “Sure. How do you think I got to appear on Wendy’s show? All one big happy family. Today TV, tomorrow the world, right?”

  I used to think that. “Where’s Wendy?” I asked.

  “Waiting for her?”

  “No, I’m going to a Christmas pageant as an icicle, and I’m rehearsing. Yes, Bea, I’m waiting for her.”

  “She’s in the Jacuzzi. Her knee, you know. Fragile. I’ve been lucky that way. All these years, and nothing worse than a sore ass.”

  Considering I was freezing to death, I was enjoying the conversation. If you’re going to freeze, you might as well do it in the company of a pretty girl, I suppose. Bea, for some reason, was really enjoying it. She was teasing me, but not in the way Carla Dinkover had. It was as if Bea had some secret she was trying to lead me to.

  “All how many years?” I asked. I figured I might as well play along.

  “Same as Wendy, just about. We used to skate against each other sometimes at state youth championships. Do you know who the last person to beat Wendy in competition was?”

 
“I’ll take a wild backhand stab at it,” I said. “You?”

  “How smart you are! Yes, me. Sports trivia. We were seventeen or so. Just before I turned pro.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” She knew why what, she just wanted me to say it.

  “Why didn’t you keep competing? It might have been you with the gold medal.”

  A blue flame is very hot. I thought that when I saw her eyes.

  “It’s nice of you to say so,” she said, but her tone said, you’d better believe it. “But life isn’t fair, you know? It costs a lot to be a world class skater, Matt. Is it okay to call you Matt?”

  “I called you Bea.”

  “Okay. The first thing you have to do is go live in Colorado, where all the coaches are. Then you have to pay a coach. Do you want to know how much Wendy has paid Danov over the last ten years or so? Unbelievable.

  “Wendy’s father was a hotshot college professor, and her stepmother has family money, so no problem. My father owned a bakery, my mother is a secretary in a bank. They were just about able, with everything mortgaged, to keep me going. Then my father died, and Mom couldn’t do it alone. So, when I got the chance to make some money skating, I took it.”

  “Couldn’t you have found someone to sponsor you?”

  “Maybe. I was mixed up—I probably should have. There’s more money on the other side of an Olympic medal than I’ve ever been close to. Still, things change, don’t they? They’re changing for me. My big turn is coming soon.” She went on in a similar vein for a few minutes without saying anything specific. Finally she asked me what time it was. I told her, but she didn’t believe me because I didn’t look at my watch.

  I took my hand out of my pocket (reluctantly), let her take a look, then shoved the hand back home.

  “How did you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and she didn’t believe that either.

  She said she had to go, waved me a cheery good-bye with a mittened hand, then stepped into Seventh Avenue. I noticed without thinking much about it that she didn’t go across the street to the Statler but got into a cab which took her away through the now slightly thinner traffic.

  It was only a few seconds later that Wendy appeared, wearing much the same motley outfit she’d had on this afternoon, and she was carrying a battered gym bag. It was hard to reconcile this look with that of the silk-sheathed goddess I’d seen inside.

  As Wendy walked toward me, I could see she was favoring her right leg a little.

  Wendy smiled and said hi.

  “Hi. Does it hurt much?”

  “Wow,” she said, “is it that noticeable?”

  “Only to an ex-jock,” I told her. “I’ve done my share of walking funny.”

  “It’s okay. These two shows a day, plus the extra stuff for the TV show is a lot of wear and tear. It’s nothing a Jacuzzi and a wipe with DMSO won’t help.”

  “If I’d known you were going to spend some time in the tub, I could have stayed and watched the finale.”

  “I’m sorry, Matt. I should have put it in the note.”

  “You didn’t even know if I was going to be here, no big deal. But why did you want to see me? Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing new.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “No. When I got here, I was thinking how nice it was of you to buy me lunch.”

  “The Network bought you lunch.”

  “You took me. I thought I’d buy you dinner. I thought that if you made it to the show, you wouldn’t have had a chance to eat, right?”

  “I had a few peanuts at a bar. You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “I want to.” She lowered her eyes. “After a performance, you know, with the people cheering for me and everything, going back to a hotel room alone is the pits. Such a letdown.”

  “Where’s Mrs. Speir?”

  “Schenectady. She’s got a cousin up there—that’s really why she’s back east. She just spent a couple of days with me because the show happened to be here. Just her luck to be there when it happened. The police said it was okay for her to go.”

  I nodded. Despite all the grim warnings you see on TV about not leaving town, police are usually very polite about that sort of thing, especially if you aren’t planning to cross any state lines. I wondered, though, how they’d feel if they heard Carla Dinkover’s allegation that Mrs. Speir and the late doctor had been lovers long ago. I wondered if Wendy knew it, but decided this wasn’t the time to ask.

  “I would love to go to dinner with you,” I said.

  “Great!”

  “But,” Wendy’s face fell and I felt like a louse. “I really have to get home and walk Spot and feed him. I’ve been terrible to him the last couple of days.”

  “Well, where do you live?”

  “Central Park West. In the Sixties. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No. Except I think that’s where Dinkover lived.” She shivered when she mentioned his name, thought I admit it might have been the wind. “Don’t they have restaurants in that neighborhood?”

  “They have restaurants everywhere in New York.”

  “Okay. I wouldn’t mind seeing Spot again. I’ll take you out after you walk him. Sound acceptable?”

  “Better,” I said. “I was hoping you’d think of it.”

  She returned my smile and hooked her arm in mine as we walked off to get a cab.

  “In the world of ordinary mortals, you are a Wonder Woman.”

  —Beatrice Straight, Wonder Woman (ABC)

  CHAPTER TEN

  SPOT, WELL EXERCISED AND well fed, was sleeping contentedly on the white rug back at the Sloan’s apartment. Wendy and I sat at opposite ends of the big leather couch, talking.

  We were also well exercised and well fed, having eaten chicken and ribs at the Swiss Chalet Bar-B-Que on Seventy-second Street. Wendy, at her own insistence, had paid. Cash, no less. Then we’d come back here.

  We talked about all sorts of things. Team sports versus individual sports. The relative merits of places we’d been. Movies—being on the road in strange towns all the time led Wendy to see a lot of movies.

  “Bea Dunney’s going to be in a movie, you know,” she said. “Max suggested her for the part.”

  “She mentioned he was her agent,” I said.

  Wendy was wearing a yellow and purple Los Angeles Kings hockey jersey tonight, size extra-extra small. The Kings had had one made specially for her after she joined them in some kind of fund-raising show. She reached inside the neck and pulled out the tie strings. She fiddled with them as we talked.

  “He wasn’t her agent before the movie came up, actually,” she said. “He heard that they needed somebody who could skate for the part, so he went out and signed her up.”

  “I thought he already handled somebody who could skate.”

  She looked up from the strings with a kind of crooked smile. “They wanted somebody who could skate who could play June Lockhart’s daughter. Somebody obviously ethnic would ‘affect the dynamics of the relationships.’ ”

  “They talk like that a lot,” I said. “I hate to say it, but it could even be true.”

  “Oh, I know. They’d have to explain me, that I was adopted, or something like that, and there’s a lot of other crap like if they gave me a boyfriend or something, the fact that I’m Japanese would be an element. I know all that. Still...”

  “It would be nice to be a movie star. It’s hard work, you know.”

  “I’m used to hard work, believe me. But if I could do movies, I’d work a couple of months, then flake out the rest of the year. I’m getting sick and tired of touring. I think I told you that this afternoon.”

  “You mentioned it. Do you like jellybeans?”

  She looked at me and laughed. “Jellybeans? Doesn’t everybody?”

  “What color?”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you? The black ones. I love licorice.”

  I got up and went to the ki
tchen to check the jellybean supply. “You’re in luck,” I called back to her. I got a couple of Steuben Glass candy dishes (the Sloans buy nothing but the best), and filled them with jellybeans, black for her, purple for me.

  I put her dish on the coffee table in front of her. “I don’t believe this,” she said. “Most guys have etchings.”

  “I just have a terminal sweet tooth. My dentist loves me for it.”

  “I’ll bet he does,” she said. She popped a jellybean between her lips.

  “I just realized I was being a lousy host. And I wanted some jellybeans for myself. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “What goes with black jellybeans, for God’s sake?”

  I suggested anisette.

  “You’re crazy, do you know that?”

  “That seems to be the consensus.”

  “Nothing to drink for now,” she said. “Thank you all the same. Where were we?”

  “Bea Dunney’s movie. How you understood why your agent hadn’t tried to get you the part.”

  “Oh, right. I wasn’t overjoyed, but I guess I understood. My stepmother sure didn’t, though.”

  I attempted to say “Aha” at the same moment I tried to swallow some grape-flavored goo. I don’t recommend it. I made a horrible noise getting my throat cleared.

  Wendy crossed the couch in a single bound, concern showing on her face. “Are you all right?” she demanded.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “That just tied up with something I heard earlier.”

  “Something important?” Wendy’s face was eager.

  “Probably not,” I said. “It’s just the first time anything has made any sense since Dinkover showed up at the Network yesterday afternoon.”

  “What makes sense, Matt?”

  “Did your stepmother confront Brother about this? In public?”

  Wendy made a face. “Yes, she did. Embarrassing, isn’t it? This was supposed to have been kept quiet, though. How did you hear about it?”

  I told her about my meeting with the widow Dinkover.