Killed on the Ice Page 9

  “Her,” Wendy said. No further comment was necessary. “What did she want from you? Besides the obvious, I mean.”

  “She wanted to know which of you five people at the rink let Dinkover in.”

  “Her and the police,” Wendy said. She leaned back against the couch and closed her eyes. “I don’t think I can stand this, Matt. Things are worse with him dead. Now she’s going to torment me in his name.”

  “Nobody’s going to torment you if we can get this thing cleared up.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Do you think I let him in? Or Helena or Max or Bea or Alex?”

  That wasn’t rhetoric. Wendy’s dark eyes watched me intently, wanting me to say no.

  Instead, I said, “Maybe.” Wendy groaned. “Look,” I went on, “last night I was ready to believe somebody had mugged Harris Brophy to get the magnetic key to the Blades Club. The theory was that the killer wanted to get at you or one of your party, and Dinkover somehow got in his way.”

  “By coincidence? Why couldn’t the killer have wanted to kill Dinkover?”

  “How did he know he was going to be there? Sure, he could have lured Dinkover there to kill him—a phone call saying he could have another shot at convincing you would have brought the old man running, if I’m any judge.

  “But why should the killer bother? All he had to do was get Dinkover out of the house, and he could handle him the way he (in this theory) handled Harris.”

  “Maybe he wanted to frame me for it,” Wendy said. “Everybody knows I hated him.”

  I shook my head. “He couldn’t be sure you didn’t have an alibi.”

  “I don’t, though,” Wendy said. “You were there when we talked to Lieutenant Martin. Each of us was alone at one time or another during the important time.”

  I picked up a handful of jellybeans. Wendy told me to be careful, and I smiled at her as I put a couple in my mouth. I was stumped by the same problem that had always stumped me. Why the Blades Club? It could be that the killer just hoped the intrigue surrounding Wendy and her entourage would give the police enough to keep them busy. But what about Harris’s apartment, then? That was consistent with a professional mugger/burglar, less so with a killer. Unless the killer had been very smooth, and had covered his tracks that way.

  It boiled down to two rival theories:

  One—Harris had been mugged, and his keys taken, to get access to the Blades Club; while there, the mugger had killed Dinkover. Intentionally? Perhaps, but that caused complications. If not intentionally, what had our friend intended to do? Who was the real target?

  Two—the mugging of Harris was one of those unfortunate things that can happen to any New Yorker, like a power failure or your subway going out of service. Paul Dinkover had been given entry, then killed by one of the five people present last night. If so, who? And why? Wendy had hated Dinkover and made no bones about it. But unless she was actually insane (which, in my admittedly untrained opinion, she was not), she had too much to lose by doing him in at that time in that place. That held true for all of them, in one way or another, even if they did have motives against Dinkover. Not that any of them seemed to. The only one I could see doing something like that was Danov, and, as Wendy had said, he wasn’t crazy, only Russian.

  And of course, the one we keep coming back to, no matter which theory we like: What in the name of all the saints did Dinkover expect to accomplish by crawling to the flag?

  “Matt?” Wendy’s voice was soft. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but if you keep making that face, you’re going to give yourself a headache.”

  I smiled at her. “You’re right,” I said. “How’s this?”

  “Lots better. What were you thinking about?”

  “Ramifications. I do that all the time.”

  “Think about ramifications of murders?”

  “Not murders all the time, thank God. Most of the time, not even crimes.” I decided it might be a good idea to change the subject.

  “There’s one thing I have to say to you, Wendy. I should have said it before.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “You were magnificent out there on the ice. Absolutely breathtaking.”

  “Matt, don’t,” she said. You might have thought I told her she stank.

  “What’s the matter? I mean it. I’m not the sort to toss superlatives around, you know. It’s rare for somebody to be truly great at anything. It’s rare even to meet someone who is. That’s all I want to tell you. I’m not trying to butter you up or anything.”

  She mumbled something; I asked her to speak up.

  “There’s more to me than skating!” she yelled. Spot woke up, gave her a dirty look, licked his chops, and settled back to sleep.

  Wendy was quieter but no less intense. “I’m so tired of this. I’m not real to anybody. I’m some sort of athletic genius—Howard Cosell called me that—or I’m America’s Little Oriental Sweetheart. I’m afraid to smoke in public, or say what I think, or date, or anything because of my image.

  “That’s all I am, you know. Really. To Max Brother, I’m an image he can market. To my stepmother, I’m a Duty, and maybe a souvenir of my father. To Danov, I’m some kind of puppet—he really thinks he does all the work. If you asked him, he’d tell you the relationship between a coach and a skater is exactly like the one between an architect and a bricklayer.

  “And to Dinkover, I was nothing; a mixed-up tragedy to be blamed on my father.” Her eyes were big and moist. “Maybe I hated him because I’m afraid he’s right.”

  “Wendy, stop it,” I said.

  She shook her head, angry at the interruption. “No, dammit! Do you know the only time I feel real is when I’m skating? That’s the only time I feel sure of myself, the only time I know what the hell I’m supposed to do!”

  She made a fist and chewed on one of the knuckles. “Then here you are. You told me jokes and made me laugh. You listened to my troubles. You got Dinkover off my back, at least for a while. And in all this time, you never mentioned skating once!

  “I said to myself, ‘He doesn’t care! He’d like me even if I weren’t famous or rich.’ ” She looked at her lap. “I—I’ve been falling in love with you, if you haven’t been too stupid to notice.”

  “Wow,” I said, or something equally apt.

  “Then you come up with this bullshit, about ‘truly magnificent,’ and ‘absolutely breathtaking.’ What am I supposed to do now? Say thank you and sign your autograph book?”

  She went back to her knuckle. I sat there feeling stupid. Finally, I took a breath and began to talk.

  “Wendy,” I said. “I’m not going to say you overreacted—”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “—because you probably didn’t. After all my talk about ramifications, I have to admit I didn’t think of the ramifications of saying what I said to you.

  “I only said you were a great skater because I could see it was true and because in a dumb sort of way I meant to thank you for showing it to me. Most people, most of us everyday mediocrities, don’t know how to deal with a genius.”

  “For God’s sake, Matt, don’t make it worse.”

  “Let me finish. I met Oscar Robertson once. My idol. The greatest guard who ever played basketball. I couldn’t think of a goddam word to say to him. I wanted to tell him what he’d meant to me, how it was my greatest ambition to be him. I never opened my mouth because I was afraid he’d laugh at me. He probably wouldn’t have; that’s not the point. It was just that his greatness was so obvious to me that—Hell, I’m not saying this very well. Fifteen years later, and I’m still tongue-tied.

  “Robertson deserved to hear me say that, him and all the other famous strangers who affected me, changed my life, really, that I was too lazy to write to, or too shy to talk to.

  “What you did on the ice tonight, and what you did in the Olympics, affected me the same way. But I never could have told you if you weren’t real to me. A person. A friend. I could finally get
it out and let the one time stand for all the others.”

  “Come off it,” Wendy said. “You meet famous people all the time.”

  “Sure. Damn few geniuses, though.” I reached across the couch and took her hand. “Look, Wendy, from what you’ve told me, you’ve worked hard all your life to be great. I wanted to let you know that you succeeded. That’s all.”

  She was silent, but she didn’t take her hand away.

  “Another thing,” I said. “I saw you skate about nine o’clock. I met you outside about twenty to ten. It’s twelve thirty now. That means for two and a half hours, I went on treating you like a person, while I was getting up the guts to tell you how good you are. A genius is still a person, and I intend to go on treating you like one.”

  Wendy looked at me for a long time. “I think you mean it,” she said at last.

  “Cross my heart.”

  “You could do something a lot better,” she said, “than treat me like a person.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Treat me like a woman.”

  And suddenly she was in my arms, and her hands were clenched in my hair, and her lips were on mine, hot and sweet. When the kiss ended we looked at each other, and her almond eyes were very warm, very wise. We kissed again, more slowly. I took her to the bedroom. Soon the jeans were gone and the hockey jersey was gone (the strings had already been untied, after all). I felt strong muscles beneath smooth brown skin and spent the night making love to a genius. Who happened to be a real person.

  A real woman.

  Sometime in the night, Wendy rolled over and gasped.

  “What’s the matter?” I demanded.

  “Nothing. Just my stupid knee. Skating, walking, making love—too much strenuous activity for one day.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Shut up,” she said. She craned her neck back and kissed the tip of my nose. “It was worth it. Where’s my bag?”

  “In the living room.” She rose from the bed and limped off toward the living room. I watched her go, sorry she was in pain, but glad she was here.

  I yawned and decided I might as well go to the bathroom. Wendy was there already. She was wearing the jersey again, and she had one shapely leg propped up on the rim of the tub. She had a jar in her left hand and a piece of cotton in her right. She dipped the cotton in the jar, and it came away stained brownish yellow.

  “Hello,” she said. She rubbed the cotton over her knee. There was wetness on her skin for about a second; then it looked as if she had never put anything on at all.

  “That is fast,” I said.

  “Don’t kiss me,” she said, reading my mind. “My mouth tastes disgusting. Uck. Do you have any Listerine?”

  “In the cabinet.”

  “Good. Only thing that kills the taste.” She stretched out her leg, bent it a few times, then reapplied the DMSO. She stretched again. “That’s better. Now let me gargle.”

  I kissed the back of her neck, making her giggle, then I went off to use the other bathroom. Wendy rejoined me a few minutes later.

  “Safe to kiss you?” I asked. She showed me it was.

  “Wendy,” I said, “I want you to be careful.”

  “With the knee? I’m used to it.”

  “Not just with the knee. There’s too much going on and too little of it is understood. I’m going to have my people hanging around you when you go anywhere.”

  “You will, huh? What about you?”

  “I’ll be there whenever I can. Maybe I’ll catch you in the finale this afternoon.”

  “Don’t overdo it. I don’t want you to get bored, you know.”

  “No chance,” I told her.

  “Okay, then. Let me show you how to do this without hurting my knee...”

  “Read label directions carefully; do not exceed recommended dosage.”

  —Standard disclaimer, TV drug advertising

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I HAD TO GO see Tom Falzet in the morning, so I called Al St. John and had him take Wendy wherever she had to go. I checked with Wendy first, of course, but she seemed to be in a mood to give her image a kick in the behind and therefore didn’t care who knew we’d spent the night together. If Al thought anything of it, it didn’t show on his face. Since he’d be at the Garden, anyway, I gave him an extra key to the Network room and told him to check on progress there.

  The president’s office is the entire thirty-seventh floor of the Tower of Babble, the kind of place Dick Powell used to have in the fantasy numbers of old Busby Berkeley musicals, with conference tables, and steps, and plateaus you have to cross before gaining the Presence. All of which, as far as I can see, having no purpose other than to impress the visitor with his own insignificance.

  The room hadn’t been designed with Falzet in mind, but he had made it his own. This was a man who had raised pomposity to a Fine Art.

  Falzet was tall, with gray hair and the kind of toothy, long-nosed good looks that always remind me of Old Money. He could be charming when he wanted to; I had seen him do it. He had yet to be charming to me.

  “Where were you yesterday?” he demanded. No hello.

  I took a chair, crossed my legs, and spent plenty of time adjusting my pants. “It is a lovely morning, isn’t it? Do you think we’ll have snow for Christmas?”

  “If you were where you deserve to be,” he said, “you’d never see snow. I wanted to see you yesterday, Cobb. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I am still running this Network.”

  This boded well; Falzet was always easiest to handle when he tried to be funny.

  “Well, sir, if you’ll wait a second, I’ll call Dun and Bradstreet to check.”

  “Never mind! The Network has been receiving unfavorable publicity.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “It’s not even the Network’s fault!”

  “Not even a little bit, sir.”

  “That crazy old man had no business there. That was a Network facility and should have been secure.”

  “Not much we can do if someone let him in. Especially if that someone, a business associate of the Network or someone close to a business associate of the Network, let him in expressly to kill him.”

  “One of your people should have been there!”

  “My person who should have been there was in the hospital fighting for his life. Shall I send him flowers in your name?”

  Falzet was impervious to cracks like that. “I want you to get to the bottom of this, Cobb. I want this business cleared up and out of the media. With the killer caught, if possible.”

  “Thank you, sir, for your guidance. Now I know what to do. I was all at sea, before.” I really had to wonder why Falzet ever wanted to see me. All we ever did was get on each other’s nerves.

  This time came close to setting a record. I managed to get out of the office with no blood being shed, but it was a near thing.

  The next stop was Network News on the sixth floor, where I paid a visit to Bill Bevacqua. Bill is the Network News librarian, charged with keeping track of all the film and videotape (miles of it) that we use in our news operations.

  I found him filing updated obituaries. That’s something he and the rest of the News department have to attend to every now and then. When somebody attains prominence, they put together a bio for him. If you attain real prominence, your story gets narrated by the Anchorman himself. Anyway, the Network has these things ready; all we have to do is wait for you to die. If you’ve ever wondered how the Network was able to whip a half-hour special about Elvis Presley on the air within an hour and twenty minutes of the time he kicked off, now you know.

  Bill is a slight, good-humored guy who gets lonely among the cans of three-quarter-inch videotape. He looked up from his list and smiled over his glasses.

  “Matthew! What can I do for you?”

  “I didn’t get to see the Dinkover obit—do you still have it?”

  “You didn’t get here a moment too soon—it was going in the histo
rical section in about ten minutes. Hold on a second.” He punched a few buttons on a computer terminal, made a few notes on a piece of paper, and muttered, “Okay, you people live for a while, will you? I’m tired of rearranging obits.”

  He turned back to me. “You want the obit piece or the whole file on him?”

  “The whole thing, Bill, if you can.”

  “Sure. How’s it going?” I grunted; he laughed. “I’ve got confidence in you. Maybe you’ll find something in my tapes. If you want to check out everybody, I’ve got some great stuff of Wendy Ichimi.”

  I told him I’d pass on Wendy’s tapes for now. I already knew more about her than any video tape could tell me. Bill got on the phone and called for an engineer to run the tapes for me. In all the time I’ve worked for the Network, I have never touched a videotape machine. TV is a strongly unionized industry.

  I was just as glad, after I’d watched a few tapes, that I didn’t have anything expensive within reach, because I probably would have broken it in frustration.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t learn anything. I learned that Dinkover had a tendency to repeat himself over the years, using the same insults for Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. I learned what a pitiful bunch the Landover Four were. Stern faces, defiant, justified in taking a life here because of what Nixon was doing there. But deep in their eyes, fear.

  In a way, a TV camera is like an X-ray machine. It takes time, but it works. Joseph McCarthy used TV as a weapon to build his power, but the senator found the blade turning in his hands. He overexposed himself, and finally, destroyed himself. Just by letting TV cameras stay pointed at his face too long.

  The Landover Four didn’t get as much exposure as McCarthy did, but they got enough for me to see they were indeed dancing for Dr. Dinkover. It occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to check with the police to see if Velda Delinski, June Lathen, or Cyril Guzick were still in jail. John Free, more or less the ringleader of the Four, was dead and therefore out of it. I hoped. Things were weird enough without resurrections or ghosts to deal with.

  I looked at the tapes twice. Neither Dinkover, nor any of his friends or enemies, not even the Anchorman, mentioned anything about eagles. I thanked Bill and the engineer more from politeness than gratitude, then left.