The Dead of Winter

by William H Hallahan

  “You were in the office. There were three desks and that was the name plate on the third one: Arthur Pappas. That must be him. He’d be the man they’d want to talk to.”

  “Of course,” said Tyler, frowning.

  Basche backed the car down the street and parked in the dark away from the streetlight. Most of the bungalows had boards over the windows. The wind was stronger here, and it seethed around the houses, pressing against the rigid dune stalks of last summer, whining against the car.

  Basche looked unhappily at the blackness where the bay water lay. “Sleet storm tonight,” he murmured. “I wonder how long they’re going to be in there.” He settled back with a sigh.

  Tyler stretched and yawned. They settled down to wait in the whining wind.

  Basche shut his eyes and considered his position. The quarry’s inside the building. They’re outside, armed and ready. Wait now until Ozzie comes out of the building to drive the old man home, follow them, wait for the opportune moment. Wait.

  He considered his African plain again, but his mind was restless. That Ozzie bothered him. He had been one of Fleagle’s customers, a man who had purchased beatings in the manner of a man buying ham sandwiches.

  Basche understood a Fleagle. Sadistic, cruel, more animal than man but with some of the integrity of an animal. Putting himself up against an adversary in a kind of one-for-one combat. But the Ozzies of the world, remote, indifferent, matter-of-fact, a voice on the phone murmuring a name and address. No pleas, no extenuating circumstances. Just a name and address over the phone. Perfectly secure, cowardly, secret, unapproachable. Human scum.

  He glanced at Lyons and that frightening mind. Always working, that mind. Always sifting facts and ideas, always putting them together in new relationships.

  Lyons figured out who that old man was with the same information he had and Tyler had.

  He, Basche, had looked at that old man and said to himself, Who is that? His memory file had no such face in the memory bank. So he said, “I don’t know who that is,” and ceased interrogating.

  But that cursed bloody mind of Lyons—it didn’t say, “Who’s that?” It said, “Identify that face, that man.” And when the memory banks said, “Insufficient data. We have no such face on record,” then the master Lyons brain turned away from the memory banks and went into the projection and speculation room of the brain and said, “Who might that be?” That’s the secret. The cunning Lyons mind extended itself. It was willing to speculate. It could take a question from last week, add a question from this week and from two questions make one answer.

  That cunning Lyons mind said, “I know things I don’t know I know.” And all along it had known that there was a third person in the Ha Ha office, even noted down and remembered the name. Saved that bit of information and, having then a name with no face, and now a face with no name, put them together and, behold, a gusher of information.

  First, he’s made an identification. Second, by speculation, he’s determined that Ozzie New York Avenue is after information, the same information those ransackers are after. And that creates two new facts: Ozzie works for them. And, two, they haven’t found what they’re looking for.

  Basche blinked his eyes. With a mind like that, he could conquer the television industry. Why didn’t Lyons use that mind for conquest? Answer: Lyons’ mind had no passion. No involvement except for momentary rages like the night he shot Fleagle through the head.

  That had to be the most deadly adversary on earth—a brilliant, arrogant hunter’s mind, captained by absolute indifference. Maybe Tyler was right. What was more dangerous? Remorselessness? Bottomless cunning? Which?

  He felt the fever of Tyler in the back seat prickle his neck. He turned and looked at those hot eyes. And had his answer.

  Basche turned his mind away from that—back to Ha Ha, back to that hideous Hollywood-style viewing. Ha Ha sitting in a chair, staring with propped open, dead eyes. He pictured Ha Ha buried that way, seated in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, leaning forward attentively, wearing a gardenia and staring for eternity into the dirt before his eyes. Forever seated in his hole as the earth spun through time, staring expectantly at what? Dirt.

  Maybe Lyons was right. Mrs. Ha Ha had made a clown of him intentionally.

  The frigid wind began to penetrate the car, and they each lapsed into a private silence. Basche turned away from vexing questions to his mental hunting preserve.

  His feet crunched along the flinty African track. The grass stalks seemed higher, the terrain hotter, the sun more blinding, the torrid sirocco wind off the desert almost purifying in its intensity. At the crest of a moraine Basche flushed his prey. Ozzie New York Avenue. The rifle rose up; he sighted and put a bullet right through the base of the man’s skull.

  Basche bestirred himself and sat up. “I’ve got an idea, Lyons. Let’s play thirteen questions. What do you say, Tyler?” He looked at Lyons. “How about it? Let’s hear those questions again.”

  Lyons exhaled and sat up. “I’ve been playing a kind of solitaire version of it.”

  “Fine. Trot them out. Let’s hear them again.”

  “If I sit here long enough,” said Dan Lyons, “if I brood and stew and scratch and belch long enough, I’ll have the answer. Because there’s one answer to all my questions. One answer.”

  “Let’s hear the questions. What’s number one?”

  “Where did I get this hole in my arm? Charlie Ha Ha? We found a hypodermic syringe in his safe with a bottle of sodium pentothal. Truth serum. Why? What do I know? Is the whole secret in my head? Do I know the answer and not know I know?”

  “O.K.,” said Tyler. “Charlie Ha Ha did it to get some information from you.”

  “That answer asks several more questions.”

  “Who cares?” said Tyler. “They’re all going to be in their graves soon anyway, including this Ozzie animal.”

  “What’s the next question, Lyons?” asked Basche.

  “How did somebody get into a locked and bolted apartment?”

  Basche shrugged. “What else do you have?”

  “How come I didn’t wake up?”

  “Try another. That whole needle thing isn’t important.”

  “Who’s the guy with the red scar on his neck?”

  “Maybe it’s this Ozzie New York Avenue,” said Tyler. “If not, it’s the guy after him. By a process of elimination we’ll find him.”

  “Maybe it’s the old man,” said Basche. He looked doubtfully at Lyons. “Well … what’s the next question?”

  “What made Charlie Ha Ha kill himself? Why just before a big meeting? When a man commits suicide, it’s because he faces something worse than death. What can that be? Why did he say that Reece pulled him into the grave with him?”

  Basche shook his head. “What else?”

  “Why did they search Vinny Reece’s apartment and who did it? Why did they ransack Ha Ha’s place—and who did it? Why did they sack Ha Ha’s office?”

  “And who did it?” echoed Tyler. “They’re looking for something.”

  Lyons turned and looked at Tyler. He nodded. “Something,” he said, “that fits in a man’s head.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “They looked inside my head. And Vinny died protesting that he couldn’t remember. What, what, what?”

  “Next question,” said Basche.

  “O.K. Why did Vinny Reece say he worked in a laundry?”

  “Ah, come on, Lyons, you’re reaching for that one. That may have been his idea of a joke.”

  “O.K. I’m reaching.”

  “What’s next?”

  “What are all those airplane trips of Fleagle’s all about?”

  “Maybe he was a professional passenger. He flew all over for a living. Maybe an airline-seat sampler.” Basche stopped again, smirking. “What else?”

  Lyons shrugged.

  “Well, Lyons, don’t you have any more questions?”

  “Yeah. One.”

 
“O.K. Spit it out.”

  “When do we stop killing people?”

  Roger Basche became alert when the light inside the building went out. The street was completely dark, and the bay waters beyond were invisible. The night was composed of black on slightly more black, faint angles in a grainy absence of light.

  “There’s someone at the trunk of the Cadillac, isn’t there?”

  “No. He’s walking to the side.”

  “No. Look. The trunk lid is open.”

  Their eyes became more accustomed to the darkness.

  “There’s two of them now,” declared Basche positively. “And one of them’s definitely Ozzie the animal.”

  “What are they doing in the darkness like that?”

  “There’s the old man.”

  “Where’s the old man?”

  “There by the wall.”

  “No,” said Basche. “That’s some kind of a bush. See. It moves in the wind.”

  “Where’s the old man?”

  The two shadows re-entered the building.

  They returned in silhouette. Plodding. Lugging.

  “Oh, my God,” said Basche.

  The two men were briefly lighted when they opened the doors of the car. Then the doors slammed, the light went out.

  “Oh, my God,” said Basche. The car’s headlights went on and swung in an arc as the car turned and moved back up the street. “Down,” he said.

  The three of them slouched below window level and waited as the car filled with light and went black again.

  “Quick, quick, quick,” said Tyler. But Basche already had the engine running and he turned, without lights.

  The Cadillac moved very quickly back to the Belt Parkway. It raced several miles to Flatbush Avenue and turned onto the road to Jacob Riis Park beach over the Marine Bridge. Traffic was lighter, and Basche stayed back a good distance. When the Cadillac turned into a public area, Basche rolled rapidly by.

  The pavilions of summer were boarded up, and the boardwalk and ramps lay empty in weak streetlight under the buffeting North Atlantic wind. Basche put out his lights and turned back, then parked at a curb.

  He searched the distant parking lot.

  “See? There,” said Tyler.

  “Yeah,” said Basche. The two men hurried over a cement retaining wall that led onto the beach. “Let’s go.”

  The air was a stiff breeze out of the northeast, nearly gale force, and it was filled with impending rain and sleet. It whistled through the caked wintry sand and rocked the pale street lamps. It went through their city clothes as though they were cheesecloth.

  Basche hurried to the trunk of the car, opened it and withdrew three rifles from the golf-club bag. He hurried across the wide, empty road to the seawall.

  It was a lantern. A kerosene lantern.

  And it glowed like the last spark of life in a primordial world. It stood on the sand, lighting the legs of the two men and lighting the way for the booming surf.

  The smell of the sea was strong. Spume and salt flaws were flung at the three of them by the wind. In the darkness, only the white tumbling scarves of surf picked up any light from the boardwalk lamps.

  They watched, crouching behind the seawall out of the wind, watched the movement of legs and shovels at the foot of the wild Atlantic surf careening up the strand of beach from low tide. The wind maintained a roar with the shriek of the sand. Each burst of surf seemed about to swallow the legs, the thin sticks of the shovels and the spark of lantern light itself in an awesome wall of booming sea water.

  The digging stopped.

  “Now?” asked Tyler.

  “Wait,” said Basche.

  They waited as the two figures jogged back up the beach, over the seawall and to the car.

  “The old man’s heavy,” cried Basche in a croupy stage whisper.

  “Yeah. Very heavy.”

  The stumbling, swaying mass moved down the esplanade, lurching ever closer toward the tumbling walls of surf and the waiting hole in the wet sand.

  “Come on,” said Basche. The three of them hopped up on the seawall, then jumped down onto the beach.

  The two men were past the hole now, standing between the hole they’d dug and the luminous, white sea behind them. By the forelight of the lantern they dropped the thick old man into the hole.

  “Anytime you say,” said Basche.

  “Now,” said Tyler. He knelt on one knee, raised the rifle and fired, a puny snap in the wind’s roar.

  His shot knocked down one of the figures like a clay boat on parade in a shooting gallery. Basche fired a moment before Lyons’ rifle fired. The second figure collapsed like a black parachute, seemed to turn and bow solemnly to the sea, then fell out of range of the small lantern.

  “Spread out,” said Basche. “Don’t bunch.”

  They walked slowly toward the lantern, leaning in the raging wind, almost paralyzed now with the cold. They’d almost reached the lantern when suddenly, abruptly, painfully they were pelted with stinging sleet. It drove down at an angle out of the northeast and it burned flesh where-ever it touched.

  Basche tucked his chin into his shoulder and moved closer to the lantern. He waved the other two toward him. As they hurried forward, he fired several shots into the two fallen men.

  “Pull,” he shouted in the wind. “Pull them into the hole.”

  They quickly stooped and dragged the bodies over the top of the old man’s as the tide sloshed around their feet. Some of it tumbled into the hole. “Come on.”

  They hurried back up the beach, grateful to have their backs to the wind and slashing sleet. They were soaking wet.

  Lyons turned and looked back.

  The little lantern stood like a beacon. Out of the hole projected legs and arms like a box of human spare parts. A sheet of white surf slid over the hole, over the bodies and up farther on the beach. The lamp stood unperturbed.

  They were running at last. Running up the beach to the wall, to the warmth and safety of the car.

  Basche and Tyler leaped up and over. Lyons came last, and on the wall he paused as the other two dashed across the road to the car.

  He turned and looked back into the sleet storm. The seawall burst into a white foam and swamped the lantern.

  Like a drowned star it went out.

  7

  “What is it, Lyons?”

  “I want to see the inside of that shack.”

  “Come on, Lyons,” said Tyler. “We’re in the middle of a sleet storm.”

  “Easy,” said Basche. “You want to go back to that shack, Lyons, we go.”

  The sleet drummed on the roof of the car like gravel and crunched under the tires. It thickly coated the roadway ahead of them—a treacherous slick that packed into a film of ice as the tires rolled over it. Few cars were on the road.

  Roger Basche located the exit ramp and crept through the empty streets of Sheepshead Bay. Ice had begun to weigh down the power lines and to cover cars and shrubs and grass and streets with a glazing of frozen rain. The car crabbed sideways and slid past an intersection as Basche tried to turn.

  “Christ,” muttered Tyler when they had reached the cinder-block building. “We’re taking a chance, Lyons. You know that? We’re taking a chance of being seen here.”

  Lyons got out of the car and hurried through the cutting sleet to the door of the building. It wasn’t completely shut. He pushed it open and found a wall switch. Several overhead lights revealed a bare cell of a building, unfinished like the interior of a garage, bare cinder-block walls and dusty concrete flooring. There was a cheap wooden desk and several folding wooden chairs and a wall phone.

  The room was filled with the rattle of sleet on the roof.

  “God,” said Tyler as he jumped through the doorway.

  Basche entered silently, turning down the collar of his coat.

  The sleet shattered loudly against the windows.

  “Let’s get this over with and get home,” said Tyler. “It’s cold as hell in her
e.”

  Lyons walked up to the wall phone and studied the square wooden wall board that held the phone. He read some of the notes and scribbles on the board, then turned to the desk and pulled open its only drawer.

  “O.K.,” said Tyler. “We’ve searched the place. Let’s go. There’s nothing here.”

  “What is that stuff?” asked Basche.

  “Couple of dozen airline ticket books,” said Lyons. He pulled them from the drawer and spread them on the desk top. The inconstant wind shifted and drove sleet and rain directly against the front windows.

  Tyler shook his head nervously at it.

  “All for Detroit and return,” said Basche.

  Lyons examined other papers. An old laundry pad, “Charlie’s Laundry,” with a printed list of garments. Loose sheets from the pad lay in the drawer. The blank backs had been used for penciled notes. He studied them—and snorted. “Three ham and cheese,” he read. “One pastrami. Four coffees, regular.” He picked up another. “Kennedy. United A.L. 8:40 p.” He picked up a third. “Ozzie. Be back in an hour. J.” He picked up several airline schedules and looked at them indifferently, then walked back to the wall board that held the telephone.

  “O.K.,” said Tyler. “There’s nothing here. Right? Let’s go.”

  Lyons picked up the old laundry pad and began to copy all the numbers and words on the board.

  “We’ll be here all night!” cried Tyler.

  “See that newspaper, Joe?” asked Lyons. “Wrap these papers in it.”

  “What do you want all this stuff for?”

  “Because there are a couple of numbers I recognize.”

  “Numbers? What numbers?” demanded Tyler.

  “Telephone numbers.” Lyons nodded at the corner near the door. “What are those packages?”

  “Just trash,” said Tyler.

  “Open them.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Tyler pulled open a blue paper bag and slipped out a box. He lifted the top and, frowning, looked at Lyons.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Lyons.

  Tyler held up a blond-haired rag doll.

  Lyons studied it for a moment. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “From Daddy.”

  The horseman was in a black riding habit and he wore a black hood and he rode a black horse and he moved down the black road of Rockaway Island toward the blackness of the Marine Bridge.