I grumbled at myself all the way back to my building. I was glad to see it. I waved hello to the doorman and started for the elevators.
“Hold it a second, Mr. Cobb,” he said. “Package for you.”
“For me?” I asked stupidly, then, “Oh. Thanks.”
It was a bag from the neighborhood’s intellectual bookstore. They deliver, which is nice, but I don’t deal with them much because they have such a lousy mystery section. I certainly hadn’t ordered anything from them today.
The bag had my name written on it, though, and my address and apartment number. I looked inside and saw a package, gift-wrapped. The way things had been going, my first instinct was to go out and bury it in the snow, but I decided I might as well ask Wendy about it first.
I took the elevator to the eighteenth floor, which is really the seventeenth floor, a fact which never fails to irritate me, and went over and rang the doorbell of the Sloans’ apartment.
Spot started his happy bark as soon as I did. That was a good sign. Another good sign was that the next thing I heard was the peephole thing being opened. I stepped back—those things aren’t built to look at tall people through—and wanted Wendy to be good and sure it was me.
Chain bolts were undone, locks slid open, and the door opened. Wendy, still sexy and beautiful in the nightgown, took a look at me and started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded. I stepped inside, closed the door behind me, and redid the locks.
“You look like a snowman,” she said.
“I’d hate to tell you what I feel like.”
“Oh, poor Matt. You’ll feel better once you get out of those wet things.” Right, I thought, and into your arms. She found a dry spot on my cheek and gave me a kiss.
“I sure will,” I said. “Unfortunately, I have to walk Spot first.”
“Give me a few minutes, and I’ll be right with you.”
“You will not. You will stay right here with the door locked.”
Wendy’s black eyes were shiny with excitement. “Matt, it doesn’t matter now. Haven’t you heard the news? I thought that’s where you were.”
“I was there.”
“Then what’s the matter? It’s over, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“It has to be over. I heard a woman say it on the radio. They interrupted the Christmas carols. I called Ivan and told him everything would be okay—I’ll be ready to skate again by tomorrow evening. He passed it on to the Ice-Travaganza people and the Network.”
I looked at her. I was thinking I could have saved myself all the soul searching on the way home.
“For the special. You know, the Network. You work there. I have a contract. You made me pregnant last night. Matt, for God’s sake, say something.”
“Call them back. Tell them you’ve changed your mind.”
“I can’t do that. Not now. I’ve already told everybody.”
“It could be dangerous.”
“What the hell are you talking about? It’s over. She was as crazy as he was, and they canceled each other out, and now I’m free. Matt, what is the matter?”
I told her, in detail. Wendy took it stoically, nodding her head from time to time to show she understood.
“...so I don’t know what to tell you,” I concluded. “I could be seeing things that aren’t there, and even if they are there, it’s a coin flip as to what’s the best thing to do.”
“There’s something you left out,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m not saying I believe you, now,” she warned. “Those objections of yours seem pretty nitpicky, to me.”
“It doesn’t feel right,” I insisted. “Those little things add up.”
“Having it over with feels right to me,” Wendy said. “I want it to be Dinkover’s wife. I want that so bad.”
“Wendy, for Christ’s sake—”
“But even if you’re right. Somebody’s out there determined to kill me.”
“Maybe.”
“That’s not very comforting, Matt.”
“I know. Best I can do, though.”
“That’s my point,” she said, then her face folded up, and her eyes got heavy with tears. “The best you can do isn’t going to be enough. If I don’t skate tomorrow, okay, but I can’t stay here the rest of my life.”
Spot always investigates when he sees a woman crying. He rested his snout on Wendy’s lap and looked up at her with sympathetic eyes. She scratched his ears absently as she went on.
“If he really wants to get me, sooner or later, he will. Won’t he?”
I couldn’t make myself say anything.
“That answers the question, I think,” Wendy said. “So if I skate tomorrow, you and the police set something up so that if he tries to kill me, you catch him.”
“Just like that, huh?”
“Do the best you can,” she said, then smiled.
“You want to use yourself as bait,” I told her.
“I want it over with. I don’t want to die; I just want this over with. Don’t tell me you didn’t think of it yourself.”
“I thought of it. I didn’t like it much.”
“What would you do if you were in my position?”
I thought it over and decided I would skate. Not from any great courage; I just really resent the idea that some murdering son of a bitch is going to have me rearranging my life. Wendy wasn’t crying, now, and I could see a lot of the same attitude in her face. I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. You don’t get to be the best in the world at anything without plenty of what my grandmother used to call Moxie. I told Wendy what I would do was irrelevant. She jeered at me for ducking the question, but I felt guilty enough without actively encouraging her.
I called Spot over and hooked the lead to his collar. Then I told Wendy to lock up behind me and went to the door.
“Are you going to take the package back outside with you?” she asked.
I had forgotten all about it. “Oh. No. What the hell is this thing?”
“Your Christmas present. I got the idea from your mother.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
Wendy giggled. “Possibly,” she said. “I called the bookstore and had them deliver it—found them in the Yellow Pages. Some things about New York are really great.”
“Fabulous,” I said. “Now nobody knows you’re here except everybody who works for the bookstore and all the customers.”
“Matt,” she said reproachfully. “There is more to me than just the Japanese-American neato cutesy bouncy cheerleader you seem to think I am. I didn’t give them my name. I put it on a credit card I’ve got—”
“And you didn’t give them your name? Let alone your account number and, God help us, expiration date?”
“The credit card is in Max’s name. He got me one just so I could buy stuff without having a fuss made. And I didn’t even have them bring it up to the apartment, did I? They left it with the doorman.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sounds okay. I apologize. What is it?”
“Oh, no. Do not open until Christmas. Or at least Christmas Eve.”
“Oh, all right,” I said. I opened the door. “You didn’t have to.”
“I wanted to.” She stood on tiptoe and gave me a soft kiss. “Hurry back,” she said.
Spot got excited the moment he saw the snow. He was straining at his leash, something he hardly ever does. The doorman said, “He’s a lot more eager to go out there than I am.”
“Well,” I said, “he hasn’t been walked since this afternoon. Also, it’s genetic. He was bred to be a sled dog; when he sees snow, he goes all ethnic on me.”
It wasn’t snowing quite as hard now, but it was colder. Most of the doormen in this classy neighborhood had conscientiously shoveled sidewalks, so the walking wasn’t so bad. I told Spot to make it quick, but he was having none of it. He was going crazy with repressed friskiness. After I tugged him back for about the third time, he loo
ked up at me with these big cow eyes he makes. I was cold enough and wet enough to have smacked him if he whimpered at me, but Spot was too smart for that. He just looked soulful.
“All right, goddammit,” I said as I bent to let him off the lead, “but stay in sight.” I reflected, as I watched him jump in and out of snow drifts, and generally frolic, that he could stay in plain sight and still disappear if he wanted to. All he had to do was lie down in the snow, close his eyes, and cover his little black nose with one paw. I read somewhere that polar bears hunt that way.
Spot sprinted down the block, then turned around to see what was keeping me. He seemed disappointed that I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the whole business as he was.
I called to him to stay, and his expensive obedience training was never put to a tougher test. He gave me that soulful look again, but my heart was frozen solid. I told him again to stay, and he did. He rolled around the snow a few times, and made a few experimental jumps, but he remained in more or less the same spot. I was proud of him.
The next thing to do was to get him to come back to me. This would be easier—it would give him a chance to sprint a good half block through the snow, and I doubted he’d resist that. I opened my mouth to give the command, but I was jumped before I could do it.
Footsteps on fresh snow make no noise. The first inkling I had that I was under attack came when I felt the thump in my back.
Actually, it was something more than a thump. It was a flying tackle that knocked the breath from me and sent me sprawling face first into a snowdrift.
I tried to roll over, to be able to fight back, but when I did, my eyes were full of snow and I was blind. Before I could clear them, my attacker was on top of me. A vertical right cross to my chin turned me back over. My head was buried in a snow drift. When I tried to open my eyes again, all I could see was stars against a field of white.
I thrashed and struggled and did similar useless things. My attacker never said anything (not that I could hear too well in any case); he just pressed his knee against my spine until I was sure he was going to crack it.
I was struggling now, even more desperately. Struggling for air. I couldn’t free my face from the snow, not even a nostril. I couldn’t even melt an airway for myself with my breath, because the son of a bitch who was riding my back kept forcing my face deeper into the snow. The field of white was becoming a field of dark red, and my mind was starting to race. I was going to die, this bastard was going to drown me, I was going to drown right here on West Seventy-third Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, and he would bury me in a snowbank and nobody would find me till spring. My last thought before the roaring in my ears became too loud for me to hear myself think was that here was the first White Christmas in years, and I was going to miss it...
Then I felt his hand in my pocket. The one where I keep bus change. Subway tokens. And my keys.
I had a vision of Wendy, happy Wendy, loving Wendy, rushing to take the chain bolt off when she heard the key in the lock.
The roaring in my ears got louder.
“The nightmare has already begun.”
—Roy Thinnes,
The Invaders (ABC)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I WOULD HAVE CURSED myself, if I could have opened my mouth. As it was, I just got mad. The struggling I was doing was worse than useless. Lucky Pierre up there had all the leverage—all I was doing was exhausting myself, killing myself that much sooner.
I had to devote the few remaining molecules of oxygen in my brain to thinking. So I tried to think, and what do you know, it worked.
I did one last thrash and brought my arms up so that my hands were near my face. Then I stopped moving. I didn’t expect my assailant to get off me—I just wanted to get him to relax a little.
I don’t know if he did or not. I just waited until I couldn’t stand it any more, then I moved. I planted my hands (cold beyond feeling now) against the asphalt beneath the snow and pushed straight back. I lifted myself (and my friend) only a couple of inches, but it was enough. It changed angles, leverages. Now I could use my legs.
Before I could get forced back down into the snow, I pulled my legs up flat, knees out, like a frog. Then, with whatever purchase I could get against the snow and the slick pavement below it, I leaped.
It worked better than I thought—the man on my back had just shifted his weight toward my head to force me back down after my push-up—my frog maneuver just encouraged him to keep going.
I didn’t quite do a flip—I got up about sixty degrees, then went over sideways. The important thing was, I had him off my back, and after I spat a two-pound lump of snow from my mouth, I could breathe again. Cold air never tasted so good.
It was nice to breathe, but I knew my troubles weren’t over by a long shot. I still couldn’t see. I rubbed my eyes with my left hand, while I kept my right extended to try to ward off another attack.
Which never came.
As I pulled air by the bushel into my lungs, the roaring in my ears subsided enough for me to hear why. Spot was at my side, snarling and barking. I was going to give him the kill command, but he stopped doing it, which meant my attacker was out of sight.
I got one eye functioning well enough to see the line of indistinct footprints leading out of sight around the corner.
I stood there, panting and squinting and trying to fight off the world with one hand. Then I took a deep breath and collapsed, falling on my ass in the snow.
Spot came over and started to lick my face, and for the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed it. It was warm and rough, and it started to bring me back to life.
“Where the hell were you?” I demanded when I had enough breath to talk.
Spot cocked his head and said, “Moooort?” which is how a Samoyed expresses concern. I reached out and gave him a hug. I knew what had taken him so long. He thought I was frolicking in the snow with a friend. When he got the message I was in trouble, he came right to my rescue. God bless him.
I caught my breath at last and struggled to my feet. I put my hands in my pockets against the cold. No keys.
No change or subway tokens, for that matter. I screamed and dropped to my knees. Spot was startled, but I could apologize to him later. At Wendy’s funeral, for instance.
I swept my hands through the snow, frantic until I found the keys. Spot had scared him off before he had a good grip on them. Or the attack had been a simple mugging, and he hadn’t especially been after my keys at all. Shades of Harris Brophy. I was getting damn sick of this case.
Wendy didn’t even wait until the door was opened. Right after she looked through the peephole, she said, “Matt, my God! What happened?”
She didn’t wait to hear an answer before she opened the door, for which I was grateful. I stumbled in and said, “Take Spot’s leash off—my fingers are too stiff. Meet me in the extra bathroom.”
I couldn’t help seeing myself in the bathroom mirror. Grisly. Bright red where I wasn’t frozen white. I got some warm water running in the sink and put my hands under it. I knew it would hurt, but I didn’t know it was going to hurt that much. Still, it worked. With the pain came (some) flexibility. I started to peel off my stiff, sodden clothes. What wasn’t crusted with snow was soaked with sweat.
Wendy came in and joined me. “I know I’m repeating myself, but you’ve got to expect that if you don’t answer questions. What happened to you? From the bruises on your back, it looks like you got run over by a snowplow.”
“Not that simple. Did anyone try to get in here?”
“Nope. All alone, just me and the radio. Look, Matt, if you don’t want to tell me, just say so.”
I told her all about it, emphasizing the attempt to get my keys. I concluded by saying, “Still want to skate tomorrow?”
We went around with that one for a while. The conclusion was that this didn’t really change anything, except to make it more likely we’d have somebody to look for tomorrow.
By
now I was naked. The clothes were in a heap in the tub. I couldn’t think of any better place for them, so I padded into the other bathroom and started the water running. I was just about to step in to the shower, when I had a sudden thought. I said a rude word, told the shower not to go away, and went to the other room to inform the police about my little adventure.
Lieutenant Martin was impressed. Bewildered, but impressed. He asked me if I was okay, and that taken care of, he asked me what I thought. It’s a misdemeanor to use on the telephone the words it would have taken to describe what I thought, so I skipped it. Lieutenant Martin said he’d be at the Garden tomorrow, along with as many men as he could spare. And maybe some police women so that the female skaters’ locker room could be watched too.
I said it sounded like a good idea and told him I’d have as many of my people there as I could get, for what it was worth. Then he griped to me about the case, and I stayed on the phone, but the whole time I was fantasizing about the shower. My body had thawed out to the point where it wouldn’t hurt any more, it would just feel great.
Finally, it was okay to hang up. I did so with glee, then headed for the bathroom. Someone was humming in the shower stall.
I was crushed. “Aw, Wendy,” I said. Now I had to go to the other bathroom and schlep all the disgusting wet clothes somewhere else...
The shower door opened. Wendy was smiling under the spray, rubbing her self vigorously with a washcloth, and generally disporting herself like an incredibly sexy seal.
“Well, come on,” she said. “You wanted to get warm, didn’t you?”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure.” I joined her under the spray. We helped each other wash those hard-to-reach places.
“Hey,” I said, “this really works.”
Wendy pushed wet hair from her eyes. “Getting warm?”
“Can’t you tell?” I took her in my arms.
“Matt,” she said, “stay with me tomorrow.”
“Every second,” I promised, “except when you’re on the ice.”
Killed on the Ice Page 16
