Killed on the Ice

by William L. DeAndrea

  She held me tighter. “Good. Good. That’s what I want.”

  After that we didn’t talk for a while.

  Of course, my staying with Wendy next day meant she had to stay with me—I had a few errands to do, and I had to put in at least an appearance at the Network.

  Before we left the apartment that morning, Wendy slipped the package into my coat pocket.

  “Open it when I’m on the ice,” she said.

  “So during the only time I won’t be next to you, I’ll be thinking of you?”

  “Matt, you’re so romantic. Actually, it’s so I’m out of reach if you don’t like it.”

  “What is it, a bomb, for God’s sake?”

  “No. But your mother ought to get a kick out of it, too, if you use it properly.”

  “It’s a cookbook,” I said, but Wendy just said wait and see.

  The first thing on the agenda was to get myself a pair of gloves, which I did on the way to the Network. Black leather, with rabbit fur inside, warm and soft. I made a promise to remember not to bleed inside the goddam things. When we went back outside, it was a pleasure not to have to keep my hands in my pockets all the time.

  I visited the Network next, using the phone to tell my people I’d need them tonight. They all signed on, including Al, who was especially eager. I told him to call Lieutenant Martin and work out details, then get back to our staff.

  “Who’s in?” he said.

  “Everybody. You, Kolaski, Smith, Ragusa, me.”

  “What about Shirley?” he said. “Nobody’s seen her in days.”

  “She’s been at the hospital. I’m going to ask her in person. I want to see Harris, anyway. Going to compare notes.” I told him how I’d almost wound up with two lungfuls of snow.

  “Good Lord, Matt,” he said. “This guy must be a maniac.”

  “If the attack on me is connected at all,” I said.

  “Too many coincidences,” he said. “One or two, okay, but this is too many.”

  “You know something?”

  “What?”

  “I agree with you one hundred percent.”

  “You’re a good teacher,” he said. “I try to think the way you think.”

  “Yeah, well you still can’t have a raise. I’ll be at the hospital. If you need me, beep me.”

  Harris was making a remarkable recovery, and Shirley acted as if she had spent three days witnessing a miracle. She met me and Wendy at the entrance of the hospital, and spent the whole walk up to Harris’s room telling us the good news.

  “The doctor says he’s going to make a complete recovery. As soon as all his bones heal, he’ll be good as new. Of course, he’ll be a little weak, but they said no brain damage, no nerve damage. It’ll be a month or so before he leaves the hospital, naturally, and longer than that before he can come back to work, but it’s still pretty wonderful.”

  “It is,” I said. “Especially considering the way he looked that first night.”

  “I’m glad,” Wendy said. “I like Harris a lot.”

  Shirley was so happy she didn’t even give Wendy a dirty look.

  Leaving aside the bandages and the traction sling and the purple spots on his face, Harris was pretty much his old chipper self.

  “Shirley’s been telling us the good news,” I said.

  “Shirley is the good news,” he replied. Shirley blushed, no surprise. “Do you know she’s been here practically every second since I was brought to the hospital? She’s eaten here, slept here, in the waiting room down the hall. Only time she was away was when I sent her away, and when she went with you to check out my apartment.”

  “We got there too late,” I said. “Sorry.”

  Harris tried to shrug, winced, and laughed. “Reflexes are stupid. I’ve been trying to shrug for three days now, and it hurts every time. Don’t worry about the apartment, Matt. I’ve got insurance. I’ll miss the coin collection, though. My father started it.”

  This was rare. I’d never heard Harris speak of his family before. In fact, Harris was so cool and detached, it was hard to imagine him even having a family. He’d always struck me as the kind of person who’d never been a child—not dignified enough.

  “Anyway,” Harris said, “when I finally came out of my haze, there she was. She’s a hell of a woman, isn’t she?” Another blush.

  “I keep telling you that,” I said.

  “Maybe I better start listening.” He moved his eyes over toward Wendy. She took a step to her left so he could see her better. “I’ve spent the last day or so bringing myself up to date on your problems, Wendy,” Harris said. “Ordinarily, I’d be at the Network, telling Matt what to do, and things would be all settled by now.”

  I laughed. “We’ve hardly noticed you were gone.”

  “St. John doing a good job?”

  “Incredible. I don’t know when he sleeps.”

  “He wants your job,” Harris said. “He’s been studying you since he signed on. He’s too goddam eager.”

  “He’s too smart for that, I hope. You know, Harris,” I said, “I got mugged last night.”

  Shirley looked surprised. Harris looked at me and said, “Well, you came through it in a lot better shape than I did.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t find a pipe.”

  “Wrench,” Harris said. “He did me with a wrench. Maybe he couldn’t find one, at that. But the m.o. is too different, Matt. Even if it was the same guy, you’d never be able to prove it. I don’t think these things are connected anyway.”

  “Still a funny coincidence, though,” Wendy said.

  Harris looked at her for a second, then ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth before answering. It made his bandages jump on his head. “There are plenty of muggers in New York, Wendy,” he said quietly. “If a person lives long enough, he’s likely to be the victim of a crime sooner or later. Matt and I have been lucky enough to have survived ours.”

  Wendy blanched. I tightened the screws on my self-control, hard. If I hadn’t, Harris might have found himself nursing a few new broken bones.

  “Wendy,” I said, “I want to talk to Harris for a couple of minutes about Network stuff. Bore you to death. Why don’t you and Shirley step into the hall for a few minutes.”

  Then I remembered my promise to be by her side every second and added, “Don’t go away or anything. Just stand right by the window in the door so I can see you, okay? Shirley is just as good a conversationalist as I am.”

  “Better,” Harris said. I gave him a dirty look. His help I didn’t need at the moment.

  Wendy, after an initial twinge, seemed to take it fine. She gave me a little smile and said, “Sure, Matt.” Her good-bye to Harris was considerably colder.

  The door closed. I backed up to the little cupboard thing against the wall opposite the foot of Harris’s bed and leaned my fanny up against it. I waved to Wendy through the narrow window.

  Then I turned to Harris. “I suppose,” I said, “that I should make allowances for your injuries.”

  “Especially my brain surgery, right.”

  “Bullshit. Your brain is as good as ever. I should have told them to stuff a little compassion in while they had you opened up.”

  Harris made his eyes round. “My, how upset. What have I done?”

  “Well, for one thing, you continue to treat Shirley like a faithful puppy instead of as a woman who is seriously in love with you.” He started to open his mouth. “Don’t bother to say anything. You do it, and you know you do it, if for no other reason than I’ve told you repeatedly. Shirley is a big girl now, and if she can get along on patronizing compliments, God bless her.

  “But,” I said, “until that tape stops rolling tonight, Wendy Ichimi is Network business. You know the cops and the Network are walking on eggshells trying to keep that girl alive. How she’s going to step out on that ice like a bug on a plate, knowing somebody has killed three people, one of whom might easily have been her. Was supposed to have been. And then you run this
crap about everybody is the victim of a felony if he lives long enough and implying she wouldn’t necessarily survive hers when it happens. As if she didn’t already, with the DMSO-cyanide cocktail.”

  “Maybe,” Harris said, “she didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?” I took a look out the window. Wendy was smiling at Shirley, who was probably apologizing for Harris’s rotten behavior. The Harris Brophys of this world always seem to find somebody like Shirley to apologize for them.

  Harris said, “Maybe she didn’t have a narrow escape from a murder attempt. I can’t believe you haven’t been thinking of this yourself. You’re sentimental, but you’re usually sharp, too.”

  “Thinking,” I said, controlling myself, “of what?”

  “Thinking that everybody who got murdered was supposed to be murdered?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That the killer didn’t make any mistakes, Matt.”

  “You mean,” I said, intrigued in spite of my anger, “that Bea Dunney was the target all the time?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  I shook my head. “The only way that could have happened would be if Wendy had done the poisoning herself.”

  Harris said nothing.

  “No, Harris,” I said. “It won’t work. How could Wendy have known Bea was going to ask to borrow the DMSO?”

  Harris tried to shrug, winced. “That could have been luck.”

  “Luck,” I said.

  “Killers get lucky. Because there could have been dozens of ways for Wendy to have gotten that stuff on the Dunney girl. Could have spilled it on her, accidentally. Poured some in her shoes.”

  “Reaching Harris,” I said.

  “Just open your mind up and think about it, Boss.” He knows I hate to be called Boss. “You saw how she reacted to my tasteless remark.”

  “She got sick,” I said. “What do you expect when you remind her her Christmas box may be wood with brass handles?”

  “She got sick,” Harris conceded, “but was it because of that? Or did she suddenly get a queasy feeling I was on to her?”

  “You’re incredible,” I said. “Have you tried this out on Shirley?”

  “Of course not. Shirley’s too nice to believe it. But look at it, Matt. That call that got Brother to open the door. Could she have known about Brother and his coke deal? She was practically living in the guy’s pocket, of course she could have. Did she hate Dinkover and his wife?”

  “Why’d she kill Bea Dunney?”

  “That death put Wendy in the clear,” Harris said. His voice was patient with me, as though he were afraid I was going to be difficult and say that might not have been reason enough. “If you need a reason, there’s always that movie contract.”

  I was exasperated. “I won’t,” I said, “give you the reasons Bea was better suited to the movie than Wendy was. I’ll just tell you that Wendy spotted them all for herself. And I will add that you’re making her look bad only if I’m willing to postulate that she’s a complete psycho.”

  Harris was no longer being patient. “Naturally, Matt,” he said. “For God’s sake, you’ve seen the bodies—I’ve just had what the newspapers tell me and what Shirley gets from people at the Network. But it’s obvious that this killer is not sane.”

  “It’s not possible,” I told him. “I’ve been with her constantly for two days. I’ve been sleeping with her.”

  Harris looked disgusted. Then that passed, replaced by a look of sadness. “Matt, you must really have it bad for our little ice skater. If you were in your right mind, I wouldn’t have to say this. I know you think I’m a selfish son of a bitch, and I guess I am, but you’re a good boss, and I worry about you—who knows what kind of asshole they’d replace you with?”

  “Go ahead and say it.”

  “This wouldn’t be the first time a woman has made a fool of you.” I looked at him. God knew I couldn’t argue with that. I made him promise not to tell Shirley, then I left, promising myself I’d fire him as soon as he was healthy again.

  “What hath God wrought?”

  —First message ever transmitted via electronic medium

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  LIEUTENANT MARTIN WAS SHOWING me how he planned to deploy his personnel around the Garden when Shirley Arnstein gave me the bad news.

  “The Great Low-Light Experiment is off, Matt,” she said. She explained that having a few minutes with nothing to do (something she, as a workaholic, found intolerable) she’d gone up to the ad hoc control room on the mezzanine to see how things were going. She’d arrived in time to see disgusted techys power down the whole business.

  “Some kind of glitch turned up in that new Japanese camera,” Shirley explained. “They can’t get the aspect ratio adjusted properly—they keep losing things off the edge of the screen.”

  “What are they going to do?” Wendy asked. She’d been relaxing in a chair while the lieutenant had briefed me. We’d kept our voices down, but so had Shirley, and now I knew that Wendy’s hearing was no less acute than her stepmother’s.

  Her stepmother had shown up earlier, and there had been a big reconciliation between them. Mrs. Speir believed, or had talked herself into believing, that the whole business was dead, though she was shocked to think Carla could have done such a thing.

  It was, I suppose, heartwarming, though my heart would have been more thoroughly warmed if Mrs. Speir hadn’t given me an incredibly dirty look on the way out. I was still on the shit list for sleeping with her little Wendy.

  I answered Wendy’s question for her. “No problem; this has all been planned for. The Network will use the stuff that belongs to the Garden.”

  I could see some of the tension leave Wendy’s face. Not all of it. Not the inevitable tension fear for one’s life tends to afflict one with. But the tension of indecision, the fear that after deciding to be brave, that she might not have the chance to skate after all, and might have to go through the whole process again at some other time. Or (and I damned Harris Brophy for planting the thought), was it some other kind of relief she felt?

  Lieutenant Martin said, “Miss Arnstein, I want to put you in the control room. Cobb tells me that the director is going to have one camera scanning the crowd at all times, to get reactions to Miss Ichimi’s skating. I want you to keep watching the, the—what do you call that TV screen thing?”

  “The monitor,” I said.

  “Right. The monitor for that camera. Look at it constantly, see if anyone looks suspicious.”

  Shirley took a handkerchief from her purse and began to polish her glasses, as though to be absolutely ready to do a good job for the lieutenant.

  “How do I tell you if I do notice something?” she asked.

  “You’ll have a walkie-talkie. Everybody will. You Network people—you in the control room, St. John, Kolaski, and Smith on the mezzanine for surveillance, and my people, who’ll be in flying squads at strategic places around the building. Everybody will be using the same frequency that Garden security uses, and they’ll be keeping their eyes open, too. Any questions?”

  Shirley shook her head, smiled at me. “Thanks for bringing me in on this, Matt,” she said. She was only happy when she had an important job to do.

  “Don’t mention it,” I said. I was happy to have Shirley’s eyes, and her brain behind them, watching that monitor. It wouldn’t have been the same if Harris had shared his suspicions of Wendy with her.

  Lieutenant Martin went on. “Okay, Cobb. You’re going to stay with Miss Ichimi, right?”

  “I’ll meet her as soon as she comes off the ice. I’ll usher her on there in the first place.”

  “Good. Policewoman Constant will be with you, too. I want somebody armed with you, just in case. I’ve got Rivetz in charge of a squad of ten men. They’ll string themselves out along the ice, just on the outside of the sidewalk. If anybody tries to get down there, they’ll take care of it.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “It’ll be
all right,” he said. He raised his voice. “Don’t worry, Miss Ichimi, we’ve got you covered.” Back to me. “Constant will be right outside the door here. Outside of Rivetz, she’s my best man.”

  Knowing how hard that incorrigible male chauvinist had fought having a woman assigned to him, I was more impressed with Policewoman Constant than ever. It would also be practical, if Wendy had to go to any ladies’ rooms.

  The lieutenant left. Wendy started to take off her clothes.

  “I guess I’d better get ready now.”

  “You’ve still got time,” I said, then looked at my watch to confirm it. Seven twenty-seven. Right as usual.

  “Everybody’s in place?”

  “The security people? Yeah, the lieutenant’s had a chance to get to his own post by now.” Lieutenant Martin had left himself in command of the largest of the flying squads—mezzanine level, center ice, on the Eighth Avenue side of the Garden, almost directly across the way from the Network’s erstwhile control room. “Shirley’s had time to get to the control room,” I added.

  “They’ve let the crowd in by now,” Wendy said. Her voice was kind of wistful.

  “They have,” I said. “Doors were supposed to open at quarter to seven.”

  “Then I ought to get ready.”

  She was still undressing, down to underwear now. I’d seen a lot of her body over the last few days, and it occurred to me I could see it a lot more before I got tired of it. The same was true of her personality.

  I decided not to tell her about Harris’s suspicions, though I had planned to when I left the hospital. To hell with it. I’ll tell her afterward, I thought.

  If there was an afterward.

  That was pretty morbid, I told myself in disgust. I have long since given up trying to control where my thoughts will take me, but there was no sense getting defeatist about it.

  Time to change the subject. “How’s your knee?”

  She flexed it. “It hurts a little. But,” she said, “I don’t think I’ll be using DMSO any more. The government is right. That stuff is bad for you.”

  She started to laugh. Not healthy laughter, but a hysterical shriek that seemed to ripple up her body and burst out like a prisoner. It went on too long. I started over to her, intending to shake her out of it.