Halfway there, though, the shrieks turned to sobs, and she sank into her chair with her face in her hands. I lifted her, held her until she stopped.
“Matt,” she said, “I’m afraid.”
“Who wouldn’t be? You don’t have to go through with this, you know.”
“But the police. The Network.”
“Screw them both. They don’t count. You don’t have to skate if you don’t want to.”
She thought about it, and for a second I thought she was going to call it off, and so did she. It took a conscious effort to restrain a sigh of relief.
Then she stopped and shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “I’ve got to do it. If I don’t, I’m letting some maniac ruin my life the way Dinkover ruined my father’s.”
“Whatever you say, Champ.”
She laughed again, but it was a wholesome sound this time.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded.
“The Network paid a lot of money, but they’re probably going to get a lousy performance. Two days, no practice. No warm up.”
“You’ll be fine.”
She put her little hands against my chest and leaned back to look at my face. “I should get you to make love to me now,” she said.
“I don’t think that will be such a good idea.”
“It may be my last chance.”
“You just knock that stuff off right now, all right? We’ll do it tonight. It’s Christmas Eve. I’ve always wanted to make love to a World Champion on Christmas Eve.”
“If I live.”
“I told you to stop that. Is it a date?”
“Of course. Dope.”
“That’s better. What are you doing tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. Max was going to take Helena and me out to dinner, but the next time I see him I’m going to tell him he’s through, and I don’t want to do that on Christmas, even to him.”
“Okay. Come with me to my mother’s house tomorrow. Helena, too, if you want her.”
“Matt, I can’t do that. There won’t be enough—”
“There’ll be enough. Have you ever seen a thirty-five-pound turkey?”
“Thirty-five pounds? They don’t grow that big.”
“The hell they don’t. We happen to be a family that loves leftovers. There’ll be enough.”
“I’d love to, Matt.” She sealed a bargain with a kiss.
There was a knock at the door. “Fifteen minutes, Miss Ichimi.”
Wendy acknowledged and began to put on her beautiful white shiny skating dress. Soon, there was another knock on the door, and it was time to go. Wendy took a deep breath, smiled, kissed me again, and opened the door.
It was amazing how well she could walk on those rubber-covered skate blades. I noticed this as she scampered back into the dressing room after we’d gotten about five steps away from the door.
It scared me to death, and it didn’t do much good for the policewoman’s health either. After about a half second of shock, I followed, but Wendy was coming back out again as I got there.
“We forgot your package,” she said. “You’ve got to open it while I’m on the ice, and tell me how you like it when I get back. It’ll give me something to think about.”
“You could always think about your routine.”
She shook her head. “Some skaters do, but I’ve got to let it flow, or I screw it up. Here.” She handed me the package and started off again for the arena.
There was more excitement before we got there. Ivan Danov ran up to Wendy, shouting as usual. Where had she been? Why had she not been in touch with Danov? How could she expect to skate without practice? Why did Max Brother not talk to her on this occasion? Why—
He stopped because it’s difficult to talk when you’re looking in the mouth of a .38. Wendy and I hastened to reassure Policewoman Constant that Danov was okay.
“Have you seen Brother?” I asked the coach.
“Yes, we are sitting together in the special box. Miss Ichimi may no longer wish to consult us, who have helped her become famous and rich, but we still take an interest in her career. Her mother is also with us.
“Stepmother,” Wendy said.
“Don’t get huffy, Danov, Wendy has had a lot on her mind. She’ll talk to you after Christmas.”
“How kind of her.”
“Ivan, come on, I have to skate.” Wendy waved her arms gracefully, getting loose. She’d been stretching in the dressing room on and off for hours.
For the first and last time, I saw Ivan Danov with no trace of bombast whatever. He looked at Wendy the way a proud father would and said, “Yes, child. You must skate. And your coach must not delay you. We will talk after Christmas, and you will explain the things I do not understand?”
“Yes, Ivan. And thank you. Thank you for everything.”
I thought Danov was going to cry as he turned and left. I thought it was interesting that three of the ace suspects in the original murder were all sitting together. And here we were, all together at a skating rink once again. Cozy. Well, at least they could keep an eye on each other.
I turned to Wendy and said, “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
She’d had her eyes closed and was breathing deeply; my comment made them pop open. The previous act had finished (one I’d never seen before—the Ice-Travaganza had had to make a lot of changes over the last few days), and we stepped aside to let them get off. Garden employees went out to freshen the ice.
“Do what?” Wendy said.
“Keep delivering these valedictories. You’re going to be all right.”
She went back to the breathing. “Don’t talk to me now,” she said. “I have to get ready.”
The time got closer; the lights dimmed. Looking around the arena, I could see the red tally light of the live camera like a bloodshot eye. Somewhere in the dark, someone wanted to kill Wendy. Maybe.
The announcer went into his spiel. Her gold medal. Her world and national championships. How this was going to be a special twelve-minute performance taped by the Network for a big TV Special (the crowd cheered). It all concluded with, “Miss Wendy Ichimi!”
I’d been watching Wendy during the buildup. She’d been completely divorced from the surroundings; from the planet Earth, it seemed. When her name was called, she exploded onto the ice; as before, to the center circle for a quick bow, then into the routine.
Possibly her last routine, but I quickly reminded myself that we weren’t going to be defeatist.
Wendy had neglected one very important thing when she’d told me to open my present while she was on the ice—I would have to take my eyes off her in order to do it. The skating may have been routine for her, but it was still magic to me.
As she had told me just before Bea Dunney had died, it’s a whole different show at ice level, a low-perspective world of long leaps and showers of ice crystals. It was a good two minutes before I could take my eyes off her.
I told the policewoman I’d be stepping aside for a minute but would stay in her sight. Then I stepped over to a service light and skinned the paper off the package. Just before I did, though, a silly notion scurried across my mind—if Harris Brophy was right, this might well be a bomb.
It wasn’t a bomb. It was a Bible.
I smiled as I saw it. The sarcastic little wretch. She’d said my mother would like it, and so she would. I’d show up at church in the morning carrying a brand-new Bible.
It was a really nice one, too, bound in black leather with “Salton’s American Bible” debossed on it in gold, Salton being the publisher. A little band around it said it was intended to marry the poetry of the King James version with the clarity of the modern-English Bibles (a worthy aim if I ever heard one), presenting it all in the best of modern graphics in a comfortable size.
I took a look inside. My opinion of how well the folks at Saltan had realized their literary ambitions would have to wait. There was no question about the graphics.
They were beautiful. Two colors
of ink; the words of God were in red. A glimpse at the New Testament showed me Jesus’ words were done the same way. The paper was thin, but strong and opaque. The main text of the Bible ran down the middle two columns of the page; explanatory notes ran concurrently in the outer two columns. There were color reproductions of famous religious paintings, two-color maps and graphs, and line drawings done in a bold, strong style.
And one more nice graphic touch. At the top of each page, next to the page number, there was a little symbol for the book of the Bible we happened to be in.
I wondered idly if Dr. Dinkover, with his work on religious symbolism, would have been upset about this. I decided he probably would have.
I looked at a few of them. The Book of Genesis was represented by a small rectangle, diagonally divided into light and dark. Exodus had a stylized rendition of the tablets of the Ten Commandments.
Naturally, I had to see what they’d chosen for the Book of Matthew. I turned to the first book of the New Testament, where I found they had used the simple little stick-figure of a man.
Something clicked in the back of my mind. No that’s not right. Something grated, the way the ends of a broken bone grate as the doctor tries to get them set. It hurt about as much, too.
I’d come across this before in religious books and paintings. Matthew, represented by a man. There was a stone carving at the church I was going to go to tomorrow morning. Four figures. Each Gospel writer represented. Matthew by Man, of course I’d remember that, and...And what?
I forced shaking fingers to turn pages. Saint Matthew was a man. Saint Mark was a lion. Saint Luke was an ox.
And Saint John was an eagle.
“Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”
—Don Meredith,
NFL Monday Night Football (ABC)
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I LET AL ST. JOHN’S name trickle through my head, letting it bounce off the facts of the case like steel balls through a pachinko game. It never failed to tally. I hated it. I tried again. It fell through again. I could be wrong. But there was no time to be wrong. I had to go with it.
A noise from the crowd told me Wendy had just done something spectacular. I didn’t even look. I had wasted too much time already. I had maybe eight minutes before he struck.
I grabbed hold of Policewoman Constant’s arm. “Get on your radio,” I told her. “Al St. John is the killer. Al St. John. Got that?”
She was surprised. “St. John? Your man.”
“Yeah,” I said bitterly, “my man. That means I’d better go try to stop him, doesn’t it?” The policewoman was unhooking her radio from her belt. “Try to get Miss Ichimi off the ice,” I told her.
I turned my back and headed away before I could hear her ask how.
I tried to make a mental schematic of the building as I sprinted up the stairs. Al was on the mezzanine, along with Kolaski, Smith, and Ragusa, the rest of my Special Projects crew. They had quartered the arena—Al had the northeast, or about a third of the way around from where I was now. When Wendy finished her number, with that incredible, drawn-out spin, he would have a perfect vantage point to shoot from. If he had a silenced weapon, he could get off four or five careful shots. And I’d put him there.
Seven minutes.
I still didn’t want to believe it. But it answered so many things. How Dinkover knew Wendy was at the Network the other afternoon, before we’d chased him with laughter. How Dinkover had known about Max Brother’s drug sale—Al had told him, that’s all. He found it in the Network files.
It explained how the killer knew to have the doctored DMSO ready for the moment I’d let him get at Wendy—that was more Network information. And he knew when to have it ready because I called him on the phone and told him I was turning Wendy over to him.
I reached the mezzanine level and took a breath. Five and a half minutes. I began running down the corridor. Cops asked what I was doing—I told them to follow me. I wasted a half minute identifying myself before they took me seriously. One of them would stand and watch the station; the other would follow me.
He didn’t run fast enough. I got so far ahead of him, sometimes the crowd inside would drown out the sound of his footsteps.
The steel balls bounced. It was easy to see (none to goddam soon, though) what happened. Al decides to kill Dinkover. He approaches him as a friend, offers to help put him together with Wendy. He proves his sincerity by tipping Dinkover to Wendy’s being at the Network, then gives him blackmail ammunition against Max Brother and tells him he might see Wendy at the Blades Club late that night. Dinkover is a determined old man, he wants Wendy to do her bit for him, he goes along.
Al mugs Harris for his keys. He’s never liked Harris too well anyway, so he really lets things loose with the wrench. I was breathing hard now, but I had to use some breath to laugh. This was beautiful. He’s got Dinkover inside—now he has to get himself inside. Harris and I each have a key to the Blades Club. He goes for Harris’s. Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt me—Shirley told me he’d said I reminded him of his big brother.
But he has to make it look good. Al knew me. That was his big advantage. He knew me. I’d been teaching him since before I became head of Special Projects. He could be sure, once we knew about the murder, we’d look for a connection between it and Harris’s mugging.
So Al, to make it look good, goes downtown and trashes Harris’s apartment, overdoing it a little, so we’d get the point. Too eager. He takes the obviously valuable stuff, the stereo, coin collection, etc., but never tries to fence it. Why bother? We’re convinced of the coincidence—that’s enough.
Then he makes it uptown. He sees Dinkover slip inside, then uses his stolen key and joins him before the old man can meet any of the others. He gets close to Dinkover, who has no reason to be suspicious, and rips him open with the knife. Al takes off. Sometime later, Shirley has him beeped to come to the Network. He hadn’t planned on this, but it’s nice for him—he finds out everything immediately now. And he can calm his nerves by calling Harris’s apartment every five minutes to see if I’ve arrived. To see if I’ve bought the burglary. Too eager, Al, I thought. It wasn’t anything that couldn’t have waited.
But the old man, with his desperate, muddled dying thoughts, crawls across the ice. To the flag. To the eagle. To tell us who killed him. The old, brilliant brain has just composed ninety thousand words or so on religious symbolism. And so the man who had hated symbols, called them a lie, grabs for one as his last act. Pulling the flag into his body to tip the flagpole, he takes hold of the eagle. The symbol for Saint John.
I remembered how Al had taken things so humorously every time I mentioned that eagle, making ridiculous strings of possible applications. I’d even noticed how out of character it was for him to make jokes. But it worked. I got irritated with myself every time I found myself thinking seriously about the eagle and what it could mean. Paul Dinkover wasn’t the only person who didn’t like to get laughed at.
The corridor began to take on the elastic proportions of a nightmare. I kept running, thinking, but not getting anywhere. A summing up of the whole case. Except I had to get there, or Wendy wouldn’t take any bows after this performance.
I ran on. I could hear my breath and footsteps, and the roar of the crowd, and the clatter of the policeman, following me like a conscience.
Why did he want Wendy dead? (Why did he want Dinkover dead, for God’s sake?) I couldn’t answer either. But after he switched Wendy’s DMSO for the stuff mixed with poison (and it had to be Al who made the phone call to get Mrs. Dinkover to the agent’s office so the list of suspects would be complete), he made his boldest move. He planned to tie off the case with the “suicide” of Carla Nelson Dinkover.
I had wondered why she would commit suicide before she knew Wendy had died. That objection didn’t hold for Al. Carla Nelson Dinkover had to be dead before any news of Wendy’s death could get out—it wouldn’t do for his next victim to hear of the death and talk to the police b
efore he could do anything about it.
Besides, he had no way of knowing that there’d be a delay before I pulled him in by that little beeper of his. I might have called him immediately. It didn’t happen that way, but if it had, he wouldn’t have had time to fix the widow up with a poisoned drink.
The DMSO misfired, and Al went from bold to brilliant. He deliberately outlined all the flaws in the phony suicide—the note on the word processor, choice of weapons, the timing, and the rest. Made it plain he didn’t believe any of it. Because by then, he knew he’d killed poor Bea Dunney (and now I was calling her that, I realized) by mistake. There would be more attempts on Wendy, but who could suspect old Skeptical Al, Matt Cobb’s pal? He had read my mind and been one step ahead of me all the way.
He’d even, by God, reminded me that I hadn’t walked Spot. It was worth a try. He gave me a few moments to precede him down the street, then came up out of the subway and waited for me. If he’d managed to drown me in the snowbank, he could have gotten inside and done Wendy, too, and who would have tagged him for it? Hell, he probably would have been a pall bearer at my funeral.
That hadn’t worked out, but what the hell, there was always tonight. His boss and friend, Gullible Matt, would always give him another chance at America’s Skating Sweetheart.
“God damn it!” I yelled. Why? All those chances, all those deaths. Why?
I had reached my destination—through the door and down a short flight of steps. With any luck, a flying squad of cops should have gotten there first. Over two minutes left, too. I looked at my watch to confirm it.
I opened the door to the arena and looked down the short, steep flight of stairs that led to where Al was supposed to have been stationed. I let my breath go when I saw that Lieutenant Martin and about four uniformed cops were there.
I caught it again when I saw Al St. John wasn’t.
It made sense. I’d been too busy watching my life flash before my eyes to notice it, but it made sense. Why should he stay out in the open where anyone of fourteen thousand Wendy Ichimi fans might see his gun and raise an alarm? Why shouldn’t he go, for example, to the hockey press box, a nice, private, semi-enclosed area directly at center ice?
Killed on the Ice Page 18
