Killed on the Ice
Page 20
“Alive and here. Conscious sooner than you were.”
“He shot himself in the face for Christ’s sake.”
“Yup. Doctor says he was lucky; I don’t know how he’s going to feel about it. They’ve got him upstairs, right next to your pal Brophy. He’s been asking for you since he woke up. Won’t talk to anybody else. Won’t take medicine until he sees you. Doctors are going apeshit. Frying Nun, too. She’s been swooping around him like a vulture, hoping to get a statement to make things neat and tidy.”
“I’ll talk to him,” I said.
Upstairs, I was stopped in the hallway by Shirley Arnstein, back at Harris’s side. “Came through again, Ace,” I said. “Thanks.”
“It wasn’t hard. I had to agree to a date with the cop though. I can always break it.”
Or not, I thought.
“Harris is asleep, but he told me to tell you he’s sorry. That you’d know what it means.”
“I know what it means.”
Shirley shook her head. “It sure doesn’t sound like Harris.” She went back inside.
The Frying Nun gave me a dirty look as I went to the room they had Al in, but she refrained from talking. I wished her a blessed and peaceful Christmas; she looked as if she were chewing lemons, but she managed to wish me the same.
It was another dark room. At first, in the dim light, I had the unsettling impression that the figure in the bed was headless, until I realized it was only the bandages blending in with the pillowcase. A clear tube went into the bandages where you’d expect the nose to be. Doctors and nurses did things with machines and charts.
“Hello, Al,” I said.
“Hello, Matt. That’s Matt Cobb, isn’t it?”
“It’s me,” I told him.
“Good.” Something, maybe the tube in his face, made his voice gurgle. “Everybody else out. Let me talk to the man, then you can do whatever you please. Leave me.”
A few seconds later, he said, “Are they gone?”
“They’re gone.”
“Good. Well, Matt, it’s over. I’m kind of relieved.”
“That’s nice,” I said. I got a little queasy watching his mouth move and make the bandage wiggle. They’d told me what was under there.
“What did you do to me?” he asked.
“You did it to yourself,” I told him. “All of it.”
“All right, be sanctimonious if you want to. What did I do?”
“You mean besides kill three people?”
“I mean to my face. Good Lord, Matt, you act like I’m some kind of monster or something.”
“Yeah. It was my face you had in the snowbank.”
“I’m sorry about that. Things started to get out of hand.”
“Out of hand. Okay. Here’s what you did to yourself. You absolutely destroyed both your eyeballs and the bones of your face above your upper lip. It’s a miracle none of the bullet fragments made it to your brain. You might have some kind of face rebuilt, but you will never see again.”
A noise came from him. I decided it was a chuckle.
“I got Dinkover, though. I got him for Freddie.”
“Who’s Freddie?”
“My brother, Matt. Dinkover killed him.”
I had a flashback to the lunch I’d shared with Wendy, when she’d said the same thing, in the same tone of voice, about her father.
“Frederick St. John. Dinkover destroyed him. You may have heard of him under the name of John Free.”
It was beginning to make sense. “The Landover Four,” I said. “He was the one who—”
“The one who was killed in prison. His stomach cut open with a knife.” The gurgle got faster. “Dinkover had to die for that, Matt, he deserved it. He was a killer nobody could touch. He talked them into joining the worst part of the ‘movement,’ into doing the crime; made them get themselves convicted so he’d have martyrs to point to, then he forgot all about them.
“I kept myself up on him. For years. Since before I came to the Network. I found out he’d done it before. To Wendy’s father. Others. I waited, getting myself ready. When Wendy came to New York to do her show, I knew it was time.
“I went to him, told him I was Freddie’s brother, told him I wanted to help. The egomaniac didn’t question me for a second. I set him up at the Blades Club, with a ready-made set of suspects in a totally different case that would come to nothing.
“It should have worked. It would have. When I learned he’d gone for that eagle, I was sick. I looked it up. An eagle for Saint John the Evangelist, because he spread the word of God.”
“That explains Dinkover. But why his wife? Why Bea Dunney?”
“Bea was a mistake. You know that. I was after Wendy.”
“Oh. Excuse me.” I remembered how shocked Al had been when I told him Bea was dead. How he kept making sure it was Bea who’d been killed. If I’d been paying attention, I might have tagged him then.
“That was Dinkover’s fault, too,” Al went on. “Even after I’d killed him, he was causing evil. I had to get Wendy because she was the one who put you on to the eagle business. Dinkover’s dying message. It was obscure enough, but she knew right away it was the eagle and not the flag that was important. You told me she’d said her father and Dinkover used to discuss religious symbolism in front of her. She could remember at any minute. I couldn’t have that.”
“Of course not,” I said. I damn near gurgled myself. It was all I could do to keep from going over there and wrapping that tube around his neck.
“I had to kill Mrs. Dinkover for the same reason. I had no love for her, but I could have let her live if it weren’t for the eagle. She helped her husband with his books—that was common knowledge. She might put it together, too. Plus, she had custody of his manuscript. The secret had to be in there somewhere. I had to get to it; and I had to kill her to do it.”
“Are you trying to lay the basis for an insanity plea, or what?” I demanded.
“What are you talking about?” He sounded hurt.
“What were you planning to do? Kill everybody who ever read a Bible? Studied religion? Read Freud or Jung or Dinkover? Burn a million books?”
“I was buying time, Matt. It would have all been wrapped up when Mrs. Dinkover died, except that Wendy was still alive, threatening me. I had to try again. I thought I could stay ahead of you. You trusted me, and I knew how you thought. You taught me everything I know.”
“There’s an old saying. I taught you everything you know, but I goddam well didn’t teach you everything I know.”
“I guess so,” he said, then gurgled a sigh. “Dinkover. Dinkover. I didn’t want to kill those women. It’s his fault. It’s funny.”
“Hilarious,” I said. “If I go now, will you cooperate with people?”
“Sure, Matt, but I meant it’s funny strange. I guess I’m Dinkover’s last victim.”
I looked at him. I’d known, or thought I’d known, the mind behind those bandages for three years. Liked the man, worked with him. I felt like I wanted to lean up against something, to feel something real. I said, “Good-bye, Al,” then ran to the corridor where I took huge gulps of sane air.
Doctors and nurses and law officers went in to replace me. Before he went inside, Lieutenant Martin gave Wendy and me permission to leave.
I put my arm around Wendy and we walked away. She waited until we were in the elevator before she spoke. “Why did he want to kill me, Matt?”
“Nothing personal. He was afraid you were going to catch on about the eagle business. He wanted to silence you before you did.”
“Oh,” Wendy said. “Matt, know something?”
“What?”
“I still don’t understand that stuff too well.”
“It was your subconscious he was worried about.”
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?”
“Only if you let yourself go crazy with hate.”
“Is that a message meant for me?”
“I’m too t
ired to mean anything.”
The elevator stopped. We crossed the lobby and stepped out into a cold, clear morning. The stars and the snow were shining with us in between.
I took Wendy’s arm and we walked off to find a cab. “Are we still going to make love tonight?” she said.
“Oh, yes. And hear my sister sing at ten o’clock mass, and let my mother feed us turkey till we pass out. I need some normal human stuff very badly about now.”
Wendy walked a little closer to me. “Merry Christmas, Matt,” she said softly.
I saw a cab and waved for it. “Yeah,” I said, “Merry Christmas.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1984 by William L. DeAndrea
cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4532-9032-3
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