The Dead of Winter Read online

  Yes. Dark.

  He went back through the three doorways into his apartment and listened. A distinct scrape directly over his ceiling lamp.

  Lyons walked back out to the carpeted hallway and followed it to the inside stairs. He mounted them to the first floor. The main hallway was faintly lit by the lamp on the table by the two large front doors. He could hear the wind rushing at the house and whining at a keyhole. From above on a higher floor came the sound of a radio. A phone rang.

  He walked lightly over to Reece’s apartment door and listened. He pressed his ear to the door. A sound. Like a laundry bag being dragged. A sound. Definitely. He rapped with a knuckle.

  “Vince?” He waited. “Hey, Vince.” He rapped harder. “Vince? It’s me.”

  He gripped the egg-shaped metal knob. It turned and he opened the door a crack. The room was dark. The two large front windows were lit by the street lamp, shadows of leaves and branches swaying all over the light curtains.

  He listened. And heard a noise near his feet. Then he smelled it. Vomit. The second time in one day he smelled vomit. And he heard something like a sigh. He pushed the door open wider. Something. On the floor. It writhed. A leg moved, a shoe scraped. Another sigh. And now an over-powering stink of vomit.

  Lyons flipped the wall switch, and the overhead fixture threw the room in a flat, washed-out light.

  The first blow had landed on Reece’s back when he shut his apartment hall door behind him.

  It caught him between the scapular blades of the spine, high up on the thoracic vertebrae. It sent his corpulent form across the dark room and onto his knees, sliding into his couch. Completely winded, he was unable to cry out. An unbelievably powerful hand grabbed his shoulder, deeply bruising the brachial plexus as it turned him. The tip of the flexible rubber billy, lined with steel ball bearings, was jabbed into the sternum of the rib cage, creating a saucer-sized bruise of the rectus abdominus muscle and paralyzing his breathing. He began slowly to strangle.

  His topcoat and suit jacket were yanked off his arms. The white billy was raised.

  He was flung face down on the couch to expose his back and buttocks. Under steady blows, muscle walls were ruptured and fibers split, ripped from their moorings and parted from cartilage. Triceps, deltoids, biceps trapezius, the flexor digitorum sublimus of the forearms, the sternocleidomastoid of the neck, the gluteus medius and gluteus maximus, the biceps femoris, fascia lata and lattisimus dorsi, all in turn, were bashed with the tremendous, supple power of the billy and paralyzed.

  Only the external oblique muscles and the serratus anterior muscles which controlled the breathing were spared.

  By now, some wind had pried into his lungs and he felt a sudden rush of life-giving breath. Before he could cry out, a second deliberate blow on the trapezius, just below the occipital bone of the skull, brought him to the brink of blackout and he was turned again, this time on his back on his couch with his exposed face up and accessible. The work proceeded from the top, beginning with the frontalis muscle of the forehead, nearly mashing it like cooked rhubarb.

  The supple billy next crushed both orbicularis oculi muscles that would quickly turn the eyelids into great pillows of prune purple. Two remarkably placed glancing strokes shredded the inner walls of the masseter muscles of the cheeks without breaking a tooth or cheekbone.

  The nose was spared and the skull was spared, yet from the nostrils blood poured. Reece began to strangle again, this time from a throat filled with blood, and he was roughly spun over to lie in his own spewing blood and vomit.

  Vinny Reece’s nervous system recorded screaming pain from over half of the six-hundred-fifty-odd muscles in his heavy, middle-aged body. It shut down. He fainted.

  Some ground beef, very little gristle. And no bones.

  2

  “I don’t remember,” slurred Vincent Reece, writhing. His eyelids opened partly, then shut again. He was panting, and his entire balding head was a ball smeared with blood.

  “I don’t remember,” he cried.

  Two nurses turned him on his side on the surgical table and pulled off his trousers and undershorts, then turned him again on his back. Long, thin skin-splits covered his body. Some wept blood. He was an angry red everywhere, and large areas of purple had begun to cover his body. Weakly he writhed.

  The doctor removed the stethoscope from his ears and, with angry disgust on his face, deftly felt Reece’s body—arms, legs, torso, neck, armpits. He opened one of Reece’s eyes and carefully studied it with a small pencil flashlight. He listened again to the heart, moving the stethoscope all over the chest. He opened Reece’s mouth and studied it with a flashlight. “Ho boy,” he murmured. Using a cotton-tipped stick dipped in alcohol, he cleaned the blood out of both ears and studied the passages with the flashlight.

  “Clean his head. Carefully,” he said to the two nurses. Using gauze soaked in alcohol, they quickly washed his face, head and neck.

  “Awful,” said one of them, looking at Reece’s face.

  The eyelids were like two inflated bags, turning a black-blue, and the entire face, emerging from the caked blood, was swollen red and thickly welted. Quickly the doctor studied the scalp. He sighed and nodded at one of the nurses. She began to fill a hypodermic syringe.

  “Fleagle,” said Reece. “Oh oh.”

  “He’s fainted again,” said the other nurse.

  The doctor nodded. He pushed the needle into Reece’s upper arm just below a long purple bruise. Still shaking his head with disgust, he put his stethoscope on again. He frowned, listening.

  “How do you spell it?” said the policeman.

  “Lyons. L-y-o-n-s. Dan Lyons.” He watched the policeman write on the printed form. The policeman asked himself the questions on the form, mumbling his answers as he wrote.

  At the other end of the table, a black hospital orderly sat, listing the items he had before him. “One wrist watch,” he told himself. He glanced at it. “Hamilton. One ring. Erasmus High School. Key chain …”

  “Hey,” called the doctor over the linen screen. “This man have a history of heart trouble?”

  Dan Lyons stood up and stepped around the screen. “Jesus,” he said involuntarily, looking at Reece’s face.

  The doctor followed Lyons’ eyes. “Yeah,” he said, writing on a clipboard. “Somebody doesn’t like him. What about his heart?”

  Lyons pulled his eyes away from the face. The two nurses eased Reece’s limp arms into a hospital gown. “No. I don’t know. Jesus. What a terrible …”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Couple of years.”

  “You know anything about his medical history?”

  Lyons shook his head. “I guess he can’t tell you anything either.”

  “I put him out. He won’t come around until tomorrow.” He placed his stethoscope on Reece’s chest again. “I think we’d better get some EKGs,” he said to the nurse. “And some X rays of the skull.”

  “How is he?” ask Lyons.

  The doctor took a deep breath. “Well. A lot better than he should be. I can’t detect any internal ruptures or bleeding. His lungs seem to be functioning well enough. Blood pressure—well, that’s pretty high but it’s been coming down since he got here. I don’t think there are any skull fractures. But his heartbeat is irregular and I suspect he may have had a heart problem sometime in his life. This is the damnedest beating I’ve ever seen. No broken bones or fractures. No broken teeth. His nose is O.K. But every major muscle set is badly bruised. He won’t be able to move for weeks, but when he heals up there won’t be a mark on him. Somebody knows anatomy.”

  The policeman waved Lyons back to the desk. “O.K. Once again. For the official report. Tell me from the top. When you heard the noise and went up to his apartment …”

  Lyons recited the tale again.

  Roger Basche and Joe Tyler came through the swinging doors of the emergency ward.

  “Butter,” said Roger Basche.

  “Huh
?” asked Joe Tyler.

  “You’ll get butter.”

  Joe Tyler looked down at his hand rapidly stirring the shot of Scotch in the ice water. “Oh. Yeah.” He cast the stirrer onto the bar and looked glumly out of the barroom window into the dark cobblestoned courtyard of the hospital. A huge lighted sign yelled “Emergency” at him.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” said Roger Basche.

  “Penny!” said Tyler. “I’d give a penny for the name of the guy who did that to Vinny.”

  “Fleagle,” said Dan Lyons.

  “What?”

  “His name is Fleagle.”

  Joe Tyler slowly drew an amazed hand across his brown mustache, studying Lyons’ face. “You know his name is Fleagle?”

  “Yes. Fleagle.”

  “How?”

  “Vinny. He said it. Every thirty seconds. ‘Fleagle.’ And he said, ‘I don’t remember.’ He said ‘I don’t remember’ a hundred times or more. Urgently.”

  “Fleagle,” said Tyler. He wiped his mustache again, then idly smoothed it with his thin fingers. “Do you know who Fleagle is?” He looked at Lyons’ face. Lyons shook his head. He looked at Roger Basche’s face. Basche shook his head.

  Joe Tyler cleared his throat, restraining himself with great effort. “Did that cop in there hear him say ‘Fleagle’?”

  Lyons nodded. “He said that Fleagle could be the name of a horse in the eighth race at Hialeah.”

  A police ambulance curved into the hospital’s emergency entrance. All along the bar the orderlies, the laboratory technicians and other staffers looked up briefly from their glasses of beer, their sandwiches and newspapers.

  “Another Friday-night special by Fleagle,” said Lyons, watching the back of the ambulance open.

  “Maybe,” said Basche, “it’s the horses.”

  “What horses?” demanded Tyler.

  “Maybe he owes a bookie.”

  Tyler shrugged. “And maybe he surprised a burglar.”

  “He was deliberately beaten,” said Lyons. “He was deliberately beaten by some kind of a Stone Age freak named Fleagle who is an expert in human anatomy. How you like them apples, brown eyes?”

  Tyler shook his head. “You know what the police are going to do about this? Nothing. Nothing. Goose-egg nothing. I’ll lay you eight to five that the name ‘Fleagle’ doesn’t get on the report. And I’ll lay you another eight to five that if it ever did get on the report, nobody would do a damned thing about it anyway. You know what’s going to happen to Fleagle?” He blew through a ringed finger and thumb. “Nothing. The police are going to go on believing that Fleagle is a long shot in the eighth at Hialeah, and Fleagle’s going to go on destroying people with his anatomy lessons.”

  “Bitter, bitter,” said Basche. “You’ve become a churlish philosopher.”

  “Up yours,” said Tyler. “The only way Fleagle will ever get his is if one of his victims blows his head off. No, shut up a minute, goddam it! I’m talking. Criminals can topple civilizations.” He rapped the bar with a knuckle. “They can literally, actually tear civilizations down. We have to form vigilante committees and—”

  “Wowzie,” said Basche, gazing around the bar. He waved a hand at Tyler. “Down. Down. Turn the volume down.”

  “The hell with the volume! That man’s been beaten cross-eyed over there and that nose-picking, flat-footed cop says Fleagle’s in the eighth race at Hialeah!”

  “O.K.,” said Roger softly. “I agree.”

  “If we don’t get the Fleagles of the world, they’ll get us. I can tell that as a trained philosopher and historian. It’s curtains.”

  Basche rubbed his nose vigorously. “O.K. All I had to do was get one look at Vince Reece and I’m ready to cream Fleagle. Love to. Point him out to me. Where is he?”

  “You would? You’d cream Fleagle?”

  “You know, Joe, today a customer asked if I’d ever hunted a man. And I said no. But I’d forgotten something. When I was in college a group of us formed an organization called the Seneca Lodge. To qualify, you had to survive in a wilderness area of the Adirondacks in the middle of winter for five days. Couple of candles, a knife, some string, matches and other basic gear and that was it. Now wait. It’s my turn to yap. There was a purpose to that test because the Seneca Lodge was formed to hunt men.”

  “O.K., O.K.,” said Tyler. “But what’s this got to do with Fleagle?”

  Basche, with elaborate great patience, adjusted the spill of his white pocket handkerchief. “Tyler, buddy, how did a neurotic bar pounder like you ever decide on the serene contemplative life of the philosopher? Tell me, do you have dangling hemorrhoids? Throbbing, itching hemorrhoids?” “Damn your hemorrhoids! Get on with it!”

  Roger Basche shook his head and addressed himself to Dan Lyons. “Well, hunting man is no simple matter to arrange. I mean, you just don’t start dogging a stranger in the wilderness unless you’re really going to bring him down. So the purpose of the Seneca Lodge was to provide quarry—from among ourselves. The quarry was selected from among the more experienced members—occasionally a pair. They were given a head start and the game was to track them up the Adirondacks into Canada and back. Eighty miles up, eighty back, and that’s in the Laurentian chain—rugged stuff. Temperatures usually go below zero at night up there. No killing, of course. We hunted with movie cameras on a gun stock and a telephoto zoom lens. And the only one who ever made it up and back without being bagged was … me. Everloving me. Now to the point … Ah ha!”

  “Ah ha,” said Tyler sourly.

  “Not being trained as a philosopher—like this underweight neurotic here with the hair all over his mouth—my terminology ain’t so good but my point is. Can I cream a Fleagle. I repeat, point him out to me and stand back.”

  “Bravo,” said Joe Tyler, patting his hands together softly. “That’s what I want to hear.”

  “I have just one question.”

  “What?”

  “Why did our buddy Vincent Reece get his eggs scrambled? Maybe he had it coming?”

  “Who?”

  “Reece. Vince Reece. How do we know? I’ve played poker with him in Lyons’ pad for a couple of years now. I like him fine. But, tell me, who is he? Maybe he’s in the rackets. Maybe he’s a bookie or a numbers guy who didn’t pay off.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Tyler.

  “Come on, my foot. Where does he work?”

  “An importing company,” said Dan Lyons thoughtfully.

  “Importer. Well, that’s vague enough. He joked one night about working for a laundry. What is it—importer or laundry? All I know is he can recite every card we all held in every hand for an entire night. And I like him fine. Period.”

  “It doesn’t matter who he is. No thug has the right to do that to him. I’m talking about killing somebody …” Joe Tyler glanced around the barroom and whispered. “I’m talking about assassinating a guy named Fleagle.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Lyons, whispering back with a smile.

  Joe Tyler shook with anger. “Listen. Goddam it! Listen! You are the very worst bad news for a philosopher or anybody. If the government came along tomorrow and stuck your can into a brown uniform with a symbol on the shoulder and some stripes, you’d take up your rifle and shoot anyone they told you to. But here’s a mortal enemy right in your midst and you don’t want to do a thing about it because it’s outside the structured world you live in.”

  Lyons shrugged.

  “There’s only one way you’ll kill somebody outside of the Army. With rage. Super ape—in a rage.” He shook a finger at Lyons. “Well, tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to go down to Myrtle Avenue and buy you a military tunic in an Army-Navy store with big emblems all over it—and then I’m going to buy a big German medal in a hock shop and a rifle and you’ll be all set. The hell with you.” He strode angrily to the men’s room.

  Roger Basche prudently cleared his throat. He turned around and leaned his back on the bar. Thoughtfully, he again adjust
ed the spill of his handkerchief at the breast pocket of his blue blazer, then fingered the throat of his white turtle-neck jersey. “Well, hell. Before I get too excited I’d like to know why Reece was slammed.”

  A nurse came out of the emergency entrance and ran across the courtyard, coatless, hugging her arms against the bitter wind.

  “I think I’ve got a better question,” said Dan Lyons.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “What was it he couldn’t remember?”

  The nurse scurried across the street and into the saloon. “Quick!” she called to Dan Lyons. “The doctor wants you.”

  “He went,” said the doctor, snapping his fingers, “like that. Felled. Like an ox. He was gone before the first of our coronary team could answer the alarm.” He scowled at some of the electronic machines that were being wheeled back out of the room. “It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d all been standing right here. He was a goner.”

  “His heart?”

  “Yes. Heart and that thumping he got. I’ll lay odds the D.A. rules it a homicide.”

  Vince Reece, with the long strands of thin gray hair around his pulpy blue face, looked like a worn-out part. Lyons patted one of Reece’s hands, then shambled to the visitors’ waiting room at the front entrance to the hospital. He sat down across from a small dark man reading a newspaper. Lyons stretched out his legs and exhaled loudly. He sat staring at his shoes. This was all as improbable, as mad, as the hole in his arm. He crossed his arms and pondered it all.

  The little round man who came through the front revolving door walked carefully, like a man carrying a time bomb.

  Everything about him was oval or tubular. His head was an egg; so was his torso; his trousers were two wrinkled tubes like elephant legs. Below the sunken, wrinkled eyes spread the hectic flush of blood pressure.

  He was not a well man, no longer young, no longer strong, and he walked with a conscious conservation of energy, badly flat-footed and toeing out markedly.

  The chilling odor of the hospital assailed his nose, and he drew his lips back over his teeth in hatred. He glanced at the man reading the newspaper and stepped slowly down the main corridor, slowly like an old elephant.