The Dead of Winter Read online

  Not him. Not Fleagle. He was a professional. A moralist with a mission.

  There was a dark silhouette of a stand of trees. He moved boldly toward it. The first was Niles. Danny Niles. He’d taken him from behind Christmas night five years ago. In the alley, behind the delicatessen on Montague Street. Two hundred and twenty pounds and hard but not hard enough for Fleagle. He wiped some wet mud from his crew-cut blond hair. Then there was the fighter—Bummy, they called him, he was so dirty—and he took him right in the empty locker room, remembering easily the sound of Bummy’s head hitting the metal locker door. They’d wanted a major decommissioning job on Bummy and they got it: four months stiffed and Bummy never fought again. And the only woman he’d ever done a job on—only he didn’t finish. She’d cried, her face one huge welt where he’d slapped her, and he’d left. Yes, this was better than parts to the brain. Remember every bit of it. Then there was the businessman with the gun. Easy. And the guy who got on his knees and prayed to him. He cried and held up rosary beads with trembling suppliant hands. Enraged, Fleagle went almost too far.

  None of them—not one sinner on the list—ever won the fight, and not one ever died until now. That Reece—a heart like a Swiss cheese. It got so that Fleagle didn’t ask for a list of sins when he got a job anymore. Just the name and address. It was enough that they were listed for a treatment. They wouldn’t be ticketed if they hadn’t done some great sin.

  Bolder now and warmer, righteous anger filling him, Fleagle neared the clump of trees. From there he’d slip back to the cindered parking lot. A man shouldn’t crawl through a marsh alone. He should have a friend. One friend. One day he would.

  He’d get them. All three of them. He’d get them. That left flanker first.

  Then a pair of car headlamps came on, throwing an enormous area of marsh into view. Fleagle halted to study the terrain, seeing the way he could follow when darkness came back.

  Instead he dropped like a stone. The bullet entered his forehead just below the hairline. It dropped down from the frontal lobe of the cerebrum through the temporal lobe and carried away the entire back of his head, including the parietal lobe, the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. It hit only three of the six-hundred-fifty-odd muscles in his body.

  Roger Basche reached in through the car window and pushed the headlight button. The marsh went dark again. He stood in the darkness watching the tavern door. The banjo still rang out. Good. No one had heard the shot. Casually, like a man on a possum hunt, he shoved his shotgun into the golf bag. He walked back to the trunk of his car, opened it and lifted out a long flashlight.

  Joe Tyler’s slight form scrambled up the soft cinder embankment. Twenty feet to his left, Lyons emerged from swaying ditch grass. The cold was penetrating deeply into the marsh and the soggy ground was beginning to freeze.

  “Nice shot,” said Basche.

  Joe Tyler stood in the darkness trembling. “You cold-blooded bastard. We just killed a man. Killed him and you say ‘Nice shot.’ ‘Nice shot’ just like it was a game of pool.”

  “It was still a nice shot,” said Basche, taking the rifle and shoving it into the golf bag. He turned back to Tyler. “It’s what you came here to do. It’s what you did.”

  Tyler stood, hands pocketed, trembling, watching Basche and breathing steamy clouds in the damp marsh air.

  Lyons approached with slow steps, carrying the rifle in the crook of his arm, feeling the trigger guard pressing painfully on the needle wound. He was breathing heavily from his climb.

  “Nice shot,” said Basche again, taking Lyons’ rifle.

  Lyons blew steamy breath on his hands. He felt numb—like a finger hit by a hammer.

  Tyler watched him. “Boy, you’re something else. You really did it.”

  Basche looked at them, shivering, heads cast down, hands hidden in pockets. “There’s one way to find out. Let’s go.”

  Basche finally located the body with his flashlight.

  Fleagle lay on his back on a tussock of earth, his arms flung back over his head in a gesture of surrender. His mouth was slack and his eyes were open.

  Basche squatted down beside him. There was a red hole in his forehead just below the hairline. Fleagle’s scalp was loose and ill-fitting, like the pumpkin cap of a sagging jack-o-lantern. The bullet had made its familiar wound, and Basche knew without looking that the back of Fleagle’s head was spewed over the marsh. Basche studied the placement. Seventy-five yards and a fifteen-knot wind. Never fired in anger before and he makes a perfecto. The quiet ones.

  Tyler examined the face, feeling pleased that he could look calmly at it. The mouth was thin and sadistic. The eyes had the inscrutable blankness of a wolf. One less cruel fang in the hide of society.

  Lyons stood behind them at the base of the tussock, looking at the strange mask in the circle of the flashlight. A tiger. He’d killed a great, wild tiger, with muscles that bulked like smooth stone, with a neck like a tree trunk. God help him. God help me. I’ve burned my boat now.

  Tyler stepped down and stood next to Lyons, eying him sidelong in the dark and freezing wind.

  Faintly from the tavern the banjo jigged.

  Basche turned and frowned at them. “I hope we didn’t kill the wrong man.”

  “What!” said Joe Tyler, clambering up the slope again. “What in hell are you talking about?”

  Basche nodded his head at Fleagle. “I can’t find any red scar on his neck.”

  4

  NIVYX RTNEC OECEE EWTEN EREVL

  SNESM TEERT AHCYB HEILR ONAHA

  EBMEV RIHTR LLIBD OBONY XYSEN

  “The Greeks in Sparta were among the earliest known users of cryptography. It was their practice to wind a belt in a spiral around a stick, write a message on the leather the length of the stick, then unwind it and wear it. This is called, by professional cryptanalysts, the first transposition cipher. It took a matching stick of exactly the same diameter to read the coded message.

  “Julius Caesar used a simple substitution cipher. Each letter in his message was replaced by a letter three steps to the right in the Roman alphabet.

  “The first extant text on cryptography was published by Gabriel de Lavinde in 1379. It took another hundred years for the code breaker to appear. In 1474, Sicco Simonetta wrote the first text on cryptanalysis. The war between the concealer and the revealer has continued unabated since.

  “Sir Francis Bacon developed a famous concealment system which is not properly a cipher or a code at all but an amazingly close cousin to the binary code of the modern computer.

  “Cardinal Richelieu developed the grille, an ingenious device. He wrote the letters of his message in the randomly placed holes in the grille. Then he filled in with ordinary words to disguise the message as a harmless note. A matching card would quickly reveal the message when placed over the paper.

  “Strip codes, diagraphic substitution quadrants, mono- and poly-alphabetic substitution systems, the combined substitution-transposition cipher, called the ADFGVX system, in a 6x6 bilateral matrix—all of these tedious, ingenious and complex systems have been reduced to mere child’s play by the advent of mechanical devices and computers.

  “However, since the game plan for ciphers and codes involves less than ideal conditions for either transmission or receipt of messages, the most practical system still remains one that relies not at all on mechanical devices. Indeed, the best is one in which a carefully remembered 6x6 matrix scramble, combined with a 6x6 matrix of a sequential left-to-right reading alphabet, are placed in a prearranged adjacency, then diagonally coded in oblongs.

  “In the absence of any prearranged cipher, the agent can always cipher his plain language by reversing the order of the letters and breaking them into five-letter groups.”

  At dawn the last of the stray cats loped across the street and shinnied a high wooden fence to disappear for the day. A fine, faint film of hoarfrost coated, like lace, the bodies of the automobiles in the street. A heavy sabbatical silence lay over the
city.

  Lyons sat at his table turning the pages of a small spiral pad. Leaf after leaf of coded five-letter groups. Bunker’s The Cryptogram Solver and Other Games lay under the lamp. He looked down at the pages of scrawled papers on the floor and on the table, then rubbed his burning eyes and stretched, yawning, feeling defeated.

  He rolled his shirt sleeve up and looked at the sore on his arm. The large magenta splotch had slowly turned to plum purple, the fever had subsided and only the stiffness of the joint remained.

  Maybe Fleagle’s juvenile code book would tell him about that needle hole.

  Lyons was tired. Leadened. Friday morning he’d had a hole poked in his arm—in a locked room. Then he’d found a friend savagely beaten, got him to a hospital, lost him, vowed a murder, played telephone detective, stalked a suspect, committed the crime of breaking and entering, taken the chance of being pummeled to death, stalked a man, killed him with a rifle and, after sleeping fitfully for three hours, now sat with a code book in his lap, worried that he’d stalked and killed the wrong man.

  Why would a hospital technician kill a clerk in an importer’s office? Why would a technician keep a coded diary? Why didn’t Fleagle have a red scar on his neck?

  Lyons exhaled fully and returned to the code. He looked around the chair at the sheets of paper.

  He tried Caesar’s code. Three letters to the right.

  NIVYX became QLXBA

  He tried three letters to the left.

  KFSWU

  He looked at Bunker again. Tired. So tired. So guilty. He’d killed the wrong man. A man is dead because he had the name Fleagle. Morning light had grown stronger. His ticking wall clock chimed the quarter hour. Six forty-five Sunday. He heard the solitary steps out in the street of a man heading for Sunday Mass.

  He tried Bunker’s code, reversing the sequence of letters.

  XYVIN

  Nah. Nothing. VIN. XY—-padding? Nah. He stretched. Coffee. Maybe a cup.

  VIN? VIN?

  Wait. Next group.

  CENTR

  Nah. Forget it.

  XYVIN CENTR

  And then he saw the code, broken open.

  XY VINCENT R

  He went to the next group.

  OESEE reversed EESEO

  XY VINCENT REECE O

  “My God!” he cried. Like a confession from the grave.

  Lyons went over to his typewriter, then sat down again. Drained. Spent. Vincent Reece O. Ah. He’d tagged the right man after all. Shot him dead. What was served? Reece was dead. Now Fleagle was dead. When would Lyons be dead? Eh?

  He made a pot of coffee. He wanted badly to sleep, yet he couldn’t stop pacing.

  A thick little code book. What would he find? He put a piece of paper in the typewriter and began to transcribe.

  VINCENT REECE ONE TWELVE REMSEN STREET BY CHARLIE HA HA DECEMBER THIRD. BILLY NO BONES.

  He transcribed the next one:

  FLIGHT THREE EIGHTY SEVEN PANAMA CITY NOVEMBER TWENTY EIGHT.

  The text then scrambled. ACBOOX

  Another:

  FLIGHT FOUR TWELVE NASSAU NOVEMBER TWENTY and a scramble DACOOX.

  A code within a code? Lyons studied the scrambles but he was too tired to penetrate the code.

  Mr. Fleagle was an indefatigable traveler. Just a vivisectionist attached to the pathologist of a hospital?

  For over an hour Lyons typed away at the coded books. After a while it was predictable. Fleagle flew a regular pattern to Mexico City, Panama, Nassau, Liechtenstein, Curaçao or Zurich. Six destinations. No others. Stay of twenty-four hours. Sometimes less.

  And interspersed, like layers in a sandwich, were beatings. All in Brooklyn. He transcribed these, too, working from back to front of the book, in reverse chronological order, feeling as though he were exhuming corpses from a secret burial ground.

  “Joe Craps, Brokman’s Weightlifting Studio, Flatlands Avenue by Charlie Ha Ha October fourteen. Revenge beating. Nine broken bones. Broken nose. Seven broken teeth. Wired jaw. Extensive scars. Seven weeks Kings County.”

  The next was a sailor. “Petey, Albert Enforcer’s nephew. Sands Street Gate by Charlie Ha Ha. October third. Major put-down. Five broken bones. Eight weeks, Navy Sick Bay.”

  Lyons wrote out over twenty beatings. Fourteen were commissioned by one man. Charlie Ha Ha. Or Haha. A code name? Two were commissioned by Ozzie New York Avenue and four by Pell. Just Pell.

  At eight o’clock the campanile of Saint Borromeo’s chimed. Lyons looked up at the sound of the wrought-iron gate as Joe Tyler stepped down. He reached through the window grating and rapped on Lyons’ pane.

  Tyler walked into the apartment crisply. He wrenched his way out of his overcoat and cast it quickly on the couch. The smell of cold air rolled off him and his coat.

  He rubbed brisk hands. “Well, did you do it?”

  Lyons, watching solemnly, nodded. “Yes.”

  “You did? You’re fantastic! How long did it take you? What does it say?”

  “It took all night. It says he beat up half of Brooklyn and lived in an airplane.”

  “Let me see.” Tyler stood by the window. In the pale morning light his brown hair, his brown mustache and his sharp, restless brown eyes were all the same shade.

  “Ha Ha? What’s Ha Ha? Charlie Ha Ha?”

  “That’s Mr. Big—Fleagle’s major client.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Look at this. Ha Ha commissioned most of the beatings. Albert Enforcer’s nephew. My God. Look! The ghoulish bastard kept a record of the number of hospital days. Can you believe that? My God. Ha. Ha. What kind of a name is that? He’s the cat we need to get. He ordered Reece’s beating. My God. This is sickening. All—all of these people were beaten?” He looked at Lyons. “Eight weeks in the hospital. Do you know how bad you have to be to lie eight weeks in the hospital? You have to be practically dead. And you were having qualms about breaking into Fleagle’s apartment. What are these airplane trips? Zurich, Mexico City, Panama City. What are these?”

  “I don’t know. ‘It gets curiouser and curiouser!’ said Alice.”

  Basche began to read the sheets. Slowly he placed them on the table, reading. He sat down and looked at the two of them. “Holy God.” He picked up the sheets again as Tyler and Lyons watched in silence.

  “Bummy. He’s the one who creamed Bummy, the welterweight. I remember that.” He snorted again. “Billy no bones. That’s what he calls the beating he gave Reece. Billy. No bones. Jesus God on a Sunday. Charlie Ha Ha? Who’s Charlie Ha Ha? What kind of a name is that? O.K. I’ll answer my own question. A nickname, obviously. Huh? Yes.” He sat back in his seat. “Well, this more than makes up for the sleepless hours worrying about a missing red scar. I must say, Lyons, I half believed that we’d bagged the wrong man.”

  Lyons nodded. “O.K. Now riddle me a question.”

  “Fire.”

  “Who’s the man with a red scar on his neck?”

  Broad sunlight filled his apartment when he woke up in the afternoon.

  Lyons gazed about the room, looking at the broken bakery box and the cold coffee cups on the table. “Ha Ha!” he said in a loud voice to the plaster buds on his ceiling. “Lyons is to pull off another magic act. Find Ha Ha!”

  He stood up and looked at his soiled shirt and trousers. “I feel like the bottom of a bird cage,” he said aloud. “People who live alone get sloppy and eccentric and talk to themselves.” He kicked off his clothes and walked to the bathroom shower. As he stepped in he looked at his face in the mirror. “I am not at all sure,” he said to it, “that I like you very much anymore. You shoot people.”

  After he’d cleaned up the bakery debris from the table, he sat down with a pad and wrote out a series of thirteen questions.

  1. Why have I got a needle hole in my arm?

  2. Who put it there?

  3. How did they get into a locked and barred apartment?

  4. How did they do it without waking me?

  5. Who’s the man with the red scar o
n his neck?

  6. Why was Vincent Reece’s apartment searched?

  7. Who did it?

  8. Why was he mortally beaten?

  9. Where did Reece work—importer or laundry?

  10. Who is Charlie Ha Ha?

  11. How do I find him?

  12. What are all those airplane trips of Fleagle’s about?

  13. What was it that Vinny Reece couldn’t remember?

  The thirteenth question led him back to Vinny Reece’s apartment.

  The apartment in sunlight was, if possible, worse looking. Vandalized. Sacked. Destroyed. Piles of strewn clothing. Magazines. Dishes. Empty food boxes and cans and jars. A moraine of cotton batting. And bright sunlight catching the slowly swaying bachelor’s pennants of dust hanging from the ceiling. He looked at the bird’s nest of dust from the vacuum cleaner. It had been carefully pulled apart and studied, then cast aside.

  Lyons knelt down next to the tin box and the papers from it that had been tossed on the floor. He gathered the papers together and sat down, holding them in his lap.

  He found a white envelope fat with old photographs. He found a birth certificate. Vincent Rapolo Reece. Would have been fifty-three in February. Checkbook stubs. VA insurance policy. A deed was there—a land deed to two acres in Catton’s Run, Vermont. Property tax bill, $86. Marked paid. Honorable discharge, U.S. Navy, to Vincent R. Reece, Quartermaster 2/c. USNR. Marriage certificate. Vivian Dropcek. Fourteen, fifteen years ago. Divorce decree, County of Kings, Borough of Brooklyn, Prothonotary’s Office. Four years ago next month. Title to an automobile. A small rolled Certificate of Accountancy from a Manhattan business school. A Statement of Income and Tax Paid to Vincent R. Reece. Employer: Mt. Aetna Importers Inc.

  There was an old newspaper clipping in an envelope. It reported that Vincent R. Reece, fifteen, of Cortleyou Road, had won the All-Borough Mnemonic Contest by reciting the entire Constitution of the United States, including all punctuation, without a single error. One of the judges, the principal of Erasmus High School, declared it the most remarkable performance of memory he’d seen in forty years of education.