The Dead of Winter Read online

  “What do you think?”

  Lyons squirmed around on the front seat. “Eighty-five an hour. Those people don’t seem to be worried about the police.” He looked at Tyler. “I don’t know. Why?”

  Tyler shrugged. “He saw that we were going to kill him.”

  Lyons said nothing.

  “Well?” demanded Tyler.

  Lyons hunched his shoulders. “O.K.”

  “Well, do you have a better idea?”

  Tyler watched Lyons’ head. Speak, for God’s sake. He could feel Lyons thinking. A left-handed mind with a right-handed philosophy.

  “Ha Ha wasn’t afraid of us. He was taking those pills before we got there. He was afraid of them.”

  “But they were expected. He’d set up a meeting for them.”

  Lyons’ head nodded. “And I bet the subject of the meeting was the roasting of Charlie Cakes Ha Ha.”

  The traffic clotted at Kennedy Airport and the caravan slowed considerably driving around Jamaica Bay, Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, Fort Hamilton. Near the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel the caravan turned off.

  “Hey,” said Tyler. “I know where they’re going.”

  “Right,” said Basche. “To Ha Ha’s office.”

  Ha Ha’s office was an easy job for the searchers. They turned it to splintered trash in about four minutes flat. Every scrap of paper was taken and chucked into the back seat of the limousine.

  Tyler watched them thoughtfully. A little black book? A supply of heroin? The key to a bank vault?

  Like a snake, the five limousines uncoiled and drove off toward the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

  “Aren’t you going to follow them?” asked Tyler.

  “Nah,” said Basche. “Sit still a minute.” They waited in the dark car.

  A moment later one of the limousines returned, sped down the alley and around Ha Ha’s office building, paused at the front, then slipped away again.

  “Full of tricks, ain’t they?” said Basche. “Give them ten minutes and we’ll go see what they did.”

  Lyons was the first to enter and. he walked directly to the wall safe. It was now open.

  “Boy,” said Tyler, looking over Lyons’ shoulder at it. “They opened it like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Pros,” said Basche. “Real pros.”

  Lyons stood in the garish overhead light, amidst the office debris, looking into the safe. Tyler squinted at it too. A small bottle stood there: sodium pentothal. Next to it was a hypodermic syringe.

  Tyler. watched Lyons’ hand rub the crook of his arm.

  6

  Charlie Ha Ha sat comfortably in his chair.

  He leaned on one arm of the high-backed Louis Quinze reproduction. One leg was cocked over the knee of the other. His head was canted quizzically to one side. He seemed about to sniff the large gardenia in the lapel of his tuxedo as he looked with vacuous serenity at the Scotch on the rocks before him on the burnished mahogany table. He had never looked better in his seventy-one years.

  All about him men in tuxedos stood, drinking and talking. In the background of the tastefully furnished room rose the unmistakable orchestration of Glenn Miller’s “Tuxedo Junction.” The white-coated barman moved discreetly among them, serving generously poured glasses.

  Mrs. Charlie Ha Ha stood at the doorway in a striking pale-blue gown of crushed velvet.

  Uncomfortable in his tuxedo, Ozzie New York Avenue leaned against a wall and sipped a martini. Then he looked at his runner. “Well, where the hell is he?”

  “He’ll be here. He’ll be here.”

  Ozzie looked critically at Charlie Ha Ha and then at Mrs. Ha Ha. “This was all her idea. The biggest thing this year in Hollywood. Dum-dum.”

  The runner shrugged and squirmed his neck out of the confining starched collar. Ozzie turned his nose at the next number on the recording system: “A String of Pearls.” “You sure you’ll know this guy when he comes in?”

  The runner nodded. “Yeah, Ozzie. I could draw a picture of him in my sleep.”

  “I think it’s a waste of time. It’s Fleagle’s job anyway. Why don’t they use him?”

  “You want to argue about it?”

  Ozzie looked at his runner. “Don’t be so damned dumb. They want it done, it gets done. Just point him out to me.”

  The runner turned his head. “Is that classical music?”

  “Yeah. The New York Philharmonic under Glenn Miller playing ‘A String of Pearls.’ What a dumb broad!” He stood up uncomfortably in his rented tuxedo and walked toward the bar.

  Charlie Ha Ha stared happily at his glass.

  Roger Basche stood across the hallway, leaning against the doorjamb and looking into the cocktail party. The word “obscene” occurred to him.

  “If you two weren’t here,” he said, “I’d think it was some kind of gag.” He tilted his head and looked past a tuxedo right at Charlie Ha Ha. Ha Ha never looked up. Basche looked at Lyons and shook his head. “Wild. Are you sure that’s Ozzie what’s-his-puss leaning against the wall with that cretin?”

  Lyons stepped farther into the hallway and looked into the room. “Yeah. That’s him. About five years older than his picture.” He stepped back and Basche’s eyes followed him. Cunning. Lyons walked back into the room, near the coffin of Miss Deirdre Gallaher, eighty-four, born in Londonderry, Ireland.

  She lay peacefully, her rosaries entwined in her waxen hands. A small bank of candles and a single floral spray stood near the head of the bier.

  Tyler looked at her. “I think we’d better get out of here. Suppose her family turns up.”

  “Fake it,” said Basche.

  “You fake it!”

  “Peace, peace,” said Lyons.

  “O.K. O.K.” said Basche. “Just keep your eyes on that Ozzie thing.” He looked uncomfortably at Charlie Ha Ha again.

  The old man, without a tuxedo, walked arthritically down the black-and-white checkerboard hallway and paused at the doorway of the Ha Ha bon voyage cocktail party. Mrs. Ha Ha, instantly animated, patted his arm, smiling sweetly, and then led him to Charlie Ha Ha.

  Basche watched solemnly. There had been times these last few days when he felt that they’d opened a Pandora’s box. He was completely puzzled by the world they’d blundered into. He studied the roomful of men. They were angry. They were talking with intense, deliberately lowered voices and swinging their drinks, chins out, eager to make their points known. They were smashers and breakers, compunctionless men, beyond restraint and human mercy. No wonder Tyler hated them so.

  Most of them turned an occasional angry face to the serene Mr. Ha Ha.

  Now, they watched the old man standing before Ha Ha. Ozzie New York Avenue and his runner both had moved around to the doorway and watched the old man attentively. Roger Basche read their alertness.

  Mrs. Ha Ha pressed a glass of wine into the old man’s scabrous hands, and he stood graceless and stooped, holding it.

  Basche found himself appraising Ozzie New York Avenue like a hunter estimating range, bearing and deflection. He felt an intense dislike for the man, an instinctive hostility toward some lower form incapable of much feeling. Basche turned and looked at Tyler. High-strung, excitable, fanatical Tyler. And silent, cunning Lyons. It suddenly occurred to Basche that he didn’t know whether he liked these two associates or not. He wasn’t sure he felt any loss in the death of Vinny Reece. In fact, he wasn’t sure that killing criminals was so satisfactory after all. But that Ozzie. Now, that was something else. He felt some of Tyler’s relentless rage when he looked at that Ozzie New York Avenue. Perverse ass. Anyone who dubs himself Ozzie New York Avenue has a stunted, immature romantic streak —combined with a completely underdeveloped sense of human feeling.

  Some of the men in tuxedos began to move toward the doorway. They murmured words to Mrs. Ha Ha.

  “Here we go, boys,” said Basche, stepping into Miss Gallaher’s room. “It’s breaking up.” He glanced across the hallway at Charlie Ha Ha.

  Tyler
was furious. “They ought to horsewhip her for that. Farewell cocktail party in a funeral home.”

  “Shhhh. Shhhh,” said Basche. “I’ll go first. See you out in the car.”

  He watched the groups of men walking and talking with bowed heads and angry faces.

  Basche blended in with them, walking to the front doorway.

  The party-goers left Charlie Ha Ha sitting alone while Mrs. Ha Ha talked with the mortician.

  Charlie Ha Ha continued staring at the top of his glass. In the light it looked exactly like a zero.

  The bus boy sat behind the steering wheel of his car, thinking. The heavy, lowering sky of the December afternoon heralded a sleet storm.

  He waited, looking at his heavily carbuncled face in the rear-view mirror. All about him the stormy air bent the dead fields of ditch grass. He took out a pocket comb and combed his curly black hair. He shivered again and turned on the engine of his car. Warm air rushed around his skinny legs.

  Slowly his eyes went along the row of empty garbage cans behind the tavern. He’d filled them the night before and the pig farmers had emptied them. Every night, filled. Every morning, emptied. Without end.

  He picked up his copy of El Diaro and began to reread what he’d already read. He waited.

  There was a cobra-like quality about the car that approached the tavern parking lot. It seemed to slither through the high reeds along the serpentine road.

  It pulled up next to the bus boy’s car. The driver looked at the bus boy, then at Fleagle’s car. His straight black hair, heavily oiled, lay like enameled paint on his skull, and his perfectly flat eyes moved with no expression from thing to thing, fact to fact.

  He got out of the car and walked over to the bus boy, reading accurately the jerk of the boy’s head. He descended the cindered bank of the parking area, slipping through the brittle dried stalks of ditch grass. It was cold. Cold and gray with a sharp, constant breeze, and the waters of the bay were as lusterless as old pewter.

  The man moved with liquid grace, slipping quickly into a clearing of low clumped salt grass, picking his way step by step, hummock by hummock across the boggy meadow toward the leafless swamp maple.

  The body had begun to putrefy. Rigor mortis had come and gone and the corpse was now swollen. The man leaned over it and studied the face with care. He noted the wound and its nature, then turned and estimated the distance up the cinder bank to the parking area. He looked at the earth-caked shoes, the crusted socks and trouser cuffs. Impassively, he went through the pockets of the suit jacket. Casually he dropped the mechanical pencil he found.

  At last he turned and walked and hopped and stepped back across the meadow to the thicket of ditch grass and the cinder slope. He scrambled up. He dropped a white envelope through the opened window of the bus boy’s car, entered his own and drove slowly away.

  The bus boy’s car followed.

  Fleagle’s car was once more left alone in the descending darkness.

  The steering wheel was like ice. Early December dusk had come while they were in the mortuary, and a homeless wind loped along the boulevard, spinning dust and scraps and sinking a penetrating cold into the earth.

  Basche looked at the endless parade of headlamps and at the gaudy signs of the roadside businesses—at the gas station, the restaurant, the car wash, the plumbing supply company—and at the tawdry plastic Christmas decorations. The back-lit undertaker’s sign was a cold white beacon in the darkness. Cold. So cold.

  His mind rejected it. He walked, instead, along a flinty track that skirted the edge of the African desert in that unforgettable soft gold light of the tropics, feeling the air rolling hot and dry off the desert, his eyes searching the short brown grass, following the sweat-wet guide, hearing the ground crackle under his boots, feeling the sweat between his shoulders,—and breathing that hot, dry, clear golden air. Ready, ready for the burst of an animal and the precise, cool swing of his rifle, firing and hitting.

  He was always walking that waste, forever curious to see what animal was to break cover this time in that marvelous piece of mental terrain, far from cold and soot and tawdry Christmas gimcrackery. The animal was an index of his mood.

  This time, he startled no animal. His mind was interrupted. Amidst the line of limousines that crept up the driveway amidst the door-slamming and toing and froing of tuxedoed men, he watched Ozzie and his runner. They got into a Cadillac. Crime pays—better than television program sales.

  The runner got behind the steering wheel just as Lyons and Tyler crossed the mortician’s still green lawn.

  Tyler shivered audibly. “This is a great night for a roaring fire and a fifth of old Bushmill’s.”

  “They’re there,” said Basche, pointing at the Cadillac. “I’m going to try to get a car between them and us, maybe even two.”

  The Cadillac abruptly leaped into a line of traffic. Basche jumped in the line five cars behind.

  “If you could have aimed a thunderbolt into that cocktail party,” said Lyons, “you could have killed half of the organized crime in this country.”

  “That woman is sick,” said Tyler. “She turned him into a clown.”

  “Maybe,” said Lyons, “she meant to.”

  Basche snorted, then laughed. “God, what a twisted mind you have, Lyons.” Basche found himself four cars behind the Cadillac. He watched it curiously as it curved along the access ramp to the Belt Parkway. He followed it with increasing interest.

  “Why’s he going so slowly?” asked Lyons.

  “You know what?” said Basche. “We’ve got a wheel within a wheel here. We’re following a car that’s following another car.”

  “What!” demanded Tyler. “We’re what?”

  “O.K. See that Cadillac? That’s Ozzie, the animal. See the car in front of it? He’s been tracking that car since we left the undertaker’s.”

  “O.K.,” said Tyler. “Who’s in the first car?”

  Basche frowned. “I don’t know.”

  In the darkness the trail led into Brooklyn, to Fort Hamilton and 7th Avenue, to a heavily populated brick row-house district. The car pulled into a driveway in front of a garage door, and the Cadillac followed after it.

  “Quick!” said Tyler. “There’s a clear place by the hydrant.”

  Basche rolled into the space and stopped. He turned off his headlights. The three watched the driveway.

  The lead car was an old four-door sedan, and a figure stepped out slowly in the darkness.

  “That’s the old man who was at the viewing.”

  Ozzie and his runner got out of their car and called to the old man. He turned and studied their dark forms with a mixture of caution and irritation.

  “Somebody tell me what’s going on,” demanded Tyler. “Who’s that old man?”

  Ozzie and the runner talked to the old man, Ozzie pointing over his shoulder with his thumb. The old man shook his head. He pointed with his thumb at a row house. He looked at his wrist watch. Ozzie thrust his head forward aggressively and spoke volubly to the old man. He shook a finger.

  The old man glanced once at the row house, sighed and walked back to the Cadillac. He got into the back seat. The runner backed into the street and drove away. Basche followed him.

  The Cadillac went directly to the Belt Parkway and moved quickly, swerving in and out of lanes around slow traffic. Basche followed, got blocked by a car crawling in the left lane, dropped back and got around a clot of slow cars through the right lane.

  “We’ve lost him,” said Basche.

  “No, he must still be up ahead,” said Lyons.

  Basche raced down the Parkway until he was blocked by another clot of traffic.

  “There he is,” said Lyons. “He’s breaking through on the left there.”

  Basche forced his way into the pack of cars, getting within three cars of the Cadillac. “Yeah, that’s him. That Ozzie’s talking a mile a minute to that old man.”

  The Cadillac got through and raced away. “Hot damn! I wish I
had a General Sherman tank with a snow plow on front.” Basche began to blow his horn and blink his headlights furiously. The car in front slowly moved to the center lane, and Basche raced after the Cadillac.

  “Now we have lost him,” said Basche.

  They moved past a number of scattered cars.

  “Get over quick!” called Lyons. “He’s taking that exit! See him?”

  Basche jumped two lanes, leaped in front of a car and, riding his brake hard, shot into the exit lane.

  He exhaled sharply. Two cars ahead of them was the Cadillac. “I’d like to have that jerk arrested for speeding. He drives like a maniac. Where are we?”

  “Sheepshead Bay,” said Lyons.

  Basche followed the Cadillac along a bay road. When it turned into a small settlement of old shacks and bungalows, Basche rolled past for a few blocks while Lyons and Tyler watched the Cadillac moving between the houses.

  Basche put out the car lights and parked. “Well, he’s in there somewhere. If I’d gone in with him, he would have realized we were following him.”

  “Maybe he does already,” said Tyler.

  Basche shrugged. “I doubt it. I’m a very good driver, Tyler.”

  Tyler nodded. “So is that cat in the Cadillac.”

  “He’s not good. He’s crazy.”

  “Let’s drive back,” said Lyons, interrupting them.

  “Right,” said Basche, “quite right.”

  They found the car easily, parked in front of a cement and cinder-block building. The bay beach lay behind it, littered with boards and cans and slimy oil. Over the door to the building someone had crudely lettered: OFFICE.

  Basche paused, studying the building. “I just saw that Ozzie’s head go by that window. He’s still talking. A marvelous talker that one is. Any guesses who that old man is?”

  “Would you believe Arthur Pappas?” asked Lyons.

  “Who’s that?”

  “The old man who worked for Mount Aetna imports.”

  “Huh?”

  “Charlie Ha Ha’s company.”

  “I didn’t know that anybody worked for Charlie Ha Ha except Reece.”