The Dead of Winter

by William H Hallahan

  Basche eased off the two chain locks and turned the two bolt-action locks. Tentatively he tried the door.

  It opened. He jerked his head at them and they stepped out on the brick steps. Carefully Basche pulled the door softly shut, and the three of them hurried around the house to the back lot.

  They crossed the yard at a rapid walk, entered the car and drove away. Back toward Metropolitan Airport and New York.

  “I wonder,” said Joe Tyler, “what we would have done if that woman had seen us.”

  Roger Basche turned and looked directly at him. “We would have killed her.”

  He came in through a side door of the airline terminal.

  He walked without haste toward the lectern that held the clipboard with the passenger list.

  Two airline men stood with their backs to him, arms folded, watching through the glass observation windows as the New York jet turned onto the flight line and rolled heavily forward.

  The man turned the clipboard around and read the names of each passenger, his flat black eyes following his finger. The finger paused at three names in a row, then tapped the page thoughtfully. He withdrew a folded sheaf of legal-size paper from his breast pocket and consulted the topmost sheet, titled “Reece.” He read the first column: “Friends & Neighbors.” The mouth below the flat eyes settled into a hard straight line.

  “Can I help you, sir?” asked one of the men, turning.

  He shook his head at the question and walked back to the side door, refolding the papers as he went.

  He walked back along the outside wall to his car.

  Turning now, he looked up as the enraging scream of the jet shook the earth. He watched it, watched the retracting wheels, watched the wavering trail of spent kerosene.

  The man opened the car door and reached into the glove compartment. He withdrew a clasp knife with an eight-inch blade folded into the handle. He tapped the weapon on the open palm of his right hand, then, glancing around the area, he stooped slightly to drop it onto the concrete. His foot nonchalantly flicked the knife, and it slid through the massive iron bars of the grate. It fell into the storm sewer below, permanently beyond the reach of Detroit homicide detectives, who were just entering Pell’s house on Lincoln Drive.

  His bleak eyes returned to the jet. Slowly his hands pulled up his overcoat collar.

  It was his move. And he’d decided to make it in disguise.

  “What did you do with it?”

  “It’s in my suitcase, Joey. Relax.”

  “Relax! Lyons, you ought to have your head examined.”

  Dan Lyons took a deep breath and looked out of the jet window at the clouds, waiting. The stewardess was approaching with a tray of coffee. As she leaned over, he saw a small felt Santa Claus pinned to her blouse pocket. The plastic face had a slightly caved-in smile, as though he’d been shot in the head three times. The stewardess smiled at Roger Basche and minced back up the aisle to the galley.

  Joe Tyler leaned sidewise over to Dan Lyons. “If anyone catches us with that stuff, they’ll put us right in the electric chair. That house must be boiling with cops right now. They’re going to be looking for that wallet. What the hell did you take it for?”

  Dan Lyons looked at Tyler’s angry face. “Is that any more incriminating than the three pistols with silencers in Basche’s bag?”

  Tyler frowned thoughtfully at Lyons.

  “Furthermore, Joey,” said Lyons, “that wallet and those other papers can pass a metal detection test. Can you say the same for Basche’s suitcase? What would you do if they had one in operation at Kennedy?”

  Tyler sighed. “Look, Lyons, you are obsessed with getting answers, solving riddles, playing detective. Now all you’re going to do is draw attention to us. Your thirteen questions are all very interesting, but they don’t have anything to do with our original plan—to get the guys who got Reece.”

  Lyons nodded. “O.K. We got them.”

  Irritably Lyons turned away. The depressing gray cloud cover was following him back to New York—a chilly gray shroud of winter.

  He picked up his coffee cup. Basche tried a tight smile at him. Lyons shook his head wryly at Basche.

  “You guys ought to unwind a little. We don’t need arguments,” said Basche.

  Tyler chewed a cookie thoughtfully while holding his cup in air. He scratched his mustache and then nodded. “No fighting.”

  Lyons watched him, then smiled sardonically. He leaned over to Tyler’s ear. “How do you like killing, Joey?”

  Tyler slowly put his cup down and considered. He looked at Lyons’ face, then away. “ I’m surprised how easily men die.” He picked up another cookie and began to chew it whole with a lumpy cheek. “I’ll bet they’re dancing in the aisles down in the FBI in Washington.” He shook a finger at Lyons. “We. Bagged. A. Big. One. Today.”

  “They’re not dancing in the aisles, Joe,” said Lyons. “They’re out looking for us.”

  The stewardess decided that Roger Basche needed more coffee. He held up his cup for filling. Then she leaned over and filled Lyons’ and Tyler’s. The lopsided face of the Santa Claus pin smiled catatonically.

  Lyons leaned over to Basche. “And how do you like your newfound profession, Mr. Basche?”

  Roger Basche exhaled heavily and studied Lyons’ face. “It’s much more tense than any other kind of hunting I’ve ever done. There’s a death penalty for the hunter who misses—and that’s novel. And, finally, I think there are better places for this conversation.”

  “My sentiments exactly, Roger. Tell him.” Lyons looked at Tyler.

  Tyler looked at him. “Do you know the motto of the Irish terrorists—the IRA?”

  “No.”

  Tyler looked directly at him unsmiling. “Once in, never out.”

  Lyons nodded. “Until death do us part.”

  “Easy,” said Basche. “Easy.”

  The earth was in darkness and slowly turned. The black horseman slowly turned. He wore a black riding habit, and a black hood, and he rode a black horse. He moved down the black highway from Rockaway Island. No matter how Dan Lyons turned with the earth, the horse turned to face him, stepping closer and closer, bringing that eager saber eagerly closer.

  That familiar voice spoke to Dan Lyons with the same insistent question over and over. A question he couldn’t hear, but he knew that voice and he knew that the answer was “I don’t know.”

  He woke shivering, spinning, soaked with sweat. He was face down on his bed and he was shivering with fear, with cold, with sickness. His stomach was a churning knot and he was wet with sweat. Sopping wet.

  He said the word “Laundry” again. He tried to raise his head. He was going to puke. The headache was like a hot iron rod up inside his skull.

  He’d been drugged again.

  With slow force he moved. He turned. So slow. Sideways … And slow again, he raised his pounding head. Now … he was sitting on his couch in his apartment and the room was pitch-dark. The room began a slow turn. His stomach began a slow kneading. A great white burst of pain swelled slowly in his head.

  He was panting like a runner. He felt sweat rilling down his face. Cold. He shivered. He tried to gauge the distance to the toilet bowl. Cool toilet bowl. He decided to wait.

  Faint light from the street lamp lay in two squares—a rhomboid and a trapezoid on the rug. A nice crooked square. And he was going to die. Right there. Die sitting there. Dead man with a headache and vomity stomach.

  His arm. He felt his arm for a new needle hole. No? Yes? No. No hole.

  The voice over and over. That voice was familiar. He knew it. Whose? That voice spoke to him—with that same question.

  The room. They’d searched the room this time and they’d found the pillow case. No doubt. Light. He needed light. He managed to stand. Using his knuckles on the springy couch, he walked along the edge to the table and fumble-fisted at the lamp. He got it, and the light stabbed him violently in both eyes. The entire interior of his head screamed
and exploded with balls of light. Reverberating light. He held on to the back of the couch with eyes squeezed shut and waited for the rocketing balls of light to stop. Then they turned colors—from whites and yellows all the way down to magentas and blue-blacks.

  He tried squinting with his eyes, avoiding the bulb. He looked at his wrist watch. Seven-thirty. Dark at seven-thirty.

  He focused his eyes on the suitcase by the door. Unopened. Unopened? The rest of the room was in order. No ransacking. No destruction.

  He worked across the room crabwise to the bathroom. Fight it. Fight it.

  He sat down on the lid of the toilet and waited. These were the clothes he’d worn from the airport. It must still be Saturday.

  Early evening. Seven-thirty.

  Soaking wet clothes.

  He peeled them off. Slowly. He decided he was slightly ahead in the war with his stomach. Cold. So cold.

  He got the shower going. Nice hot water. He carefully stood up, feeling his head ascend fifteen stories and his feet miles down. Slowly his body settled. Dwarf-size, his magnified feet sticking out from his basketball-sized chin.

  Steady now, he stepped into the warm shower and let it flow over him.

  Not going to be as bad as the last time. Hot water helped. Strangely hungry. That voice purring at him.

  He stepped out of the shower and wanted badly to sit down. Wrapped in his towel, he sat down at the table.

  How had he been drugged? And why?

  The wallet held $823. Three singles, six tens, eight twenties and a dozen fifties.

  It was $823. It was 9:30. It was Saturday night. And it had been 11:30 the night before when he’d been drugged. The pain was a long time lifting from his head, and he had to force his mind away from it.

  Pell’s wallet also held a driver’s license, a plastic calendar and several membership cards for private clubs in Miami. And that was all. No credit cards, no photographs.

  The papers from Pell’s bedroom desk were a miscellany of mundane details of a private life. Receipts for subscriptions to magazines, receipts for automobile repairs, a small sheaf of gasoline vouchers clipped to a small square of white paper with the notation “For the office.” Notices from the community tax assessor. Estimate for roof repairs. Bills for pointing out some brickwork. Monthly statements from the gardener. Circulars: notice of a dress sale from Jacobson’s. A small printed note from a custom tailor with a crown for a letterhead. There was a brown pocket-sized folder with dinner recipes. There was a small stack of letterheads— blank—from the Grosse Pointe Diana Association. Two cigars. A small address book. And there was another small oblong brown envelope.

  Lyons pulled out some folded sheets of paper from the envelope. He opened them. “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

  He got up slowly, holding a hand to the top of his hammering head, and went over to a large manila envelope and removed the pile of papers he’d taken from Ozzie New York Avenue’s desk.

  Anthony Pell had carefully stored eleven receipts in his brown envelope, and all of them were from Charlie’s Laundry. Lyons compared them to the blank forms he’d found in the Sheepshead Bay desk. They were identical.

  Charlie’s Laundry.

  He read the printed list of items:

  ( ) sheets

  ( ) pillow cases

  ( ) towels

  ( ) face cloths

  ( ) shorts

  ( ) undershirts

  ( ) socks

  ( ) other

  According to the first receipt, Mr. Pell had turned over to Charlie’s Laundry four sheets, two pillow cases, three towels, two face cloths.

  Lyons put the laundry receipts back in the envelope and resumed studying Pell’s other papers. A recent telephone bill. Lyons laid it aside for further study. Checkbook stubs and several bank statements. Check stubs were quite ordinary: taxes on house, cash, furnace oil, electric bill, paint, property insurance.

  Lyons walked over to his couch-bed and lay down. If he could regain his strength and think, he’d solve the riddles. In a moment he was sound asleep.

  Sunday morning, he pondered all the material in the light of a bluff day, racing cloud shadows blocking the morning sun at whiles.

  His floor was bespread with papers: airline schedules and passenger tickets, laundry receipts and coded books—all the bits and lumps he’d gathered in a temporal sequence, reading from left to right, top to bottom, starting with Fleagle’s diary. Neat rows of information set on the floor before him like an orchestra, each with its piece of pipe if only he had ears to hear.

  Sunlight of a bluff day spread at whiles with cloud shadows.

  Water cured his headache slowly. The pain went away with the thirst.

  “Speak,” he said to the papers.

  A quick tapping at his basement window—and he looked up at Roger Basche, peering in with a shielding hand over his eyes.

  Lyons padded to the understeps vestibule and let him in.

  “Have you seen the paper?” demanded Basche, following him into the room.

  “How about coffee?”

  “In a minute. Have you seen the paper?”

  “No.”

  Basche glanced at the rows of material on the floor and sighed heavily. “Here. Read this.”

  It was right on the front page of the Sunday paper. And Lyons read with his mouth fallen open.

  MYSTERY MAN, TWO OTHERS, SLAIN IN DETROIT HOME.

  DETROIT: Anthony Pell, a mystery man whom police have often tried unsuccessfully to link with the American underworld, was found shot to death in the bathroom of his expensive home in Grosse Pointe Farms, a fashionable section of Detroit. In the kitchen, his housekeeper and his chauffeur-bodyguard were also found dead. Both had been stabbed.

  Dan Lyons raised his eyes to Basche’s. Slowly he shut his mouth.

  “How do you figure that one, Lyons?”

  Dan Lyons shook his head and resumed reading. The report detailed the skimpy history of Pell’s business life and repeated the bare facts of the multiple murder, Pell in his bathroom, his two employees in the kitchen. Both stabbed. Both in the back.

  “That’s funny,” said Lyons.

  “What?”

  “Stab in the back. That was Pell’s specialty. It’s almost —nah.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, impossible. But it’s almost as if Pell got so damned mad at his people for letting him get killed, he went downstairs and stabbed them both.”

  “That’s no help.” Basche turned away and sat down, glancing again at the arrangement on the floor. “Why would anyone kill them?”

  Lyons leaned against a wall thoughtfully. “Oh, silence maybe. They’d both know a lot. Maybe the chauffeur was killed for punishment. He failed at his job.”

  Lyons poured coffee from the pot. “Does Tyler know yet?”

  Basche hunched his shoulders. “This will really rattle his chain.”

  “Yeah. Maybe that’ll do some good.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  Lyons sat down by the coffee cups. “Oh, come on, Roger. Tyler is some kind of a twisted romantic. He sees us in some kind of a secret society, bonded by blood.”

  Basche tilted his head wryly. “We’re certainly bonded by blood. Which leads me to a point I want to make.”

  “What?”

  “Stop ragging him.”

  “What!” Lyons lifted his head from his supporting hand.

  “Put the needle away.”

  Lyons sat back in his chair and looked curiously at Basche.

  “Let’s get one thing straight, Roger. If anyone is doing any ragging, it isn’t me.”

  “O.K. O.K. Tyler isn’t the easiest person in the world to live with—but he’s not stupid. When he asks you how it feels to kill someone, he’s being tactless as hell, but the curiosity is genuine. When you ask him the same question, he knows you’re sinking a harpoon into him. There’s a difference.”

  Lyons exhaled sharply and picked up the Sunday paper. He reread the report from
Detroit with considerable attention. Finally he laid it on the table.

  “I wonder what these people know about us,” he said.

  Basche frowned at him. “How would they know anything about us?”

  Lyons looked at the now healed needle hole in his arm. “Remember this?”

  “Do it again,” said Joe Tyler.

  “I said,” repeated Lyons, “these laundry receipts were in this brown envelope in Pell’s desk.”

  “That’s all you found? Those things? Nothing in his wallet?”

  “Just what you see.”

  Tyler shrugged. Lyons shrugged at Basche. Basche wagged his head in disgust and looked out the window.

  “Stabbed,” said Tyler. “Doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  His eyes roved over the rows of documents on Lyons’ floor. “Hey, you know, we ought to be careful of this stuff. People walking by can look right in the window and see this.”

  “See what?”

  “See this!”

  Lyons looked at Basche’s wagging hand and sighed. “Joey. It’s just a bunch of miscellaneous pieces of paper. It doesn’t mean a thing to anyone on God’s green earth—no, not even to me. Even I can’t make any sense out of it. Could anyone walking by take one glance and make it mean something? Look, Joey, stop being so nervous.”

  “Nervous! That house we were in—there were two people killed in it after we left. Someone is breathing down our necks.” He pointed at Lyons. “Who knows what he told them when they had that needle in his arm.”

  “Joey,” said Basche patiently, “Lyons didn’t know anything when they poked that needle in his arm. We started all this after Reece was beaten and that was after that needle business. Nobody knows anything. Calm down.”

  “I think we ought to cool everything down for a while,” said Tyler.

  Lyons crossed his hands behind his head. “What about the America Safe for Democracy speech you made in the saloon?”

  “What about it?”

  “We haven’t made a dent in the criminal population yet. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of hiring help.”

  “Oh. Funneeee,” said Tyler.