The Dead of Winter

by William H Hallahan

  “There’s another problem I haven’t told you about, Joey.”

  “I’m afraid to listen. What is it?”

  “I was drugged again.”

  “No! When?”

  “Last night. After I got home from the airport. I don’t know how they got in here. But they did.”

  “More needles? My God, Lyons, you must have told them everything.”

  “No needles. I don’t know what they did in here. They didn’t search anything. They didn’t open my suitcase.”

  “Well, that tears it.” Tyler got up and paced, thinking while chewing on a knuckle. He stopped before a window and pulled with both hands at the wings of his mustache. Basche thoughtfully rubbed his chin.

  “Look,” said Tyler, pacing again. He stopped at the rows of papers on the rug. Then he looked at Lyons. “I guess you’re right. I’m sorry I knocked your thirteen questions.”

  Basche frowned at him. “What do you mean you guess he’s right? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m saying we ought to get answers to all of Lyons’ questions plus a few others I can think of.”

  “Yeah?” Basche studied Tyler’s copper-colored mustache.

  Tyler exhaled sharply. “By giving him time to work on them. We should have a moratorium on any more shootings.”

  Basche looked at Dan Lyons. “What do you think?” Lyons shrugged. “We’re fresh out of names for the moment. Unless I can make sense of this, we’re going to have to draw names out of a hat.”

  “A little cooling-off period ought to make you happy, Lyons,” said Tyler. “You wanted to know when we’re going to stop the killing. We need a new master plan. We got everyone we went after.”

  “Except one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The guy with the red scar on his neck.”

  The policeman let the eight-foot clear plastic bag fill up in the wind off Jamaica Bay. Then he and another policeman began to work Fleagle’s feet and legs into the bag.

  A plainclothesman was busy sawing a low branch from the swamp maple tree. A little stream of sawdust blew away in the breeze. The plainclothesman paused to let the cramps out of his arm muscles. Patiently he waited while staring at the bullet hole in the branch.

  Fleagle was decomposing rapidly. The entire back of his body had turned black from the settling blood responding to the pull of gravity. The two policemen got the ballooned corpse into the plastic bag. The corpse was then worked onto an ambulance litter and covered with a blanket. They unfolded a half dozen canvas straps. These they passed under the litter over and around the corpse and cinched them with the buckles. The short distance that Fleagle had run was a long struggling walk for the policemen—across the meadow and up the cinder embankment to the waiting police van, watched by a throng of boys with bicycles.

  The plainclothesman followed behind, sweat streaming down his face, carrying the saw and the branch with the embedded bullet.

  The plainclothesman paused and picked up Fleagle’s necktie. He studied it curiously for a moment. He hefted it, found the lead weight, swung it a few times and studied the fabric.

  Since the night that Fleagle had tied it around his neck in his furnished room, it had been soaked repeatedly by night mists, rained on, pelted with sleet, dried by winds, and slowly stained by the earth it lay on.

  It now went to the morgue with Fleagle’s body to be filed in a drawer with other articles from Fleagle’s person.

  The plainclothesman looked out on Jamaica Bay above Pumpkin Island at an untidy flight of gulls flopping like dirty sheets of newspaper.

  A body under every bush, he said to himself. He looked up the embankment at the slamming of the van doors.

  Fleagle, himself a dissectionist, was now to be dissected.

  9

  There is a series of mental stages that identify the creative act and, indeed, the creative mind as well—that of a highly motivated problem solver.

  The first state is an awareness of the problem. This is not as painfully obvious as might be assumed. Much human energy has been expended on convincing prosaic minds in all civilizations that problems—even of the gravest type—are new and tangible. Next comes a defining of the problem—often a creative act of great originality in itself. Indeed because of poor definition, creative minds have often brilliantly solved the wrong problem.

  Third comes a saturation in the problem and the factual data surrounding it—a dreary process of ingestion—a killing boredom that only soaring creative minds find interesting. Then comes the period of incubation and surface calm—seeming indolence, in fact. Then the fifth and last step—the explosion—the mental insight, the sudden leap beyond logic, beyond the usual steppingstones to normal solutions.

  It is this inexplicable explosion, the transcending of logic and time-as-a-continuum and progressive mathematical lucubrations, that makes the creative mind the most remarkable work in the entire universe.

  There is an obsessive quality in the personality of the problem solver.

  He can’t abide an unsolved riddle. He cannot rest on an unanswered question, an unresolved challenge. He becomes restless, irritable, hostile to outside diversions.

  Long after the prosaic mind has turned indifferently away with the problem unsolved, the creative mind is still applying almost superhuman quantities of single-minded concentration on it.

  That is one key characteristic of the creative mind. It simply will not give up. Never.

  —Charles S. Wakefield

  Predator of the Universe:

  The Human Mind

  “Well, I’ll be damned, Lyons, you’ve become a girl watcher. Try the hotel entrance across the street. Lots of broads going and coming all the time.”

  Dan Lyons turned from his office window and looked at his supervisor. The man leaned against the doorjamb. “Maybe I can get you transferred a few floors lower. We’re too high here. All you can see is the tops of their heads. Yes, I’ll work on that. In the meantime, why don’t you work on the marketing plan for that blister-pack hammer set? Good idea?”

  “I have a better idea, Calvert. You work on your door-knocking skills.”

  “Temper, temper.”

  “I’ll temper, temper you if you open that door again without knocking.” He shut the door in Calvert’s face and went back to the window with his binoculars.

  Tyler and that second drugging had him paranoid, checking the hotel entrance for suspicious figures, scanning his office-building lobby when he entered and left, changing subway cars on the Lexington line to Brooklyn, peering out of his apartment window at the street, changing locks. He even suspected that wino-drunk Santa Claus with the hand bell down on the corner. He was tired of it. They’d gotten close enough twice to drug him. If they wanted him they seemed to get him at will. Why watch or worry?

  He sat down at his desk and studied the word circled there on a piece of yellow paper: “Laundry.” Heavily circled. “Laundry.” He knew something about the word but he couldn’t remember. He was trying too hard. Maybe if he crept up on it …

  Oh, how in the hell did he get into all this? This madness that had taken charge of his life.

  All his professional life he’d been solving problems—marketing problems, sales problems, people problems, motivation problems. He was, to the bone, a professional problem solver. Like a worm finding mud, he began functioning the moment he touched a question, a riddle, a puzzle.

  The questions surrounding Vinny Reece hadn’t yielded an inch to all his mental pliers, calipers, chisels and rust solvents.

  Aside from his great curiosity and professional ego, the problem was different from all others he’d ever been confronted with. The wrong answers could kill the three of them.

  He went over to a corrugated carton on the floor and pulled out several plastic blister packs, each containing a metal tool handle and a set of tool fittings—hammer head, screwdriver heads and wrenches. Marketing: through independent hardware stores by way of jobbers and wholesaler
s. Pricing, mark-up and volume.

  The hell with that Tyler. Walking around the corridors and classrooms of that rinky-dink college absolutely cocksure that Lyons, the wizard, would solve their problems, pull them out of the chasm before the rope broke.

  Not today: no miracles on Monday.

  He went back to his blister pack and tried to solve for maximum continental distribution.

  Laundry.

  Vinny Reece had once said that he worked for a laundry. But he worked for Charlie Ha Ha, a Lebanese or Syrian importer of Mediterranean foodstuffs. But that wasn’t true either, because Charlie Ha Ha did damned little importing. Or did he? Lyons wished he could read a set of books; he’d break into Ha Ha’s office again. But then, Ha Ha’s books were no longer there.

  Why did Reece say “laundry”? A laundry is a place that washes things. Clothing. Cars. Hot cars? If you repaint hot cars and sell them, are you operating an underworld “laundry”?

  He sat cross-legged on the floor of his apartment, the problem of blister packs and tools forgotten in his office briefcase that lay on the wooden spindle chair by the door.

  Around him on the floor was the array of miscellaneous papers. A new game of solitaire by Dan Lyons, professional numbskull.

  Like a man peeking at face-down cards, he picked up various pieces, studied them, then put them down. He picked up, finally, Anthony Pell’s telephone pad. Then he picked up the listed numbers from Ozzie New York’s wall in Sheepshead Bay. He began to compare phone numbers.

  He reached for a large legal pad to collate the numbers in two columns, working through Pell’s book starting with “A” and locating numbers that matched from Ozzie’s wall.

  He found it under “L.” There was one entry on the page: “Laundry.” And the number listed was Charlie Ha Ha’s office.

  He heated a can of stew on the stove and ate it sitting on the floor cross-legged before his papers. He ate absent-mindedly, staring at the original sheet with the 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 on 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 teakettle whistled. He got up and turned it off, curling his lip at the instant-coffee jar.

  He sat down and reread the questions.

  He still couldn’t answer #1. Charlie Ha Ha had used a truth drug on him Why?

  #2. Who put it there? Charlie Ha Ha. He stood up, remembering. That voice he kept hearing, that kept asking him questions—that was Charlie Ha Ha’s, talking to him while he was under drugs. He’d forgotten that he knew that. So. Charlie Ha Ha came in here to the apartment and, using truth drugs, asked him questions. And his answer was “I don’t know.” If only he could remember Ha Ha’s insistent question. In every dream he dreamed the same answer. “I don’t know.”

  “I still don’t know,” he said to the paper. He went on to the next question. “How did they get in here? Beats me.”

  He went over to the door and put the chain on. He unlatched it and stepped into the hallway and pushed the door to. Then he pulled it open. The door swung out into the hallway. He pushed it shut, then opened it a few inches. He tried to get his hand through to the jamb and the chain. He reached the chain and tried to slide the head into the track. Never. Even if they managed to slip the chain open, they’d never have been able to put the chain back.

  He sat down on the floor again.

  He looked at question #4. He had no idea how they had drugged him. And if Ha Ha did it the first time, who did it the second time? And why?

  #5. No pieces left on the board. No one they’d met so far had a scar. So, Scarneck knew them, they didn’t know him.

  #6. They searched Reece’s apartment because they were looking for something. A piece of information? Reece kept saying, “I don’t remember. I don’t remember.”

  #7. Who searched it? Maybe Fleagle. Maybe the man with the red scar. Maybe Ha Ha.

  #8. Reece was mortally beaten because they wanted information he couldn’t remember.

  #9. Reece worked for some kind of laundry that used importing as a cover-up activity.

  #10. Who’s Ha Ha? A dead man. Forget him.

  #11. You find Charlie Ha Ha in the cemetery, sitting in a chair six feet under.

  #12. What are all those trips that Fleagle took? That reminded him. He got his pad and made a list of dates from the Detroit flight tickets that he’d found in Ozzie’s desk.

  It took him a half hour to list them all, then compare them with Fleagle’s overseas flights. No connections. On occasion there were as many as three Detroit flights for each overseas flight. No pattern of elapsed days. No pattern of times of the week. Nothing.

  He looked at the last question and sighed. He didn’t know what Reece couldn’t remember.

  He picked up the paper and began to add more questions. “Why was Ha Ha’s bookkeeper killed? Why was Ozzie given the job of killing him? What was Pell’s connection with … He threw the pencil down. Brain fag. He needed rest.

  Hurry up. Find the answers. Someone is closing in on you. Hurry. Hurry.

  He got up and paced the floor. Then he had an idea. He left his apartment.

  Terry Raphael’s apartment was on the first floor rear.

  She opened the hall door with the chain on. “Oh, hi, Danny,” she said and slipped the chain.

  She was wearing a pair of slacks and a sweat shirt with the legend “Property of Sing Sing Maternity.”

  A half-empty tumbler of beer stood on the ironing board, its head gone flat. A burned-down cigarette smoldered in an ashtray next to the tumbler. She glanced at the television as she removed a blouse from the ironing board. She disconnected the iron. “Turn that TV off, Dan.” She went to the refrigerator and a moment later handed him a bottle of beer with a glass. “I know. You’re looking for a fourth for poker.”

  Lyons smiled silently at her.

  “Well, Danny, don’t laugh. I’m not such a bad player. Of course, I don’t have Vinny’s fantastic memory. But I’ll tell you something. I played strip poker with Vinny more than once and never ended up in my birthday suit altogether.”

  “Rats,” said Lyons.

  Terry Raphael’s phlegmy laugh rattled. “You say the nicest things, Dan.”

  Lyons sat on the couch and glanced out at the bare December back yard. Old unpainted wooden fences, stripped sumac trees in darkness partly lit by window lights.

  “Supposed to snow tonight,” she said. “They had a big storm in Detroit.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Dan Lyons drank some of the beer and looked again out the window. “Listen, Terry, what condition were Vinny’s affairs in?”

  “Affairs? I don’t know. He never talked to me about them.”

  “No will?”

  She shook her head slowly, doubtfully. “I … gee, Dan, I don’t think so. His sister went through his papers.”

  “Yeah? She say anything?”.

  She nodded. “Want an exact quote?”

  He nodded at her.

  “She said, ‘Oh, shit, he died intestate.’”

  Lyons snorted. “Well, that gets it said.”

  “It means no will, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  She sat down in a hunch on a chair with her hands clasped between her knees. Her face was deeply lined in the lamplight. Without makeup her eyes were markedly circled and tired. “He once said he had a neat little nest egg put away somewhere. He tal
ked a lot about retiring to Italy in a couple of years.”

  “He didn’t say where the nest egg was, did he?”

  “Ah.” She flapped a hand at him. “I never believed him.”

  “Why?”

  “You ever meet a poker player with any money?”

  Lyons smiled. “Maybe he made a bundle in his business. He ever talk about his business?”

  She shrugged. “Not much. He was an accountant, wasn’t he? In an importing company? That doesn’t sound like something that would make you rich. Besides …” She shrugged. “If he’d had any money would he have lived in a dump like this?”

  The wind was rolling out of the northwest, heavy with the feeling of snow. The night sky over New York was sullen, gray, bouncing back the lights of the city below it.

  Lyons stood looking out on the harbor. Over by Kill Van Kull between Staten Island and Bayonne he saw the anchorage lights of a number of ships—freighters from all over the world. Fragile points of light in the immense bitter night. The Staten Island ferry like a hollowed-out and lit-up tortoise slipped across the harbor toward the Battery in Manhattan.

  “Up yours, Tyler,” said Lyons to the wind. “How did I get myself in this asinine position? Once in, never out—God, what a romantic.” He buttoned his overcoat against the freezing wind and walked back to his apartment.

  The answers had to be in those papers on his floor.

  The wind leaned and seethed against his window panes, and the radiator pipes banged as the heater responded to the dropping temperatures. The answers were here before his eyes. By asking the right questions …

  He sat down with a cup of coffee and resumed reading his questions.

  The phone rang. He stood up again.

  “You find anything?” asked Joe Tyler.

  “Nope. A whole row of goose eggs.”

  “You check your street for people in doorways?”

  Lyons sighed. “Yep. And I changed trains on the subways and doubled back through office buildings.”

  “You were out for a while.”

  “Yeah. For a walk. Why?”

  “I rang and there wasn’t any answer. Somebody could have gotten into your apartment when you were out.”

  “That would be new and different.”