The Dead of Winter

by William H Hallahan

  “No joke. You got to take care of yourself, Dan. Anyone can get in there. That landlady, she has an extra set of keys. Anybody could make a copy from hers. You sure you don’t want to bunk in here with me for a while?”

  “No, Joe. It’s O.K. How’re you coming with those magazines?”

  “O.K. Well, O.K. Call me if—”

  “Yeah, I will.”

  “O.K., Danny. I’ll talk to you later.”

  He hung up.

  “People can get in here like Grand Central Station.” He felt strange when he sat down—as though he were going to sink right through the floor. Was someone behind him? He stood up. And fainted.

  Joe Tyler hung up his telephone and sat down on the floor amid piles of back-date magazines.

  The old suitcase he’d used to carry them was lying empty on an upholstered chair.

  A rising wind crooned resonantly around the rain gutter above his windows. The only sound inside his apartment was the slicing of his scissors through pages of the magazines.

  His scissors had snipped and chopped through the pages of three years of Fact Crime and True Police Tales. He’d made eighteen piles of clippings on organized crime—eighteen regions of the country. He’d already charted the organizations and individuals in each region that operated the crime syndicate. The dreary song of the magazines was true: an enormous, growing and fatal disease was oozing through the country—organized criminal programs. It had engulfed the law-enforcement ranks of city after city, suborning police, district attorneys, mayors, councilmen, legislators, jurists, medical officers, and multitudes of others. Tyler was convinced: It would destroy the nation.

  He was slowly evolving a plan of defense and reprisal. An extra-legal body organized in each region to parallel the syndicate. An extra-legal body with one secret, quasireligious purpose: assassination.

  One thing still bothered him. The second drugging of Lyons. He got up and went to his window. Carefully his eyes searched the windswept street.

  With all the multitudes of criminals he’d encountered in the pages of the magazines, he’d not found one man with a red scar on his neck.

  Something rattled. Then there was a terrific bang. He opened his eyes and painfully rolled his head off his flattened nose. It was filled with dried blood.

  The roller coaster started again, and he felt himself stretching to sixty-five feet, thin as a garden hose. Then he came back again, flat as a clam. Hot. Dry. Head as though it had been struck with hammers, with burning needles inserted.

  He pulled himself into a sitting position on the floor with his hands, pulling on the couch. Papers all over. He’d been lying on them. Dried puddle of blood on his question sheet.

  And now he was really going to puke. He got to his feet and cried out in pain as the blood pounded in his skull. His eyes went out of focus, and he squinted through one of them to locate the bathroom.

  The trip across the room was like trying to walk with a top-heavy, mile-high, swaying ladder. The vomit rose in his throat and he fought it down.

  He crashed into the bathroom doorway, bounced and slid off it and landed on his knees on the tiles and tumbled forward in painful slow motion. As he rose, he got the lid of the toilet up and just raised his head.

  It came in such a strangling rush, he couldn’t catch his breath and almost choked. He held up his head with two fistfuls of hair, fearing that it would fall off his shoulders and into the toilet bowl.

  Drops of blood. In the puke in the bowl were drops of blood. Another fell as he watched. He reached up and flushed the bowl. His nose was bleeding again.

  Another terrific bang sounded in the apartment. He puked again. Felt the top of his head nearly explode again. Lost his wind and recovered. The pain in his head was beyond enduring.

  He heard himself moaning. Whimpering.

  The bang sounded again. And now he heard the windows rattling violently. The next bang shook the cabinet mirror over his head. He turned like an animal at bay. Using both hands against the walls, he got to the bathroom doorway upright.

  The papers were scattered in disarray where he’d rolled on them. The saucer-sized dried puddle of blood from his nose still lay on his list of questions. All the table lamps were on. And the two barred windows that faced the street were insistently rattling.

  The rest of the room was in order. Nothing was being banged.

  He leaned his face against the cool wood of the doorjamb, gathering himself for the long walk to the couch.

  The next bang rattled the jamb on his cheekbone. The hallway? He walked along the apartment wall, using both hands, trying to hold his head away from the pain.

  Carefully he slipped the chain out of its channel, turned the lock and opened the door.

  A high wind with stunningly cold air spun into the room, seething around him, scooping up the papers on the floor and spinning them into miscellaneous litter.

  The thick, carved wooden vestibule door under the brownstone steps swung slowly, nearly closing, then flung back with a violent bang against the hall wall. Dan Lyons worked his way along the wall with his hands to the door.

  Then, absurdly, inappropriately, he remembered what it was he hadn’t been able to remember about the word “laundry.”

  The sopping-wet handtowel dribbled down his neck from his head, and he leaned over his kitchen sink, administering glasses of water to himself. A three-time loser now, he at least knew how to cure the headache the fastest way. A flush. With gallons of water. This time his head hurt so much, he wondered if he was suffering from progressive damage to his brain. Even the slightest movement of his eyeballs made him cry out. He wanted to die, then, there, but he didn’t have time.

  Had anyone been standing behind him when he passed out? Someone who’d left the vestibule door open? He squinted one eye at his wrist watch. It was two-thirty in the morning and the city was under attack by a violent arctic windstorm. He wanted to go immediately to the cellar, but he knew he’d have to rest for a while.

  He carefully stepped over to the kitchen table and, sitting, laid his pulsing, incredibly heavy head on the table and covered it with the dripping wet towel.

  He understood how men could be driven to suicide.

  It was an unmistakable sound. The metallic snicker of a clip of ammo socked into a rifle chamber.

  Roger Basche was wide awake in his dark bedroom. Tree branches were scratching a mad screed on the brick walls of his apartment building. The wind was seething like a great sea surf, flowing in wild torrents through the city. Things were banging and squeaking and squealing and scratching and scraping and rocking and rolling. Noises, rhythmical noises.

  He listened.

  His ears screened out the outside noises, straining for a sound inside the silent bedroom.

  Branch shadows were dancing spastically on his bedroom wall. In his dreams he’d been prowling his imaginary terrain. For the first time he crossed that terrain in his sleep. It was hot. Panting hot. No breeze. Oven air rolled off the long fingers of intruding dunes, flowed over the grassy savannaland of the hunting ground. He was alone, stepping on the dry ground, hearing the brushing sound of his boots going through the dry brown grass.

  He paused before a dense thicket, the leaves a dusty gray-green. He listened, tensed as something small and fast was flushed from the brush. It rose in the air like a skeet and he fired at it. It spun violently and fell. When it hit the ground, he saw it clearly.

  It was a small rag doll.

  He stepped slowly, cautiously over the grass to it. As he looked down, he heard the chatter of a clip ratcheting into a rifle. Not a hunting rifle. A military rifle. A man-killing rifle. Behind him, beyond a dune.

  He’d awakened then.

  He snapped on his bedside lamp. He turned back the covers and stood up. He crossed the room, snapped on the lights to the living room, put on the bathroom light and then the kitchen.

  He was quite alone.

  He put out all the lights and sat by the window looking out
at the tides of wind streaming through the trees.

  He wondered how Lyons and Tyler were doing with their brainstorming. Maybe Tyler was right. Maybe there was a conspiracy against them—a closing ring. He looked down in the street for lurking figures. His mind turned and faced a fact: The rag doll was Ozzie New York Avenue’s “Merry Christmas from Daddy.” His terrain was haunted by a child’s doll.

  The nightmare had murdered sleep.

  Prior to the American Civil War, Levi Coffin and Robert Purvis had operated an underground railroad for escaping slaves. One of its branch lines included a “station” in New York, reputedly in Brooklyn cellars that led to the waterfront through secret tunnels.

  The last time he’d been in the cellar he and Vinny had spent a rainy Saturday afternoon looking for a passageway to the waterfront. The walls had been constructed of flat shale-like stones, cemented with a sandy friable cement that crumbled easily.

  They’d found no secret tunnels.

  Now he slowly descended, half insane with the pain in his head, the taste of vomit in his mouth, his legs threatening to collapse from trembling and exhaustion, and the bare light at the bottom of the stairs hurting his eyes.

  He descended one slow step at a time, pressing against the wall. The musty smell was cloying.

  The old piano bench was still standing against the rear wall next to some long-broken, brittle wicker chairs. And on the bench were four high piles of newspapers and magazines.

  He held one hand on the top of his head, and with the other he pulled off the newspapers a section at a time and dropped them with a plop on the floor. It was going to take a long time.

  He sifted through the first pile all the way to the bench surface and started through the second pile. His feet were hidden in the mounting scattered newspaper sections and magazines.

  Halfway down the second pile he found it. Too sick to be elated, too weak to examine it, he put all his attention into the slow, slow shuffle along the uneven cement cellar floor to the stairs, then the head-popping climb up the stairs, then the shuffle along wall and carpet to his room and couch.

  With the greatest preparation and care, he lay down on the couch, putting his head down first, then slowly settling the rest of his body after it.

  He slowly sank in sleep, deep, deep and deeper still, while in the streets the violent windstorm tore up and down, uprooting trees, smashing windows, rolling empty trash cans and howling at bedroom windows.

  He’d found the laundry.

  10

  Silence.

  A thin slice of silent sunlight lay on the living-room wall.

  Silence. What was wrong with silence? Something.

  A pipe stuttered in the walls. The distant sound of running water. Then silence again.

  The clock. It had just stopped. Lyons had forgotten to reset the chains on the pendulum clock.

  He put the crook of his left arm over his eyes and waited. If he moved, the headache would start. The joints of his bones would throb, working like rusty pulleys. Three times drugged. His arms—he checked his arm at the crook, then the other. No needle hole.

  He lowered his arm and turned his head on the bed. Slowly. He moved his eyes and focused them on the wall clock. Seven-ten in the morning. How long ago had the clock stopped? Only a few moments ago. Tuesday? Yes. Just after dawn on a bright windy day. Christmas season.

  He wanted to get up—to get going. Hurry. Danger. Up. Up. Holding scalp hair in his fists, he rose up from the couch and sat on its edge. The whole stalk of his neck complained. His eyes began to throb like shelled hard-boiled eggs caked in sand being slowly turned in a glass cup. His tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth. His stomach muscles were sore. A long, long day.

  He began his treatment with two aspirins and a quart of canned pineapple juice. Then he sat down with Fleagle’s notebook.

  He compared the destinations in the notebook with the cities listed in the article in the magazine he’d found in the cellar.

  Identical: Mexico City, Panama, Nassau, Liechtenstein, Curaçao and Zurich. Of course.

  Reading hurt his eyes. He got up and moved around the apartment, reviewing the information he had, trying to extend it by recombining his facts.

  He started the clock and thought of Teresa Raphael.

  A fascinating new question had occurred to him.

  Terry Raphael was vacuum-cleaning the hallway near the front door of the main floor when he stepped slowly up the carpeted stairs. To his throbbing eyes she was a sinuous black flame of movement in front of the terrible glare of the two doors. He put a hand over his eyes as he approached her. The whine of the electric cleaner hurt his ears.

  “Oh boy,” she murmured as she shut it off. She watched him a moment more as he stood before her, peering through his fingers, his teeth bared in pain. “I don’t know whether to call the doctor or the undertaker for you. It must have been a very late night.”

  “Sh-h-h. The slightest vibration—even laughing—and I’ll shatter. You have any aspirin?”

  “Follow me.”

  He followed her to her apartment and sat at her kitchen table. She gave him two aspirins, two glasses of water and a cup of coffee.

  “What were you drinking?” she asked. “It couldn’t have been that can of beer I gave you.”

  “Not unless you drugged it.” He peered at her through his fingers.

  “Drugged!”

  “Yeah. I passed out in my apartment, and when I woke up I lost my lunch. I can hardly hold my head up.” He watched her carefully. “You ever been drugged, Terry?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No,” said Lyons.

  “Vinny never told you?”

  “Told me what?

  “Somebody got into this apartment one night,” she said, “and stuck a needle in my arm. I thought I was going to die. I never threw up so much in my life.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh …” She stared at the floor. “Couple of weeks ago. Matter of fact, it was a few nights before—before Vinny was killed.”

  She sat down next to him at the kitchen table. “Stay away, Dan.”

  “Huh?”

  “Stay out of it. Vinny was no holy innocent.”

  “Come again.”

  “Look. I don’t know what was going on. Vinny never talked about it. I never asked him. But even a dummy could figure that Vinny was involved.”

  “How?”

  Teresa Raphael shrugged. “Dan, you could end up in a casket and never even know why.”

  “What you’re saying is Vinny was involved in the rackets.”

  “He hung around with all kinds of seedy characters. He knew all of the policy players, the bag men, the runners, the stations. He knew bookies and gamblers, con men, boosters and slopeheads with fists like hams. He wasn’t accidentally beaten. He was taken care of.”

  He sighed with his head writhing in his hands. “Why?”

  She snorted and shook her head.

  “Did he ever give you any papers to hold?”

  She exhaled smoke wearily. “No. No papers. Nothing. You know—one time you talked about grabbing a freighter to the Mediterranean and banging around the Greek islands for a year. Want a word of advice?”

  “No.”

  She shook her head angrily. “You’re going to take them all on. The whole bunch of crumb bums. Forget it, Dan. People get what they deserve.”

  “People like Vinny?”

  “People in general. Including Vinny. And me and you. Listen. I had this figured in high-school history. People and countries are just like each other. They start off great—like an army. Everybody in step, everybody working together. Then the whole thing comes apart. Every man for himself. Up yours, Jack, I got mine. So the criminals conquer the divided. People in general are no damned good—and they’re not worth dying for. And I mean you.”

  She paused and looked at his bowed head writhing in his palms.

  “This isn’t the way you were talking the othe
r day. You were yelling for blood then.”

  “I’m all cried out. And now I’m watching you get in over your head.”

  “I can swim.”

  She stood up and pointed at her door. “Get out of my life. I can’t mourn for two in the same month.”

  Lyons took his hands away from his eyes and looked at her. “Maybe you won’t have to.”

  Fleagle.

  And Ha Ha.

  And Ozzie New York Avenue and his helper.

  And Ha Ha’s office man.

  And Anthony Pell.

  And all of Pell’s people.

  All of them had—or had been—ransacked and pummeled and pounded and killed and shambled to find something. Pieces of paper.

  Now they were all dead. What they sought was still on the earth. Still undiscovered. Hidden.

  Where?

  Where not? Lyons composed a list in his mind. Not in Ha Ha’s house. In fact, Ha Ha didn’t know where it was—that’s why he killed himself. Ditto for his office, then. And Pell didn’t have it. Ha Ha had felt that Reece had it. But Vinny’s apartment had been searched, so Vinny didn’t have it. And around and around.

  If Reece had the papers—whatever they were—where would he hide them?

  Here? In this basement apartment? If he hid them in Lyons’ apartment, he’d put them in a place that Lyons would never look into.

  What would that be?

  “Eidetic imagery.”

  “What’s that?” asked Lyons.

  “That’s the condition you’re describing.” Professor Townsend flopped a hand in air. “That’s the term clinical psychologists use. You know, Dan, you look awful. Have you been sick?”

  “I have marvelous powers of recovery.”

  “Recovery from what?”

  “Let’s go back to eidetic imagery.”

  “O.K. In the normal person, memory functions in a time core. The mind stores information normally without limit. The human animal hasn’t even begun to use the capacity of his brain. We may have to evolve into a higher type animal in order to learn how to use it. Now—are you sure you can concentrate on this, Dan?”

  “Yeah. Go.”

  “What were you drinking?”