The Dead of Winter

by William H Hallahan

  “You wouldn’t believe me, Mike. Go.”

  “Well, the problem with our brain is this. It functions like an incredibly subtle computer—with a very poor information retrieval system. It’s gigo.”

  “Gigo?”

  “Yes. That’s a computer acronym, GIGO. Garbage in. Garbage out. In short, you can only get out of a computer what you put in. Put garbage in—junk, useless information, incorrect information—and that’s what you get back. That’s why for thousands of years religions and governments have claimed the right to load or pre-program a child’s computer. They call it education.”

  Lyons slightly nodded his aching head in comprehension.

  “Now. I said that the brain has a very poor information retrieval system—memory banks. O.K.? Today, thousands of bits of information will reach your brain. The monitors in your head will screen a lot of it out—and you won’t remember it by nightfall. What does get stored fades. It’s in there somewhere, but we somehow lose the key to the drawer. This is all enormously complex, and I could spend hours explaining how the brain sorts out information and places value weights on it before storing it. But let’s go on with eidetic imagery.”

  “Got a couple of aspirin?”

  “Yes. Be right back.” Professor Townsend left the high, narrow room of his office, leaving Lyons sitting before his desk looking out at the campus, empty now because of the Christmas recess. The worst of the headache was gone, and a sense of elation was growing in him. The problem was beginning to crack. He leaned back in his chair and began to read the titles on the spines of the books that filled two walls to the ceiling of the small office.

  He heard voices and footsteps in the hallway and turned. Professor Townsend stood in the doorway with Professor Gregory. They both looked doubtfully at Lyons.

  “Here’s your aspirin, Dan. Ah, are you sure you don’t want to tell us a little more?”

  “Why?”

  “You know what’s in this stuff you gave me?”

  “No.”

  “A highly powerful downer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a member of the most powerful sleeping-pill family. With the concentration I found here, it could put you to sleep permanently. I think you should talk to the police about it.”

  Lyons nodded.

  Professor Townsend looked at Professor Gregory. “Thanks, Pete.”

  Professor Gregory took a long look at Lyons. “You’re playing with dynamite.”

  Lyons looked at the piercing eyes of the chemist. “I’m not playing, Professor.”

  Professor Gregory nodded and left. His footsteps faded down the hallway.

  Lyons turned to find Townsend’s eyes on him. “That’s why you look so bad, eh?”

  “Eidetic imagery.”

  “O.K., Dan. O.K. Let’s see. Did I get to RNA and DNA?”

  “No.”

  “O.K. It’s kind of obvious that we need to improve the functioning of this fantastic computer of ours. Specifically, the information retrieval function.”

  “Memory.”

  “Yes, memory. By the way, one of the most remarkable aspects of the human brain is the insight function. Creativity. This is essentially an irrational function that no tin computer can duplicate. Anyway, a lot of talent has gone into RNA in the past few years. Ribonucleic acid. Some biochemists thought it might be the chemical the brain uses for storing information. A molecular base for data.

  “Now DNA is the suspect. That’s deoxyribonucleic acid. The reason for all this is that science knows that some brains are capable of fantastic feats. The eidetic image is one. It’s popularly called photographic memory and its powers of regurgitative performance are awesome. Thomas Babington McCauley, for example, could recite Milton’s Paradise Lost flawlessly many years after he committed it to memory. Blind Tom, an American musician, could play any piece of music exactly after hearing it just once. I have a colleague who not only can recite the United States Constitution verbatim but he does it by shutting his eyes and reading it off the pages from his college text—inside his memory banks. He even sees the page numbers. That’s pure eidetic imagery.”

  “Hunh.” Lyons looked speculatively at him. “Coincidence.”

  “What?”

  “Skip it. What you’re telling me is there’s no known limit to the eidetic capacity of the human brain.”

  “No known limit. That’s right. Now just one more thing to remember. No pun.”

  “What?”

  “In many cases, the eidetic powers weaken in middle age.”

  Holding one hand on his throbbing head, Lyons browsed through his own clothes closet. Then he searched his kitchen cabinets and the oven. He studied his walls, looking for a loose panel, a loose baseboard. He examined his bathroom, poking here and there with a screwdriver at the floor tiles. Then he went over the tiles on the kitchen floor. Lastly, he peeled back his carpeting a quarter at a time.

  Then he sat in the pale shafts of winter sunlight and pondered.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for exactly, but if he found it he’d have solved the whole riddle.

  He decided he knew where to look.

  Lyons mounted the weathered wooden stairs and stood looking at the door, which stood ajar still, the wood splintered where Pell’s men had kicked it open. The door swung open at his touch.

  Weather had gotten in. The outer office had been rainsoaked and the floor was water-stained and still damp.

  Lyons sat down at the old man’s desk first. The musty desk drawers were empty and dust-filmed. He found some old paper clips and an antique pen holder with a cork handle and a set of nibs of varying stroke thicknesses. There were also some sheets of blank paper. Pell’s men had apparently taken anything with writing on it.

  He drew out the wooden pull panels on either side and found nothing except dried plastic tape strips.

  Charlie Ha Ha’s desk had also been cleaned out. The old wooden filing cabinets were bare. The desk phone that he used to call Roger looked as antique as the furniture. The coat rack was barren. The safe door was still open. The sodium pentothal and the hypodermic syringe still stood glumly inside. Lyons took out the sodium pentothal and pried off the rubber and metal cap. He poured the contents onto the floor and smashed the bottle.

  Vinny’s office contained just a desk and a chair with an old black desk phone. The drawers were empty. He took them out one at a time and turned them over. Nothing.

  Lyons sat in Vinny Reece’s chair and scowled through the begrimed window pane at a tug moving a barge through Buttermilk Channel. Gulls flurried in a cloud over the barge. Garbage. A barge that carries garbage should be called garbage. GIGO. Garbage in. Garbage out.

  Lyons wondered why he couldn’t find what no one else had been able to find. It was a principle of creativity to change one of the factors in the equation.

  Reject the obvious. Lyons rejected.

  The hall lamp threw a long oblong of light into the room as the door swung open.

  Nothing had been moved. Everything stood waiting for Terry Raphael to muster her courage and clean the apartment out for rerenting. He turned on the overhead light and leaned wearily against the jamb.

  He remembered the bumping that Vinny’s shoes had made, the slurred murmurings, the writhing of a hurt animal.

  His eyes roved over the rows of empty boxes and jars that stood on the floor before the kitchen sink, the heelless shoes in the closet, the gouts of cotton batting, the destroyed couch, the wadded, shredded dust ball from the vacuum cleaner, the piles of clothing, the stacked bureau drawers, the disarrayed furniture.

  He began in the pullman kitchen. He picked up the first empty box. Breakfast cereal. With scissors he cut it open, laid it flat and studied the inner walls of the cardboard. Nothing. He opened every other cardboard box. He examined the empty cans and jars. With a stool he searched every square inch of the closet shelves, removed the dishes and examined their undersides, lifted out the shelf papers and conned them care
fully on both sides. He moved the refrigerator, studied the inside carefully, removed the ice-cube trays and dumped the cubes into a bowl of hot water, watching.

  With a table knife he tested and pried on every floor tile. He removed the racks from the oven and broiler, raised the lid on the stove and examined the drip pan below the burners. He squeezed his hand between the cabinet and the stove, then down behind the stove.

  Nothing.

  An hour later he’d worked his way through the closet and the pile of clothing and drawers and the emptied cabinet of the bureau.

  Now he was lifting the linoleum cover in the bathroom. He’d pried up the metal edging at the bathroom door. Hand-pegged flooring. Oak. Golden oak. Large black tar cement dabs, dried out long ago and cracked. He used a broom handle to raise up the linoleum, using a shadeless table lamp as a flashlight. He peered intently under the linoleum. Nothing.

  He walked slowly around the living room, sliding his hands along the wallpaper, feeling for lumps.

  He felt behind the radiators and checked the baseboards for looseness. Then he began moving pieces of furniture from the rug.

  By the front windows he began to roll the rug back until he’d rolled it completely up to the back wall. Then he rolled the foam-rubber liner. It was getting old and dried out and pieces crumbled as he rolled it. It came to rest against the rolled-up carpet, like two gigantic scrolls.

  Nothing.

  Wearily, sick of the questions and the searching, yet stubbornly, willfully, perversely refusing to quit, he walked to the front windows, his feet echoing on the bare wooden floor. He leaned against a windowsill and surveyed the apartment again. He scanned the ceiling and the walls and the floor.

  The shadeless light still rested on the floor by the bathroom door next to the broom. It threw a shine along the shellacked floorboards. He squinted at the reflection, his eyes still sensitive to light.

  He stood up from the sill and stepped hollowly along the floorboards, squinting, peering, crouching. Kneeling down, he touched the boards with his fingertips, slowly moving his head to see the reflections in the shellacked finish. Scratches. Faint scratches. A multitude of faint scratches.

  Lyons stood up, backed away from the reflection, then strode over to the door. He pulled the two rolls away from the doorway and squeezed through the partly opened door into the hallway. He took the steps down to his apartment two at a time, rooted through his desk drawer and ran back up the stairs with a magnifying glass.

  11

  “What is it, Lyons?”

  “I could make a lame joke and say it’s a laundry ticket.”

  “What?’

  “It’s a miniature set of books. Each one is a T account with a debit and a credit column.”

  “Why?” demanded Joe Tyler. He knelt down and touched the fine scratchings. “Why didn’t he put it all in regular ledgers?”

  “Because he had a photographic memory. Here. Take this magnifying glass and hold it at an angle. Now move around with that lamp. See it?”

  “Be damned,” said Roger Basche. “I can just make out—here’s a name and a number on the top of a T, then two columns of figures. What’s the number?”

  “It’s for a Swiss bank account.”

  Basche sat back on Vinny Reece’s floor and leaned on the rolled-up rug. “Yeah? Swiss? Why?”

  Lyons looked at him thoughtfully, then snorted. “Money. From the rackets. Dope. Books. Numbers. Prostitution. Fencing. Shakedowns. Suitcases full of dirty money—money that has to be made clean every day. It needs to be hidden, concealed, invested. Ha Ha and Reece gave the rackets just what they needed: a money laundry. They used a network of banks in six foreign cities that led ultimately to Switzerland in a numbered account. Absolute secrecy. Swiss bankers won’t tell. Not even our Feds can get information from them. So if you have any dirty money—from an offtrack book or from prostitution or a policy bank, or dope or union kickbacks—Ha Ha and Reece would take care of it, wash it clean in the snows of the Swiss Alps, and you get it back through your own secret Swiss account ready to invest in American business—anonymous. Untainted. Untraceable. O.K. so far?”

  “Yes,” said Basche. “Explain these scratches.”

  “Charlie Ha Ha’s laundry offered two things. Reliability. The racketeers trusted him. And absolute secrecy. He must have guaranteed there’d be no written record of any transaction—nothing the tax men could take to court.” He pointed at the floor. “So this is what caused all the commotion. Vinny Reece had a photographic memory and they used his head as a human accounting system.”

  “Come on,” said Tyler.

  “Yes. And it wasn’t so incredible. These accounts were fairly active, so he didn’t have to remember any figures for long. By constantly changing the amounts, Vinny kept the information fresh in his head. O.K.?”

  “Ingenious,” said Basche. “Go on.”

  “Well, everything was fine until Vinny discovered his memory was slipping.”

  “Slipping?”

  “Yep. That’s what wrecked the whole thing. Vinny, of course, didn’t tell anyone. First, he bought books on how to improve his memory. Then when he got really worried he began to write things down secretly. Here. Problem: When you’re at work and someone wants a number and you can’t recall it, what do you do? Stall him—right? Come home and bring the answer back later—even the next day. Just the kind of behavior that would make a cunning partner like Ha Ha suspicious. He must have figured that Reece was pulling something and hired Fleagle to scare him. When I found Vinny on the floor, he said, I can’t remember!’ Ha Ha said, ‘Reece pulled me into the grave with him.’ Can you picture that? Here you have some of the worst animals on earth for your customers—and your complete set of books dies. Dies. All that money you owe them is safely locked away in a bank where no one can ever get it again. Fantastic? That meeting at Ha Ha’s house. They were his customers, his clients, and they were naturally curious because a member of their money laundry had died —Vinny Reece. And when they get to the meeting, Ha Ha is dead. Frenzy! No Ha Ha, no records. Guaranteed by Ha Ha. No records. All that money and no way to get it.”

  “How’d you figure all this out, Lyons?” asked Basche.

  “I’m not even sure I’m right. The word ‘laundry’ finally rang a bell. So I rooted through some back issues of a financial magazine. And I found it: They ran an article on money laundering—mainly because Swiss bankers are very active in the American stock exchange with anonymous money that the Feds think is very taxable. The other word was ‘memory.’ I tried to imagine where Vinny would hide records of their financial dealings. It finally occurred to me that, with his memory, the best place to hide information was in his own head. Then I realized that the key to the whole drama was his fading memory.”

  “Fantastic,” said Tyler solemnly. “Fantastic.”

  “How does this answer your thirteen questions?”

  Lyons smiled. “Yeah. Thirteen. Let’s go look.”

  “First,” said Roger Basche, reading from a sheet. “Needle hole.”

  “Well. We know who did that. Ha Ha. He got me and he got Teresa. He must have thought we were involved in some kind of a plot with Vinny.”

  “How did he get in?”

  “Ridiculously simple. I guess Fleagle figured it out. And I figured it out the night of the windstorm. The vestibule door was banging and I was dying from being drugged and I went into the hallway and I saw how they opened the door. Watch.”

  Lyons opened the door into the hallway, then shut it behind him.

  Basche and Tyler watched the door. They heard a series of sharp raps and suddenly the whole door came off its hinges.

  “Stupid?” asked Lyons. “This dumb door opens out into the hallway. So the hasps of the hinges are there. All you need is a tool to knock the hinge pins out and you’re into my apartment—chain or no chain.”

  Joe Tyler helped him put the hinge pins back in.

  “O.K. But how did you get doped three times?”
<
br />   “Three times by Ha Ha and Fleagle.”

  “No. They’re dead,” said Tyler.

  “From the grave, Joey. From the grave.” Lyons put a jar of instant coffee on the table. “Sloppy bastards. They couldn’t even be bothered to take it with them. I could have scrambled my brains permanently—they didn’t care. Animals.”

  “You mean they drugged your powdered coffee and just left it here?”

  “There’s one question you haven’t answered,” said Basche.

  “What?”

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

  Joe Tyler rushed into the apartment, tearing the brown paper bag from two bottles of champagne. He flipped his overcoat into a ball on a chair and proceeded to worry the plastic stopper out of the bottle neck with his thumbs. The stopper exploded out of the neck and spun across the room. Tyler poured foaming champagne into three tumblers.

  “Too bad we ain’t got champagne glasses, Lyons.”

  “We’ve got something better than champagne glasses, man,” said Basche. “We’ve got champagne!”

  “Amen,” said Lyons.

  “A toast, you guys, a toast.” Tyler held his glass aloft. “To … to … us!”

  They drank to that.

  Basche shook his head. “You can do better than that, Joey.”

  “Yeah.” Tyler nodded his head. “I guess that was pretty bad. You try one.”

  “Me! I’m the man of few words. Lyons, give us a toast.”

  Lyons frowned. “I’m not going to do much better. We can’t toast Vinny or his crooked playmates. We should toast success. O.K.?”

  “Success!” cried Basche and swallowed a slug of champagne.

  “O.K., Roger,” said Tyler. “Your turn.”

  Roger Basche frowned thoughtfully. “How about—nah. O.K. I got it. How about a toast to Lyons’ fantastic brain? Long may it wave.”

  “Brain!” cried Tyler and drank. He got the bottle and poured more champagne into the glasses.

  “How about …” began Basche thoughtfully. “How about a toast to the money? How much money, Lyons, is lying on the floor up there?”

  “I thought you’d never ask. Twenty-seven accounts.”