Winter Kills

  “Do I sign something?”

  Frey took the papers from his pocket and a large black fountain pen. She signed without reading the paper. “Don’t let my kids know about this, Fritz.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “That’s right.”

  They walked toward the front door. “We’re talking about moving to Arizona,” Myrtle said. “The kids want it.”

  “Year-round sunshine.”

  “Frank is all over this place, except he isn’t here.”

  “He was a man.”

  “He was a great man,” Myrtle said.

  “Oh—there’s just one other thing. I wonder if I could pick up the rifle Frank brought home last Wednesday? They need it down at the lab.”

  She looked at him oddly. “Don’t you remember, Fritz? You sent for it Thursday morning.”

  “The rifle?”

  “It was a patrol-car cop. A skinny little guy named Marek, with a weak handshake.”

  They stared at each other.

  “Fritz—did I do wrong to let him take the rifle?”

  ***

  With Nick, Frey played back the cassette tape at police headquarters.

  HELLER: Come in. Shut the door. Hands against the wall, please. Lean on the hands…. Sit down here please…. Coffee?

  WOMAN: No coffee.

  HELLER: What can I do for you?

  WOMAN: You called Mr. Casper. You said you had the rifle. I came here to buy the rifle.

  HELLER: Good.

  WOMAN: I would have thought we had been more than generous.

  HELLER: You were fine. But this is a separate transaction.

  WOMAN: How much?

  HELLER: What is it worth to you?

  WOMAN: It doesn’t matter. No matter what I say you’ll say it’s not enough.

  HELLER: Try me.

  WOMAN: Five thousand dollars.

  HELLER: Not enough.

  WOMAN: All right then. Five thousand and one dollars.

  HELLER: You have committed a federal offense here. The death penalty for a federal offense depends on the mode of execution of the state in which the offense was committed. In Pennsylvania we use electrocution.

  WOMAN: How much do you want?

  HELLER: I will bring the rifle tonight to Hunt Plaza at eleven. [There is the sound of a knock on the door.] Come in. [Door opens. Sound of cups rattling on a tray.] Ah—coffee and schnecken. Thank you, Myrtle.

  MYRTLE: You’re welcome, dear. [Sound of door closing.]

  HELLER: So—Hunt Plaza at eleven. We will meet under the railway bridge. You will hand me twenty-five thousand dollars cash. I will hand you the rifle.

  WOMAN: That’s a lot of money for a rifle.

  HELLER: It’s a lot of money for anything.

  WOMAN: I think I will have some coffee. No—please! Let me pour it…. Let me freshen yours…. My God! It’s a quarter to twelve, and I have to get to the bank if I’m going to buy that rifle.

  HELLER: As you wish, dear lady.

  [Recording is terminated.]

  Nick asked for a copy of the tape, then the Commissioner asked if Heller and the woman had been talking about what he thought they were talking about.

  “They were haggling over the price for the rifle used to murder my brother, Commissioner Frey.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Frey said sadly. “Frank finally overpriced himself.”

  “May we have copies of the two tapes filed for Mr. William Casper?”

  “You can have copies and voice prints on all of them, Mr. Thirkield. And a copy of the autopsy report.”

  “Maybe you’d better include the autopsy reports on the Engelson Building manager and John Kullers.”

  SATURDAY NIGHT, FEBRUARY 2, 1974—NEW YORK

  He took the train to New York. When he got there it was a wet, cold winter evening. He was baffled by the emergence of a Mrs. Casper who had left the antilife substance in Heller’s coffee. Just by showing up out of nowhere she had widened the inquiry. He had to pass all of this along to Pa for Professor Cerutti, Pa’s house mastermind.

  There were many more people than taxis at Penn Station. He did not have the courage to roam the streets looking for a cab. He waited for ten minutes before he understood that he was going to have to fight for a cab to get one. He fought off three men (who had body-blocked two women), made it into a cab, slammed the door and locked it instantly. There was no thought in anyone’s mind that he should have offered to share the cab, because everyone there knew that everyone else there was probably a homicidal maniac who carried a concealed ice pick that would flash out and pin the cab-sharer’s heart to the back of the seat. The driver, locked inside a steel compartment behind the wheel, didn’t want to know who rode, who killed whom or who didn’t. Everything but the street traffic hurried across the funeral parlor of the western world in taut silence and with frightened faces. Even with the doors locked and a good grip on the blackjack bestowed by his father, Nick sweated out the passage to the protected inner zone of the city, where no junkies were permitted to wander around unless they had an assured source of supply.

  He felt locked in the ultimate stasis on concentric levels of self and civilization. He responded against the savagery and the threat of the city automatically: he moved out within his mind to defy his father. To throw off the threat of collective insanity from the most dangerous place in the world he hacked at the central suffocation of his life—his father.

  He wasn’t aware of how his mind was reacting, but Nick was so committed to impressing Pa with his intelligence and efficiency, his daring and skill, that he compromised in his mind with what his father had not wanted him to do, telling himself he had to do it to get results, that there was no other way: he decided to bring the press into the investigation. He was certain that he could make a written agreement with them at the outset that would control them. He reasoned that he would be able to control them until Pa could be brought to see why the cooperation of the press was necessary and give his permission to let them publish.

  Nick decided he could negotiate press assistance on a copyright basis. It would be his story. He would lease the story to them with explicit conditions.

  He had to do it, he told himself. Lieutenant Doty had said the Syndicate had found Joe Diamond for whoever had paid to have Tim killed. Nick had only the vaguest idea of what the Syndicate was; he supposed it was another way of saying “Mafia” and labeling organized crime. If the Syndicate had agreed to provide a man to do the killing, then it followed that they knew who had asked them to find the killer. As impenetrable as the situation had seemed a few hours before, he now saw that all he had to do was to find a way to reach the Syndicate, whatever that might be. The press knew such people. Until the woman from the National Magazine had had her car accident, Nick hadn’t known any part of the press, but he knew someone now.

  Mr. Zendt, the managing director of Pa’s hotel, took Nick personally to the family apartment, a three-story penthouse in the tower of the hotel. It was an extraordinary apartment at the very center of the mire of twenty-five million people and all of their lights. And Pa believed in comfort most after matters of money and power had been settled. The colors of the apartment soothed: muted ivory against pale orange, green and soft blue. There was a living room that was three stories tall; a dining room, library, a large foyer and kitchen on the main floor; four bedrooms, four baths and two studies on the upper floors. The first-floor study, with blue walls and white woodwork, had another installation of Pa’s replicas of the White House telephone system, by which, he bragged, he could reach anyone in the world who was lolling about near their phone within six minutes. Pa had stolen all the records and systems of the White House switchboard, including every public, private and hideout telephone number of some six thousand people in the world. Pa bragged that he could reach the Metropolitan of the Russian Church during Mass through a phone in the tabernacle.

  Nick knew that as soon as he arrived at the desk in the lobby of the
hotel Pa would be flashed on the special equipment so that he could know Nick was in residence in New York. “Information is the key to everything,” Pa taught. The thought made Nick sweat. Suppose Pa had the whole place bugged? Why was he supposing? Of course Pa would have it bugged. That meant (a) no meetings with the press at the apartment and (b) he would be crazy to invite Yvette Malone up into one these bedrooms, because she was so operatically vocal in the sack. Therefore, when Mr. Zendt asked whether Nick would like to have a cook while he was in residence, Nick declined; no entertaining. God, what a waste, he thought.

  A man came to unpack him and to take out his clothes to be pressed. Two chambermaids turned down the beds in Tim’s beige and brown room, which had one green velvet chair and one green leather chair into which Pa had had screwed commemorative tabs establishing that Tim had sat in his own two chairs.

  Nick put in a call to Jake Lanham in Brunei. While he waited for it, he walked aimlessly around the room, staring out at the rare beauty of the city when seen at night from a height of seven hundred feet. The view made him thirsty. Remarkable things could happen in buildings in which Pa stayed, because he had the foresight to own everything. He called down for a bottle of Montrachet ’59, a dry white wine of which the Vicomte Henri d’Emmet had said it caused one “to be drunk on one’s knees, with the head bared,” but of which the Vicomtesse d’Emmet (to some the greater authority) had recorded, “Very great, but the very best makes the veins swell like whipcord.”

  By the time he had spoken to Jake Lanham he had drunk a third of the bottle and felt himself to be one-third wider and one-half longer. Jake was willing to stay on, managing Brunei, with a 20 percent raise (less than Nick had paid Keifetz). Then Lanham said that Keifetz had died thirty-five hundred dollars light in petty cash. Gulping, Nick said that was “all right.” He was thinking of asking Lanham if he’d like to take Carswell’s job in London, but after hearing news like that, he decided he didn’t dislike Carswell quite so much.

  After another glass of wine he couldn’t stand being separated from Yvette Malone any longer, so he called her. Maddeningly, she was not at her apartment. He told her answering service to tell her to call him. If she didn’t want to get married, what the hell, they wouldn’t get married. He sipped at the wine, then hoping it wasn’t too late for magazine office hours—but it was the only way he knew to reach her—he suddenly called Chantal Lamers at her desk number at the National Magazine.

  Chantal Lamers was happy—he was even willing to estimate that she was very happy to hear from him. She would be stimulated and delighted to have dinner with him. They agreed on the Canopy for eight thirty, just about two hours ahead. The moment he disconnected, the switchboard flashed again. It was Pa.

  “What are you doing in New York?” Pa asked.

  “I wanted to see a friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “Oh. A friend. Well, the agency confirms that Turk Fletcher worked for the National Rifle Association, and they will get us photographs of him. No line on Casper in Dallas. Did you know your pal Keifetz clipped us for thirty-five hundred bucks?”

  “How did you know that?” Nick gasped.

  “I keep in touch, kid.”

  “Well, Keifetz didn’t clip anybody. I authorized the withdrawal.”

  “Like hell you did.” Pa hung up. Nick felt himself swelling up with rage, although it was probably the Vicomtesse d’Emmet’s prognosis for people who drank too much Montrachet. He called down for a car and driver to pick him up at eight fifteen. He thought of ordering a car to pick up Chantal Lamers, but he decided he didn’t know her well enough.

  He felt a little drunk. He decided to take hot and cold showers. He thought about sending out for some tanked oxygen or maybe some propranolol, because he had to be sharp for Lamers if he were going to maintain control of the press. He started for the stairway to go to the upstairs bedroom when the doorbell rang. He shook his head, took a deep breath and went to the door. He opened it on a large, bulky man wearing a Chesterfield overcoat, a blue woolen scarf and a bowler hat who was pointing a pistol at his stomach. The man jabbed the barrel of the pistol into him and backed him across the entrance hall, kicking the door shut behind him. “Don’t talk,” the beef-cheeked man said. “There is nothing to talk about. You are going out that window.” He had a pronounced British accent.

  Nick leaped to the wall at his right. He pressed the alarm button that the Secret Service had installed for Tim within the columns of the decorative paneling. Rapid bells and heavy gongs began sounding simultaneously. A full-throated siren began to moan. The bulky man took his eyes off Nick in astonished panic, as though he could not shoot him because his orders had been to thrust him out the window. Nick threw a bronze bookend from a recessed shelf. It struck the man at the side of his bowler hat and sent him staggering backward into the wall. Nick lunged for the man’s gun wrist, holding it with both hands, forcing it downward. The man dropped the gun and hit Nick heavily in the face with a long, left-side swing, then dropped him to his knees, screaming, by applying deep pressure with his powerful left hand to a nerve terminal in Nick’s elbow. Nick let go the man’s wrist. The man kicked him in the right temple, spun around, opened the front door through all the noises of the alarms, and sprinted down the hall. Nick lay there unconscious for fifty seconds or so until a swarm of house security officers, followed by Mr. Zendt, came pounding down the hall into the flat. The whole assault had taken less than two minutes.

  They walked Nick around the room while he said to Mr. Zendt, “My father wouldn’t want anyone to know about this, Mr. Zendt.”

  “Not a word, sir.”

  “Do we even have to tell the police about it?”

  “He left a gun, Mr. Thirkield,” the chief security officer said. “We have to report the whole thing.”

  “But the police are cooperative,” Mr. Zendt said. “And you’d goddam well better make sure of that, Flicker.”

  “Mr. Thirkield is gunna have to talk to them,” Flicker said.

  “I have a meeting at eight thirty,” Nick said. “If they can get here in time for me to make the meeting, I’ll be happy to talk to them.”

  “Otherwise tomorrow?” Flicker asked wistfully.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  The telephone rang. “That would be my father,” Nick said. “He has heard about the attack no doubt.” He walked unsteadily away from them, then turned to ask if Mr. Zendt would have another bottle of wine sent up. If it affected the meeting with the National Magazine, too bad. He needed it.

  He closed the door of the study and picked up the phone. “Yes, Pa?” he said automatically. It was Pa. It wasn’t Yvette.

  “Did they nail the son-of-a-bitch? He must be somewhere in the goddam building.” Nick figured that the British hit man must have called Pa himself to make sure he was filled in.

  “Not yet. He wore a derby hat and sounded like he came from London.”

  “London?”

  “Carswell probably sent him.”

  “No jokes, kid. This is very bad. I don’t give a goddam what you say, we are putting a security team on you.”

  “All right, Pa.”

  “How did you fight off a professional with a gun? I can’t tell you what a terrific feeling it gives me that you actually saved yourself by fighting off an armed man.”

  “Thanks, Pa.”

  “I don’t want the cops giving this to the papers. Leave it to me.”

  “Pa, something very big happened in Philadelphia this afternoon. I drove out with Commissioner Frey to Heller’s house to look for the gun. We didn’t find it, but we got voice prints William Casper and a woman who calls herself Mrs. Casper made in Heller’s office. He was one of those nuts who records everything. But the thing is, all of a sudden there is a woman in this case. A woman in her middle thirties with silver hair, Mrs. Heller says, and Commissioner Frey is sending copies of the tapes to you so that Cerutti can analyze them.”


  “You are absolutely terrific, Nick.”

  Nick felt the glow beginning at his toes and starting upward. “It just happened to happen, Pa,” he said.

  “Well, I am telling you that you are solving this case.” Pa hung up. When Nick returned to the big room only Mr. Zendt was waiting.

  “Was it your father?” he asked nervously.

  “Yes. He just wondered if we had caught the gunman, that’s all.”

  “We’ll have him within the hour, Mr. Thirkield.”

  “The hour?”

  “We have only two floors of rooms and suites for transients. The rest are all leased apartments. In order to get up here the man would have had to check in to one of the transient accommodations or he would have had to ask at the desk for someone who had an apartment and who would clear him with the desk before he could get upstairs. The security officers are making the check on the transient rooms first. They think he returned to one of them to wait until a chance came to get out of the building. In the meantime, Mr. Thirkield, we have these photographs taken of people who checked into the hotel in the past forty-eight hours or who inquired at the desk to call on a tenant in the building.”

  “You photograph people who check in?”

  “We photograph anybody who enters the lobby. If he goes to the desk we also record him to synchronize with the photos. Your father insists on this.”

  Nick pulled the seventh picture from the top of the stack. “That’s the man,” he said. Mr. Zendt turned the photo over. “He checked in at six forty-five yesterday evening. We had a reservation from a travel agency in Malta.”

  “Malta?”

  “We’ll get him. It is as hard to get out of this building as it is to get in.”

  The wine arrived. The city detectives came in right behind it. Nick reidentified the photograph of the man, said he had British speech and probably a bruised head, while Mr. Zendt talked to the front desk and came up with information that the man had registered as Martin Keys and that he had a British passport. The police took the gun and left to work with the hotel security on a comb-out of the apartments in the building. A house physician appeared. He pressed a sedative on Nick, but Nick had a glass of Montrachet instead.