Winter Kills

  SATURDAY NIGHT, FEBRUARY 2, 1974—NEW YORK

  Chantal Lamers seemed to have lost the skinny, pale look he remembered her having. How could he ever have thought she was skinny, he asked himself. She wasn’t merely “interesting looking” anymore either. She was an absolute gas to stare at. He began to have actively lewd thoughts as he watched her cross the restaurant to join him. Join him? More than lewd, he estimated—lewder. She was shucking off her coat as she hurried toward his table. As she leaned far forward to free her second arm, still walking, he had to grip his chair compulsively to keep himself from diving head first into her beckoning décolletage. He shook the china on the table as he arose, dismayed by an instant erection. He had lived alone too long, he decided. He dropped a napkin in front of himself in a gesture of diffidence, not to say personal daintiness—as a matador might work with a cape—but not in time. Miss Lamers was a fly-watcher. Most women were fly-watchers, but Miss Lamers was a fly-starer. She had seen it, hefted it mentally, and the experience allowed her to feel all the happier about everything.

  You are involved in multiple grisly murders, he told himself. It is your responsibility to convince this woman that the essence of American history is within the grasp of her journalism, so that she will lead the way to the topmost reaches of the management of her magazine and possibly bring to justice a man who has killed more people than Landru, and yet he was peeking down the front of her dress and manufacturing erections.

  She wore a tiny nile-green patch where the unsightly bandage had been. She wore matching eye makeup, and that startled him, because he knew that women who wear eye makeup and ankle bracelets were usually just as unaccountably lewd as he was. He had thought of her as being far more serious than that. He wanted to notice whether her dress gave her any of the thirty-one hundred extras that the work of Madame Grès conferred on Yvette Malone, but he could not bear to take his eyes away from that neckline.

  He was appalled to realize that the urgency of being with Yvette Malone was disappearing from his mind with the speed of the evanescence of the Cheshire cat. What disturbed his deepest sense of self, his image of what he was and had always been to himself, however, was that seventy minutes after a man with a gun had been determined to throw him out of a skyscraper window, he could pursue such lascivious thoughts, pursue them as a groupie pursues an employed rock singer. Then he knew he should not have thought of the man with the gun. It was spoiling everything. Instantly he lost the erection. He felt like a living Indian rope trick.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Thirkield?”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you. I did feel a little odd for a moment. Perhaps I stood up too quickly.”

  “Your face seems a little swollen too,” she said.

  “I ran into a door.”

  “How marvelous that you were able to come to New York so soon.” Her Muskogee accent was fruity and gorgeous. She talked like a field hand in Gone with the Wind, which he had seen in Bhutan.

  “Something to drink?” he murmured.

  “A Gibson, please.”

  “Two Gibsons,” Nick told the table captain, even though he deplored gin. People who drank gin simply walked differently. The captain departed on the run, because Mr. Thirkield’s father owned the restaurant.

  They dined on fillets of brill poached and glazed in Mornay sauce; coq au vin cooked in La Gaffelière ’61. They finished a vanilla soufflé with pieces of biscuit soaked in kirsch and anisette. The food was so good they talked less than they thought they would. The wine was so good that they talked more than Miss Lamers thought she should. Nick had a marvelous time: the bodice, that slack red cushion of a mouth, the food and her anecdotes—about actors, jockeys and politicians (including several racy ones about the late President Kegan)—all built his euphoria. “You must know two thousand people more than I’ll ever know,” Nick said.

  “I never met those people,” Miss Lamers murmured. “It’s just that I usually take my lunch to the office and eat it in our file room, which has all kinds of stuff we can’t print about people like that.”

  “I’d sure like to read the file on Tim Kegan,” Nick said.

  “Are you a Kegan admirer?”

  “He was my half brother.”

  Miss Lamers dropped a spoon. “Oh, dear God,” she said, “and there I was ruffling my mouth with those awful stories about him.” She blushed like a peony. “I am just terribly embarrassed.”

  “Oh, please! No. He would have loved those stories—that is, those particular stories. Anyway, Tim is why we’re having dinner—in a way. I mean, when you hear what it is, you’ll know the story is important. It is so important that before I start I’ll have to ask you to keep total silence on it—that is, until my father and I say you can print it.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes. Is that okay?”

  “I—well, I guess so.”

  “The story concerns the fact that I talked with the man who fired the second rifle at my brother’s assassination. In a way, considering the findings of the Pickering Commission, you could call it the third rifle. That’s enough to start with, isn’t it?”

  “My God, yes.”

  “I’d like to talk to your editor. If we can reach a written understanding that the story is mine, that it belongs only to me under the protection of common-law copyright, I will tell him everything I have found out about my brother’s murder.”

  “This is simply fantastic, Mr. Thirkield.” Her large eyes got larger. He noticed that they were violet. He had read that actresses were supposed to have violet eyes, but this was too much.

  “There is also a woman’s angle. I mean, there is a woman involved with the assassination team.”

  She suddenly got pale with excitement. “I’ll call my editor right now,” she said. She walked out of the dining room rapidly.

  ***

  The hire car drove them to the National Magazine building. She held his hand tensely in the car all the way across town. She smelled very good. They walked hurriedly across the plaza to the building’s night entrance. Miss Lamers signed them in. They rode up to the main editorial floor. It was ten fifty-two, the reception-area clock said.

  The office of the managing editor, Harry Greenwood, was totally bare and functional, with a desk, two chairs, a picture of the founder on the wall and sealed windows. Greenwood was a tall, almost languid man, younger than Nick, with an elaborate Harvard Yard accent. His working uniform was less than severe, because, he explained, he had been at home across town when Miss Lamers had telephoned. He had just gotten there before them. The stitching around his lapels seemed tattooed on. Nick feared to look down in case he might find two-toned shoes. Before he shook hands with Nick, Greenwood paused to rinse his hands with Guerlain’s cologne from a large cut-glass bottle.

  “Please sit down,” he said. It was an unctuous voice. “Miss Lamers told me what you have in mind, Mr. Thirkield, and I am greatly excited. I took the liberty of sending down for some photographs of you, just to be sure we were talking to the right man—so that is quite satisfactory. How does this letter agreement look to you? Are you warm enough? Would you like a drink?” He slid the magazine’s letterhead across the bare desk. Nick studied it. He passed it back and nodded. Greenwood signed both copies. Miss Lamers signed as witness. Nick folded his copy and slid it into his inside pocket. “We have evidence to prove,” he said, “that the Pickering Report is all wet.”

  “Prove?” Greenwood said.

  “We think we have enough evidence to go to the President and ask that the investigation be reopened.” It occurred to Nick vaguely that he was overreacting to his distaste for Greenwood by being maybe a little too sweeping in his statements.

  “Is there any way we can help you?”

  “That’s why I’m here, actually. We’ve come to an area where we need help.”

  “What’s the area?”

  “Organized crime. For starters, I’d like to see everything you have on Joe Diamond.”

  “Well, sur
e. We’re loaded on Diamond. If we aren’t, we should be.”

  “I have to know where he came from—which geographical area of national crime. We think someone who knew him from the old days came to him in Philadelphia with what they call the ‘contract’ to have my brother killed. We think that if we can find out who dug up Diamond for the organizer of the assassination, we’ll be able to buy from them—in one way or another—the names of the people who came to them.”

  “Very logical,” Greenwood said.

  “My God, yes,” Miss Lamers chimed.

  “Get the Diamond files, please, Miss Lamers,” Greenwood directed. She left the room with the speed of a bird.

  “I was a great admirer of your brother,” Greenwood said nasally.

  “Everyone was,” Nick said.

  “What was he really like?” Greenwood asked after a few minutes of silence.

  “He had wit and wisdom,” Nick said. Miss Lamers returned with a stack of three thick file folders which she handed to Greenwood.

  “Newspaper clips,” Greenwood said and flopped the folder on the desk. “Post-arrest stuff.” He dropped the second file. “Personal. This is the one. Read through it. Take your time. We’ll go out and see if we can find some coffee.” He handed the file to Nick. Greenwood and Miss Lamers left the room.

  Nick went through it slowly. Joe Diamond had started as a hanger-on with the Cleveland Syndicate. The Syndicate, which had begun in the pre-World War I period, had originally been partly the Mayfield Road mob (Sicilian) and partly the Purple Gang of Detroit (Jewish). These two Cleveland elements combined with an Irish group in 1913 when a brawling circulation war began between two Cleveland newspapers, the News and the Plain Dealer. The Mayfield Road mob worked for the News. It kept them in training for the big upcoming opportunities of Prohibition. The gang congregated in the Woodlands section of Cleveland, where 213 murders were committed between 1918 and 1930, and where 98 houses of prostitution flourished. Yussel Schell, a/k/a Joe Diamond, was a Woodlands boy born in 1910, just too late to cash in on the big Prohibition action but ready to learn his trade in the Depression years when he worked for the Syndicate as a bouncer in gambling joints and doing collection work on the Ohio-Kentucky border. According to the file, at about the time World War II ended he went back to work for Samuel “Gameboy” Baker, whom he’d worked for in the Syndicate, this time as assistant muscle (and the boss’s gunsel, which doesn’t mean what it sounds like) at the Lookout House near Covington, Kentucky, and, in the winter season, at the Island Club in Miami Beach.

  Gameboy Baker, until Frank Heller came along, was Diamond’s lifetime idol. He tried to model everything he did on Gameboy’s example in every way. Gameboy taught him that cops were terrific people—strong, action men, and if you were always on the right side of the cops they could do plenty for you. He also took pains to explain that you should never admit to making more than 35 percent of what you were actually making if you were working with cops, because they always tried to take as much as they could get. Joe took Gameboy literally. He came. To love cops. Gameboy said that about Joe and always got a laugh. It is hard to say what made Joe Diamond so crazy about Gameboy Baker. Gameboy was a schmuck.

  The four Cleveland fellows who owned the Syndicate, with an outstanding assist from two Sicilians, were Jews operating in Cleveland, Canada, Kentucky, Ohio, Florida and Arizona. Nobody else in the business operated with a spread like that. They were pumping out real money in Arizona when everybody was looking at Vegas—not that they have stopped. Joe Diamond left the Syndicate in Tucson to join Lansky’s operation in Cuba, which kept him in Cuba straight through the war, because he made some solid political contacts there who put him into the narcotics industry. Sometime in the early fifties Diamond came up with a bundle and opened a restaurant and a bar in Philadelphia, influenced by the glamour of Gameboy Baker’s development of the famous Odeon Grill in Vincent Street in Cleveland, which was, and still is, the place to eat.

  When Greenwood and Miss Lamers came back Nick said, “Well, it’s a line, I guess. He started in Cleveland, so I should start there too.”

  “Let me talk to our people in the morning,” Greenwood said. “We have the best people in the country on organized crime.”

  “Can I call you about eleven?” Miss Lamers asked Nick demurely.

  “We can pinpoint this thing,” Greenwood said. “This is an area I know we can deliver on.” Greenwood and Nick shook hands good night. Miss Lamers and Nick left the building together, he mumbling that he would take her home. She protested that she could easily get a taxi. “While I have a car and a driver?” he said. “Don’t be silly.”

  She gave the driver an address on East Thirty-first Street. “Please call me Chantal,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s my name!”

  “Oh. I see. How pretty. Means pertaining to song, doesn’t it?”

  “Just as Nicholas pertains to Santa Claus, doesn’t it? My mother was French, and that’s what she called me.”

  “My mother was from Utica, New York.”

  As the car rolled down Park Avenue she said, “I’ve never been on a story as big as this. This story has become the most romantic thing that could happen to me.”

  “You must have been about fourteen when they killed Tim.”

  “Ho-ho.”

  “Well, I hope you get a raise and a chair of journalism at Harvard out of it. You’ve been very helpful to my father and me.”

  “It’s very easy to be helpful to you.” She stared at him wide-eyed. He had a very clear feeling that things were going to happen if she played her cards right.

  “I’m very glad to hear that,” he said huskily, then he cleared his throat involuntarily and the sexy effect was gone. “I hope we’ll be working very closely together.”

  “You’re so tan,” she murmured. “God, it’s gorgeous.”

  “It’s really occupational.”

  “I see you on the bridge of a ship scanning the horizon through narrowed eyes, seeking something, perhaps someone who you and you alone know is waiting for you over the edge of the world.” She blinked. “I certainly hope we will be working closely together.”

  “There will be a lot of traveling on this story.”

  “And a lot of danger?”

  “Perhaps. But not for you.”

  “I can’t get over how—out of all the people in the world—we came together for this. Where were you a week ago today?”

  “Brisbane. Australia.”

  “Brisbane! The Coral Sea. Stone fish. Captain Cook sweeping north through that treacherous channel.”

  “I’m really not up on the area.”

  “You crossed the world from the Coral Sea to find me in Oklahoma. If—and I accent and emphasize that ‘if’—those two men had not forced me off the road—”

  “I hope they got those guys.”

  “But we were meant to be. Weren’t we meant to be, Nick?”

  “I’d say definitely.”

  She sighed like a cello. Nick had to take his hat off and place it over his erection this time. It was all beginning to make him nervous. He had just proposed marriage to an entirely different woman, and he had been all torn up when she turned him down. What had happened to that emotion? He was being inconsistent. He was responding disloyally. It was the sort of thing that Tim might have done.

  “Uh—what kind of a fellow is Greenwood?”

  “Who?”

  “Your editor.”

  “Oh, fine. Harry is fine.”

  “I suppose it’s a pretty close relationship—writer and editor.”

  “On some things, yes.”

  The car stopped at Chantal’s apartment house. They sat there for a few seconds in a mock absent, undecided sort of way. Nick discovered he was holding her hand.

  “Won’t you come up for a drink?” Chantal said.

  “Thank you. I’d like a drink very much.”

  They got out of the car with elaborate movements. They wa
lked together to the entrance of the towering apartment building, then Nick stopped and turned. “I’ll have to tell the driver how long he’ll have to wait,” he said. Chantal caught his sleeve calmly and unnoticeably. “Why don’t you just send him home?” she murmured, eyes appropriately cast down. Nick cleared his throat again and ran lightly back to the car. “I’ll call the garage if I need a car,” he told the driver. “’Night, now.”

  Chantal’s apartment was attractive, unexpectedly not like her at all, done in chrome-and-glass Italian modern—low, blocky, impossible furniture, with a lot of mauve and light green everywhere, and a blanketing smell of pot hanging over all. Before Chantal disappeared she put a large goblet of Yugoslavian red wine into his hand. He decided to concentrate on his own disapproval of Tim and the way he had leaped from woman to woman to woman. He had spent six weeks at the hospital under the care of Keith Lee complaining bitterly about all the ass Tim had managed to get, and when he had exhausted himself on the subject, naming the names of women who were absolute pillars of the national establishment, Keith had “explained” Tim’s commitment to exchanging old bodies for new. Nick reasoned that the worst thing that could happen to him, especially after a year of such intensive psychotherapy, would be if he allowed himself to conduct his life as Tim had done. Not that he could deny himself sex totally. That would be carrying a silly compulsion ridiculously far.

  He had never really discovered if he was like Tim. He was here, in this woman’s drug-fumed apartment. He hardly knew her, but just the same, in about fifteen minutes he was going to be lying absolutely naked on a bed beside her. If he loved Yvette, could he have put himself in such a spot? Did he and Tim have so much in common as half brothers that he really had no control over his disloyalty to the woman he loved? At least Tim hadn’t been disloyal. After his brief marriage he had never committed himself to any woman. Keith Lee had said, “As in the song, Tim was a motherless child. The operative word for Tim’s endless excursions into endless vaginas—that long tunnel in which there is no light—is ‘seeking.’ He was endlessly searching for Mama. Of course he couldn’t find her, but he peered closely into almost every woman he met. Because it is a tremendous distinction, a tremendous thing to have over other women, to screw the President of the United States, Tim got to do even more searching than other men with his problem. No matter how much they appeared to look like his dear mama’s photograph, his search was still never satisfied. When a search is never satisfied, it must continue, because the point of the search is that it fail. Of course if he found a mama, sex with her would be forbidden anyway, and that is the point of the whole search and what makes it endless.”