Winter Kills

  “But we are vouching for the quality of Mentor’s information. You would be paying out fifteen thousand only on our say-so.”

  “I knew I’d have to pay somebody something. What’s the difference? This way I’ll be paying with confidence.”

  Chantal sighed. “All right, then. I hope this doesn’t get Harry Greenwood angry.”

  “If it does, you tell me.”

  “Thanks. The next thing is—I’ve been assigned to the story and to you. We’ll be traveling together.”

  “No.”

  Chantal was shocked and hurt. “No?”

  “Listen, Chantal. A lot of people have died because they got too close to this story. Anyway, Mentor wouldn’t talk if you got into the car, because you’d be what they call in his business a corroborating witness. You stay here for this one, and you can interview me with a tape machine when I get back.”

  “Suppose you don’t get back? What happens to the story then?” Her voice was coldly professional. “You are closer to all the facts than anyone alive. If anybody is killed, your name should be at the top of the list.”

  “When you come right down to it,” Nick said, “I’m the only one they won’t kill—not yet anyhow.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have passed everything I know—and all the evidence I have piled up—along to my father. If I got killed that would be the capper. The President would be absolutely forced to reopen the case, my father would set up such a hue and cry.”

  “Then, in good faith, I think we should spend the afternoon right here, and you should spill everything you know about the case, down to the smallest detail, into a tape recorder so the magazine will have the story when, as, and if anything happens to you.”

  “That wasn’t the deal I made,” Nick said. “First, the magazine helps me to run down the people who located Diamond for the killers. When that is all sorted out, then we sit down and work out the whole story.”

  She put her arms around his neck and kissed his throat softly. “Don’t do any part of it,” she said. “Don’t go to Cleveland, and to hell with the story. Your brother is dead and nothing can bring him back. I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you. God, you could be tortured if they think they have to find out all you know.” Dropping her arms, she clung to his crotch with fear and devotion. He laid her on the floor as if she were a department-store dummy. Then he laid her—on the floor.

  SUNDAY NIGHT, FEBRUARY 3, 1974—NEW YORK

  Pa’s gargantuan hospital, whose lab threw off such great figures, towered considerably higher along the East River, north of the Queensborough Bridge, than the white cliffs of Dover. Pa had settled down in a three-room suite, the equivalent of the owner’s cabin on an ocean liner but more luxurious. He had a duplicate of his White House switchboard, with its eighteen direct lines, installed beside his bed. There was no smell of iodoform in Pa’s suite. There was a gentling scent of Jolie Madame which Pa sprayed on his two nurses three times a day. For decoration, the Metropolitan had sent four important pieces—two paintings and two sculptures. There was a magnificent vaseful of two dozen long-stemmed roses from the directors of the hospital. But most decorative of all were the two nurses, Eve and Rose, beautiful young women with brave, starched white caps and great big knockers. One of them was reading to Pa from Barron’s Weekly, the other was feeding him grapes, when Nick arrived. Pa seemed so content that Nick could hear the regret in his voice when he asked Eve and Rose to leave him with his son.

  “How’d you like to climb one of those, kid?” he asked when they left.

  Nick shrugged.

  “How did the magazine meeting go?”

  “I have a meeting in Cleveland at eleven tonight with a man named Irving Mentor who is at the top of the Syndicate.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Why should you?”

  “Nick, when I say ‘even you,’ I am reaching away out to the edge of the world, right? But even you may have heard of Frank Mayo. Did you ever hear of him, Nick?”

  “Certainly. Frank Mayo, the grand vizier of the underworld.”

  “Do you know of a bigger hood?”

  “I don’t know any others.”

  “Frank Mayo will be here in about ten minutes. We’ll ask him about Irving Mentor.”

  “Gee, Pa, how come?”

  “Because I’ve been in the whiskey business and a few other businesses since the twenties. Frank was my partner in a lot of things. Punks who were street-corner hustlers when I was a big man with these guys are now big bosses. That’s the ‘Gee, Pa, how come.’”

  “Who don’t you know?” Nick asked with a sudden flash of hatred.

  “Well, I don’t know you, kid, but it doesn’t throw me, because you don’t either.”

  “If the National Magazine says Mentor is a big man, then he has to be a big man in crime,” Nick said.

  “Would you ask Frank Mayo to recommend a newsstand? It’s the same thing. Business is business. Frank knows. Those punks wouldn’t know a Syndicate executive from Mary Miles Minter.”

  Eve popped her head into the room. “Mr. Mayo is here, Mr. Kegan,” she said gaily.

  “Send him in,” Pa said.

  Salvatore Verdigerri, a/k/a Frank Mayo, a/k/a Frank Brown, was a flawlessly dressed man in elegant charcoal-gray flannel, with a carefully knotted black knitted Mafia tie and immaculate fingernails without polish. He sounded perpetually hoarse, as if he spent the mornings bawling out police captains at the top of his voice. He had quiet assurance and the gift of geniality. He could have been about five years younger than Pa, Nick thought. Of the two men Nick would have found it far easier to believe that Pa was the criminal, Frank Mayo the tycoon.

  Pa became manically hospitable. He directed Mayo to a wicker chair. He introduced Nick. He asked how Mr. Mayo had liked the two nurses, Eve and Rose. Then he said, “Frank, wait’ll you hear this. I got an actual salame de felino and a culatello di Zibello from Parma, direct from Parma, and fifteen pounds of grana from Montecchio—absolutely gorronteed straveccione—just like the old days.”

  “How? How did you get it?” Mayo asked with amazement.

  “Interest is the key to life,” Pa said. “I sent a man over in my own plane with a blank check and he came back with it. But that ain’t all, Frank. I got a whole case of Brunello de Montalccino 1945. Right here.”

  “Holy Jesus.”

  Eve and Rose came trooping in with tea carts loaded with slices of salame and culatello, oblong hunks of parmigiano cheese, glasses and three opened bottles of red wine.

  “Holy Jesus,” Mr. Mayo said again. “Don’t tell anybody I’m so crazy about this kind of food, because I’m supposed to be a Sicilian.” His voice was really so coarsely hoarse that he might have had a touch of syphilis of the larynx. He took a bite of the cheese very daintily, staring at Pa while he chewed it. “That has got to be eight, ten years old,” he said. “I don’t know where you can get eight-year-old parmigiano even in Parma, fahcrissakes.”

  “I’m going to send you a wheel of it,” Pa said. The nurses poured the wine and the men sipped it reverently. “Eat!” Mr. Mayo said to Nick. “Jesus, just try that culatello.”

  Nick dug in.

  “That’s some glassa wine—right, Mr. Thirkield?” Mr. Mayo said to Nick.

  “I’ll accept a case,” Nick said, and that broke Mr. Mayo up. When he recovered he said, “What’s on your mind, Mr. Kegan?”

  “Frank, I am going to tell you something that I will not tell to anybody else—and you know what a tight trap I have.”

  “Go ahead, Mr. Kegan.”

  “Nick and I are on the trail of the bastards who killed my boy, Tim.”

  “Son-of-a-bitch!”

  “Okay, Frank, did you ever hear of a pezzo da novanta in the Syndicate named Irving Mentor?”

  “Mentor?”

  “M-e-n-t-o-r. Irving.”

  “No. Never. A pezzo da novanta? Never. And I am two hunnert percent sure.” He glared at Nick
to defy him.

  “Frank, this is very close to me.”

  “Look, Mr. Kegan—there could be like a coffee-runner who works for some paperhanger who has a son who is like maybe a barber who cuts hair for Syndicate fellas, but, believe me, there is no pezzo da novanta name of Irving Mentor—believe me, I am telling you.”

  “This is the straight story, Frank. Somebody in Cleveland gave the contract to Joe Diamond to hit my son Tim—your President.”

  Nick blinked.

  Mayo and Pa stared at each other. Mr. Mayo poured another glass of wine. Looking at the glass, he sighed very lightly before he spoke again. “You always hear about these things too late. I knew about it right after. But it wasn’t a business thing. They did it on their own.”

  “Frank—I’m with you,” Pa said. “But now my son needs to talk to the man who gave Joe Diamond the contract, because he will know who paid the bills.”

  “Mr. Mayo,” Nick said, “if you are talking to Cleveland, maybe you could ask who this Irving Mentor is.”

  “Who told you about him?”

  “The National Magazine.”

  “Aa! They think Big Jim Colisimo is still operating.”

  “Nick is supposed to meet this Irving Mentor at eleven tonight,” Pa said.

  “Well, that’s a long trip for nothing, Mr. Thirkield,” Mayo said. “Why don’t you let us cover it for you?”

  “We have a lot of questions we want to ask him,” Pa said smoothly. “But thanks, Frank, just the same.”

  Mayo stood up, brushing his fingers lightly. “I’ll call you tumorra,” he said hoarsely. He shook hands with both of them.

  “I’ll send the rest of the case of wine with the wheel,” Pa said.

  “You’re gunna make me a hero in my house,” Mayo said. “I’ll call you as soon as I know something. Okay?”

  When Mayo was gone Nick sipped the unctuous red wine and nibbled on the heavenly cheese.

  “We know Mentor is nothing,” Pa said, “but that doesn’t make it a wild-goose chase. That’s why you have to go.”

  “I have to go just to have it on the National Magazine,” Nick said. He felt sad because a chance at the big time had just eluded Chantal. She had enough stardust in her eyes to bread a veal cutlet.

  “You better get moving,” Pa said.

  SUNDAY NIGHT, FEBRUARY 3, 1974—CLEVELAND

  When Nick called Yvette from the airport it was six twenty and he got her answering service. He left a message that he had been called to Cleveland and that he would call her from there. He got to downtown Cleveland at ten twenty. He called her again from a telephone booth at the Statler, but he got the answering service again, which reported that Mrs. Malone hadn’t yet called in that night. Nick told them he was calling from Cleveland, that he would try again in the morning.

  He walked slowly through the winter night. He stood in front of the Hollanden Hotel watching the street. At three minutes to eleven an El Dorado Cadillac parked directly across the street from the Odeon Grill. The driver got out from behind the wheel and sat in the back seat of the car. He was an endomorph—a circular mass of flesh wrapped in a camel’s-hair overcoat complete with a belt. Nick sensed instinctively that he wore vicuña underwear.

  It had begun to rain. The area had reached its peak-for-the-night traffic about a half hour before. Nick crossed the street slowly. He grasped the traffic-side door handle of the Cadillac, opened the door, looked in at a Buddha face impaled upon a flashy cigar, and said, feeling as if he were playing pirates, “I’m Nick Thirkield. Monroe sent me.”

  “Get in,” Irving Mentor said.

  Mentor smelled like a lived-in steak house. “You brought the money?” he asked. Nick handed him a flat package.

  “Better count it,” Nick said.

  “Bet your ass.” Mentor counted it. “Okay,” he said. “The contract to Joe Diamond came from Gameboy Baker.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Joe Diamond was from my old neighborhood. He was a thief when he started out, and he stayed a thief. He got his hand caught in the till in Tucson, and he had to run, because Gameboy couldn’t help him. Moe and Sam put out an offer on him. When he heard about it he was in Florida. He got so nervous he killed two Sicilians who didn’t even have nothing to do wit’ him, so he knew he was now like in double trouble. You know what I mean?”

  “Vaguely,” Nick said.

  “So he got a job in Cuba. By the time the Rappaport boys knew who he was, Joe was in bed wit’ every fagele Cuban politician. So when he told the biggest politician what the Rappaport boys were willing to do to him as a favor to Sam and Moey and the Sicilians, this politician called Max—he’s the oldest Rappaport brother—to his office, which it is like surrounded wit’ soldiers and wire, and he tells Max he wants to make sure Max protects his friend Joe Diamond. Which Max does. Diamond sat out the war in Cuba—if you can call what he did sitting. His Cuban friend gave him a piece of the national lottery, and, believe me, with a very, very small piece of this you could buy like the Baltimore and Ohio. Joe had real connections. Almost everybody inna business needed a route to bring in junk without losses, so Joe organized. The French would get their shit as far as Havana, they would be paid, then Joe had the fishing fleet take it into the Keys, then up to Miami. Everybody was making money, so there was a tendency for Moe and Sam to forget and to talk to the Sicilians so they should forget too. They didn’t call it off, you understand, they just forgot it for a little while.”

  “Mr. Mentor, you are telling me more than I want to know about Joe Diamond. All I want to know is, who approached Gameboy Baker to hire Diamond.”

  “Listen, I’m witchew. But it takes time. Joe wanted to get back, because now that he had money he had this disease about cops—he wanted to be a big man with the cops. But they should be American cops. Socially, he had to ice Cleveland and Miami and Tucson—a question of personal popularity. So he opened a saloon in Philly, which it was like a club for cops, and all of a sudden he is running all the shit in Philly too. He really thought he had it made. If I was ever in Philly I always went to his place. I would call up first and he would ask me to come in playing the heavy movie gangster to impress the cops—a bunch of patrolmen and sergeants, fahcrissakes—with his big connections. Very funny stuff. But the last time I was there I was like a messenger boy with a message from Gameboy Baker.”

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1959—TUCSON

  Joe Diamond felt sick. He would get in trouble if he vomited going across the lobby of the Santa Rita Hotel in Tucson, but he was afraid it could happen. If he refused to go to Tucson to see Gameboy Baker, Irving Mentor had told him in Philadelphia, then he would be hit. So he went to Tucson even though he now had the kind of a business that needed his personal presence.

  Gameboy sent down the word that he was to wait in the lobby. He felt a little better when he sat down. They kept him waiting there from a quarter to eleven in the morning until ten after four in the afternoon. Guys he had known since Woodlands passed three feet away from him all day but they didn’t see him; nobody could see him.

  At ten after four Jack Lerner told him to come back at nine o’clock. At nine o’clock he was sent right upstairs to Gameboy. Gameboy looked old. All that junk sat on him. He asked Joe if he wanted a sannawitch. They split three pastramis on whole wheat and two bottles of celery tonic. It was lousy pastrami. “If you think the pastrami is bad,” Gameboy said, “don’t ever try Wild West corned beef.”

  “It must be the local water,” Joe said, trying to be jolly-jaunty.

  “Water? Here they cook it in sweat.”

  “You are looking great, Sam.”

  “Maybe I am and maybe I’m not, but that isn’t what we want to talk about here. I have a contract for you. The biggest contract ever handed out anywheres.”

  “Me? I’m a restaurant man.”

  “You are also a thief who was crazy enough to steal from Moey and Sam and Morris a
nd Uncle Louie.”

  “I want to pay back.”

  “You are fucking right.”

  “I can pay back?”

  “When you handle this hit you will be paying back. You will be even.”

  “The thing is—can I do it?”

  “Well,” Gameboy said, “you know how to answer that.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t do it and you’re dead.”

  “What is the contract?”

  “Nobody knows yet. But it is big, because they paid big just for me to talk to you.”

  “But why me, Sam?” Diamond hated this. He had a wonderful business, with wonderful built-in friendships with a lot of wonderful guys. Things had never been so good. “Why me when there are maybe two hundred mechanics who can make any hit better than me?”

  “That is what Uncle Louie said to them. Four very good mechanics were offered to them. But they said no good, because those guys weren’t political.”

  “I’m political?” Diamond asked with horror.

  “Uncle Louie said to them: ‘What is political? This is business.’ They said we had operated in Cuba and that they’d like to have somebody from Cuba. So—and it was very easy, you schmuck—Uncle Louie remembered you. You were eight years in Cuba already you are in the FBI files as a political.”

  “I was never a political in my life! Fah God’s sake, Sam.”

  “You speak a little Cuban. You were very good friends with a Cuban minister.” Gameboy leered. It was wholly unattractive. “So the man who is paying said you were what the doctor ordered. Because you have a Commie background in the FBI files.”

  “Commie? Sam, I was out by 1949. Castro didn’t take over until 1959—now—February, this year.”

  “Joe, what do you want from me? If people like this decide they have to prove you’re a Commie, so they’ll prove you’re a Commie.”

  “People like who?”

  “People like who have been proving that certain people are Commies for six years already.”