Winter Kills

  “This is crazy.”

  “Anyway you gotta do it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Moey said you could make your own deal, because that’s the kind of a little guy he is. Also, you gotta take rifle lessons for as long as you have to, out on Pete Volilica’s ranch.”

  “A rifle?”

  JANUARY 8, 1960—ARIZONA AND PHILADELPHIA

  The rifle teacher on the Volilica ranch was some farmer named Turk Fletcher. He could hit anything from anywhere with a rifle. They put in twenty-six days, seven hours a day, doing nothing but shooting a rifle. They shot at a dummy that was strapped into the back seat of an old-time touring car that Howie Pearl, who was now the big macher in Cleveland, towed across the field at about a hundred and ten feet away from where Diamond shot on an eighteen-foot-high rise of ground. Diamond had to hit the dummy in the throat. When they had finished he was hitting nine out of every ten shots. Because he was no dope, he figured out that they must be going to hit some guy who rode around in a car with the top down.

  Gameboy sent him back to Philadelphia and told him to wait to hear from somebody named Casper Williams and that Joe should make his deal with Casper Williams. Joe said good-bye to Gameboy in his room in Tucson, holding him close with one hand and squeezing his ass with the other hand. He never saw Gameboy again. Although Gameboy outlived him, Gameboy never saw Joe again except on television. So it goes in the march of the patriots.

  When Casper Williams came to his office in the saloon, Joe Diamond puked right on his own floor without any warning when Williams told him whom he was supposed to hit. He had never really been scared before in his life, he decided. He had to go to bed for a day and a half. After a while he got used to the idea, because the money they were paying was so good and because he would be working for Captain Heller, who had never made a wrong move in his life.

  SUNDAY NIGHT, FEBRUARY 3, 1974—CLEVELAND

  The cigar smoke in the back of the parked Cadillac in Vincent Street was like suspended meringues, but Nick couldn’t open the window, because the engine wasn’t running and the windows were automatic. “Open the door, please,” he asked. “This smoke is too much for me.”

  “It could be a signal or something.”

  “Open the door or I’ll shove that cigar down your throat,” Nick said savagely. Mentor leaned forward and turned on the ignition, then he opened the windows on both sides. “This is an eighty-five-cent cigar, fahcrissakes,” he said. “Wholesale.”

  “Who was Casper Williams?”

  “A Hollywood agent.”

  “Whaaaat?”

  “Yeah, he was dealing for Harry Small, head of the Federal Studios.”

  “Why would people like that want a President killed?”

  “Because that particular President cost them about fifty million dollars in film rentals when Ellamae Irving, who was Federal’s biggest star, killed herself because the President told her she couldn’t go to a Madison Square Garden rally for him in New York.”

  “Hardly likely.”

  “Very likely. He was screwing her, and she took it big. Maybe she had dreams of being the First Lady. That could have made her the biggest grosser in history, even if it was only announced. But chances are she would have killed herself anyway, even if your brother had kept his pants shut.”

  “Can you set a meeting for me with Casper Williams?”

  “He left Hollywood. Somebody said he was working in Rome.”

  “I’ll go to Rome.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “Can you set a meeting with Harry Small?”

  “What do you read? He’s dead for three years already.”

  Nick got out of the Cadillac and got into a cab across the street in front of the Odeon Grill. He told the driver to take him to the airport. Irving Mentor got out of the back of the car, shut the door, started to open the front door and felt the gun in his back.

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1974—NEW YORK

  Nick called Yvette in New York from the Cleveland airport at 12:55 A.M. The answering service said she still hadn’t called in for her messages. He was getting cross-eyed with fury over her perversity. Why was it that only the women one loved behaved like this and never the women one was indifferent to?

  The Cleveland flight got Nick to New York at six twenty in the morning. He checked into an airport motel and left a call for half past ten. At eleven thirty he was riding the high-speed elevator in the National Magazine building to get some kind of a reasonable explanation from Harry Greenwood as to why the magazine had sent him to a man in Cleveland who, according to the unimpeachable source of Frank Mayo, did not exist as far as the Syndicate was concerned. Nick wanted to have Greenwood’s undoubtedly plausible explanation in hand when he made his report to his father about the Mentor meeting.

  His name was sent along to Greenwood’s office from the editorial reception desk. After about seven minutes he was told Mr. Greenwood would be unable to see him. Was there someone else who could help him?

  “Perhaps his secretary doesn’t know I had a meeting with Mr. Greenwood here two nights ago. I am Thomas Kegan’s son.” The receptionist repeated Nick’s message to Mr. Greenwood’s secretary. There was a short wait, then the receptionist said Mr. Thirkield was to go to the thirty-eighth floor, please.

  A young woman was waiting for him at the elevator bank. “Mr. Thirkield?” He followed her to the uptown side of the building at the eastern end. She led him into an anteroom just as a portly man with heavy eyeglasses and an imperturbable look came through from the far room. “This is Mr. Thirkield,” the young woman said.

  “What’s this about a meeting we had?” the man asked.

  “I’m here to see Harry Greenwood.”

  “I’m Greenwood.”

  “Like hell you are,” Nick said pleasantly, managing to smile.

  “Hey, Charlotte,” the portly man yelled. The young woman reappeared. “Who am I?” he asked.

  “You are Mr. Harry Greenwood.”

  Greenwood said to Nick, “And you’re Tim Kegan’s brother?”

  Nick nodded with bewilderment.

  “Sit down,” Greenwood said. “No. You better come inside and tell me what this is all about.”

  Greenwood’s office walls were lined with cork to which production schedules, assignment sheets and oddly shaped pieces of paper were pinned.

  “Do you have a writer named Chantal Lamers?” Nick asked.

  “On our staff?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “You’d better tell me what happened.”

  Nick told him how he had met Miss Lamers, who said she worked for the magazine. She had given him her direct-to-desk telephone. The magazine did have direct-to-desk phones? Greenwood nodded. Nick had called Miss Lamers to arrange a meeting. In an office two floors below, off a corridor behind the reception desk, she had introduced him to a man she called Harry Greenwood, who said he was the editor of the National Magazine. He gave a careful description of Lamers and the false Greenwood.

  “What was the meeting about?”

  “I can’t say until I clear it with my father. But you have been very helpful. Thank you very much.”

  ***

  Nick told the cab to take him to Chantal’s address on East Thirty-first Street.

  The doorman was a ratty, if beautifully uniformed, short man who did not look strong enough to protect the tenants from the neighborhood children. He barred the way. He said no one named Chantal Lamers lived in the building. Nick asked him how long he had worked there. The doorman said three and a half years. Nick gave him three one-dollar bills and described Chantal carefully. The doorman shrugged and said they just didn’t have any good-looking tenants of any name anywhere in the building. “I don’t say this as criticism, buddy,” the doorman said, trying to earn the three bucks, “but we have never had a pretty woman live in this building. There could be a jinx on this building.”

  Nick went to the Walp
ole Hotel. He felt dazed. Two people who were as convincing in their ways as any two people he had ever met had melted away as if they had never existed. Yet he knew Chantal Lamers existed, because he could still smell her and feel her all too solid flesh, which was incapable of thawing and resolving itself into a dew. Why had she done it? Where was the point of doing what she had done? Whatever her reason, when could it have been planned?—because everything that had happened between them had been accidental. Her car had been wrecked. Her forehead had been cut. The garageman at the crossroads that bore the improbable name of Jane Garnet’s Corners, on the Muskogee road, had volunteered the information about the two stoned men who had driven her off the road. She hadn’t called him in New York, he had called her. He had wandered completely out of her life; then, because he had told her what he thought he needed, she had taken him to the National Magazine Offices and had produced the magazine’s confidential files bearing the cabalistic marks of the magazine’s staff. Then, absolutely authentically, she had fallen in love with him.

  How, or why, or because of what absurdity should she have pretended to do a thing like that? No one saw anything wrong with simple lust anymore. Subterfuges were silly when two adults wanted to couple for pleasure. Why had any of it happened? It had no shape. It made no sense. What had made any sense since he left Brunei? Keifetz was dead. Nick still could not overtake that terrible fact. Keifetz was dead. One-third of the people in the world who gave a damn about him had been a big breakfast for a shark. Nick knew it was his fault. Keifetz was his friend. If Keifetz had been less of his friend he could be alive. Miles, Tate, Kullers, Sis Ryan and Coney were all dead, as if they had all been playing cards together and he had thrown a live grenade in among them. They had one thing in common and it caused their death: they all knew Nicholas Thirkield. But why was he still alive, eluding such expert killers, who had put away twenty-three people, including Tim? Where was the missing piece? What was its shape? How had it suddenly happened, after almost fifteen years, that he was wandering around in a steam room, causing the deaths of all the indistinct shapes he happened to bump into? He was on some kind of a bummer through American mythology, a demi-god. Look at the folks: Dawson, the world’s richest and most spectacular recluse; Ellamae Irving, a suicidal movie queen; Mayo, a grand vizier of the underworld. It was all so vulgar, with illusion and falsehood used to construct dwellings of steam, buildings on wheels which had rolled him up streets, down corridors. Turk Fletcher had faded into Captain Heller who became Z. K. Dawson who resolved into Chantal Lamers who blended into a dead kitten and an English hit man until all of them fused into Casper Junior who was William Casper or was it Casper Williams. Everyone disappeared almost as soon as he began to talk to them.

  Someone, somewhere was trying to teach him futility. This came to him with the clarity of a night ball game—shadowless and static. He had to try to keep in mind that, so far, only one pattern seemed to exist: a pattern of confusion and exhaustion intended to teach him that all striving was fruitless, that when he understood the futility, he would find peace and safety for the people he loved. If that were so, he had to find Yvette and keep her with him. He felt smothered by the terrible fear that these people in the shadows around him were capable of doing to Yvette what they had done to Keifetz and twenty-two others. But if he was on this bummer through a fun house of the American myths, surely Pa’s money could save them—Yvette and himself—surely Pa’s money was the magic cloak that could cover them and let them survive any darkness?

  ***

  He left the elevator at the tower floor, opened the door of the apartment and walked into the foyer.

  Keifetz was asleep in a large chair that had been placed to face the door. There was a large manila envelope in his lap. Nick stared at him. Nausea hit him. The door slammed behind him. Keifetz awoke suddenly, came to his feet reflexively in one leap, recognized Nick as he focused and said, “Jesus, I thought you’d never get here, baby.”

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 1974—BRUNEI

  Nick worked it all out by getting hysterical. He sobbed uncontrollably. Keifetz led him into Tim’s bathroom and put his head under the cold-water shower. Nick stopped weeping. He dried himself off. “What happened?” he asked Keifetz.

  “I was driving to the office with the radio on,” Keifetz said, “when they announced that Tate and Sis Ryan had been killed in that automobile accident. I knew right away what kind of an accident that was. So I got on the radio phone in the car and called Daisy and told her to meet me at Fong’s—that’s kind of a, you know, kind of a coffee place—and to keep her mouth shut. I told her to bring every dime there was in petty cash. This cost you about thirty-five hundred dollars, incidentally.”

  “That’s okay,” Nick said. “I’m going to charge it to my father.”

  “When she got there I explained that Tate and Sis had been murdered and that if I just went on about my business I would be next. Now, I know you don’t know Daisy, but she is a terrific woman. She can do anything and she has the nerve of ten Apaches. I told her that you and your father were working on the thing that had caused the murders of Tate and Sis, and that it was all in the deposition Tate and Sis had taken at the hospital with us. She was hip. So I told her to go to Tate’s office and say casually that she had come by to pick up the favor Tate had done for me—she knows Tate’s secretary very well—then to go to Sergeant Ali Kushandra at the cops and to say, nice and easy, that I had sent her over to pick up Fletcher’s prints and photographs. We were talking in a room I rented at Fong’s—you can get rooms there besides coffee—and I told her to bring everything back to me.”

  “Daisy knows you’re alive?”

  “She got me out.”

  “But she was so stricken with grief on the telephone she could hardly talk.”

  “She’s a terrific woman, Nick. I just told her she had to stay very convincing. Also, she could have thought I’d be killed trying to get this deposition here. She likes me. We’re going to be married.”

  ***

  Daisy walked to the Shell offices, then to police headquarters, then to Fong’s. She was a small, pretty and dazzlingly intelligent-looking Palawanese woman from the Philippine archipelago whose father had been an American GI who came in with the occupying forces on March 2, 1945. Her father, who owned a Shell station in the Oranges, New Jersey, had paid for her education with the nuns in Brunei. She was nineteen years old. She was the embodiment of Christopher Colombo’s inspiration (from previous gossip by Marco Polo) to find a route to the East Indies, where gold was in abundance “to a degree scarcely credible” and “sweet scented trees like sandalwood and camphor, pepper, nutmegs, spikenard, galangal, cubebs, cloves and all other valuable spices abounded.”

  Keifetz locked the door. He patted her softly on the behind, took the envelope from her and sat down at a table.

  “Will they try to kill you, sir?”

  “Goddammit, Daisy, don’t call me ‘sir.’ Yes, they will kill me if they can find me. But that’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. They will not find you.”

  He stopped opening the envelope. “Come here.” She approached. He sat her on his lap as if she were a toy.

  “Are you sure you understand that we are going to get married, Daisy?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Then you mustn’t call me ‘sir.’”

  “After we are married, if you command me, I will not call you ‘sir,’” Daisy said.

  “What will you call me?”

  “How about ‘baby’?”

  “Not ‘baby.’ Too cold. How about ‘Your Eminence’?”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “That fits you best. It is a wonderful private name.”

  He kissed her enthusiastically, then lifted her off his lap. It was five minutes to seven. The sun was up and very hot. He checked through the pages of the deposition, checked the fingerprints and photographs. “Everything is here,” he said. “Sis was a good legal stenographer. This is what we do, Daisy. On
the way out, tell Fong to send me up some tea. Then go out to my place with a cardboard box, pack me a change of clothes in it and send it by air mail to General Delivery in Hong Kong. And bring me the pistol. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Fong’s cousin has a boat. Which reminds me—did you bring me the money?”

  “Sure.”

  “How much was in petty cash?”

  “Thirty-five hundred dollars.”

  “I have to speak to Nick about switching the petty cash to Swiss francs.”

  “What about the boat?”

  “I don’t know. Except I can’t leave by plane. They’d have somebody waiting for me when I landed. So I have to go by boat, a private boat, at night. They would expect me to head for the Singapore airport, so that’s out.”

  “Hong Kong is out too, sir. If it isn’t Singapore, they’ll think of Hong Kong.”

  “If it’s more than one airport, they’ll have to check passenger manifests, so I can’t travel with this passport. What name should I use?”

  “Gary Cooper!”

  He fell about with laughter. She laughed so hard she had to lean against the wall. When she could speak again she said, “If you take Fong’s cousin’s boat to my island, I can send you to people who will get you to Manila by plane, then you can fly out from there. Where are you going, sir?”

  “To San Francisco, then I make a call to Palm Springs and they tell me where to go. Wherever Nick is.”

  “I get your clothes.” Daisy left. “I will mail them to General Delivery, Manila, okay?”

  “No, they could miss me. Make it registered air mail, care of General Delivery, San Francisco.”

  “But if you are all the way to San Francisco in those clothes, you can buy clothes in San Francisco.”

  “That’s right. Therefore just go down and tell Fong to send up some tea and come right back.”

  “But what about the pistol?”

  “No. Fong will have to get me a pistol. You and I have to plan my death here in Brunei today so you can announce it to the police and the newspaper and radio.”