Winter Kills

  “I will get the tea, sir, while you think.”

  When she came back with the tea he had it all figured out. They sipped tea. He explained. “You go back to the office and call Gelbart in from the Number One rig. He is the safest man and he’s a foreman. When Gelbart gets to the office you hand him a note I am going to give you in my own writing, which he will dig, telling him to come here to Fong’s. When he gets here I am going to let him read the deposition, because he feels almost the same way I feel about Tim Kegan and the people who killed him. Maybe he’s not a nut about it like me, but killing Kegan was a very important thing in his life as an American. Okay. Gelbart goes back to Number One supposedly at about eleven, because you put him down in the book for a seat on the eleven o’clock chopper going out. Then you call the pier at about twelve thirty and order a seat in the chopper for me to go out to Number One at about two o’clock, just before the rain starts.”

  “But, sir—”

  “No, it’s all right. Because the two o’clock chopper is the one Gelbart will actually take. He won’t be aboard the eleven o’clock. He goes out to Number One in my seat, wearing my rain rigs. Then at about seven o’clock at night—Number One is about thirty miles out at sea—when the rain is really coming down, he radios to you at the base that I slipped on the deck of the rig and went over the side in shark-infested waters, and because the seas were too heavy and there was no sign of me, they didn’t attempt any rescue operation. Okay?”

  “Oh, very good, sir!”

  “Now, most people know we are crazy about each other, so when you get the news you have to be sad. I am not exactly sure how Filipina women show grief, but I know you will do it correctly.”

  “We weep.”

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned you can’t overdo it.”

  “I will make terrible scenes, sir.”

  “But first tell the police and tell the newspaper and the radio station. Then announce that the office will be closed for two days in mourning. Then you stay right beside my desk and files and post strong security inside and outside the building. Just wait for Nick or Carswell to call, and tell them everything, but don’t remember to call them, because you are too grieved.”

  ***

  Keifetz listened to his own obituary on the eight o’clock, nine o’clock and ten o’clock news that night, and, all in all, he wasn’t too displeased. If he had known the station would go into such detail, he might have remembered to tell Daisy to slip into his biography that he had gone to Harvard and had once won a Bollingen Award for poetry. Neither was true, but it would have impressed a lot of people in Brunei.

  He got into Fong’s cousin’s boat at eleven fifteen. It was a compact hydrofoil used to smuggle whiskey to the Mohammedans in the area and transistor electric shavers that fetishists adored using on pubic hair. They ran through the Balabac Strait, then along the south side of Palawan to Puerto Princesa, a distance of about 437 statute miles. They got into Puerto Princesa at a quarter to six the next evening, with Keifetz’ teeth hanging out from the banging by the sea. Fong charged him only five hundred dollars each way (the cousin had to get back to Brunei without a tooth in his head), which was a steal. Manila was only four hundred and eighty miles to the northeast, Puerto Princesa had an airfield, and a good old workhorse Beechcraft got him to the Manila airport at eleven the next morning after a marvelous night’s sleep. Keifetz could speak Tagalog. Daisy had sent ahead such an exalted description of his position in the world, however, that no one in the meeting party would dare to speak to him. A chief had to be summoned so that Keifetz could find a place to sleep and to make sure he got the plane into Manila.

  He slept sublimely on the flight into San Francisco and felt wonderfully refreshed especially when he called Palm Springs and was told that Nick was in New York. But he met a young woman in an airport Pancake Parlor, checked in with her at the airport hotel and got himself exhausted all over again. Then he went on to New York.

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1974—NEW YORK

  Keifetz said, “You don’t look so good.”

  “I was wondering if it is possible that all the others might come back to life.”

  “What others? Tate and Sis Ryan really caught it.”

  “Miles Gander is dead.”

  “Miles? You connected him with this—this business?”

  Nick nodded. “He went with me when we found the rifle. It was where Fletcher said it would be, but the police inspector had to get permission from the building manager to look in the room where the rifle was hidden, and there was a tenant who worked in the room—so they all saw the rifle and now they are all dead.”

  “Why?”

  “The rifle has disappeared. No rifle, no witnesses to finding the rifle, just my unsupported story.”

  “How come you got away?”

  “Somebody tried to poison me in Tulsa. I could say I’m pretty sure it was Z. K. Dawson, but the trouble is, it’s too open and shut. Nothing else about any of this is open and shut. Then somebody sent a professional killer to throw me out of that window.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “I have thought about that a lot. I mean, I’m no puny weakling in the Charles Atlas ad, but this guy was a trained one-hundred-percent mercenary warrior. I mean, he had every advantage—surprise, intent, weapons, strength and experience—and yet, somehow, I vanquished him.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “These people have never been shy about killing. I am the key gofer in all of this—the low man, the goddamn messenger who’s here to go-fer things. How come they haven’t killed me? I’ll tell how come. They don’t need to kill me, and they absolutely will not kill me. Why don’t they need to kill me?”

  “I was just going to ask you that,” Keifetz said.

  “Better yet, why are they going to such fantastic trouble and expense to confuse me and tire me out?”

  “They want you to quit.”

  “Sure. But not just quit. They want me to quit satisfied that nothing in this world can be done about it, what’s the use, that’s the way it is, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Well, that’s the permanent policy the people who own this country have for all the rest of the population, Nicholas, so why not for you? Listen, I hate to say it, but even if someone might call you a co-owner, it looks like, in this, you’re just one of the rest of the electorate. After all, on the inside, oligarchies are mutually feuding structures, right? And maybe the guys who are teaching you that famous what’s-the-use philosophy are with that same mob, those other fellas who own the country?”

  “Keifetz, did you have to go to a Marxist Sunday group when you were a kid?”

  “I don’t answer tricky questions like that.”

  “Then what makes you so smart? Come on—what Marxist Sunday group did they make you go to?”

  “It’s Marxist study group. It wasn’t a Sunday school, fahcrissake. To a socialist worker, what is a Sunday school? It is manipulation by the bosses to interfere with the day of rest.”

  “I’m glad you went, no kidding. Somebody is trying to teach me futility as a way of life, and you are telling me something that is maybe as old as the first economic figure in American history—you know, one of the basic truths that is always revived as needed.”

  “What basic truth?” Keifetz asked belligerently.

  “That there are a handful of people who own the country and who stay in power by teaching everybody else that all striving is fruitless, that there is no use fighting it—no way—that what’s-the-use is the only helpful permanent attitude to have in life.”

  “Now who was the member of the Marxist Sunday group?” Keifetz asked accusingly.

  “The thing is, whoever is teaching me futility this year also killed Tim in 1960. They were able to get close enough to him to kill him; therefore they have to be some of the people who ran him. Let’s try on some questions. Why did Z. K. Dawson agree to see me?”

  “Your old man asked him.” Keifetz’ head was as b
ald as a kneecap, as brown as a GI boot. He had knobby, rosy cheeks over the tan, that comical moustache, and the mock-kindly look of Field Marshal Lord Montgomery of Alamein just after he had consumed a regimental sergeant major and two field ranks for breakfast. He held his mouth pressed together in a permanent expression of belligerence, giving him the look of a prizefighter who was making sure his mouthpiece wouldn’t fall out. He was a head taller than Nick, a foot wider and eighteen inches thicker. His voice had overtones of a crocodile with severe indigestion.

  “That’s not why.”

  “Why, then?”

  “He agreed to see me so that he could pass me along to the next set of phony clues. So they could plant a woman on me named Chantal Lamers, who then set up the third set of phony clues like in a leapfrog game.”

  “Are you saying the guy in Cleveland was a phony?”

  “Frank Mayo says he doesn’t even exist.”

  “Do me a favor and start from the beginning.”

  “I’ve been walking around in a maze without a hat. Sometimes I think Tim is alive and well and living in Argentina.”

  “Just say what happened.”

  “I got to London, and Carswell was so absolutely impossible that there can no longer be any question about it—he has to go.”

  “Later, later. Tell me about Philly.”

  “Okay. Breakfast with Miles. Miles dug up a high-ranking cop. Now, it just happens to work out that fourteen years ago this same cop was in on Tim’s murder so deep that he is definitely one of the bad guys.”

  “Then what?”

  “We find the rifle. The cop—who is named Frank Heller—very plausibly takes the rifle to the police lab—he says—except that it never got near the lab. Heller must have tried to blackmail somebody with the rifle, because that same night he was killed.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Pa set a meeting with Z. K. Dawson in Tulsa. Dawson gave nothing away, but he went to a lot of trouble to make a case that Tim was good for his business and that the last thing he wanted was to have Tim dead.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I don’t see how I can believe anybody. This Casper Junior that Fletcher told us about is all over this thing. He pops up in every nook and cranny of the goddam thing, but I’m no closer to finding out who he was. But he’s heavy Texas, and I have to think that he was acting for Dawson, who is very heavy Texas. I did find out that the Philadelphia police were deep into Tim’s murder, but Heller is dead. Joe Diamond, the nightclub saloonkeeper, left his muddy footprints everywhere, and I have no doubt that he did everything Fletcher said he did, including shoot Willie Arnold, but he’s dead. Willie Arnold, who played Jesus to the Pickering Commission’s Pontius Pilate, is dead. It looks like we know everything but we can’t prove anything, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure does.”

  “Then why did they invent a woman named Chantal Lamers, who took me to a fake editor of the National Magazine, who arranged for me to interview this very dubious Cleveland mobster, who produced a detailed story that the movie industry had had Tim killed?”

  “How did they get in? Jesus, no wonder there was such a crowd in Hunt Plaza in Philly that day.”

  “Tim had been laying a movie woman named Ellamae Irving, you know the one, and—”

  “Do I know the one? Boyoboy!”

  “So the way the story goes from this hoodlum, she killed herself because Tim wouldn’t make her First Lady of the Land, and because that cost some movie company fifty million dollars, they had Tim killed.”

  “It doesn’t sound right. I can see how certain guys might miss her, but I don’t see them shooting the President of the United States for her. For one thing, they hate to leave Beverly Hills.”

  “A Lieutenant Doty of the Philadelphia police—a lifetime partner of Heller’s—admits that the police opened all the doors for the assassins, but he says they had nothing else to do with the killing. He says the Mob, either on its own or on hire, actually did the work. So I went to what I was told were the editors of the National Magazine to find me a top mobster.”

  “But you said you knew Frank Mayo.”

  “My father knew him, but I didn’t know then that my father knew him, or at least I didn’t know it until after the magazine had made the hoodlum connection.”

  “You should have known your old man woulda known Frank Mayo, Nicholas.”

  “Please, stay with me. We both talked to Turk Fletcher. He was just a Texas farmer. I mean, nobody would say Turk Fletcher was a member of the Mafia or the Syndicate or anything like that.”

  “Why not? Look at Farmer Rappaport. He was a real dirt farmer from New Jersey. He sold tomatoes to the Campbell Soup Company until he got a job with Lepke in Murder, Inc. My old man was a bushelman in the garment district—that’s below Thirty-first Street. That Farmer Rappaport was a real organization man.”

  “For Christ’s sake! We are fitting a puzzle together! I am saying that it is sensible to reason that if the Mob was in this, they were not acting independently for their own reasons. It is logical that whoever hired Turk Fletcher also may have contacted the Syndicate to hire the other rifleman. If I could find out who hired Joe Diamond, then I’d know who hired Fletcher, and we’d have this all wrapped up.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I found out that is what they wanted me to think, so that when the whole thing collapsed I would have been taught another lesson in futility.”

  “But how did you find out the broad and the editor were phonies?”

  “I went to the magazine this morning, and the real people put me straight. Then I went to Chantal Lamers’ building. I found out she never lived there. Then I came here to find you doing your famous impression of The Resurrection and The Light. How do you figure this mess out?”

  “I agree with you that they are trying to teach you that anything you do is just going to be futile and hopeless. The owners always do it that way. It has worked for them since the Civil War, so they know it will work with you.”

  “I haven’t even been here a week,” Nick said. “I sure haven’t been here long enough to figure out any policy.”

  “There is only one policy.”

  “If you know it, tell it.”

  “Don’t take any more outside leads like Lamers’ or anybody else’s. Run everything through your old man. He probably has an organization bigger than the Common Market. And on a thing like Tim’s murder he’s the only one you can trust.”

  The telephone rang. It was Pa. He told Nick to get right over to the hospital because Frank Mayo was on his way. Nick didn’t mention Keifetz’ being alive. He hung up and said, “God knows, I’m happy and grateful that you’re alive.”

  “Okay. So get maudlin.”

  “So would you if they told you I had been killed by those bastards,” Nick flared up.

  “Of course. But I’m a Russian Jew. You’re a WASP. It doesn’t look nice for you.” He fingered his moustache, grinned broadly and farted.

  “Keifetz, come on. Quit horsing around. The fact is, I am going to need you badly before we get out of this thing, so what I’m saying is, the fewer people who know you are still alive, the better. That includes my father, because he talks all the time, and too many people could find out about it.”

  “And knock me off.”

  “That’s right. So wait till it’s dark before you leave here. Then take the elevator to the cellar and go out through the help’s exit. Oh, shit!”

  “Whatsamatta?”

  “The hotel desk and the manager know you are here, and they file a minute-by-minute log with my father.”

  “No. I don’t know if I thought of that, but they haven’t got my real name. I told them I was from the police commissioner’s office in Philadelphia. I told them my name was Trudeman Garfunkel.”

  “Great. That’s great! Now I have time to make up a lie. When you get out of here, check into the Waldorf so I can find you. It’s just better for you to stay dead a little while longer.?
??

  ***

  When Nick got to the hospital Pa grandstanded for him by pulling a flat package out from under his pillow and saying, “Here. That’s the fifteen grand you gave that fink last night.”

  “You had him picked up?” Nick wasn’t as surprised as he would have been earlier—he had a good sense of Pa now.

  “Yeah. You know what he is, this big wheel in the Syndicate? An actor. But what kind of an actor? An out-of-work actor in blue movies.”

  “Who hired him?”

  “The tape he made for you is with Jim Cerutti now. So is the tape he made with my men who had the talk with him. Cerutti will put it all together.”

  “The whole peg they tried to hang everything on,” Nick said, “was that Tim had been killed by a movie company.”

  “They must think we’re feebleminded!” Pa said. “And they’re so careless. Just a cursory check would have showed them that a few of my companies own forty-six percent of Federal Studios. Ellamae Irving wasn’t worth any fifty million dollars in film rentals. I listened to that Mentor tape. It was fulla false notes. The whole goddam thing was a romantic story about a woman who died of a broken heart. Ellamae is supposed to have killed herself because Tim threw her over. But life just didn’t work that way with her. And Harry Small had three stars bigger than her—at the box office, that is. Also Harry Small was the kind of a guy who kept so busy that if he was alive right now he might not know Ellamae had killed herself.”

  “Maybe she didn’t kill herself,” Nick persisted. “Maybe she’s just another one of the twenty-odd people who have died because Tim was killed.”

  “Don’t believe it,” Pa said. “First of all, she died a year ahead of Tim. Second, like every other suicide, she had been a suicide inside her head since she was about five years old.”

  “Okay,” Nick said. “Who hired Mentor?”

  “The Casper Williams name again. Same description. The interesting thing is the Joe Diamond background they gave Mentor to give to you. It was all designed sideways and backwards, and the funny thing was—”