Winter Kills

  A Dr. Weiler came in to see him in a receiving room at the Philadelphia General Hospital. He was gentle but direct. Tim was dead. They turned Pa over to a police captain named Heller, who managed to get him out of the hospital without meeting the press and drove him to the heliport. By that time Eddie had Pa’s own chopper there. Pa gave Captain Heller two hundred dollars, and Heller was too tactful not to take it.

  As Pa got into the aircraft he was wondering how he could locate Nick to soften the blow. Ah, what was the use? Tim wasn’t there. Tim was dead.

  Si was waiting at the apartment in New York. Si gave him a bath and a massage, then he had him take two aspirins with the toddy he made and he wrapped Pa in blankets. Pa slept the night through. When he awoke he wasn’t confused anymore. He got up, drank a pot of tea, then called Eldridge Mosely at the White House. He didn’t congratulate the new President. He didn’t even think about wishing him luck. Eldridge said, “My heart goes out to you, the father. Anything this country can do for the father of its hero is yours to claim.”

  “Eldridge?”

  “Yes, Tom?”

  “I want the prick who shot Tim to be nailed. I want him killed. I want that man dead.”

  “We got him, Tom. We got him yesterday, and he’ll pay for what he did.”

  When Pa hung up he asked Si to bring in all the newspapers. The papers had the whole story. The killer’s name was Willie Arnold. He was a Commie. They had nailed him in the finest job of police work the country had ever seen. He was a little punk with a face like a kneecap, sullen and stupid.

  In a flash Pa saw how simple it was going to be to kill the son-of-a-bitch. He called the White House again, but the President was not available. He called J. Edgar Hoover, but Mr. Hoover was not in his office. He called Larry Walz, the Governor of Pennsylvania, who was an old-time enemy of Pa’s over some aluminum. Walz came to the phone instantly. “Kegan?” he said. “I’m sorry about your son.” Then he slammed the phone down. Pa called Pete K. Lascoff, Mayor of Philadelphia. Shaky and a little timid, Lascoff said, “Mr. Kegan?”

  “Pete, I want to ask you to get me in to see Willie Arnold.” While Pa talked he opened the top drawer of his night table and took out a short-barreled .38 calibre revolver. He looked up at Si. Si didn’t change expression, because Si was a man.

  “Not in my power, Mr. Kegan,” Lascoff said. “The city is overrun with FBI and CIA and Secret Service. There are even two generals mixed up in that crowd somewhere.”

  “Just get me in with Arnold, Pete, that’s all.”

  “Not my jurisdiction, Mr. Kegan. That’s political quicksand out there.”

  “Then go fuck yourself, Pete,” Pa said. Eddie dug out a special number for the police captain who had driven Pa to the heliport. His name was Frank Heller, and Pa called him. Heller got on the phone. He was at police headquarters. He wasn’t impressed to be talking to the father of the late President, or sympathetic, or anything but attentive.

  “This is Tom Kegan. We met a few hours ago. I want you to get me in to talk to Willie Arnold.”

  “It can’t be done.”

  “For five thousand bucks.”

  There was a fair pause. He knew Heller was thinking about it, because he understood Heller. They thought a lot alike. “I can’t do it for you, Mr. Kegan,” he said slowly, “but if there is anything I can do for you in there—”

  “Did he confess?”

  “Not yet.”

  “He didn’t confess?”

  “No. Sorry. I gotta get back.”

  “You think he can get off on a thing like this? Is there a chance he can get off?”

  “Always a chance.”

  “Heller, I think you know what I wanted to get in there to talk to him about.”

  “I think so.”

  “Follow me on this. Do whatever you can and you’ll find out what kind of a friend I can be. You got that?”

  “I feel like you do, Mr. Kegan. I am going to do everything I can.”

  When Joe Diamond killed Willie Arnold, with Captain Heller in entire charge of the detail that was then transferring Arnold to another jail, while Arnold was manacled to Heller’s partner, a Lieutenant Ray Doty, Pa knew that he had gotten through to Heller. He had Eddie find out Heller’s home address, then he sent Eddie to Heller with a package of twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. Tim was avenged. Pa said to Si, “I don’t believe in shit like sins. Tim was murdered, so the man who shot him had to get it from me or through me. Well, Willie Arnold got it, and now I have to find out if he did it on his own or if there were other people I have to pay off in the same way.”

  Si said he should eat his soup, then he should rest. The funeral had taken a lot out of him.

  But Pa couldn’t see how a nothing like Willie Arnold could have done it all alone. Just getting as near to Tim as that corner office in the TV Center warehouse in Hunt Plaza took tremendous connections. It was a little plaza. There were only two buildings with rooms and windows. The FBI and the Secret Service would have cased every one of those rooms, and no little punk with a mail-order rifle could just walk into a room and lean out of a window and shoot Tim. Arrangements had to be made. Somebody had to buy his way in to get that close and be so undisturbed.

  Pa went to Washington, and Eldridge Mosely moaned out a lot of shit about how there could be another world war if they didn’t establish how this kid had done it all by himself, because the CIA was pouring it on how the Russians thought that the Americans thought that they had killed Tim, and they were so overnervous about it that they could be thinking about sending over their own ICBMs first. Eldridge was thinking like a schoolboy.

  Pa called the Soviet ambassador and went over to see him. They had done business before on a lot of nickel ore the Russians had wanted to unload, and Pa had helped them out by getting a large piece of wheat together. The ambassador was a helluva guy—no Commie. He convinced Pa that his government didn’t feel that way at all. Mosely was grinding a whole different set of axes, Pa decided. Then the White House announced the makeup of the Pickering Commission, and Pa knew the fix was in. So many things were going to get lost and erased from here on in that if he didn’t move independently he was never going to find out what he had to know.

  So he bought himself the three best investigators in the U.S. government service. He installed them as officers of the Industrial Maintenance Services Corporation, with Jim Cerutti as vice-president of the unit and with an unlimited, open-end budget and plenty of manpower to investigate Tim’s assassination. It was the beginning of Pa’s own, wholly-owned international security organization, which undertook anything from the routine to the extraordinary in industrial espionage assignments, and which within five years after its establishment was being used by fifty-eight American and foreign corporations, and which, ironically enough, was called upon to carry out one industrial and two labor-union assassinations. It served Pa’s basic business tenet: If a service is necessary enough to serve you, the owner, then it is necessary to serve others having similar problems; therefore own everything you use; after you’ve used it, lease it out, and thereby not only have the services you require at no cost (long-term) but make a profit from the new leased service.

  The unit was set up in foam-lined offices in the skyscraper Pa owned over Grand Central Station. Jim Cerutti was established in the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior and directed the search from there, using, at peak point, sixty-one investigators and Pa’s formidable access to the records and files of the Pickering Commission, the FBI and the police departments of principal cities. Money was the miracle investigative tool.

  Pa had Mosely grant him the special privilege of attending any Pickering Commission hearing, open or closed, and permission to talk to any witness the Commission staff produced. The members of the Commission were all old friends of Pa’s and they were glad to see him on two of the fifty-seven times all of them actually got together. Pa went to Philadelphia with Hughie “Horse” Pickering, head of the Federal Synod of Ame
rican Churches Pro-Christ, chairman of the Commission. They saw Joe Diamond together. Before they went in to see Diamond, Pa arranged for a meeting between Horse and Captain Heller. Heller explained carefully that there was a big TILT light-up on Diamond’s forehead. Heller told them that Diamond had paresis and would not last very long, and there was no use going in to talk to him, because he wouldn’t talk.

  But Diamond did talk. He pleaded. He implored them to get him out of there and into the Commission’s own jurisdiction in a cell in the District of Columbia or any other venue except Philadelphia and he would tell them anything they asked. “You gotta understand, Dr. Pickering,” he said, almost sobbing, “I can’t talk here. I can’t. My life is in danger if I talk here. Can’t you even figure that out, Dr. Pickering?”

  All the time Diamond pleaded with Pickering he never looked at him. He stared at Captain Heller. Dr. Pickering, although a theologian, was quick to understand that paresis produced paranoid responses. He explained that to Pa when they got out of the cell. But Pa didn’t think so. To him, Diamond had no symptoms of anything but fright, so he arranged through Harry Matson, the then police commissioner of Philadelphia, to have Captain and Mrs. Heller invited on a Caribbean cruise. Professor Cerutti fixed it for Mrs. Heller to enter a regional baking contest and win a trip for two, and she persuaded her husband that he had to take a rest for ten days after all the terrible strain he had been under. When Heller was gone, Professor Cerutti went into Diamond’s cell and they talked everything over. Pa gave Diamond fifty thousand dollars through Cerutti, which must have been a kick in the head for Diamond’s estate taxes, because he was dead in just under two months. How it happened, the police said, they would never know, but out of nowhere, in an isolation cell, he developed spinal meningitis, and it killed him. Cerutti said he had been injected with the virus, but there was no autopsy.

  Cerutti came away from the talk he had with Diamond with information about a Dallas man named William Casper, including a solid description of the man. Real work got started. He found out from Diamond that the name of the second rifleman was Arthur Turkus Fletcher and that he was still at large, having disappeared on the day of the assassination. Pa was disappointed that Diamond refused to talk about Captain Heller, but he would not. He was scared witless of Heller, and, even more unusual, he was in love with Heller. But he was a lot more scared than he was in love, Cerutti said. What could a cop do to him that a judge and jury hadn’t already done, Cerutti asked Pa rhetorically. Kill him, Pa replied. Right, Cerutti said. So there was nothing, absolutely nothing, about Heller. But Diamond did say that the Philadelphia police had set Tim up, so the link with Heller wasn’t entirely moldy, Pa said.

  The man they were looking for had his own antenna. He found them before Cerutti could find him. Cerutti was getting closer, but no cigar. Five weeks after the Pickering Commission investigation had gotten under way, on a Saturday afternoon while Pa was at Rockrimmon trading in forward yen by telephone with Zurich and playing pinochle with General Nolan, Jim Cerutti called.

  “The man we’re looking for contacted me today,” he said.

  “Who is he?” Pa yelled into the telephone. He could feel the adrenalin rush into his bloodstream. His lust to bring death was so vividly with him that he began to breathe shallowly.

  “He wouldn’t say.” Cerutti laughed grimly. “He called from Chicago.”

  “Then he has men on you?”

  “Very good men. I didn’t know it. We hope to pick them up today.”

  “They won’t be there. They were just supposed to pin you long enough for him to call you.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted to ask me to ask you if you would be willing to talk things over through a friend of his.”

  “Who’s the friend?”

  “Alan John Melvin.”

  “The Assistant Secretary at the Pentagon?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is there to talk over?”

  “He wouldn’t say.”

  “How do we confirm with him?”

  “Somebody calls Alan John Melvin.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  He abandoned the pinochle game and the forward yen trading, left General Nolan and went into the kitchen to find Si. Si was polishing silver.

  “The man I’m looking for just got Cerutti on the phone in Venezuela.” Si kept polishing. “The man wants me to talk to his man, who is an Assistant Secretary at the Pentagon. What do you think?”

  Si stopped polishing. “That is good,” he said, looking right at Pa.

  “Why?”

  “Because the man has been sent to test the temperature. To see if you are serious.”

  “What is serious?”

  “To see if you want to kill his master.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That is all. No real talking with the tester. You know how it works. This is big business. This is a very big deal. The man you want has to bet his life that he can talk you down—if you serious.”

  “I get the picture,” Pa said. He went back to the pinochle game. That night when Cerutti called from Bermuda Pa told him he would meet Alan John Melvin at four o’clock at the family apartment at the Walpole in New York. Then Si broke out a platter of roast beef sandwiches and a solid bottle of Pontet-Canet, and General Nolan played them a concert on his ukulele, doing “In a Little Spanish Town,” “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” “Exactly Where We Are,” and other popular favorites. When he had finished, the General said wistfully, “I can’t tell you how I miss the little broads Tim used to bring up here.”

  “You’re sixty-eight years old, fahcrissake,” Pa said. Pa himself was then sixty.

  “Age in sex is a lotta Sunday-supplement crap,” the General said. “Sometimes I get so nervous I could bang the cleaning women.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” Pa said indignantly. He picked up the telephone at the big console. “I’ll call Eddie in Palm Springs and have him send out some broads from New Haven.”

  ***

  Alan John Melvin was a sweet-faced man with an old-fashioned New York, Greenwich Village, Al Smith accent. The Assistant Secretary was just another civil service employee to Pa. There were no preliminaries and no offers of drinks. Pa didn’t even ask him to sit down. He just stared up at the man from his chair beside his drink and said in greeting, “Are you going to tell me who sent you here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then take a message and get the hell out of here. Tell him what he knows already—that we’re so close behind him that he can hear us breathing. Tell him that when I find him—like next week or the week after that—I’m going to have him killed. Get out of here.”

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  Si knew his stuff. Si was right.

  “Where? When?”

  “At noon tomorrow. On the bench of the traffic island at One Hundred and Twelfth and Broadway.”

  “How come?”

  “You can’t kill him there.”

  “My sniper could.”

  “He might. However, my principal is counting on the fact that you want to shoot him yourself. For maximum security there will be an extra detail of police in the area.”

  ***

  He was sitting on the bench on the traffic island, his image distorted by the thick fumes from car exhaust. Pa got out of his limousine on the east side of Broadway. He stared across the monstrous traffic in disbelief. He had known the man who was waiting for him on that bench for thirty years. They had come up together into the ownership of the nation. If the entire country were divided into ten-foot squares of ownership, between them they would have owned three of the squares. What the hell would that man want to kill Tim for?

  Pa crossed the half street to the island. As it happened, there was a red light. He had not thought to look for traffic. He was staring in unbalancing hatred at the man who had ordered the death of his son.

  The man smiled the way
he had always smiled. “Hello, Tom,” he said.

  Pa fell limply onto the bench beside him.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Tom,” the man said, “because I know how you think. You’re thinking how you are going to have your people follow me to wherever I’m going when this is over, and how, when you have me staked out, you’re going to kill me there. Well, that’s the way you are. That’s the way you think. But a man has many levels of resources, doesn’t he? While we talk, as we came here to do, I want to address myself to some of the many levels of your mind. Where you really live. To who you really are. That’s what I want to do while we’re sitting here, Tom.”

  Women with baby carriages and women with shopping bags walked past them on the way to both sides of Broadway. Old men shuffled slowly in front of them, glaring because they had preempted the old men’s bench and a chance to die a little faster in the carbon monoxide. It was very cold, but the sun was up there somewhere behind the smoke. It radiated rather than shone. Pa and the man were oblivious of the hordes of people, the poison that they had helped to put into the air, and the traffic. The man spoke on and Pa gaped at him.

  “You and I have more in common than maybe most people in the world, Tom. Better than almost anyone else, we made it our business to find out where the money was, then to go and get it, didn’t we? We know that money is neither a production good nor a consumption good. We know there is no satisfactory way to state the value of money. They’ve used feathers and salt and stones for money. They used human skulls for money once, in Borneo, didn’t they? But the true fact is, Tom, over all the millennia nobody—not even you or I—knows what money is or how it works. We know only where and how each man uses it. Isn’t that right? We know it has to be portable, durable, divisible and recognizable. But there is an intangible essential that is even more important than all those qualities—and even harder to define. That essential is value.”