Winter Kills (10 page)

The north side of the living room displayed a rank of eleven transaction tickers that were even then reporting on stock, mineral and commodity markets. Pa picked up the tape of the nearest one reflexively and looked at it. “Drink?” he asked mechanically.

“Maybe some cold white wine.”

“What were you looking at the Pickering Report for?”

“When did Si get a chance to fill you in on that?”

“I called from the plane before we got to LA.”

“Well—that’s what I came out to see you about.”

“The Pickering Report?”

Si came in with the sandwiches and the beer. He took Pa’s hat and coat. Pa asked him to bring Nick a bottle of white wine.

“Tim,” Nick answered.

“What about Tim?”

“Pa, this is going to jolt you, but I have to tell you.”

“Okay, tell me.”

“I was there three days ago in Brunei when a man named Turk Fletcher confessed on his deathbed that he had been one of the two riflemen who had shot Tim. No—wait!” Nick stood up, cutting off his father’s protest with a raised hand. “This man told us where he had hidden the rifle in Philadelphia. I went there with the police and we found it. It is covered with the man’s fingerprints. It has his name taped to it.”

To Nick, Pa’s face was terrible to look at. The thousands of things that seemed to be trying to crowd through his memory into a recognizable place in his consciousness had jammed right behind his eyes. For Pa the moment was one of total release from the tensions of fourteen years, the bursting out of a long black tunnel. To Nick, Pa’s eyes seemed to scream. His face seemed to be falling apart. Tics began under his left eye and at the right corner of his mouth. For Pa the
great moment had finally arrived. It had happened as he had dreamed it would happen, and the effect of it on him was transmogrifying. Nick saw that his father had turned dead white. He was all white—white seventy-four-year-old skin, with watery blue eyes and ketchup-red and white hair held in place by large out-jutting white ears.

Staring at Nick, Pa began to weep, contorting his face into shocking grimaces, dragging clanking sobs out of his chest, causing his head to shake with the regularity of a metronome from side to side, denying what he had done but seeming to deny what Nick had said. He stood motionless, his face glistening wet, an appalling noise machine. Nick wanted to vomit.

Si returned with the wine in a cooler. He set it down calmly. He went to Pa and led him slowly out of the room, permitting him to continue to weep without stop. He took Pa into the bathroom and closed the door between them and Nick.

While Si was helping Pa pull himself together again in the bathroom, Nick poured himself a glass of the cold wine, his hands shaking badly. He gulped the wine, then went to the piano and began to play Mozart mindlessly.

After about fifteen minutes Pa came back into the room alone. Si had left the bathroom through another door. Pa took up a half of a thick sandwich, poured a glass of beer and sat down to listen to the music. Nick played through to the end while Pa ate the three roast beef sandwiches.

Pa finished the last half of the sandwich almost at the same time that Nick touched the last chord. “If this guy Fletcher was the second rifle when they killed Tim, how come he was working for you? Who hired him?”

“Keifetz hired him.”

“But why with you? All the way out in Asia?”

“Keifetz says sixteen people have been killed because they had little scraps of information about Tim’s
murder. Fletcher had the biggest scrap of all, the main piece to the jigsaw, and we think he probably figured that whoever was looking for him—that is, looking for him to kill him—probably wouldn’t think of looking for him in my company.”

“But how come Keifetz hired him?”

“He was a good crane operator. Besides, he had a letter of recommendation from your friend General Nolan.”

“
No
lan? James Nolan?”

“Tim’s old commanding officer. The man who runs Rockrimmon for you. Whoever he is, I never met him.”

“I’ll be goddamned. You mean, he sent this killer to Keifetz?”

“No. Not really. Fletcher was carrying around an old to-whom-it-may-concern letter from General Nolan.”

“Who was the Philadelphia cop who went with you and Miles to find the rifle?” Pa asked.

“Inspector Heller.”

“Oh, yeah. Who else was there?”

“The manager of the building and the occupant of 603, a man named John Kullers.”

“We’ll have to get a deposition from every one of them. I’ll handle that.”

“The police are doing that. Heller took the rifle to the police lab, and by now they’re checking the fingerprints—and whatever else they do—with the FBI.”

“That’s real evidence.”

“We had a Shell lawyer take a deposition from Fletcher, the second rifleman, in Brunei. Keifetz got the Brunei police to lift Fletcher’s prints and take his photograph. Those are all in the mail now and on their way here.”

“To this house?”

“Yes.”

“Then we have a case. We have a case,” Pa said. “We are going to take this to the President.”

“I hoped you’d say that, Pa.”

“You did a wonderful job, Nick.”

Nick blinked with gratitude. He felt a hard, dazing blow of almost paralyzing satisfaction. Pa had never said anything even distantly like that to him before. It was a glorious feeling. It was a feeling of glory. He clung to Pa’s words the way a groggy fighter clings to an opponent until his head clears. “I think it should be a congressional investigation,” Nick was able to say, “not a presidential commission.”

“We won’t have much to say about that.”

“Yes we will. If the President refuses, we’ll take it to the press and TV. Anyway, no President would want to be solely responsible for the shameful necessity of a second time around in the investigation of the murder of an American President. He wouldn’t dare to risk anything as sinister as the Pickering Commission again.”

“Nobody would want it. But they would risk it,” Pa said.

“What do you mean?”

“I think we have to watch everything ourselves. With my people. We have to have a place in the investigation. You could be his liaison with the congressional committee. That would be good politics.”

Pa looked glassy. Si must have sedated him, Nick thought. Pa began to wander about the room, picking up pictures of Tim and rambling in his speech. “I am thinking about how we took the first primaries. Believe me, politics in a state like that involves a lot of money, and I mean under-the-bridge, over-the-table, and tucked-in-a-box-of-cigars money. All of it for a little state whose primary vote isn’t even binding on the delegates it elects. Shit, I put out ninety-seven hundred primary-day workers alone. And we had the most gorgeous TV commercial you ever saw of Tim leading those three tanks across that Hilda Hess sector in Germany to liberate that beleaguered infantry column. Jesus, he looked great. And there was one showing
Tim very solemn, very respectful, holding his book under his arm while he was awarded the Anne Knauerhase Prize right here in my library. We made a real noise in that shitty little state, kid. We got fifty-three real movie stars to turn out and roam up and down the state yelling Tim’s name. Sickleton’s people began to sneak in some money to the opposition in the primary, and I called up the son-of-a-bitch who was their head honcho and I said that if they didn’t pull out every goddam Sickleton dime, Old Baldy wouldn’t even be
considered
as Secretary of State.”

Pa stopped and stared at a large photograph of Tim wearing the full headdress of a sachem of the Cherokee nation. When he turned to face Nick his eyes had filled with tears, but the sedation Si had given him held him down. “And all that time and later—and before—and during,” he said, “everything I did, every buck I spent, every threat I made, I was just leading Tim along the road to meet that bullet.” He sat down helplessly.

“Pa, there’s a couple of more things,” Nick said evenly.

“Like what?”

“Willie Arnold was not one of the riflemen. Somebody sold that to the commission.”

“Do we have to start this all over again?”

“There were two riflemen. Fletcher was one. He talked a lot about the other one. That’s the whole point of the new investigation. The commission didn’t care who killed Tim—they only wanted to prove that there was no conspiracy. Well, there was a conspiracy. Our new investigation has to establish who hired those two riflemen and Willie Arnold.”

Pa didn’t seem to be listening. He was dazed, but Nick told himself he had to be getting the point. Pa himself had said what they had to do.

“Pa?”

“What?”

“Every doctor who attended Tim after he was hit—and the doctor who performed the autopsy—said Tim
had been shot from front and back. But the Pickering Commission twisted that. They shifted the whole emphasis to rationalize
why
Willie Arnold had shot Tim, not
whether
he had done it. Then they buried the autopsy report for the next seventy-five years.

“Pa, listen to me. If we’re not sure of all the facts, it’s because they were changed so often and so fast by the Pickering Commission, whose job it was to make sure of the real facts and bury them before the investigation was over.”

“All right, Nick,” Pa said steadily. He seemed to have himself together. “We’ll quit talking and do something.” He sat down at the switchboard and took up the phone. “Get me Fred Frey, the police commissioner of Philadelphia.” He hung up. “Play something on the piano, Nick,” he said. “I have to think a little.”

Nick went to the piano and began soothes by MacDowell. Pa stared at the Blake portrait of Tim. In about four minutes the telephone light went on and Pa picked up.

“Hello, Fritz? Fine. How are you? Fritz, you’ll understand why I have to take kind of a guarded tone here—do you have a lab report on that rifle yet?” His face clouded with irritation. “What rifle? This is Tom Kegan. Don’t kid around. Listen, you have a cop named Heller—Inspector Frank Heller—right? Okay. Well, yesterday morning at—what time, Nick?”

“Quarter to eleven.”

“At a quarter to eleven your man Heller in the presence of my son, Miles Gander—you know, the geologist—and two other witnesses, both residents of Philadelphia, found one of the rifles that was used”—Pa faltered, his voice broke—“was used in Hunt Plaza in 1960.” Nick moved away from the piano in tension while Pa listened on the telephone. “Why would I try to make a clown out of you?” Pa said to Frey. He became incredulous. “Nobody told you anything about it?” He looked across at Nick blankly. “Well, you better call Heller in, Fred. You better untangle your options.
I’ll be waiting right here in Palm Springs for your call.” He disconnected.

“You heard it,” he said to Nick.

“Heller must be waiting for a confirming report from the FBI before he takes it to the commissioner.”

“He’s a crook,” Pa said. “I mean, I feel that.” He got up and began to wander around the room again. “Nick, I hate to let them have another shot at burying all this. Everything I stand for resists the idea of taking what is absolutely my own vengeance to the government and asking strangers to avenge my son.”

Nick was bland. “That’s the way it has to be, Pa.”

“Is it? Are we supposed to turn everything over to a pack of lobbygows again? A strung-together scarecrow of mediocrities who are only interested in making sure the United States doesn’t look like a banana republic, a bunch of failed lawyers who were able to eat well only because they were eating at the public trough?”

“How long have you felt this way?”

“From the time I talked to Mosely twenty-seven hours after Tim was murdered.”

“But you went along, Pa.”

“I had to go along; there was carefully nurtured doubt! There were men convincing me that it would be scalding America with shame and disaster—and maybe even revolution—if I stood up and pointed a finger at some figure in American life and charged that he had paid to have Tim shot down in the streets. Yes. I went along. Because they gave me Willie Arnold’s body as representing Willie Arnold’s guilt, and I bought it because there was nothing else to do.”

A telephone light went on. Pa picked up. “Yes, Fritz? What’s the scam? What? That’s crazy. You’d better haul Heller up on your carpet, my friend. Whaaaat? Dead? Heller is
dead
? How? When? What happened?” He listened, staring at Nick with consternation. “Listen, Fred, I’m going to put my son on the line and he’s going to give you the names and addresses of the three witnesses who saw Heller find that
rifle and take it with him out of the Engelson Building. Hold on.” Pa put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Heller is dead of a heart attack. It happened some time this morning. The rifle has disappeared.” He gave Nick the telephone.

“Commissioner? I am Nicholas Thirkield, Mr. Kegan’s son. Yes, sir. Miles Gander. At the Petroleum Club. The building manager, David Coney. The third man ran a business in vending machines which occupied Room 603. His name is John Kullers. That’s K-u-l-l-e-r-s. Yes, sir, I will report to you and make a sworn statement.” He hung up.

“I’d like to make a deposition here, Pa, and send it in. I have to go to New York tonight.”

“This cop Heller was on the case in Philadelphia when Tim was shot,” Pa said. “He was a captain then. He seemed to run everything.”

“Could Heller have been working for the man we are looking for?”

Pa nodded blankly.

“When Heller got the rifle, could he have tried to blackmail whoever the man is?”

“Yes. He probably tried to sell the man the rifle.”

“And the man killed him?”

Pa nodded.

“Then it isn’t a total loss. If all that is true, we know the man is still alive—that he survived these past fourteen years with the rest of us.”

Pa grinned. His plaque teeth revealed themselves row on row. They shone in the light like files of ivory. His eyes crinkled and his creased face showed two little Santa apples under each eye, all rosy and shiny. Nick knew he must be thinking of death for someone else, that he was summoning ruin and pain for whoever had caused this thought to make him smile so wondrously. “Yes,” Pa said, “the son-of-a-bitch is still alive.”