Winter Kills (12 page)

To get the meeting over with so he could begin a manhunt, Nick asked Pa to have his agency people check out the National Rifle Association, to confirm that Fletcher had worked for them and to see if they had any fingerprints and photographs.

“What else?”

“We ought to try as close a total comb-out of Texas as we can, to try to run down a trace of this Casper,” Nick said. “But most of all, can you set a meeting for me with Z. K. Dawson?”

“Sure. When?”

“Anytime beginning tomorrow. I’ll be in New York. Either at the Walpole or at Butterfield 9-1845. Meantime please tell me what you know about Dawson. He’s just a name to me.”

“Z. K. Dawson is the richest man in Texas. He owned Eldridge Mosely. Eldridge was oil business in Pennsylvania, and Dawson was big oil business in Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado. In Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In Algeria and the Gulf. He wanted Eldridge to be President, but he had to settle for Vice-President—and
you know what John Garner said that was worth. But Dawson didn’t see it that way. I say he had Tim killed to put Eldridge in the White House. He’s the greediest man we ever had in this country.”

“You agree that he was probably one of the men who paid to have Tim killed?”

“He had the most reasons. He was against everything Tim did and everything Tim stood for. And he owned Eldridge Mosely…. Who lives at Butterfield 9-1845?”

“A girl. I’ll have to have Jake Lanham take over for Keifetz at Brunei. That means you have to put your people aboard the
Teekay
right away so he can get off.”

“I’ll handle it,” Pa said.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 1974—NEW YORK

Nick caught a twelve ten plane to New York. He sat in a daze sipping cranberry juice and mourning Keifetz. He should have paid him more. Why was he so stingy with everything? He remembered Keifetz’ uncle, an old dermatologist named Harry Lesion. Keifetz used to send the old man a hundred-dollar bill whenever he thought of it. He’d have Daisy dig out the old man’s address, Nick decided, and send him the raise Keifetz should have had. He got to the family flat at the Walpole on upper Madison at a quarter to six. He took a bath, left a call for seven thirty, and went to bed so he would be as fit as possible for an evening with Yvette Malone.

***

Yvette Malone was a lightly bruised woman of about thirty who had been trampled by a man named Malone in holy matrimony and who had been fleeing ever since to almost anywhere it was emotionally comfortable, because a love of emotional comfort was all she had been able to salvage out of a marriage that had happened ten years before, when she had been even more defenseless. She had married one of those men who are retroactively determined to fly a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain or to become the leading climber of the Sherpa people for the first conquest of Everest or to pitch four consecutive no-hit games in the 1928 series against the Yankees—almost anything superlative if it were fictional or unattainable. He punished his wife for being denied these ambitions. After two years of doing the
dishes for this prince of obscurity Yvette got out of town and moved to Paris. She divorced Malone.

***

As contracted, Nick called from the lobby of the building at exactly eight o’clock and rose like a randy eagle to her flat on the twenty-eighth floor. They didn’t speak much for the first hour—mostly there were grunts, moans, wails and shrieks. He threw himself at her, ran his hands up along her legs under her dress and grabbed everything that was waiting there. He scooped her up and ran down the short hall with her into a bedroom with a large bed. He threw her on it, then threw himself on top of her and began to flop about trying to kiss her and get out of his clothing while refusing to give up his hold on her crotch. She got his clothes off at about the same time he got hers off. It was fierce. It was poignant. It was noisy. And it was very, very carnal. As they were reaching a third climax he proposed to her. But he did it just before she moved into exultant chords of orgasm, bellowing “Yes, yes,
yes
!” to the extraordinary pleasure of the moment. He forgot she always responded just like that and thought she had agreed to marry him with enormous enthusiasm.

Forty minutes later, while they were getting ready to sit down to dinner in the kitchen, as he opened a bottle of French wine she had smuggled in with her, he told her how happy she had made him by accepting his proposal so happily.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“I asked you to marry me, and you yelled ‘yes’ three times.”

“Nick, I couldn’t have.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t marry you.”

“Why not?”

“Just because I can’t, that’s all.”

He put the bottle down with the corkscrew impaled in the cork. “I think I deserve more of an explanation
than that. Have you met somebody else whom you’d rather marry?” he said stiffly.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Nick. There isn’t anybody else, and I’ve cooked a very good dinner, and we can certainly talk about anything else in the world except about getting married.”

“Just answer one question. Do you refuse to marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Ever?”

“Yes.”

“Then I can’t even stay here, much less eat your dinner.”

“Well, I’m certainly glad you didn’t propose the minute you got out of the elevator. At least we got something out of this evening.”

“Listen, Yvette—you’ve said about thirty times that you love me. You certainly act as if you love me. You certainly couldn’t be more sure that I loved you. Are you just generally against marriage because you had that one bad experience, or what is it?”

“I can’t marry you, Nick. That’s all there is to say about it, and that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

As he started to protest, the telephone rang. Yvette answered it. “It’s for you,” she said.

Baffled, he took up the telephone. It was Pa. “Nick? Pa. You’re all set with Dawson. The house is on the Muskogee road, outside Tulsa. He’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock.”

“Thanks, Pa.”

“Before you leave the Tulsa airport set the car’s odometer to zero, then drive out on the Muskogee road for one seven, point four miles. It’ll be a white house on the right-hand side.”

“Does he know what I want to talk about?”

“He knows you’re in the oil business. He probably thinks it’s about a deal. He’s an odd bird. He keeps fresh money in laundry sacks and runs all his meetings lying down in a dentist’s chair.”

Nick hung up. “That was my father,” he told Yvette.

“I’ve heard of him,” she answered curtly.

“Listen. What the hell is the matter with you? I haven’t seen you for almost five months, and it’s like all that time you’ve been studying up on how to chop me down.”

“Everything’s changed.”

“What? How?”

“I have to have time to think.”

“What has changed? What could possibly have changed? I talked to you from London a couple of days ago and nothing had changed.”

“I am not going to talk about it until I get it worked out.”

“You are so going to talk about it! I want to know what has changed?”

“If you force me to talk about it, I swear to you, Nick, that that could be the end of it for us. I don’t think I want it to be the end.” She began to weep. “I know I don’t. But it’s hard. It’s very, very hard.”

He walked to her and tried to put his arms around her. She moved away from him, eluding him. She said, “Please just sit down and eat this marvelous daube.”

“What the hell, Yvette,” Nick shouted. “How can I eat? How can we sit here staring at each other and pushing food into our faces to keep from talking about whatever it is you won’t talk about?” He stalked out of the kitchen along the hall to the front door, grabbed his overcoat and hat and left, slamming the door, Yvette sobbed into her hands at the kitchen table, thinking about the lies Nick’s father had spread all over the world about her father.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1974—TULSA

The weather was sunny and mild when Nick got to Tulsa. While he waited for his baggage to come up he called Ed Blenheim, who was out. Nick said he could call Blenheim again at about seven o’clock. The secretary gave him Blenheim’s home number. Nick picked up the rental car, set the odometer, and went out to find the Muskogee road.

The white house was where it was supposed to be. It was a very modest house for a man with eight hundred million dollars and wells still pumping as if they had no bottoms. It stood about a hundred feet off the road and looked as if they kept chickens out back. He rolled the car up the driveway. He checked the voice-activated recording equipment he had stowed in the glove compartment. The meeting would be picked up through the microphone in Nick’s signet ring, then transmitted from the house to this recorder in the car. Pa thought of everything. Pa didn’t own a big, rich Japanese electronics complex for nothing.

As Nick got out of the car the front door of the house opened. A short fat-faced old man with a big belly and curvy white hair came out and asked Nick what he wanted.

“I’m Nick Thirkield.”

“Who?”

“Tom Kegan’s son.”

“All right. Come on in.” The old man didn’t wait for him. He went back into the house and left the door
open. Nick went in through the high-ceilinged hall. He entered the only open door. The old man was stretched out almost flat on a dentist’s chair with his eyes closed. His stomach dominated the room. The old man was like a big fat bullfrog with the wearies. “Close the door and set down,” the old man said. Nick sat in an overstuffed Grand Rapids chair. The wallpaper was hideous. Cord was showing through different parts of the carpet.

“What’s on your mind? My boys tell me you got a small company but that you’re doin’ all right in the South China Sea. Do you need money for that Australian operation you got comin’ up?”

“Do I? Have you heard anything?”

“No. I ain’t heard a thing. I’d tell you if I had. But nobody’s goin’ to drill on that barrier reef in your lifetime. The pollution nuts took care of that. What can I do for you?”

Speaking very deliberately, Nick told the old man about Fletcher, and how he had found the rifle. He didn’t mention Keifetz or the other five who had died. When he finished, the old man lay on the chair as if he were asleep, his domed stomach rising and falling as he breathed.

“That’s a funny goddam thing to come all this way to tell me about,” he said at last.

“You are an extensive operator in the Southwest,” Nick said. “I wondered if you might remember a Dallas man named Casper or Casper Junior.”

“I don’t think that’s exactly what you wanted to ask me. I think you’re trying to figure out a way to tell me you think I was the prime mover who got your brother shot.”

Nick didn’t answer.

“A lot of people think that. Why, I do not know. You tell me. If you got any ideas on that subject, you tell me. I’m a big producer in the war industries, and your brother was a politician who was hell-bent for
war, and he could have doubled my fortune.”

“Only in the beginning, Mr. Dawson. Only for the first eleven months.”

“He tried to get World War Three going over Berlin. He doubled, then he tripled the draft. He called up a hundred and fifty thousand reservists. He demanded that the Congress provide fallout shelters instantly while he ordered the development of a household-attack warning system. Your brother was reckless and irresponsible to an extreme degree, but I wouldn’t have had him shot for that, because it was good for my business. Why, the Pentagon’s own study of the war in Vietnam concluded that your brother transformed what they called the ‘limited risk gamble’ of the Eisenhower administration into a ‘broad commitment’ of American forces at war. Your brother was a crisis-eating President. That is the only way that kind knows how to convey the illusion that he is accomplishing something—which he wasn’t.”

“You keep talking about his first eleven months. Everything changed after that.”

Dawson chuckled. It sounded like oil bubbling in the earth at the bottom of a well. “How about that goddam space program? Well, Jesus Christ, an awful lot of money was made out of that, but the more nonhuman the project, the more it appealed to your brother. But everything he did helped me, just the way it helped his daddy. Your brother was good for business. He was a helluva lot more conservative a President than Eisenhower. All his policies were set to profit big businessmen. He was his daddy’s own true son, and I don’t have to tell you that they don’t come any more reactionary than that. Why would I shoot a man who kept thwarting the dreams of the niggers?”

“Only at the beginning. Only the beginning.”

“That’s all there was, sonny. Only a beginning. He went to Berlin to say ‘I am a Berliner,’ but he never went into the state of Mississippi and said ‘I am a nigger.’
He was a token President with token policies, and he fooled ’em all most of the time. All that talk about how he was gunna put through a law to abolish the oil depreciation allowance was purely horseshit. And the biggest bunch of horseshit was the bunch that got everybody convinced that your brother was antibusiness in every area—in taxes, wages, finances and federal spending. Take a look at his Medicare proposal, how he dragged his feet on civil rights legislation, the way he encouraged government contracting, and his whole yammer about poverty at a time when just about ever’thing the poor needed was in surplus supply. And you have some crackpot idea that I had him shot? Sonny, your brother reduced taxes by ten
billion
dollars in the short time he was in office. Your brother worked like a nigger to make the rich richer. He was a faker from the word go, but if we started going around to shoot the fakers, there wouldn’t be enough bullets, sonny. So let’s let it go. I am seventy-nine years old, which means I’ve outlived a lot of bubbleheads like your brother. I never did give a holler about what people said, and I care less now. But I know who killed your brother.”

“Who?”

“All that talk back at the time about me gettin’ your brother killed plain upset my daughter. And she’s a good old girl. So I hired me some sleuths and reminded a lot of people in Washington that they owed me a few. We worked at it and we found out who did do the killing, then I showed the whole report to my little girl, and after she seen it I threw the whole thing into the furnace.”