Winter Kills (13 page)

“Who killed him?”

“Now, your brother was a frivolous man. He didn’t do much more for his country than help the rich and improve the social life in Washington. He did ever’thing off the top of his head, and he was an arrogant, cold-ass son-of-a-bitch. But you’re his brother,
and that’s something like being a daughter when it comes to this kind of feelin’. So I’ll get you started towards where you want to go.”

“Who killed him?” Nick said loudly.

“The Philadelphia police killed him,” the old man said. “A man named Cap’n Frank Heller was in charge of the operation. Best thing for you to do is to talk to Cap’n Heller.”

“He’s dead, Mr. Dawson.”

The old man blinked. “Then try his sidekick, Lieutenant Ray Doty. They were the Philadelphia Special Squad, which was the Political Squad fourteen years ago.” The old man’s almost-round right hand, whose stubby fingers made it seem like a bear’s paw, dropped to the side of the chair and pushed a lever. The chair came full upright. He swung it around to face Nick. Stiffly he got out of the dentist’s chair. Nick stood up. He was herded toward the door.

“Goin’ to Dallas, sonny?”

“No, sir. I have to see a man in Tulsa about some oil business.”

“Who’s that?”

“Ed Blenheim.”

“Good man. What’d you want to see him about?”

“I have a job for him in London.”

“Where’ll you put up in Tulsa?”

“I don’t know yet. First time in Tulsa.”

“Try the Gusher Motel at the airport. It’s a good clean place to stay even if I do own it myself. I’ll phone ahead and tell them to fix you up.”

“Very kind of you.”

The old man stood on the porch and watched Nick back the car down the driveway and out onto Muskogee road.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1974—MUSKOGEE ROAD

Halfway to Tulsa, ahead of Nick’s moving car about two hundred yards down the road in the approaching dusk, a car had been run off the road. A woman was standing on the highway near the wrecked car. She was trying to flag Nick’s down, waving a red-and-blue scarf. He braked and stopped near her. She was a shockingly pale woman in her middle thirties with exquisitely sculpted features. She had a bleeding gash at the right side of her forehead.

Nick asked, “Can I help you?” thinking he had wandered into a James Bond movie, remembering old-time warnings about weird holdups he had read of in the old
American Weekly
at Harmonia, New York; obliquely worrying that this might be some kind of Women’s Liberation attack in which other equally smashing-looking women would rush out from behind trees and bushes and would all gang-bang him.

She had a voice with the texture of pecan pie. “If y’all would be kind enough to ride me down the road a piece so I can find a telephone back there at Jane Garnet’s Corners—”

“Jump in,” he said.

“A cah deliberately drove me off the road! Ah swear they were hopheads.”

“We’d better find you a doctor.”

“The proper thing is for us to introduce ourselves.”

“How do you do?”

“I am Chantal Lamers.”

“Happy to meet you. I am Nicholas Thirkield.”

“Thoykeeld?”

“Yes.”

“A handsome and unusual name.” She slammed the door. “I’m just dazed. I swear those men tried to drive straight into me.”

It was getting dark. Nick switched the low beams on. After not more than five minutes of driving they came to a collection of buildings grouped around a gas station. Nick leaned out of the car and asked where they could find a doctor. The gas pumper pointed to the house next door. The woman got out of Nick’s car and ran inside, holding a handkerchief to her forehead.

“She get hit by two weirdos wearin’ a 1967 Thunderbird?” the gas pumper asked. “Mans they were flyin’. Lemme tell you, they had eyes just like four sleepy rocks.”

“Where’s the police?”

“Jessacrossa highway.”

Nick crossed the road and made a report to a young trooper who called ahead to Muskogee to have a 1967 Thunderbird stopped. Then he needed a better description of the car and the victim’s name and license and insurance. Nick told him the victim was in the doctor’s office and he’d send her over. When the woman came out she had a plaster on her head, but she didn’t look as pale. “He gave me a big drink of grain alcohol,” she said happily. Nick took her to the young trooper and she completed all the forms. Her car was rented, and the trooper told her to refer the car-rental people to him.

When they got back to Nick’s car Nick said he was on his way to the Gusher Motel at the airport and that he’d be glad to drive her into Tulsa. She said the airport was exactly where she wanted to go. As they drove in she told him she had been visiting her parents in Muskogee, where her father ran the oldest pharmacy in town. She lived in New York, where she worked for the
National Magazine
. She was ticketed on
a flight that would leave at six fifty-five. Nick said he was in Tulsa on oil business.

They got to the airport at six ten. He invited her for a drink, but she said no, because she’d face a lot of red tape at the car-rental office and she had to check in at the flight counter. She thanked him earnestly, staring nearsightedly into his eyes, holding his forearms tightly. She was as tall as he was. She had deep black hair worn in a Dutch-boy cut. She had a strong, sensual, classic face. He decided she was an interesting-looking woman. Her mouth came together into one large, loose cushion.

“If you ever come through New York I’d love to have that drink with you,” she said. She wrote down her telephone number at the magazine office, explaining that they had a system that bypassed the switchboard and went straight to her desk. She kept thanking him for his kindness. He stared at her legs as she walked away from him. Not since Yvette Malone had he seen legs like that.

He arranged to have the rental car picked up at the Gusher Motel, bought a
Tulsa Tribune
in the motel lobby and was checked into room 1364. He asked the bellman how they could have a number 1364 in a one-story motel. The bellman said the numbers started at 1351 because this one was part of a chain of motels which at the time the Gusher was built had 1350 rooms. Nick got no special greeting at the desk, so it was hard to say whether Mr. Dawson had bothered to tell them he was coming.

There were still twenty minutes to wait before the time when he said he would call Ed Blenheim, so he settled down to read the local newspaper. Tulsa was an oil capital, so the paper was big with oil news. On the front page he read: G
EOLOGIST
S
UICIDE IN
E
AST.
Miles Gander had been found dead of monoxide poisoning in a closed car near Trenton, New Jersey. He dropped the paper. Miles Gander was dead from having agreed to
have breakfast with a friend. He telephoned Pa.

“Pa? Miles is dead.”

“I know. My people found him. Nobody thinks it was a suicide. Did you see Dawson?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He said the Philadelphia police organized Tim’s murder. The man in charge of it was Captain Heller.”

“Our Captain Heller?”

“Who else? Dawson said the man to talk to now is a police lieutenant named Ray Doty. Can you set me with him?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“I sure have a rotten feeling about Dawson. He even smells like death.”

“Call me in the morning for details on Doty.”

Nick called room service and ordered some tea. When it arrived a small ginger cat wandered in with the waiter. Nick watched the cat scoot under the bed, but it was time to call Ed Blenheim.

Blenheim couldn’t take the job because, to his absolute amazement, he had just, five minutes before, had a big surprise offer—which he had accepted—from Z. K. Dawson personally. “He just called me up. Z.K. himself,” Blenheim said in an awed voice. “It’s raining big jobs today.”

When Nick hung up, he felt a different kind of worse about Dawson. He poured himself a cup of tea, and because he never used milk or sugar, filled the saucer with the milk and put it on the floor next to the bed. The cat came out of hiding to lap at the milk. Sipping tea, Nick called his airline to make a reservation on an early-morning flight to Philadelphia. The reservation was confirmed for 8:50
A.M.

At the periphery of his vision, Nick saw the small saucer of milk on the floor next to the leg of the bed. As he sipped the tea he looked down to watch the kitten lap it up.

The kitten was dead. She was on her back with her
eyes open, stretched taut, bent backward, looking like a bow, in agony. But she was very dead.

Nick emptied a bottle of aspirin tablets. Carefully he poured the meager amount of milk out of the saucer into the bottle and capped it tightly. He called the bell captain to find him a roll of aluminum foil and some Scotch tape. The man said everything was closed. Nick surprised himself by saying he would pay ten dollars for it. It arrived in ten minutes. While he waited he changed his departure reservation to a flight leaving at nine fifty-five that night to Los Angeles. He called Si to tell him he would be coming in. Si told him a car would be waiting at the Palm Springs airport. It would be too late to use the chopper, he said, because the noise would wake up the boss.

Nick wrapped the dead cat in thicknesses of aluminum foil and made the package secure with tape. He packed the cat into his attaché case. He went to the motel restaurant, ordered a large steak, even allowed the waiter to talk him into the doughnuts called “French fried onions,” and marveled that he felt both hungry and refreshed after someone had tried to murder him. The curtain was torn aside. He was frightened because he was intelligent, but he was also gratified that he would not have to pretend to carry on this feud of vengeance for Tim across fourteen years. He had to find the killer to stay alive, the best reason. Whoever it was he was pursuing—and it simply had to be Dawson—knew he was coming and feared him enough to try to kill him. That made whatever Nick would have to do all the clearer. He was accumulating evidence.

He got to the Palm Springs fortress at eleven thirty-five. Pa was waiting for him in the “small” sitting room.

“What happened?” he asked irritably. “You’re due in Philadelphia for lunch tomorrow with Doty.”

“Dawson tried to kill me, Pa.”

“When?” Pa was confused. His aged, leather face offered
new diagonal seams. “You called me after you left him, you said.”

“He sent me to stay at the Gusher Motel—which he said he owns—then someone put poison in the milk intended for my tea, which I gave to a cat who wandered into the room—and that cat was dead in seconds.”

“Poison!” Pa spat out the word with contempt and disgust.

“I poured it into a bottle and I wrapped the cat in aluminum foil. Let’s see what a lab says. Let’s find out if whatever killed the cat is the kind of stuff that would make Inspector Heller’s death look like a heart attack.”

“You’re really right on top of this thing, Nick.” Pa looked at him as though he were seeing someone new. Pa also had a look on his face that said if they had poisoned Tim instead of shooting him he wouldn’t have had much respect for Tim.

“Well, anyway,” Nick said, “if the lab report checks out, we’ll have to ask for an autopsy on Heller. Maybe we haven’t got much solid evidence now that Fletcher’s deposition and the rifle have disappeared. But we have one helluva newspaper story that could shake any government into reopening an investigation.”

The idea panicked Pa. He almost exploded with passion. “Absolutely not,” he said so loudly that Nick knew he was suddenly frightened. “I’m not going to barter Tim’s place in history with yellow journalism. We’ve had enough government-by-printing-press in this country.” He stared at Nick, breathing heavily. “You’ve got to go out and dig up evidence. Real evidence. You have to do it. No one else can do it, and I’ll have the agency cover you with security men around the clock.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because that might just stop somebody from trying to kill me when I’d have the chance to grab him and hang onto him.”

“Then you have to take a gun.”

“No, Pa. I don’t even know how to use a gun.”

“Then will you take a blackjack? You don’t need lessons for that.”

“Okay, I’ll take a blackjack.”

“And brass knuckles. So they stay down when you hit them.”

“Okay, Pa.”

“It’s my fright as much as it is yours.”

“There is plenty to share, Pa.”

“But we have to do it. We can’t take this. I am proud of you, Nick.”

“Don’t get sloppy, Pa.”

“I can’t believe that I once thought you were just another piano player.”

“Pa—what was the agency able to find out about Lieutenant Doty?”

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1974—PHILADELPHIA

Lieutenant Ray Doty was retired from the Philadelphia police department. He raised Cornish hens in Amalauk, New Jersey. He was eight years older than Frank Heller. They had been partners on the force since 1939. They were both rough men. When the new mayor decided he needed a kind of task force to keep organized crime (and other special problems) in line in Philadelphia, he formed the Political Squad. Heller and Doty were it. Heller was the brains, although he put in a lot of rugged muscle too. Doty was the hammer.

Doty was sixty-eight years old when he agreed to meet Nicholas Thirkield in the restaurant of the Barclay Hotel. He was as slight a man as Heller had been thick and tubby. He was tall, skinny-looking, very strong and had bright red skin. He came complete with a cockade of stiff white hair worn in the style identified affectionately by Captain Heller as
der Bürstenhaarschnitt
. His eyes, much like Captain Heller’s, had all the warmth of two set mousetraps. He smiled a lot, showing his teeth.

Nick and Doty made a memorable lunch of snapper soup, imperial crab and pineapple chiffon pie. They also made small talk.

“Tomorrow is Frank’s funeral,” Doty said. “I can’t believe it. We were partners for thirty-five years.”

“I met Captain Heller briefly,” Nick said. “Seemed like a very nice fellow.”

“Was he on duty?”