Winter Kills (16 page)

Myrtle greeted him warmly. She took him to the kitchen, which was the largest room in the house. She poured him a cup of coffee, put a schnecke on a plate and set it in front of him. “Take care of yourself,
Fritz,” she said. “You smoke too many cigars.”

“I never light ’em.”

“But the juices. Who would have thought it would be his heart? Two weeks ago he had a department checkup and the doctor said he had the heart of a twenty-five-year-old.”

“Myrtle, look…”

“What’s the matter?”

“It might not have been his heart.”

“But the doctor said it was his heart.”

“We have some new evidence. I mean there’s a chance that—well, I have to say it to you—Frank could have been poisoned.”

“Poisoned? In his own house?”

“Did anyone come to see him that night?”

“A woman was here. Just a routine call, Frank said. I showed her in. I brought them some coffee.”

“Do you remember her name?”

“I remember everything about that night. I always will. She said her name was Mrs. Casper.”

“Think you could identify her in a lineup?”

“I’m sure I could. She was a pretty woman about thirty-five, but she had silver hair.”

“Did Frank keep any records of his meetings here?”

She smiled proudly. “No one kept such meticulous records as Frank. He taped every phone call. And he taped every meeting, then he filed it all away—why, you can’t imagine. Come in here with me.” Myrtle led the way to Captain Heller’s study. She went to a long filing box on his desk. “This is just the card file for meeting tapes,” she said. “You should see the boxes with the card files to locate the telephone-call tapes.” She opened the box. “Go ahead. Look up Casper. It’ll be there.”

Frey riffled through the cards. There was one Casper card with three entries. It said:

C
ASPER
, W
ILLIAM
—Dallas (?) Texas. Five feet
seven, 190 lbs. White wavy hair which curves over the forehead. Contempt for money. Recorded:

November 28, 1959. No. 1364

December 1, 1959. No. 1371

February 18, 1960. No. 1409 in Code P

Myrtle was looking over Frey’s shoulder. “I don’t know what ‘Code P’ means,” she said. Frey thought silently that it probably stood for “payoff.” There was no card for Mrs. Casper.

“It could be he didn’t have time to make out a card for Mrs. Casper,” Frey said.

“That would mean the tape is still in the machine,” Myrtle said. She went to the window seat behind Heller’s desk and opened a large walnut cigar box. There was a four-track cassette recorder fitted inside it. Frey leaned on the
EJECT
button. A cassette popped out. Written on the cassette was “M
RS.
W
ILLIAM
C
ASPER.
”

“I’ll have to take this along with me, Myrtle.”

“What is happening?”

“I came here myself this morning because we have all been such good friends and I know you trust me.”

“I do trust you, Fritz.”

“We want your permission to conduct an autopsy.”

She looked at him helplessly.

“It won’t delay the funeral,” Frey said. “We can have it done this afternoon, and he can be back at the funeral parlor tonight.”

“Is it police business?”

He nodded. “If he was poisoned.”

“Do I sign something?”

Frey took the papers from his pocket and a large black fountain pen. She signed without reading the paper. “Don’t let my kids know about this, Fritz.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“That’s right.”

They walked toward the front door. “We’re talking
about moving to Arizona,” Myrtle said. “The kids want it.”

“Year-round sunshine.”

“Frank is all over this place, except he isn’t here.”

“He was a man.”

“He was a great man,” Myrtle said.

“Oh—there’s just one other thing. I wonder if I could pick up the rifle Frank brought home last Wednesday? They need it down at the lab.”

She looked at him oddly. “Don’t you remember, Fritz? You sent for it Thursday morning.”

“The rifle?”

“It was a patrol-car cop. A skinny little guy named Marek, with a weak handshake.”

They stared at each other.

“Fritz—did I do wrong to let him take the rifle?”

***

With Nick, Frey played back the cassette tape at police headquarters.

HELLER
: Come in. Shut the door. Hands against the wall, please. Lean on the hands…. Sit down here please…. Coffee?

WOMAN
: No coffee.

HELLER
: What can I do for you?

WOMAN
: You called Mr. Casper. You said you had the rifle. I came here to buy the rifle.

HELLER
: Good.

WOMAN
: I would have thought we had been more than generous.

HELLER
: You were fine. But this is a separate transaction.

WOMAN
: How much?

HELLER
: What is it worth to you?

WOMAN
: It doesn’t matter. No matter what I say you’ll say it’s not enough.

HELLER
: Try me.

WOMAN
: Five thousand dollars.

HELLER
: Not enough.

WOMAN
: All right then. Five thousand and one dollars.

HELLER
: You have committed a federal offense here. The death penalty for a federal offense depends on the mode of execution of the state in which the offense was committed. In Pennsylvania we use electrocution.

WOMAN
: How much do you want?

HELLER
: I will bring the rifle tonight to Hunt Plaza at eleven. [
There is the sound of a knock on the door
.] Come in. [
Door opens. Sound of cups rattling on a tray
.] Ah—coffee and schnecken. Thank you, Myrtle.

MYRTLE
: You’re welcome, dear. [
Sound of door closing
.]

HELLER
: So—Hunt Plaza at eleven. We will meet under the railway bridge. You will hand me twenty-five thousand dollars cash. I will hand you the rifle.

WOMAN
: That’s a lot of money for a rifle.

HELLER
: It’s a lot of money for anything.

WOMAN
: I think I will have some coffee. No—please! Let me pour it…. Let me freshen yours…. My God! It’s a quarter to twelve, and I have to get to the bank if I’m going to buy that rifle.

HELLER
: As you wish, dear lady.

[
Recording is terminated
.]

Nick asked for a copy of the tape, then the Commissioner asked if Heller and the woman had been talking about what he thought they were talking about.

“They were haggling over the price for the rifle used to murder my brother, Commissioner Frey.”

“That’s what I thought,” Frey said sadly. “Frank finally overpriced himself.”

“May we have copies of the two tapes filed for Mr. William Casper?”

“You can have copies and voice prints on all of them, Mr. Thirkield. And a copy of the autopsy report.”

“Maybe you’d better include the autopsy reports on the Engelson Building manager and John Kullers.”

SATURDAY NIGHT, FEBRUARY 2, 1974—NEW YORK

He took the train to New York. When he got there it was a wet, cold winter evening. He was baffled by the emergence of a Mrs. Casper who had left the antilife substance in Heller’s coffee. Just by showing up out of nowhere she had widened the inquiry. He had to pass all of this along to Pa for Professor Cerutti, Pa’s house mastermind.

There were many more people than taxis at Penn Station. He did not have the courage to roam the streets looking for a cab. He waited for ten minutes before he understood that he was going to have to fight for a cab to get one. He fought off three men (who had body-blocked two women), made it into a cab, slammed the door and locked it instantly. There was no thought in anyone’s mind that he should have offered to share the cab, because everyone there knew that everyone else there was probably a homicidal maniac who carried a concealed ice pick that would flash out and pin the cab-sharer’s heart to the back of the seat. The driver, locked inside a steel compartment behind the wheel, didn’t want to know who rode, who killed whom or who didn’t. Everything but the street traffic hurried across the funeral parlor of the western world in taut silence and with frightened faces. Even with the doors locked and a good grip on the blackjack bestowed by his father, Nick sweated out the passage to the protected inner zone of the city, where no junkies were permitted to wander around unless they had an assured source of supply.

He felt locked in the ultimate stasis on concentric levels of self and civilization. He responded against the savagery and the threat of the city automatically: he moved out within his mind to defy his father. To throw off the threat of collective insanity from the most dangerous place in the world he hacked at the central suffocation of his life—his father.

He wasn’t aware of how his mind was reacting, but Nick was so committed to impressing Pa with his intelligence and efficiency, his daring and skill, that he compromised in his mind with what his father had not wanted him to do, telling himself he had to do it to get results, that there was no other way: he decided to bring the press into the investigation. He was certain that he could make a written agreement with them at the outset that would control them. He reasoned that he would be able to control them until Pa could be brought to see why the cooperation of the press was necessary and give his permission to let them publish.

Nick decided he could negotiate press assistance on a copyright basis. It would be his story. He would lease the story to them with explicit conditions.

He had to do it, he told himself. Lieutenant Doty had said the Syndicate had found Joe Diamond for whoever had paid to have Tim killed. Nick had only the vaguest idea of what the Syndicate was; he supposed it was another way of saying “Mafia” and labeling organized crime. If the Syndicate had agreed to provide a man to do the killing, then it followed that they knew who had asked them to find the killer. As impenetrable as the situation had seemed a few hours before, he now saw that all he had to do was to find a way to reach the Syndicate, whatever that might be. The press knew such people. Until the woman from the
National Magazine
had had her car accident, Nick hadn’t known any part of the press, but he knew someone now.

Mr. Zendt, the managing director of Pa’s hotel, took Nick personally to the family apartment, a three-story
penthouse in the tower of the hotel. It was an extraordinary apartment at the very center of the mire of twenty-five million people and all of their lights. And Pa believed in comfort most after matters of money and power had been settled. The colors of the apartment soothed: muted ivory against pale orange, green and soft blue. There was a living room that was three stories tall; a dining room, library, a large foyer and kitchen on the main floor; four bedrooms, four baths and two studies on the upper floors. The first-floor study, with blue walls and white woodwork, had another installation of Pa’s replicas of the White House telephone system, by which, he bragged, he could reach anyone in the world who was lolling about near their phone within six minutes. Pa had stolen all the records and systems of the White House switchboard, including every public, private and hideout telephone number of some six thousand people in the world. Pa bragged that he could reach the Metropolitan of the Russian Church during Mass through a phone in the tabernacle.

Nick knew that as soon as he arrived at the desk in the lobby of the hotel Pa would be flashed on the special equipment so that he could know Nick was in residence in New York. “Information is the key to everything,” Pa taught. The thought made Nick sweat. Suppose Pa had the whole place bugged? Why was he supposing? Of course Pa would have it bugged. That meant (a) no meetings with the press at the apartment and (b) he would be crazy to invite Yvette Malone up into one these bedrooms, because she was so operatically vocal in the sack. Therefore, when Mr. Zendt asked whether Nick would like to have a cook while he was in residence, Nick declined; no entertaining. God, what a waste, he thought.

A man came to unpack him and to take out his clothes to be pressed. Two chambermaids turned down the beds in Tim’s beige and brown room, which had one green velvet chair and one green leather chair into
which Pa had had screwed commemorative tabs establishing that Tim had sat in his own two chairs.

Nick put in a call to Jake Lanham in Brunei. While he waited for it, he walked aimlessly around the room, staring out at the rare beauty of the city when seen at night from a height of seven hundred feet. The view made him thirsty. Remarkable things could happen in buildings in which Pa stayed, because he had the foresight to own everything. He called down for a bottle of Montrachet ’59, a dry white wine of which the Vicomte Henri d’Emmet had said it caused one “to be drunk on one’s knees, with the head bared,” but of which the Vicomtesse d’Emmet (to some the greater authority) had recorded, “Very great, but the very best makes the veins swell like whipcord.”

By the time he had spoken to Jake Lanham he had drunk a third of the bottle and felt himself to be one-third wider and one-half longer. Jake was willing to stay on, managing Brunei, with a 20 percent raise (less than Nick had paid Keifetz). Then Lanham said that Keifetz had died thirty-five hundred dollars light in petty cash. Gulping, Nick said that was “all right.” He was thinking of asking Lanham if he’d like to take Carswell’s job in London, but after hearing news like that, he decided he didn’t dislike Carswell quite so much.