Winter Kills (17 page)

After another glass of wine he couldn’t stand being separated from Yvette Malone any longer, so he called her. Maddeningly, she was not at her apartment. He told her answering service to tell her to call him. If she didn’t want to get married, what the hell, they wouldn’t get married. He sipped at the wine, then hoping it wasn’t too late for magazine office hours—but it was the only way he knew to reach her—he suddenly called Chantal Lamers at her desk number at the
National Magazine
.

Chantal Lamers was happy—he was even willing to estimate that she was
very
happy to hear from him. She would be stimulated and delighted to have dinner with him. They agreed on the Canopy for eight thirty,
just about two hours ahead. The moment he disconnected, the switchboard flashed again. It was Pa.

“What are you doing in New York?” Pa asked.

“I wanted to see a friend.”

“What friend?”

“You don’t know her.”

“Oh. A
friend
. Well, the agency confirms that Turk Fletcher worked for the National Rifle Association, and they will get us photographs of him. No line on Casper in Dallas. Did you know your pal Keifetz clipped us for thirty-five hundred bucks?”

“How did you know that?” Nick gasped.

“I keep in touch, kid.”

“Well, Keifetz didn’t clip anybody. I authorized the withdrawal.”

“Like hell you did.” Pa hung up. Nick felt himself swelling up with rage, although it was probably the Vicomtesse d’Emmet’s prognosis for people who drank too much Montrachet. He called down for a car and driver to pick him up at eight fifteen. He thought of ordering a car to pick up Chantal Lamers, but he decided he didn’t know her well enough.

He felt a little drunk. He decided to take hot and cold showers. He thought about sending out for some tanked oxygen or maybe some propranolol, because he had to be sharp for Lamers if he were going to maintain control of the press. He started for the stairway to go to the upstairs bedroom when the doorbell rang. He shook his head, took a deep breath and went to the door. He opened it on a large, bulky man wearing a Chesterfield overcoat, a blue woolen scarf and a bowler hat who was pointing a pistol at his stomach. The man jabbed the barrel of the pistol into him and backed him across the entrance hall, kicking the door shut behind him. “Don’t talk,” the beef-cheeked man said. “There is nothing to talk about. You are going out that window.” He had a pronounced British accent.

Nick leaped to the wall at his right. He pressed the alarm button that the Secret Service had installed for
Tim within the columns of the decorative paneling. Rapid bells and heavy gongs began sounding simultaneously. A full-throated siren began to moan. The bulky man took his eyes off Nick in astonished panic, as though he could not shoot him because his orders had been to thrust him out the window. Nick threw a bronze bookend from a recessed shelf. It struck the man at the side of his bowler hat and sent him staggering backward into the wall. Nick lunged for the man’s gun wrist, holding it with both hands, forcing it downward. The man dropped the gun and hit Nick heavily in the face with a long, left-side swing, then dropped him to his knees, screaming, by applying deep pressure with his powerful left hand to a nerve terminal in Nick’s elbow. Nick let go the man’s wrist. The man kicked him in the right temple, spun around, opened the front door through all the noises of the alarms, and sprinted down the hall. Nick lay there unconscious for fifty seconds or so until a swarm of house security officers, followed by Mr. Zendt, came pounding down the hall into the flat. The whole assault had taken less than two minutes.

They walked Nick around the room while he said to Mr. Zendt, “My father wouldn’t want anyone to know about this, Mr. Zendt.”

“Not a word, sir.”

“Do we even have to tell the police about it?”

“He left a gun, Mr. Thirkield,” the chief security officer said. “We have to report the whole thing.”

“But the police are cooperative,” Mr. Zendt said. “And you’d goddam well better make sure of that, Flicker.”

“Mr. Thirkield is gunna have to talk to them,” Flicker said.

“I have a meeting at eight thirty,” Nick said. “If they can get here in time for me to make the meeting, I’ll be happy to talk to them.”

“Otherwise tomorrow?” Flicker asked wistfully.

“Sure. Why not?”

The telephone rang. “That would be my father,” Nick said. “He has heard about the attack no doubt.” He walked unsteadily away from them, then turned to ask if Mr. Zendt would have another bottle of wine sent up. If it affected the meeting with the
National Magazine
, too bad. He needed it.

He closed the door of the study and picked up the phone. “Yes, Pa?” he said automatically. It was Pa. It wasn’t Yvette.

“Did they nail the son-of-a-bitch? He must be somewhere in the goddam building.” Nick figured that the British hit man must have called Pa himself to make sure he was filled in.

“Not yet. He wore a derby hat and sounded like he came from London.”

“London?”

“Carswell probably sent him.”

“No jokes, kid. This is very bad. I don’t give a goddam what you say, we are putting a security team on you.”

“All right, Pa.”

“How did you fight off a professional with a gun? I can’t tell you what a terrific feeling it gives me that you actually saved yourself by fighting off an armed man.”

“Thanks, Pa.”

“I don’t want the cops giving this to the papers. Leave it to me.”

“Pa, something very big happened in Philadelphia this afternoon. I drove out with Commissioner Frey to Heller’s house to look for the gun. We didn’t find it, but we got voice prints William Casper and a woman who calls herself Mrs. Casper made in Heller’s office. He was one of those nuts who records everything. But the thing is, all of a sudden there is a woman in this case. A woman in her middle thirties with silver hair, Mrs. Heller says, and Commissioner Frey is sending copies of the tapes to you so that Cerutti can analyze them.”

“You are absolutely terrific, Nick.”

Nick felt the glow beginning at his toes and starting upward. “It just happened to happen, Pa,” he said.

“Well, I am telling you that you are solving this case.” Pa hung up. When Nick returned to the big room only Mr. Zendt was waiting.

“Was it your father?” he asked nervously.

“Yes. He just wondered if we had caught the gunman, that’s all.”

“We’ll have him within the hour, Mr. Thirkield.”

“The
hour
?”

“We have only two floors of rooms and suites for transients. The rest are all leased apartments. In order to get up here the man would have had to check in to one of the transient accommodations or he would have had to ask at the desk for someone who had an apartment and who would clear him with the desk before he could get upstairs. The security officers are making the check on the transient rooms first. They think he returned to one of them to wait until a chance came to get out of the building. In the meantime, Mr. Thirkield, we have these photographs taken of people who checked into the hotel in the past forty-eight hours or who inquired at the desk to call on a tenant in the building.”

“You photograph people who check in?”

“We photograph anybody who enters the lobby. If he goes to the desk we also record him to synchronize with the photos. Your father insists on this.”

Nick pulled the seventh picture from the top of the stack. “That’s the man,” he said. Mr. Zendt turned the photo over. “He checked in at six forty-five yesterday evening. We had a reservation from a travel agency in Malta.”

“Malta?”

“We’ll get him. It is as hard to get out of this building as it is to get in.”

The wine arrived. The city detectives came in right
behind it. Nick reidentified the photograph of the man, said he had British speech and probably a bruised head, while Mr. Zendt talked to the front desk and came up with information that the man had registered as Martin Keys and that he had a British passport. The police took the gun and left to work with the hotel security on a comb-out of the apartments in the building. A house physician appeared. He pressed a sedative on Nick, but Nick had a glass of Montrachet instead.

SATURDAY NIGHT, FEBRUARY 2, 1974—NEW YORK

Chantal Lamers seemed to have lost the skinny, pale look he remembered her having. How could he ever have thought she was skinny, he asked himself. She wasn’t merely “interesting looking” anymore either. She was an absolute gas to stare at. He began to have actively lewd thoughts as he watched her cross the restaurant to join him.
Join
him? More than lewd, he estimated—lewder. She was shucking off her coat as she hurried toward his table. As she leaned far forward to free her second arm, still walking, he had to grip his chair compulsively to keep himself from diving head first into her beckoning décolletage. He shook the china on the table as he arose, dismayed by an instant erection. He had lived alone too long, he decided. He dropped a napkin in front of himself in a gesture of diffidence, not to say personal daintiness—as a matador might work with a cape—but not in time. Miss Lamers was a fly-watcher. Most women were fly-watchers, but Miss Lamers was a fly-starer. She had seen it, hefted it mentally, and the experience allowed her to feel all the happier about everything.

You are involved in multiple grisly murders, he told himself. It is your responsibility to convince this woman that the essence of American history is within the grasp of her journalism, so that she will lead the way to the topmost reaches of the management of her magazine and possibly bring to justice a man who has killed more people than Landru, and yet he was peeking
down the front of her dress and manufacturing erections.

She wore a tiny nile-green patch where the unsightly bandage had been. She wore matching eye makeup, and that startled him, because he knew that women who wear eye makeup and ankle bracelets were usually just as unaccountably lewd as he was. He had thought of her as being far more serious than that. He wanted to notice whether her dress gave her any of the thirty-one hundred extras that the work of Madame Grès conferred on Yvette Malone, but he could not bear to take his eyes away from that neckline.

He was appalled to realize that the urgency of being with Yvette Malone was disappearing from his mind with the speed of the evanescence of the Cheshire cat. What disturbed his deepest sense of self, his image of what he was and had always been to himself, however, was that seventy minutes after a man with a gun had been determined to throw him out of a skyscraper window, he could pursue such lascivious thoughts, pursue them as a groupie pursues an employed rock singer. Then he knew he should not have thought of the man with the gun. It was spoiling everything. Instantly he lost the erection. He felt like a living Indian rope trick.

“Are you all right, Mr. Thirkield?”

“Oh, yes. Thank you. I did feel a little odd for a moment. Perhaps I stood up too quickly.”

“Your face seems a little swollen too,” she said.

“I ran into a door.”

“How marvelous that you were able to come to New York so soon.” Her Muskogee accent was fruity and gorgeous. She talked like a field hand in
Gone with the Wind
, which he had seen in Bhutan.

“Something to drink?” he murmured.

“A Gibson, please.”

“Two Gibsons,” Nick told the table captain, even though he deplored gin. People who drank gin simply walked differently. The captain departed on the run,
because Mr. Thirkield’s father owned the restaurant.

They dined on fillets of brill poached and glazed in Mornay sauce; coq au vin cooked in La Gaffelière ’61. They finished a vanilla soufflé with pieces of biscuit soaked in kirsch and anisette. The food was so good they talked less than they thought they would. The wine was so good that they talked more than Miss Lamers thought she should. Nick had a marvelous time: the bodice, that slack red cushion of a mouth, the food and her anecdotes—about actors, jockeys and politicians (including several racy ones about the late President Kegan)—all built his euphoria. “You must know two thousand people more than I’ll ever know,” Nick said.

“I never
met
those people,” Miss Lamers murmured. “It’s just that I usually take my lunch to the office and eat it in our file room, which has all kinds of stuff we can’t print about people like that.”

“I’d sure like to read the file on Tim Kegan,” Nick said.

“Are you a Kegan admirer?”

“He was my half brother.”

Miss Lamers dropped a spoon. “Oh, dear God,” she said, “and there I was ruffling my mouth with those awful stories about him.” She blushed like a peony. “I am just terribly embarrassed.”

“Oh, please! No. He would have loved those stories—that is, those particular stories. Anyway, Tim is why we’re having dinner—in a way. I mean, when you hear what it is, you’ll know the story is important. It is so important that before I start I’ll have to ask you to keep total silence on it—that is, until my father and I say you can print it.”

“Your father?”

“Yes. Is that okay?”

“I—well, I guess so.”

“The story concerns the fact that I talked with the man who fired the second rifle at my brother’s assassination.
In a way, considering the findings of the Pickering Commission, you could call it the third rifle. That’s enough to start with, isn’t it?”

“My God, yes.”

“I’d like to talk to your editor. If we can reach a written understanding that the story is mine, that it belongs only to me under the protection of common-law copyright, I will tell him everything I have found out about my brother’s murder.”

“This is simply fantastic, Mr. Thirkield.” Her large eyes got larger. He noticed that they were violet. He had read that actresses were supposed to have violet eyes, but this was too much.

“There is also a woman’s angle. I mean, there is a woman involved with the assassination team.”

She suddenly got pale with excitement. “I’ll call my editor right now,” she said. She walked out of the dining room rapidly.

***