Winter Kills (23 page)

“I’m glad you went, no kidding. Somebody is trying to teach me futility as a way of life, and you are telling me something that is maybe as old as the first
economic figure in American history—you know, one of the basic truths that is always revived as needed.”

“What basic truth?” Keifetz asked belligerently.

“That there are a handful of people who own the country and who stay in power by teaching everybody else that all striving is fruitless, that there is no use fighting it—no way—that what’s-the-use is the only helpful permanent attitude to have in life.”

“Now who was the member of the Marxist Sunday group?” Keifetz asked accusingly.

“The thing is, whoever is teaching me futility this year also killed Tim in 1960. They were able to get close enough to him to kill him; therefore they have to be some of the people who ran him. Let’s try on some questions. Why did Z. K. Dawson agree to see me?”

“Your old man asked him.” Keifetz’ head was as bald as a kneecap, as brown as a GI boot. He had knobby, rosy cheeks over the tan, that comical moustache, and the mock-kindly look of Field Marshal Lord Montgomery of Alamein just after he had consumed a regimental sergeant major and two field ranks for breakfast. He held his mouth pressed together in a permanent expression of belligerence, giving him the look of a prizefighter who was making sure his mouthpiece wouldn’t fall out. He was a head taller than Nick, a foot wider and eighteen inches thicker. His voice had overtones of a crocodile with severe indigestion.

“That’s not why.”

“Why, then?”

“He agreed to see me so that he could pass me along to the next set of phony clues. So they could plant a woman on me named Chantal Lamers, who then set up the third set of phony clues like in a leapfrog game.”

“Are you saying the guy in Cleveland was a phony?”

“Frank Mayo says he doesn’t even exist.”

“Do me a favor and start from the beginning.”

“I’ve been walking around in a maze without a hat. Sometimes I think Tim is alive and well and living in Argentina.”

“Just say what happened.”

“I got to London, and Carswell was so absolutely impossible that there can no longer be any question about it—he has to go.”

“Later, later. Tell me about Philly.”

“Okay. Breakfast with Miles. Miles dug up a high-ranking cop. Now, it just happens to work out that fourteen years ago this same cop was in on Tim’s murder so deep that he is definitely one of the bad guys.”

“Then what?”

“We find the rifle. The cop—who is named Frank Heller—very plausibly takes the rifle to the police lab—he says—except that it never got near the lab. Heller must have tried to blackmail somebody with the rifle, because that same night he was killed.”

“Jesus.”

“Pa set a meeting with Z. K. Dawson in Tulsa. Dawson gave nothing away, but he went to a lot of trouble to make a case that Tim was good for his business and that the last thing he wanted was to have Tim dead.”

“You believe him?”

“I don’t see how I can believe anybody. This Casper Junior that Fletcher told us about is all over this thing. He pops up in every nook and cranny of the goddam thing, but I’m no closer to finding out who he was. But he’s heavy Texas, and I have to think that he was acting for Dawson, who is very heavy Texas. I did find out that the Philadelphia police were deep into Tim’s murder, but Heller is dead. Joe Diamond, the nightclub saloonkeeper, left his muddy footprints everywhere, and I have no doubt that he did everything Fletcher said he did, including shoot Willie Arnold, but he’s dead. Willie Arnold, who played Jesus to the Pickering Commission’s Pontius Pilate, is dead. It looks like we know everything but we can’t prove anything, doesn’t it?”

“Sure does.”

“Then why did they invent a woman named Chantal
Lamers, who took me to a fake editor of the
National Magazine
, who arranged for me to interview this very dubious Cleveland mobster, who produced a detailed story that the movie industry had had Tim killed?”

“How did
they
get in? Jesus, no wonder there was such a crowd in Hunt Plaza in Philly that day.”

“Tim had been laying a movie woman named Ellamae Irving, you know the one, and—”

“Do I know the one? Boyoboy!”

“So the way the story goes from this hoodlum, she killed herself because Tim wouldn’t make her First Lady of the Land, and because that cost some movie company fifty million dollars, they had Tim killed.”

“It doesn’t sound right. I can see how certain guys might miss her, but I don’t see them shooting the President of the United States for her. For one thing, they hate to leave Beverly Hills.”

“A Lieutenant Doty of the Philadelphia police—a lifetime partner of Heller’s—admits that the police opened all the doors for the assassins, but he says they had nothing else to do with the killing. He says the Mob, either on its own or on hire, actually did the work. So I went to what I was
told
were the editors of the
National Magazine
to find me a top mobster.”

“But you said you knew Frank Mayo.”

“My father knew him, but I didn’t know then that my father knew him, or at least I didn’t know it until after the magazine had made the hoodlum connection.”

“You should have known your old man woulda known Frank Mayo, Nicholas.”

“Please, stay with me. We both talked to Turk Fletcher. He was just a Texas farmer. I mean, nobody would say Turk Fletcher was a member of the Mafia or the Syndicate or anything like that.”

“Why not? Look at Farmer Rappaport. He was a real dirt farmer from New Jersey. He sold tomatoes to the Campbell Soup Company until he got a job with Lepke in Murder, Inc. My old man was a bushelman in the garment district—that’s below Thirty-first Street.
That Farmer Rappaport was a real organization man.”

“For Christ’s sake! We are fitting a puzzle together! I am saying that it is sensible to reason that if the Mob was in this, they were not acting independently for their own reasons. It is logical that whoever hired Turk Fletcher also may have contacted the Syndicate to hire the other rifleman. If I could find out who hired Joe Diamond, then I’d know who hired Fletcher, and we’d have this all wrapped up.”

“So what happened?”

“I found out that is what they wanted me to think, so that when the whole thing collapsed I would have been taught another lesson in futility.”

“But how did you find out the broad and the editor were phonies?”

“I went to the magazine this morning, and the real people put me straight. Then I went to Chantal Lamers’ building. I found out she never lived there. Then I came here to find you doing your famous impression of The Resurrection and The Light. How do you figure this mess out?”

“I agree with you that they are trying to teach you that anything you do is just going to be futile and hopeless. The owners always do it that way. It has worked for them since the Civil War, so they know it will work with you.”

“I haven’t even been here a week,” Nick said. “I sure haven’t been here long enough to figure out any policy.”

“There is only one policy.”

“If you know it, tell it.”

“Don’t take any more outside leads like Lamers’ or anybody else’s. Run everything through your old man. He probably has an organization bigger than the Common Market. And on a thing like Tim’s murder he’s the only one you can trust.”

The telephone rang. It was Pa. He told Nick to get right over to the hospital because Frank Mayo was on his way. Nick didn’t mention Keifetz’ being alive. He
hung up and said, “God knows, I’m happy and grateful that you’re alive.”

“Okay. So get maudlin.”

“So would you if they told you I had been killed by those bastards,” Nick flared up.

“Of course. But I’m a Russian Jew. You’re a WASP. It doesn’t look nice for you.” He fingered his moustache, grinned broadly and farted.

“Keifetz, come on. Quit horsing around. The fact is, I am going to need you badly before we get out of this thing, so what I’m saying is, the fewer people who know you are still alive, the better. That includes my father, because he talks all the time, and too many people could find out about it.”

“And knock me off.”

“That’s right. So wait till it’s dark before you leave here. Then take the elevator to the cellar and go out through the help’s exit. Oh, shit!”

“Whatsamatta?”

“The hotel desk and the manager know you are here, and they file a minute-by-minute log with my father.”

“No. I don’t know if I thought of that, but they haven’t got my real name. I told them I was from the police commissioner’s office in Philadelphia. I told them my name was Trudeman Garfunkel.”

“Great. That’s great! Now I have time to make up a lie. When you get out of here, check into the Waldorf so I can find you. It’s just better for you to stay dead a little while longer.”

***

When Nick got to the hospital Pa grandstanded for him by pulling a flat package out from under his pillow and saying, “Here. That’s the fifteen grand you gave that fink last night.”

“You had him picked up?” Nick wasn’t as surprised as he would have been earlier—he had a good sense of Pa now.

“Yeah. You know what he is, this big wheel in the
Syndicate? An actor. But what kind of an actor? An out-of-work actor in blue movies.”

“Who hired him?”

“The tape he made for you is with Jim Cerutti now. So is the tape he made with my men who had the talk with him. Cerutti will put it all together.”

“The whole peg they tried to hang everything on,” Nick said, “was that Tim had been killed by a movie company.”

“They must think we’re feebleminded!” Pa said. “And they’re so
care
less. Just a cursory check would have showed them that a few of my companies own forty-six percent of Federal Studios. Ellamae Irving wasn’t worth any fifty million dollars in film rentals. I listened to that Mentor tape. It was fulla false notes. The whole goddam thing was a
romantic
story about a woman who died of a broken heart. Ellamae is supposed to have killed herself because Tim threw her over. But life just didn’t work that way with her. And Harry Small had three stars bigger than her—at the box office, that is. Also Harry Small was the kind of a guy who kept so busy that if he was alive right now he might not know Ellamae had killed herself.”

“Maybe she didn’t kill herself,” Nick persisted. “Maybe she’s just another one of the twenty-odd people who have died because Tim was killed.”

“Don’t believe it,” Pa said. “First of all, she died a year ahead of Tim. Second, like every other suicide, she had been a suicide inside her head since she was about five years old.”

“Okay,” Nick said. “Who hired Mentor?”

“The Casper Williams name again. Same description. The interesting thing is the Joe Diamond background they gave Mentor to give to you. It was all designed sideways and backwards, and the funny thing was—”

Rose put her head in the doorway. “Mr. Mayo is here,” she said, smiling broadly.

“Send him in, you beautiful thing,” Pa said. Frank
Mayo came in and shook hands with Pa and Nick heartily. “Whatever it is you’ve got,” Pa said, “Eve and Rose like it.”

“The feeling is entirely mutual,” Mr. Mayo said.

“I got a big surprise for you,” Pa said. “It’ll turn you into a Sicilian again. I got a case of Corvo di Castellodaccio—with four bottles waiting, lightly chilled, right now—to go with—ready?—hey?—crispeddi di riso alia Benedittina, nice and hot, right out of the microwave. I flew them in on my own plane from Catania.”

“Holy
Je
zuss, Mr. Kegan!”

“Okay, girls!” Pa yelled.

Eve and Rose rolled the Salton hot cart in. Eve carried two bottles of wine in a cooler. She filled the glasses while Mr. Mayo was tasting the crispeddi and moaning.

“I got four dozen of those deep-frozen for you,” Pa said, smiling with great pleasure.

After ten minutes of eating and drinking, Pa said, “Nick is dying to hear the real story on Joe Diamond.” To Nick he said, “Frank heard both the Irving Mentor tapes.”

Mr. Mayo cleared his throat. “Well, sure, Diamond come from aronn Cleveland originally. He worked for Gameboy Baker in some of Moey’s joints, but he never worked in Cuba. He was inna war even. He was infantry in Germany.”

“Tim was in Germany,” Pa said.

“When he come outta the army he was in Chicago, and him and Max Davidoff got the okay to take over the Grocery and Office Used Box and Paper local after Eddie Brinkman was shot. Davidoff was international president and Diamond was international first vice-president. It was a good thing for them. It threw off maybe two hundred, three hundred thousand a year. That’s where he saved up to open a joint in Philly. Davidoff had a son-in-law who was a real hustler in the insurance business, and Davidoff was very solid with
Vonnie Blanik, the international president of the Tubesters, and he made a good deal with Blanik to shove the union insurance through the kid, and there was so much for everybody that Davidoff sold his piece of the Used Box and Paper local to Diamond, and Davidoff moved to Detroit. Whenever this is who killed our President wanted to buy somebody to do it, he went to Blanik, because—which every little kid onna street knows—Blanik hated Tim Kegan more than anybody in the United States, he thought, up until then. Lissen, your brother kept after him, put him in jail, made a monkey of him, called him a crook to his own men, his men that were proud of their crook! Blanik saw how he could hit our President and not get any trouble, so he talked it over with Davidoff.”

DECEMBER 5, 1959—DETROIT

Joe Diamond always liked to see Murray Davidoff, a man the Sicilians always called Max for no reason whatsoever, and he always liked to go to Detroit because of the time they had given Elvis Presley his suite at the Book-Cadillac, and by the time they got Presley out of there and he had gone in, very exhausted, while he was having a room-service meal in the living room, four little broads had sneaked into the bedroom without him knowing anything about it. They thought Presley still stayed there. When he threw them out one of them stole his pajama bottoms. The idea of four little broads climbing twenty-one flights of service stairs hoping to get laid by Elvis Presley disgusted him. In fact, when he found one of them still hiding in his room after he had had dinner, he felt like throwing up. But he knew that somewhere in Detroit his pajama bottoms were probably tacked up on the wall of some little broad’s room and that they would stay with her for the rest of her life because she thought Elvis had worn them, and that was why he liked Detroit.