Winter Kills (3 page)

“Now, listen, Keifetz—”

“Every doctor on that job said there was a second rifle.”

“Newspaper talk!” Nick had read more than very nearly anyone about his brother’s murder, but he had known what he wanted to believe, and he had stayed in Asia most of the time after that, or in London or Paris, except for when he had the breakdown because he was
taking the whole thing too big. All he knew as he stared at Keifetz was that fourteen years after everything had happened he just didn’t want to hear that there had been a second rifle, because that would just stir everything up again. It could get Pa all agitated and active. He would pull Nick into some crazy vengeance scheme, and that would put an end to Nick’s life without father. Talk or proof about a second rifle couldn’t serve anything except to keep him away from running his own company for another three months. Tim was dead. He’d been dead for fourteen years. No big deal of another presidential commission investigation would bring Tim back to life.

“Look,” Keifetz said, “how many times I gotta say it? Go ahead, Nicholas. Turn your back. What the hell do you care?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“I already told you plenty of times.” Keifetz had raised his voice. “Abe Weiler won a Nobel Prize for medicine, and I went to school with Abe Weiler. He is the doctor who pronounced your brother dead. I wrote to him. He answered back exactly the way he told the newspapers in the official medical report—that your brother had been hit front and rear by two different rifles. You allow the shot in the back of the head because the Pickering Commission told you to—right? Okay. The other bullet knocked on the front door.”

“That’s a cute expression.”

“Boy, that’s what this dying man, this Turk Fletcher, needs, some of your famous sarcasm.”

“Willie Arnold was a Communist,” Nick said irrelevantly. Not irrelevantly for him, because Pa had trained him all his life to use sentences like that, but irrelevant to the question.

“Would you believe the Hearst papers on Communists?” Keifetz asked.

“Of course.”

“Okay, so I’m a Victor-ola. The Hearst papers, in 1960, the year your brother was killed, said that in assassinating
the President, Willie Arnold had, quote, served the Communist cause its worst setback in forty-six years since its baneful inception, unquote. Okay, tell me something. Would you believe the late J. Edgar Hoover on Communists? In 1960 J. Edgar Hoover said—”

“Never mind, fahcrissake! I was crazy to bring it up. What do I talk politics with you all the time for? Why don’t I back you into a good argument about piano techniques?”

“I’m sorry, Nicholas.”

“You are so goddam self-righteous about the Joseph Alsop columns you were able to memorize.”

“Still, right is right.”

Nick stared at him with his Captain Bligh look. “Keifetz, this is a family affair. If the man in this hospital was part of a conspiracy that murdered my brother, I am going to find out about the rest of the people in the conspiracy.”

“I hoped you’d say that. I am proud of you. I honestly am.”

What have I said, Nick wondered. Is this a John Wayne movie? How could I commit myself like that? Keifetz was a dangerous mental case where Tim was concerned and Keifetz would never let him forget what he had just said. It meant, for Christ’s sake, he had been manipulated again, and he would never be able to prove that he had been manipulated. Someday he was going to decide he had had enough and fire this son-of-a-bitch.

11:10 P.M., SAME NIGHT—BRUNEI

There was a parking space in front of the hospital. They waited in the air-conditioned lobby. “Enjoy the cool while you can,” Keifetz said. “The air-conditioning breaks down here every hour on the hour.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“Fletcher is going to be able to go through this only once,” Keifetz said, “so I borrowed a lawyer from Shell to take a deposition.”

The lawyer brought a stenographer with him. The lawyer’s name was Chandler Tate. The stenographer was a Javanese girl named Sis Ryan. Keifetz led them to Fletcher’s room. There was a screen around the bed and two chairs on either side of it. Keifetz leaned over and spoke directly into Fletcher’s ear. “President Kegan’s brother is here, Turk,” he said. Fletcher opened his eyes, but he didn’t look at anybody.

“We are going to swear you in, Turk,” Keifetz said. Sis Ryan moved a Bible under Fletcher’s hand on the bed. Tate read the formula to Fletcher from a typewritten slip. Fletcher repeated that what he was about to say was the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help him God.

The iodoform smell was sweet and heavy. The flat fluorescent light poured age down on all of them except Sis Ryan. Fletcher’s face was as lined as a phonograph record. His voice was a hoarse whisper.

“State your full name, please,” Tate said.

“Arthur Turkus Fletcher.”

“Your address, please.”

“Dallas. Texas.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-eight years.”

“We will hear your testimony now.”

“I shot President Kegan.”

“How?” Nick asked the question involuntarily.

“I was second rifle in Hunt Plaza on February 22, 1960. I hit with both shots.” His voice had no color because he was saving everything. “First rifle missed with his second shot. I fired from the sixth floor of the Engelson Building, from behind the President’s car.”

Nick corrected Fletcher. “You mean you shot from the TV Center warehouse,” he said.

“There never was any shot from there,” Fletcher whispered, sweating like a mollusk. The people around the bed glistened. Keifetz’ thousand-mile blue shirt had dark loops under each arm. “That room up there was just a decoy. They left the phony rifle there. A mail-order Carcano, fercrissake. I couldn’t hit you from here with no Carcano.”

“Where was the Number One rifle?” Keifetz asked.

“I shot on a line with him,” Fletcher said. “At a high angle where you gotta watch your azimuth and you gotta figure your lead time with a big car that’s bound to pick up speed after them first two shots. Number One shot from behind the fence with the bushes in front—up on the grassy knoll to the right of the car and a little above. I shot three seconds—about thirty yards—behind him.”

Tim loomed up in Nick’s mind wearing a dark jacket with a yellow silk lining that had horses printed on it. He could smell the smoke from Tim’s Cuban cigar. He could see Tim’s eyes mocking him. Tim’s eyes could either use you or you were useless. If you were useless, the eyes were indifferent, but if there was something else seen there that could possibly hoist Tim, the eyes sparkled with attention and flattering concern.

Fletcher gasped with surprise at the intensity of a serial pain that had just scampered through him. Then
he continued to speak slowly, leaning against the ramp of the pain. “First shot to the back of his head. Second shot beside the spine. Near side. I went into history. The way the fortune teller told my momma I would, two hours before I was born.”

Keifetz looked at Nick. Nick seemed to be trying to memorize the square inches of Fletcher’s face. This man killed Tim, Nick was telling himself incredulously. He could reach out and touch Tim’s murderer, but he couldn’t see anything evil in his face.

Pa had made Tim the President. This man had unmade him. Between the two stood an odd stranger, a shimmering figure of memory in TV newsreels. A zero called The Wit and Wisdom of President Kegan. Teeth. Ellamae Irving and her orogenic brassiere. All that red hair. The man who had stared down the Russian Chairman. Women. All sizes of women. A rusty-haired man in white pajamas. A head on a celluloid button. Vietnam.

This exhausted, dying, staring body on the hospital bed, whose face had less expression than a baseball glove, had exploded all of it, had made the wlonk presidential cartoon disappear. It was ridiculous.

Fletcher stared upward as though the ceiling were a crowded movie screen that was offering a spectacular starring himself back in the days when he had never bothered to think about dying.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1959—DALLAS

Toward the end of November 1959, Turk Fletcher came out of the barbershop of the Baker Hotel in Dallas. Just about twenty-three years before, he had gotten the first manicure of his life right there. He had admired the manicurist, Harleen, so much that even after she left to marry the biggest grapefruit producer in East Texas he had continued to patronize the Baker barbershop. He kept track of his haircuts, as he kept a careful record of nearly everything, in case the Internal Revenue ever questioned his expenditures. He had been pleased to note that he had had two hundred and eleven out of two hundred and seventy-six haircuts in the barbershop at the Baker.

On the way out, inhaling the wonderful odors of tonics and cures, the steaming towels and the good clean soap, his back to the barber, who was staring with horror at the ten-cent tip Fletcher had just given him, he was bumped into by a short, stocky fellow who just didn’t give a goddam where he was going. If the little fucker couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see a hole in a forty-foot ladder. The man’s hands apologized for him before his voice could say it. They grabbed Turk sincerely and set him right. Then he came right out and said, “Say, ain’t you Turk Fletcher?” Fletcher nodded like a billy goat (excepting he sure didn’t smell like one right at that minute). “I seen you shoot in Crystal City and at the big chili cookout up to Nito Bennett’s ranch.”

“Win a little?” Fletcher asked smarmily.

“Some. I know maybe a dozen people who think you’re the finest rifle shot alive.”

“Purely fine of you to say it.”

“Would you do me the honor of acceptin’ to drink with me?” This fellow was something else, Fletcher thought. “It would purely be a pleasure,” the stocky man said, “and more than that.”

He had a bright pink face as if barbers had been pinching at it day and night. He had a curvy, white, bartender’s haircut. The part in his hair was a pink, flat, straight ribbon. He was wearing a sure-thing mail-order suit, so he had to be country bred. He had kind of a crude-oil look to him, a good, old-time look. “Call me Casper or call me Junior,” he said. “The name is Casper Junior. And I hope, with all respect, that you’ll let me tell all my people that you asked me to call you Turk.”

“Call me Turk,” Fletcher said in his slow, hoarse voice.

They went up to Casper’s suite of rooms on the fourth floor. Fletcher thought suites of rooms were a great way for a man to chouse his money and make it all nervous. Nobody could live in more than one room at a time. People were outside most of the time anyways. He’d never lived in anything bigger than one room in his life. But, oh hell, it wasn’t anything to get chuffy about.

“In town for long, Turk?”

Casper was the kind of a fellow who polished a bottle with a towel before he poured your drink. He had to have been a bartender before he found the money to throw away on hotel suites. Turk had never seen a bottle of bourbon so undusty. Casper poured them both drinks in a pair of bathroom glasses, then it turned out the little fucker had a goddam icebox right in his parlor. He pulled a bowl of ice out of it, put two lumps into each glass—as if one cube wasn’t cold all by itself—then put the bowl back. Casper must have
learned about life from a correspondence course, Turk figured.

“I live here in East Dallas now,” Turk said.

“What about your Rifle Association work?”

“Well, that was no life. I was as homeless as a poker chip and the West Texas food wasn’t gettin’ to me. I got a mean little stomach, and the best thing is like cheese, so I come back into Dallas where I could get it any time of day.”

“But what about rifle shootin’?”

“I still shoot for the side money. The boys still like to bet if I can hit it or I can’t.”

“The rifle is sure your meat,” Casper said. “We was talkin’ once out in Bryson, Texas—the town named for the great actor?—or no, maybe it was Littlesam—hell, no, I think it was in Bryson—about what the fortune teller said to your mother?”

“I guess ever’body knows that story.” Turk meant it He was sure everybody in Texas knew that story.

“Well, you’ll sure as hell go into history as the best marksman in the world in your time or any old time.”

“No,” Fletcher said reluctantly. He had thought a lot about it. “Tom Frye could beat me with a Remington Nylon sixty-six, twenty-two calibre. And I know Zeiser can take me with benchrest rifle rules, because he has goddam well done it.”

Casper filled Fletcher’s glass with more of the same fine drinking whiskey.

“Then maybe the prediction means you’re gonna shoot the most famous man in the world,” Casper said with a broad grin. “That sure would put you into the history books.”

“I guess it would.” He sipped at the whiskey and stared at the wall. “Hell, come right down to it, Wigger and Anderson can both take me with a small-bore rifle.”

“That’s a different story,” Casper said. “Them boys is full-time record-book shooters.”

***

Over the next month or so Casper Junior saw a lot of Fletcher. They would run into each other accidentally at first. Fletcher saw nothing unusual about that or about Casper’s hero worship. They began to dine together once a week, always at the best places, such as Old Warsaw, or Arthur’s, or Town and Country, and with Casper always grabbing the tickets. Turk felt Casper was the kind of a man who liked to spend money. Turk had given his life to Texas, but that hadn’t made him rich, although he knew he was meant to be rich. It took a rich man to keep grabbing dinner tickets like these, and if Casper wasn’t rich it would be poor manners to let on that Fletcher thought that Casper was just pretending to be rich.

Suddenly, for no reason in this world, Fletcher lost his job on the crane.

The foreman just came up to him on the third pay-day and told him he was through. Fletcher wanted to know how come, but the foreman just walked away. Nobody could understand it. “Why, it wasn’t a week ago that this same little pissmire was tellin’ me an’ ever’body else that I am the best crane operator in the entire Southwest. I mean, I’ve known that man and he has known me and my work for near to eight years,” he told Casper.