Winter Kills (6 page)

As with: what to do if he found Fletcher’s rifle? As with: the succession of broken comma chords in the transition in the first movement of the Waldstein Sonata. His upper arm performed energetic vertical movements added to the rotation of the forearm, the passive movement of the wrist and the slight bending of the elbow joint. Everything worked together interdependently, capable of being stopped only if the censor in the mind ordered all of it to stop.

The Pickering Commission had operated like arms, elbows and fingers upon a silent keyboard. They had
played all the notes—the score was surely there to be read, but they would not allow it to be heard. The commission had announced Stephen Foster when they were actually playing Wagner. Surely, critics who had followed the true score should have pointed that out.

As he played, two immediate decisions became apparent. He had to find the murderer-hirer; and somehow his father would have to be persuaded to help him. Then he felt sleepy. He put the keyboard and the score book back into the attaché case, lay down on the bed, forgot he was wearing white pajamas, and went to sleep.

A car picked him up at eight o’clock in the morning. It drove him to Keifetz’ office in Brunei, but Keifetz wasn’t there. Nick put in calls to his father in Palm Springs, to David Carswell, his manager in London, and to Jake Lanham on the
Teekay
. Daisy, Keifetz’ gorgeous Filipina secretary, lined up plane tickets to Philadelphia from Singapore via London. While he waited for the calls to come in he tried to figure out the time-zone ratios to keep from thinking of the holy hell Pa was going to raise when he heard that Nick had left the
Teekay
. Well, maybe not. Maybe even Pa would rate nailing Tim’s murderer over, at the most, six hours more on a drilling ship. The Lanham call came in first. Nick told Jake he was to take over as drilling superintendent until Pa’s people came aboard, and he emphasized that Jake was to get a written release from them certifying that the
Teekay
was in perfect condition. The London call came in about ten minutes after Jake’s. Carswell had a hard time fighting his way out of a sleeping-pill haze. It was eleven o’clock the night before in London. Nick had to repeat his name several times to get through to Carswell’s recognition level.

“You know who I am now?” Nick abominated Carswell because he was a fink of Pa’s.

“Perfectly all right,” Carswell said. “Missed the name at first. Playing the wireless too loud, I suspect.”

“That is a transparent lie, David.”

“What? Will you repeat that, please?”

“Write this down,” Nick snarled.

“Try to speak more clearly, Nick.”

“I arrive at Heathrow at ten o’clock Tuesday morning on BOAC 713 from Singapore,” Nick shouted. “Go to my flat and pack a bag with winter clothes for me. Meet me in the VIP lounge and bring me a heavy overcoat, a muffler, a hat and long woolen underwear. What I am wearing now could kill me in Philadelphia in January.”

“What about the
Teekay
?”

“I’ll tell you about it Tuesday morning. And don’t take that tone of voice.”

“Your father will not be at all pleased, nonetheless.”

“Did you make a list, you twit? Did you write it all down? You sound all doped, and I need those clothes.”

“Not to worry.”

“Next—pay attention, goddammit—call Miles Gander at the Petroleum Club in Philadelphia and ask him to hold breakfast for me Wednesday morning.”

“He’s about to go bankrupt, you know.”

“Just call him. Save your comment.” Nick detested Carswell doubly each time he was forced to talk to him, because Carswell’s whole air made him act like such an ass.

When Carswell disconnected he was wide awake enough to put in a direct-dial call to Thomas Kegan in Palm Springs.

Nick’s call to Pa was still delayed, but the charter was waiting to fly him to Singapore. He told Daisy to talk to Pa and to tell him that Nick had finished the tests on the
Teekay
and was on his way to Palm Springs. When he got outside, Keifetz was waiting to drive him to the Shell airport.

“What did you decide to do?” Keifetz asked as they drove away.

“Find the rifle.”

“Better take a couple of witnesses. But lay off newspaper guys.”

“I’ll have Miles Gander as a witness.”

“Poor Miles,” Keifetz said. “He’s going bankrupt.”

“That’s certainly the world’s worst-kept secret. I’m going to ask Miles to find me a Philadelphia police official as the other witness.”

“The Philadelphia police didn’t smell very good in 1960.”

“It can’t be helped. The rifle is a murder weapon, and it’s their turf. Anyway, we’ll outnumber him.”

“Then what?”

“If I find the rifle?”

“What else?”

“Then I’ll take Fletcher’s deposition and prints and photographs—which you will airmail out to Palm Springs by tomorrow afternoon—together with the rifle, and my father and I will go to the President and ask that the investigation be reopened.”

***

Keifetz was coming in the office door after seeing Nick off when Pa’s call came through. He told Daisy he’d take it.

“What’s up, kiddo?” Pa said.

“Nicholas is on his way to the States.”

“What about the
Teekay
?”

“He finished the tests.”

“Maybe he thought he finished, but he doesn’t finish until I say he’s finished.”

“Anyway, Mr. Kegan, he’s on his way.”

“Why is he having breakfast with Miles Gander?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Kegan.”

“Listen—you know, and I know you know.”

“Mr. Kegan, how do I know? Maybe he meant to tell me, but he was out of here like a shot this morning.

“But you saw him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. Why is he having breakfast with Miles Gander?”

“A man who worked here died last night. Before he
died he confessed that he had been the second rifle when they killed President Kegan.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“Nicholas wants to tell yon himself.”

“What’s Nick going to the States for?”

“The guy who was dying told Nicholas where he hid the rifle. Nicholas is going to Philadelphia to get the rifle, with Miles Gander and a police official as witnesses.”

“No press!”

“No, Nicholas won’t call in the press. He also got a deposition and fingerprints of the man who died—Arthur Fletcher. Those are going out to him by registered mail to your address—probably tomorrow night.”

Pa hung up on him.

9:20 A.M., MONDAY, JANUARY 28 1974—SINGAPORE

Nick loved Singapore, but he wouldn’t see it on this trip. Something eccentric happened to him every time he got to Singapore. The last time, there had been an epidemic of over four hundred Chinese believing that their penises were retracting into their bodies. Rickshaws had rushed past him from all directions carrying appalled men whose friends, sitting beside them, held on firmly to the imperiled part to prevent it from disappearing up into the lower abdomen.

On this visit all there was to do was to climb down out of the Bonanza and climb up the first-class ramp of the BOAC flight. He had thirty-four hours of sitting ahead of him to Philadelphia, with a three-hour-and-forty-minute layover in London. There were six other passengers in the first-class section, all men. The man in the window seat ahead of him was an unconscious hummer who was improvising Grieg over and over again. It was crazing. Nick moved to the last row in the section, but it was a long time before he could no longer hear the humming.

He decided not to eat or drink until he got to Philadelphia, hoping that that would help him to survive better. He was flying in the wrong direction for minimum jet lag, because as the plane went westward it got earlier and earlier, but his body clock couldn’t understand that. Eating and drinking only made it worse. His head had to be clear when he got to Philadelphia. Goddam Keifetz and Fletcher, he thought uselessly. Responding to them like an altar boy, he had reverted to
the most obvious comic-book cliché—his brother’s avenger. He decided that he must be afraid of Keifetz’ contempt, with all that hissing steam about marching on the White House. How old does a man have to be before he stops finding things out about himself, he thought. He knew more about himself than he had ever wanted to know by the time he was twenty-one. Well, there were clouds and there were silver linings. When he got to London he’d be able to call Yvette Malone. That almost made the whole devious business worth it. No poking and probing (in a psychological investigator’s sense) there. He knew all he had to know about Yvette Malone. She was beautiful. She had a disposition as soft as the down on angels’ wings. She was from Texas, but that was an accident of birth, and even so it wasn’t all bad because, in its unmysterious way, Texas had made her very rich. As far as Nick was concerned, that was all anybody needed to know about anybody. Find out who her mother’s aunt was, and the first thing you know, you discover you are sleeping with the sister of a first cousin of yours. Besides, marginal information about anybody merely reduced to the least the ecstasy of concentration upon the center of the warm sun. Yvette felt the same way. He was just another oil man, and she collected oil men. She liked the way he looked and tasted, she figured he was not from Texas, because he talked like a Yankee. That’s all she wanted to know. It was gratifying to wallow in the generous gifts of pleasure of a woman like Yvette and know that she was giving because she wished to, not because it made her a peripheral part of history to screw the half brother of the late, great Timothy Kegan, once President of the United States.

Yvette Malone lived an idyllic life anywhere it was the comfortable, fashionable place to be. She had a big, fat house on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais (on the right side of that privileged street), and she was willing to fly anywhere except Texas. She insisted on screwing on an “exchange of presents” basis. She always gave
Nick gaudy underwear. He had seventeen sets of silk underwear in five pastel colors. After the first time, when she had explained her policy, he had given her a Hiroshige print. After that she had guided him toward stockings. She said stockings were more impersonal. He didn’t think he really understood her, but he liked barter-banging very much.

Nick was unmarried; had never been married. He was forty-one years old. More and more he had been thinking he should marry Yvette Malone. He couldn’t think of even one small reason against it. They could breed some people to whom he could leave all that underwear. Marriage was a tricky business. When Tim had married Mary Elizabeth McGlade he had certainly never expected he would be a widower at twenty-two, while he was still at Yale. And he had remained a widower, because Pa had underlined that since the tragedy had happened anyway, and terrible as it was, no one could change it, it should be viewed as a political asset: The Man Who Had Remained True to a Precious Memory. Tim had agreed, partly because he felt that way (at the time), but even more because it meant big action with the hundreds of women who had wanted to console him.

Tim had appreciated women because they brought out the actor in him. When he got bored with himself he changed women and got himself a new personality. Except for Pa’s implacable resistance, Tim would have been an actor. Tim had been a wholesomely vulgar man who had believed in a good mirror when he saw one.

Tim’s women always ended up sad, Pa’s mad. Nick preferred his own women glad. Not that it always worked out that way, thank God.

He hadn’t seen Yvette Malone for more than four months. He took her picture out of his wallet and propped it up in front of him. What a beautiful thing she was, he thought. She had kind of burnished brown
hair—red hair, really—and eyes as green as avocados. She was so smart she could speak Italian, French and German with a Texas accent. He was suddenly direfully needful to be in some kind of contact with her, so he asked the steward for some notepaper and began to write her a letter. “Dear Yvette,” he wrote, “I am wearing the lime-colored silk underwear and thinking of you. But when do we get out of the underwear phase? Not that I want ties. But pajamas would be nice. You must be yearning for a letter like this. You have ninety-six pairs of stockings I know of. Why don’t we switch? I’ll give you underwear and you give me navy-blue lisle socks, size eleven.

“Disaster has struck. When I explain it I realize everything is going to sound like a bad movie, but are there any more good movies—were there ever any? This family secret has to come out sometime (between us, that is), and the whole framework of the events leading to the reason why I am on my way to Philadelphia and Palm Springs without the slightest chance that I can stop over in Paris long enough to make love gives me as good a chance to let the skeleton out for an airing as I guess I’ll ever have. To put the whole thing bluntly: Timothy Kegan, a President of the United States, was my half brother, and now a man has just died in Asia who said he was just one of the people hired by somebody to kill my brother, so now I have to rush into the labyrinths of this melodrama, extract the answer to the enigma (which is probably that a man named Z. K. Dawson was the man who hired the killers), confront my unpredictable father with all that is happening, and, generally as well as particularly, have my life light up TILT for the next month or so. It is brutally stupid because it is so wastefully silly. There is not one chance in a million that, after fourteen long years of covering tracks ruthlessly, the man (Dawson, if it is Dawson) or men who paid for Tim’s death can
ever be found. But I have to do it as the Avenging Brother, because entertainment has taken over culture and we all live in a movie, or worse, in a mid-morning TV soap outcry.

“I cannot imagine that you will continue to stay on in the coldest city in the world (in January). You are probably on the beach at Grenada right now. I can’t wait to get to London to call you to find out.”

He put Yvonne’s letter aside, because writing about Pa and what he would be walking into with Pa had brought out his never-absent dread of seeing Pa again. He would be in the worst sort of a position: the fink who brought bad news to Thomas Xavier Kegan about his most sacrosanct property—the dead son who had made him the revered father of the late President.