Winter Kills (9 page)

“What the hell is that?” Mr. Kullers said. “I’ll tell you one thing. That ain’t mine.”

Heller sent Mr. Coney down the hall for some towels. Miles Gander stumbled to a chair and sat down heavily. He looked ill.

“What was that doing in there?” Mr. Kullers asked shrilly. “Don’t think you can pin that goddam thing on me.”

Coney came back with a large, soft roll of paper towels. Heller carefully wrapped the rifle on all sides then secured the package with Scotch tape from Mr. Kullers’ desk. “This goes to the lab,” Heller said grimly. He left the package on the floor, and moving very deliberately to increase his menace, he walked behind Mr. Kullers’ desk and lifted him to his feet by his shirt and tie. “You make one sound about what you saw here this morning and you will be the sorriest little man in this state,” he said. He dropped Kullers. He turned to the building manager. “That goes for you too. You understand?”

The manager nodded: very bright eyes.

“Well, fuck you for a start,” Mr. Kullers said, whacking Inspector Heller across the back of the head with a large, heavy, green Scotch-tape dispenser and dropping him to his knees. “I am an American citizen, you Cossack, and you can take a flying fuck back to Poland.”

Heller picked himself up and charged. Nick slammed himself between the two men. He was less bulky than the inspector but he was twenty years younger, and he was able to back him against the wall and hold him there, talking right into his face.

“There is simply no call for this, Inspector,” he said. “No call at all. Mr. Kullers is absolutely right.”

“You are goddam right I am right,” Mr. Kullers yelled. “No more Mr. Nice Guy. I am going to bring you up for invading without a warrant, you fucking bellhop.”

Heller nodded to Nick that he was in control of himself. Nick released him. Heller went straight to the rifle, picked it up and left the room.

“Will somebody tell me what this is all about?” Mr. Kullers said, disheveled and red-faced.

Nick walked to the window and stood beside him. He looked down over Hunt Plaza. “That gun was fired from this window,” he said, “to kill President Kegan.”

Kullers gaped. Coney lifted his right hand to the side of his face. “Well, why didn’t he say that?” Kullers asked. “All he had to do was say that. Who would go around blabbing a thing like that? You could get killed just knowing a thing like that.”

All the way down in the elevator David Coney kept saying, “I don’t like it. This is bad. This is trouble. I don’t like it.”

On Market Street Nick and Miles Gander walked slowly in the general direction of the Petroleum Club in Rittenhouse Square.

“Who hired Fletcher?” Miles asked.

“He didn’t know. There was a go-between. He said he thought it would be someone like Z. K. Dawson.”

“It sounds like Dawson,” Miles said. “I’ve worked for him. I’ve heard him sound off against your brother because of the depletion allowance. But threats to the allowance made a lot of Texans feel murderous. Still, Eldridge Mosely was Dawson’s man.”

“Mosely had nothing to do with this foul business.”

“I didn’t say he had. But Z.K. made Eldridge the governor of Pennsylvania. Z.K.’s money was all over the presidential nominating convention. If Z.K. had been as smart as your father, he could have made
Eldridge President. But when your brother was dead it was suddenly Z.K.’s turn—wasn’t it?”

***

The post was delivered at the Avenue de la Bourdonnais at nine fifteen ayem. A houseman in a starched white coat signed for the registered letter from Frankfurt. He gave it to a parlor maid, who took it up the white flying staircase to Madame’s personal maid, who walked it across two rooms to Madame, who was making elaborate lists having to do with the organization of her packing for both New York and Jamaica.

Madame let out a yelp of pleasure when she looked at the envelope, stopped her work and sat down to read the letter. She asked the maid to bring her a cup of tea. She read the letter smiling, with total absorption.

She stopped smiling. A look of shock that almost immediately turned into a look of loss set itself into a mask of tragedy. She covered her face with her hands and began to weep.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT, JANUARY 30, 1974—PALM SPRINGS

Nick was on the ground at the Los Angeles airport at four ten in the afternoon. He chartered a helicopter to fly him to the pad at Pa’s rambling white stucco house south of Palm Springs which had once been called “the western White House.” Flying in over the Springs, he was able to identify nine of the great houses wherein Tim had screwed his hostesses. When they flew over Lola Camonte’s pleasure complex he grinned with vicarious pleasure as he thought of the dozens of long, friendly talks Tim and the great Mexican star had had, one lying atop the other. Nick wished he could have seen her in the last great scene, which Tim would always allude to but refused to be explicit about. Just thinking about that last scene made Tim howl with glee.

The chopper went in over Pa’s own eighteen-hole golf course, which was as green as Ireland in the middle of the desert and set down there not only because Pa liked uncrowded golf but as a buffer between Pa and his security men and anyone else in the rest of the world who might like to take a shot at Pa.

Li Hsi was standing beside the pad with a security man, waving wildly and looking exactly as ageless as when Nick had first seen him: standing at the front door when the huge car had driven nine-year-old Nick to the house. Si was an extremely scrutable Chinese who could whoop and weep and waffle at the drop of a hat. Si wrapped his arms around Nick and giggled madly as he welcomed him home. Si was probably the
only Chinese out of some 800,000,000 who had always called President Kegan by his first name.

“How long you gung be here?” he asked happily.

“Until about like three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

“Ah. Long time.”

“I should be in Australia right now. But I have to talk to Pa.”

“Pa not here.”

“Not here? When will he be back?”

“Tonight. Mebbe ten o’clock, twelve o’clock. You eat with Keith?”

“I sure will.”

“I fix. Eight o’clock. What you like to eat?”

“Anything.”

“Anything so long is chili and noodles, hey, Nick? I fix.”

On the way to Nick’s apartment, which was in its own cottage about sixty yards from the main building, Nick asked Si if his father’s library had the full twenty-six-volume Pickering Commission Report.

“We have. But only make you sad, Nick. No good.”

“You told me all learning is good.”

“I bring. I send Keith as soon as he come.”

Keith was Si’s son. He was a psychiatrist with the Riverside County medical staff. He was a fine doctor, a better chess player, a good painter, a great cellist, a loving husband and a gaga father. He had married a third-generation Californian whose great-grandparents had been working Eskimos who, Keith said, had overshot Nome with a dogsled. Their three children were as Oriental as pandas. The whole family spoke Californian that twanged like a banjo.

The twenty-six volumes of the Pickering Report arrived by golf cart as Nick finished unpacking his bags. He settled down at a large desk with the volume that covered the time slot of the assassination which Turk Fletcher had described. It was as though he were reading
a ponderous fairy tale written by lawyers. Except for its description of Hunt Plaza and the route by which the motorcade had crossed it, the official account was like the testimony of a witness in Rashomon—totally different from what Fletcher said had happened, yet immovably sure of itself. Three hours later a security man knocked at the door to say that dinner was ready.

Nick and Keith had a grand reunion while Si beamed on them. They had been through more together than most boyhood chums. Keith had admitted Nick to the Riverside Hospital as his psychiatric patient a year after Tim’s killing. Nick was in the hospital for five months, and the treatment was continued at Pa’s house for four months after that. Having put Nick together again, Keith handled him like eggs wherever Tim or Pa were concerned. Nick’s emotional collapse had happened because he had been able to sleep less and less as he waited for Pa to come to tell him that it would be necessary for Nick to take Tim’s place to get Pa’s work done.

But they didn’t talk about that anymore. Keith watched him closely, wondering if Nick thought like that anymore, but Si joined them at table, so there was no clinical talk. Si had made them Chinese noodles cooked in won ton, then covered with a thick rug of chili, which they ate with two bottles of cold white wine from the North Coast counties. Si chortled, wept and burped through the meal, pausing now and then to take a phone call in the pantry. Nick was having the best time he had had since being in bed with Yvette Malone, and he was achieving a form of double-think: while he enjoyed the presence of his two oldest friends he levitated Yvette over the kitchen table mentally so that he could be with her simultaneously. At that moment Si asked his perpetual question: “When are you getting married, Nick?” At last he had something definite to report. “It just happens that I almost asked a girl to marry me the day before yesterday,” Nick said.

“Oh, boy,” Keith said. “Wait till Grace hears this. She’ll give a big party whether you can come or not.”

“What did the lady say?” Si asked. “When is the wedding day?”

“She didn’t say anything. She went right on talking as if she hadn’t heard me.” Nick really enjoyed this fantasy.

“You must have surprised her,” Keith said. “You have to lead up to things like that.”

“Maybe I did surprise her. Maybe I was too sudden.”

They heard the sound of a chopper coming in from Palm Springs. “The boss!” Si said joyfully, leaping to his feet and standing behind Nick’s chair to pull it out as he got up.

“I’ll slink out the front door,” Keith said. Si guided Nick along the shortcut to the helicopter pad.

The area was densely lighted by flood lamps on high poles. Two security men had taken their positions on either side of the pad to watch all approaches. Two more would be with Pa in the chopper. The helicopter was a ten-seat U.S. Army utility tactical transport whose lengthened cabin had been luxuriously refitted. It had been made by Bell and fitted with a Lycoming T53 L-13 engine that could cruise at a service ceiling of twenty-two thousand feet over a range of three hundred and fifteen miles. Pa used it to get to his jets at the Palm Springs airport and sometimes to go into L.A.

Some people scramble out of helicopters, but it is a thing that takes practice. A security man pushed a ramp elevator up to the door of Pa’s machine. He stepped out on its platform into the glaring theatrical lights and was lowered gently to the ground like a ballerina in the arms of the first dancer, at half the speed of a gently falling leaf. Pa was wearing a scarlet linen waistcoat under a white bawneen jacket. He had a sheared mink overcoat across his left forearm and a large billycock bowler on his head. His face was so deeply creased with lines that it looked as though it had
been plowed by a combine. He was smoking a thick black cigar. He smiled horrendously when he saw Nick, displaying what looked like row upon row of huge white false teeth that seemed to have been made of mother-of-pearl.

“I knew you’d be here, you little son-of-a-bitch,” he bawled. “What’s this I hear about you screwing Carswell’s secretary in London?” The two men came together and embraced with a great show of fake feeling.

“Carswell is through,” Nick shouted over the sound of the engines.

“Don’t be a chump,” Pa said. “Where are you going to find another guy who knows his stuff like Carswell?”

“I’ll run Jemnito, Pa. You’re just a salesman working on commission.”

“Some salesman. Who got you the Alhart field in Tanzania? Who set you with Somoza in Nicaragua? Who’s gonna fit you into the North Slope after someone else figures out how to get the oil out? Me, your commission salesman.” He threw a long bony arm around Nick’s shoulders and began to march him off to the house, asking Si, who trotted beside him, if he could find him three roast beef sandwiches and a bottle of beer.

“Hey, you guys,” somebody yelled behind them, “wait for me!”

Nick turned and had the satisfaction of knowing that his father could not have known he was going to be there, because a small blonde, with muscular legs and a mouth as depraved as a Venetian principessa’s, wearing a fantasy pink-and-blue mink coat in wide checkerboard squares, was descending on the miniature elevator. Pa gestured to her angrily as if she had been a stowaway. “Get the hell out of here,” he yelled. “Get back in that chopper. Eddie will take you back to Chicago and I’ll call you next week.”

“I will like hell,” she shouted. “My ass is sore now from riding in your goddam airplanes.”

“Eddie!” Pa yelled at the top of his voice.

“Yes, sir?” a short gray-haired man yelled back from beside the lift.

“Put her in the De Mille cottage and give her a bottle of booze. And see that she doesn’t bother anybody. I’m going to have a visit with my son.” He took Nick’s arm and dragged him quickly into the main house. Si bolted the door after them just in time, because the young woman’s small form hurled itself against it and she hammered on it with her fists.

“Jesus.” Pa grinned. “If we only had some way to tell they had a temper when they first looked good to us, right?” He kept walking. Nick followed him through a complex of corridors to the “small” sitting room that adjoined his father’s sleeping quarters. The room was decorated with photographs, busts, medals and paintings. Tim with Malraux and De Gaulle. Tim with Khrushchev. Tim with Adenauer. Tim with the Supreme Court. Tim with the cast of
Hello, Dolly
at Rockrimmon. Tim with the cast of the Bolshoi Ballet at Rockrimmon. Tim accepting honorary degrees. Tim with Harold Macmillan. Tim between Floyd Patterson and Archie Moore. A life-size portrait of Tim in oils by James Richard Blake, famed for his portrait of Edward VII. Tim with the senior class of Wellesley at Rockrimmon. Tim with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A bust of Tim by Edward Delaney. An illuminated display case of Tim’s decorations: the Vatican State Order of the Golden Spur conferred “motu proprio”; the Order of Charles III (Spain); the Order of the Elephant (Denmark); the Order of Merit of the Principality of Liechtenstein; the Yugoslavian Grand Star; the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor (France); Polonia Restituta (Poland); the Grand Cross with Collar (Italy); the Baden-Powell Medal for the Perpetuation of World Scouting (Britain)—all earned through connections of Pa’s before Tim had attained the Presidency. Far at the back of the piano, somewhat blocked from view by a large cabinet photograph of Tim wearing a ten-gallon hat shaking hands with Oveta
Culp Hobby, there was a small framed snapshot of Tim with Nick, grinning at each other over a net on Pa’s tennis court, Nick not showing a single tooth.