Winter Kills

by Richard Condon

  “Everything’s changed.”

  “What? How?”

  “I have to have time to think.”

  “What has changed? What could possibly have changed? I talked to you from London a couple of days ago and nothing had changed.”

  “I am not going to talk about it until I get it worked out.”

  “You are so going to talk about it! I want to know what has changed?”

  “If you force me to talk about it, I swear to you, Nick, that that could be the end of it for us. I don’t think I want it to be the end.” She began to weep. “I know I don’t. But it’s hard. It’s very, very hard.”

  He walked to her and tried to put his arms around her. She moved away from him, eluding him. She said, “Please just sit down and eat this marvelous daube.”

  “What the hell, Yvette,” Nick shouted. “How can I eat? How can we sit here staring at each other and pushing food into our faces to keep from talking about whatever it is you won’t talk about?” He stalked out of the kitchen along the hall to the front door, grabbed his overcoat and hat and left, slamming the door, Yvette sobbed into her hands at the kitchen table, thinking about the lies Nick’s father had spread all over the world about her father.

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1974—TULSA

  The weather was sunny and mild when Nick got to Tulsa. While he waited for his baggage to come up he called Ed Blenheim, who was out. Nick said he could call Blenheim again at about seven o’clock. The secretary gave him Blenheim’s home number. Nick picked up the rental car, set the odometer, and went out to find the Muskogee road.

  The white house was where it was supposed to be. It was a very modest house for a man with eight hundred million dollars and wells still pumping as if they had no bottoms. It stood about a hundred feet off the road and looked as if they kept chickens out back. He rolled the car up the driveway. He checked the voice-activated recording equipment he had stowed in the glove compartment. The meeting would be picked up through the microphone in Nick’s signet ring, then transmitted from the house to this recorder in the car. Pa thought of everything. Pa didn’t own a big, rich Japanese electronics complex for nothing.

  As Nick got out of the car the front door of the house opened. A short fat-faced old man with a big belly and curvy white hair came out and asked Nick what he wanted.

  “I’m Nick Thirkield.”

  “Who?”

  “Tom Kegan’s son.”

  “All right. Come on in.” The old man didn’t wait for him. He went back into the house and left the door open. Nick went in through the high-ceilinged hall. He entered the only open door. The old man was stretched out almost flat on a dentist’s chair with his eyes closed. His stomach dominated the room. The old man was like a big fat bullfrog with the wearies. “Close the door and set down,” the old man said. Nick sat in an overstuffed Grand Rapids chair. The wallpaper was hideous. Cord was showing through different parts of the carpet.

  “What’s on your mind? My boys tell me you got a small company but that you’re doin’ all right in the South China Sea. Do you need money for that Australian operation you got comin’ up?”

  “Do I? Have you heard anything?”

  “No. I ain’t heard a thing. I’d tell you if I had. But nobody’s goin’ to drill on that barrier reef in your lifetime. The pollution nuts took care of that. What can I do for you?”

  Speaking very deliberately, Nick told the old man about Fletcher, and how he had found the rifle. He didn’t mention Keifetz or the other five who had died. When he finished, the old man lay on the chair as if he were asleep, his domed stomach rising and falling as he breathed.

  “That’s a funny goddam thing to come all this way to tell me about,” he said at last.

  “You are an extensive operator in the Southwest,” Nick said. “I wondered if you might remember a Dallas man named Casper or Casper Junior.”

  “I don’t think that’s exactly what you wanted to ask me. I think you’re trying to figure out a way to tell me you think I was the prime mover who got your brother shot.”

  Nick didn’t answer.

  “A lot of people think that. Why, I do not know. You tell me. If you got any ideas on that subject, you tell me. I’m a big producer in the war industries, and your brother was a politician who was hell-bent for war, and he could have doubled my fortune.”

  “Only in the beginning, Mr. Dawson. Only for the first eleven months.”

  “He tried to get World War Three going over Berlin. He doubled, then he tripled the draft. He called up a hundred and fifty thousand reservists. He demanded that the Congress provide fallout shelters instantly while he ordered the development of a household-attack warning system. Your brother was reckless and irresponsible to an extreme degree, but I wouldn’t have had him shot for that, because it was good for my business. Why, the Pentagon’s own study of the war in Vietnam concluded that your brother transformed what they called the ‘limited risk gamble’ of the Eisenhower administration into a ‘broad commitment’ of American forces at war. Your brother was a crisis-eating President. That is the only way that kind knows how to convey the illusion that he is accomplishing something—which he wasn’t.”

  “You keep talking about his first eleven months. Everything changed after that.”

  Dawson chuckled. It sounded like oil bubbling in the earth at the bottom of a well. “How about that goddam space program? Well, Jesus Christ, an awful lot of money was made out of that, but the more nonhuman the project, the more it appealed to your brother. But everything he did helped me, just the way it helped his daddy. Your brother was good for business. He was a helluva lot more conservative a President than Eisenhower. All his policies were set to profit big businessmen. He was his daddy’s own true son, and I don’t have to tell you that they don’t come any more reactionary than that. Why would I shoot a man who kept thwarting the dreams of the niggers?”

  “Only at the beginning. Only the beginning.”

  “That’s all there was, sonny. Only a beginning. He went to Berlin to say ‘I am a Berliner,’ but he never went into the state of Mississippi and said ‘I am a nigger.’ He was a token President with token policies, and he fooled ’em all most of the time. All that talk about how he was gunna put through a law to abolish the oil depreciation allowance was purely horseshit. And the biggest bunch of horseshit was the bunch that got everybody convinced that your brother was antibusiness in every area—in taxes, wages, finances and federal spending. Take a look at his Medicare proposal, how he dragged his feet on civil rights legislation, the way he encouraged government contracting, and his whole yammer about poverty at a time when just about ever’thing the poor needed was in surplus supply. And you have some crackpot idea that I had him shot? Sonny, your brother reduced taxes by ten billion dollars in the short time he was in office. Your brother worked like a nigger to make the rich richer. He was a faker from the word go, but if we started going around to shoot the fakers, there wouldn’t be enough bullets, sonny. So let’s let it go. I am seventy-nine years old, which means I’ve outlived a lot of bubbleheads like your brother. I never did give a holler about what people said, and I care less now. But I know who killed your brother.”

  “Who?”

  “All that talk back at the time about me gettin’ your brother killed plain upset my daughter. And she’s a good old girl. So I hired me some sleuths and reminded a lot of people in Washington that they owed me a few. We worked at it and we found out who did do the killing, then I showed the whole report to my little girl, and after she seen it I threw the whole thing into the furnace.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Now, your brother was a frivolous man. He didn’t do much more for his country than help the rich and improve the social life in Washington. He did ever’thing off the top of his head, and he was an arrogant, cold-ass son-of-a-bitch. But you’re his brother, and that’s something like being a daughter when it comes to this kind of feelin’. So I’ll get you started towards where you want t
o go.”

  “Who killed him?” Nick said loudly.

  “The Philadelphia police killed him,” the old man said. “A man named Cap’n Frank Heller was in charge of the operation. Best thing for you to do is to talk to Cap’n Heller.”

  “He’s dead, Mr. Dawson.”

  The old man blinked. “Then try his sidekick, Lieutenant Ray Doty. They were the Philadelphia Special Squad, which was the Political Squad fourteen years ago.” The old man’s almost-round right hand, whose stubby fingers made it seem like a bear’s paw, dropped to the side of the chair and pushed a lever. The chair came full upright. He swung it around to face Nick. Stiffly he got out of the dentist’s chair. Nick stood up. He was herded toward the door.

  “Goin’ to Dallas, sonny?”

  “No, sir. I have to see a man in Tulsa about some oil business.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Ed Blenheim.”

  “Good man. What’d you want to see him about?”

  “I have a job for him in London.”

  “Where’ll you put up in Tulsa?”

  “I don’t know yet. First time in Tulsa.”

  “Try the Gusher Motel at the airport. It’s a good clean place to stay even if I do own it myself. I’ll phone ahead and tell them to fix you up.”

  “Very kind of you.”

  The old man stood on the porch and watched Nick back the car down the driveway and out onto Muskogee road.

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1974—MUSKOGEE ROAD

  Halfway to Tulsa, ahead of Nick’s moving car about two hundred yards down the road in the approaching dusk, a car had been run off the road. A woman was standing on the highway near the wrecked car. She was trying to flag Nick’s down, waving a red-and-blue scarf. He braked and stopped near her. She was a shockingly pale woman in her middle thirties with exquisitely sculpted features. She had a bleeding gash at the right side of her forehead.

  Nick asked, “Can I help you?” thinking he had wandered into a James Bond movie, remembering old-time warnings about weird holdups he had read of in the old American Weekly at Harmonia, New York; obliquely worrying that this might be some kind of Women’s Liberation attack in which other equally smashing-looking women would rush out from behind trees and bushes and would all gang-bang him.

  She had a voice with the texture of pecan pie. “If y’all would be kind enough to ride me down the road a piece so I can find a telephone back there at Jane Garnet’s Corners—”

  “Jump in,” he said.

  “A cah deliberately drove me off the road! Ah swear they were hopheads.”

  “We’d better find you a doctor.”

  “The proper thing is for us to introduce ourselves.”

  “How do you do?”

  “I am Chantal Lamers.”

  “Happy to meet you. I am Nicholas Thirkield.”

  “Thoykeeld?”

  “Yes.”

  “A handsome and unusual name.” She slammed the door. “I’m just dazed. I swear those men tried to drive straight into me.”

  It was getting dark. Nick switched the low beams on. After not more than five minutes of driving they came to a collection of buildings grouped around a gas station. Nick leaned out of the car and asked where they could find a doctor. The gas pumper pointed to the house next door. The woman got out of Nick’s car and ran inside, holding a handkerchief to her forehead.

  “She get hit by two weirdos wearin’ a 1967 Thunderbird?” the gas pumper asked. “Mans they were flyin’. Lemme tell you, they had eyes just like four sleepy rocks.”

  “Where’s the police?”

  “Jessacrossa highway.”

  Nick crossed the road and made a report to a young trooper who called ahead to Muskogee to have a 1967 Thunderbird stopped. Then he needed a better description of the car and the victim’s name and license and insurance. Nick told him the victim was in the doctor’s office and he’d send her over. When the woman came out she had a plaster on her head, but she didn’t look as pale. “He gave me a big drink of grain alcohol,” she said happily. Nick took her to the young trooper and she completed all the forms. Her car was rented, and the trooper told her to refer the car-rental people to him.

  When they got back to Nick’s car Nick said he was on his way to the Gusher Motel at the airport and that he’d be glad to drive her into Tulsa. She said the airport was exactly where she wanted to go. As they drove in she told him she had been visiting her parents in Muskogee, where her father ran the oldest pharmacy in town. She lived in New York, where she worked for the National Magazine. She was ticketed on a flight that would leave at six fifty-five. Nick said he was in Tulsa on oil business.

  They got to the airport at six ten. He invited her for a drink, but she said no, because she’d face a lot of red tape at the car-rental office and she had to check in at the flight counter. She thanked him earnestly, staring nearsightedly into his eyes, holding his forearms tightly. She was as tall as he was. She had deep black hair worn in a Dutch-boy cut. She had a strong, sensual, classic face. He decided she was an interesting-looking woman. Her mouth came together into one large, loose cushion.

  “If you ever come through New York I’d love to have that drink with you,” she said. She wrote down her telephone number at the magazine office, explaining that they had a system that bypassed the switchboard and went straight to her desk. She kept thanking him for his kindness. He stared at her legs as she walked away from him. Not since Yvette Malone had he seen legs like that.

  He arranged to have the rental car picked up at the Gusher Motel, bought a Tulsa Tribune in the motel lobby and was checked into room 1364. He asked the bellman how they could have a number 1364 in a one-story motel. The bellman said the numbers started at 1351 because this one was part of a chain of motels which at the time the Gusher was built had 1350 rooms. Nick got no special greeting at the desk, so it was hard to say whether Mr. Dawson had bothered to tell them he was coming.

  There were still twenty minutes to wait before the time when he said he would call Ed Blenheim, so he settled down to read the local newspaper. Tulsa was an oil capital, so the paper was big with oil news. On the front page he read: GEOLOGIST SUICIDE IN EAST. Miles Gander had been found dead of monoxide poisoning in a closed car near Trenton, New Jersey. He dropped the paper. Miles Gander was dead from having agreed to have breakfast with a friend. He telephoned Pa.

  “Pa? Miles is dead.”

  “I know. My people found him. Nobody thinks it was a suicide. Did you see Dawson?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said the Philadelphia police organized Tim’s murder. The man in charge of it was Captain Heller.”

  “Our Captain Heller?”

  “Who else? Dawson said the man to talk to now is a police lieutenant named Ray Doty. Can you set me with him?”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I sure have a rotten feeling about Dawson. He even smells like death.”

  “Call me in the morning for details on Doty.”

  Nick called room service and ordered some tea. When it arrived a small ginger cat wandered in with the waiter. Nick watched the cat scoot under the bed, but it was time to call Ed Blenheim.

  Blenheim couldn’t take the job because, to his absolute amazement, he had just, five minutes before, had a big surprise offer—which he had accepted—from Z. K. Dawson personally. “He just called me up. Z.K. himself,” Blenheim said in an awed voice. “It’s raining big jobs today.”

  When Nick hung up, he felt a different kind of worse about Dawson. He poured himself a cup of tea, and because he never used milk or sugar, filled the saucer with the milk and put it on the floor next to the bed. The cat came out of hiding to lap at the milk. Sipping tea, Nick called his airline to make a reservation on an early-morning flight to Philadelphia. The reservation was confirmed for 8:50 A.M.

  At the periphery of his vision, Nick saw the small saucer of milk on the floor next to the leg of the bed. As he sipped the t
ea he looked down to watch the kitten lap it up.

  The kitten was dead. She was on her back with her eyes open, stretched taut, bent backward, looking like a bow, in agony. But she was very dead.

  Nick emptied a bottle of aspirin tablets. Carefully he poured the meager amount of milk out of the saucer into the bottle and capped it tightly. He called the bell captain to find him a roll of aluminum foil and some Scotch tape. The man said everything was closed. Nick surprised himself by saying he would pay ten dollars for it. It arrived in ten minutes. While he waited he changed his departure reservation to a flight leaving at nine fifty-five that night to Los Angeles. He called Si to tell him he would be coming in. Si told him a car would be waiting at the Palm Springs airport. It would be too late to use the chopper, he said, because the noise would wake up the boss.

  Nick wrapped the dead cat in thicknesses of aluminum foil and made the package secure with tape. He packed the cat into his attaché case. He went to the motel restaurant, ordered a large steak, even allowed the waiter to talk him into the doughnuts called “French fried onions,” and marveled that he felt both hungry and refreshed after someone had tried to murder him. The curtain was torn aside. He was frightened because he was intelligent, but he was also gratified that he would not have to pretend to carry on this feud of vengeance for Tim across fourteen years. He had to find the killer to stay alive, the best reason. Whoever it was he was pursuing—and it simply had to be Dawson—knew he was coming and feared him enough to try to kill him. That made whatever Nick would have to do all the clearer. He was accumulating evidence.

  He got to the Palm Springs fortress at eleven thirty-five. Pa was waiting for him in the “small” sitting room.

  “What happened?” he asked irritably. “You’re due in Philadelphia for lunch tomorrow with Doty.”

  “Dawson tried to kill me, Pa.”

  “When?” Pa was confused. His aged, leather face offered new diagonal seams. “You called me after you left him, you said.”

  “He sent me to stay at the Gusher Motel—which he said he owns—then someone put poison in the milk intended for my tea, which I gave to a cat who wandered into the room—and that cat was dead in seconds.”