Winter Kills by Richard Condon
Nick was about to attempt to put the parallel to himself and get to the true bottom of where, really and exactly, he stood with Yvette and she with him, when Chantal came back into the room wearing the god-damndest getup he had ever seen, making self-analysis impossible. She was wearing a sensible sweater and skirt. She had gone inside and had changed into a sensible sweater and skirt and a pair of sheep’s-wool-lined bedroom slippers. It was a sensible sweater, because the way her chest bobbled around in there he knew it was all alone. The way the slippers called attention to her improbably perfect bare legs made it better than even money that she had nothing on under the skirt. She was extending a box half filled with funny cigarettes. “Want to light up?” she asked and sat down on the sofa beside him. Music was playing from somewhere in a distant room, but not too distant.
“Beautiful music,” he said, exhaling a pound and a half of smoke.
“It’s an open-end machine.”
“Very sexy.”
“It can play for seven hours.”
He pulled her. He pushed his fingers along the soft skin of her sides under her sweater to her breasts. She had nipples like thumbs, and her breath had begun to fall out of her like a marathon runner’s. He distinctly heard her say, “I think I’m falling in love with you.” He kissed her, a kiss for its own time, unending. By manipulating a simple zipper he discovered that it was quite true that she had nothing on under her skirt. He decided that Tim had been utterly right.
They outlasted the open-end machine by thirty-two minutes.
When he awoke he was as naked as a nixon. He felt wonderful. It was eight thirty-eight on a digital clock on a widely sunny morning. He yodeled eight bars from “Der Bürgenstock Ewig.” It brought Chantal running into the room. She had nothing on either. It looked great.
“What’s the matter?” she said with alarm.
“Come here.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’m making breakfast.”
“But the spatter. You must be delicious. Come here.”
“I have to get to work.”
“You are the most marvelously depraved woman I ever known, and you are never going to leave this place again. Neither am I.”
“Oh—honey—”
She approached near enough to be pulled down. “I’ll show you how to liberate a woman,” he said. “I have never felt more like liberating a woman in my life.”
***
The garage sent a car. Nick dropped Chantal off at the National Magazine building. She told him she would call him at the Walpole as soon as Harry Greenwood established a line to the Syndicate people in Cleveland. Nick had gotten more euphoric with each block they rode uptown. “I don’t think I’ve ever awakened on any day of my life as happy as I felt this morning,” was one of the things he said.
“It was the pot.” Chantal could have had postcoital depression. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn the night before.
“I have to tell you something.”
“No, please, Nick. Please don’t tell me anything. I mean not anything that would naturally follow a sentence like that at a time like this.”
“Why not?”
“Because it will inevitably be about your past, and just for this morning I’d like it a lot better if I could tell myself that both of us had been reborn.”
“Why—that’s beautiful, Chantal.”
She patted his hand.
“But you sound sad,” he said.
“Do I? Well, the time to exult is when there is an absence of pain. I exulted all night, Nick darling. Now—well, it’s back to the same old chains.”
“Not necessarily.”
She smiled at him.
As he rode uptown alone he was happy that he hadn’t said any more. First things first. He had to establish where Yvette stood before he went forward with a new claim. Anyway, what the hell. Chantal had been marvelous—but Yvette was Yvette. Even if she wouldn’t marry him. She had it, whatever it was that held his total attention, night and day. Chantal cared. He could feel that. He could feel that as if he were a living Ouija board. Maybe a little part of it was caring about his money. Maybe a bigger part of it was caring about Tim and what he had overachieved. But that could be the entire trouble with Yvette. She had too much money. It was a mistake to allow women to get money. It changed everything. Who would make the millions and millions of beds? Who would listen to the tens of millions of children? Chantal Lamers needed him, cared for him, and after a few more nights like last night—if he could stay in the satyric condition he was in—she could learn to adore him. Where had she learned all she knew! Poppaea Sabina, a titleholder, was a Salvation Army lassie compared with Chantal in the field of sexual erudition. But, still, there was something absolutely wild-making when a woman refused to marry a man.
SUNDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 3, 1974—NEW YORK
As he walked across the lobby of the Walpole he had to admit that when Pa bought anything he really maintained it well. This was the classiest hotel in New York, and the food in one of Pa’s restaurants last night had been up to the best of first-class food he had ever had anywhere—beyond Si’s chili and noodles. Tack another fifty years on Pa’s life and the whole country would be looking great, because Pa would own it all.
There were two messages at the front desk. It was nine forty in the morning. Both messages were from Yvette. Well! So she wanted to make it all up, did she? She had probably thought everything over and now wanted to marry him. If so, what stand should he take? He felt the grab of guilt. He stared at his own face in the elevator mirror all the way up to the tower. He telephoned her before he took off his coat and hat, but she wasn’t there. Where could she be? Why wasn’t she home at such an hour of the morning? Could she have been out doing what he had been doing while he was in the same city with her? He loved her. She understood things about him that no one else understood. She had never laughed at his long woolen underwear (the most sensible winter garment a man could wear) the way Chantal had laughed at it this morning. Certainly a girl as honest as Yvette wouldn’t play games by calling him, then letting the phone ring and pretending not to be there when he called back?
He went into the kitchen to get a glass of milk and found Pa, in a beautifully tailored green-and-white-checked jacket, sitting at a table by the window eating the second half of a grapefruit.
“What the hell were you doing at the National Magazine?” Pa asked.
“How did you know I was at the National Magazine?”
“A hoodlum tried to put a gun on you and throw you out the window last night. Do you think I’m going to let you walk around alone from now on?”
Nick blushed with enormous gratification. As he had observed himself, Pa maintained his properties.
“Thanks, Pa.”
“Who did you see?”
“The editor.”
“Harry Greenwood?”
“Yes.”
“How come you know him?”
“I met a woman in Oklahoma who works there. I called her and she introduced me to Greenwood.”
“Where?”
“At his office.”
“What was the woman’s name?”
“Chantal Lamers.”
“I never heard of her. Did you screw her last night?”
Nick glared at him.
“I forgot. You’re the Boy Scout in the family. Tim always shared information on his broads.”
“I thought we had reached a general understanding that I’m not Tim.”
“I want to know what you told the magazine.”
“Pa, listen—”
“You did it. You told them.” Pa resumed eating. He stared downward at the traffic pattern. He looked murderous. Nick took the letter agreement out of his pocket and put it down on the table beside his father. Pa read it without touching it. Then he said, “You aren’t as dumb as I thought. This is something, anyway. Leave it with me.” He wheeled around in the chair. “Okay. What is it
“It’s open and shut,” Nick said. “We have to find out where Diamond came from so we can find the people who agreed to find a murderer for the men who decided to kill Tim. The only way a civilian can get to the top of organized crime is through the press. So I went to the National Magazine.”
“I see.”
“If you know a better way, let’s do it.”
“It depends on who you talk to, Nick,” Pa said. “Do you really think a bunch of entertainers at a magazine are going to know who to talk to?”
“Pa, they have people who do nothing else but work with organized crime!”
“You could have asked me.”
“To find one top gangster out of thousands?”
“You didn’t ask me. But let it lay. What did the magazine people do for you?”
“They expect to have the name of a contact before noon today.”
“Okay. It’s a lot of shit, but as soon as they tell you, I expect you to tell me.”
“Did you come all the way to New York for that?”
“I go into the hospital in an hour.”
“Hospital?” Nick was bewildered. Pa had seldom looked this well.
“The quarterly checkup. Three days every three months. That’s how I made it to seventy-four. Maybe you’d better stay right here until I get out.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“The name of the killer who went after you last night is Martin Keys. He got out of the hotel with the late-afternoon shift of cooks. Now listen to this. After he got out of the building, all in the clear, he came back to his room just to prove he had never been involved. He walked in the front door, sauntered across the lobby and asked for his key. Then he went to his room. Zendt sent for the cops. Now—ready? Our camera record shows that this Mr. Martin Keys is not the Mr. Keys who had registered. However, Nick, he was carrying the first Mr. Keys’s passport, but with his own—a different—picture in it. The first Mr. Keys, as you know, was dark and bulky. The second Mr. Keys is shortish, with ginger hair and a ginger moustache. But the little bastard didn’t know about the concealed cameras, so the cops are working him over right now. I called Ben Kiely, the chief inspector for the East Side, and I told him to beat the living shit out of him.”
“How do people get into businesses like that?” Nick asked earnestly.
“Laziness,” Pa said. “Lissen, Nick, you better know, I have an invisible team all over you around the clock wherever you go, you understand?”
“Do you own the agency, Pa?”
“In my kind of businesses you’ve got to own a national detective agency. I pay it in, take that as a tax deduction, then get it back as profits. And I get top security at wholesale or better.”
“What hospital will you be in?”
“The Anglican Memorial.”
“Do you own the hospital, Pa?”
“Use your head, kid. There is no business today that can compete with owning a hospital.” He ticked the points off on his long fingers. “No credit for the customers, and they pay in advance or out on their ass. Next, supply and demand is constant. Third, a unique product—pain—right? A hospital is a hotel for pain, but what hotel gets those prices? Christ, the laundry alone throws off enough to pay the orderlies and the lab. And you should see the net figures on what one of those labs makes. I own twenty-seven hospitals in nineteen cities, kid, and I’d like to have fifty more.” Pa patted Nick on the shoulder as he went past. He turned at the door.
“My advice to you, Nick, is own whatever you use—forget railroads and, naturally, the postal service, because you wouldn’t use them. Break everything down into food, shelter, clothing, diversion and dying—then own everything. I was luckier than you, because I bought everything in the Depression when you could get useful industries for a nickel on the dollar. I live absolutely free now. I own farms, cattle, freezing firms, airlines, ferry services, the best restaurants, French vineyards, California vineyards, Scotch distilleries, hotels, resorts, apartment houses, housing developments, shopping centers, three great tailors, sixty-two whorehouses where they’re legal, two cable-TV companies, a set of satellites and a national undertaking system—and other useful things, like pharmaceutical houses, wholesale loan-sharking and twenty-seven hospitals. And what have you got? A lousy twenty-million-dollar oil company, which, like all other oil companies any day now, is going to run out of oil or be taxed out of business or be expropriated by the locals.” He left the kitchen, with Nick staring blankly after him. Nick heard the front door slam.
He found a box of matches in a kitchen drawer. The telephone rang. He ran to Tim’s study for maximum comfort. It was Yvette.
“Where were you?” he wailed.
“At Gristede’s. Why?”
“Oh.”
“The last time I called you,” Yvette said sweetly, “it was one thirty in the morning, but still I expect you noticed how I did not greet you with a ‘Where were you?’”
“I’ve gotten very, very involved in this thing.”
“I bet.”
“I don’t want even to talk about it. I’m scared witless that you could get mixed up in it—the way other people have.”
“Okay, honey.”
“It’s wonderful just to talk to you.”
“I used to think I was in love with you, but now—”
“What?” He was terror-stricken. He had about as large a reserve of cool as a Pittsburgh steel smelter at full production.
“—that I’ve known you for three whole years I know I’m in love with you.”
He groaned.
“Why the groan?”
“It was a groan of ecstasy. I love you, Yvette. I have loved you for three years, but more every day, more wherever I was and you weren’t there, more every month and every year. I am simply crazy about you, Yvette.” Bye-bye, Chantal, he thought. Quoth the Thirkield, never more.
“I am very happy. Right now.”
“Then we can get married?”
“Shall we have dinner tonight?”
“I’m waiting for a call about Tim. They are trying to set up an appointment. I may have to fly to Cleveland.”
“Can you call me by six? I’ll be back here at three. I’m having lunch out, then I’ll come right back here.”
“Absolutely.”
***
Chantal Lamers called from the reception desk downstairs at eleven fifty. She was taken up to Nick at the tower. She was knocked out to be there. “Is this where he lived?”
“Yes. This is it,” Nick said.
“Oh, it’s beautiful! I can just feel him everywhere in the atmosphere of this wonderful place.”
“My father put little bronze tabs on the chairs in there—if you’d like to see those.”
“I would. Oh, I would!”
He took her to the chairs. She read the identical inscription on each: PRESIDENT TIMOTHY KEGAN SAT HERE 1955–1960. “My God,” Chantal said. “I cannot tell you what a wonderful feeling this gives me.”
“He used that john,” Nick said, gesturing vaguely.
Chantal ran into the loo and shut the door. He went out to the living room again to wait for her. When she joined him, after what he thought was an inconsiderable length of time, she asked if there was some souvenir she might take with her.
“How about an ashtray?” he asked.
“Oh, my God, that would be heaven, darling. But would it be really his? Would he have tapped one of his famous cigars on it?”
“I’ll get you the one from his bedside,” Nick said. “He not only tapped his famous cigar on that but frequently kept his vitamin C pills on it.”
“Oh, Nick, dearest.”
After she had stowed a hotel ashtray in her purse she told him that ever since the killing of Willie Arnold, Evander Milship, the magazine’s organized-crime person, had had as his hobby the background and career of Joe Diamond. “He was able to actually pinpoint the man in Cleveland to whom the someone you are searching for had gone to f
“That’s great,” Nick said. “But can your man set a meeting for me with Mentor?”
“He’s already set a meeting. Harry Greenwood has had Evander working on this all night.”
“Where?”
“Mentor will be sitting alone in the back of an El Dorado Cadillac in Vincent Street, in Cleveland, directly across from the Odeon Grill. Now, you’ll have to remember certain things. You must get into the car from the traffic side. Get into the back, beside Mentor. You then say your name and tell him you are from Monroe. Eleven tonight.”
“Monroe, Alabama, or Monroe, Mississippi?”
“No. Monroe is some man’s name. Just Monroe.”
“Okay. It’s like some kid’s game.”
“It’s for identification. Anyway, it’s what he told Evander you have to do. Mentor knows what you want, but he won’t cooperate for less than fifteen thousand dollars. But we’ll pay it.”
“No, no. I’ll pay it.”
“No—really. We insist.”
“No. It gives the magazine too much of a lock on the story,” Nick said. “It’s too early to put yourselves in a proprietary position, because it isn’t your story yet.”