Winter Kills by Richard Condon
“Don’t you think you ought to talk the whole thing over with your father?”
“Yeah, when I have a little more background. After I talk to the Universe Labs in Glendale and buy a copy of their report on that dead cat and the poisoned milk. I’ll call you from Palm Springs.”
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1974—MUSKOGEE AND L.A.
Nick went up and down the main streets of Muskogee very slowly, but there was no Lamers Pharmacy. He looked in the telephone book: no Lamers. He went into three drugstores, and two of them said they were the oldest. Nobody had ever heard the name Lamers. He went through the L’s on the tax list at the courthouse. There was nothing in the birth and death records. He was as pleased as he could be. It meant that somebody was convinced that people believed anything they were told. Time and time again, from the beginning of the search, the people up ahead of him in the chase believed that people were all stupid and did what they were told, that they were too lazy to do otherwise. That meant whoever had had Tim killed was somebody who was way out of touch, but, then, anyone who thought he was solving his problems by multiple murders had to be just a little bit out of touch somewhere.
As he drove back toward Tulsa he stopped for a moment on the highway, trying to decide whether he would go into the little white house. He stared at it amazed that he could have thought that Z. K. Dawson, the mystery man of the oil business who had piled up an estimated six hundred million dollars, could have lived in a dinky little house like that. That was why they had invented the dentist’s chair gag, he decided. To keep him from thinking about the ordinariness of the house.
He decided he had to go in to be sure, but he shoved the thought out of his mind that he was doing it because of what Keifetz had said—that maybe Yvette was in on the mind-bending from her father’s angle. He parked the car in the driveway, went to the front porch and rang the doorbell.
A woman of about thirty-five opened the door. Two small children were holding onto her dress. From where he stood the house looked just as bare inside as it had the last time he had seen it.
“May I speak to Mr. Z. K. Dawson, please?” Nick said.
“Z. K. Dawson? The oil king? Here?” The woman was incredulous.
“I wanted to talk to him about buying the dental chair.”
“What dental chair? What are you talking about, mister? This is Carson Feenette’s place. Z. K. Dawson wouldn’t use it to keep his shovels in.”
She closed the door. Nick went back to the car and drove back toward Tulsa on the Muskogee road.
He stopped again when he came to the crossroads gas station at Jane Garnet’s Corners. For ten dollars the gas pumper told him he had been paid to pretend that there had been two doped guys in the car.
There was no doctor’s office next door. There was no state police post across the road.
***
He spent the night at a motel in Glendale. The next morning he was at the Universe Labs bright and early. They had no record of having received a dead cat and an aspirin bottle of contaminated milk at any time. He was able to reward the girl at the desk with ten dollars for a list of all other principal analytic laboratories. He covered them all by cab. The circuit produced nothing.
He called Keifetz from the Hollywood Biltmore lobby at noon, New York time.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I went with Alvin to the station house. They never picked up or booked any Martin Keys. They haven’t had a call from the Walpole Hotel in over a year. Alvin asked me if he should make a little trouble for the manager of the Walpole. I said sure. So we went over and leaned on him. It’s a guy named Zendt. Well, you know him. He makes out like he doesn’t know what we’re talking about.”
“Okay, the next thing is, I want you to go to see the police commissioner in Philadelphia, a guy named Frey. I’ll call him now. Heller was so meticulous about taping everybody who came into his house that there is just an off chance that he had a concealed camera permanently installed in that room. Frey will have it cased by the time you get there. If there was a camera, what I want you to get from Frey is one clear picture of William Casper. Okay?”
“You got it.”
“I’ll be with you tomorrow.”
***
Nick called Pa at Palm Springs from Hollywood at twenty minutes after six, but Pa, out of the hospital, would be working at his New York office for the next four days. Nick had dinner at the Mexican Stove on La Cienega and caught an eleven o’clock plane to New York. By the time he got into town it was almost half past nine in the morning. He went directly to the Walpole. The desk said Pa had left for the office at half past seven.
There was a large buff envelope without any stamp addressed to Nick in maroon ink waiting in his letter box. He opened it as he crossed the lobby to the elevator. Reading it, he stopped short in mid-lobby. It had only two lines on it. They were made up of cut-out newspaper type. All the letter said was: IF YOU WANT TO SEE YVETTE MALONE ALIVE STOP INVESTIGATING 1960. WE HAVE HER. STAND BY FOR ORDERS. Nick turned around dully and started for the hotel entrance. He felt as if he had stopped breathing. The force of the fear he felt was suffocating him. He had to stay alive, he told himself dully, to help Yvette. He sat down in the nearest lobby chairs, staring at the letter, He had sensed this coming, yet he had done nothing about it. When they thought they had killed Keifetz, there was nothing he could have done. But he could have protected Yvette somehow. He could have done something. He could not find the power to imagine what he would do for the rest of his life if these people harmed Yvette. He got up slowly from the chair and walked, as an old man walks, to the pavement in front of the hotel. He nodded to the doorman to get him a taxi. He gave the driver the address of his father’s office.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1974—NEW YORK
The taxi swung into Park Avenue and headed downtown. There seemed to be thousands of cars snarling at each other as they ran in their packs, north and south, east and west—predatory, murderous, apocalyptic. Far ahead of them in the thick midtown smog, Nick could see Pa’s office building (literally Pa’s) as it straddled the broad highway colossally. Nick saw it all at once for what Pa meant it to be: a kindly Maypole for the city, Pa’s own phallus towering erectile to one hundred stories tall, one story for each senator Pa ran in the course of his daily work.
It was a spectacular Maypole. From the twelve windows in Pa’s private office on the fiftieth floor (above the fifty floors signifying each state in the great American union from which Pa took blood each day in one form or another) a gigantic American flag had been hung straight downward for fifteen stories, faded and thin-looking from exposure to the kinds of weather, over the years, that Pa permitted to happen in New York, but, emphatically striped, starred as a firmament is starred and thereby proclaiming to all who could see that Thomas Xavier Kegan, father of the late, great President of the United States, was toiling personally at his desk at that moment for the greater glory of the American people. The great flag was a gay curtain that obscured the light (such as it was out there in the Kegan-made smog) for one hundred and eighty windows of the building, but it gave Kegan employees great distinction among their peers. Further, since Thomas Kegan, father of a President, came to his office only about six times a year, and the flag flew only at those times, it could not be said to be a hardship to have to be hidden from the smoky light of the city. Today the flag also hid the combination of falling snow and rain that Pa’s satellites could predict but not yet reschedule.
All else Nick had said he had to know from Pa had shrunk away in importance. He had to get Yvette back. That need filled his mind. But to get Yvette back, he realized that Pa would have to answer all the questions Nick and Keifetz had framed. Pa had to make what had happened suddenly make sense. Pa had to explain. When he explained, they would be that much closer to saving Yvette.
Nick felt weak. He hoped he could sit and face his father without his hands shaking. It was one thing to sneer to himself about Pa from the far-off safety o
As the cab stopped at Pa’s office building, Nick made himself think of what Tim had done by facing Pa down after their quarrel and barring him from any access to the government. If Tim could confront Pa, then he must find the courage to confront and question him.
At the fiftieth-floor elevator bank Nick was halted by a security man in uniform who demanded, with the belligerency of a male gorilla whose territory has been entered without permission, to know what he was doing on the fiftieth floor. The man’s mean little eyes threatened to beat the bones out of Nick if he didn’t come up with an instantly satisfactory answer. He made Nick feel mean. He was already scared by the kidnap note and by going in to beard Pa. He also felt silly, even humiliated, by Pa’s grotesque use of the flag as an at-home signal, so he said, “Get out of my way.”
As required in the Industrial Maintenance Services Corporation manual of instructions for security precautions on the fiftieth floor, the man hit Nick very hard directly below his spleen, and when Nick fell to the floor the man kicked him in the head until he was unconscious. The man pressed a button in an apparatus that he took from the outside breast pocket of his uniform. Within twenty seconds two uniformed guards came running around the corner of the corridor. Using a metal hook, one of these guards opened the door of an emergency elevator stationed on the floor. Nick’s body was dragged into the car by the two newly arrived guards. The door closed. The car fell to the basement floor. Nick was put into a panel truck. One guard drove. The other guard sat on a low bench in the back beside Nick, who was still unconscious. When the truck reached its destination the guard handcuffed Nick to himself. Together the two guards dragged Nick into the East Sixty-seventh Street police station. Nick was now more than half conscious. He could stand and move under his own power. He was booked for forcing entry and conspiring to do bodily damage. The two guards left him in a squad room with two detectives.
“Why did you do it?” the fattest detective asked Nick.
Nick was more fully alert than he had been. “May I have a moment to think about that?” he asked.
“Take your time, Mac.”
“Can I wash up?”
“Sure.” The fatter detective pointed to a door.
When Nick sat down across from the two detectives he said, “If you will take the identification out of my left rear pocket—it’s a credit-card case—and get my passport out of my right inside breast pocket of the jacket—that has my picture, okay? My fingerprints are on file with the FBI.”
They told him to take the identification out and hand it over. “So your name is Nicholas Thirkield and you look like your picture—what else?”
“My head hurts.”
“Why did you do it?” the fatter detective repeated.
“Please look inside the front flap of the card case and at the inside front page of the passport. It tells where to call in case I’m in an emergency.”
Each detective took one of the objects and looked.
“‘In case of emergency call Thomas Xavier Kegan, 3 Park Avenue.’” He turned to his partner. “Is that what you got?”
“Yeah.”
“Okey-dokey, wise guy,” the fatter cop said to Nick, “what’s the gag?”
“I had never been to my father’s office alone before,” Nick said. “I work in Asia. The few times I went to that office I was with my father. You get a different kind of a reception that way. I just didn’t understand the security requirements, so his Waffen SS knocked me down and kicked me unconscious because I got off the elevator at the fiftieth floor.”
“What is Thomas Kegan’s name doing in these, I asked you.”
“Thomas Kegan is my father.”
The fatter detective called the telephone number written in Nick’s passport. Eventually he got through to Thomas Xavier Kegan himself. Nick spoke to his father. His father spoke to the fatter detective, yelling. Nick was released.
“You wanna bring charges against that guard?” the fatter detective asked as they drove Nick back to Pa’s building.
“This is a feudal society,” Nick said. “I’ll bring the charges to my father the duke.”
“Say, if you don’t mind my askin’,” the thinner detective said, “what was President Kegan really like?”
“He had wit and wisdom,” Nick said.
“I knew it!”
There was a different security guard at the elevator bank on the fiftieth floor. He was in civilian clothes and he looked as if he was going to cry. He rushed Nick past two successive plainclothes guards along corridors and rooms filled with extraordinarily beautiful furniture to where a giant of about twenty-five years old sat at a small desk.
“This is Mr. Nicholas Thirkield, Mr. Kegan’s son,” the sponsor said. The brawny youth nodded.
“Do you carry a gun?” Nick asked. “Could they get back this far to you?”
Unsmiling, the young man unbuttoned his jacket and opened it. There was a pistol in each chest holster. Four grenades were suspended from his belt.
“Sorry about that,” Pa said when they were alone.
“My head hurts.”
“It is a very unpleasant business. But very necessary. There are thousands of Commies and niggers who’d like to get a clear shot at me.”
“More every day, I guess,” Nick said. He was feeling much, much less compunction about cross-examining Pa.
“I suppose you want that guard fired.”
“The one who punched me in the stomach, then kicked me in the head until I was unconscious?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t want him fired. You hired him to do that to people and he does it very, very well.”
“I am very happy you can see it that way.” Pa beamed. “That is exactly the way to look at it. But how come you’re here at all? How come you didn’t telephone first. I mean, you know the security requirement.”
“Pa, listen—I’m going to get married.”
“No kidding? Who’s the lucky girl?”
“She’s been kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped? Kid—napped?”
Nick handed him the note. Pa read it, his face shattering into dismay. “This is terrible. Let me get to a phone. I’ll turn the fucking FBI upside down.”
“Not yet, Pa. But what I want to be sure you understand is that we both understand that whoever had Tim killed is also the kidnapper.”
“No question about it. Absolutely clear. Oh. I follow your drift. You mean, we can’t get the FBI mixed up in that yet. Okay. Well, I can do better than the FBI. You can have the entire Industrial Maintenance Services Corporation to help you get her back. You can know that I’ll do anything in my power to help you any way I can.”
“Do you really mean that, Pa?”
“Of course I mean it. Why shouldn’t I mean it?”
“Then maybe you’ll start helping me by explaining a few things.”
“What things?”
“Like how you knew about the rifle before I told you about it. About why you bribed Miles Gander. About why you sent me off on a wild-goose chase to a man you knew was a false Z. K. Dawson, and about the fake murder attempt in that Tulsa motel and the other fake murder attempt at the Walpole. And why you set up that elaborate scheme with Chantal Lamers and the National Magazine and Irving Mentor in Cleveland. Just tell me all about those things, Pa. You can help me one goddam heavy great big lot if you’ll just tell me all about those things.”
Pa’s face began to fall apart. Section by section, beginning with his right cheek area, his face seemed to disintegrate, as though he were soluble in the water of the tears that had begun to roll down his seamed, freckled cheeks, which were sinking in imperfect unison, as though he were being punched by small, invisible fists. His eyes rolled in his head. He covered them with his large-knuckled, pale hands. He dropped downward into a leather chair and sat there hun
Nick went to a telephone and called Eddie, Pa’s driver-pilot-valet, to come in on the double. Eddie was there in a few seconds, his face stamped with concern. He lifted Pa gently to his feet. He walked him slowly to a doorway almost forty feet away. The door closed after them.
Nick sat down shakily. After a while he got up and walked to the windows to stare up Park Avenue. The edges of the enormous flag were firmly fixed into steel sleeves that had been built into the window sills for that purpose. It was snowing so hard the sky was dark. The wind drove the hard snow noisily against the window.
Nick was touring among the art objects Pa had spot-lighted without price tags around the room when Pa came back into the office. He was erect, but he seemed to be floating. His face had been recomposed, but his eyes seemed to have been stopped down to an impossible f. 64. “Sit down, Nick,” he said with great serenity. Nick sat on a straight-backed chair. Pa sat on a sofa facing him.
“I want you to know something,” Pa said. “It is a secret so terrible that I could not have conceived until now that I would ever tell it. But you have the right to know.”
“I don’t want to know, Pa, unless I have to know. And I mean unless it is related directly to the kidnapping of Yvette.”
“I think it is.”
“Why?”
“Because it will answer your questions about the wild-goose chases.”
“Okay, Pa. Tell me.”
“A certain person spent four hundred thousand dollars to buy the murder of my son—then I sat with him on a park bench and let him buy me into accepting that.”
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1960—PHILADELPHIA
Fourteen years before, on the twenty-second of February 1960, Pa had been playing high-stakes bridge at the Dial Club in New York when an unknown man suddenly appeared in the doorway and shouted, “Tim Kegan was just shot dead in Philadelphia.”
Pa had ran out of the club into the street. His driver had stopped him. He told the driver, incoherently, to take him to Philadelphia. The driver took him to the helicopter pad on East Sixty-first Street, telephoning ahead from the car as they went. Pa was in Philadelphia in twenty-nine minutes.