Winter Kills by Richard Condon
When Jakob had made his fortune in the northern gold fields (the Ornstein Nugget) he moved to southern California, where he married Gertrude Garfunkel. In 1868 their son, Heini, absconded with his father’s principal savings, which caused his father’s death. Heini fled to San Francisco, where (using the name Hank Kegan despite his heavy Scheraldgrün accent, conferred by his father) he built a large saloon in the Barbary Coast district of the city and named it Kegan’s. As Hank Kegan, Heini married an Italian girl from the Lugano area of Switzerland (Maerose Carnaghi).
On New Year’s Day 1900, Heini and Maerose Kiegelberg-Kegan had a son born. His name was Thomas, then pronounced Toe-mahss. The infant’s parents and all records of his true family name at baptism, Kiegelberg, were destroyed in the great San Francisco earthquake, which began on April 18, 1906. The authorities entered the boy’s name as Thomas Kegan, taking the name from the child’s father’s saloon. Little Tom was raised by the Little Sisters of the Poor in a sound San Mateo boarding school for the children of the rich. The Little Sisters gave him the name Xavier at his confirmation. His father’s considerable estate appreciated at the Crocker Bank.
Ever endowed with the mystical gift of piercing the heart of any matter instantly if the heart of the matter concerned money, Thomas Kegan sought and was granted a court order that forced the Little Sisters of the Poor (how he hated that designation!) to release him into the guardianship of the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Swaine, O’Connell, Cravath & O’Connell. He wanted his money put to work. At fourteen he qualified to enter the University of Notre Dame, and was graduated from that institution with honors for sports, religion and Irish studies. At eighteen he enrolled at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he won two graduate degrees in accountancy and advanced finance in three years.
In 1923, at twenty-three, he was ready for the expanding bull market and for Prohibition. He was also readier than most when the slide began in 1929 to transmogrify himself into a ruthless bear. By 1934, at thirty-four, he had increased his father’s pleasant eight-hundred-thousand-dollar legacy to a far pleasanter five million, six hundred and forty thousand dollars in cash and shrewdly bought (meaning entirely with bank loans) Chinese boxes of real-estate parcels in eleven American cities worth thirty-one million, one hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars (a 1934 evaluation). He realized a net profit of two hundred and seventy-three million dollars from even shrewder investments in liquor stocks and liquor production, using them to circumvent the Prohibition law. He sold his liquor interests to eastern Mafia families whom he had helped to establish and who had worked for him in the mid-thirties, and reinvested the funds in founding personal loan-financing companies in twenty-eight states to provide welcome short-term small loans for his fellow Americans at 39 percent annual interest, and in three competing pharmaceutical manufacturing companies, which were to grow and expand (in the sixties) to produce 9,400 kilograms (2.5 billion pills) of amphetamines and 5,382 kilograms of methamphetamines, which was 61 percent of the total (U.S.) market, as well as 23 percent of the tranquilizer and sleeping-pill market, with marketing problems greatly diminished through the help of the same grateful Mafia families. He balanced his cash investment in these home products and home banking with heavy buying into weapons-producing firms so that he could later feel he was backing up the Vietnam war effort when that effort cried out for help. He had done most of his major investing well before the wondrous 1960 decade.
Fourteen years after Tim’s mother’s death, Pa married his new, beautiful and in every way splendid wife, who became the mother of Nicholas one year after that. She divorced Pa two and a half years after that when, to her chagrin, Pa had infected her with a contagious catarrhal inflammation of the genital mucous membrane due to Neisseria gonorrhoeae. For this affront Pa paid Nicholas’ mother ten million dollars and the custody of Nicholas.
In her modulated farewell Mrs. Kegan called Pa a guttersnipe, and for whatever reason far, far back in his extraordinary snobbism, which concealed his lack of belief in his own worth, Pa accepted this description as true. Therefore, after Mrs. Kegan became Mrs. Thirkield (and was later killed) he was forced to feel deep ambivalence toward her son.
Nicholas knew well that his mother had been negatively moved by his father. She had not withheld her opinions of Pa during their son’s plastic years. By the time Nicholas was nine and his mother was dead, Nicholas had been formed by her opinions and was unable to feel other than infinitely superior to his father and to his half brother.
This was not Pa’s fault. More likely it was the fault of the necessity that had made Heini Kiegelberg-Kegan steal from his father, thus affecting his conscience and making him seek punishment by accepting snarls and humiliations from other older men whose advice helped make him rich. This cringing attitude in his father may have signaled the basic family inferiority to little Thomas, a six-year-old boy, so that even after a succession of brilliant accomplishments, when a beautiful woman of the world for whom he had the most respect was impelled by her shame to call him a guttersnipe, he had accepted that as truth, and in so doing had confirmed the belief in this of his wife and son.
As the years took Nick and his father wider and wider apart, this confirmation gave authority to her teachings to her son. His half brother, Nicholas observed, was merely a satellite of his father and was therefore of the same common substance. Nicholas had been given reason for his undeniable arrogance by the towering nature of the superiority he felt for (a) the President of the United States and (b) a self-made multibillionaire—together the two most imposing American institutions.
Tim never knew this, because Tim had skin thicker by far than the blood that is thicker than water. Tim loved his silly little brother, who he thought was silly because he worked so hard to alienate the source whence all good things flowed—Pa. Nick was “little” to Tim because Tim was six feet three inches tall and Nick was about five feet nine. Like all tall men, Tim figured everyone else’s hostile acts in terms of the number of inches of height the offender lacked.
Only Pa thought he knew what the deep displacement between himself and Nick was all about. His son obviously thought he, Thomas Kegan, was a guttersnipe. Nick saw it somewhat differently but in effect just as clearly: his father held him in contempt because he would not let his father run him as he had run Tim, because although his father was of a caste to give orders to Tim, it would be altogether unseemly for him to attempt to give orders to Nick—circular frustrations circularly arrived at.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 1974—PALM SPRINGS
When Nick awoke in Palm Springs the next morning it was half past ten. He was still exhausted from so many airplanes. He remembered the Philadelphia police commissioner and scrambled out of bed, was showered and dressed in twelve minutes, then called the kitchen to ask them to send him a pot of tea to his father’s office.
Pa looked like a heap of ashes tied up in golfing clothes. As Nick came in he shook his head sadly. “I talked to Philadelphia. Miles Gander has disappeared.”
“Miles is always traveling. That’s the kind of business he’s in.”
Pa nodded blankly. “Yeah. But the Engelson Building manager and John Kullers of 603 are dead.”
“Dead?”
“Suicides, Frey said. But he doesn’t believe it.”
“No,” Nick said.
“I told Frey I’d pay for an all-points on Miles. And I put my own people out to find him.”
“And Heller didn’t die of any heart attack.”
“Three out of five people who saw that rifle are dead. In twenty-six hours.”
“And the rifle is gone,” Nick said. “And no depositions could be taken. Did the package come in from Keifetz this morning?”
“Not yet. But you gotta give it another day. This isn’t 1955. They walk the mail in now.”
“I can’t explain it—but John Kullers knew he was going to be killed when he saw us find that rifle.”
“We must find Mi
Nick looked away from his father. He was in the oil business. He wasn’t a policeman. He didn’t think that the fact that three other people had died because they had seen the rifle meant that he might be killed himself. He just thought of the time it would take and the time he would have to spend with Pa that he could be spending with Yvette Malone. Then he thought of Kullers and Mr. Coney. They certainly hadn’t asked to be declared into this thing. They were dead because they happened to be standing in the wrong place, and, to a large extent, they were dead because of him.
“People would talk to you because you’re Tim’s brother. They’d talk to you because of me in other cases. You and me and Tim are a powerful combination, Nick, and I’d give you as many trained men as you need.”
The light on the switchboard turned on. Pa picked up the phone. He listened, then handed the phone to Nick. “It’s for you. A call from Brunei.”
Nick took the phone. “Hello? Yes, Daisy.” He listened. His face changed into a twist of grief. “No!” His legs seemed to give way. He leaned on the desk. “This is terrible. This is the worst. Daisy—Daisy, please—try to pull yourself together. Daisy, I know, I know—he was a fine man. But there was something he was trying to do and I have to know. What happened to the deposition and the fingerprints?” He listened. At last he hung up.
“Keifetz is dead,” he told Pa. “The lawyer who took the deposition is dead. The stenographer is dead.”
“Is the deposition in the mail?” Pa asked harshly.
“No. It was with Keifetz. We are supposed to believe he fell off a rig and drowned.”
“Then that’s the end of that.”
“No,” Nick said grimly. “The deposition is only lost, Pa. Like the rifle. Somebody has them, and we have to get them back.”
***
Keifetz was dead. Keifetz had been more of a father to him than Pa had ever been. Kullers was a total stranger, but he had been a valiant man, and his death somehow meant more to Nick than Tim’s murder had. Life was all a thing of trying to make contact. He had made it with Keifetz and Kullers. It had eluded him with Pa and Tim, and no interminable talk about families could change that. He felt a need to avenge Keifetz. The same man had bought the deaths of all those people. He had bought a blood lust for Nick at last.
To get the meeting over with so he could begin a manhunt, Nick asked Pa to have his agency people check out the National Rifle Association, to confirm that Fletcher had worked for them and to see if they had any fingerprints and photographs.
“What else?”
“We ought to try as close a total comb-out of Texas as we can, to try to run down a trace of this Casper,” Nick said. “But most of all, can you set a meeting for me with Z. K. Dawson?”
“Sure. When?”
“Anytime beginning tomorrow. I’ll be in New York. Either at the Walpole or at Butterfield 9-1845. Meantime please tell me what you know about Dawson. He’s just a name to me.”
“Z. K. Dawson is the richest man in Texas. He owned Eldridge Mosely. Eldridge was oil business in Pennsylvania, and Dawson was big oil business in Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado. In Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In Algeria and the Gulf. He wanted Eldridge to be President, but he had to settle for Vice-President—and you know what John Garner said that was worth. But Dawson didn’t see it that way. I say he had Tim killed to put Eldridge in the White House. He’s the greediest man we ever had in this country.”
“You agree that he was probably one of the men who paid to have Tim killed?”
“He had the most reasons. He was against everything Tim did and everything Tim stood for. And he owned Eldridge Mosely…. Who lives at Butterfield 9-1845?”
“A girl. I’ll have to have Jake Lanham take over for Keifetz at Brunei. That means you have to put your people aboard the Teekay right away so he can get off.”
“I’ll handle it,” Pa said.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 1974—NEW YORK
Nick caught a twelve ten plane to New York. He sat in a daze sipping cranberry juice and mourning Keifetz. He should have paid him more. Why was he so stingy with everything? He remembered Keifetz’ uncle, an old dermatologist named Harry Lesion. Keifetz used to send the old man a hundred-dollar bill whenever he thought of it. He’d have Daisy dig out the old man’s address, Nick decided, and send him the raise Keifetz should have had. He got to the family flat at the Walpole on upper Madison at a quarter to six. He took a bath, left a call for seven thirty, and went to bed so he would be as fit as possible for an evening with Yvette Malone.
***
Yvette Malone was a lightly bruised woman of about thirty who had been trampled by a man named Malone in holy matrimony and who had been fleeing ever since to almost anywhere it was emotionally comfortable, because a love of emotional comfort was all she had been able to salvage out of a marriage that had happened ten years before, when she had been even more defenseless. She had married one of those men who are retroactively determined to fly a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain or to become the leading climber of the Sherpa people for the first conquest of Everest or to pitch four consecutive no-hit games in the 1928 series against the Yankees—almost anything superlative if it were fictional or unattainable. He punished his wife for being denied these ambitions. After two years of doing the dishes for this prince of obscurity Yvette got out of town and moved to Paris. She divorced Malone.
***
As contracted, Nick called from the lobby of the building at exactly eight o’clock and rose like a randy eagle to her flat on the twenty-eighth floor. They didn’t speak much for the first hour—mostly there were grunts, moans, wails and shrieks. He threw himself at her, ran his hands up along her legs under her dress and grabbed everything that was waiting there. He scooped her up and ran down the short hall with her into a bedroom with a large bed. He threw her on it, then threw himself on top of her and began to flop about trying to kiss her and get out of his clothing while refusing to give up his hold on her crotch. She got his clothes off at about the same time he got hers off. It was fierce. It was poignant. It was noisy. And it was very, very carnal. As they were reaching a third climax he proposed to her. But he did it just before she moved into exultant chords of orgasm, bellowing “Yes, yes, yes!” to the extraordinary pleasure of the moment. He forgot she always responded just like that and thought she had agreed to marry him with enormous enthusiasm.
Forty minutes later, while they were getting ready to sit down to dinner in the kitchen, as he opened a bottle of French wine she had smuggled in with her, he told her how happy she had made him by accepting his proposal so happily.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“I asked you to marry me, and you yelled ‘yes’ three times.”
“Nick, I couldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t marry you.”
“Why not?”
“Just because I can’t, that’s all.”
He put the bottle down with the corkscrew impaled in the cork. “I think I deserve more of an explanation than that. Have you met somebody else whom you’d rather marry?” he said stiffly.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Nick. There isn’t anybody else, and I’ve cooked a very good dinner, and we can certainly talk about anything else in the world except about getting married.”
“Just answer one question. Do you refuse to marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Ever?”
“Yes.”
“Then I can’t even stay here, much less eat your dinner.”
“Well, I’m certainly glad you didn’t propose the minute you got out of the elevator. At l
“Listen, Yvette—you’ve said about thirty times that you love me. You certainly act as if you love me. You certainly couldn’t be more sure that I loved you. Are you just generally against marriage because you had that one bad experience, or what is it?”
“I can’t marry you, Nick. That’s all there is to say about it, and that’s all I’m going to say about it.”
As he started to protest, the telephone rang. Yvette answered it. “It’s for you,” she said.
Baffled, he took up the telephone. It was Pa. “Nick? Pa. You’re all set with Dawson. The house is on the Muskogee road, outside Tulsa. He’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock.”
“Thanks, Pa.”
“Before you leave the Tulsa airport set the car’s odometer to zero, then drive out on the Muskogee road for one seven, point four miles. It’ll be a white house on the right-hand side.”
“Does he know what I want to talk about?”
“He knows you’re in the oil business. He probably thinks it’s about a deal. He’s an odd bird. He keeps fresh money in laundry sacks and runs all his meetings lying down in a dentist’s chair.”
Nick hung up. “That was my father,” he told Yvette.
“I’ve heard of him,” she answered curtly.
“Listen. What the hell is the matter with you? I haven’t seen you for almost five months, and it’s like all that time you’ve been studying up on how to chop me down.”