Winter Kills (28 page)

“Fine. What time?”

“Eight twenty your house, eight thirty the Walpole. I’ll be in the lobby.”

***

It was snowing. It was freezing and getting colder. The prevailing wind was pushed through the high-walled streets building power, turning each snowflake into a razor blade, driving each one with great force into the faces on the streets of the city.

The table they sat at in the L-shaped top of the dining room at the Canopy—one of the perfect restaurants that Pa owned in New York—put them just out of sight of the rest of the room but directly in line with the main entrance, which was the whole point of the yearning to be seated at one of these six tables that were traditionally reserved for visiting royalty or stately patrons who gave the maître d’hôtel fifty dollars or more. Or for Pa or Nick. Everyone else who entered or departed the place got to see the elite seated to eat against that hallowed wall. Yvette, a seeded international diner, was gratifyingly impressed. She was awed when Nick said offhandedly to the Patron (himself), who hovered over them grinning and rubbing his hands, “You know what we like, Carlo. Do it well, please,” and handed the
carte
back to the man without looking at it. Carlo, who was perhaps the third most important man in New York society and in all business conducted on the eastern seaboard, murmured his gratitude and backed away with lowered eyes. The word
rolled across the dining room swiftly between and around the packed tables that a British royal was dining at the stem of the L.

“You certainly have a way with tyrants,” Yvette said humbly.

“I ought to. My father owns this place.”

“
Owns
it?”

“If you like this sort of thing, you should ask your father to buy you a fashionable restaurant. But you have to have a very rich father, and—quite possibly—you have to feel certain that such a headwaiter as Carlo would be cruelly rude to you if you did not.”

“As it happens, I do have a very rich father,” Yvette said.

“But not the need.”

“This is as good a time as any to bring this up and get it over with. My father is Z. K. Dawson.”

“Zane Kenneth Dawson?”

“Yes.”

“He is your
fath
er?”

“That is why I cannot—will not—marry you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You and your family think my father had something unspeakable to do with your brother’s murder.”

“Is that because—are you saying that because of that little reference I made in the letter I mailed from Frankfurt?”

“That was the first time I knew you had any connection with that vile man Thomas Kegan, yes. But you even said yourself that my father was probably the assassin.”

“Well, I—you see, Yvette, I—”

“Your father and his people have spread that word from the very first day. From the day your brother died. That wasn’t the only word he spread or the only one he blamed, but we know he was the spreader because my father spent a lot of time and money tracking those rumors down.”

“This is a very hard thing to talk about, but we’ve got to do it.”

“We are doing it.”

“When I wrote that to you it wasn’t because of anything my father said to me. My father had never mentioned the name of Z. K. Dawson to me.”

“Then how did you—?”

“A man who has turned out to have been the second rifleman at Tim’s murder confessed to me on his deathbed just ten days ago tonight. We asked him who hired him. He said he didn’t know but that he thought it was probably Z. K. Dawson.”

“That’s a goddam lie. He’s a goddam liar.”

“Well, just the same I had to check it out. I went all the way to Tulsa to see your father and—”

“
Tul
sa?”

“The little white house on the Muskogee road. Dentist’s chair and everything.”

“
Den
tist’s chair?”

“He was pretty convincing in an intellectual way about why he hadn’t had anything to do with the assassination, but—I’m sorry, Yvette, this is what happened and I’ve got to say it—he sent me to a motel in Tulsa at the airport, and while I was there—I’m sorry, Yvette—his people tried to kill me.”

“Every bit of that actually happened?”

“Every bit.”

“Then we both have a bad enemy somewhere. You and me and Daddy. Nick, my daddy hasn’t set a foot outside his ranch in the back country of Venezuela in maybe twelve or fourteen years, because he had a bad automobile accident that left him with kind of a crushed face which he is very sensitive about strangers looking at. So much for his living in a little white house outside of Tulsa. Now what is this about the dentist’s chair?”

“Z. K. Dawson is famous for holding all his meetings in a dentist’s chair.”

“Nick, you got a master illusionist working on you.
We’ve got to be talking ’bout two different people. And as far as daddy ever owning a crappy little motel in a crappy little town like Tulsa, that’s silly. He’s an Amarillo oil man and a horse-race bettor, and that’s all he’s ever been or ever wanted to be.”

“I saw him. I was with him. Will you let me describe him?”

“I can’t wait.”

“He’s a man of about seventy-five—”

“Ha!”

“—with a great big stomach, a real pink, round face and dead-white hair that curves down over his forehead like a Gay Nineties bartender.”

“That tears it. Look, my daddy—that is, Z. K. Dawson of Amarillo, Texas, and Jaime del Arias, Venezuela—is a sixty-two-year-old man with a flat stomach, a dark, dented face and jet black hair that he combs straight back on his head like a Cherokee Indian, of which he happens to be part of, partly.”

Nick gulped.

“And if my daddy ever decides to kill you he’ll do it in the middle of Main Street at high noon, with a great big loud pistol if not with his bare hands.” Yvette fumbled in her purse. She came out with a Polaroid snapshot. Her eyes were filled with tears of indignation. “That is Z. K. Dawson, you turd,” she said.

Nick held the picture and stared at it. “I’m knocked out. I’m all out of synch. Not that I’m not glad. I was absolutely wrong. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that it all happened that way. But now you can marry me.”

There was a delay while the waiter poured wine. Then Nick said, “First, will you accept my profound apologies?”

“Yes. I will. But it hurts to know you’re so dumb.”

“It all sounds dumb but—”

“I guess I don’t really mind if you’re dumb. Daddy can support us.” He produced a look of such shocked outrage that she giggled.

“Next, are you going to marry me?”

“Yes. I will. If you go to Venezuela and ask Daddy for my hand.”

***

Keifetz had moved into a room at the Waldorf at ten o’clock that night on the supposition that no one would have the time to wire the room for bugging before he and Nick started to talk. Nick had told him to stay out of hotels built after 1962 because there was always the chance that they had had wiring for taps all built in during the construction. Nick got to the hotel at 10:10
P.M.
after sending Yvette home in one of Pa’s cars.

“How did it go in Wisconsin?” Keifetz asked.

“Interesting. But the real news is that Yvette says she’ll marry me.”

“Nicholas! Oh boy, that’s great.”

“So if I take Carswell’s job—on account of nobody else wants it—and we move the main office from London to Paris—if that’s okay with the tax lawyers—can you handle the operations end alone?”

Keifetz snorted. “What do you think?”

“Okay. Seven percent of the profits, and we apply the other four points of that agreed escalation to start at seven percent.”

“What happened to you?”

“No, it’s okay. It’s fair.”

“I’ll take it. Any cash?”

“A twenty-percent raise.”

“Jesus, now I can take two wives. Daisy won’t mind. Her father had four, and she says the second wife is a lot of help around the house.”

“You want something to drink?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I have to talk. We have a lot to figure out. It’s getting real bad.” He picked up the phone and called room service. He ordered a bottle of Scotch, some setups, a platter of cold roast beef and some toast.

“Now think. Did you talk to my father that first day, the day I left Brunei?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. He just wanted to know what plane you were on. Why?”

“You are sure that’s all you talked about?”

Keifetz thought about it. He said, “I think he asked me why you were going to Philadelphia.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him about Fletcher—and I told him about the rifle. And I said you were going on to Palm Springs—I think.”

“So the only thing he knew before he called you was that I was going to Philadelphia. That means that little sod Carswell called him as soon as he hung up on me.”

“What’s this all about?”

“Mainly it’s about the fact that Pa pretended to me never to have heard the name Fletcher or anything about Fletcher or the rifle when he had discussed everything we knew about Fletcher within an hour after I left Brunei.”

“But—what is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to ask my father. And he wasn’t at Palm Springs when I got there. Somebody went to see Miles Gander to bribe him. Somebody knew all about that rifle the instant we found it.”

“Your
fath
er?”

“I don’t know. But he was the only one who could have had all those facts. So I’m going to ask him to explain all that to me.”

A room-service waiter brought in the food and the liquor and left.

Keifetz poured drinks for both of them. “I lift it to Yvette and you,” he said.

“I lift it to your entirely legal harem,” Nick said.

They drank. “Enough talk about sex,” Keifetz said. “What else about your father?”

“He set up the meeting with Z. K. Dawson for me. Tonight I found out that the man I saw wasn’t Dawson, that Dawson hasn’t been out of Venezuela for like ten years.”

“How could you find out a thing like that tonight and check it out?”

“Because I found out tonight that Z. K. Dawson is Yvette’s fathers and he comes complete with a photograph.”

“But—”

“But what?”

“Well, Jesus. This is a rotten thing to say but—well, what the hell, everybody else has been bending your mind—maybe Yvette gave you a bum steer.”

“It didn’t happen that way. Besides, she wants me to fly to Venezuela to meet her father. No, it’s Pa. And it’s not even so much that Pa sent me to the fake Z. K. Dawson, it’s that the people who paid to have Tim killed knew I would be at the fake Dawson’s, arranged that I be sent to that particular house on that particular road so that they could plant Chantal Lamers and so that everything that led up to Lamers could lead away from her—the magazine, Mentor, the fake stories, everything.”

“Then that whole trail led you right back to your father again. Jesus. What are you going to do?”

“You were born in New York. Do you know any cops?”

“My kid brother, Alvin, is a Homicide lieutenant in Bay Ridge.”

“Is he straight?”

“Is he straight? My uncle, Doc Lesion, would beat the pole off him if he wasn’t straight. He’s as straight as a great big Mosler safe at the headquarters of the Boy Scouts of America.”

“Good. Now—please get your brother to get a copy of the statement by Martin Keys, the Englishman who tried to throw me out the window. They booked him at the East Sixty-eighth Street station.”

“What are you going to be doing?”

“I’m going to Oklahoma to see if I can talk to Chantal Lamers’ father in Muskogee. She claimed he was
the oldest established pharmacist in town and I have no choice, I have to buy that.”

“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.”