Winter Kills (30 page)

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.

A Dr. Weiler came in to see him in a receiving room at the Philadelphia General Hospital. He was gentle but direct. Tim was dead. They turned Pa over to a police captain named Heller, who managed to get him out of the hospital without meeting the press and drove him to the heliport. By that time Eddie had Pa’s own chopper there. Pa gave Captain Heller two hundred dollars, and Heller was too tactful not to take it.

As Pa got into the aircraft he was wondering how he could locate Nick to soften the blow. Ah, what was the use? Tim wasn’t there. Tim was dead.

Si was waiting at the apartment in New York. Si gave him a bath and a massage, then he had him take two aspirins with the toddy he made and he wrapped Pa in blankets. Pa slept the night through. When he awoke he wasn’t confused anymore. He got up, drank a pot of tea, then called Eldridge Mosely at the White House. He didn’t congratulate the new President. He
didn’t even think about wishing him luck. Eldridge said, “My heart goes out to you, the father. Anything this country can do for the father of its hero is yours to claim.”

“Eldridge?”

“Yes, Tom?”

“I want the prick who shot Tim to be nailed. I want him killed. I want that man dead.”

“We got him, Tom. We got him yesterday, and he’ll pay for what he did.”

When Pa hung up he asked Si to bring in all the newspapers. The papers had the whole story. The killer’s name was Willie Arnold. He was a Commie. They had nailed him in the finest job of police work the country had ever seen. He was a little punk with a face like a kneecap, sullen and stupid.

In a flash Pa saw how simple it was going to be to kill the son-of-a-bitch. He called the White House again, but the President was not available. He called J. Edgar Hoover, but Mr. Hoover was not in his office. He called Larry Walz, the Governor of Pennsylvania, who was an old-time enemy of Pa’s over some aluminum. Walz came to the phone instantly. “Kegan?” he said. “I’m sorry about your son.” Then he slammed the phone down. Pa called Pete K. Lascoff, Mayor of Philadelphia. Shaky and a little timid, Lascoff said, “Mr. Kegan?”

“Pete, I want to ask you to get me in to see Willie Arnold.” While Pa talked he opened the top drawer of his night table and took out a short-barreled .38 calibre revolver. He looked up at Si. Si didn’t change expression, because Si was a man.

“Not in my power, Mr. Kegan,” Lascoff said. “The city is overrun with FBI and CIA and Secret Service. There are even two generals mixed up in that crowd somewhere.”

“Just get me in with Arnold, Pete, that’s all.”

“Not my jurisdiction, Mr. Kegan. That’s political quicksand out there.”

“Then go fuck yourself, Pete,” Pa said. Eddie dug out a special number for the police captain who had driven Pa to the heliport. His name was Frank Heller, and Pa called him. Heller got on the phone. He was at police headquarters. He wasn’t impressed to be talking to the father of the late President, or sympathetic, or anything but attentive.

“This is Tom Kegan. We met a few hours ago. I want you to get me in to talk to Willie Arnold.”

“It can’t be done.”

“For five thousand bucks.”

There was a fair pause. He knew Heller was thinking about it, because he understood Heller. They thought a lot alike. “I can’t do it for you, Mr. Kegan,” he said slowly, “but if there is anything I can do for you in there—”

“Did he confess?”

“Not yet.”

“He didn’t confess?”

“No. Sorry. I gotta get back.”

“You think he can get off on a thing like this? Is there a chance he can get off?”

“Always a chance.”

“Heller, I think you know what I wanted to get in there to talk to him about.”

“I think so.”

“Follow me on this. Do whatever you can and you’ll find out what kind of a friend I can be. You got that?”

“I feel like you do, Mr. Kegan. I am going to do everything I can.”

When Joe Diamond killed Willie Arnold, with Captain Heller in entire charge of the detail that was then transferring Arnold to another jail, while Arnold was manacled to Heller’s partner, a Lieutenant Ray Doty, Pa knew that he had gotten through to Heller. He had Eddie find out Heller’s home address, then he sent Eddie to Heller with a package of twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. Tim was avenged. Pa said to Si, “I don’t believe in shit like sins. Tim was murdered, so the
man who shot him had to get it from me or through me. Well, Willie Arnold got it, and now I have to find out if he did it on his own or if there were other people I have to pay off in the same way.”

Si said he should eat his soup, then he should rest. The funeral had taken a lot out of him.

But Pa couldn’t see how a nothing like Willie Arnold could have done it all alone. Just getting as near to Tim as that corner office in the TV Center warehouse in Hunt Plaza took tremendous connections. It was a little plaza. There were only two buildings with rooms and windows. The FBI and the Secret Service would have cased every one of those rooms, and no little punk with a mail-order rifle could just walk into a room and lean out of a window and shoot Tim. Arrangements had to be made. Somebody had to buy his way in to get that close and be so undisturbed.

Pa went to Washington, and Eldridge Mosely moaned out a lot of shit about how there could be another world war if they didn’t establish how this kid had done it all by himself, because the CIA was pouring it on how the Russians thought that the Americans thought that they had killed Tim, and they were so overnervous about it that they could be thinking about sending over their own ICBMs first. Eldridge was thinking like a schoolboy.

Pa called the Soviet ambassador and went over to see him. They had done business before on a lot of nickel ore the Russians had wanted to unload, and Pa had helped them out by getting a large piece of wheat together. The ambassador was a helluva guy—no Commie. He convinced Pa that his government didn’t feel that way at all. Mosely was grinding a whole different set of axes, Pa decided. Then the White House announced the makeup of the Pickering Commission, and Pa knew the fix was in. So many things were going to get lost and erased from here on in that if he didn’t move independently he was never going to find out what he had to know.

So he bought himself the three best investigators in the U.S. government service. He installed them as officers of the Industrial Maintenance Services Corporation, with Jim Cerutti as vice-president of the unit and with an unlimited, open-end budget and plenty of manpower to investigate Tim’s assassination. It was the beginning of Pa’s own, wholly-owned international security organization, which undertook anything from the routine to the extraordinary in industrial espionage assignments, and which within five years after its establishment was being used by fifty-eight American and foreign corporations, and which, ironically enough, was called upon to carry out one industrial and two labor-union assassinations. It served Pa’s basic business tenet: If a service is necessary enough to serve you, the owner, then it is necessary to serve others having similar problems; therefore own everything you use; after you’ve used it, lease it out, and thereby not only have the services you require at no cost (long-term) but make a profit from the new leased service.

The unit was set up in foam-lined offices in the skyscraper Pa owned over Grand Central Station. Jim Cerutti was established in the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior and directed the search from there, using, at peak point, sixty-one investigators and Pa’s formidable access to the records and files of the Pickering Commission, the FBI and the police departments of principal cities. Money was the miracle investigative tool.

Pa had Mosely grant him the special privilege of attending any Pickering Commission hearing, open or closed, and permission to talk to any witness the Commission staff produced. The members of the Commission were all old friends of Pa’s and they were glad to see him on two of the fifty-seven times all of them actually got together. Pa went to Philadelphia with Hughie “Horse” Pickering, head of the Federal Synod of American Churches Pro-Christ, chairman of the Commission. They saw Joe Diamond together. Before they went in to see Diamond, Pa arranged for a meeting
between Horse and Captain Heller. Heller explained carefully that there was a big TILT light-up on Diamond’s forehead. Heller told them that Diamond had paresis and would not last very long, and there was no use going in to talk to him, because he wouldn’t talk.

But Diamond did talk. He pleaded. He implored them to get him out of there and into the Commission’s own jurisdiction in a cell in the District of Columbia or any other venue except Philadelphia and he would tell them anything they asked. “You gotta understand, Dr. Pickering,” he said, almost sobbing, “I can’t talk here. I can’t. My life is in danger if I talk here. Can’t you even figure that out, Dr. Pickering?”

All the time Diamond pleaded with Pickering he never looked at him. He stared at Captain Heller. Dr. Pickering, although a theologian, was quick to understand that paresis produced paranoid responses. He explained that to Pa when they got out of the cell. But Pa didn’t think so. To him, Diamond had no symptoms of anything but fright, so he arranged through Harry Matson, the then police commissioner of Philadelphia, to have Captain and Mrs. Heller invited on a Caribbean cruise. Professor Cerutti fixed it for Mrs. Heller to enter a regional baking contest and win a trip for two, and she persuaded her husband that he had to take a rest for ten days after all the terrible strain he had been under. When Heller was gone, Professor Cerutti went into Diamond’s cell and they talked everything over. Pa gave Diamond fifty thousand dollars through Cerutti, which must have been a kick in the head for Diamond’s estate taxes, because he was dead in just under two months. How it happened, the police said, they would never know, but out of nowhere, in an isolation cell, he developed spinal meningitis, and it killed him. Cerutti said he had been injected with the virus, but there was no autopsy.

Cerutti came away from the talk he had with Diamond with information about a Dallas man named William Casper, including a solid description of the
man. Real work got started. He found out from Diamond that the name of the second rifleman was Arthur Turkus Fletcher and that he was still at large, having disappeared on the day of the assassination. Pa was disappointed that Diamond refused to talk about Captain Heller, but he would not. He was scared witless of Heller, and, even more unusual, he was in love with Heller. But he was a lot more scared than he was in love, Cerutti said. What could a cop do to him that a judge and jury hadn’t already done, Cerutti asked Pa rhetorically. Kill him, Pa replied. Right, Cerutti said. So there was nothing, absolutely nothing, about Heller. But Diamond did say that the Philadelphia police had set Tim up, so the link with Heller wasn’t entirely moldy, Pa said.

The man they were looking for had his own antenna. He found them before Cerutti could find him. Cerutti was getting closer, but no cigar. Five weeks after the Pickering Commission investigation had gotten under way, on a Saturday afternoon while Pa was at Rockrimmon trading in forward yen by telephone with Zurich and playing pinochle with General Nolan, Jim Cerutti called.

“The man we’re looking for contacted me today,” he said.

“Who is he?” Pa yelled into the telephone. He could feel the adrenalin rush into his bloodstream. His lust to bring death was so vividly with him that he began to breathe shallowly.

“He wouldn’t say.” Cerutti laughed grimly. “He called from Chicago.”

“Then he has men on you?”

“Very good men. I didn’t know it. We hope to pick them up today.”

“They won’t be there. They were just supposed to pin you long enough for him to call you.”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He wanted to ask me to ask you if you would be willing to talk things over through a friend of his.”

“Who’s the friend?”

“Alan John Melvin.”

“The Assistant Secretary at the Pentagon?”

“Yes.”

“What is there to talk over?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

“How do we confirm with him?”

“Somebody calls Alan John Melvin.”

“Let me think about it.”

He abandoned the pinochle game and the forward yen trading, left General Nolan and went into the kitchen to find Si. Si was polishing silver.

“The man I’m looking for just got Cerutti on the phone in Venezuela.” Si kept polishing. “The man wants me to talk to his man, who is an Assistant Secretary at the Pentagon. What do you think?”

Si stopped polishing. “That is good,” he said, looking right at Pa.