Winter Kills (8 page)

“Oh, no, you won’t. Go to a booth and shut the door.”

Nick glared at his back. The twit. He ordered tea. He was impatient to get Carswell out of there for good so that he could talk to Yvette at his leisure. It took Carswell twenty minutes to get back.

“Marian will be here in about an hour,” he said.

“Did you talk to Miles Gander?”

“He will be
charmed
to have breakfast with you tomorrow morning.”

“Good.” He decided to fire Carswell as soon as he could find a replacement. “That’s all. You may go, David.”

“It is Monday morning. I
do
have an extraordinary amount of work to do.”

“Well, go and do it.”

They shook hands limply. David waddled away. Nick asked for a telephone. He dialed Yvette’s number in Paris and instantly she was on the line.

“Yvette? Nick.”

“
Nick
? Oh, boy! Are you in town?”

“London airport.”

“Oh.”

“I am dazzled to know that I am this close to you. The Channel and a little hunk of France is all. Nothing
like half the world between us.”

“How come you’re at the
London
airport?”

“I put it all in a letter to you and mailed it in Frankfurt.”

“I may not see it—I mean for a couple of months. I’m going to the States in about two days.”

“Where to?”

“New York first.”

“How long will you be there?”

“Through January. Then Jamaica or something.”

“Can we have dinner Thursday night? I have to go to Palm Springs but I can make it to your place by eight on Thursday.”

“Oboyoboyoboy.”

“It’s been almost four months.”

“I know.”

“Just talking to you is too much. I don’t know how I can be this close and not see you.”

“Don’t even say it, Nick.”

“Okay. So long.”

“I love you, Nick.”

He hung up in a pink daze. He drifted to the newsstand and bought paperbacks and magazines. Marian arrived with the underwear in a plastic shopping bag. She was a short, thin girl in a miniskirt. If she couldn’t afford to wear a long skirt in London in January, Carswell must be underpaying her.

“I had a crazy cabbie,” Marian said. “He must be fleeing the police. Aren’t taxis supposed to have speed governors?”

“How much do we pay you, Marian?”

“Twenty-three pounds a week. Why? I didn’t miss finding the underwear the first time round. David forgot to tell me.”

“Give me your notebook.”

In fullest holograph he wrote a note to Carswell saying that henceforth Marian was to be paid thirty pounds a week. That should annoy the repulsive twit, he thought. Marian stared at the note. “But—why, Mr.
Thirkield? I’m really not very good at anything in an office. Honestly, I could have missed your underwear the first time this morning even if David had told me.”

“You weren’t good at anything in an office because you were underpaid,” Nick said. “Now that you will be paid properly you will improve enormously.”

“But I don’t want to spend my life improving at this. If I could find a husband I’d be away from you like a shot.”

“Perfectly all right.”

“You may not understand it, but you are trying to obligate me, Mr. Thirkield. It’s as though thirty pounds a week were my price. This could change my life. This could make me so obligated that I would stop looking for a husband and turn into an office creep like a girl David Carswell.”

“What do you want me to do, Marian? I’ll do whatever you say.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Thirkield.”

“I’ll take it back. Here, we’ll tear it up.”

“No,” she said glumly. “That’s all right. It’s my problem now, innit?” She turned away from him and walked toward the exit of the lounge.

The pink haze had lifted again.

JANUARY 29 AND 30, 1974—PHILADELPHIA

Nick’s plane touched down at Philadelphia at four thirty-five that afternoon. He checked into the Petroleum Club.

“You are looking worse than I have ever seen you look, sir,” the reception clerk said genially.

Nick was very much pleased. “I’ve been on an airplane from Borneo.”

“Travel is terrible punishment, sir.”

“Please tell the operator to post Do Not Disturb signs all over the switchboard. That includes my father—I mean, most of all my father.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And please send a man up to wake me at eight thirty tomorrow morning.”

He slept for fifteen and a half hours, until the bell captain shook him awake. At nine fifteen he shambled into the baroque Victorian dining room with its magnificent portrait of Edward VII as a young man, by James Richard Blake the immortalist. The room was a womb of the past in deep green and heavy gold. Miles Gander was waiting for him, a thin and melancholy man with a high bald head and heavy black-rimmed glasses. They told each other that each was looking very well indeed. Nick was ravenous. He hadn’t eaten for two days. They ordered at once.

“Somebody said you ran into a string of dry wells, Miles.”

“Quite an advertisement for an oil geologist, wasn’t it?”

“Need any money?”

Miles shook his head in a melancholy way and went on nibbling at a piece of toast. He was smallish, with a birdlike face and a squamulous nose, as though he were an evolutionary map of reptile-into-bird-into-man.

“I cannot stand David Carswell any longer, Miles.”

“He is impossible. But he knows everything.”

“We are too small an operation to fit in a fellow like that.”

“But whom would you get?”

“I thought I’d ask you.”

“A desk job? No,” he said sadly. “I’m a geologist, Nick—but I thank you.” Every shading of Gander’s manner was melancholy, indicating that bankruptcy can be depressing but also that he had deeper malaise than the loss of money. “If you can’t bear Carswell, try Ed Blenheim in Tulsa.”

The food arrived. Nick attacked an enormous pile of scrapple, about which Edward VII had said (in that room), “Philadelphia is filled with people named Scrapple, and they all have biddle for breakfast.”

After a while Miles said, “What did you want to see me about, Nick?” He coughed lightly. “It couldn’t be about the job, because you wouldn’t have had David call me if it were.”

“I need your integrity,” Nick said.

Miles winced.

“A man who was working for Keifetz fell off a crane in Brunei. He knew he was dying. He confessed that he had been one of the two men who had shot my brother.”

“My God!”

“He told us where he hid the rifle. Here in Philadelphia. So I wanted to ask you for two favors. Can you arrange for me to meet a high-ranking police official? Second, will you come along with us as witness that the rifle has been found—if it is found?”

Miles wet his lips. He took a sip of water. He had a
mouthful of black coffee. He dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, drying it. “Yes,” he said. “I can do those things.”

“Thank you.”

“When do you want me to do this?”

“Now, if you can.”

“I’ll go out to the hall and telephone.” He got up abruptly and left the table. Nick thought he had become a different man since the bankruptcy. He had to need money. He decided to press it on him. He ordered more scrapple, with poached eggs and fried apples, and more hot toast and coffee. When he was in Asia, he had dreamed of scrapple—a divine marriage of American Indian cornmeal with the genius of German sausage.

“Well, we were lucky,” Miles said when he came back. “An inspector of police named Heller is on his way over.”

Nick said, “I don’t believe you when you say you don’t need money. Let’s get this straight, Miles. I am your friend, and there are things you have to make yourself accept from friends. I am worried about you. I want you to tell me how much money you will need, and that will be that.”

Miles’s eyes suddenly brimmed with tears, but they held. He looked away, and after a time the tears were gone. “The fact is, Nick,” he said, “I would have grabbed that offer last night. But everything was settled last night. I have the money. I don’t need to be a bankrupt.”

***

Deputy Inspector Frank Heller came into the dining room in full uniform, fruit salad across his left chest and a gold badge that gleamed like a searchlight under the commendations. He was a beefy, red-faced, heavy man with hard eyes. He shook hands as though it were a karate maneuver. He sat at the table, refused breakfast, because he never ate breakfast, he said, grudgingly accepted some coffee, then asked if there was any
raisin bread, then asked if he could have some red currant jelly to go along with the raisin bread.

“Why not have some lamb with the red currant jelly, Frank?” Miles asked.

“The scrapple is great,” Nick said.

“Scrapple? Well. I’d like to try some scrapple.” He nodded to the waitress. “What’s up?” he asked Miles.

“This is all very delicate and confidential, Frank, as you will see,” Miles said.

The inspector grunted. It was like a random hit on a bass drum. He looked quickly from one face to the other. His eyes had large pouches of blackness under them, as if he had rubbed them with sooty mittens. “Everything is,” he said.

“Mr. Thirkield is the half brother of the late President Kegan,” Miles said. “We work together in the oil industry.”

Heller nodded with automatic, sympathetic appreciation, then he caught himself and went on the defensive.

“We did everything humanly possible to protect your brother here, Mr. Thirkield. But you can’t protect anyone from a nut. I hope you realize that.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Nick said. “Two days ago in the Far East a man confessed to having killed my brother.”

“Impossible.”

“And he told us where he had hidden the rifle. In Philadelphia.”

“Out of the question.”

“His name was Arthur Turkus Fletcher.”

Heller grunted again. It had a threatening sound. Boar hunters have heard the sound. The food arrived, so they stopped talking until the waitress left. Heller attacked the scrapple as if it were trying to devour him first. He finished everything on the plate before he spoke again. “You read the Pickering Report?” he asked Nick.

“The short version.”

“There was no second rifle.”

“Inspector,” Nick said with all the Innocent arrogance of his relationship to the late President, the late President’s father’s billion dollars, and the thirty-seven thousand, nine hundred crunch people his father knew in the crevices and on the pinnacles, “when you finish your coffee we will go out of here and see if we can find that rifle. The rifle will have Fletcher’s fingerprints on it, and taped to it we should find his full name. As you will discover, the prints will match the fingerprints of the man who confessed, taken two days ago by the police in Brunei, on Borneo. They will also be shown to be the prints of a man who worked for eight years as a professional marksman for the National Rifle Association with the rating of Master. When we have all those things in hand I will give you a certified copy of the deposition Fletcher made in Brunei before he died. Then you will be asked and Mr. Gander will be asked to make a deposition as to what you will have witnessed this morning. My father and I will then take a complete copy of this record, with the weapon, to the President to request a reopening of the investigation under a congressional commission. That is all.”

There was a delay of ten minutes while the desk located the club’s engineer so that he could lend the expedition a large wrench. They drove to the Engelson Building in a black police car that had a uniformed police driver.

They found the manager of the Engelson Building in his office. The inspector explained that they wanted to make an examination of Room 603. The manager looked the room up in a notebook, then dialed on his telephone. “Mr. Kullers? This is David Coney, the building manager. I wonder if we could trouble you for a few minutes for a look around your office.” He put his hand over the receiver. “He wants to know what for,” he said to Inspector Heller.

“The steam pipe,” Nick said.

“The steam pipe, Mr. Kullers,” Coney said into the
phone. “Thank you.” He hung up. “There are no steam pipes in this building,” he said. “This doesn’t involve Mr. Kullers, does it?”

“How long has he leased 603?” Heller asked.

“About four years.”

“Probably not, then,” Heller said. The four men went to the elevator.

Lettered on the door of 603 were the words J
OHN
K
ULLERS
and V
ENDING
M
ACHINES
. Coney knocked. A voice told them to come in. A rumpled, red-haired man wearing heavy black horn-rimmed glasses exactly like Miles Gander’s was alone in the room checking figures at a desk, his back to the two windows.

“Cops? Why cops?” he said.

“Are you Kullers?” Heller said in a hard voice.

“Who else?”

“Go down the hall and smoke a cigarette or wash your hands or something. You can come back in ten minutes.”

“What for?”

“Listen—it would only take a little time to get a search warrant, but I can get one.”

“A search warrant to find a steam pipe? There it is.” He gestured. “And while you’re getting the search warrant see if you can find the two milk machines somebody palmed on me at Bryn Mawr last Friday. What is there to search? I am a one-man operation.”

“Do I have to get a warrant?”

“You can search, but I am staying.”

Heller shrugged. He took the big wrench to the vertical heating pipe.

“That never worked,” Kullers said.

“It isn’t even supposed to be there,” Coney added.

There was a sleeve joint halfway up the pipe. Heller tightened the wrench around it, applied force and turned. The sleeve fell to the floor around the pipe with a clatter. The inspector and Nick separated the pipe and looked downward.

“I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” Heller said. He lifted a
star-shaped wooden rack out of the pipe. Attached to the rack was the barrel of the .30 M1D. Heller lifted it out very carefully by the tip of the barrel and the rack.

Nick felt light-headed. His hands began to shake hanging beside him. He had never looked at a rifle and seen it to mean certain death before, designed for death, accomplished only in death.