Winter Kills, Page 2

  Nick liked the oil business for solid reasons. It kept him remote from his father, who had believed in thrusting the world on Tim while ignoring Nick. So Nick ignored Pa. Pa had bought immortality for Tim—a sainthood for a family that had everything. Pa got what he wanted. The other reason Nick liked the oil business was that it produced the dramatic kind of wealth his father respected. Pa found it difficult to measure men who had only three, four or even five million dollars. People who had less than that did not exist for Pa any more than plankton existed for a whale.

  But no matter how hard Nick tried, Pa looked right through him. Nick told himself Pa couldn’t see him because he wasn’t President of the United States. It was all pretty silly stuff and it hurt. Nick answered all of it by keeping ten or fifteen thousand miles between them.

  Nick’s mother (who had conducted the Albany Symphony Orchestra, with Dame Maria Van Slyke as soloist, in a performance of “Rastus’s Dream,” Mrs. Thirkield’s own composition, at a charity concert held at Palazzo Bonetti, her home and shrine near Utica, New York, where her second husband, Gabriel Thirkield, manufactured superior harmonicas) had insisted that Nick learn to play the piano really well. Nick had studied piano formally from the time he was five until he was twenty-two. When he was moved across the continent to his father’s house after his mother’s sudden death, Tim had told him (Nick being nine at the time and Tim almost twenty-four) that Pa considered piano playing to be “faggy,” this delivered in Tim’s bland, wary way from behind his remote gray eyes. The put-on was part of Tim’s famous emotional detachment, which also, Nick came to see, kept him out of conflict with Pa. It was a projection of calm weakness experienced tensely. Nick finally discovered that his brother was always fearful that Pa, or the world (in that order), would catch him out in a mistake. Despite the heroic detachment, it tended to make him excessively dependent on other people.

  Tim’s big piano warning had the wrong effect on Nick, who concentrated with redoubled vigor on his piano studies, until Pa actually remarked how much he was beginning to enjoy listening to Nick play. As soon as he said it, Nick stopped playing on the full piano when Pa was near. He played on a silent practice keyboard. As he got older and went away to school, on the occasions when he did visit Pa he would set up the silent keyboard in his father’s sight and play on it lustily. For many years he actually believed he was depriving Pa of pleasure. Later he understood that Pa probably thought that reading books was “faggy.” There were books in all Pa’s houses but they were placed far from where they could corrupt Pa. Pa owned paintings and sculpture, but all he appreciated about any beauty was how much it had cost him and how much he could stick the next buyer for it. Pa hardly ever drank his own wine, because that would be cutting into capital. “You don’t have to read books, kid, if you can read a balance sheet,” he told Nick (when he was fourteen) in a rare bit of father-and-son tenderness. Pa wasn’t a Philistine, Tim explained, he was more of a barbarian. To put it one way: Pa was not one of Nick’s friends, but Nick loved him.

  Nick had three friends. Keith Lee, his oldest and most seldom seen friend, was the son of Pa’s Chinese butler. Next came Keifetz, who had been working with Nick since Nick had rushed to the Orient in 1958, when Pa had gotten him and his mining engineer’s degree an offshore job with Gulf. Last in calendar order (but first in the heart of her countryman) was Yvette Malone. Nick was in love with Yvette Malone, but just the same she was his friend. Three strong friends were a lot for a rich man to have, Tim had told him. But Tim had been like Pa, he hadn’t wanted friends, just people on whom he could be dependent and who were certified to appreciate his wit and wisdom. It all worked out backward. Why not, Nick thought. By 1974 the big difference between Tim and Nick, Nick felt, was essentially that he had three friends, and Tim, although dead for fourteen years, had approximately three hundred million.

  ***

  Nick flew off the pad on the high stern of the Teekay on a rainy night. He was the only passenger in the ship’s twenty-six-seat Sikorsky S-61N that Mitsubishi had built under license for Pa (Pa having gone into Japan with his money and his specialists as a spiritual part of the treaty MacArthur had produced). It was fully amphibious, with twin stabilizing floats, and was cleared for all-weather operation. It had a 275-mile range.

  The chopper had a crew of three, and ordinarily Nick would have visited with them all the way in to Brunei, but he had been telling Pa for the past seventeen days that the Teekay was as perfectly checked out as it could ever be, and still he couldn’t get away to get back to his own business, because Pa now wanted him to start all the goddam tests over again for the third time. Sometimes he wasn’t exactly clear on whether he was lurking around Asia with dirty fingernails in order to stay away from Pa or whether Pa was delighted to pile time on him to keep him in Asia safely out of the way. But safely out of the way of what? Or did he go through all these elaborate rituals just to bug Nick. They both knew at least three men as qualified or more qualified to ran the shakedown on the Teekay, but Pa had insisted that he do it, then do it over and over. Someday he’d have to have a long talk with Pa and try to find out who was staying out of whose way. It was a pain in the ass to belong to any family, he thought, but to be in the same family with Pa was like having an anal fistula and having to run the hundred-meter dash in the Olympics. He moped in a seat at the back of the chopper trying to figure out what he could do to get off the goddam Teekay. Maybe Keifetz would have an angle. He supposed he should get laid or something now that he would be ashore, because he would be crazy if he didn’t, even if he was too goddam exhausted to get his pants off.

  When they put down at the Shell airport in Brunei, Keifetz was there sweating Tiger beer. It was ten thirty at night, pouring down some hard January rain.

  “Seasonal weather,” Keifetz apologized. Nick realized that he had never bothered to find out Keifetz’ first name. Maybe Keifetz didn’t have one. He liked it the way it was, just Keifetz. Who ever called a tiger Eddie Tiger?

  “Is he still alive?” Nick asked stiffly, because he had to carry out being sore at the way Keifetz had hustled him off the drill ship.

  “He’ll hang in until he talks to you.” Keifetz wrestled Nick’s suitcase away from him, waving amiably at the customs officer and speaking to him in rapid Bahasa.

  The Jemnito company car was a 1965 Dodge half track. Nick sulked and Keifetz pretended he had traffic problems until they got out on the highway, then Keifetz said, “This crane operator has been with us four years, which is pretty fantastic. I signed him on first in East Pakistan. When we moved he showed up on the next job. I asked him how come. He said it was a privilege to work for Tim Kegan’s brother, you dig?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “After he came to, he knew he was a goner, so he asked me if I could get you here and he told me why.”

  “Who is he?” Nick asked with irritation.

  “His name is Turk Fletcher. When he signed on he even had a reference. It was a to-whom-it-may-concern letter from General Nolan—that friend of your family.”

  “General Nolan? James Nolan, Tim’s old commanding officer?”

  “That’s him. You know him?”

  “I never met him. He’s been Pa’s caretaker up at Rockrimmon, in Connecticut, almost ever since the war was over. This man’s name is Turk Fletcher?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know most of our guys. I never heard of him.”

  “So he was in the cab fifty-one fucking feet over your head whenever you came aboard. Whatta you want?”

  “Okay, tell me.”

  “He said he was Number Two rifle when they killed your brother.”

  “Oh, come on! You’re a fanatic on this. There was no second rifle.”

  “Only according to the Pickering Report.”

  “Do you believe this guy?” Nick was incredulous.

  “Let’s say I believe there was a second rifle.”

  “Suppose there was a second rifle. What am I supposed to do about it
?”

  Keifetz shrugged. “Let me put it this way: the Pickering Commission didn’t want to know anything about a second rifle so why should you—right?”

  “Now, listen, Keifetz—”

  “Every doctor on that job said there was a second rifle.”

  “Newspaper talk!” Nick had read more than very nearly anyone about his brother’s murder, but he had known what he wanted to believe, and he had stayed in Asia most of the time after that, or in London or Paris, except for when he had the breakdown because he was taking the whole thing too big. All he knew as he stared at Keifetz was that fourteen years after everything had happened he just didn’t want to hear that there had been a second rifle, because that would just stir everything up again. It could get Pa all agitated and active. He would pull Nick into some crazy vengeance scheme, and that would put an end to Nick’s life without father. Talk or proof about a second rifle couldn’t serve anything except to keep him away from running his own company for another three months. Tim was dead. He’d been dead for fourteen years. No big deal of another presidential commission investigation would bring Tim back to life.

  “Look,” Keifetz said, “how many times I gotta say it? Go ahead, Nicholas. Turn your back. What the hell do you care?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “I already told you plenty of times.” Keifetz had raised his voice. “Abe Weiler won a Nobel Prize for medicine, and I went to school with Abe Weiler. He is the doctor who pronounced your brother dead. I wrote to him. He answered back exactly the way he told the newspapers in the official medical report—that your brother had been hit front and rear by two different rifles. You allow the shot in the back of the head because the Pickering Commission told you to—right? Okay. The other bullet knocked on the front door.”

  “That’s a cute expression.”

  “Boy, that’s what this dying man, this Turk Fletcher, needs, some of your famous sarcasm.”

  “Willie Arnold was a Communist,” Nick said irrelevantly. Not irrelevantly for him, because Pa had trained him all his life to use sentences like that, but irrelevant to the question.

  “Would you believe the Hearst papers on Communists?” Keifetz asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, so I’m a Victor-ola. The Hearst papers, in 1960, the year your brother was killed, said that in assassinating the President, Willie Arnold had, quote, served the Communist cause its worst setback in forty-six years since its baneful inception, unquote. Okay, tell me something. Would you believe the late J. Edgar Hoover on Communists? In 1960 J. Edgar Hoover said—”

  “Never mind, fahcrissake! I was crazy to bring it up. What do I talk politics with you all the time for? Why don’t I back you into a good argument about piano techniques?”

  “I’m sorry, Nicholas.”

  “You are so goddam self-righteous about the Joseph Alsop columns you were able to memorize.”

  “Still, right is right.”

  Nick stared at him with his Captain Bligh look. “Keifetz, this is a family affair. If the man in this hospital was part of a conspiracy that murdered my brother, I am going to find out about the rest of the people in the conspiracy.”

  “I hoped you’d say that. I am proud of you. I honestly am.”

  What have I said, Nick wondered. Is this a John Wayne movie? How could I commit myself like that? Keifetz was a dangerous mental case where Tim was concerned and Keifetz would never let him forget what he had just said. It meant, for Christ’s sake, he had been manipulated again, and he would never be able to prove that he had been manipulated. Someday he was going to decide he had had enough and fire this son-of-a-bitch.

  11:10 P.M., SAME NIGHT—BRUNEI

  There was a parking space in front of the hospital. They waited in the air-conditioned lobby. “Enjoy the cool while you can,” Keifetz said. “The air-conditioning breaks down here every hour on the hour.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “Fletcher is going to be able to go through this only once,” Keifetz said, “so I borrowed a lawyer from Shell to take a deposition.”

  The lawyer brought a stenographer with him. The lawyer’s name was Chandler Tate. The stenographer was a Javanese girl named Sis Ryan. Keifetz led them to Fletcher’s room. There was a screen around the bed and two chairs on either side of it. Keifetz leaned over and spoke directly into Fletcher’s ear. “President Kegan’s brother is here, Turk,” he said. Fletcher opened his eyes, but he didn’t look at anybody.

  “We are going to swear you in, Turk,” Keifetz said. Sis Ryan moved a Bible under Fletcher’s hand on the bed. Tate read the formula to Fletcher from a typewritten slip. Fletcher repeated that what he was about to say was the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help him God.

  The iodoform smell was sweet and heavy. The flat fluorescent light poured age down on all of them except Sis Ryan. Fletcher’s face was as lined as a phonograph record. His voice was a hoarse whisper.

  “State your full name, please,” Tate said.

  “Arthur Turkus Fletcher.”

  “Your address, please.”

  “Dallas. Texas.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifty-eight years.”

  “We will hear your testimony now.”

  “I shot President Kegan.”

  “How?” Nick asked the question involuntarily.

  “I was second rifle in Hunt Plaza on February 22, 1960. I hit with both shots.” His voice had no color because he was saving everything. “First rifle missed with his second shot. I fired from the sixth floor of the Engelson Building, from behind the President’s car.”

  Nick corrected Fletcher. “You mean you shot from the TV Center warehouse,” he said.

  “There never was any shot from there,” Fletcher whispered, sweating like a mollusk. The people around the bed glistened. Keifetz’ thousand-mile blue shirt had dark loops under each arm. “That room up there was just a decoy. They left the phony rifle there. A mail-order Carcano, fercrissake. I couldn’t hit you from here with no Carcano.”

  “Where was the Number One rifle?” Keifetz asked.

  “I shot on a line with him,” Fletcher said. “At a high angle where you gotta watch your azimuth and you gotta figure your lead time with a big car that’s bound to pick up speed after them first two shots. Number One shot from behind the fence with the bushes in front—up on the grassy knoll to the right of the car and a little above. I shot three seconds—about thirty yards—behind him.”

  Tim loomed up in Nick’s mind wearing a dark jacket with a yellow silk lining that had horses printed on it. He could smell the smoke from Tim’s Cuban cigar. He could see Tim’s eyes mocking him. Tim’s eyes could either use you or you were useless. If you were useless, the eyes were indifferent, but if there was something else seen there that could possibly hoist Tim, the eyes sparkled with attention and flattering concern.

  Fletcher gasped with surprise at the intensity of a serial pain that had just scampered through him. Then he continued to speak slowly, leaning against the ramp of the pain. “First shot to the back of his head. Second shot beside the spine. Near side. I went into history. The way the fortune teller told my momma I would, two hours before I was born.”

  Keifetz looked at Nick. Nick seemed to be trying to memorize the square inches of Fletcher’s face. This man killed Tim, Nick was telling himself incredulously. He could reach out and touch Tim’s murderer, but he couldn’t see anything evil in his face.

  Pa had made Tim the President. This man had unmade him. Between the two stood an odd stranger, a shimmering figure of memory in TV newsreels. A zero called The Wit and Wisdom of President Kegan. Teeth. Ellamae Irving and her orogenic brassiere. All that red hair. The man who had stared down the Russian Chairman. Women. All sizes of women. A rusty-haired man in white pajamas. A head on a celluloid button. Vietnam.

  This exhausted, dying, staring body on the hospital bed, whose face had less expression than a baseball glove, had exploded a
ll of it, had made the wlonk presidential cartoon disappear. It was ridiculous.

  Fletcher stared upward as though the ceiling were a crowded movie screen that was offering a spectacular starring himself back in the days when he had never bothered to think about dying.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1959—DALLAS

  Toward the end of November 1959, Turk Fletcher came out of the barbershop of the Baker Hotel in Dallas. Just about twenty-three years before, he had gotten the first manicure of his life right there. He had admired the manicurist, Harleen, so much that even after she left to marry the biggest grapefruit producer in East Texas he had continued to patronize the Baker barbershop. He kept track of his haircuts, as he kept a careful record of nearly everything, in case the Internal Revenue ever questioned his expenditures. He had been pleased to note that he had had two hundred and eleven out of two hundred and seventy-six haircuts in the barbershop at the Baker.

  On the way out, inhaling the wonderful odors of tonics and cures, the steaming towels and the good clean soap, his back to the barber, who was staring with horror at the ten-cent tip Fletcher had just given him, he was bumped into by a short, stocky fellow who just didn’t give a goddam where he was going. If the little fucker couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see a hole in a forty-foot ladder. The man’s hands apologized for him before his voice could say it. They grabbed Turk sincerely and set him right. Then he came right out and said, “Say, ain’t you Turk Fletcher?” Fletcher nodded like a billy goat (excepting he sure didn’t smell like one right at that minute). “I seen you shoot in Crystal City and at the big chili cookout up to Nito Bennett’s ranch.”

  “Win a little?” Fletcher asked smarmily.

  “Some. I know maybe a dozen people who think you’re the finest rifle shot alive.”