Winter Kills (21 page)

“Mr. Mentor, you are telling me more than I want to know about Joe Diamond. All I want to know is, who approached Gameboy Baker to hire Diamond.”

“Listen, I’m witchew. But it takes time. Joe wanted to get back, because now that he had money he had this disease about cops—he wanted to be a big man with the cops. But they should be American cops. Socially, he had to ice Cleveland and Miami and Tucson—a question of personal popularity. So he opened a saloon in Philly, which it was like a club for cops, and all of a sudden he is running all the shit in Philly too. He really thought he had it made. If I was ever in Philly I always went to his place. I would call up first and he would ask me to come in playing the heavy movie gangster to impress the cops—a bunch of patrolmen and sergeants, fahcrissakes—with his big connections. Very funny stuff. But the last time I was there I was like a messenger boy with a message from Gameboy Baker.”

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1959—TUCSON

Joe Diamond felt sick. He would get in trouble if he vomited going across the lobby of the Santa Rita Hotel in Tucson, but he was afraid it could happen. If he refused to go to Tucson to see Gameboy Baker, Irving Mentor had told him in Philadelphia, then he would be hit. So he went to Tucson even though he now had the kind of a business that needed his personal presence.

Gameboy sent down the word that he was to wait in the lobby. He felt a little better when he sat down. They kept him waiting there from a quarter to eleven in the morning until ten after four in the afternoon. Guys he had known since Woodlands passed three feet away from him all day but they didn’t see him; nobody could see him.

At ten after four Jack Lerner told him to come back at nine o’clock. At nine o’clock he was sent right upstairs to Gameboy. Gameboy looked old. All that junk sat on him. He asked Joe if he wanted a sannawitch. They split three pastramis on whole wheat and two bottles of celery tonic. It was lousy pastrami. “If you think the pastrami is bad,” Gameboy said, “don’t ever try Wild West corned beef.”

“It must be the local water,” Joe said, trying to be jolly-jaunty.

“Water? Here they cook it in sweat.”

“You are looking great, Sam.”

“Maybe I am and maybe I’m not, but that isn’t what we want to talk about here. I have a contract for you. The biggest contract ever handed out anywheres.”

“Me? I’m a restaurant man.”

“You are also a thief who was crazy enough to steal from Moey and Sam and Morris and Uncle Louie.”

“I want to pay back.”

“You are fucking right.”

“I can pay back?”

“When you handle this hit you will be paying back. You will be even.”

“The thing is—can I do it?”

“Well,” Gameboy said, “you know how to answer that.”

“How?”

“Don’t do it and you’re dead.”

“What is the contract?”

“Nobody knows yet. But it is big, because they paid big just for me to talk to you.”

“But why me, Sam?” Diamond
hated
this. He had a wonderful business, with wonderful built-in friendships with a lot of wonderful guys. Things had never been so good. “Why me when there are maybe two hundred mechanics who can make any hit better than me?”

“That is what Uncle Louie said to them. Four
very
good mechanics were offered to them. But they said no good, because those guys weren’t political.”

“I’m po
lit
ical?” Diamond asked with horror.

“Uncle Louie said to them: ‘What is political? This is business.’ They said we had operated in Cuba and that they’d like to have somebody from Cuba. So—and it was very easy, you schmuck—Uncle Louie remembered you. You were eight years in Cuba already you are in the FBI files as a political.”

“I was never a political in my life! Fah God’s sake, Sam.”

“You speak a little Cuban. You were
very
good friends with a Cuban minister.” Gameboy leered. It was wholly unattractive. “So the man who is paying said you were what the doctor ordered. Because you have a Commie background in the FBI files.”

“Commie? Sam, I was out by 1949. Castro didn’t
take over until 1959—now—February, this year.”

“Joe, what do you want from me? If people like this decide they have to prove you’re a Commie, so they’ll prove you’re a Commie.”

“People like who?”

“People like who have been proving that certain people are Commies for six years already.”

“This is crazy.”

“Anyway you gotta do it.”

“Yeah.”

“Moey said you could make your own deal, because that’s the kind of a little guy he is. Also, you gotta take rifle lessons for as long as you have to, out on Pete Volilica’s ranch.”

“A rifle?”

JANUARY 8, 1960—ARIZONA AND PHILADELPHIA

The rifle teacher on the Volilica ranch was some farmer named Turk Fletcher. He could hit anything from anywhere with a rifle. They put in twenty-six days, seven hours a day, doing nothing but shooting a rifle. They shot at a dummy that was strapped into the back seat of an old-time touring car that Howie Pearl, who was now the big
macher
in Cleveland, towed across the field at about a hundred and ten feet away from where Diamond shot on an eighteen-foot-high rise of ground. Diamond had to hit the dummy in the throat. When they had finished he was hitting nine out of every ten shots. Because he was no dope, he figured out that they must be going to hit some guy who rode around in a car with the top down.

Gameboy sent him back to Philadelphia and told him to wait to hear from somebody named Casper Williams and that Joe should make his deal with Casper Williams. Joe said good-bye to Gameboy in his room in Tucson, holding him close with one hand and squeezing his ass with the other hand. He never saw Gameboy again. Although Gameboy outlived him, Gameboy never saw Joe again except on television. So it goes in the march of the patriots.

When Casper Williams came to his office in the saloon, Joe Diamond puked right on his own floor without any warning when Williams told him whom he was supposed to hit. He had never really been scared before in his life, he decided. He had to go to bed for a
day and a half. After a while he got used to the idea, because the money they were paying was so good and because he would be working for Captain Heller, who had never made a wrong move in his life.

SUNDAY NIGHT, FEBRUARY 3, 1974—CLEVELAND

The cigar smoke in the back of the parked Cadillac in Vincent Street was like suspended meringues, but Nick couldn’t open the window, because the engine wasn’t running and the windows were automatic. “Open the door, please,” he asked. “This smoke is too much for me.”

“It could be a signal or something.”

“Open the door or I’ll shove that cigar down your throat,” Nick said savagely. Mentor leaned forward and turned on the ignition, then he opened the windows on both sides. “This is an eighty-five-cent cigar, fahcrissakes,” he said. “Wholesale.”

“Who was Casper Williams?”

“A Hollywood agent.”

“Whaaaat?”

“Yeah, he was dealing for Harry Small, head of the Federal Studios.”

“Why would people like that want a President killed?”

“Because that particular President cost them about fifty million dollars in film rentals when Ellamae Irving, who was Federal’s biggest star, killed herself because the President told her she couldn’t go to a Madison Square Garden rally for him in New York.”

“Hardly likely.”

“Very likely. He was screwing her, and she took it big. Maybe she had dreams of being the First Lady. That could have made her the biggest grosser in history, even if it was only announced. But chances are
she would have killed herself anyway, even if your brother had kept his pants shut.”

“Can you set a meeting for me with Casper Williams?”

“He left Hollywood. Somebody said he was working in Rome.”

“I’ll go to Rome.”

“I’ll find out.”

“Can you set a meeting with Harry Small?”

“What do you read? He’s dead for three years already.”

Nick got out of the Cadillac and got into a cab across the street in front of the Odeon Grill. He told the driver to take him to the airport. Irving Mentor got out of the back of the car, shut the door, started to open the front door and felt the gun in his back.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1974—NEW YORK

Nick called Yvette in New York from the Cleveland airport at 12:55
A.M.
The answering service said she still hadn’t called in for her messages. He was getting cross-eyed with fury over her perversity. Why was it that only the women one loved behaved like this and never the women one was indifferent to?

The Cleveland flight got Nick to New York at six twenty in the morning. He checked into an airport motel and left a call for half past ten. At eleven thirty he was riding the high-speed elevator in the
National Magazine
building to get some kind of a reasonable explanation from Harry Greenwood as to why the magazine had sent him to a man in Cleveland who, according to the unimpeachable source of Frank Mayo, did not exist as far as the Syndicate was concerned. Nick wanted to have Greenwood’s undoubtedly plausible explanation in hand when he made his report to his father about the Mentor meeting.

His name was sent along to Greenwood’s office from the editorial reception desk. After about seven minutes he was told Mr. Greenwood would be unable to see him. Was there someone else who could help him?

“Perhaps his secretary doesn’t know I had a meeting with Mr. Greenwood here two nights ago. I am Thomas Kegan’s son.” The receptionist repeated Nick’s message to Mr. Greenwood’s secretary. There was a short wait, then the receptionist said Mr. Thirkield was to go to the thirty-eighth floor, please.

A young woman was waiting for him at the elevator
bank. “Mr. Thirkield?” He followed her to the uptown side of the building at the eastern end. She led him into an anteroom just as a portly man with heavy eyeglasses and an imperturbable look came through from the far room. “This is Mr. Thirkield,” the young woman said.

“What’s this about a meeting we had?” the man asked.

“I’m here to see Harry Greenwood.”

“I’m Greenwood.”

“Like hell you are,” Nick said pleasantly, managing to smile.

“Hey, Charlotte,” the portly man yelled. The young woman reappeared. “Who am I?” he asked.

“You are Mr. Harry Greenwood.”

Greenwood said to Nick, “And you’re Tim Kegan’s brother?”

Nick nodded with bewilderment.

“Sit down,” Greenwood said. “No. You better come inside and tell me what this is all about.”

Greenwood’s office walls were lined with cork to which production schedules, assignment sheets and oddly shaped pieces of paper were pinned.

“Do you have a writer named Chantal Lamers?” Nick asked.

“On our staff?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“
No
?”

“You’d better tell me what happened.”

Nick told him how he had met Miss Lamers, who said she worked for the magazine. She had given him her direct-to-desk telephone. The magazine did have direct-to-desk phones? Greenwood nodded. Nick had called Miss Lamers to arrange a meeting. In an office two floors below, off a corridor behind the reception desk, she had introduced him to a man she called Harry Greenwood, who said he was the editor of the
National Magazine
. He gave a careful description of Lamers and the false Greenwood.

“What was the meeting about?”

“I can’t say until I clear it with my father. But you have been very helpful. Thank you very much.”

***

Nick told the cab to take him to Chantal’s address on East Thirty-first Street.

The doorman was a ratty, if beautifully uniformed, short man who did not look strong enough to protect the tenants from the neighborhood children. He barred the way. He said no one named Chantal Lamers lived in the building. Nick asked him how long he had worked there. The doorman said three and a half years. Nick gave him three one-dollar bills and described Chantal carefully. The doorman shrugged and said they just didn’t have any good-looking tenants of any name anywhere in the building. “I don’t say this as criticism, buddy,” the doorman said, trying to earn the three bucks, “but we have never had a pretty woman live in this building. There could be a jinx on this building.”

Nick went to the Walpole Hotel. He felt dazed. Two people who were as convincing in their ways as any two people he had ever met had melted away as if they had never existed. Yet he knew Chantal Lamers existed, because he could still smell her and feel her all too solid flesh, which was incapable of thawing and resolving itself into a dew. Why had she done it? Where was the point of doing what she had done? Whatever her reason, when could it have been planned?—because everything that had happened between them had been accidental. Her car had been wrecked. Her forehead had been cut. The garageman at the crossroads that bore the improbable name of Jane Garnet’s Corners, on the Muskogee road, had volunteered the information about the two stoned men who had driven her off the road.
She hadn’t called him in New York, he had called her
. He had wandered completely out of her life; then, because he had told her what he thought he needed, she had taken him to the
National Magazine
Offices and had produced the magazine’s confidential files bearing the cabalistic marks of the magazine’s staff. Then, absolutely authentically, she had fallen in love with him.

How, or why, or because of what absurdity should she have pretended to do a thing like that? No one saw anything wrong with simple lust anymore. Subterfuges were silly when two adults wanted to couple for pleasure. Why had any of it happened? It had no shape. It made no sense. What had made any sense since he left Brunei? Keifetz was dead. Nick still could not overtake that terrible fact. Keifetz was dead. One-third of the people in the world who gave a damn about him had been a big breakfast for a shark. Nick knew it was his fault. Keifetz was his friend. If Keifetz had been less of his friend he could be alive. Miles, Tate, Kullers, Sis Ryan and Coney were all dead, as if they had all been playing cards together and he had thrown a live grenade in among them. They had one thing in common and it caused their death: they all knew Nicholas Thirkield. But why was he still alive, eluding such expert killers, who had put away twenty-three people, including Tim? Where was the missing piece? What was its shape? How had it suddenly happened, after almost fifteen years, that he was wandering around in a steam room, causing the deaths of all the indistinct shapes he happened to bump into? He was on some kind of a bummer through American mythology, a demi-god. Look at the folks: Dawson, the world’s richest and most spectacular recluse; Ellamae Irving, a suicidal movie queen; Mayo, a grand vizier of the underworld. It was all so vulgar, with illusion and falsehood used to construct dwellings of steam, buildings on wheels which had rolled him up streets, down corridors. Turk Fletcher had faded into Captain Heller who became Z. K. Dawson who resolved into Chantal Lamers who blended into a dead kitten and an English hit man until all of them fused into Casper Junior who was William Casper or was it Casper Williams. Everyone disappeared
almost as soon as he began to talk to them.