Nick was on the ground at the Los Angeles airport at four ten in the afternoon. He chartered a helicopter to fly him to the pad at Pa’s rambling white stucco house south of Palm Springs which had once been called “the western White House.” Flying in over the Springs, he was able to identify nine of the great houses wherein Tim had screwed his hostesses. When they flew over Lola Camonte’s pleasure complex he grinned with vicarious pleasure as he thought of the dozens of long, friendly talks Tim and the great Mexican star had had, one lying atop the other. Nick wished he could have seen her in the last great scene, which Tim would always allude to but refused to be explicit about. Just thinking about that last scene made Tim howl with glee.
The chopper went in over Pa’s own eighteen-hole golf course, which was as green as Ireland in the middle of the desert and set down there not only because Pa liked uncrowded golf but as a buffer between Pa and his security men and anyone else in the rest of the world who might like to take a shot at Pa.
Li Hsi was standing beside the pad with a security man, waving wildly and looking exactly as ageless as when Nick had first seen him: standing at the front door when the huge car had driven nine-year-old Nick to the house. Si was an extremely scrutable Chinese who could whoop and weep and waffle at the drop of a hat. Si wrapped his arms around Nick and giggled madly as he welcomed him home. Si was probably the only Chinese out of some 800,000,000 who had always called President Kegan by his first name.
“How long you gung be here?” he asked happily.
“Until about like three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”
“Ah. Long time.”
“I should be in Australia right now. But I have to talk to Pa.”
“Pa not here.”
“Not here? When will he be back?”
“Tonight. Mebbe ten o’clock, twelve o’clock. You eat with Keith?”
“I sure will.”
“I fix. Eight o’clock. What you like to eat?”
“Anything.”
“Anything so long is chili and noodles, hey, Nick? I fix.”
On the way to Nick’s apartment, which was in its own cottage about sixty yards from the main building, Nick asked Si if his father’s library had the full twenty-six-volume Pickering Commission Report.
“We have. But only make you sad, Nick. No good.”
“You told me all learning is good.”
“I bring. I send Keith as soon as he come.”
Keith was Si’s son. He was a psychiatrist with the Riverside County medical staff. He was a fine doctor, a better chess player, a good painter, a great cellist, a loving husband and a gaga father. He had married a third-generation Californian whose great-grandparents had been working Eskimos who, Keith said, had overshot Nome with a dogsled. Their three children were as Oriental as pandas. The whole family spoke Californian that twanged like a banjo.
The twenty-six volumes of the Pickering Report arrived by golf cart as Nick finished unpacking his bags. He settled down at a large desk with the volume that covered the time slot of the assassination which Turk Fletcher had described. It was as though he were reading a ponderous fairy tale written by lawyers. Except for its description of Hunt Plaza and the route by which the motorcade had crossed it, the official account was like the testimony of a witness in Rashomon—totally different from what Fletcher said had happened, yet immovably sure of itself. Three hours later a security man knocked at the door to say that dinner was ready.
Nick and Keith had a grand reunion while Si beamed on them. They had been through more together than most boyhood chums. Keith had admitted Nick to the Riverside Hospital as his psychiatric patient a year after Tim’s killing. Nick was in the hospital for five months, and the treatment was continued at Pa’s house for four months after that. Having put Nick together again, Keith handled him like eggs wherever Tim or Pa were concerned. Nick’s emotional collapse had happened because he had been able to sleep less and less as he waited for Pa to come to tell him that it would be necessary for Nick to take Tim’s place to get Pa’s work done.
But they didn’t talk about that anymore. Keith watched him closely, wondering if Nick thought like that anymore, but Si joined them at table, so there was no clinical talk. Si had made them Chinese noodles cooked in won ton, then covered with a thick rug of chili, which they ate with two bottles of cold white wine from the North Coast counties. Si chortled, wept and burped through the meal, pausing now and then to take a phone call in the pantry. Nick was having the best time he had had since being in bed with Yvette Malone, and he was achieving a form of double-think: while he enjoyed the presence of his two oldest friends he levitated Yvette over the kitchen table mentally so that he could be with her simultaneously. At that moment Si asked his perpetual question: “When are you getting married, Nick?” At last he had something definite to report. “It just happens that I almost asked a girl to marry me the day before yesterday,” Nick said.
“Oh, boy,” Keith said. “Wait till Grace hears this. She’ll give a big party whether you can come or not.”
“What did the lady say?” Si asked. “When is the wedding day?”
“She didn’t say anything. She went right on talking as if she hadn’t heard me.” Nick really enjoyed this fantasy.
“You must have surprised her,” Keith said. “You have to lead up to things like that.”
“Maybe I did surprise her. Maybe I was too sudden.”
They heard the sound of a chopper coming in from Palm Springs. “The boss!” Si said joyfully, leaping to his feet and standing behind Nick’s chair to pull it out as he got up.
“I’ll slink out the front door,” Keith said. Si guided Nick along the shortcut to the helicopter pad.
The area was densely lighted by flood lamps on high poles. Two security men had taken their positions on either side of the pad to watch all approaches. Two more would be with Pa in the chopper. The helicopter was a ten-seat U.S. Army utility tactical transport whose lengthened cabin had been luxuriously refitted. It had been made by Bell and fitted with a Lycoming T53 L-13 engine that could cruise at a service ceiling of twenty-two thousand feet over a range of three hundred and fifteen miles. Pa used it to get to his jets at the Palm Springs airport and sometimes to go into L.A.
Some people scramble out of helicopters, but it is a thing that takes practice. A security man pushed a ramp elevator up to the door of Pa’s machine. He stepped out on its platform into the glaring theatrical lights and was lowered gently to the ground like a ballerina in the arms of the first dancer, at half the speed of a gently falling leaf. Pa was wearing a scarlet linen waistcoat under a white bawneen jacket. He had a sheared mink overcoat across his left forearm and a large billycock bowler on his head. His face was so deeply creased with lines that it looked as though it had been plowed by a combine. He was smoking a thick black cigar. He smiled horrendously when he saw Nick, displaying what looked like row upon row of huge white false teeth that seemed to have been made of mother-of-pearl.
“I knew you’d be here, you little son-of-a-bitch,” he bawled. “What’s this I hear about you screwing Carswell’s secretary in London?” The two men came together and embraced with a great show of fake feeling.
“Carswell is through,” Nick shouted over the sound of the engines.
“Don’t be a chump,” Pa said. “Where are you going to find another guy who knows his stuff like Carswell?”
“I’ll run Jemnito, Pa. You’re just a salesman working on commission.”
“Some salesman. Who got you the Alhart field in Tanzania? Who set you with Somoza in Nicaragua? Who’s gonna fit you into the North Slope after someone else figures out how to get the oil out? Me, your commission salesman.” He threw a long bony arm around Nick’s shoulders and began to march him off to the house, asking Si, who trotted beside him, if he could find him three roast beef sandwiches and a bottle of beer.
“Hey, you guys,” somebody yelled behind them, “wait for me!”
Nick turned and had the satisfaction of knowing that his father could not have known he was going to be there, because a small blonde, with muscular legs and a mouth as depraved as a Venetian principessa’s, wearing a fantasy pink-and-blue mink coat in wide checkerboard squares, was descending on the miniature elevator. Pa gestured to her angrily as if she had been a stowaway. “Get the hell out of here,” he yelled. “Get back in that chopper. Eddie will take you back to Chicago and I’ll call you next week.”
“I will like hell,” she shouted. “My ass is sore now from riding in your goddam airplanes.”
“Eddie!” Pa yelled at the top of his voice.
“Yes, sir?” a short gray-haired man yelled back from beside the lift.
“Put her in the De Mille cottage and give her a bottle of booze. And see that she doesn’t bother anybody. I’m going to have a visit with my son.” He took Nick’s arm and dragged him quickly into the main house. Si bolted the door after them just in time, because the young woman’s small form hurled itself against it and she hammered on it with her fists.
“Jesus.” Pa grinned. “If we only had some way to tell they had a temper when they first looked good to us, right?” He kept walking. Nick followed him through a complex of corridors to the “small” sitting room that adjoined his father’s sleeping quarters. The room was decorated with photographs, busts, medals and paintings. Tim with Malraux and De Gaulle. Tim with Khrushchev. Tim with Adenauer. Tim with the Supreme Court. Tim with the cast of Hello, Dolly at Rockrimmon. Tim with the cast of the Bolshoi Ballet at Rockrimmon. Tim accepting honorary degrees. Tim with Harold Macmillan. Tim between Floyd Patterson and Archie Moore. A life-size portrait of Tim in oils by James Richard Blake, famed for his portrait of Edward VII. Tim with the senior class of Wellesley at Rockrimmon. Tim with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A bust of Tim by Edward Delaney. An illuminated display case of Tim’s decorations: the Vatican State Order of the Golden Spur conferred “motu proprio”; the Order of Charles III (Spain); the Order of the Elephant (Denmark); the Order of Merit of the Principality of Liechtenstein; the Yugoslavian Grand Star; the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor (France); Polonia Restituta (Poland); the Grand Cross with Collar (Italy); the Baden-Powell Medal for the Perpetuation of World Scouting (Britain)—all earned through connections of Pa’s before Tim had attained the Presidency. Far at the back of the piano, somewhat blocked from view by a large cabinet photograph of Tim wearing a ten-gallon hat shaking hands with Oveta Culp Hobby, there was a small framed snapshot of Tim with Nick, grinning at each other over a net on Pa’s tennis court, Nick not showing a single tooth.
The north side of the living room displayed a rank of eleven transaction tickers that were even then reporting on stock, mineral and commodity markets. Pa picked up the tape of the nearest one reflexively and looked at it. “Drink?” he asked mechanically.
“Maybe some cold white wine.”
“What were you looking at the Pickering Report for?”
“When did Si get a chance to fill you in on that?”
“I called from the plane before we got to LA.”
“Well—that’s what I came out to see you about.”
“The Pickering Report?”
Si came in with the sandwiches and the beer. He took Pa’s hat and coat. Pa asked him to bring Nick a bottle of white wine.
“Tim,” Nick answered.
“What about Tim?”
“Pa, this is going to jolt you, but I have to tell you.”
“Okay, tell me.”
“I was there three days ago in Brunei when a man named Turk Fletcher confessed on his deathbed that he had been one of the two riflemen who had shot Tim. No—wait!” Nick stood up, cutting off his father’s protest with a raised hand. “This man told us where he had hidden the rifle in Philadelphia. I went there with the police and we found it. It is covered with the man’s fingerprints. It has his name taped to it.”
To Nick, Pa’s face was terrible to look at. The thousands of things that seemed to be trying to crowd through his memory into a recognizable place in his consciousness had jammed right behind his eyes. For Pa the moment was one of total release from the tensions of fourteen years, the bursting out of a long black tunnel. To Nick, Pa’s eyes seemed to scream. His face seemed to be falling apart. Tics began under his left eye and at the right corner of his mouth. For Pa the great moment had finally arrived. It had happened as he had dreamed it would happen, and the effect of it on him was transmogrifying. Nick saw that his father had turned dead white. He was all white—white seventy-four-year-old skin, with watery blue eyes and ketchup-red and white hair held in place by large out-jutting white ears.
Staring at Nick, Pa began to weep, contorting his face into shocking grimaces, dragging clanking sobs out of his chest, causing his head to shake with the regularity of a metronome from side to side, denying what he had done but seeming to deny what Nick had said. He stood motionless, his face glistening wet, an appalling noise machine. Nick wanted to vomit.
Si returned with the wine in a cooler. He set it down calmly. He went to Pa and led him slowly out of the room, permitting him to continue to weep without stop. He took Pa into the bathroom and closed the door between them and Nick.
While Si was helping Pa pull himself together again in the bathroom, Nick poured himself a glass of the cold wine, his hands shaking badly. He gulped the wine, then went to the piano and began to play Mozart mindlessly.
After about fifteen minutes Pa came back into the room alone. Si had left the bathroom through another door. Pa took up a half of a thick sandwich, poured a glass of beer and sat down to listen to the music. Nick played through to the end while Pa ate the three roast beef sandwiches.
Pa finished the last half of the sandwich almost at the same time that Nick touched the last chord. “If this guy Fletcher was the second rifle when they killed Tim, how come he was working for you? Who hired him?”
“Keifetz hired him.”
“But why with you? All the way out in Asia?”
“Keifetz says sixteen people have been killed because they had little scraps of information about Tim’s murder. Fletcher had the biggest scrap of all, the main piece to the jigsaw, and we think he probably figured that whoever was looking for him—that is, looking for him to kill him—probably wouldn’t think of looking for him in my company.”
“But how come Keifetz hired him?”
“He was a good crane operator. Besides, he had a letter of recommendation from your friend General Nolan.”
“Nolan? James Nolan?”
“Tim’s old commanding officer. The man who runs Rockrimmon for you. Whoever he is, I never met him.”
“I’ll be goddamned. You mean, he sent this killer to Keifetz?”
“No. Not really. Fletcher was carrying around an old to-whom-it-may-concern letter from General Nolan.”
“Who was the Philadelphia cop who went with you and Miles to find the rifle?” Pa asked.
“Inspector Heller.”
“Oh, yeah. Who else was there?”
“The manager of the building and the occupant of 603, a man named John Kullers.”
“We’ll have to get a deposition from every one of them. I’ll handle that.”
“The police are doing that. Heller took the rifle to the police lab, and by now they’re checking the fingerprints—and whatever else they do—with the FBI.”
“That’s real evidence.”
“We had a Shell lawyer take a deposition from Fletcher, the second rifleman, in Brunei. Keifetz got the Brunei police to lift Fletcher’s prints and take his photograph. Those are all in the mail now and on their way here.”
“To this house?”
“Yes.”
“Then we have a case. We have a case,” Pa said. “We are going to take this to the President.”
“You did a wonderful job, Nick.”
Nick blinked with gratitude. He felt a hard, dazing blow of almost paralyzing satisfaction. Pa had never said anything even distantly like that to him before. It was a glorious feeling. It was a feeling of glory. He clung to Pa’s words the way a groggy fighter clings to an opponent until his head clears. “I think it should be a congressional investigation,” Nick was able to say, “not a presidential commission.”
“We won’t have much to say about that.”
“Yes we will. If the President refuses, we’ll take it to the press and TV. Anyway, no President would want to be solely responsible for the shameful necessity of a second time around in the investigation of the murder of an American President. He wouldn’t dare to risk anything as sinister as the Pickering Commission again.”
“Nobody would want it. But they would risk it,” Pa said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think we have to watch everything ourselves. With my people. We have to have a place in the investigation. You could be his liaison with the congressional committee. That would be good politics.”
Pa looked glassy. Si must have sedated him, Nick thought. Pa began to wander about the room, picking up pictures of Tim and rambling in his speech. “I am thinking about how we took the first primaries. Believe me, politics in a state like that involves a lot of money, and I mean under-the-bridge, over-the-table, and tucked-in-a-box-of-cigars money. All of it for a little state whose primary vote isn’t even binding on the delegates it elects. Shit, I put out ninety-seven hundred primary-day workers alone. And we had the most gorgeous TV commercial you ever saw of Tim leading those three tanks across that Hilda Hess sector in Germany to liberate that beleaguered infantry column. Jesus, he looked great. And there was one showing Tim very solemn, very respectful, holding his book under his arm while he was awarded the Anne Knauerhase Prize right here in my library. We made a real noise in that shitty little state, kid. We got fifty-three real movie stars to turn out and roam up and down the state yelling Tim’s name. Sickleton’s people began to sneak in some money to the opposition in the primary, and I called up the son-of-a-bitch who was their head honcho and I said that if they didn’t pull out every goddam Sickleton dime, Old Baldy wouldn’t even be considered as Secretary of State.”
Pa stopped and stared at a large photograph of Tim wearing the full headdress of a sachem of the Cherokee nation. When he turned to face Nick his eyes had filled with tears, but the sedation Si had given him held him down. “And all that time and later—and before—and during,” he said, “everything I did, every buck I spent, every threat I made, I was just leading Tim along the road to meet that bullet.” He sat down helplessly.
“Pa, there’s a couple of more things,” Nick said evenly.
“Like what?”
“Willie Arnold was not one of the riflemen. Somebody sold that to the commission.”
“Do we have to start this all over again?”
“There were two riflemen. Fletcher was one. He talked a lot about the other one. That’s the whole point of the new investigation. The commission didn’t care who killed Tim—they only wanted to prove that there was no conspiracy. Well, there was a conspiracy. Our new investigation has to establish who hired those two riflemen and Willie Arnold.”
Pa didn’t seem to be listening. He was dazed, but Nick told himself he had to be getting the point. Pa himself had said what they had to do.
“Pa?”
“What?”
“Every doctor who attended Tim after he was hit—and the doctor who performed the autopsy—said Tim had been shot from front and back. But the Pickering Commission twisted that. They shifted the whole emphasis to rationalize why Willie Arnold had shot Tim, not whether he had done it. Then they buried the autopsy report for the next seventy-five years.
“Pa, listen to me. If we’re not sure of all the facts, it’s because they were changed so often and so fast by the Pickering Commission, whose job it was to make sure of the real facts and bury them before the investigation was over.”
“All right, Nick,” Pa said steadily. He seemed to have himself together. “We’ll quit talking and do something.” He sat down at the switchboard and took up the phone. “Get me Fred Frey, the police commissioner of Philadelphia.” He hung up. “Play something on the piano, Nick,” he said. “I have to think a little.”
Nick went to the piano and began soothes by MacDowell. Pa stared at the Blake portrait of Tim. In about four minutes the telephone light went on and Pa picked up.
“Hello, Fritz? Fine. How are you? Fritz, you’ll understand why I have to take kind of a guarded tone here—do you have a lab report on that rifle yet?” His face clouded with irritation. “What rifle? This is Tom Kegan. Don’t kid around. Listen, you have a cop named Heller—Inspector Frank Heller—right? Okay. Well, yesterday morning at—what time, Nick?”
“Quarter to eleven.”
“At a quarter to eleven your man Heller in the presence of my son, Miles Gander—you know, the geologist—and two other witnesses, both residents of Philadelphia, found one of the rifles that was used”—Pa faltered, his voice broke—“was used in Hunt Plaza in 1960.” Nick moved away from the piano in tension while Pa listened on the telephone. “Why would I try to make a clown out of you?” Pa said to Frey. He became incredulous. “Nobody told you anything about it?” He looked across at Nick blankly. “Well, you better call Heller in, Fred. You better untangle your options. I’ll be waiting right here in Palm Springs for your call.” He disconnected.
“You heard it,” he said to Nick.
“Heller must be waiting for a confirming report from the FBI before he takes it to the commissioner.”
“He’s a crook,” Pa said. “I mean, I feel that.” He got up and began to wander around the room again. “Nick, I hate to let them have another shot at burying all this. Everything I stand for resists the idea of taking what is absolutely my own vengeance to the government and asking strangers to avenge my son.”
Nick was bland. “That’s the way it has to be, Pa.”
“Is it? Are we supposed to turn everything over to a pack of lobbygows again? A strung-together scarecrow of mediocrities who are only interested in making sure the United States doesn’t look like a banana republic, a bunch of failed lawyers who were able to eat well only because they were eating at the public trough?”
“How long have you felt this way?”
“From the time I talked to Mosely twenty-seven hours after Tim was murdered.”
“But you went along, Pa.”
“I had to go along; there was carefully nurtured doubt! There were men convincing me that it would be scalding America with shame and disaster—and maybe even revolution—if I stood up and pointed a finger at some figure in American life and charged that he had paid to have Tim shot down in the streets. Yes. I went along. Because they gave me Willie Arnold’s body as representing Willie Arnold’s guilt, and I bought it because there was nothing else to do.”
A telephone light went on. Pa picked up. “Yes, Fritz? What’s the scam? What? That’s crazy. You’d better haul Heller up on your carpet, my friend. Whaaaat? Dead? Heller is dead? How? When? What happened?” He listened, staring at Nick with consternation. “Listen, Fred, I’m going to put my son on the line and he’s going to give you the names and addresses of the three witnesses who saw Heller find that rifle and take it with him out of the Engelson Building. Hold on.” Pa put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Heller is dead of a heart attack. It happened some time this morning. The rifle has disappeared.” He gave Nick the telephone.
“Commissioner? I am Nicholas Thirkield, Mr. Kegan’s son. Yes, sir. Miles Gander. At the Petroleum Club. The building manager, David Coney. The third man ran a business in vending machines which occupied Room 603. His name is John Kullers. That’s K-u-l-l-e-r-s. Yes, sir, I will report to you and make a sworn statement.” He hung up.
“I’d like to make a deposition here, Pa, and send it in. I have to go to New York tonight.”
“This cop Heller was on the case in Philadelphia when Tim was shot,” Pa said. “He was a captain then. He seemed to run everything.”
“Could Heller have been working for the man we are looking for?”
Pa nodded blankly.
“When Heller got the rifle, could he have tried to blackmail whoever the man is?”
“Yes. He probably tried to sell the man the rifle.”
“And the man killed him?”
Pa nodded.
“Then it isn’t a total loss. If all that is true, we know the man is still alive—that he survived these past fourteen years with the rest of us.”
Pa grinned. His plaque teeth revealed themselves row on row. They shone in the light like files of ivory. His eyes crinkled and his creased face showed two little Santa apples under each eye, all rosy and shiny. Nick knew he must be thinking of death for someone else, that he was summoning ruin and pain for whoever had caused this thought to make him smile so wondrously. “Yes,” Pa said, “the son-of-a-bitch is still alive.”