The weather was sunny and mild when Nick got to Tulsa. While he waited for his baggage to come up he called Ed Blenheim, who was out. Nick said he could call Blenheim again at about seven o’clock. The secretary gave him Blenheim’s home number. Nick picked up the rental car, set the odometer, and went out to find the Muskogee road.
The white house was where it was supposed to be. It was a very modest house for a man with eight hundred million dollars and wells still pumping as if they had no bottoms. It stood about a hundred feet off the road and looked as if they kept chickens out back. He rolled the car up the driveway. He checked the voice-activated recording equipment he had stowed in the glove compartment. The meeting would be picked up through the microphone in Nick’s signet ring, then transmitted from the house to this recorder in the car. Pa thought of everything. Pa didn’t own a big, rich Japanese electronics complex for nothing.
As Nick got out of the car the front door of the house opened. A short fat-faced old man with a big belly and curvy white hair came out and asked Nick what he wanted.
“I’m Nick Thirkield.”
“Who?”
“Tom Kegan’s son.”
“All right. Come on in.” The old man didn’t wait for him. He went back into the house and left the door open. Nick went in through the high-ceilinged hall. He entered the only open door. The old man was stretched out almost flat on a dentist’s chair with his eyes closed. His stomach dominated the room. The old man was like a big fat bullfrog with the wearies. “Close the door and set down,” the old man said. Nick sat in an overstuffed Grand Rapids chair. The wallpaper was hideous. Cord was showing through different parts of the carpet.
“What’s on your mind? My boys tell me you got a small company but that you’re doin’ all right in the South China Sea. Do you need money for that Australian operation you got comin’ up?”
“Do I? Have you heard anything?”
“No. I ain’t heard a thing. I’d tell you if I had. But nobody’s goin’ to drill on that barrier reef in your lifetime. The pollution nuts took care of that. What can I do for you?”
Speaking very deliberately, Nick told the old man about Fletcher, and how he had found the rifle. He didn’t mention Keifetz or the other five who had died. When he finished, the old man lay on the chair as if he were asleep, his domed stomach rising and falling as he breathed.
“That’s a funny goddam thing to come all this way to tell me about,” he said at last.
“You are an extensive operator in the Southwest,” Nick said. “I wondered if you might remember a Dallas man named Casper or Casper Junior.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly what you wanted to ask me. I think you’re trying to figure out a way to tell me you think I was the prime mover who got your brother shot.”
Nick didn’t answer.
“A lot of people think that. Why, I do not know. You tell me. If you got any ideas on that subject, you tell me. I’m a big producer in the war industries, and your brother was a politician who was hell-bent for war, and he could have doubled my fortune.”
“Only in the beginning, Mr. Dawson. Only for the first eleven months.”
“He tried to get World War Three going over Berlin. He doubled, then he tripled the draft. He called up a hundred and fifty thousand reservists. He demanded that the Congress provide fallout shelters instantly while he ordered the development of a household-attack warning system. Your brother was reckless and irresponsible to an extreme degree, but I wouldn’t have had him shot for that, because it was good for my business. Why, the Pentagon’s own study of the war in Vietnam concluded that your brother transformed what they called the ‘limited risk gamble’ of the Eisenhower administration into a ‘broad commitment’ of American forces at war. Your brother was a crisis-eating President. That is the only way that kind knows how to convey the illusion that he is accomplishing something—which he wasn’t.”
“You keep talking about his first eleven months. Everything changed after that.”
Dawson chuckled. It sounded like oil bubbling in the earth at the bottom of a well. “How about that goddam space program? Well, Jesus Christ, an awful lot of money was made out of that, but the more nonhuman the project, the more it appealed to your brother. But everything he did helped me, just the way it helped his daddy. Your brother was good for business. He was a helluva lot more conservative a President than Eisenhower. All his policies were set to profit big businessmen. He was his daddy’s own true son, and I don’t have to tell you that they don’t come any more reactionary than that. Why would I shoot a man who kept thwarting the dreams of the niggers?”
“Only at the beginning. Only the beginning.”
“That’s all there was, sonny. Only a beginning. He went to Berlin to say ‘I am a Berliner,’ but he never went into the state of Mississippi and said ‘I am a nigger.’ He was a token President with token policies, and he fooled ’em all most of the time. All that talk about how he was gunna put through a law to abolish the oil depreciation allowance was purely horseshit. And the biggest bunch of horseshit was the bunch that got everybody convinced that your brother was antibusiness in every area—in taxes, wages, finances and federal spending. Take a look at his Medicare proposal, how he dragged his feet on civil rights legislation, the way he encouraged government contracting, and his whole yammer about poverty at a time when just about ever’thing the poor needed was in surplus supply. And you have some crackpot idea that I had him shot? Sonny, your brother reduced taxes by ten billion dollars in the short time he was in office. Your brother worked like a nigger to make the rich richer. He was a faker from the word go, but if we started going around to shoot the fakers, there wouldn’t be enough bullets, sonny. So let’s let it go. I am seventy-nine years old, which means I’ve outlived a lot of bubbleheads like your brother. I never did give a holler about what people said, and I care less now. But I know who killed your brother.”
“Who?”
“All that talk back at the time about me gettin’ your brother killed plain upset my daughter. And she’s a good old girl. So I hired me some sleuths and reminded a lot of people in Washington that they owed me a few. We worked at it and we found out who did do the killing, then I showed the whole report to my little girl, and after she seen it I threw the whole thing into the furnace.”
“Who killed him?”
“Now, your brother was a frivolous man. He didn’t do much more for his country than help the rich and improve the social life in Washington. He did ever’thing off the top of his head, and he was an arrogant, cold-ass son-of-a-bitch. But you’re his brother, and that’s something like being a daughter when it comes to this kind of feelin’. So I’ll get you started towards where you want to go.”
“Who killed him?” Nick said loudly.
“The Philadelphia police killed him,” the old man said. “A man named Cap’n Frank Heller was in charge of the operation. Best thing for you to do is to talk to Cap’n Heller.”
“He’s dead, Mr. Dawson.”
The old man blinked. “Then try his sidekick, Lieutenant Ray Doty. They were the Philadelphia Special Squad, which was the Political Squad fourteen years ago.” The old man’s almost-round right hand, whose stubby fingers made it seem like a bear’s paw, dropped to the side of the chair and pushed a lever. The chair came full upright. He swung it around to face Nick. Stiffly he got out of the dentist’s chair. Nick stood up. He was herded toward the door.
“Goin’ to Dallas, sonny?”
“No, sir. I have to see a man in Tulsa about some oil business.”
“Who’s that?”
“Ed Blenheim.”
“Good man. What’d you want to see him about?”
“I have a job for him in London.”
“Where’ll you put up in Tulsa?”
“I don’t know yet. First time in Tulsa.”
“Try the Gusher Motel at the airport. It’s a good clean place to stay even if I do own it myself. I’ll phone ahead and tell them to fix you up.”
“Very kind of you.”
The old man stood on the porch and watched Nick back the car down the driveway and out onto Muskogee road.