Free Winter Kills by Richard Condon Page B

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 thephone. “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