The Lincoln started on the second try. It was forty degrees below zero. I let the immense engine idle for several minutes while we went inside and finished our coffee and toast. We didn’t say much but she smiled at me rather shyly from time to time as if she was remembering last night’s kisses, not Cyril’s death.
The heater didn’t work, of course, so we huddled in the front seat and I let the 462-cubic-inch engine with its 340 horsepower slowly off its leash. It shimmied slightly in the snow and then began inching forward. It was a long way through snow that was over the bumper but as long as I held back on the gas pedal it just kept burrowing ahead, past the trees in a wide arc and on up the grade to the road. The road to town had been plowed and I accelerated just enough to send us hurtling through the barrier of piled frozen snow.
Arthur Brenner’s life was divided into halves, each of which gave him great, enduring pleasure: his office in the Cooper’s Falls Hotel, where he was a man of affairs, where he practiced law, where he wrote his articles and advised those who sought his counsel, and his home, which was where he indulged himself in the art of porcelain—the creation of porcelain sculptures, firing, painting, displaying them. I had heard him say, when questioned about his hobby, that a man with the patience and nerve and steadiness of hand to master porcelain was not an altogether inappropriate choice to lead one through the pitfalls and menaces the law sometimes held.
And, now, holding the door for us, he looked all that I had remembered and hoped for. He was a tall man of considerable girth, gray hair thinning over a broad land face, a face quick to open laughter which made him seem at times younger than his seventy years and at other times implacable and eternal. He smiled now, held out his hand to Paula, then to me. The office was comfortable: the draperies were pulled back, allowing that bright grayness into the room; the ceilings were fourteen feet and the bay window looked out onto Main Street, commanding an unobstructed view of its entire length.
He led us to a grouping of three chairs in the bay of the window and when we were both seated in the comfortable chintz-covered chairs he lowered his own 250 pounds into the third.
“Let me say first how very sorry I am about Cyril. It’s a sad homecoming, a hell of a note.” He cocked his massive head and peered at me from behind heavy-lidded eyes. “How are you? You look wonderfully well, but Doctor Bradlee tells me you were set upon and left for dead by highwaymen. Can such things be?”
I related the curious matter of the inefficient thugs and he sat massaging a close-shaven jowl, shaking his head, widening his eyes in amazement at the proper moments. He popped a match on his thumbnail and rolled a cigar on his tongue, lighting it evenly. When I finished he leaned forward and looked from one of us to the other, bushy eyebrows raised. “Can such things be?” He sighed. “Of course they can. Life is full of such acts of violence, meaningless, tortured, psychotic. But still … I sicken at the thought of it. Are you recovering adequately? Good. You’re a very fortunate fellow they were so sloppy in their work habits.” He blinked at me as if he were looking past me. “There’s really no excuse for your being here after such an elaborate charade.” I remembered it; it seemed for an instant to be happening again: I felt the impact, felt the Lincoln slipping away in the snow. …
Arthur was speaking again and I hadn’t been listening.
“I beg your pardon, Arthur?”
“I say, why did Cyril want you to meet him here? What was the purpose of his summons?”
“That’s what we want to talk to you about. You see, I had no idea of the purpose of any of it, none whatsoever.” Paula was looking out the window, apparently wrapped in her own thoughts, despair: I wondered if she would eventually break down from the shock and what must have been her deeply felt grief. “And I wouldn’t have known at all if I hadn’t stopped in at the library yesterday morning. Sheer coincidence. I went to the library and found Paula.”
Paula came out of her reverie without hesitation; she’d been listening after all. “And I told John two things about Cyril. I told him that Cyril and I had been lovers for years, that we had been in weekly contact for a long time no matter where Cyril had been. And I also told him why Cyril had asked him to come back.”
Arthur Brenner leaned back contentedly in the sea of chintz and lifted his right leg up onto an embroidered gout stool. His nose was red from his cold and he produced a wad of Kleenex from his sweater sleeve. He was wearing a heavy cardigan with leather buttons, a tattersall checked shirt, a heavy brown-knit tie. His whole bulk shuddered when he blew his nose and watching him I felt like a small boy again.
“And why was that, Paula?” he asked, his voice soft and reassuring. “Why had Cyril asked John to come home?”
“Because of what I found in the boxes,” she said, “boxes from the house, things that had been in Austin Cooper’s estate. You see, they’d been packed up in boxes years before, twenty or thirty years before at least, and they must have been stored away in an attic … or a basement, somewhere.” She cleared her throat, toyed with a slim silver bracelet. “Anyway, the boxes had been shipped down to the library—for the librarian to sort through them. There was nothing but magazines and books so far as anyone looking at the boxes could see. But the thing was, the librarian’s job here has always been a sort of part-time thing and instead of being sorted out and catalogued the boxes were stored away in the storm cellar beneath the library. No one ever bothered to look at them until I went down to the cellar a couple of weeks ago.”
“But, my dear,” Arthur said patiently, wheezing slightly, “what was it that you found in those boxes?” He smiled. “Surely not Austin’s old love letters.” He chuckled quietly and took Paula’s hand, hid it in his own huge hand. “That would never have been reason to come home.”
“There were diaries, Mr. Brenner, diaries of Austin Cooper’s trips to Germany, France, Spain, England, and Scandinavia during the 1920s and 1930s.”
Arthur shook his head, as if to say not good enough. “Well-tilled soil I should say, very well tilled, indeed.” He pulled on the huge black cigar. “Nothing else?”
“Yes, there was something else.”
“And what was it, my dear?”
“There were documents in German. I couldn’t read them, of course, but there were names—very famous names, some I didn’t know, and they were addressed to Austin Cooper. There were envelopes with seals and no stamps as if they had never been intended to go through the mails. It was all—I don’t quite know—very official-looking, if you see what I mean.”
Arthur raised himself slowly out of the chair and walked carefully to the window, stared down into the street. The light shifted with the movement of blowing snow but the gray glare remained. His head was wreathed in thick cigar smoke. Paula looked at me inquiringly.
“Yes, I see what you mean,” he said finally, “but I don’t understand this business of documents. You say this is why Cyril asked John to come home? Curious, I should say. Curious at the very least.”
“He laughed when I told him and then he said he thought it was funny, that life was so carefully constructed, detail upon detail. He told me I shouldn’t tell a soul. He said he’d contact John and be here in person to talk to me this week.” She smiled weakly. “He sounded so happy that he was going to be here … we’d been talking on the telephone for so many months.” Brenner turned to her expectantly. “He called me each week” she said, “from wherever he was—Cairo, Munich, Glasgow, London, and finally this last call from Buenos Aires.”
Arthur thumped his hand on the back of the chair.
“I don’t understand it. Why in the name of God would he come all the way back here, summon John all the way from Cambridge, just because you came across a bunch of Austin’s old Nazi junk? Who gives a damn about Nazis anymore, anyway?” He snorted, Kleenex at the ready. “And that solemn portentous telegram, FAMILY TREE NEEDS ATTENTION, now what the devil does that mean? And then he comes home secretly, goes upstairs, has a brandy, and dies. By gad, if Cyril were
here I’m afraid I’d be short-tempered with him. All this obscurity!”
“The point is,” I said, “that we don’t know why he decided to come back, nor why he asked me to come back. We know certain facts but we don’t know the one big fact: why.”
He slowly levered himself down into the chair. Except for a flareup of gout, Arthur Brenner did not seem an old man.
“You know as well as I do that Cyril Cooper was never capricious, Arthur. If he wanted me back here, well then he had a perfectly good reason. The problem is that we have not been able to figure it out.”
Paula looked at me, then at Brenner, touched the huge safety pin on her blackwatch kilt. “Cyril knew something we don’t know, then.”
“Of course he did, my dear,” Arthur said. “He knew why the devil he came back—which is everything at this point. Well, there’s the will,” Arthur said, changing the subject. “Fairly simple, really, John. You get it, most of it. Several million dollars, my boy, and what do you think of that?” A smile split the broad face and his eyes glistened. “You see, there was no one else to leave it to … although, and I thought it odd until this morning, there was one other substantial bequest.” He fixed Paula with those pale blue eyes. “One-quarter of a million dollars for you, my dear.” As I watched him I saw that there were tears welling up in his eyes. Quickly he snuffled and blew his nose, furtively wiping them from the corners of his eyes. The Coopers were his family.
Finally, Paula began to sob quietly, her fingers clenching and working in the kilt. As for myself, I had not quite taken in the fact that I was suddenly a multimillionaire. The whole thing seemed faintly absurd. It was Cyril’s money; the family’s had been mostly wrapped up in foundations.
“Well, I suppose we’d better take a look at those damned documents,” Arthur said grimly. “Damned nonsense and a waste of time.” He sighed. “But I can’t see what else there is to do, can you, John?”
“No, I can’t. We’re going to have to look at the damned papers.” I hated it, the thought of prying into Austin Cooper’s Nazi world. I hadn’t realized how much I hated it all, but as I sat there in the chintz, it hit me, waves of revulsion. What had Austin Cooper’s peculiar political preferences to do with me? But there it was. In the end you never escaped your past. It lay in wait for you, somewhere in your future.
Arthur looked at his watch, went slowly to the desk, and consulted his calendar. “I have an appointment at one o’clock and I will certainly want a nap after that. What do you say to five o’clock, Paula? John, you could perhaps stop by here at four thirty and we could go to the library together. Paula?”
“Yes, I’ll be at the library. … I think Cyril would have wanted us to turn to you.” She had dried the tears. I was very happy that Cyril had left her some money. At least, she would never have to worry about money again.
We left Arthur together and in the lobby I heard someone call my name. When I turned, the fellow behind the desk smiled obsequiously at a Cooper boy and said that there was a call for me.
It was Olaf Peterson.
“How’s the head, Mr. Cooper?”
“All right,” I said noncommittally.
“Well, that’s good to hear. We’d hate to lose another Cooper. You’re the last of the Coopers, you see, the very last one.”
“Did you want something, Mr. Peterson?”
“Well, yes, I did. I’d like you to stop by my office over here in the courthouse. We’ve gotten an autopsy report and I think you’ll find the results, ah, diverting.” There was a grin implied in his voice. The man had no sense of decency.
“Diverting, Mr. Peterson?”
“More than a little. Why don’t you come on over now and I’ll buy you lunch, how’s that?”
“All right,” I said.
Paula and I were walking down the steps to the Lincoln, which still stood in the No Parking zone, against the growing drift. I told her what Peterson had said and she sucked in her breath. “Murder.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” I said lamely.
I drove slowly through the veil of snow until I reached the library, standing like something from an Ingmar Bergman film.
Impulsively I leaned across the cold space between us and touched Paula’s face, turning it to mine, and kissed her again. She didn’t move away.
“I like kissing you,” I said.
“It’s all my money,” she said.
“No, no, I don’t believe it is.”
“Well, I like kissing you, too. It must be the Cooper charm. I’ve had the full course, John.”
She finally moved away to get out of the car. “It’s very strange, kissing you like this. It doesn’t seem quite real.”
“I know,” I said, “but there it is.”
“You know when we were trying to figure out why Cyril came back? Up in Arthur’s office?’
“Yes?”
“Well, I had a theory about it, too.” She laughed reticently. “I thought maybe I was the reason he came back.”
I didn’t know what to say.
She squeezed my hand.
“See you at five o’clock.” Then the door slammed and she was swallowed up by the snow.
Thirteen
PETERSON’S OFFICE WAS ON THE second floor of the old frame courthouse. Inside, the dry wooden floor creaked noisily underfoot and the radiators hissed and pounded. Snow-soaked overcoats hung on a rack in the front entry. A typewriter clacked away in some records office. Stepping into the hallway, I felt as if I’d entered a tomb.
A middle-aged woman sat at a desk in the anteroom to Peterson’s office. Half a sandwich lay on wax paper beside her typewriter. I could smell hot coffee. Like most people in Cooper’s Falls the woman was vaguely familiar.
“Oh, Mr. Cooper,” she said. “Mr. Peterson is expecting you. He asked me to find out if you wanted a turkey sandwich or a meatloaf sandwich and how you wanted your coffee.” She grinned expectantly like a woman of good heart who had at one time many years before tried to teach Cyril and me to dance.
“Turkey, cream, and sugar,” I said and walked on into Peterson’s office. He was sitting in a swivel chair behind his desk with his feet up on the windowsill. It was stuffy in the room; the radiator was gurgling, sounding as if it needed a Bromo. Peterson was wearing a navy blue turtleneck and his concession to fashion was making him sweat. He was staring out the window at the snow and a copy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key lay open in his lap.
“You know, Cooper,” he said without looking at me, “this kind of a storm, this really brutish kind of a storm, does funny things to my mind. Do you know what I mean?” He glanced up and grinned, then let his face collapse into seriousness. “I look at all the snow and it makes me realize how insignificant men are in the face of a storm like this. I wonder how important it is to find the person who murdered your brother—what in hell difference does it really make, anyway? We’ll all be dead soon enough anyway.”
“Murdered,” I said.
He nodded. He fumbled for a cigar and didn’t have one. “Alice,” he called, “do I have any cigars out there?”
“Not unless you brought some in this morning,” she answered.
“Ah, Christ.” He sighed. “Did you tell Alice what you wanted for lunch?”
“Yes. I thought you were taking me out.”
“Not in this weather, Cooper,” he said, rubbing his deep-set eyes and swiveling around to his desk, which was cluttered with folders, envelopes, papers. “You’d have to be crazy to go outside in this weather.”
“You said something about murder.”
“Indeed I did. Your brother was poisoned, very painlessly, with a nicotine derivative of some kind. I know very little of forensic medicine. I just believe what they tell me. But somebody did for him, just about the time you were getting there.” He shuffled papers, regarding the mess. “I was quite right about the brandy.” He caught my eye, ran his finger around inside his turtleneck. “Very little brandy did your brother drink. Ergo, someb
ody else did.”
I sat mute.
“Curious little thing,” he mused. “Damn! I wish I had a cigar. You don’t happen—no, you’re a pipe smoker, aren’t you? Well, it looks very much like whoever killed your brother—and, of course, he could have poisoned himself but that seems somewhat far-fetched—drank some brandy with him, administered the poison, and then cleaned up.”
Alice appeared with a plastic tray and our lunch, set it on the clutter between us, and left quietly.
“You recall our little trip to the kitchen last night?”
I nodded.
“And what did I show you?”
“Brandy snifter and some garbage.” Fighting my irritation at his insufferable bloody ego, I fixed my eye on a team picture of the Minnesota Vikings hanging on the wall. There was another photograph of a huge black head and the top of a football shirt and it was inscribed “To Olaf Peterson from his friend Alan Page.”
“Right, brandy snifter and some garbage. Now—go ahead, eat your sandwich, won’t hurt you. Won’t taste very good, but it isn’t poisoned, anyway. Now—that brandy snifter had caught my eye when I looked in the cupboard because all the other glasses were covered with dust. You see? Only the brandy snifter was dust-free—it had obviously been washed. Which tended to confirm my theory that your brother had not drunk all that brandy himself.”
He bit into his own turkey and lettuce sandwich and washed it down with some coffee, making a loud sipping sound.
“As I’ve said, this is the fun part, Cooper, all this theorizing and what not. This is where I excel. I hate to chase people, shoot at them, arrest them. God! Awful stuff for a man to do. Well, anyway, there was that little bit of garbage, too—cigar butt and ashes. We found cigars in your brother’s coat pocket, so they’re no lead for us, but obviously he didn’t smoke two cigars, then run downstairs and empty them into the trash. That would be hard to believe, don’t you see?
The Wind Chill Factor Page 6