The Cavanaugh Quest

by Thomas Gifford

  “But he didn’t want you and Larry to get married, did he? His wife said the marriage sent him into a decline. From which he never quite recovered, she says. Why did he oppose the marriage? You were two of his favorite people, by all accounts.”

  “I never discussed it with him. I’m not at all sure that what you say was true.” She was staring at me, coolly, remote.

  “Maybe this is an easier one. Why did Tim and his friends take such good care of you?”

  “They weren’t taking care of me, Mr. Cavanaugh,” she said, an understandable edginess chewing at the corners of her voice and slowly invading her eyes. “They were helping me. They helped Billy. Did they need any particular reason? Why not just look on us as borderline charity cases? And anyway, I worked very hard. I made a good impression, I’ve never thought it was any more than that. What can I say? I applied myself to what I was supposed to do … why not settle for the plain, obvious truth? Too simple for you?”

  “Not at all. It’s just that the simple truth so often turns into something else. It’s like history, remember? It changes with time, becomes something altogether different the more you look at it.”

  “Well,” she said, looking at the Cartier tank watch on her strong left wrist, “I’ve got to get over to the university. Any more questions?” She was smiling. The interview was almost over.

  “Only one,” I said. “I’d like to hear your life story.”

  She laughed aloud, shook her head. “Oh, no, not that. Never, much too boring. Anyway, I don’t even know you, Mr. Cavanaugh.”

  “You said I’m not your type. Maybe we never will know each other.” I gave my boyish, rueful grin a try and deeply regretted it. “But I enjoyed this morning. And I appreciate your giving me so much of your time. You didn’t have to. Anne said I’d like you …”

  “I am fond of Anne,” she said, moving toward the door. “She’s living her own life, too. We have that in common.” In the doorway she smiled a little mechanically. “Good-bye. And forgive my telephone call. Please.” She was still smiling when the door clicked shut.

  I moved the Porsche over to the Sheraton-Ritz driveway, gave the keys to the doorman, and went down the outside stairway to the pool. The tables were almost deserted at the tail end of summer. The lifeguard gave me a surprised glance, tugged at the seat of her swimming suit, and went back to her book. I sat in the sunshine and ordered a gin and tonic and a well-done hamburger. The lifeguard, whose name was Sheila, had long tapered legs and broad shoulders and a mahogany tan. She had spent the entire summer reading Graham Greene thrillers and was working on The Confidential Agent. I’d suggested the reading program. She came over finally and scraped her chair across the cement. “Poor D,” she said hoarsely, “he’s having a hell of a time.” She bent down the corner of a page and put the book on the metal table. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Waiting for my drink,” I said, “and thinking about a woman.”

  “Me?” She was stroking her arm, touching herself without realizing it, the way athletes habitually do.

  “No, someone else.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “My God, you’re such a chauvinist,” I said. “Can’t you think about a woman in any other terms than how pretty she is?”

  “I suppose I can, sure. Just curious.” She coughed; she had had a cold all summer long. She hated the water but what she did, she contended, beat working. “Is she?”

  “Very pretty, in a sort of funny way. Not obvious.”

  “Is she nice?”

  “I don’t know. Some people think she’s a monster. Other people think she’s okay. I don’t know what to think …”

  “You can’t trust your feeling,” she said. “You think too much. You should follow your gut reactions—but you’re too inhibited. You’re always trying to validate your experiences, that’s your problem.” My drink arrived and she took a sip, sucked the lime slice out of it, and kept it.

  “That doesn’t mean anything, Sheila. Validate my experiences? Jargon, kiddo. I may be inhibited but you’re a prisoner of your jargon.” My hamburger came in a little wicker basket. She took the first bite and went back to her book, as if I weren’t there. A siren swept past up above us, on street level. The hamburger was rare and I pushed the basket back to her. I closed my eyes and leaned back, feeling the warmth of the sun. I could hear her chewing, turning pages, breathing.

  I thought about the way Kim had handled our chat, how she’d sat so primly on the couch—no, not prim, but so carefully, physically guarded as well as mentally. I heard her voice, the careful pronunciation, the little pauses, the solemn cadence. She occasionally pursed her thin lips between words and frowned at the corners of her mouth and her eyebrows grew so gracefully, like the perfect grooming of an animal who had nothing better to do than be perfect. I kept seeing her face, the straight nose, the lavender in her eyes, the crescent of smallpox.

  I opened my eyes. Sheila was gone. I remembered what Helga Kronstrom had said in the doorway of Dierker’s apartment. Did they know the woman I’d spent the morning with? How many Kim Rodericks were there?

  I called Ole Kronstrom’s office from a pay phone in the hotel’s lower lobby. He said he had a free hour and he’d be glad to talk. There was warmth in his voice, a comforting quality after a morning of playing peculiar games with Kim Roderick, games quite possibly without rules.

  His office was high up in the First National Bank building so I walked. It didn’t occur to me that I was still prying into Kim Roderick’s life; I didn’t yet know how her mind worked. As far as I was concerned, she had satisfied my curiosity and was slipping out of the equation. Her role had been created by Harriet Dierker and life had revealed it as a figment of her imagination. But my subconscious was whirring away on its own. There was one question which did matter at the back of my mind. Why had she stood still for all my snooping when it had obviously irritated her the night before?

  Mainly I wanted to know who killed Tim Dierker.

  And there was always the chance I could validate an experience or two along the way.

  The name on the door said OLE KRONSTROM: BUSINESS CONSULTANT, nothing else. The secretary was a perky white-haired woman in a tailored suit which bespoke a life-long charge account at Harold’s. I gave her my name, she smiled and told me to go right on in, Mr. Kronstrom was expecting me. If Kim Roderick had ruined him financially, then ruination was a very relative matter.

  He was sitting in an Eames chair with his feet cocked up on the leather footrest, facing the glass wall with its view of the IDS building and the top of the rest of Minneapolis. He turned quickly and got up smiling, engulfed my hand in his, which was about the size of a catcher’s mitt, and pointed to a chair. The Wall Street Journal was open on his desk top but the Tribune lay across it, open like Kim’s to the old photograph of his late partner. Ole Kronstrom had a lot of stiff white hair, the pale large-featured face of so many Scandinavians, and an aura of good health. On his desk there was a black-and-white photograph in a gold frame: He and Kim stood side by side in ski togs on the balcony of a chateau with something which looked suspiciously like an Alp in the distance behind them.

  “I’d gotten the impression you were retired,” I said after I’d told him how sorry I was about Tim Dierker. “But this …” There were manila file folders stacked on a long cabinet, file cabinets, piles of mail in the in/out trays.

  “Oh, my, no,” he said in a high, hearty voice. “Once I left Tim I’d intended to do a great deal of traveling, catch up on all the things I’d wanted to read for thirty or forty years, and generally find out if I was still alive.” He chuckled deep in his broad chest.

  “So I traveled and read and proved to myself that I wasn’t quite dead yet. Then I got the itch. Clipping my coupons—pardon the cliché, but you know what I mean—wasn’t very satisfying after a lifetime on the job. I looked around, checked out a thing or two, and came up with this little enterprise. I wanted to work at something where I could do so
me good and this was perfect. I’m a business adviser, but only to our senior citizens, those who have found themselves forcibly retired before they were ready for the home—if you see my point. My clients want advice about setting up their own companies, all sorts of undertakings, lots of interesting problems. One elderly couple—just to give you an example and then I’ll stop boring you with my own little passions—this one elderly couple decided to go into the jewelry-making business. Gorgeous stuff, all made from Swedish horseshoe nails. By jiminy, that one caught my eye. They were going about it in a small way, selling at little art fairs and the like … well, that was a couple of years ago. Now we’ve got them doing in excess of one hundred thousand dollars a year, supplying shops all over the Midwest, investing in some very nice bonds, building up quite an estate for their grandchildren, wintering in the Bahamas … and still working the little art fairs they enjoy so much.” He paused and rubbed his nose energetically. “You get an idea of the kick this kind of thing gives me. I’m an enthusiast, Mr. Cavanaugh, always have been. Hell of a salesman, I was. And still am. Clients pay me a few percent, not enough to hurt me taxwise, and it beats a vacation any day. Fun, that’s what it is.” He sat back down in the Eames chair and turned toward me. “You look surprised?”

  “Well, I am,” I said. “You’re not quite what I’d expected.”

  “How’s that, pray?” He leaned forward with his elbows on the desk blotter and his hands kneading each other, his big mouth smiling slightly, the sun behind him blacking him out. He wore glasses like Nelson Rockefeller’s, black plastic and just off center.

  “I’m going on what Harriet Dierker had to say,” I began, and his big laugh boomed off the walls like cannon fire and he shook his head.

  “Well, you’re starting off in the hole, young man, I’m sorry to tell you. Harriet’s quite a gal but she never has known what the heck she’s talking about!” He brushed his huge hand across his mouth, lessening the smile, shook his head. “This must be a terrible time for her and I don’t mean to poke fun … but she does have some flaws that used to drive Timothy crazy, I mean more than most wives. Never stopped talking, for one thing, and had a positive ache—you know what I mean by ache?—well, she had one for gossip. Thing was, she never got it quite right, always misunderstood what she heard. About three-quarters of the time Harriet was out there in left field getting hit on the head with fly balls …”

  “She depicted you as a broken, ruined man,” I said.

  “Well,” he sighed, reality intruding on his heartiness, “that’s wishful thinking and I’m sorry she feels that way. I suppose you’ve noticed that some people have a way of making the world fit their ideas about it. Harriet’s that way. My wife, Helga, she’s not that way so much—more of a down-the-line martyr, you know? These women, they’re all so wronged, so determined to be the wronged party …” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles like a little boy and leaned back in his chair. “Some women seem to feel, and stop me if I’m boring you, but they seem to feel that putting in their time is enough. They marry, put in their time, and never mind the quality of the time, and then they seem to think you owe them something. It’s a peculiarly feminine trait, maybe we men have made them that way because we’ve treated them like employees … I don’t know. Awfully well-paid employees, with permanent access to the company funds—then, when the thirty years have been put in, the husband conveniently dies and the women go to Palm Springs to do some serious bridge playing at long last.” He was nibbling on his glasses. “Well, it’s the way of life, isn’t it? I’m not complaining and I’m not angry. But I’m relieved that I didn’t keel over in harness. I’m glad I lived long enough to figure out the game and get out of it.” He came back to the present. “So what can I do for you, Mr. Cavanaugh? And may I congratulate you on your taste in fathers, by the way?”

  “Actually, Harriet Dierker was one of the subjects I had in mind. She asked me to look into the death of Larry Blankenship, that’s how it began, and then Tim was killed and she told me, or your wife did—they were together—that the deaths were connected …”

  “And what’s your interest?”

  “Curiosity, not enough to keep me busy … I’m a writer, maybe I can smell something. I don’t know. But the murder of Tim has sort of locked me into it, for the time being. I had a talk with him the other day … and now somebody’s killed him. I’m curious.”

  “All right. You’re an interested observer and your father writes mystery novels, a perfect team.” He smiled perfunctorily and got to business. “Harriet Dierker isn’t a liar, Mr. Cavanaugh, she simply has an untidy, imprecise mind. Most of the time she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Add to that her innate malice, her feigned concern for others’ misfortune, and you’ve got her to a T.”

  “Nothing she says seems to be quite true,” I said.

  “That’s right.” He poured two glasses of water from a pitcher on his desk. I heard ice cubes rattle. He wet his lips.

  “Can you imagine why anyone would want to kill Tim?”

  “No. He was a kind man. If he made a mistake or treated anyone badly, he made it right. If he had a code, that was it. Personal accountability. He was human but he was a man of honor. That simple. Wanting to kill him? It’s hard to imagine.”

  “You’ve known him for a long time?”

  “Oh, yes, socially and in business. We go back a long way, our wives and ourselves.”

  “The hunting and fishing club, you were one of them, too?”

  He paused and looked at me head-on, thoughtfully.

  “I was never much involved with the club, now that you mention it. My memories of Timothy have nothing to do with the club. My attitude about it was a good deal like your father’s. Adolescent hijinks going sour when you grow up. I was never comfortable with the club. Oh, hell, at first it was good, fun to get away from our jobs and our wives … Funny thing, Harriet was one of the primary reasons there ever was a club! Timothy just had to get away from her. So he pushed the club idea … It was fun, yes, at the beginning, an adventure, we felt like kids off on our own for the first time. Then, well, it changed and I figured it was a pain in the ass …”

  “How did it change? What went wrong?”

  “Men in groups are to be avoided,” he said as if he were stating a physical law. “The men changed after the beginning. The club, the lodge began to represent something I didn’t care for—a release from normal behavior, a place they could go and be themselves, that’s what some of them said, that we could go up to the lodge and be ourselves. Well, hell, I finally told them one night that if this was what they really were, they could all go to hell … I’d had a drop to drink, of course, but still, I was right. They were getting into some cutthroat card games, they visited a whorehouse up on the Range … it all just got a little raw for my blood. It’s my nature, I didn’t take to it. What they did was their nature, I guess.” He opened a drawer and took out a blackened old pipe and stuffed it with Prince Albert, packing it down with his forefinger.

  “Did you ever hear the one about the scorpion and the frog?” I asked. He just went on packing but a grin spread quietly across his face, deepening the wrinkles, softening the Scandinavian toughness.

  “Do you know that one, too, or have you been talking to Kim? I told her that one. It’s a favorite of mine. I believe it, too, you can’t change your nature. Behavior yes, but nature no.” He lit the pipe, drew noisily, and wreathed his head, in curls of smoke. Air ducts began pulling at the smoke immediately. “That was the problem with the club, anyway. Their nature got the best of them, I guess, and the night I got mad at them they got pretty sore at me.” He shrugged and I heard his teeth click on the pipestem. “So I left my gear right there, went out, and got in my car and came home. It seemed the best way to handle it … I only went up a few times after that, nobody ever said anything about it to me, but the group kind of tightened the circle with me on the outside. As I say, your father wasn’t really one of th
em either and of course he moved away. Once your father was gone the fun was completely out of it for me. I’m not a worldly man, I suppose, and whoring and such is not my idea of a rip of a time …”

  “What about Father Boyle?” I asked. “Surely, he took an equally dim view of what was going on.”

  Ole Kronstrom was shaking his head slowly.

  “I’ve known Marty Boyle for a long time, like the others, and I’ve never really understood what made him tick. Of course, I’m not a Catholic and that may have something to do with my inability to understand him. I’m a fundamentalist Lutheran, as you might guess, and Catholics are far too sophisticated for my blood. But even for a Catholic, Marty’s too worldly to fit into my view of churchmen generally.” He puffed thoughtfully.

  “You mean he did what the rest of them did?”

  “I’m not saying that. And I’m not judging anyone. I’ve always figured that every man is alone with his own conscience in the end. Beyond that I’m not much of an expert on Marty Boyle.”

  “I talked with him last night, at his home. He didn’t seem at all well …”

  “Gout, I understand. Funny illness for a priest.”

  “I made him sicker, I’m afraid.”

  “Why, for heaven’s sake? Or how?”

  “I got him talking about the club. The thing is, Tim Dierker was looking through his scrapbook the night he was killed. And he was crying. Harriet saw him. But when they went over the apartment after his death the scrapbook was gone. The murderer apparently took it. Stole it. Must’ve had a reason.”

  He tamped the ashes down into the bowl and applied another match, sucking dryly.

  “I wonder why,” he said.

  “That would seem to be the question. I told Father Boyle and asked him if he had a scrapbook, one which might contain pictures taken up at the lodge. He did, he got it out, and we looked at it, and then he went all funny and threw me out …”

  “Strange. But, ah, let me ask you, what would the connection be? Between Timothy’s death and the lodge?”