“Now, it stands to reason that he’d be in Timothy’s photo collection, as well. He begins to show some signs of taking his place in the dance. Juicy prospect, indeed, if we let our imaginations go a bit. Suppose he’s still alive and out there, a different man after all these years. Suppose he’s come back. Suppose he went to see Larry Blankenship and after he left, Larry killed himself—suppose he got back into the apartment and took something that connected him to Larry … and what if he then went to see Timothy Dierker?” He was smiling, happy, knee-deep in his own element. “Ah, well, it’s a line of inquiry, you’ll surely grant me that.”
When I staggered sleepily to the door, my moth-eaten old Rolex told me it was two minutes to midnight. There were certain things in my life I trusted: my Baseball Encyclopedia; my old Rolex, which knew nothing of watches that told the date or drew their power from quartz chips; the Porsche, which refused to say the hell with it and die.
“Let me think about it some more, Paul. And don’t give up on your little chats with the interested parties. When in doubt, remember Fenton Carey and push on. As my English cronies used to say during the war, it’s early days. Be patient.” He slapped my back and sent me into the night. On the way back to town I listened to the music from A Man and a Woman, wished I looked like Jean-Louis Trintignant doing Bogart, and let my mind drift back to Peanuts Lowrey running down fly balls in the vines at Wrigley Field. Very peaceful.
There had been dry snow blowing on the platform, swirling in the lights and stinging my face and sifting down inside my coat collar the night I killed the old man in Finland. He had worn a black overcoat flapping around his ankles and the fur collar was dusted with snow; he’d believed he was safe at last, had come carefully through the snow-packed, squeaking streets of the village. I’d watched him from an alleyway, shaking with fear and sick to my stomach, tanked up on vodka, my toes nearly frozen. He’d walked as quickly as he could, clutching a worn briefcase to his chest, looking behind him and expecting the worst. By the time he got to the station he’d begun to believe he was going to make it and I’d puked the vodka into the snow. It made my head clearer and clammy sweat soaked through my clothing. My joints ached; it was hard to walk.
We were the only passengers. A wood-burning stove glowed, spit when the old man brushed snow off his coat. He caught my eye, his round spectacles flat and shining in the light. He sniffled into an old gray handkerchief and sat on an uncomfortable hardwood bench. Together, in the hot stillness, we waited. Just the two of us. My Rolex, old even then, said eight minutes to eleven when he scuttled over to the counter and bought his ticket. I stood behind him, mutely bought my own ticket. At four minutes to eleven he went onto the platform, holding the briefcase like an infant, protectively, determined. He went cautiously toward the tracks, peered down the darkness. I moved close to him, as if I, too, wanted the first glimpse of our way back to Helsinki. There was a powerful light mounted on the front of the engine and at two minutes to eleven we saw it, poking through the blowing snow, making a halo of whiteness in the darkness …
I was remembering it all because I was going to see General Jon Goode. It was early and bright with the morning sun slanting on Lake Harriet, turning it into the beginnings of flat silver that replaces summery gold. It was funny, the way that worked. I’ve never figured it out. Maybe it was me; my stomach felt just the way it had all those years ago and I had Jon Goode to thank for the memory.
What I’d done that night to save my own life had been something less than a success: Part of me, part of my humanity, had died with the old man. When it was over I was remote from life, cool to the passions of happiness. Maybe that was what I sensed in Kim Roderick, what drew me to her. Maybe that was what Anne had meant.
General Jon Goode met me at the door of the lofty brick home where he lived alone. The paint on the columns and window ledges was pristine, the walk straight, and the lawn neatly, precisely trimmed. A man in a vest and work pants was at work on a hedge with old-fashioned manual shears, beside him a wheelbarrow full of sacks of fertilizer and potting soil and tools. Goode smiled grimly, frigid lines chipped out of the rock of his face, and wished me a good morning. In his gray sweat shirt and sweat pants and striped Adidas running shoes, he had the quality of a miniature cut from a book of paper soldiers, square shoulders, small square head with its thick gray, close-cropped hair. His nose bisected his rectangular face vertically, with gray eyebrows and narrow mustache trisecting it horizontally. His ears were small and fine, shell-like, and even the tips of his tanned fingers were delicately squared off. He positively reeked of self-control, a viceless, taut, distant man.
“Good timing, Paul,” he said as I followed him back to his sun porch, which throbbed with plants and hung heavy with the output of a pair of whirring humidifiers. “I’ve just finished my morning’s run around the lake, like clockwork. The shape I’m in”—he chuckled dryly, settling into a wicker chair and waiting for me to sit opposite him—“the shape I’m in, I’m likely to live forever. Never felt better. I’d offer you coffee but, like smoking, I’ve gone off the stuff. The less you put in your stomach, the better off you are. I fast one day a week and …” He considered me appraisingly and frowned. “You’d do well to fast yourself, Paul. Two days a week, that would be my advice. You’ve really got to get a grip on yourself or it’ll be too late.” He gave his excuse for a grin and rubbed his hands together. “Well, what can I do for you, Paul?” The son of a bitch had just spent an hour running and he wasn’t even breathing hard. I gave him the folderol about writing the nostalgia story; it was beginning to sound so false to me that I cringed at repeating it.
“So I’m just gathering recollections about the club,” I said. “Dad got me onto it, then I talked to Tim Dierker, just before he took the big fall …”
“Awful thing,” he said brusquely, pouring orange juice from a glass pitcher into a cut-glass goblet on a wicker table beside his chair. A Swedish ivy drooped over the tabletop from a basket above. He gestured to me with the goblet and sipped the juice.
“But death doesn’t bother you quite so much, as it does other people, I mean. Not with the life you’ve led.” There was an edge in my voice and the way I felt about General Goode was working its way toward the surface of the morning. Goode ignored it, if he noticed it at all.
“Death is waiting for us all,” he said philosophically, arrogantly, as if he were wise in the ways of dying, as I suppose he was. “Death is the winner in the end and the sooner we stop fidgeting about it, the better off we are. I’ve seen a death or two in my time, men cut off in their prime and that’s a bad business, but Tim … Tim had a long and prosperous run for it. It’s not his death that upsets me, but the manner of it, yes, that’s upsetting. Result of a permissive society, some people say, and they may be right—hoodlums pushing old men off rooftops, violence in the streets, it’s everywhere. Neighbor of mine was out walking around the lake one evening a month or so ago. Our lake, my lake, goddamn it! And he was beaten, robbed, left out in the rain to die … car after car went by him as he crawled toward the street, nobody helped. I found him in the fog the next morning, unconscious, fractured skull and pneumonia, but alive.” He sipped some more juice and crossed his slender, gray-clad legs. “Hoodlums ought to be dealt with the way we did it in the army, in combat, or on a mission. I’ve seen bullies, criminals, psychotics—shot to death by their fellows and I shut my eyes to it … Simple justice, I’d say.” He leveled his pale eyes at me. “You’re right, I don’t look at death like most people. Death had been a part of my job. But that doesn’t lessen my sorrow at Tim’s death. Don’t confuse my feelings, Paul, because you don’t understand them.”
“Is that an order, General?”
“A request, Paul.”
I shrugged. I knew all about his requests. I asked him to tell me about the hunting and fishing club.
“I’m no fisherman. I’m a hunter, fulfilling the general destiny of man …”
“Ah, bullshit, General,”
I said. “Don’t be obscure.”
“What’s the matter, Paul? Get out of bed on the wrong side?” He summoned up the taut little smile and poured some more orange juice. From a milk-glass bowl he scooped out a handful of pills, shoveled them into his mouth, and downed them with two long drafts of orange juice.
“What do you mean, the destiny of man? That sounds suspiciously like crap—”
“Men are predators, it’s our nature to hunt. We’re only animals, after all. There’s a predator lurking inside each of us and it’s the wise man who deals with the impulse. That’s one of war’s most beneficial aspects, provides a runoff for our aggression. The need to hunt, to kill, to strike at the crucial moment decisively, irrevocably—that’s to accept the nature of the human species …”
“And you can’t change your nature, is that it?”
“Now you’re getting it, Paul.” The gardener had made his way along the hedge and was working his shears rhythmically beneath the screens of the porch. “That killing instinct, it’s the same damned instinct that leads a man to collect. To collect rare books or stamps or beautiful guns—it’s a version of the old killing instinct, a sublimation of it.”
“Behavior is changed, modified,” I said. “But not nature.”
“On the button, Paul.”
“Did you ever kill anyone? Personally, I mean.”
“I never talk about that kind of thing. Never.”
“I don’t blame you.”
I poked around in club matters for a bit, getting nowhere. “Going over the club members,” I said, “I ran across one I can’t find. Fellow called Carver Maxvill. I’m told he disappeared, whatever that means.”
General Goode pulled back fractionally, straightened in the chair, and set his goblet down.
“What the hell has that got to do with anything? How should I know what happened to him? He used to come up north with us, odd fellow. I wondered if he were a queer for a while, but I suppose that was uncharitable of me … But I was in Washington most of the time then. I don’t know anything about what happened to him. I don’t really care.”
“It’s funny,” I said. “No one wants to talk about the poor bastard, old Carver Maxvill. Father Boyle gave me a couple of funny looks and asked me to leave.”
“Well, I’m not asking you to leave, Paul, but I do have an institute board meeting on tap in about half an hour.” He glanced at the round gold watch with a butter-colored strap that blended into his tan. “I’ve got to take a shower.” He stood up, came up to my shoulder, but his presence was commanding.
“One last thing—”
“You sound like Columbo on the television, luring his guest star to death row …” He laughed quietly, moving out of the plant room into the long dark hall. I heard a power mower fire up in the backyard.
“Why would the murderer—who was no hoodlum, by the way—why would he steal Tim Dierker’s old scrapbook?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Well, I think it had something to do with the club, it fits, he kept all those old pictures from up north in it … and his wife told me that he was crying and looking at the scrapbook just before he was killed …...”
“Listen to me, Paul.” He stopped, put his hands on his narrow hips. “You’re on your way into a swamp, I’m afraid. You’re wasting your time. Tim’s murder didn’t have anything to do with the club, which is what you seem to be implying. We were just an innocent bunch of friends, young men who enjoyed getting away from it all … Nothing sinister at all.”
I stopped again at the doorway. “Did you know Larry Blankenship? Or his wife?”
“I knew Larry through Tim Dierker. Not well.”
“Well enough to attend his funeral.”
“A favor for Tim. Wanted a turnout, the man had no family of his own, from what I understand.”
“And his wife?”
“I knew who she was, from Norway Creek. Nice enough kid, hard worker, that’s all.”
“You didn’t know where she came from?”
“My God, why should I? She’s nothing special to me.”
General Goode was growing impatient, which gave me considerable pleasure. He was controlling himself, however, which wasn’t.
“Well, when you can spare the time, I’d like to hear some of your memories of the north country, what it was like thirty, forty years ago …”
“Pretty much like it is now, I’d think. It doesn’t change much up there.”
“You don’t happen to have any snapshots, by chance? For the piece I’m writing.”
“Oh, there’s a box of them around somewhere, I suppose. In the attic. Or maybe they got thrown away—I don’t live much in the past, Paul, I don’t think about the past much.”
“I wouldn’t either, I’m sure, if I were you.”
He’d had enough of me. Failing the opportunity to court-martial me, he began to close the door in my face.
“I don’t think I can help you,” he said, all smiles gone. “I’m sure of it.”
The Crocker estate was only hinted at from the highway that circles through the village of Long Lake, curves back into the hills rising from the lake itself. There were fieldstone gateposts and a white fence which looped over the hills and disappeared in the middle distance among stands of trees; farther back still, glimpsed through the trees, was a green-tile roof, acres of green-tile roof with one chimney after another. The driveway clocked out to 1.4 miles, by which time I felt as if I’d passed at least one national border and was among another kind of people altogether. I was driving over crushed rock, watching horses wander across the white-fenced fields, two children in jodhpurs and boots strolling among them. A huge turnaround with a dry fountain in the middle fronted the house, which lay in a crescent of three wings. There were several automobiles lying carelessly about the grass and rock, as if sprinkled: Crocker’s gunmetal Mark TV with the sun roof open, a red Cadillac Eldorado with the white top down, a Ford station wagon, a Mercedes 450 SL in gold, an old Thunderbird … I put the Porsche in the shade of a tree and hoped no one would be offended by it. It was one o’clock.
I was standing there like an idiot, staring at the vastness of the house, the multitude of long windows, wondering where to begin my search for Crocker, when my second gardener of the day came earnestly around the nearest corner. On the whole, it beat pounding the sidewalks of the inner city in search of a poverty-stricken killer who did his dirty work for money or out of habit or social pressures or indifference for his fellowman.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, this elderly gent with calluses on his hands and a stub of corncob pipe stuck in his mouth. “Are you Mr. Cavanaugh?” I ’fessed up. “Mr. Crocker said you’d be coming and I should tell you they’re back by the pool. Just make your way around this corner and you’ll see them. Just join right in.” He sucked on his pipe and watched me around the corner.
The day was changing the way they do toward the end of summer, the sunshine of morning giving way to furling banks of white clouds rolling across the crystal-blue sky like surf. A breeze had sprung up and flickered in the trees, worried at the striped-canvas awnings along the back of the house, above the rattan and glass and fieldstones. The lake looked gray as a cloud blotted out the sun.
A large oblong swimming pool lay midway between the house and the lake, maybe a hundred yards from either, and there was a bathhouse with patio and screened-in porch, a tennis court past some poplar trees closer to the lake, a stone barbecue area with tables and chairs and more canvas umbrellas. Smoke was drifting up from the gas-fed black barbecues and I could smell it as I began trekking across the thick soft lawn. Maybe twenty people of various ages and sizes dappled the area, which was so large they looked vaguely lonely, as if there’d been a party and nobody came. It was a long-enough walk to try to figure out who they were. Crocker in white shorts and a Harry Truman Hawaiian shirt was tending the grills; his wife in a flowing drapery of terry cloth was sitting with a couple of women a generation younger, all obscu
red behind sunglasses; husbands threw a football around with teenage boys; a couple of beautiful rich teenage girls sauntered back from the tennis court with their tawny hair and bodies flowing like syrup, positively edible. Some other people were standing by a dock way down at the lake, heaving lengths of rope back and forth, tussling to either untie or make fast a sailboat. A couple of small children flailed away at croquet balls, swinging their mallets with malicious abandon. The royal family at their leisure. I wondered if they were having fun and decided it was a stupid, middle-class question if ever I’d heard one. In their place, I sure as hell would have been having fun.
Crocker was by himself and nobody seemed to have noticed me in my chino slacks and red checked shirt with the epaulets you couldn’t see because I was wearing a beat-up denim sport coat. I hadn’t done the beating up. It came that way from France and cost me more because somebody else had obviously spent a lot of time kicking it around an empty room. Radical chic. And I was disappointed in myself for being so smitten by it.
James Crocker, with wavy white hair, heavy features, black horn-rims, and a gold University of Minnesota ring with a red stone roughly the size of a horseshoe, ground my hand in his and returned it marked damaged goods. It was a bad beginning; a kick in the nuts was the only possible civilized response. But he seemed a gruff, kindly man who probably doted on John Wayne movies and loved hanging around his construction sites in hard hat and gear. There were ten chickens laid out on the grills, sizzling and turning reddish brown.
“My famous barbecue sauce,” Crocker said, licking some of it from his stubby fingers. “Family tells me it’s wonderful, but what the hell can they say, hunh? Got the recipe down on the Johnson spread during his Presidency, real Texas-style barbecue sauce …” He grabbed a towel and wiped his hands, reached behind him and untied his smeared apron.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 14