Lunch arrived and I sliced open the eggs. A gasp of steam escaped from each one. They required salt and pepper. I could see Andy Malcolm and luckily the sight took away my appetite; he wasn’t laughing or smiling. His face was yellowish and deeply lined, jaw clenched, and he looked as if he had to go to the bathroom. I hoped Mr. Nixon appreciated his sacrifice.
“I got a call from our aging football hero, Jim Crocker, last night, Paul. Threatening more or less to run you over with one of his bulldozers. He demanded a meeting. Have you ever confronted a hysterical fullback, or whatever he was? Even at his advanced age the prospect is alarming.” He chewed a bit of sole and nodded happily. “So I met with him. And Martin Boyle. And Jon Goode. Talk about a cabal, it was remarkably offensive in almost every detail. Their hysteria differed only in degree. Crocker appeared in danger of an apoplectic fit and Boyle was, as is frequently the case, about two-thirds gone—on Irish whiskey, I assume. All”—he sighed—“because of your little social calls … Really, Paul we’re going to have to get you straightened out and the old lads becalmed before they croak out of pure terror and indignation.” More sole disappeared. An egg was gone and I was choking on the odd bite of whole wheat toast.
“Hub, I don’t know what you’re talking about …”
“I shall explain.” He patted his mouth with immaculate linen. “The crux of the matter is Carver Maxvill. You’ve exhumed old Carver and scared them half to death. Yes, I can understand your confusion, yes, and I agree that it is surprising in men of such substance. But they’re not as young as they once were and they’re not cool, as the younger generation would say. The mere mention of Carver Maxvill, as you can see, hardly renders me a basket case … but, by heaven, it bothers them.” He shrugged impatiently. “Damned old ladies … but it’s an exposed nerve and there you are.”
“Well, why?” I asked. “What’s their excuse for behaving so stupidly?” I rustled my own indignation, such as it was, reminiscent of creeping damp.
“All we know—all anybody knows, for that matter—is that Carver disappeared. I’d known him for some time, in law school at the university, and his father, since deceased, was an insurance man. Carver was a nice-enough fellow, no Norway Creek connection—the only one of us who didn’t have—but he was an avid outdoorsman, brought up on The Open Road for Boys and the Scout manual, trustworthy, loyal, friendly, courteous, kind, on and on. He wanted to join us … I convinced the others he was a straight lad, hail-fellow. Actually he was like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character, loved wearing tuxedos, had saucer eyes and a kind of flapperish innocence which appealed to a decidedly lower class of women.” He smiled faintly, tolerantly. “His women ran to waitresses, maids, and the general category of easy girls, as we used to call them, but still and all a good fellow. Anyway, he went up north with us regularly, was a good sport, established himself in a top-drawer firm—Vosper and Reynolds—and was generally an enjoyable companion. Tendency to drink a bit heavily …”
“Was there a lot of hell-raising done up at the lodge, Hub? Heavy stuff?”
“Ah, we were young, Paul. At moments our high spirits got the better of us—nothing of moment but a kind of naughtiness I associate with the twenties and thirties, killed off by the war. The spoiled, idle rich, rubbish like that.”
We took our coffee in the dim library, deserted, smelling faintly of furniture polish and cigars. He went on about Carver Maxvill.
“There was nothing untoward or even noticeable about him. Oh, a spot of infatuation with a woman up north who did some cooking for us but nothing to make a fuss over. Then one day, during the war, he simply was gone, taking nothing with him … Do I have an explanation? Only theories. After all, men do take flight, take cover, get swallowed up from time to time. Missing Persons is full of people who’ve never been found. My own feeling is that he’s almost certainly dead. There’s never been the slightest hint that he’s alive. Hypothesis … he probably went slumming and tied one on, got mixed up with the wrong guy’s girlfriend, and got himself killed. I’ve known of drunks who lost consciousness in Minneapolis and wound up dead in Chicago the next day and nobody knows how. He was the kind of irresponsible fellow that sort of thing happens to … fatal flaw and so on. Hell, Paul, he was probably dead within forty-eight hours of his disappearance.”
It reminded me of the Lindbergh baby, in the bush a couple miles from home. Nobody ever gets very far. Hubbard Anthony was probably right. Thirty years of mystery was a waste of time and the man was dead, anyway.
“So why does this set the jolly boys atwitter? Boyle, Goode, Crocker … what’s it got to do with them?”
“Well, it may sound peculiar to you, Paul, but the best excuse for their behavior I can find is just that Carver Maxvill is an irregularity … something that doesn’t fit with the rest of their lives, doesn’t square. Do you know what I mean, Paul?”
“Sounds weak to me,” I said.
“People get old and less resilient, they can’t adapt anymore—that’s what’s happened to these guys. Try to understand. The memory of Maxvill opens up an old sore, something they’d rather not have to think about anymore …”
“Sounds a hell of a lot like guilt to me,” I said.
“Come on, Paul”—he chuckled—“don’t be ridiculous.”
“My explanation makes more sense than yours, that’s all.”
“Perhaps, but mine has the advantage of being true.” He fixed me with a somber stare. “So, please lay off the boys. As a favor to me. I’ve had enough of dealing with elderly hysterics.” He stood up and checked his watch. “All right?”
“All right, Hub.”
He slapped me on the shoulder and we went back outside together. I wasn’t going to get any more of an explanation out of him. I sat alone for a while, squeezed uncomfortably in behind the Porsche’s steering wheel, contemplating a growing rip in the fabric of the top. Ah, so much to do and so little time to do it in.
But Hub, an eminently logical man, hadn’t made much sense. What the hell was he talking about, anyway? Nervous old men; it didn’t stand up; Jon Goode and James Crocker—it was ridiculous. Father Boyle, maybe, but not the others.
I remembered what Kim had said and I tried to fit it into the pattern. It seemed to fit, if I could only jiggle it around, gently, linking it to the rest of what I knew. She said she was fascinated by the past, by the way it reached out and affected the present, how it changed as the years went by and became something new, a different reality from what it once had been. It made a good deal more sense than Hubbard’s explanation.
But how?
What was it about Carver Maxvill, with the saucer eyes and the tuxedo? Had he ever gotten away? Or was he close to home, closer than the old men wanted him? Did Carver Maxvill have something on them? Did he know where the skeletons were buried?
The mention of his name had turned them decidedly green around the gills. And they had been the core of the club. And the club had been somehow entwined, I was increasingly convinced, like a choking vine, with the deaths of Larry Blankenship and Timothy Dierker.
I parked in the newspaper lot, stopped briefly by my desk to throw the jumble of press releases into the wastebasket, and went downstairs to the subbasement to see Orville Smart, head librarian and keeper of the morgue. There were a good many very up-to-date knicknacks throughout the great slablike building but none of them pertained to Smart’s bailiwick, which changed only in the number of dark-green filing cabinets aligned in Kafkaesque rows. There had been talk of converting the entire morgue to microfilm and he never really argued against it; he didn’t push for it, though, so the operations committee kept letting it slide as bright boys in aviator sunglasses and Italian suits yelped their way to bigger budgets. That was fine with Orville Smart. He liked things down in his vault the way they were.
He sat at a green metal desk, looking unhealthy beneath the fluorescent lighting. He was drinking coffee from a cardboard container. He’d made his way through most of a liver-sausage sandwich a
nd looked up, running his tongue around inside his mouth. He wore a striped shirt with a starched collar, the cuffs rolled halfway up his forearms, a narrow black tie carefully knotted with a horseshoe tie clasp, and about a dozen gray hairs were combed across the top of his head. Grant Wood might have painted him.
“Well,” he drawled, looking me over slowly, a visitor from topside. “Don’t see you down here once a year. Nice day, is it?” He always asked about the weather. I’d been to the morgue half a dozen, times and he always asked about the weather. I told him it was a nice day and he bit off a piece of sandwich. I sat down on a metal chair. Aside from a distant whirring sound, it was quiet. “So what is it you’re after? Let me guess. Old movie reviews? Some old theater reviews?” He produced a toothpick and leaned back, staring at me through round rimless spectacles.
“Not this time, Mr. Smart. Something else altogether.” He perked up. “I want to find whatever we’ve got on a disappearance about thirty years ago. Local lawyer named Carver Maxvill, just walked off one day and never turned up again. Slick as a whistle, gone. Mean anything to you?”
He put down his toothpick and belted down the coffee and stood up, about six and a half stooped feet. He looked like an ambulatory parenthesis.
“Mean anything to me?” He cackled, as if such a question were too absurd for serious comment. The past was where he lived. “That’s good! Sure I remember Carver Maxvill, made quite a stir in its day—little pieces followed the lead for about a week, the war was pushing it out of the way. It was winter, the winter of ’44-’45, the Germans broke through the Ardennes just when we figured we had ’em licked …” He blew his nose into a gray handkerchief and shuffled to the first rank of file cabinets, then slowly down the aisle, took a left, and led me to the M’s. The cabinets were arranged alphabetically, the subject matter in manila reinforced folders which grew stained and dog-eared as the years passed.
“Ought to be right here,” he said, toothpick jutting out from his thin, bloodless lips. He pulled the deep drawer out and we discovered a peculiar fact. The Maxvill file was gone.
Orville Smart jabbed quickly through the drawer’s contents, fruitlessly, and stood back, cupping his bony chin in a heavily veined, bony hand. “Real strange,” he mused. “It ain’t there.” He leaned forward, head down, a little vein pulsing high on his white forehead the only sign of concern. He slid out several nearby drawers, checking to see if the file had been misplaced. But I knew it wasn’t going to be there and I felt little prickles of sweat on my neck. The file on Carver Maxvill was gone as surely as he was himself, as surely as Tim Dierker’s scrapbook …
It took awhile for Orville Smart to accept fully the disappearance of the folder. Then he straightened up and looked down at me, eyes quizzical and almost ashamed. “Damned thing’s gone.”
“Where might it be?”
He led me back to the green metal library-size tables, two of them with six chairs at each, said, “See for yourself, no place to hide ’em. No drawers in the tables, no hiding places, the damned thing’s gone. Unless …” He turned back to the sea of cabinets and frowned. “Unless you figure that it could be anywhere, anywhere, from A to Z in the entire system. Golly, that’s too horrible to think about, ain’t it? No, it couldn’t be just stuck anyplace—”
“You’re sure there was a Carver Maxvill file?”
“Oh, hell, yes, that’s like being sure there was a file on Floyd B. Olson or Hubert Humphrey or Kid Cann. Sure there was a Maxvill file. Musta been ten, twelve clippings anyway, counting the morning and evening papers … And we’ve been the only newspapers in town all this time …”
“Would there be a file in St. Paul?”
He shook his head; no he didn’t think so. Like a man treading carefully, away from familiar ground which had betrayed him, he trudged back to his desk. He folded up into the swivel chair and scrounged a Chesterfield from a flattened packet. His fingers were stained yellow with nicotine. He snapped a wooden match on his thumb and lit it, inhaling deeply, cocking his head philosophically. “Been twenty years since I missed a file and that one turned up on the garden editor’s desk upstairs. Just walked out with it, contrary to every rule of man or beast … none of this stuff is ever supposed to leave this room …”
“So where’s your security?” I asked. The sweat on my neck was soaking my collar and my stomach felt funny. Somebody was stealing the remnants of Carver Maxvill.
“Security? What security? Who needs security? Everybody knows the rule—don’t need security. Staffers can come down whenever they need something, they can depend on it to be here. It’s a good rule.” He was looking at the remains of his sandwich, which was growing a bit leathery at the edges of the liverwurst. “It’s always been a good rule.”
“Who can use the files, Mr. Smart?”
“Staff people, writers and researchers and editors—”
“Anybody from the outside?”
“Nope,” he snapped, then backed off, “at least not the public, they’re private files. We get college professors and fellas writing books, they can get permission—”
“From whom?”
“What, permission? From me, of course.”
“How?”
“Well, they call me or they write a request. Sometimes they just come down and ask.”
“Do you just take their word for it?”
“Now, look,” he said edgily, “there’s one file missing in twenty years—golly, in the forty years since I been here, one file—”
“Two,” I said. “And you’re not going to find this one upstairs, Mr. Smart.” He scowled through the smoke. “Do visitors have to sign in? Write down the files they want, to see?”
“Believe me, there ain’t that many visitors, Mr. Cavanaugh. They just ask and I tell ’em where to go. Informal.”
“Do you remember them? If there are so few?”
“Not that few.” He pursed his lips, cigarette dangling, eyes squinting. “If you could give me a name, I could maybe remember it … but I don’t remember every person. Nobody has asked for the Maxvill file in years. I can’t remember anybody ever asking for it …”
“If they were going to steal it,” I said, “they probably wouldn’t have asked for it.”
There was nothing else to do. “Do you remember, or could you check the date of the man’s disappearance?”
“I don’t remember it,” he said. “But I could check upstairs. Montgomery probably covered it, he might remember the dates.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Do it. I’ll get back to you on it.” Montgomery was now an editorial vice-president and I didn’t want to run him to ground, more likely than not at the polo grounds in Hamel. Orville Smart scratched something on a piece of yellow foolscap and picked up a begrimed black telephone. I climbed back into the sunshine, worried, confused. Who was trying to erase Carver Maxvill’s poor life from its meager resting places?
I went home and took a shower, changed clothes, and called Ole Kronstrom’s office. He was gone for the day. He wasn’t home either. On the off chance, I dialed Kim Roderick’s number. It rang several times and she was out of breath when she answered. I apologized for interrupting and I imagined her pursing her lips before she spoke.
“It’s okay, I’d just come out of the shower and was drying off. I just finished a couple of hours of tennis, with Anne, as a matter of fact.” She stopped for air.
“Did you beat her?”
“Oh, yes, but she’s improving, she really is.”
“Look, is Ole there? I couldn’t get him at home or the office, so I thought maybe he dropped in on you.”
“No, I haven’t seen him today. I really don’t suppose I will because this is his boating night. He goes out on the St. Croix on his cruiser one night a week, with some of his cronies—tonight’s the night.” She sniffed water in her nose and the towel muffled her voice. “What did you want to see him for?”
“Just some questions about the club, some people he knew in the old days. Lo
ose ends—nothing important.”
“I’ll bet, nothing important …” But she wasn’t sounding unfriendly, just neutral.
“Look, Kim,” I said, trying to ingratiate myself just enough, “maybe I could talk to you. You’re right, it is important. Or it might be. You never can tell, you might remember something Ole said if I hit the right switch.”
“You know,” she said slowly, after a moment’s hesitation, “you sound suspiciously like a man who hasn’t stopped poking around in other people’s lives. Ouch!”
“Ouch what?”
“I don’t know, I lost my rhythm today, started hitting my forehand badly. I picked up a blister, first one since last January—I got into some bad habits then, too. It’s like a golf swing getting out of square, damn it. Anyway, I just peeled it back … Does sucking it help?”
“Beats me,” I said. “Look, it’s not your past I’m poking into, and I’d certainly rather talk to you than Father Boyle and the rest of the Wild Bunch … it’s you or them. Have mercy.”
She laughed, high, clear. “Do you remember, you threatened to ask me for a date the first time we talked. Is that what you’re doing now?”
“Almost.”
“Well, I must be interested,” she said. “I read your book yesterday, the one about the Caldwell murder. It was hard to find, I finally got the paperback at Savran’s on the West Bank. I also picked up six of your father’s Fenton Carey stories at Shinder’s, they must have a dozen different titles. You’re quite a family. It’s scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. C?” She didn’t offer an opinion, holding that back in the reservoir of her remoteness.
“So I get another interview?”
“Sure, if you’ll buy me a lemonade. I’ll meet you in an hour at the Cheshire Cheese, in the Sheraton-Ritz. Bye.”
I caught myself reflecting that I was making headway with her and that snapped me to. What the hell did I mean by headway? What made me think in those terms, that I was trying to get someplace with her? She was a difficult woman with a curiously undefined past, open to misinterpretation, and without known antecedents. It didn’t make any sense. Except that the simple fact of her existence was a gauntlet, a challenge to break through her reserve.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 16