“You infuriate me,” she said.
“I don’t mean to. I don’t want to …”
“Well, I don’t know what to say. Was Billy of any help?”
“No, not really. I think he knows something, it was there behind his eyes, but he wasn’t telling me. He thought I tricked him, by not telling him I knew you. We finished up in the red, on the hostile side. It just worked out that way. I think he’s got something on his mind and it’s bothering him.”
“He’s hard to understand,” she said. “He’s an Indian, he doesn’t open up easily. And there’s bitterness, too. I gave him some of that, I suppose.”
“He spoke very highly of you. Very highly.”
“I thought you didn’t—”
“It came up, that’s all. And … well, I saw your daughter.”
“Sally.” She pronounced the name clearly, without inflection.
“She’s a charming girl, a Gemini—she and I are both Geminis.”
“She’s got to get out of there,” Kim said. “She can’t be a professional Indian. Like her father.”
“She’s very beautiful,” I said. “She looks like you.”
“Yes.”
“Are you still angry with me?”
“I don’t know—it isn’t anger, Paul, it’s a kind of fear. I feel terribly threatened by you. Your ceaseless, pushing determination. You make me feel as if I’m not making myself clear. I feel drawn to you—I would certainly never, ever have gone to anyone else the way I went to you at the lodge … but I didn’t think twice about it, I didn’t worry about being rejected, I wasn’t afraid that you’d have a girl with you, I just flung myself into it, went to call on you. So I admit that, that I’m drawn to you … which by itself I find frightening. I wonder, what will I do if our relationship becomes sexual, if you expect me to respond sexually? Will I be able to do it? I can feel myself start to sweat just thinking about it … And there’s my fear, I don’t know what else to call it, my fear of my old life, the old times, and the way you keep picking at it. That frightens me, angers me, my life is my own—and you are invading it. I don’t know what to do, that’s all. If I don’t see you again, will my problems be solved? I don’t know … but I want to see you. Every time we talk, more of my life seems to get peeled back, more of my privacy torn away …”
I sat watching the fog mass over the park, dropping down like spray through the treetops. Her voice quivered at the end and when I tried to speak my mouth was dry.
“Look, come to the Guthrie with me tonight. They’re opening something or other, I’ve got to review it. Will you? Can you? I don’t know about Ole.”
“I’ve told you, Ole is my friend. He has nothing to say about what I do, where I go, he’s my friend. Yes. I will go to the Guthrie with you tonight. I’ll come for you, we can have a drink at your place.”
“You don’t mind coming here, to this building?”
“Come on, Paul, don’t be absurd. Seven o’clock?”
“Fine.”
“You see, I’m from the old school,” she said, a smile in her voice for the first time. “I believe in facing up to things, doing what you have to do, doing the things that frighten you.”
“So you’re going to do me?”
“We’ll have to see. But I’m no chicken. So, I’ll see you at seven and you can reveal the latest murder bulletins.”
I’d wanted to ask her about Blankenship, where the hell he fit into the story, but, talking about fright, she’d pretty well conditioned me. I was afraid of her, afraid of upsetting her and losing her for good. I wasn’t at all confident about how many more run-ins she’d be willing to put up with—maybe none. That scared me. Which made us two frightened people. I had all sorts of questions about Larry Blankenship but if he stood between me and the woman, the hell with him.
The adrenaline rush I’d gotten from going through Kim’s morning therapy got me on the street again. I felt like a tiger and tackled the tough one first. I flicked on WCCO to hear Ella Fitzgerald singing “I’ll Be Seeing You” and that got me around Lake of the Isles and Lake Calhoun, moving the Porsche like a burrowing ferret through the fog, past the mushy glow of stoplights, across the flow of traffic on Lake Street to the sudden hush of the lake itself, gray and choppy beneath the blur of fog, a man and his dog at the end of a jetty watching the droop of a bamboo pole. Peaceful. Quiet. Only the clunking of the Porsche’s guts loused up the morning and I vowed to turn Anne loose on the damn thing.
General Goode’s gardener looked up from a pile of fertilizer and told me it wouldn’t do any good to ring the doorbell because the general wasn’t home. I looked at my watch.
“He’s doing his roadwork,” I said. “Right on schedule.”
“Sure is,” he said. His eyes were sunk deep in his lined face, a permanently dirty face, as if he wore his occupation at all times. “Been down there about half an hour.”
I left him to his fertilizer and rolled the Porsche down to the cupped old bandshell and slid it to a stop by the shuttered popcorn stand, full of life one day and nothing but peeling paint and padlocks the next. The green benches stood before the stage and I walked through them, along the pier, listening to the water slap the pilings. It was hushed, as if everything had died at the end of summer. From across the water a bell rang and sailboats bobbed in and out of fog banks, sails furled, masts thrusting up like toothpicks in leftover canapés at a leftover party. I walked out into the fog, to the end of the wooden planks, and when I looked back the popcorn stand had disappeared. I was alone in the fog and I wasn’t absolutely sure I liked it. Wonderful place for a murder.
I walked back to land and sat down on one of the green metal benches. Quiet, lap, lap, lap …
I could hear him coming long before I could see him, the sound of the Adidas running shoes pounding the walkway. He was hitting a pretty good pace, muttering cadence under his breath, and when he saw me his internal discipline kept him from showing surprise. He jogged on over and stood looking down at me, gut sucked tight, breath beautifully controlled. A violent boot in the groin would have done wonders for him.
“Rather inclement,” he said, “and no concert scheduled. Do you just like to sit in the fog? Or are you waiting to see me?” He released a humorless grin from his dwindling store; at his age they were running out, and he gave them grudgingly, coldly.
“Yes, I am, General,” I said. “Hoping to continue our wonderful talk from the other day. I figure each time one of the club gets murdered, I’ll drop by and see if you’ve remembered any more about the old days.” He grimaced at the heavy irony. “Father Boyle seemed harmless enough, didn’t he?”
“He was harmless. We’re dealing with a psychopath—and if you’re assuming there’s a connection between Tim’s death and Marty’s, you’re reaching. Really reaching, Paul.” He stood with his hands on his hips, fine perspiration on his flat forehead. “You’ll find it was a disgruntled Catholic student who decided there was no God and Father Boyle a fraud, something in that line. People sometimes get killed.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “Has Bernstein been out to see you this morning?”
“He’s coming after lunch. To no avail, I’m sure.”
“Boyle wasn’t harmless, General. You can pull that with Bernstein, not with me. I know all about you and Crocker. You got hysterical after I talked to you and went tear-assing over to Prospect Park to give him hell, to get him to shut up about Maxvill—”
“You actually followed us?” He drew his flat, regular eyebrows together. “Incredible, simply incredible. What do you think you’re doing, Paul?”
“And after you got through yelling at Boyle, I talked to him. And the poor old bastard told me all about you two blowhards and how Carver Maxvill scares hell out of you … Then, with all the subtlety of our famous Finland adventure, General, you had Hub Anthony soft-soap me at the Minneapolis Club. Jesus, talk about obvious! Do you get that from being a general?”
“I suppose you’ve told Bernstein all a
bout this?” Sometimes I couldn’t help admiring him; he controlled his anger because he wanted to know where I was, what I was thinking. But there was an animal wariness in the normally expressionless eyes.
“What if I had? He doesn’t give a damn about somebody who disappeared thirty years ago. Carver Maxvill’s buried so deep in the past, Bernstein will never find him. And what would he do if he did find him—a guy who’s been gone for thirty years? What I’m curious about is this: Why do you guys worry about him so much?”
The sound of the bell drifted out of the fog. General Goode put a foot up on the bench, draped an arm casually across his thigh, and leaned toward me.
“I don’t like the past being dragged up again,” he said. “Nothing more than that, Paul, an unpleasant incident, a man vanishes, and now you are apparently obsessed with making some connection between the club and their deaths, between us and the deaths.” He took a deep breath. “Perhaps we overreacted, Paul, perhaps we should have just let it go … I’m sure we should have. But we did what we did. What can I say? My God, I was in Washington when the man disappeared.”
“Well, it’s gone too far,” I said flatly. “You’re not the only people interested in Carver Maxvill.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Brace yourself. Somebody stole the file on Mr. Maxvill from the newspaper’s library. Stole it.” That one got to him. “Now, I wonder who could have done that. A murderer, maybe?”
General Goode had paled beneath his tan, face tightening like the fellows on horses in public places, heroes made of bronze. One more turn of the screw enjoyed. He turned abruptly and went to the edge of the water, arms folded, staring out across the lake, waiting for reinforcements. He believed that men are predators, that it is their nature to hunt and kill. If he’d looked inside my head, he’d have been terrified. He’d have believed he was right. I went and stood beside him.
“Why don’t you explain about Maxvill?”
“There is nothing more to explain. We should never have made such a big thing out of it …”
“You know, you’re going to stonewall yourself right into the grave, Jon.”
“You’re mad. Disturbed. Are you threatening me, Paul?” He wouldn’t look at me; his eyes searched the fog.
“A prediction, not a threat.”
“You are mad.”
“I don’t send men to kill other men. I may be mad but you, Jon, are something very like a monster. If you would tell me the truth, whatever it is, you might save your life … but they’re gonna get you. The monster destroys himself.”
He finally turned toward me, half smiling, and put his arm on my shoulder. I looked at him in surprise.
“If there is a secret,” he said, “if there is, I feel quite sure you’d never understand. Only old men would understand.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Now, I must finish my run, Paul. One last word on the subject—I don’t fear death. When you’re old and almost finished there are worse things than death. All that’s left is what your life has meant, your reputation, what it’s added up to. You know, you see, that you’re going to die. The one thing that you leave behind is the memory of you. You want to leave it … intact.”
He chuckled and began to jog away into the fog.
Suddenly I was alone again.
I got back to my place at noon and called Grande Rouge. Jack came to the telephone with the hubbub of lunchtime at the Chat and Chew behind, his voice gravelly. He was excited and just a little smug.
“Well, I checked it out,” he said, “spent the whole damned morning going through my daddy’s logbooks. I knew the war was still on when it happened. Y’know how you associate things with things? Anyways, I was looking at ’42 and ’43 and gettin’ eyestrain when I remembered it was right around the time of the Battle of the Bulge, just popped into my mind …”
“1944?” I asked.
“Right, December of 1944. And it all began to come back to me, the Christmas decorations up, hanging over the street, my sister visiting … she was a Wac, see … Anyways, I went through the log and sure as hell, there it was. The night of December 16, 1944, that was the night Running Buck said he took her out there. Daddy’s log shows that he talked to the Indian, talked to Ted, the weather was just terrible, snow on the fifteenth and sixteenth, then it warmed up and rained like billy hell on the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth … The police car got stuck in the mud out at the lodge when he went out there, he’s even got that in the log …”
“Well, I’m in your debt, Jack,” I said. “You’ve been a real help.”
“Y’know,” he said, “it’s mighty funny looking at them logs. My daddy’s been dead here, what, fifteen years now, and he actually wrote them logs, he was about fifty then, and now I’m fifty and he’s gone and I’m reading what he wrote … Sorta makes you think. Know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“It’s like he wrote that stuff down and put it away … and it’s been waitin’ there all these years for somebody to get hold of it. And when the time came, it was me—his boy. Funny. Well, my roast beef sandwich is gettin’ cold. You come visit us again, young fella. We ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He chuckled, apparently at his own inertia.
I hung up, then called Bernstein.
“How’s your ass?” I said.
“Got more holes in it than God ever intended, I’ll tell you.” He was eating lunch at his desk and his mouth was full. He finished chewing and slurped some coffee.
“So what’s the word on Maxvill?”
“I got the report right here—let’s see. Ah, right, Carver Maxvill, attorney. Oliver Avenue South—nice neighborhood—was last seen by his secretary, one Miss Anita Kellerman, leaving his office at four forty-five on the afternoon of 16 December 1944. Finis. No more Mr. Maxvill—”
“Jesus Christ,” I blurted.
“What’s so amazing about that?” His voice was suddenly edged. “Jesus Christ what?”
“Well, nothing,” I lied. “It was a long time ago … That’s all.”
“I hope you’re not fucking me over, Paul,” he said with exaggerated gravity. “I’m a very busy fellow and I don’t have time to play silly games. If you know something about all this, do yourself a favor and don’t get me pissed at you …” I didn’t know what to say. “What do you know about Maxvill?”
“Nothing. Just that he was a member of the hunting and fishing club, that’s all. He disappeared.”
“I know that. Are you connecting him with Dierker and Boyle?”
“Not beyond that.”
“You think Maxvill was the first to go? Dierker and Boyle the second and third?” He chewed on some more sandwich.
“Look, I’m a drama critic, a patron of the arts. I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”
“Paul, fuck yourself.”
In the months since this business came to an end, I’ve often counted up the turning points, and there were a great many of them. It was all so terribly complex. Every little aspect seemed to have a fulcrum of its own, on which it slowly went out of balance. December 16, 1944. That was certainly one of them, as important as any. It hung before me in neon during the few moments after Bernstein hung up on me, like the TED’s in Grande Rouge. Then I called Archie to meet me for lunch.
Norway Creek slows to a crawl at the end of summer. The kids are all back in school, many of the golfers are sufficiently golfed out, and the club returns to the employees, the people who make it run. The dining room was thinned out by one thirty, when Archie arrived, and I’d finished my second old-fashioned. Darwin McGill wandered through, clutching a couple of tennis rackets, eyes bloodshot; he nodded and went on his way, forlorn, nursing himself toward the end. He was brown as a penny, all the damage done inside.
We ordered sliced chicken sandwiches and I told Archie about my chat with Goode and the information from Grande Rouge and Bernstein. He listened quietly, raising his eyebrows at the proper moments.
“December 16, 19
44,” he mused. “Well, that’s a break, a real break.” He shook his head, smiling faintly beneath the white fringe. “You just never know, do you? Truth being stranger than fiction and all. The possibilities just radiate out from a thing like this. Exponential growth.”
“It looks like it’s pretty well tied together, Dad,” I said. “Coincidence carries you only so far.”
“I agree. We have to assume there’s a connection.” He peeled back the bread and salted, then peppered the sliced chicken, scraped mayonnaise off the bread, put the bread back on, and then with his knife and fork cut a piece of sandwich. Archie had a method for everything. “The point is, what’s the connection?”
“They went off together?” I ventured. “I mean, it fits with what Boyle was hinting at about Maxvill and Rita … that he had a yen for women generally and, just maybe, for Rita Hook in particular. It fits what we know, Archie.”
He did it to the sandwich again. “But it’s awfully convenient, don’t you think? I know, I know, just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it can’t be true … but everything about this mess has been so obscured, so deep, it’s hard for me to take the easy way out.
“For instance, Paul, if they were going away together, as lovers, why would they leave all that money—one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of hers, according to Ted, and who knows how much of his? On principle? Because they were turning their backs on their previous lives? Very romantic but utterly senseless … No one would do that, surely. Unless they had some other source of income, a cache we know nothing about … Still, I think the money left behind casts doubt on their just pulling up stakes.”
“But why else would they be tied together like this? Why else do they disappear on the same day if they aren’t going away together?”
He made a bridge with his fingertips and pursed his lips behind it. “We must cogitate on that, I expect.” He squinted at me, looking into the past. “And how in the world did Rita Hook, not a particularly prepossessing person, ever amass a fortune of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars? That seems to me as big a question as any. As well as the matter of Blankenship. Who was this dreary fellow? We still don’t know why he did himself in, do we? He’s so terribly easy to forget, in death as in life, apparently. Yet he began this whole thing. I suggest you do a bit of work on Blankenship. And don’t look like that, Paul. It’s important.”
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 25