“But what if Mr. Crocker pushes the button? His button?” She was half turned to face me, sitting with one leg under her. “He sounded angry enough … to kill somebody. You.”
“I don’t know,” I said, and we drove back to the Riverfront Towers in complete quiet but for the continuing agonies of the car. I looked at her when the car was stopped and she was staring at her lap. I leaned over clumsily and tilted her head up, kissed her dry lips.
“I wonder if they’ve finished with the Eastern Front,” she said, her lips moving against mine.
“We could check, I suppose,” I said.
She was a different person, too: normal, not herself. I didn’t trust it, but I wanted to. I came close. She leaned against me in the elevator and I tried to be satisfied with whatever blessing came my way.
There was a note scotch-taped to the kitchen wall: “Russkies held out longer than usual. But not long enough. Great party. And good night, Kim-O, wherever you are.”
“They are gone,” she sighed, her voice unnaturally cheery. “It’s hard to believe.”
“Well, here we are,” I said. “Alone at last.”
“We’ve been alone before,” she said.
“This is a little different …”
“I thought so. I thought maybe—”
I reached out and took her, held her against me, hoping she was ready.
“Paul,” she said, her voice trembling.
I kissed her again, wanting her to be pliant, yielding. I moved my hand from the small of her back down to her hips, pulling her against me so she’d know. And she tried.
I’ve got to give her that. She tried; she had several reasons for wanting it to work, one of which may even have been instinctual and spontaneous. She held herself against me and returned my kiss with a kind of pathetic manufactured fervor, her body stiffening as she tried to make it softer, melt, lubricate. Mind and matter were at it and I knew it and finally she knew I knew it. She stopped pressing, stopped the movement of her lips on mine, and sighed deeply, clinging, with her arms around my neck, leaning on me. It was exhausting, fighting toward such a commonplace goal so far from her grasp, and she clung like a child. She was sweating and I don’t remember ever feeling any closer to anyone. For most people in my life it had been so easy, so natural; for her it was so terribly difficult, so consigned to failure’s hollow bin … Shared failure can bring two people closer together: The ragged edges of character and breeding show through and you get close. The toughest, rawest kind of failure is the dispiriting failure of the body. She couldn’t make her body work for her and in the darkened, private rooms where she lived she was of no use to me; it wasn’t true, but she felt it, backed away, shaking her head, fists clenched.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her lips were pressed together, everything about her was tight, clamped shut. “I really wanted to … you don’t know what it’s like, but I can’t, I can’t let go. When you go, I’ll be able to satisfy myself—it doesn’t bother me to tell you that, I don’t feel as if I have any secrets from you—when I’m alone I’ll take a hot bath and I’ll be all right, I’ll make it happen, but now it’s hopeless … sometimes I think I’m the only sexual partner I can trust, I can use myself and I won’t betray me …” She opened her refrigerator and popped a can of beer, sipped from the rim and handed it to me. “God,” she whispered, “I can’t believe the things I let myself tell you …” The can was cold against my mouth. “Are you angry?”
“No,” I said. “I love you.”
“I wish you didn’t,” she said. “It’s because you haven’t been able to have me …”
“I don’t know anything about reasons.”
“I’m so distracted, my mind is splintered—maybe that’s why I’m so far away so much of the time. I really tried tonight, from the moment you called. I wanted to be light and easy, but I couldn’t do it. I’m in the middle of so many things, so incomplete, I wish I could tell you … how my mind works, the way I think and what I have to do …” She came back to me and took my hand.
“But I can’t and if you’re fed up, I don’t blame you. If you want to leave and never come back, I’d understand …”
“I’m not done yet,” I said. “I can wait …”
“I hope you don’t have to wait forever, that’s too long.”
It was well past one o’clock when I left Kim and I didn’t really take my mind with me. She had completely occupied my thinking process, doubtless because I’d decided that it was only a matter of time before she felt secure enough with me to let whatever there was between us take root, flower. I drove rather aimlessly, trying to imagine exactly what she would be like when I finally took her to bed, and I didn’t pay any attention to the car behind me. But it was there, patient, determined, waiting for me to get away from the lights of the downtown loop. They must have thought I was crazy, cruising the deserted, bright, windswept streets, but they stayed with it. Up Hennepin, all the way to Franklin, where I turned right and bumped westward to the northern end of Lake of the Isles. In the bright moonlight the tennis courts in the park had a gray glow about them and the heavy trees on the gentle slope of Kenwood Park were navy blue. The surface of the lake moved in the wind, lapped at the shores with a faint sucking sound; the wind in the treetops made noises like a train rushing out of a darkened tunnel.
I stopped the Porsche and crossed the street, walked through the shadows and stood by a tree which angled out over the water. I thought I was alone and I felt like a poet, shivering in the wind, watching the white plate of moon flicker and ripple in the water. I don’t often feel like a poet but I did then, drifting on the youthful hope of love and warmth and affection which I’d given up as lost causes a long time ago. It was back, that sense of humanity which springs only from the pulse of love, eager and glowing first love. What I felt, felt new, unlike whatever I’d known before, and I stood for a long time leaning on that tree feeling pleased, even proud, as if I’d dragged life out of the cold ashes and made it spark and catch fire again. A miracle.
I’d almost gotten back to the car when I noticed what appeared to be a pickup truck a hundred yards or so away. That was just registering as a curiosity when they stepped out from the shadow of an immense oak near my car. They moved neither quickly nor slowly, just calmly, wordlessly, around my car, one on either side of me. Nobody said anything. One pinned my arms behind me and the other hit me with a methodical left and right, burying his fists in my stomach. Lasagna and Chianti backed up in my throat and the fellow behind me let me slide to the ground. I could hear myself gagging and gasping, the grinding of their shoes on the pavement. I was desperately sucking at air and I got some dirt and pebbles in my mouth. I drew my knees up toward my chest, bracing myself, protecting myself from the boots which were sure to start tattooing my ribs, kidneys, groin.
But the kicks didn’t come. One of the men leaned over me, turned me face up.
“Can you breathe through your mouth?” He was talking to me and my addled brain wondered what the hell was going on.
I groaned some animal sound, an affirmative, and he leaned down beside me, tilted my face so that I was staring straight up, seeing the moon through a pattern of leaves. Involuntary tears blurred my vision. I couldn’t see his face, only a darkened, bleary shadow, but he was staring at my face. Then, like the blade of a guillotine descending, the side of his hand dropped down and smashed across the bridge of my nose. I heard something crunch in my head, waited, and was then engulfed in a circular, swirling sort of pain, inescapable and acute. I brought my hands up to my face and felt the stickiness of blood smearing down my cheek. I choked on blood running into my throat, turned my head, spit it out with a nasty gurgling sound.
“He gets the message,” the observer said tonelessly. He yawned audibly, bored.
“You’d better see about that nose,” the hitter said.
They went away and I lay in the roadway beside the car for a while, trying to get a grip on reality. I’d been beaten up, a novel
experience. My stomach hurt and my nose was surely broken. So I lay there taking stock, breathing through my mouth. I got the message all right: Crocker wanted me to keep my nose out of his business. When the truck had cruised past me, I’d seen it in the moonlight, maroon and gold with the lettering across the door: CROCKER CONSTRUCTION COMPANY.
16
WHEN I WOKE UP THE next morning, I wondered for a moment if it had been a nightmare. I lay in bed, hanging like a spider at the end of his filament between sleep and consciousness, pondering my condition, curious as to the noise I was hearing, a whistling, scraping rattle. When I began moving, I knew it hadn’t been a dream: Little darts of pain across my abdomen quickly became great awful arrows and the peculiar sound was coming from my mouth, which tasted like the inside of the Porsche’s carburetor. When I stood up, my head fell off and rolled under the bed. I tripped over it when it rolled on out the other side, gingerly replaced it, and, peering at it in the bathroom mirror, disowned it altogether. My eyes were swollen and red; spreading outward from the bridge of my nose was a pale purple bruise seeping away almost to the outside corners of my eyes. I didn’t even try to inhale through what had in the old days been a usable, if undistinguished, nose.
I soaked my face with ice cubes wrapped in a hand towel, achieving a certain numbing of facial pain. My gut felt as if I had been sawed in half by an especially clumsy magician and inadequately stuck back together. I found a package of Q-tips and tentatively inserted one in a nostril, wiping out blood and mucus and some other stuff gentlemen would never imagine discussing. It was clearly no time for home remedies so I called Max Condon, my only doctor friend, and when I finally got to his office, he repaired what was reparable, packed my nostrils, clucked at my nocturnal habits, droned on about some goddamn fish he’d caught on a trip to Acapulco and was having stuffed, and put a symbolic bandage across my nose.
“You look like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown,” his nurse said with irritating good humor. I mentally gave them both the finger and went home, called Kim without any answer, and crawled back into bed hugging my bloodstained pillow.
It was dark when I woke up and I’d lost a day. I did a couple of four-minute eggs and amused myself for half an hour trying to pick off the recalcitrant bits of shell.
The telephone scared me half to death. It was Archie. He said he had some news so I struggled into the Porsche and headed back out on Highway 12. I had dropped four Excedrin into the eggs and my tummy now felt funny both inside and out.
We settled in Archie’s study, as we were doing with considerable regularity these days. It was cozy and I held the stage for a telling of how I’d come to resemble the Swedish Angel following a tough match during which Man Mountain Dean sat on his head. Archie humphed, gnawing on his cheroot, when I revealed my assailants as mugs from the Crocker Construction Company. Julia was amused. “Man of his word,” she said. “And no waiting. Just a good thrashing—plenty macho! Frontier justice.” She patted my arm, poured coffee. “Don’t despair.” Then, to Archie: “Does this mean that Jim Crocker is the murderer, dear? I’d never had thought that of him … Unless it’s some kind of vigilante thing, righting wrongs and whatnot, I can see him taking matters into his own hands if he believed it had to be done …”
“I don’t know,” Archie mused. “Crocker’s deeper than people think. And he’s used to having his own way … I can see him killing somebody, no doubt of that, but not dropping them off buildings … and not stealing snapshot albums and rifling the newspaper files. Hell, he’d just sock ’em with a big fist and wait for the cops. How’s your nose, Paul?”
“It hurts. Now, what’s your news?”
Archie had been moving fast since the previous morning and everything had been dropping into place. He’d begun his search for Larry Blankenship—“who the hell he was, that might give us an idea of why he killed himself”—with an old friend of his who was the president of the advertising agency where Larry had worked briefly before being laid off. On his job application and insurance forms Larry had listed as his parents a Mr. and Mrs. Clyde Blankenship of Bemidji, Minnesota. Archie hired a private pilot to get him up to Bemidji and wait while he found the Blankenship home, a humble but respectable Depression bungalow where scientology had been practiced since the fifties by Mr. Blankenship, a bookkeeper for a large hardware store, and Mrs. Blankenship, a substitute elementary-school teacher. They were both quiet, uncommunicative people, solemn, put-upon by life but bearing up nicely, thank you.
Larry Blankenship was not their natural child and they had been very happy to get him through an adoption service, even though he’d been rather old—twelve years old, actually—and hard to place. He’d been a conscientious boy, hard-working, quiet; he had been an average student; “high average,” Mrs. Blankenship had corrected Clyde, with a nice way of talking to grown-ups, very respectful.
The difficult part of the interview had been the fact that they had not known of his death. There were no tears: He’d been gone for some time, had written only a few letters a year, a card at Christmas. “And always a remembrance on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day,” Mrs. Blankenship, Edna, had said, dry-eyed. “They were amazing people,” Archie had said, “simultaneously dead and alive, no smiles, no tears, nothing. Could Bemidji do that to people? Or Scientology?” Remembering that he was trying to trace Larry back as far as he could, Archie had kept digging. Larry had come to the Blankenships from the Sacred Heart Orphanage in Duluth in the fall of 1945. Archie left them on the front stoop of the little bungalow with its neatly trimmed lawn and precise flower beds and the concrete birdbath which had become a planter a quarter of a century ago. That had been Larry’s idea his senior year in high school. He loved geraniums, bright-red geraniums, his favorite flower. No, they knew nothing of the family Larry’d come from, of course not. “It was none of our business, was it?” Edna said. “He may have been twelve, but he was our baby. We even named him … I always favored the name Larry, such a happy name. He was our Larry for a while. Then he left. Children grow up, leave the nest, that’s the way of life, isn’t it?”
By midafternoon Archie was in Duluth, finding out that the Sacred Heart Orphanage was a dead end. The old orphanage building had burned to the ground in 1958, shortly after the move to a new building on the northern outskirts of town. No great damage had been done by the fire, the children and staff having moved out the week before. But the great mass of records had been lost and were irreplaceable. It was all a long time ago as far as the present staff was concerned. But when Archie was leaving, one of the sisters had a thought: She remembered that Sister Mary Margaret, who had been in charge of admissions in the forties, was now residing in a convent rest home near Dubuque, Iowa. Archie got the name of the residence and was told not to expect too much: Sister Mary Margaret must be close to ninety. He could imagine the chances of her remembering a certain lad, someone from thirty years before, one from among so many.
While I was being beaten on the nose beside Lake of the Isles, Archie was sleeping soundly in the Julian Motor Hotel in Dubuque. His pilot, intrigued by the adventure, had the room next door, marveling at the eccentricities of the famous mystery novelist. In the morning Archie had found Sister Mary Margaret, hard of hearing, but sharp-eyed, watching a game show on television in the residence common room.
After two hours of shouting Archie sagged in his chair, grinned weakly at Sister Mary Margaret, and let her return to the television: The soap operas were beginning. She had remembered the boy, he was there in the cupboard of her memory, darting into view for an instant, then retreating, wiped away by time. But she did remember, in the first place because so few children came to Sacred Heart at such an advanced age. She remembered the name of the family he went to, the Blankenships, once Archie mentioned it, but not the boy’s own name. She remembered him as a lethargic boy, puffy, always eating when he shouldn’t have been, tending toward the sullen, but not an outright complainer, resentful, but easily led, one who did what he was told to do �
�� yes, he’d gone to Bemidji, and she remembered that there had been something sad, something unusual about that—some thing about the boy …
But she couldn’t remember what it was. A blank.
Still, we knew a good deal more about Larry than we had before. He had simply appeared; Maxvill and Rita had disappeared. He had been added, they had been subtracted. He had no beginning, they had no end. Archie smiled at the symmetry of it, wondered if it was all part of some glorious plot concocted by some celestial novelist. He liked it.
“We don’t quite know where the puffy lad who became Larry Blankenship actually fits but we’re closing in on him,” Archie said. “We’re closing, I can feel it. It’s working just like it does on paper for Fenton Carey … I’m really quite amazed, life imitating art, don’t you see?”
Julia turned to face us from the French door, hand on hip, smoothing her hair with the other hand. “Kim and her cousin, the boy, were in an orphanage in Duluth. Weren’t they? Yes, we’ve established that … Could it have been the same one?” Her eyes roamed between us. “Don’t you see, don’t you see how beautiful it is? What if Kim, age four or five, had actually known this twelve-year-old orphan boy? Maybe all three were friends … And all those years later, all grown up, Kim and Larry found each other again … and fell in love …”
“Sounds like an opera,” Archie growled. “She was only four. Even if it was the same orphanage and she did know him, they’d never recognize each other twenty-five or thirty years later … Impossible. You’ve got to keep to the path of reason, dear Julia, eschew flights of fancy.” He smiled benignly.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 30