“I know, I know,” she admitted, fingering her lower lip, “but it does make a lovely story. If you forget the ending, anyway. A fairy tale, I know.”
“It is a nice story,” I said consolingly. “And I’d believe almost anything about her … she hasn’t led the most conventional of lives. She seems drawn to the irregular, the dramatic, as if she were being controlled by an astrological destiny. Seems fated, if you know what I mean.” I let it trail off since it made no sense and caught Archie peering at me over his Ben Franklin spectacles.
“Could we return to reality, girls?” he said. “Fiction Writing One is excused, Advanced Criminology is called to order. Let’s consider our killer.” He stood up, rolled the blackboard out, wiped away some accumulated scribbles, and with red chalk printed the name MAXVILL in capitals. “I see a couple of possibilities, each of which has something to recommend it. Personally, instinctively, I’m being seduced by the Maxvill theory … Why the devil should we for a moment assume he’s dead? No logical reason for it. No, I reckon he’s alive—and he’s my number one candidate … the more I think about it, the better it looks. It all fits. I can make it at least a working hypothesis.
“It begins way to hell and gone back there, with Carver Maxvill and Rita Hook.” He chalked her first name in capitals across from his. “There was Maxvill up at the lodge and in Grand Rouge, sort of on the prowl sexually. He takes up with Rita Hook, true to his form—she’s someone of a distinctly lower class—just his meat, so we’ve heard. And he flaunts this relationship among the other members, maybe makes his pals jealous … in some way, somehow, this relationship threatens or irritates the group. And the group responds by expelling him and her with him—” He held up his hand to still objections. “It’s a hypothesis, Paul, so relax. I grant it’s heavy going in here, looking for specifics, but I have some ideas. In any case, the group exerted pressure on him to leave, call it expulsion or something else. They may even have paid him off to take his wench and beat it, become a nonperson, an anonymity, disappear … So he and Rita leave, with some of the group’s money, presumably given to them, but just possibly extorted in some way … The years go by.” Archie stopped and lit a cheroot with a wooden match and clouded his head in smoke. “The years go by and in his hiding place something happens to Carver Maxvill, perhaps his mind snaps, that seems a possibility when you think of the enormity of what our killer is perpetrating here, and he surveys the wreckage of his life, his nonpersonhood, and he decides to revenge himself on the men who had the power and the fortune to erase him from the book of life … He could prove his continued existence by these violent acts. The last things his victims would know would be the fact of his endurance …”
“My God,” I said, “that might even account in a crazy way for the stealing of the photo albums, the file from the newspaper—he’s making sure, he’s symbolically drawing attention to himself!”
“Oh, such heavy thinking,” Julia said, but there was a sense of excitement in her voice, as if we were coming upon the truth more or less by surprise.
“Revenge or love,” Archie said triumphantly, pacing back and forth before the blackboard, clutching the red chalk and gesturing with it. “The most likely motives by far for an instance of homicidim seriatim … Stop and think, any serial murder must involve a group, an alliance of individuals, who have somehow, whether in reality or in a demented imagination, injured or threatened someone so terribly, so unforgivably that the only possible response is the systematic elimination of the offenders. Think how the world must appear to the killer, a crimson smear … he is beset and hounded by these people, these monsters who have despoiled his life.” Archie took a deep breath, excited by the onrushing ideas which seemed to make so much sense. “Consumed by this need for revenge, our man Maxvill comes out of the woodwork—maybe he’s alone now, maybe Rita is dead by this time, maybe there’s nothing left of his life and he broods on the ruins, looks at what it has all come to … and he sees how much of it these men have stolen from him …”
I was intrigued by it but I had questions.
“But why, really, why would the group give them money—enough money to kick over the traces of their lives for good? And what could have made Carver go for it in the first place? Why didn’t he just tell them to go to hell? He and Rita would have had all the money Rita wound up leaving in the bank—and where did that come from? Where could she have gotten all that money? So why don’t we turn it around? Let’s take the extortion thing … Maybe Maxvill and Rita had something on the group.”
Archie sighted down the slim brown cylinder of cheroot, which had gone cold as he talked.
“You mean,” he said deliberately, “Carver and Rita chose to disappear, it was their idea? And they were financed by the group … Blackmail, then, plain and simple. ‘We’ll leave,’ quoth Rita and Carver, ‘and we won’t blow the whistle on youse guys’—whatever their sins might have been—‘but you gotta pay us off … ’ Or words to that effect.” He mused over that one, stared at the blackboard, absentmindedly drew multiple slashes beneath the two names. “That’s good,” he said at last, “I like it. God only knows, though, what they’d be blackmailing the members about … but it accounts for the group’s not wanting the Maxvill thing brought up now all these years later, for fear that it might bring this nameless skeleton out of the closet.” He nodded slowly.
My nose ached dully and the flesh was tender to the touch all the way out to the cheekbones. My eyes were tired and burned. Julia brought us coffee and Danish and I munched hungrily, very nearly suffocating myself in the process. Archie sat behind his desk, eyes a little glassy, thinking his way through the complexities of the thing. I was trying not to: When I tried to unravel it, my head ached. Finally I said, “So what’s your second theory?” There was something nasty nibbling at the back of my mind like one of Crocker’s rats peering down from the hilltop, blinking, teeth gleaming in the spotlights. I pushed it away, it had no name and I didn’t want to give it one.
Archie jerked up out of his meditation.
“Oh, yes … that it’s someone inside the club, someone afraid that something the club was involved in may be revealed … I’m just groping in on this, but if Maxvill doesn’t really figure in it, if he did die or just went the hell away, then our best bet is a club member.” He sighed and took off his glasses, rubbed knuckles into his eyes. “I reckon that most serial murders, rare as they are, are committed by members of the group which is actually being eradicated—so just maybe one of our friends is killing the others. Oh, sure, it’s bizarre as hell, I know that, but Jesus, any way you cut it, it’s insanely bizarre. Real people are getting killed … so what the hell, if it’s not Crocker—and I don’t believe he’s anything like subtle enough—maybe it’s Jon Goode, hell, he’s spent most of his adult life trying to figure new ways of killing people …” My father peeled an eye my way. “You know that better than anyone, you of all people … Goode’s a fine candidate but”—he sighed deeply—“but I think, I think—maybe because I don’t know him—old Carver’s our boy.”
The wind blew the curtains inward, toward us, as if a ghost were entering the room.
“Where do you fit in, Dad?” I said, “Level with me, you were in the club …”
“Look, you miss the point,” he said. “I’m not involved, any more than you and Julia are. The time frame is wrong. Let’s say the club members were being blackmailed—but I know for a fact that I wasn’t. Obviously the ones who got murdered must have know why they were murdered, something they all had in common.
“Now, they must have had something in common with one another that they didn’t have in common with me … because, Paul, I’m telling you, no one has got a reason to kill me. Just believe me, take my word for it.”
“But what,” I asked, “if Maxvill is insane? He wouldn’t need an actual reason, only an imagined one …”
“So you’re buying the Maxvill thing? As a real possibility?”
“Yes, aren’t you
?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to try it out on you to read your reaction. I admit it has a ring to it.” He grinned puckishly.
“Well, say it is Maxvill. What the hell do we do now?”
“If you corner him in a dark alley,” Julia offered quietly from the folds of her needlepoint, “don’t lead with your nose.” She chuckled.
I ignored her; she didn’t know how much it hurt. “Are we done now?” I asked. “We’ll never find him …”
Archie leaned forward and chewed on a prune roll.
“I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case,” he said, sounding a trifle disappointed in me. “If he’s killing people, he is here, among us. Watching, waiting. We might be able to find him … but the first thing we’d better do—it rubs me the wrong way, God knows—but we’d better at least talk it over with Bernstein. We’ve done his thinking for him … now we give him the benefit of our ruminations.”
“That’s a detective-story word,” I said.
My face and head ached too much to drive back into town so I wearily climbed the stairs, returning to a makeshift womb, wounded and exhausted. Alone, the bone of doubt in the shrubbery of my mind gleamed like ivory. The drive of coincidence, life’s strong, renegade engine running its own course, was eating at me. Larry Blankenship, Kim (Shirley) Hook, and Kim’s older cousin, Robert—they all had found their childhoods tied and knotted at an orphanage in Duluth. Possibly the same orphanage. The three of them; the two boys about the same age, Kim almost a decade younger. We knew what happened to Larry: He grew up and fate brought him back to Kim, the little girl he’d probably never even noticed as a lad of twelve. And he killed himself. We knew what happened to Kim. But her old cousin—the fat quiet kid who walked Grande Rouge’s barren streets with his head down—we had no idea what happened to him. The blank made me curious.
On the small black-and-white television set in the guest room I watched the ten o’clock news and Dave Moore reassured the Twin Cities that there was no evidence of a rat stampede on the Crocker construction site. Not yet, anyway. He interviewed Crocker, who looked sunken and tired and professed a dogged optimism. On film a scientist tried to explain what chemical steps were being taken beneath the surface of the clean, perfect, self-satisfied city where to want was to have. Now the city wanted those rats dead. From the hilltop itself, the last bit of film footage gave us a look at a bewildered rat silhouetted in the kliegs, looking out at the rest of us like an understudy who’d neglected the learning of his lines … That’s show biz, baby.
I turned it off before they got to the Twins’ score—that’s how disoriented I was. I called Kim and she answered on the eighth ring. She’d almost fallen asleep reading one of Fenton Carey’s adventures. I couldn’t tell if she was in one of her remote moods or just tired. Her interest quickened when I told her about my object lesson at the hands of Crocker’s goons the night before; she clucked over me almost protectively, hardly her customary role. We chatted in the manner of two people who have developed a relationship, however tenuous and imprecise, based on having confessed inner weaknesses and surface affections, such as they were. I was setting her up and my devious intent made me squirm against my pillow. She was right the first time, she couldn’t really trust me: I kept probing. But it didn’t keep me from loving her. I worked us around to childhood, memories, the haunts of youth.
“What was it like at the orphanage?” I asked logically. “Was it like Dickens or were the sisters nice ladies?”
“They were all right,” she said. “I was awfully young.”
“Time sure as hell flies,” I mused. “I was up in Duluth, I can’t remember why anymore, when the old Sacred Heart burned down.”
“Well, I was long gone by then,” she said.
“I suppose it was tougher on Robert than on you, being so much older … twelve, thirteen, that’s a pretty impressionable age. I guess unless it’s happened to you, you can’t know …”
“He wasn’t there long.” She patted a yawn.
“Don’t you ever wonder what happened to him?”
“No,” she said quietly. “Not really. I grew up thinking of myself as an only child. Look, I’ve go to get some sleep. I played tennis all day … I’m sorry about your nose. Consider it kissed and made well.”
“I love you,” I said.
“Oh, God,” she said tiredly. “I think I love you, too. Now good night, Paul.”
We were right. All three of them had been there at the same orphanage. I hadn’t had the nerve to ask her if she’d known the one who became Larry Blankenship.
17
ARCHIE AND I WERE IN Bernstein’s office by eight thirty and the Candidate was all in off-white, prompting me to make a smart crack about his virginity. He retaliated by being terribly amusing about the condition of my face. When he got serious, wanting to know why it happened, I said my face had gotten between the wall and a squash ball; he gave that a fishy look but he was too busy to pursue it. We filled him in on our night’s theorizing and he took it calmly, endlessly clicking the top of a ball-point pen. He admitted it was as good as any scenario he’d concocted and said he’d start two of his two-headed lads checking hotels for recent arrivals. He got a description of the young Maxvill from Archie, chewed on the pen for a while, and shook his head.
“Well,” he said finally, “I’m not the only guy in town with his dick in a wringer. Your friend Crocker is up to here in rats … I don’t know who’s worse off.” He sighed and propped his white shoes up on the desk, a vision of pristine otherworldliness in the generally swinish confines of his cubicle.
“The voters of Minneapolis,” I said. “They’re worse off.”
“That’s good, Paul,” he said. “That’s a good one, all right.”
We left Bernstein straightening his bright-red tie in a tiny makeup mirror on his desk. Outside Archie shoved his hands into his hip pockets and rocked on his heels. “I’ll never understand how the cops ever get anything done right. I won’t deny that they do—they do. But how?”
He headed for the Minneapolis Club and I headed up toward the North Side to check on the rats. The sun had burned through an early cloud cover and it was getting hot early. I could smell Crocker’s Folly a couple of blocks away and there was plenty of activity when I got there. A couple of television cameramen were wandering around with gear resting on their shoulders, stockpiling footage for voice-overs. The white-coated mad scientists were doing Karloff and Chaney bits but behind them stood rows of sinister white canisters. The crowds hadn’t changed; they looked as if they’d all been hypnotized by some sort of hovering ray gun whipped up twenty years ago by George Pal’s special-effects unit. Perhaps that was how the rats had gotten there in the first place, lowered on little rope ladders from ominous, whirring Martian spaceships … The pain in my nose was obviously affecting my brain. I trudged through the dust and came upon a large young man who caught my eye and looked quickly away; he was wearing a maroon-and-gold Crocker Construction shirt and surprisingly enough, I recognized him. I’d have thought it had been too dark, but I knew him. I followed him across the worn-down, browned-out remains of the grass and caught up in front of the main maroon-and-gold trailer. He was bending over a tool case pretending to be busy. He looked up because I was very nearly standing on him.
“Hi, champ,” I said.
“What?” He squinted upward, dust in the tanned creases of his face.
“I said hi,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just wanted you to know that if I ever get the chance I’m going to pick me out a nice two-by-four and make jelly out of your face. I’ll probably never get the chance, though.” I tried to keep it conversational but I was getting a nasty acid drip going in my stomach. “But you ought to know when somebody bears you ill will. Who knows, maybe I’ll hire a couple of gorillas to do it for me. Think about it … and when you get home at night and it’s dark and you have to park your car, you’
d better check the bushes, baby.”
He stood up and walked away. Crocker was piling out of a Crocker pickup and did a double take when he saw me and my bandaged face.
“I was just talking to the creep who does your hitting for you,” I said, closing on him. There was a deep glimmer of distrust in his eyes, almost fear. He brought his hands up to his belt as if preparing to ward off a suicide charge. I grinned at him.
“You’re so scared,” I said, “that I’ve stopped worrying about you. You really disgust me. I’m not easily disgusted, but you do the trick. You see my face, Crocker? I made a point not to tell Bernstein about how it happened … I didn’t want him to start thinking about you. He might have put protection around you so the killer can’t get to you. As far as I’m concerned, you look good as a target.”
He stared at my bandage, his mouth working behind tight lips. His massive, rough-hewn head shook as if taken by a palsy. The fists clenched, relaxed, clenched. He couldn’t bring himself to speak.
“Are you working yourself up to a conniption or just pretending? What have you got to be mad about? I’m the one with the smashed face …”
“Get away from me,” he said at last, forcing it out between teeth like millstones. His hands swept across in front of his thick chest, as if the breeze would take me away.
“What are you going to do? Have one of the lads beat me up? Christ, you’re so stupid, Crocker. You could save your life and get the killer caught if you’d just go to Bernstein … You smell of fear. And cowardice.”
“I am sorry,” he said suddenly, “about your face. There’s no point in denying it. It’s not easy for me to apologize … but I couldn’t think of what else to do. You don’t understand, Cavanaugh, and there’s no real reason you should …” He grunted glumly, the anger completely gone. He amazed me; it was the last thing I’d expected. The color had left his face as surely as if a vampire’s shadow had flitted across his jugular. “I’m a blunt man. But I couldn’t order you to drop this thing and get the hell away, to safety—no, it’s not cheap melodrama, Critic. You don’t believe me, but the closer you get to it, the closer you get to danger for yourself …”
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