“Well, that’s the last time something happy happened,” I said sourly. I couldn’t stop worrying about Kim, what she had in store for her. A man rolled in a long one and did a jig on the eighteenth green. “So how did the happy thief become a murderer, Arch?”
“He got old, his wife, Rita, died, he came back to Minneapolis out of loneliness, a need to return to the scenes of his youth—whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter—and what does he find? Think of it, picture the old man who has abandoned his children and lived his life on stolen money … he comes back like Rip Van Winkle, life has gone on, his pals have grown old, too, and to his horror he discovers that they have allowed his daughter to marry her brother—after all, they knew, and they have had their revenge.” He was wound up now, rolling. “Pure opera, Paul! The club has punished him for blackmailing them by allowing the incestuous marriage of his daughter … for all we know of his son and his daughter, he could have fathered both children.” He looked at me again. “Showstopper, what? They have blighted not only Maxvill’s life, but Larry’s and Kim’s and their child’s as well. Now, if that’s the way Maxvill sees it, murder is a very logical response, don’t you agree?” He softly tapped the table with his finger. “Mark my words, we’ve got it figured out, Paul. He’s going to kill them all … .He’s gone off the edge, they’re all guilty … and it’s the incest that’s unhinged him.”
“It makes sense,” I said. “But why does it have to be Maxvill?”
“What do you mean? I’ve just told you—”
“But why not Rita? Who says it isn’t Rita that’s come back? Her motive is just as good as his, better … they’re her babies.”
Archie’s mouth dropped open and he scowled.
“Well, god damn it,” he whispered. “That never occurred to me … I’ve been absolutely hypnotized by the man in the case.” He took a bite of his lower lip. “It could be the woman …”
We drank our coffee in stillness, listening to the chatter of the brunch crowd beginning to gather.
“Crocker said he knew who the murderer is,” Archie said.
“Right,” I said. “And it could just as easily be one as the other …”
“But the pictures of Maxvill … the file being stolen.” Archie clung to the idea. “But,” he said grudgingly, “I see your point.”
We went out toward the pool on the neatly kept path, children and mothers anxiously using up what might be the last good family day at the club for that summer. Voices were higher pitched, as if the tension of the winter’s certainty up ahead were getting to them. Leaves were already beginning to drop in places. The hot sunshine was a bonus and there were large white clouds to the west, and who knew when it would begin to squall and turn cold?
There was a club tennis tourney winding up and Darwin McGill sat edgily at the top of the scorer’s high chair. He was as dark as an Indian and I remembered he was dying, or said he was, but then, who wasn’t? Archie sat at a table with a shade umbrella on the flagstone terrace above the tennis courts. “We’d better talk about Kim,” he said shyly, facing up to it. “What are you going to do about her?”
“Well, I’m in for the distance,” I said, dropping heavily into a chair beside him. The fringe on the umbrella flapped overhead. “It’s not a whim on my part. But God knows, she throws me nothing but curves … once in a while a big fastball, a big piece of truth up the middle, almost like a confession, as if I’ve succeeded in wringing it out of her, she’s done it a couple, three times … but mainly curves, nipping at the corners, getting strikes but only giving me little edges of truth. It’s unsettling, Dad, I don’t know who she really is … every time I get a handle on her she slips away, turns out to be somebody else. I don’t know how to pin her down.”
“She’s pretty well pinned down now, I’d say,” Archie said, soothing me with the calmness of his voice. “She’s a complex woman who has led a peculiar sort of life, more changes and uncertainties than most people go through in seventy years. She’s had no rest, Paul, no time to sit and think and put it together … Think about it—who is she most like in this entire matter? Who would you pair her with, of all the people we’ve come across and heard about?”
He toyed with the crease in his slacks, folded his arms across his chest, and watched the tennis match and the clouds piling up just beyond the edge of the city. I sat quietly, confused.
“Her mother,” Archie said somberly. “She’s got a lot of Rita Hook in her, Paul. A drive to get rid of her north country upbringing, the ability to cancel out one deal and make another, to go from one man to another, bettering herself. Bettering herself in every way, by going to school, by broadening her friendships and her knowledge. Think, of it, just the facts of it … She’s on her own, she’s making her way with whatever she has at hand. First, there was the need to get away from Grande Rouge. And she did it. Then there was Billy Whitefoot so she wasn’t all by herself in the threatening city, then Larry Blankenship and a full step into middle-class respectability; then Ole Kronstrom and a world of money and privilege and leisure … She’s got guts, the guts of a burglar, just like her mother. Now, she’s giving you a pretty good looking over … younger, plenty of money, a certain standing …”
“You sound like Harriet,” I said. “You make her sound like a calculating, cold-blooded monster—”
“Nonsense, I said nothing of the kind and I won’t have you say I did … I was analyzing a character—that is, a person—in an objective manner from the evidence at hand. I was making no accusations of any kind.” He tweezed his lips between thumb and forefinger, tugging on them. “In point of fact, I’m rather in awe of her. She’s obviously got a hell of a backbone, real gumption. She’s strong, Paul, in a way that you and I will never be strong. She’s had to be strong … that’s the point of what I’m telling you. Don’t worry about her—she’s got a lot of sides to her character, you’ve seen some of them, and she’s adaptable. She does what she has to do to survive. She’s not going to come apart in the face of the truth. So don’t be frightened of what you’re afraid is her fragility. If she were fragile, breakable, she’d have gotten broken a long time ago. If you’re worried about her learning the truth of her parentage and her relationship to Larry, forget it—she can take it.”
“All right,” I said, “supposing all that’s true, I’m still afraid … I don’t quite know what I mean, but I’m afraid that something may happen to her—”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m afraid that she’s in danger, too. Now, damn it, don’t look at me that way, I can’t help it. She’s so elusive, so mysterious, she’s connected with the whole thing in such peculiar, convoluted, coincidental ways. I’m afraid she’s going to get sucked all the way in … I’m afraid that she’s going to become a victim.” I looked away at the tennis action; they seemed to be playing faster, trying to beat the threat of rain, but the sun was still hot. “It’s just a feeling, that’s all.”
Archie stood up, put his hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t apologize, kiddo,” he said. “Same thing occurred to me. I don’t know why either.”
We were walking back up the grassy hill when a man Archie knew came across the parking lot toward us, a bemused expression on his thick, flat face.
“Did you hear the news just now, Archie?” Archie shook his head. “Well, get ready for the shit to hit the fan again. Ford just granted Nixon a full pardon … Full pardon. That makes me more embarrassed to be a Republican than anything Dick himself ever did. Christ, a full pardon! Can you imagine the hay they’re going to make out of this?” He punched Archie’s arm. “Well, we live and learn.”
“You know it, Walter,” Archie said. “Then, you look at it from another way, we live and never learn a goddamn thing.”
“Say, now, you writers have a way with words,” Walter said, and trotted off toward the clubhouse to spread the word.
“We’d better go see Kim,” Archie said. “Do you mind if I come with you?” I did
n’t and we climbed into the Porsche. I didn’t feel much like talking; my mind was turning over, trying to get a good purchase on things, and things kept crumbling in my grasp. It was the complexity of it that did it to me, the differences between appearance and reality being so pronounced, so awful. Just beneath that tranquil surface, the scuttling and clawing went on and on, the monster was growing hungry and itchy. It was like the rats, all right, taking up residence long ago, foraging in the garbage, making it their home. God only knew what else lay beneath the surface, scratching away at what Tim and Marty and the rest of them had built and valued, wanted at any cost to protect.
Somehow I’d become the bulldozer, ripping and scraping at the mound called 1974, with nothing whatever to gain. I’d become the machine, tearing the seams, gouging away at time, opening it all up and spilling out the rodents of forty years ago … Forty years of garbage and crap that had nothing to do with me, smashing it up and scattering it around, all the vermin and creatures of filth blinking in the light, vague and unsure and newly wakened, terrified by me. I had set them running again, the disease carriers, and the poison was out. And it was none of my business.
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Archie said.
“What doesn’t surprise you?”
“Ford pardoning Nixon. And people worry about the younger generation …” He sniffed contemptuously.
It seemed to me that it all went together beautifully, my problems and the country’s. The monster was everywhere. And I didn’t know the half of it. There was another body spoiling in the heat but nobody knew it yet.
20
I TOOK THE WRONG HIGHWAY trying to beat the crush around Lake Calhoun on a big sunning and boating day and got caught in a traffic jam. There was a rescue-unit truck, an ambulance, and three squad cars and it took several seconds for me to realize where I’d gotten us. It was the Crocker construction site and the first thought across my consciousness was that the rat stampede had started. I reflexively jabbed WCCO to life since they’d be the quickest to comment but they were in the middle of celebrating 1942 and Dinah Shore began a slow, plaintive rendition of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.”
Lights flashed, sirens screeched, and we waited in the heat with the top down. Archie swore quietly and tried not to notice the heat and the dust and the noise. There were cops all over the trailer area but nothing much seemed to be going on up on the hill. A couple of sanitation trucks stood mute and four white-coated workmen stood lazily on the hill, confident that the rats were under control. But something had happened at the site. I peered for a glimpse of James Crocker but he didn’t seem to be running things at the moment. Suddenly the traffic began to move and I headed on into town. Billy Daniels was singing “That Old Black Magic” on the radio and I was wishing I had some to use on Kim. My stomach had turned over to die and I wasn’t used to breathing through my nose. I was trying to rehearse in my mind what I was going to say to her. None of it was very graceful. By the time we left the car with a scowling doorman Sinatra was working on “The Lamplighter’s Serenade” and the sun had done the top of my head medium well.
She buzzed us in and when she answered the door, I suddenly remembered how lousy our last conversation had been, how hard she’d tried to make it nice, and how I’d left her. She shook hands with Archie, winked at me cheerily, which made my mission all the worse, and said, “My God, did you hear about Nixon?” She took us in to sit in the chrome-and-glass living room with bright explosions of flowers here and there. Archie gave it all an appreciative glance. He liked to observe women, was intrigued by the messes they got themselves into and the means by which they got themselves out; he just liked to keep his distance. She was wearing a robe of lemon yellow and the hair at the nape of her neck was still wet. A war game called Sniper was strewn about the floor, its distinctive box propped against a chair leg. She looked at the mess and smiled at Archie. “Sorry about this. It’s a new one and I was up half the night figuring out the rules … they really do approximate life’s complexities as best they can. It’s the complexity that makes it fun, of course, but you’ve got to be patient.”
“Patience is a rare quality in beautiful women, Miss Roderick.” Archie was trying to sound like an author: He’d seen a stack of three Fenton Carey paperbacks on an end table. But it was irritating me because of why we were there.
“Kim,” I said, cutting into their repartee, “we’re here for a reason. It’s pretty serious, Dad, so let’s get—”
Archie’s face clouded and he clasped his hands in front of him, leaning forward in his chair.
“We’re very much afraid that your life may be in danger,” he said, wisely choosing the best possible angle for a beginning. “Paul’s come into some troubling information and it’s going to come as a shock to you, I’m afraid. He’s going to tell you and I’ll do what I can to help. But remember, nothing is irreparable … from what Paul has told me about you, I’m sure you can handle it …” He looked at me.
“I went to Chicago yesterday,” I said, wondering where to look, “and talked with Patricia Wilson.” Kim’s eyes widened just a bit and the tip of her tongue appeared between her lips, waiting, anticipating. “She’s not dead and, the thing is, she’s not your mother. Rita Hook was your mother and we believe Carver Maxvill is your father.” I stopped, short of breath. Her hand jerked upward to cover her mouth. Her body seemed to shrink, the flesh pressing back against the bone structure. She made a soft sound, as if the breath were being forced out of her lungs by the pressure. Her face bore something in common with the night at the Guthrie when she’d been set upon by Harriet, but the anger was missing now, replaced by something a lot like fear, the fear that comes when you reach out for support and touch something that’s alive and moving.
“That’s the good part,” I said. I reached for her hand but she slid away.
“All right,” she said from far away, “what’s the bad part?”
While the air conditioning purred and blew cold air over our heads, while the flowers breathed and quivered and reached out in such desperately slow motion, while Archie clenched his hands on his knobby knees and the sniper waited quietly on his assigned hexagon, I told Kim that Larry Blankenship had been her brother unless she’d been victimized by the most bizarre coincidence of all time. I told her that the second most bizarre coincidence was their meeting, falling in love, marrying, and having a child, but it had apparently happened. I told her we believed Larry had learned the truth and it had been the final blow, had put the lock on his suicide. I told her that we believed the murder-go-round was balanced on the facts of her real parentage and her incestuous marriage.
She had gone white, mouth dry, eyes staring; her carefully constructed life lay in rubble around her tense bare feet, toes clawed into the carpet. She clasped herself with both arms, as if there were a fatal agony in her stomach. She said nothing. I could hear her trying to swallow. Her eyes had grown large, stopped staring, darted about the room. The sunshine made a mirror of the glass door to the balcony and a bottle of suntan lotion stood on another Fenton Carey leaving a greasy circle.
“Which brings us to the danger, Miss Roderick,” Archie said, clearing his throat. Her small dark head snapped toward him, nostrils flaring, eyes unblinking, like a terrified animal with its foot in a trap. Archie spoke very slowly, in contrast to the anxious spill of words from me. “Two things have us worried. Let me be very explicit. In the first place, when Larry Blankenship discovered the truth of your relationship—or so we believe—he killed himself. We don’t want this to happen to you … that’s why we decided to come here, to try to provide a buffer between you and the news, the bad news. Maybe we can lend some perspective …” He spread his hands and shrugged. “In the second place, if Carver Maxvill has come back to clean up on the old gang, he may very well be insane. And, if he’s insane, he may hold you as responsible for lousing up the end of his life … as the men who let you and Larry get married. A deranged mind is not predictable because no one c
an be sure how far gone it is and down what path … and you may therefore be in danger. For instance, now no one can surprise you with this information …” Archie smiled at her blank gaze, looked at me. “I’m very sorry, Miss Roderick,” he said, “but better you hear it from us than from someone who doesn’t wish you well—”
“You expect me to just believe this?” She turned from Archie to me. “You tell me this and expect me to just say okay, that’s interesting, and what else is new?” There was no feeling in her voice but it was high and skating.
“There’s a lot of evidence,” I said.
“What do you know about evidence? Tell me, what do you know about it? And who gave you the right? Oh—” She stood up, clutching the robe around her slim body, quaking as if she had a bad chill. Her eyes took aim at me like twin rifle muzzles. “God, you made me trust you! Why? What have I done to you, for God’s sake?”
“I love you,” I said sappily. “I want to help you out of this mess … make sure nothing bad happens to you …”
She stalked to the window, staring at the happy sunny world outside and so far below, an act of bravado in the face of heavy fire. “Carver Maxvill!” She hissed at the glass. “My father … and my husband my brother …”
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 34