Lights off, a car I’d barely noticed pulled away from the curb about thirty yards up the street, sped past behind me, and was gone in the rush of rain.
I tried to push my way through the back of the seat, my eyes squeezed shut, every muscle screaming in terror. I waited a few seconds, opened my eyes, and everything was quiet. No more shots, the street deserted, only the hissing of tires on the freeway interfering with the drumming of the rain. Wind was blowing rain through the places where the windshield and side window had been and my pants were shaping themselves to my legs. Everything about me was wet. When I got out to inspect my rapidly disintegrating automobile, my shoes squished like waders and I thought very carefully, Somebody just tried to kill me. I was shaking and climbed back behind the wheel and got the poor thing into the garage and put it to bed. There was glass all over and the car looked like a bathtub that had gone wrong.
Somebody just tried to kill me. It had happened in a speck of time, death blowing through my car, and now it was gone with no cries of outrage.
In all probability Carver Maxvill had just tried to kill me. Being beaten up was one thing. This was something else altogether. In the lobby of the building the ancient Pinkerton man was sitting with the hound of the Baskervilles snoozing at his side.
“Did you just hear anything?” I asked. “A backfire? Sounded like a gunshot?”
He shifted his ample behind and scratched his head. The dog stirred and broke wind. “No, can’t say as I did but then, I was making my rounds. Why?” Worry crossed his bland, perplexed face. A couple of months before, a tenant had been mugged outside under the marquee, in a brightly lit area. Fido and his keeper had slept right through it.
“Nothing,” I said. “My imagination.” I walked to the elevators.
“Say, you got broken glass on your pants there,” he called after me, beginning to suspect me of an obscure crime. Was breaking glass a crime? He was following me in the deep carpeting. He bent down and picked up a gleaming sliver. “See? Glass right here …”
I nodded. The elevator came. I got in. He peered after me, the dog sauntering up to him sneezing. I waved good-bye and the doors closed.
Archie was still up and took my call in his study. I told him what had happened and he whistled softly. “Well, well,” he said. “We’re getting close. I don’t think he wanted to kill you … I doubt if he’d kill for self-preservation. He’s got a reason to kill and killing you doesn’t fit—he’s not a criminal, you know, not in any conventional sense. He’s an avenging angel. And he wants you to get out of his way … He must be watching very closely. He may have watched you go to Bernstein’s office. He can’t afford to have the police getting too close—so he tries to scare you off …”
“Cutting it pretty damn close, I’d say.” I was still picking glass out of my hair,’ and my stomach was still clinging to the inside of my chest. “It worked. I’m scared.”
“I should hope so,” Archie said. “Now go to sleep. I’ll try to think of what to do … maybe we should back off entirely. There are limits to everything. This isn’t worth dying for.” Thunder cracked over the lake, a mortal blow, by the sound of it, and it gnashed at my ear across the line.
I lay on the bed with the lights off and waited for sleep. It was a long wait. You didn’t survive a murder attempt every night, after all. So I lay there cringing in my bed, frightened out of shape, a perfect example of conditioning.
23
CROCKER’S FUNERAL WAS A MAJOR event, the cortege tying up traffic for half an hour in a heavy mist, headlamps blurring dimly, motorcycle cops holding cross traffic at a standstill. I went to the cemetery, one of several hundred, sticky and uncomfortable and praying for a breeze that refused to come. I was too far from the graveside to hear what was said so I marveled at the size of the crowd, remembered that he’d set his goons on me, and figured he might have a tough time getting in upstairs.
The thought kept gnawing at me: He said he knew who the murderer was … so why couldn’t he protect himself? Unless it was bravado, unless he hadn’t known.
I searched the crowd in the hope that Kim might have come but that was a waste and only made me hotter. Hub Anthony nodded to me from twenty yards away and pointed to a pair of large straight-ahead types on either side of him and winked. Bernstein was taking no chances. Hub had his protection and so did General Goode, who looked very small and intense as he bowed his head, flanked by two guys who could have picked him up and used him for a pipe cleaner. Archie stood with Ole Kronstrom, both looking cool and composed, almost angelic. Bernstein had offered them protection but they had adamantly refused. In any case, we were all protected because the crowd was alive with coppers looking for Carver Maxvill. They didn’t know what he looked like but that didn’t stop them from being obvious, giving out with a lot of long hard stares and consulting one another in hushed tones. It was hopeless. Carver Maxvill could have spoken the eulogy and they wouldn’t have recognized him.
But the thought stuck in my mind as I slowly scanned the crowd: Is there a murderer here somewhere, enjoying the fruit of his labor but with work still to be done? I hoped Kim had gone absolutely to ground to wait it out. Otherwise, somehow, he’d find her …
At lunch Julia wore a perplexed frown and put her hand over mine. It was past one o’clock and the crowd at Charlie’s was thinned out and we were all munching on peppered beef and potato salad. Archie was working on his second martini and it was dark and quiet and Julia said she understood how I must feel about Kim’s disappearance.
“But she’s one of the independent breed,” she said. “She takes care of herself, I expect, and doesn’t like being dependent on men to take care of her. If she’s actually in danger, then she’s done the right thing. She’s probably just sorting things out, deciding what to do. I have a feeling about her—if she believes she must, I can even see her killing to save herself … I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds, dear.”
“That’s what I told him,” Archie said. “She’s a smart cookie, she saw the flame coming closer. She backed off.”
I asked Julia what she thought the incest revelation would do to Kim, to any woman.
“There’s no point in generalizing about it, Paul. Different women would react differently. Kim hasn’t had an easy time with the men in her life, this thing would just be another blow … If you mean do I think she’d crack, no, I don’t. A sheltered woman might go to pieces under the same circumstances, but not this woman—she’s toughened. She’d cope with it, one way or another.”
“You know, that note Maxvill left for her,” Archie said. “That’s the only really clumsy thing he’s done … he obviously can’t bring himself to hurt her directly.” He leaned back and patted his mustache, sipped at the martini. “It’s really quite an awesome pattern he’s working on, murders on the one hand, suicides on the other … God, you’ve got to hand it to him, mad as a hare but what a determined son of a bitch!”
“I’m worried about her all the same,” I said.
“Of course you are,” Julia said. “It would be wrong if you weren’t. But you’ll see her again, it’s all going to turn out. Just hold on and see what happens … She’ll get through all this, mark my words.”
“That’s what I told him. Patience. It’s like being in the eye of the hurricane … Suspense.” He smiled. “Suspense is my business but I’ve never done better than this.”
Julia took off in her car and Archie and I went back to my place. In his way, I think he was worried about me. He didn’t want me to have to be alone. And the attempt on my life, whether serious or as a warning, was bothering us all. He had encouraged me to stay on the case and now he wondered if we’d gone too far. Diminishing returns and all. What was left for us to gain? What had there ever been in it for us? All I wanted now was to get Kim back.
It was three o’clock when the telephone rang and we were able to stop waiting and get moving again. I didn’t recognize the voice at first, though there was something familiar about
it. I said yes, I was Paul Cavanaugh.
“This is William Whitefoot. You paid me a visit not long ago. An unsettling visit. It’s been on my mind ever since you left.” There was no warmth, no humor, no touch of life in his voice, but he seemed slightly short of breath, as if placing the call were making him nervous.
“Is Kim with you?” I blurted. Why else would he call? Archie looked up sharply.
“No, she’s not here. Why would she be here, for heaven’s sake?” He was genuinely puzzled and my hopes slipped away. I felt myself sag.
“She’s gone off,” I said. “No problem, I was just curious. What can I do for you, Mr. Whitefoot?”
“You can get in your car and meet me at the lodge tonight. The club’s lodge. You can make it in five hours or so. That’s what you can do for me.”
“Why?” It was my turn to be puzzled.
“I have something to tell you … Look, it’s important or, believe me, I wouldn’t have … called you. As far as I’m concerned, the less I see of you, the better I like it. But it’s been eating at me ever since we talked … now Crocker’s dead, that makes three of them, right? So I’d better get this off my chest and you’re the lucky recipient. And don’t ask me to tell you over the phone—absolutely out of the question. As far as I’m concerned, every Indian in Minnesota and the Dakotas has got a tap on his phone.” He took a breath.
“All right,” I said. “I’m bringing my father. He’s in this as deep as I am …”
“He was in the club, wasn’t he?”
“Not in the inner circle. But he knew the men who were. If I come, he comes.”
“Okay. He’ll be interested, in any case. I’ve got a late-afternoon meeting here but I’ll get there as soon as I can. If I’m late, just wait. I’ll be there.”
He hung up and I turned to Archie. I felt alive again.
For Archie our trip north was like a journey backward through time. It was as if the years were falling away and he was going north for a week of fishing forty years ago, when there was no freeway, no pollution, no murders staring you in the face, and you were young. That was the key to it, being young. An ambitious young newspaperman with the idea that he could write books, an ex-football hero, two canny young businessmen figuring they could make it in the paint business, a pair of bright University of Minnesota lawyers, ramrod-straight career army man, a convivial young priest with the knack for putting people at their ease … they’d all been young, with the years stretching ahead, a landscape of hope and possibility, a lifetime in which to make their marks and leave their tracks to prove they’d been there. Youth made up for a lot and the Depression was something that hadn’t hit them badly at all. They didn’t know it then, but they would turn out well in all cases but one. Life would smile and the newspaperman would become a famous mystery novelist, the football player and the businessmen and a lawyer and the priest and the soldier—they would reach those goals that seemed so important forty years before. Only one, the second lawyer, remembered in snapshots as the blond, long-haired one in baggy pants with a tight belt and the handsome rectangular face, only he would be denied his hopes whatever they might have been.
Archie drifted between reminiscing and mute reflection on his life and theirs, how it had all turned out. The freeway swept past as we worked our way toward Duluth. The mist clung to the earth and there were patches of ground fog but traffic was light. I was nervous, tight with anticipation, desperately curious about Billy’s message yet afraid to hear it.
“It’s funny,” Archie was saying, “being so near the end and looking back across your life, being able to think about it as a whole story. I do it, knowing I’m near the end, but I don’t feel like I’m near the end … I still figure I’m going to live forever, but I’ve got evidence to the contrary right under my nose, all the experiences of my lifetime. Anyway, I’ve got news for you, the idea of dying doesn’t frighten me at all anymore … I think it’s a young man’s fear, the fear that you’ll miss so much. At my age you don’t figure there’s much to miss, there’s no expectation of terrific things to come—you’ve done whatever great things you were going to do. Nobody lives much longer than this, there are no precedents for what the hell there is left for you to do … so I guess I’ll just keep writing books until my mind goes west …” He smiled and grew silent again, content.
Later he said, “You know, as a bunch we were a pretty unimaginative lot. Boring. God, how could we have enjoyed it so much? Thank heavens, I’m not a joiner, I only went up once in a while and then moved away, but think of the ones whose spare time revolved around that goddamn lodge … Whew. Crocker and his idiotic football crap, one locker-room extravaganza after another. And Dierker, he was no prize either—all the sense of humor you’d find in your average turnip. Honest, moral, sober as a young man, churchgoer … And Boyle, always had a dirty joke and a red face, like he’d been caught jacking off in the men’s room.” Archie made a little face. “Goode, he was always there with all the answers, he could shoot straighter, swim farther, run faster, and who the hell cared? Hub Anthony was always going on about which heiress to which grain or lumber or railroad fortune gave him his last blowjob … he kept score, I’m sure, and I’m amazed he never married several million dollars. Maybe all the heiresses were ugly, who knows? I never believed a word of it. So long ago. Doesn’t amount to a damn thing now, does it?
“And conservative? Oh, what a bunch of Establishment bastards. They’d take anything but a risk, they hated running risks for fear of making a mess … It happened just once, a real mess, so far as I know. Hub told me about it and it seemed funny to me at the time, though today I’m not sure why. It was that whorehouse business and it really scared hell out of them.” Archie laughed, shaking his head, caught in memory’s web. “They could just see all their wonderful ambitions getting blown right out of the water, wives beating them with umbrellas and rolling pins, I suppose. You see, apparently one of them had heard quite a bit about this all-Indian-maiden whorehouse way to hell and gone somewhere, beautiful Indian virgins were the stuff of north woods dreams forty years ago, kiddo, and some woman named Helen Littlefeather ran the place—Hub didn’t tell me whose idea it was but they apparently went up there en masse one night and something nasty happened, somebody got hurt, one of the girls, I mean. One of the lads got a bit overly enthusiastic was the way Hub put it and worked one of the Indian virgins over at some length …
“Well, hysteria reigned and Helen kept some husky, very physical young Indian gentlemen on hand who were about ready to avenge the wrongs of the past century on our boisterous clubmen. Hub stepped into the breach, according to his version, with offers of large sums of money, far exceeding the cost of any repairs to the girl. The young bucks figured they’d take the money and then beat hell out of these arrogant bastards but Helen’s cooler head prevailed … They simply bought their way out of what could have been a nasty scrape, might have escalated into a scandal … anything to avoid the consequences, they lived by that. It wasn’t that I blamed them or even disagreed with them, but when I heard about it, all I could think was gee, I wish the Injuns had beaten the shit out of ’em! And these guys were my friends!”
The mist had thickened and I turned the headlights on before we got to the crest of the hill that dropped down into Duluth. Then I turned the wipers on and wiped sweat out of my eyes with a Kleenex. It was like driving through a soup caldron.
“You know,” he said, continuing along the same line, “I always thought that it was Jon Goode the one who beat up the girl. He’s got a hell of a primitive soul flailing away beneath that buttoned-up surface. He told you man was a predator, well, he ought to know, using himself as an example. He’s a killer.” He yawned. “If Maxvill goes after Jon, he’d better be prepared. Jonny’s not gonna sit there and take it between the eyes.” He stretched his legs under the dashboard, shifted position.
We took the dip down into Duluth beside the metallic slab of lake and came out in another country where the light was
gone behind the high bluffs, the mist had turned to a stinging spray, and the temperature had dropped thirty degrees. Archie put on his Burberry when we stopped for gasoline and huddled with the collar turned up, quiet, for the remainder of the journey. It was past eight o’clock when I turned left away from Lake Superior and began to wind inward toward the lodge.
The headlamps poked accusingly into the wet darkness and finally brought the building up out of the gloom. We were the first to arrive and I pulled the car through the spongy grass as close to the porch as I could. It was a child’s fright dream come to life, the constant dripping of the rain, the wind scuttling where you couldn’t see it, the trees rustling and bending in the darkness. The steps creaked. The lights worked inside and I clomped into the living room, as if loud footfalls would frighten off the evil things.
The lamplight was dim and it was cold and damp inside the lodge. Archie wandered around, distracted by the memories being summoned, and I set about building a fire, lost for the moment in my own memories of being there with Kim the day she’d sought me out and brought a picnic with her. I had fallen absolutely in love with her that day. It seemed so long ago. I’d just gotten the logs crackling when Archie called to me from the porch.
“He’s here, son.”
A Camaro pulled up, doused its lights, and the wiry, athletic figure of Billy Whitefoot dashed across the fifteen feet of rain and mounted the steps. He shook hands with me and I introduced him to Archie.
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