The Cavanaugh Quest

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The Cavanaugh Quest Page 41

by Thomas Gifford


  “All right,” Ole said. “But I’d just as soon you didn’t shoot up my ship.”

  We’d hung back as long as we could. Archie leaned forward and opened the door to the main cabin and let it swing back. There was a funny, harsh smell in the enclosure and someone was sitting on the upholstered bench at one side, leaning against the bulkhead next to the stairway that went down to the galley. The light hung from the ceiling and cast shadows which moved ominously with the rocking of the boat. The light brushed across the face looking at us. It wasn’t Kim.

  “Hub!” Archie exclaimed, clutching the revolver. He took a step forward, stopped nervously as Hub Anthony slowly raised a limp hand in greeting. He made a sibilant moaning sound. As we stepped closer, we saw why.

  It looked like another theory shot to hell. The front of his wheat-colored boating sweater was soaked with the blood. He had been shot by somebody who had failed to kill quickly for the first time.

  We drew close, Archie muttering under his breath, and it was obvious that there was nothing we could do. Blood had soaked into his khaki slacks, welling up around the belt line. As you got closer, you sniffed the sweetish blood. We stood over him. “Sit down,” he croaked softly, “you make it dark, too dark …” His arm dropped.

  “Who did this to you?” Archie said.

  “Oh, no,” he said, “none of that. It’s over now, it’s better this way, much better; nothing left to worry about, doesn’t make any difference anymore—”

  “Who?” Archie repeated. “How long have you been sitting here like this?”

  “Long enough,” he rasped, “long enough to know I’m not leaving here … this is it for me. What a joke! I’m sorry, Ole, sorry about the mess …”

  “Hub,” Ole said slowly, “Hub, who shot you?”

  “What difference does it make?” Hub said, his hand fluttering at his chest, blood clotting on his fingers. “I can’t tell you, it’s right, it’s all right … .I’m the last, no more killing now … It’s over at last …”

  “We know,” Archie said. “We know about what happened at the lodge, about Rita and Maxvill.”

  Hub Anthony nodded.

  “Goode actually killed them—” He broke off, coughing wetly, his body quaking, his handsome aristocratic features knotting in pain. “But we all went along with it … collective guilt, all willing accessories, hid the bodies in the goddamn ice cave … what a night that was … How did you find out, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Rita wasn’t alone that night,” I said, and his eyes shifted to me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “She had Running Buck watch the whole thing … but he never told, not until he was dying, then he got it off his conscience and told Billy Whitefoot. Billy told us …”

  A dreadful grin flickered on his pain-distended face. “Jesus, he knew all the time, that’s rich, that’s a good one … Billy, Billy …”

  “She was blackmailing you, wasn’t she? She and Carver, that’s why you killed them—” I stopped: His face bore a puzzled, confused grin.

  “Carver? Carver blackmailing us? No, no, no, you haven’t got it right at all …”

  Ole passed him a hammered silver flask; Hub washed it across his mouth and immediately began coughing. Pinkish foam collected in the corners of his mouth. He shook his head violently, wiped his hand across the lips, glared at the watery stain on his tan fingers as if it offended him. He tried to straighten his back against the bulkhead, exerting himself, Archie’s arm helping to steady him, but it was too much, he was wounded too badly. As he strained upward, something seemed to break inside his chest, and thick dark blood gushed out of his mouth, poured down his chin, and soaked into the sweater. Ole groaned behind me and the sleeve of Archie’s Burberry went dark.

  There was a terrible obscenity in seeing Hubbard Anthony’s natural grace and elegance awash in his own gore. My premier tennis partner, Christ’s sake, a murderer murdered, leaking like something in a packing plant, his chest pumping blood, foaming like surf on his chin, his life draining away. Who had shot him? If the killing wasn’t done, I thought again of myself. The killer had had a crack at me and missed. And maybe it wasn’t over, after all.

  The hemorrhaging had stopped finally and Hub was laughing without making a sound, his even white teeth dark red with gouts of blood clinging like leeches.

  “Not Carver,” he whispered, vastly amused now that the end was at hand and we’d made a joke. “Not old Carver … she was blackmailing all of us, Carver, too, all of us … aw, hell, it was a long time ago, Arch, people were different then, they cared about the way things looked … we were very young, naive, didn’t know what the hell was going on … And Rita …” A smile crossed the blood-streaked face. Ole was edging toward the door, groping for a handhold, his face ashen. “Rita was a woman of the world, she knew how to use us … how to make us pay …”

  I leaned forward, ignoring the fresh smell of blood. His fingers were sunk into the folds of his sweater, clutching his chest.

  “But what did she have on you, Hub?” I cleared my throat. I looked into his eyes, squinting in pain, sunk deep into his face. “What did she know?”

  He looked away, grimacing, moaning. Archie had tried to look at the wound but it was hidden, secret. It was swamped in blood, matted, much too far along. Archie stared at his hands, dismay on his face.

  “Oh, God,” Hub said, a haze of delirium shielding him from reality, “oh, God, I’m going to die and I’m so damned hungry … I haven’t eaten for two days, too scared … I knew I was going to get it, but I didn’t know who was going to do it … Jon, I thought …” Tears began to slide down his cheeks. He didn’t want to say good-bye, was fighting it. “Shit, now I’m done for and all I can think is I’m never going to have another sandwich, another Reuben … another hot pastrami on an onion roll and some coleslaw …” He looked up at me and winked slowly. “I know, Paul, I know, I’m sounding crazy, no great last words … You’ve got to lose some weight and shape up your backhand, learn to hit through on your backhand, don’t be afraid to hit it hard … Oh, God, I’m so hungry …”

  Archie was sobbing to himself, wiping tears away and bloodying his face in the process.

  “Why was she blackmailing you, Hub?” I had to know. I had to know what Rita knew. It was like picking a dead friend’s pocket but I kept at it.

  “Christ, you’re so dense,” he whispered wetly. “She was our woman … Rita was our whore, we all used to screw her … all the time, passing her around, some weekends she’d never have a stitch on from Friday night till Monday morning … we’d take turns, I don’t think we ever satisfied her … we’d have her till we dropped …” He chuckled; it stuck in his throat. “That was our deal, we paid her plenty, gave her bonuses, she salted away a lot of money over those twelve, thirteen years … we were paying her a thousand a month, Tim and Jim and Jon and Marty and Carver—fifty a week from each of us, we got our money’s worth … it was the Depression, a lot of money for her …” His eyes were closed now, he was quiet, hands still, voice droning on. He was composing himself for wherever he was going.

  “She had two children and we increased the money each time, we wanted to be fair with her … somebody’s rubber broke or didn’t get put on …” There was more bubbling red laughter, eyes squeezed shut.

  “My God,” I said, “who, was the father? Larry’s father? Kim’s?”

  “That’s life’s little joke, isn’t it? Who could tell? How would we ever be able to know? We used her all the time, somebody was always running up and having her …”

  I shrank back, exhausted. I felt myself falling away in disgust. Was it what they had done? Or was it that … I loved Kim, that I knew what it had done to her, how it had shaped her life? I wasn’t a big believer in tragedy among the common folk, but it struck me that there was tragedy in this, fate working itself out, winding like a snake around an innocent, a child. “But you killed her,” Archie said. “You were paying her. Why kill her?”

  “She wanted mor
e, another hundred and fifty thousand, in one lump … we couldn’t handle that, it was too much … she threatened us, she had pictures she’d taken of us and we’d taken of her … it was the old story, our wives would get sets of the pictures, our friends, our enemies, she was really sticking it to us … well, Jon had a bellyful, he’d brought this gun Patton had given him, he killed them … Carver tried to protect her, he thought killing her was nuts … so Jon shot him and then he shot Rita … we all went along with it. What the hell else were we going to do?”

  “So who shot you?” It was Ole.

  “There’s been enough killing … it’ll stop here. Let it all die with me … We got about what we deserved. It all just caught up with us …”

  “Who killed you?” Archie asked, insistent, badgering. “Who?”

  “Aha, I’m not killed yet … but I sure am hungry …”

  That was all. Hubbard Anthony was dead.

  Archie and I had grown accustomed to death and Ole Kronstrom was not the type to panic. Together with the awful relief of those left alive, we went down to the galley and Ole brewed coffee and spiked it with brandy. It steamed in the tight quarters and we drank it silently, avoiding one another’s eyes.

  Finally Archie said into his cup, under his breath, “Another theory, my last, down the drain. Wrong on all counts. Nothing but victims … no killer.” He sighed and inspected the blood all over his raincoat. “And now we find out that, no matter how you cut it, they deserved to die. Where does that leave us, then?”

  “Not wanting to find a murderer,” Ole said, clinking his spoon against the cup. “Executioner, I should say.”

  “But he’s still loose, whatever the hell you call him,” I said. “Don’t forget, he tried to kill me …” I looked from one to the other. The old men were worn thin. “The thing is, who is it? There’s nobody left … But Kim’s still in danger. If he hasn’t found her yet.”

  “Maybe,” Archie said. The enthusiasm was gone. He was through.

  “Give me the gun,” I said to Archie. He fished it out of his pocket and I put it in mine.

  We decided to leave the boat and report the death of Hub Anthony the next day. Ole would simply go out to work on his boat and discover the body, stiff and cold. We finished the coffee, went past the remains, turned out the light, and climbed back on deck. A biting cold was coming with the fog and rain. We were carrying on the obfuscation the club had begun forty years ago when they began making their deals with Rita. I swung over the side and felt solid ground again.

  We drove back to Minneapolis and dropped Ole at his darkened parking lot. It was midnight and the city was quiet in the cold rain.

  “I’ve got to find Kim,” I said.

  “You’re the one to do it, Paul. You’re the one now …” Ole shook my hand.

  I drove Archie back to my place. I got him bundled up under blankets. I made him a hot toddy and told him to go to sleep. He looked like an old man. He smiled halfheartedly and accepted the toddy.

  “I’ve got to find her, Dad, you know that. I love her …”

  “It’s over, Paul,” he said sleepily. “It’s over for me, anyway, the ones who had to die are dead. Very nicely rounded off … Take the gun, go find Kim, but I think the killing is over … Just find the woman, that’s all. That’s all that’s left … You see, Billy—we forgot about Billy. And he doesn’t know Kim’s gone … He wouldn’t kill her, would he? What they did to her … that’s why he killed them.” He ran his tongue over dry lips, closed his eyes. Tired.

  I kissed my father impulsively and went downstairs to his car. There was someone standing in the shadows outside in visitors’ parking. The rain splattered on the tarmac and I felt the hair on my neck stiffen. The shadowy figure moved, came toward me. I flattened myself against the wall, rain dripping in my face. I felt for the gun. The figure stepped into the light. It was the Pinkerton man. He smiled and went inside.

  I knew where I was going. I knew where Kim was and I was trying to arrange the whole story in my weary mind. I had to drive north and there was so little time.

  28

  I HEADED OUT ON THE freeway toward Duluth in the dead of the cold, wet night, wipers working methodically across the vast expanse of glass fronting Archie’s automobile. The rain spit out of the darkness and I drove twenty-mile stretches without seeing another pair of headlamps. Franklin Hobbs was cooing his way through the night on WCCO. Frank Sinatra sang “Time After Time” and I remembered the words from high school romances. Al Hibbler sang “Unchained Melody” and I let the huge car take over. I felt oddly peaceful, alone, free of surprises and things I could neither control nor understand. I still wasn’t having much success at getting a moral fix on what had been going on but I realized with a sense of ironic detachment that I was at least able to be calm while considering it. My nose didn’t hurt much anymore. I was tired but I wasn’t dead and that put me ahead of the game.

  As the invisible night slipped past outside, I hummed to the music and thought about it all, calmly, rationally, analytically. There was, in the first place, the enormity of what the lads had done to Rita and Carver that night at the lodge. Frightened, frustrated—but also arrogant, full of the certainty that they could kill and get away with it. Why? What made them so sure, so confident? I was no psychologist; I made no pretense of knowing the answer. The fact was they’d done it and they had gotten away with it, almost … A quirk, a freak had brought them to grief, an old man who might just as well have taken his secret to the grave. And even if he’d only made his deathbed confession, it took the unlikely marriage of Kim to both Billy and Larry to crystalize the mordant joke.

  In the second place there was the awesome retribution visited on the lads from thirty years’ distance. They had sat on their guilt so long, had let the insulation of time cut them off from the unpleasantness; it must almost have passed into misty legend, even for them. Remembered like wartime experiences, heroics and cowardice, the moral imperative of the act long since bled dry. It had happened and there was nothing to be done; there would be no summons from the icy grave.

  But they had been unfortunate: Someone had not been quite so willing to let bygones be bygones, someone had carried the past inside, the seeds of retribution, someone whose morality demanded an accounting. And so had waited for them at the end.

  At some sticking point, in one determined, unforgiving soul, the caldron had finally boiled over. You will not go free, an inner voice had said, authority echoing, You will pay for your sins. I shook my head and wiped my eyes; too Biblical. Still, the idea was about right.

  But who had known it all? And why had it come so long after the fact?

  The Maxvill theory had fit so beautifully: Back from the chasm of anonymity, life in shambles and nearing the end, he had struck back and finished them off. But he’d been dead for thirty years.

  The Goode theory had made sense, too. He’d been a killer all his life and now, in a spasm of fear, he saw his comrades threatening to clear the fields of their consciences … A collective conscience or only one, it made no difference: The truth from whatever source was working its way back to the surface after all those years of safety … But then someone killed him, too.

  The Hub Anthony theory made a kind of sense as well as seeming to be the only, one left: Everyone else, was dead, ergo the one remaining … etc. The judge, the man with the most to lose, the final irony of elegance and style driven to foulest murder; he had fit the killer-from-within-the-group scenario. And at that point you took whoever happened to be left and made the facts fit. But he was shot to death, too.

  They were all dead and Agatha Christie would have loved it. Their lives had gone rotten early on and yet they had lived them out, trying to hide the truth with respectability. Martin Boyle … I remembered our discussion of evil, cast now in an entirely different light. A priest … A football hero, a soldier, a judge, a businessman …

  Someone hadn’t forgotten. Someone hadn’t let them off the hook.

  Bil
ly. Why had he never really crossed my mind? Because he was an Indian, because I was a part of Minnesota, because an Indian was our invisible man? Because a motive never occurred to me … because he wasn’t one of us, those of us who seemed a part of the present? Because he had seemed to help, because he’d finally been the one who had revealed the most to us, most dramatically?

  What did I know about him, after all?

  For one thing, he still loved Kim. He held nothing against her, found her guilty of nothing. He lived with their daughter—the image of Kim—always before him. He hadn’t remarried. And he knew what they’d done to her mother, to her life … he knew about Larry, the fact that Larry was Kim’s brother. If he loved Kim still, he didn’t need more of a motive than that …

  And he knew about death. He knew what had happened to his father; any Indian in Minnesota had had his brush with death. And he probably honored a code of behavior; he felt certain compulsions. He may have accepted the necessity for retribution. And who knew what he felt about the overall justification for killing some rich white men? Surely he knew the story of the club’s raid on the Indian whorehouse.

  Once you made the assumption that he could kill, it all made sense. A motive of love and hate. And nobody had ever checked his alibi. From Jasper he could easily have made his forays into Minneapolis, made his kill and gotten out … the invisible man. He could even tell us the story of the club’s murders without fear. In the first place, it stood to reason that no killer would make such a revelation, drawing himself into matters when he might have stayed clear, and, in the second place, by telling us Running Buck’s story he was able to put into words the justification for his actions—proving once again, if only to himself, that he was an executioner, not a murderer …

  Billy. The idea played in my mind, darting here, there, like a figure in a shooting gallery, the one you could never quite hit.

  I wasn’t altogether sure I was safe. I might still be a candidate for the role of Last Victim. But I knew that I would rather have it be me than Kim, which is, I suppose, a commentary on what rediscovering love can do to your mind. It wouldn’t be Kim, not if I could help it.

 

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