The Cavanaugh Quest

by Thomas Gifford

Billy Whitefoot was stunned. He believed what the old man told him. He faced the fact that he had once loved Kim, one of Rita’s children, and had in his own mind treated her badly by leaving her, taking their daughter with him. He felt a sense of responsibility to her … even love, the remembered sort. And he also knew that she had married Larry Blankenship … Running Buck had learned even that at the lodge, again the invisible man attending to his chores while the members argued it out by the fireplace. Running Buck had heard them say that Larry was Kim’s brother and that, too, he’d told Billy as he lay dying.

  For six months Billy had fought it out in his own mind. Should he tell Kim the truth? Or, as Running Buck had done, should he stay clear of white man’s business? In the end, he remembered Kim. And he went to Minneapolis to see her. He was outraged at what the club members had done. He had never felt such violence in himself; it was new, it was awesome. He knew he could kill. He knew these men deserved to die …

  So, not quite sure where events were leading him, Billy took his story to Kim and spent an afternoon telling it, wrapping it around them, drawing them closer than they’d been since they’d been kids in love. It had shocked her, of course, but it hadn’t been a surprise, not a surprise because somewhere in the back of her mind she’d feared the faceless thing that haunts childhood dreams. She had taken it well, heard him out, shrugged in the face of the bogeyman come true, coming to stand in the doorway of her life with his shadow erasing the color and falling across her hopes. There hadn’t been much she could say; it was all in the past, she told him, and her marriage to Larry was finished and she couldn’t bring her mother back from the grave, from the, ice cave. Billy hadn’t known what to think. Kim had always been a mystery to him, deep, impossible to fathom. He had felt uncomfortable with her quiet, downplayed reaction. He knew she was thinking. But he didn’t know what. In the end, he fell back on the knowledge that he’d done what he could. The rest of it was up to her. That night he prowled the city, the thought of what the men had done festering in his psyche. Could they possibly get away with it? Could they escape punishment forever? He grabbed a cab to Lake Harriet and stood before General Goode’s home, staring, hating him with an Indian’s atavistic resentment of the white man. He walked all the way around the lake that night, struggling with the givens of his life and this situation. He knew he could make it a good deal more complex by inserting himself; he could make it simpler, too. Finally he heaved a defeated sigh, took a last look at the general’s house, and made it simpler. He went back north to Jasper, to his daughter, to the rhythms of life he’d worked so hard to attain.

  Kim faced the truth of Billy’s story without the slightest doubt. It made sense, there was nothing of a dying man’s ravings in them. She tried to measure her response but it was impossible. She felt no particular emotion once the shock had died. She didn’t hate the men at first; disgust, yes, but not an active hatred. Her marriage to Larry left her weak when she thought about it and as time went by she thought about it more and more. How could they have let it happen? And she thought about the child who had resulted from their marriage. She couldn’t turn to Ole. She had no one. And when she thought about the child, she cried. It was the first thing she cried about in a long time. Ole was solicitous but he didn’t understand.

  It was 1973 and Larry Blankenship, groping around in his sorry failure’s vacuum, never understanding the forces at work in his life, approached Kim about a reconciliation. He had a good job, a new car, a smattering of hope. Kim couldn’t bring herself to turn him off with the truth; humanely, trying to deal gently with the fragility of his world, she explained that there was no future for them together, only separately. She tried to make him see that he could push on with his life while she went ahead with her own. They would always be friends. It was a hackneyed bit of business, she was aware of that, but it was all she could offer. The truth would destroy him; murder and incest she could handle because her emotions were so pallid by then. They would kill Larry.

  Losing her had very nearly done him in as it was. But a nervous breakdown wasn’t the worst that could happen. Nervous breakdowns, even severe ones, you survived. She saw him through it as best she could but she believed it was important to keep herself at a distance, to keep him from leaning on her. It was difficult but she managed it. Ole had helped her through it. His instincts were good. She trusted him. He loved her.

  Larry slowly came out of the pit but it was a bad year, in or out of the pit, if you were trying to catch on with an advertising agency. Even if Tim Dierker had pulled some strings to get you the job. It was 1974 and admen were tripping over one another in the unemployment lines. A new man, Larry was the first to go. Alone, he waited for the telephone to ring. He tried to tell Kim his problems but she was tired of his problems. Finally, living in the same building, he took his problems to Tim Dierker. Several times they talked, each adrift in his own hopelessness. Larry had lost his wife and his career wasn’t worthy of the name; he was forty-two years old, had just gone through a nervous breakdown, and had a new Thunderbird he couldn’t pay for. Tim Dierker had just found out he was going to die; he had an inoperable brain tumor and he hadn’t been able to tell Harriet. He told Larry down in Larry’s empty, skeletal apartment and they got drunk together. Like Running Buck, Tim Dierker hadn’t been able to take his guilt to his grave unspoken. In a spasm of premortem confession, fired with liquor, Tim Dierker told him the tale of murder and incest.

  Bludgeoned by shock, Larry Blankenship went to Kim and told her the story, begging her to refute it. She couldn’t. That was the end for Larry. For several days he composed himself, sitting alone in the apartment. Then he completed his plan, wrote a note to Bill Oliver, and shot himself in the lobby of the apartment building. It was, he felt sure, the only sane response to the banshee cry of his life.

  Which was where I came in from my tennis match.

  “Larry’s suicide,” I had said. “Was that when you decided to kill them all?”

  She nodded soberly, her eyes cast up toward me, intelligent and calm eyes, pragmatic eyes that saw life as it was.

  “Yes,” she’d said. “There was never any real question in my mind after that. If he’d never found out, if he hadn’t ended the way he did … then I don’t suppose I’d ever have done anything about it. But with Larry’s death their outrages became part of the present, part of my life—my observable life. It was too much for me to ignore … So I decided to kill them all since they were equally guilty so far as I could tell. I didn’t want to get so enmeshed in a huge plan. I just wanted them dead in full knowledge of why they were dying …”

  She called Tim Dierker and asked to see him. Harriet was out and Tim was trying to outlive his grief at Larry’s suicide. His guilt had almost killed him already. It was stifling in the apartment when she arrived; Tim had been going through his scrapbook. She suggested they go to the roof and he went willingly, babbling about how cool it would be in the rain. Once they were alone in the wind and rain she told him that she knew the story of her mother, her brother. He cowered toward the wall. She pushed him hard at the shoulders, he dropped the scrapbook, she shoved him again, he tried to scramble away. She struck him across the shoulders, wrestled his almost dead weight over the low cement wall. She watched him struggle to his feet on the four-foot graveled extension of the roof. As he came back toward her, she lunged at him. He recoiled and fell backward over the edge. She picked up the scrapbook and left.

  She went through the scrapbook carefully, saving the photographs of Rita and Carver. She knew Rita was her mother and, because he had tried to save Rita’s life, Carver Maxvill presented himself in her mind as her father. Somehow he might have known that he was the father … That would have accounted for his determination not to kill Rita. It had cost him his life. She was now redressing that particular imbalance.

  She called Father Boyle, introduced herself, and told him that she wanted to talk to him about the woman who had raised her, Rita Hook. She said she was anxious to
see whatever pictures he might have kept of their housekeeper. Boyle had received her amiably. He was alone for the weekend, with Father Patulski away. They had gone through the dusty photograph albums noting photographs of her mother and Carver Maxvill. She had already stolen the Carver Maxvill file from the newspaper’s morgue: She simply wanted to learn what she could about these people, her mother and possibly her father.

  Father Boyle invited her to sit a spell on his patio. They had chatted, the television nattering away nearby, and she had turned the conversation cold, had watched the old man go moist and gray as she told him exactly how he’d carried the packing case up the muddy, snowy hill on the night of December 16, 1944, how he’d slipped and fallen. She told him what she knew, suggested that he would in all probability dwell for eternity in a fiery Catholic Hell, and shot him. Nobody seemed to hear the shot. Nobody saw her leave.

  She bided her time then, involved with my amorous nature, waiting for the next opportunity to present itself. It came the night of her party when I took her to see the rats and James Crocker. She realized that he was staying round the clock. That night I took her home and Crocker’s goons smashed my face in. The next day, while I was theorizing with Archie and Julia, she observed the construction site. I called her that evening and told her about my beating and she commiserated. The following day, my nose preceding me by a quarter of an hour, I went to her apartment in a bluish funk, wanting to egg her into a romantic commitment. I knew I was going to Chicago to root around in her past some more and I wanted a clearer indication of where we stood with each other I didn’t get it. Her mind was preoccupied: She had decided to kill James Crocker that evening.

  I was on my way back from Chicago when she set out for the site. Crocker wasn’t surprised to see her: Yes, he’d been quite sure it was she who had been killing his old pals. Yes, he was alone. He was absolutely dead certain that he could talk her out of it. When she left the trailer, he was absolutely dead. And only two remained. But they were more difficult.

  Difficulty, however, was hardly an obstacle. The need to kill them all never lessened and she was able to compartmentalize her feelings for me and the obsessive drive for vengeance. While she eschewed involved planning, she did not want to be apprehended. Not before she had finished her task, in any case. The need to kill the five men had obliterated any of her other hopes; once it was over, she would cope. Preferring to remain free, she did not ultimately care if she lost her freedom. The men were more important …

  When Archie and I came to her with our revelations regarding her past and the apparent arrival on the scene of her “father”—Carver Maxvill—with the intention of righting the wrongs committed against his daughter, then she had ventured the artifice. She had written the note to herself purporting to be from the deranged Maxvill, urging her to kill herself, and had weighted it down on the table with the fingerprintless gun she had already used to kill Father Boyle and James Crocker. It fit perfectly with our theory and provided her with the precise out she needed: As long as we and Mark Bernstein believed that Carver Maxvill had returned as an avenging angel she was utterly safe. We could look for him forever. She knew he’d been dead for thirty years. So did General Goode and Hubbard Anthony … but they couldn’t tell.

  She then chose to disappear, leaving us to fear for her safety, believing that she was ticketed for a bullet because, as Billy finally got around to telling us that night at the lodge, she knew what they had done. In the meantime, the night after her disappearance, she fired once into the windshield of my car, hoping to frighten me off … Coming back from the lodge, Archie and I had cobbled together our Goode theory. He was the logical bet and we assumed he’d get loose from his police protection and go hunting for Kim.

  We were half right, about our norm. He got loose from his protection. Kim, however, had made the same assumption. Knowing he was both resourceful and a creature of habit, she went to meet him in the fog on the jogging path. Only one remained and time was growing short. The fog which blanketed the Cities was her ally and she used it.

  Again she was forced to rely on the predictability of her quarry. She waited on a side road, concealed by the gray wetness, watching his house. Trusting him to escape from the one place he was sure she could find him, she hadn’t long to wait. His car swirled out of the fog and she followed him through the rain, knowing almost immediately where he was going. Ole’s boat. It was a panic reaction on Hub’s part but he must have thought she’d never strike so close to her own preserve. Like the rest of them, he misjudged her. It was no great problem to board the boat undetected in the storm. He had seemed almost relieved when the door swung open and he saw her.

  They talked for a bit. He was almost noble in his decay and guilt and sorrow. He did not ask to be spared. He was the only one she regretted having to kill. When she pulled the trigger, she, not Hub, flinched, sending the slug slightly astray. She did not stop to see if he was dead. She simply left the boat, threw the gun onto the passenger’s seat of the bronze Mark IV, and drove north, where she somehow was sure I’d find her. She called Billy at a filling station, asked him to meet her. She felt obligated to tell him what she had done.

  I squinted up at the mustard-colored sky, shielding my eyes. Kim was far along the shelf, sitting on the edge above the lake. She had pulled her knees up and was hugging them to her chest. The sun was growing warm, drying the sand in patches. I went back inside the castle and felt the pockets of her army jacket. I found the pistol she’d used to kill Jon Goode and Hub Anthony. I took the other gun from my jacket pocket, the one she’d used on Boyle and Crocker. I went back into the sunshine holding the guns. She hadn’t moved. Billy was gone. He’d left her to me.

  I should have been thinking long thoughts as I walked across the expanse of layered stone. I couldn’t. I felt the breeze and the sunshine filtering through and the shelf beneath my feet. I loved her but that was at least a world away.

  She didn’t look up when I stood beside her.

  “Two-gun Cavanaugh,” she said distinctly.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “That depends on you, doesn’t it?”

  She might have been a character on the screen. I had somehow stumbled into her screenplay. It was up to me to handle the props.

  “You don’t seem quite real anymore,” I said. “I don’t know how to talk to you … what to say. I had an uncle once who was dying and when I knew it, I couldn’t think of anything to say to him.”

  She brushed a hand across her eyes. “Do you still love me?” Her mouth turned up at the corners. She might have been laughing at me. She had gone so far beyond me. She seemed full, rich, in control. I felt hollow. The longer I looked at her, the more I felt as if I were floating away, a man in a balloon going away.

  I tried to speak but there was nothing. I nodded, yes, yes …

  She stood beside me, squeezed my arm. She walked away. I knelt by the edge of the shelf and looked into the blank face of the lake. I dropped the two pistols into thirty feet of water. It might as well have been to the center of the earth.

  When I finally turned back, she was out of sight. I walked back up to the castle. Her car was gone. She had taken the coffee things, kicked the coals into the dirt. I got back into Archie’s car and moved slowly along the narrow path until I reached the highway. I took my time getting back to Minneapolis. It was over. The end.

  Epilogue

  THE MURDERS OF THE FIVE prominent Minneapolitans remain unsolved, though the files are still open. The search for Carver Maxvill continues. Halfheartedly.

  Kim and Ole Kronstrom live in Oslo near Frogner Park, where they are much taken by the heroic statuary of Adolf Gustav Vigeland.

  Mark Bernstein did not become mayor of Minneapolis.

  At Christmas of 1975 Archie Cavanaugh delivered the manuscript of his new Fenton Carey thriller, Homicidim Seriatim.

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ou have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1976 by Thomas Gifford

  cover design by Michel Vrana

  978-1-4532-6610-6

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