The Cavanaugh Quest (11 page)

There were other questions in my mind as I sat in the cluttered office, watching the afternoon turn gray. Who had been emptying Larry’s apartment of the little personal bits and pieces? What had been going on between Kim and Larry in the parking lot the day Bill Oliver had seen them?

And why the hell did I care?

It was raining hard when I finally got home. The windshield wipers on the Porsche didn’t work, which made getting home a treat. I fixed eggs and tomatoes and sausage and toast and sat on my balcony eating and getting damp, washing it down with a Bloody Mary. No good movies on the tube, no ball game; I put an opera on the record player and cleaned my plate and poured another Bloody Mary. I watched the rain, heard the girl laughing in another apartment—same girl as always. Her life must have been excruciatingly funny. I felt as if I were waiting for something.

It happened about ten o’clock. I was half asleep and the rain was still falling steadily, almost quietly. But I saw it go by my balcony, plummeting soundlessly through the rain. A bundle of somebody’s dirty clothes, a joke. But it had arms and legs. I was terribly slow on the uptake, wondering if I’d seen it in my sleep.

I got wet looking over the railing. Whatever it was, it was lying in the street far below and it wasn’t moving. It was just lying there in the rain.

I called the office in the lobby, realized it was closed, put on my raincoat, and went down to Oliver’s apartment on the other side of the building. He swore when I told him what I’d seen and together we ran through the first level of indoor parking and out onto the sidewalk.

The body had made a huge dent in the hood of a new white Pontiac Grand Prix, glanced off, and landed face down in the street. It was soaked and the head was split open and the mouth was a dark wound, blood-covered, as if the force of the impact had exploded outward like vomit. Water was damming up against the body, drumming on the white car, soaking us. Oliver looked at me, looked up at the building, rain washing down his face. He was pale.

We didn’t touch the body. Oliver picked up a soggy slipper of gray fur which had been jolted off on the other side of the car. It looked like a wet, dead animal. I remembered where I’d seen the gray stuff.

Pa Dierker was dead now and very messy with one naked foot flung out like a bit of bone.

I
T WAS A PEARL-GRAY MORNING
with mist hanging like netting from the trees in Loring Park. I had an early appointment with Bernstein at the courthouse, where he worked in a tight little office just off the squad room, a floor beneath the slammer itself. The traffic was sorting itself out more slowly than usual and I listened to WCCO, the ubiquitous radio station, which was indulging itself in an orgy of self-congratulation on its fiftieth birthday. They were working on my kind of music, the kind you don’t hear anymore. Somebody with a mean sax was playing “At Last” and I remembered the words from a long time ago. I’d romanced Anne to old stuff like that and we’d made love to Claude Thornhill recordings, which probably made her think I was insane. “At Last” carried me down Memory Lane, Third Avenue, and into Court Park.

Bernstein was sort of white-on-white, nubby silk suit in gray with too much padding in the shoulders, Sulka tie: he looked like Francis Ford Coppola’s idea of a fifties Mafia baron. I didn’t know to whom this image was designed to appeal but it wasn’t going to get him elected mayor, which was probably for the best, so I didn’t say anything. He made a sour face, looking as if he’d been at work too long already, and we went to the coffee machine in the hall. He also got a sweet roll wrapped in a plastic diaper. The nutlike protuberances on top looked as if they’d have been at home with an archaeologist. We went outside and leaned against the wall of the building, where cops kept bustling past us in both directions.

“Murder,” he said, crackling the wrapper, probing the roll with his finger. “Skin on his hands and feet all scraped to hell, little shreds of Pa Dierker stuck to the building. He didn’t want to go over but he just didn’t have the strength to keep it from happening. He probably didn’t know what was happening until it was too late. So, you know the routine, he knew who did it, probably trusted whoever it was … that loose gravel on the roof near the railing, like a warning track on a ball field, it’s all pushed around where they were standing and where they struggled. But beyond that, nothing—not the size of shoes, height and weight of-the assailant, or the color of eyes.” He bit into the roll and quickly washed it down with coffee. He was wearing heavy glasses and they were sliding down his broad, humped nose.

“Any motive? Have you talked to anybody yet?”

“Yeah, I talked to his wife and it’s a good thing I did, right then, because once the shock set in she pretty well turned to stone. I talked to her nurse this morning and she hasn’t said a word since I left her last night.”

“Motive?”

“What motive, for Chrissakes? He’s a harmless old man, Paul, he’s already ticketed for a hole in the ground—the wife told me that, he had two or three months … I mean, he wasn’t gonna make it to Christmas, dead cert. So why kill him?”

“Maybe the killer didn’t know that.”

“All you had to do was look, he was a precorpse. Whoever wanted him dead wanted the personal satisfaction of killing him. That’s my only theory.” He flicked a nut off into the street and bit the soft part; being a detective was no snap.

“Is that it? That can’t be all, Mark?”

“Before she went catatonic on us, all she’d talk about was this Kim Blankenship, or Roderick—let’s call her Roderick. She said that Kim had something to do with her husband’s death—said Kim had gone out of her way to talk to him at the cemetery, at Blankenship’s funeral—”

“Vice versa, Tim took the initiative in the talking, but the point is they talked, I suppose.”

“I know, I was there, but wait, there’s more. He refused to talk to his wife the rest of the day, that’s yesterday. She doesn’t know what Kim said to him but she insists it made him act funny. Back in their apartment he had several drinks, which he wasn’t supposed to do, and then he began to cry sitting in his chair. When she tried to comfort him he shoved her away, actually knocked her down. At that point she thought to hell with him, got dressed, and went to her bridge club with Helga Kronstrom. The last time she saw him he was sitting in his chair, the TV on, drinking, and she was just furious. She said she knew Kim had made him like that and he told her to shut up and get the hell out.” He peered up at me over the rim of the bun. “Feisty old bastard, right? I think I’d of liked him …” He finished the roll, stared at his sticky hands. “Anyway, let’s see—ah, the scrapbook. He was sitting there with the old scrapbook or photo album they’d kept for years, looking at pictures of the vacation they’d taken, back in ’38 to Banff, a trip to New York, Hawaii after the war, stuff dating way back.”

“Pictures from up north, too, I suppose,” I said. “The club? The old days?”

“How should I know?”

“But he did have pictures from up north?”

“Paul,” he said, losing patience, “how the hell should I know?”

“I guess we can just look in the scrapbook,” I said primarily to myself.

“There’s a little problem.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Gone. Not in the apartment, not in the building’s trash, not on the roof. Nowhere.”

“Killer took it.”

“Very good,” he said, heading back inside the thick walls, into the sweating corridors. He ran a drinking bubbler stream over his hands and patted them dry with his monogrammed handkerchief.

“So what are you going to do?” His heels clicked on the marble floor. “You’re a detective, Mark. You’ve got a dead guy.”

“Check out his friends, but it’s not easy. One, they’re very snotty, powerful old farts who don’t like Jews running for mayor in the first place, let alone involving them in murder investigations.”

“You’re too other-directed,” I said.

“Two, who does he interact with? His doctor and his wife and his pacemaker. Very limited life at this point. So who’s gonna kill him?”

“He talked to Larry Blankenship.”

“Well, nobody heard them, Paul, and they’re both dead, so you can drop that. His wife—she gonna kill him? Peck him to death? No way, she’s airtight, right at the old bridge table and a dozen cronies in the same room. His old Norway Creek pals? My God, the idea is ludicrous. Kim? Okay, say Harriet’s got something—I’m supposed to believe the lady throws him off the roof? What’s she got to do with Tim Dierker?” We stopped at the door to the squad room and I didn’t envy him his surrounding. “Dead end. So I’ll poke a little bit and not try to get all het up …”

Mark Bernstein’s approach to the murder of Timothy Dierker wasn’t very inspiring but I could see how unpromising the problem seemed. Where did you begin? So he assigned a couple of men to interview the building’s inhabitants and check on anyone seen in the hallways who wasn’t identifiable, to interview the staff and the Pinkerton night man and, presumably, the Pinkerton dog. It was a painstaking detail job and Mark didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t really blame him. But I wasn’t burdened with the search for details; I could look for the main chance, the long shot,

I had a late breakfast at The Hungry Eye. The guy in the next booth was listening to a transistor radio. It was another hideously depressing newscast about President Gerald Ford and Nixon, neither of whom had the charisma of Mark Bernstein, whose career might just be beginning. In a world with Ford and Nixon, with the smugness of a city like Minneapolis, where everything was so perfect and moral and came so easy, then everything might come to pass. Even Mark Bernstein. The fact that each day produced a new version of Mark Bernstein would logically work in his favor, would keep you from getting the other ones into proper focus.

I parked in the fire lane again and went upstairs to the Dierker apartment. I knocked and a small woman in starchy white opened the door and said Mrs. Dierker was indisposed. I was explaining who I was when a tall, angular woman came out of the darkened living room and took over. If Ma Dierker was a sparrow or even a shrike, this lady was an eagle.

“Mr. Cavanaugh? I’m Helga Kronstrom,” she said, curling a wide mouth back past yellowing buck teeth. It was almost a nice smile. Her flowered dress, necklace, bracelet, earrings—everything matched the tobacco stains on her teeth. “Harriet has told me of her confidence in you, Mr. Cavanaugh. So it’s almost as if we know each other, you know about me, I know at least a little something about you.” She backed away with a formal gesture of entry, watching her, you know right away that she’d always looked the way she did just then and always would. She reminded me of a grade-school teacher I’d once had and I wondered if Ole felt the same way. I thought of the snapshots I’d seen last night of Kim. It was an unfair world.

She ushered me into the living room, curtains drawn, Harriet Dierker lying on the couch with a washcloth folded across her eyes. She seemed to be asleep. Helga Kronstrom sat on a straight-backed chair and I found myself being motioned to Tim’s chair. It felt like a sickroom.

“How is she?” I asked.

“As you’d expect,” Helga Kronstrom said. “She knew Tim was dying, of course, but this is entirely different.” She lit a cigarette and the cloud of smoke seemed to make the room tighter, hotter. “Murder,” she said simply:

“Can you imagine why?” I said.

She stared at Mrs. Dierker for a long time and I waited her out.

“I understand that you know about Kim,” she said at last, continuing to watch the inert form on the couch. “As you might imagine, I’m not one to be objective about Kim. And I won’t bore you by dwelling on my grievances. But remember, Mr. Cavanaugh, that two men have died violently in the last few days and both of them … knew her.” She sighed, eyes cold with what could have been sadness. “Her husband, of course. And Timothy, who had helped her, used his influence in her behalf at Norway Creek. You might say they had her in common.” She finally turned back to me, her eyes half shut behind the smoke. Harriet Dierker snored lightly, turned on the couch, and brushed her hand across her face.

“That does seem to be stretching a point,” I said gently. “I mean, a dislike—however justified—is no reason to suggest someone is a murderer.” Both Harriet and Helga apparently were obsessed with the woman, and who the hell needed that? I wished I hadn’t come.

“I’m not a fool, or I try not to be. And long ago I accepted my husband’s frailty. But before you write me, and Harriet, for that matter, all the way off, you’d do well to learn something about this Kim. You’ve not met her, I take it?” I shook my head. “She is quite capable of anything, I assure you. She preys on men, her whole history is the same story.”

“Has she preyed on your … on Ole?”

“Yes, I would call it that. On his weakness. His innocence.”

“Which innocence is that?”

“Ole Kronstrom is a very simple man. I know that better than anyone else, Mr. Cavanaugh. A fundamentalist, an innocent, and she played on his misguided sense of—” She broke off and bit her thin bluish lip, the cigarette cocked short of her mouth. It seemed that she hadn’t accepted Ole’s departure as calmly as she’d thought. “I am not going to talk about it anymore. Not just now.”

“His misguided sense of what?”

“Paul, don’t badger her. Please.” It was Harriet, lifting the cloth back from her face, speaking from the recesses of sedation. Nobody wanted to talk about it so I expressed my sorrow at what had happened the night before. I sounded ridiculous. Harriet croaked out the same story she’d told Bernstein: Pa refusing to talk to her, getting drunk, knocking her down and abusing her, going over the scrapbook and crying. She didn’t know what it meant but Kim was part of it. The scrapbook was gone, she knew that for sure. She lapsed back into silence, the nurse came in to take her pulse, and Helga saw me to the door.

“Harriet tells me that you are looking into the reason for Larry Blankenship’s suicide. Is that the case?”

“Yes, I guess it is,” I said.

“Well, please listen to what I tell you.” I felt as if she were giving me an assignment and I was ten years old. “The answer to one is part of the answer to the other.” She shook her head, the grin struggling to return, rather ghastly, like an apparition. “Murder,” she said softly. “When will she be done with us?”