The Cavanaugh Quest (16 page)

“I talked with him last night, at his home. He didn’t seem at all well …”

“Gout, I understand. Funny illness for a priest.”

“I made him sicker, I’m afraid.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake? Or how?”

“I got him talking about the club. The thing is, Tim Dierker was looking through his scrapbook the night he was killed. And he was crying. Harriet saw him. But when they went over the apartment after his death the scrapbook was gone. The murderer apparently took it. Stole it. Must’ve had a reason.”

He tamped the ashes down into the bowl and applied another match, sucking dryly.

“I wonder why,” he said.

“That would seem to be the question. I told Father Boyle and asked him if he had a scrapbook, one which might contain pictures taken up at the lodge. He did, he got it out, and we looked at it, and then he went all funny and threw me out …”

“Strange. But, ah, let me ask you, what would the connection be? Between Timothy’s death and the lodge?”

“Just that the scrapbook had his pictures. Along with other stuff from various vacations he and Harriet had taken years ago. I couldn’t see any point in connecting their trip to Banff, for instance, with all this.”

“All this?”

“Right, all this. You see, I’m working on an assumption which could be all wrong. But what if there’s some thread between Larry Blankenship’s suicide and Tim Dierker’s murder? Then it would all seem to somehow draw closer—Larry, Tim, the club.”

“Quite an assumption, though.” He was watching me through the blue smoke.

“Another little oddity. Boyle mentioned a man named Carver Maxvill, a new character. Do you know anything about him.”

“My gosh, Carver Maxvill. Now, that is a name out of the past. Sure, he was the fellow who up and disappeared one day. Just went off, I suppose. He was an original member of our group, a lawyer, quiet fellow. I knew him least well, I think. I’ve forgotten who was closest to him … Hubbard Anthony maybe, they were both lawyers.”

“He disappeared? What does that mean?”

“Just that. Caused a commotion when it happened, about thirty years ago, Judge Crater kind of thing. One day he was there, the next he wasn’t. Gone without a trace. But I’m no authority. I hadn’t run across h
i
m in years, not since I’d stopped going on club outings. You could look it up in the papers, though. But he couldn’t figure in this thing, he’s not your connecting thread, he hasn’t been heard from, quite literally, in decades.” He smiled a trifle wearily, as if all the memories were just this side of boring him. “As far as Marty’s scrapbook goes, it may have been a case of guilt which gave him a turn. Haunted by the past. It’s possible is all I’m saying.”

“Well, anyway, Carver Maxvill isn’t the thread. I’m thinking that Kim Roderick may be the common denominator.” He didn’t react, just puffed calmly, watching me. “Oh, I’m reaching, I realize. But she was a part of their lives, you might say. Larry’s wife. And Tim took an interest in her, took her under his wing.”

“I see,” he said. “Kim. Which is why you’re here.”

“One reason. And you were right. I did hear the one about the frog and the scorpion from her. I talked with her this morning.”

“And what did you think of her? You’re so close to her age, I’m genuinely curious.” He waited. Very patient fellow, Ole Kronstrom.

“She was a bit of a surprise, actually. I’d been led to expect something else—”

“By Harriet?” he said, a chuckle just being born.

“Yes, by Harriet.”

“Her batting average isn’t so hot, is it? First Kim, then me.”

“No, it’s not. I liked her. She’s distant, I don’t think she much enjoyed talking to me. But why should she have, for that matter? Harriet had told me that you’d been preyed on and destroyed by Kim, financially and morally ruined …” I let it lie there for a moment and then he picked it up.

“You know, I’m not a man to deal in confidences. I’ve always kept to myself, refused to gossip or to listen to gossip, never talked much about myself to others. Stoic Swede, Helga used to call me. She could never make me angry, she said I always kept everything to myself. And she was right enough about that—I’m not an open man, not candid about my innermost thoughts and feelings. Naturally, I’ve never had anyone I could talk about Kim to … I’ve wanted someone, at times, but there wasn’t anyone. Now”—he looked over the tops of his glasses, rather shyly—“if I want to, I can talk to you, can’t I?”

“I wish you would,” I said. Describing himself, he might just as well have been describing Kim Roderick. “If you can spare me the time.”

“For a chance like this?” He chuckled and peered inquisitively into the gray ashes, pressed them down, and lit a third match, got the dregs going again, and waved the match in the air.

“Quite naturally, given the state of human nature,” he said, settling back in the embracing chair, “people assume that I’m an old fool having a final fling with a very young woman, though Kim is at least a decade older than she looks. People assume that we have made a trade, her body for my money. It happens often enough, so why not to Ole Kronstrom, the sanctimonious old fart of a Swede? The joke is that they are wrong. Ours is not a father/daughter relationship by any means but neither are we lovers, you see? Friends. Never lovers. I’ve never slept with her. I’ve never seen her naked body … and I don’t care. I have had no use for sex for many years. My needs died early. Quirk of fate and, contrary to what you may think, a blessing. People always say some fellow is a poor devil, can’t get it up anymore, you’ve heard them. Let me tell you, when desire itself ends, by definition you don’t miss it. There’s no sense of longing—you’ve lost interest. Literally.

“So Kim and I are very quiet together, very relaxed, we read together or she tells me about a new movie we should see or she talks to me about her courses at the university. Kim doesn’t want a close physical relationship any more than I do. We enjoy each other, we go to Europe, we have a fine time. I love Kim, she loves me, but it’s not what Harriet thinks … It’s been my good fortune to know Kim, to be at peace with her. Do you grasp what I’m saying? Am I making myself clear?”

“Helga and Harriet believe that Kim killed Larry Blankenship and Tim Dierker. One way or an other …”

“Well, that doesn’t surprise me at all, Mr. Cavanaugh. Not at all. Harriet is a gossip, neurotically so, maybe psychotically so, for all I know. Helga has been hurt. She won’t get over it now and she’d enjoy my feeling guilty. I don’t, however, and I won’t. Harriet and Helga mean nothing to me …” There was a pinkness rising in his cheeks and his eyes were narrowing as he talked. “I’m profoundly grateful for Kim, for what she has meant to me. I’m an old-fashioned religious man, from a farm in North Dakota, direct line from Sweden, and I have my share of faith, a strong belief in God.” He sighed, short of breath. “You cannot pay attention to people like Harriet and Helga. You’ve got to take control of your own life, make your own destiny as best you can …   that’s what Kim is to me, she’s what’s going to see me through to the end …”

“What about what she did to Billy Whitefoot? Think of the shape Blankenship was in at the end.”

“Have you been listening to me, Mr. Cavanaugh?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, then, think about what I’ve said. Purge yourself of some of your preconceived ideas. She’s not the woman you’ve been told she is … Talk to Billy Whitefoot. He went back up north somewhere … And think, for heaven’s sake …”

It was time for me to go. The sun was gone behind the IDS tower.

“Did you keep a scrapbook?”

“Good Lord, no. What a thought.”

“Look, you’ve been very patient,” I said, “and I appreciate it. Just one last question: Where is she from? What’s her background? Do you know?”

“The north country is a maze, Mr. Cavanaugh, at least to me. You’ll have to ask her, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I don’t suppose it’ll come to that. Just my curiosity.” We shook hands and he gave my hand an extra little squeeze. He was a nice man. I thanked him again and went away, the funny man who kept asking questions. I was exhausted.

I
T WAS A RELIEF TO
sit down at my desk at the end of the day, in the quiet, away from all the voices. I was exhausted from the talk. There was no point in even trying to assimilate all the data, speculation, and hearsay. An article waited to be written, a free-lance piece I was working my way through on the summer’s smash film,
Chinatown.
For once the nostalgia had really worked: Suffused with it, the film hadn’t seemed phony. There had been a quality of heightened reality to the past that
Chinatown
portrayed and at just that moment I got to thinking about Nicholson standing on the bridge with his binoculars watching the soon-to-be-murdered water commissioner poking around in the dry, dusty gulch. It was an astonishingly real moment, but the question I was trying to answer was “Why?” It was a relief to think about somebody else’s murders …

Which was when Julia called to ask me out to the house for dinner. Archie wondered if I was still on the “case,” as he called it, she said, and he was dying to know what was happening. I told her that was a regrettable choice of words.

Driving through the early evening purple with little patches of fog lifting up from the marshland, I let the Porsche glide a little and listened to Bobby Hackett’s trumpet recording of “Time on My Hands,” humming the words I remembered, phrasing them to Hackett’s blowing.

Over lamb chops, mint sauce, and a corn soufflé I told Archie and Julia of the day’s interviewing. As I droned on, I wondered if Kim was still wearing her jeans and the Lacoste shirt, or if she changed to a dress for dinner with Ole, or if she had to study. Summer school must be over; she had to be between summer school and the fall term. Maybe she was working on her dissertation.

“Well, I’ve been giving it some small thought,” Archie said, lighting a cheroot and staring for a moment at the Dufy over the sideboard with its chafing dishes, bowls, darkly gleaming candlesticks, pewter odds and ends. “I’ve been trying to treat it as a plot, as if it were a book I was writing, trying to create a little order and make the pieces fit.” He stood up and patted his tummy. “Very nice chops, Julia. No meat, of course, but that’s a lamb chop for you, isn’t it? Come on, let’s go into the study and think through this out loud.”

We followed him, carrying our coffee cups, and sat down in big flowered chairs. The student’s lamp on the library table glowed yellow and there was a bitter little breeze from the open doors. The wind off the lake was spending its nights chewing away at the end of summer. Archie turned on a couple of table lamps and prepared for a demonstration. He used a large schoolroom-size blackboard on wheels when he was planning a book and he was rolling it out now from the wall so we could see it. He got his boxes of colored chalk from a desk drawer and banged a couple of erasers together. I could smell puffs of chalk dust, remembered coming to see Archie and knowing his work was going well by the smudges of chalk all over his clothing.

As we watched him, like a crowd drawn to a magician, he wrote the word
SCRAPBOOK
on the black surface. “This seems crucial to me,” he said, smoke billowing around his head, “the scrapbook. It sticks out of the general mess. Why does a killer steal a scrapbook? Now, that’s a hell of a question.” He slashed two thick yellow underlinings beneath a yellow word and dropped his chalk back into the proper box. Next came a blue piece of chalk,
TIMOTHY
in blue.
KIM
in red.
LARRY
in green.

“Timothy was linked to both Larry and Kim, Kim to both Timothy and Larry, Larry to both Timothy and Kim. Now, the first thing a mystery novelist sees is the classic, basic triangularity of it, the strongest possible structure. The triangle forms the most widely used basis of all for the mystery novelist, and the novels should reflect life, at least on such an elementary level. The triangle is usually sexual, yes, and that is obviously unlikely in this instance. But there are other kinds of triangles: money, jealousy, revenge—those are also basic plot motivations and I’d be willing to bet they play a part in the murder of Tim Dierker.” He drew connecting lines between the names, forming a triangle.

“But does any of it connect with Blankenship’s suicide?” Julia was quietly doing her nails with a Kleenex dipped in Cutex and a bottle of polish. “Can you devise a plot which links the murder and the suicide? That’s the point Helga and Harriet make, that they’re related. They say by Kim but we can probably all agree that they’re a little wacky on the subject of Kim.” She wadded up a Kleenex and dropped it into an ashtray, plucked another, and dried the nails. “But is there another link?”

“Right,” Archie said, staring at the names on the blackboard. “Does Larry’s motive for killing himself in any way connect with the murderer’s motive for killing Timothy? That”—he sighed—“would be perfect … but devilishly hard to pin down. Revenge?” He wrote the word. “Jealousy?” He wrote the word. “Money?” He wrote the word, shaking his head. “One driven to suicide, the other murdered … but what’s the link, mmm? A fertile field for investigation but they are, unfortunately, both dead.”

“At least I don’t have to go talk to them,” I said. “That’s something.”

“Why, Paul,” Julia said disapprovingly.

“Honest to God, I’m talked out,” I said.

“Nonsense!” Archie said, finally turning away from the blackboard.

“You can’t possibly be talked out yet, you’re just beginning—you’ve got ninety percent of your talking ahead of you. Read my novels, you silly fellow! It’s talk, talk, talk. You’re the interrogator, the man on the track, you’re the man who is trying to make sense of events which on the surface resist having sense made of them. Read me. Read Ross Macdonald. Read Raymond Chandler.” He brushed away my exhaustion with a quick, impatient gesture. “Talking to people—that’s the way it’s done, in fiction or in real life. What do you think Mark Bernstein and his chaps do all day?’ They interview people until their faces are blue …”

“Archie,” Julia warned, “for heaven’s sake, he merely said he was tired.”