The Cavanaugh Quest (32 page)

“Well, I checked it out,” he said, “spent the whole damned morning going through my daddy’s logbooks. I knew the war was still on when it happened. Y’know how you associate things with things? Anyways, I was looking at ’42 and ’43 and gettin’ eyestrain when I remembered it was right around the time of the Battle of the Bulge, just popped into my mind …”

“1944?” I asked.

“Right, December of 1944. And it all began to come back to me, the Christmas decorations up, hanging over the street, my sister visiting … she was a Wac, see … Anyways, I went through the log and sure as hell, there it was. The night of December 16, 1944, that was the night Running Buck said he took her out there. Daddy’s log shows that he talked to the Indian, talked to Ted, the weather was just terrible, snow on the fifteenth and sixteenth, then it warmed up and rained like billy hell on the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth … The police car got stuck in the mud out at the lodge when he went out there, he’s even got that in the log …”

“Well, I’m in your debt, Jack,” I said. “You’ve been a real help.”

“Y’know,” he said, “it’s mighty funny looking at them logs. My daddy’s been dead here, what, fifteen years now, and he actually wrote them logs, he was about fifty then, and now I’m fifty and he’s gone and I’m reading what he wrote … Sorta makes you think. Know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“It’s like he wrote that stuff down and put it away … and it’s been waitin’ there all these years for somebody to get hold of it. And when the time came, it was me—his boy. Funny. Well, my roast beef sandwich is gettin’ cold. You come visit us again, young fella. We ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He chuckled, apparently at his own inertia.

I hung up, then called Bernstein.

“How’s your ass?” I said.

“Got more holes in it than God ever intended, I’ll tell you.” He was eating lunch at his desk and his mouth was full. He finished chewing and slurped some coffee.

“So what’s the word on Maxvill?”

“I got the report right here—let’s see. Ah, right, Carver Maxvill, attorney. Oliver Avenue South—nice neighborhood—was last seen by his secretary, one Miss Anita Kellerman, leaving his office at four forty-five on the afternoon of 16 December 1944.
Finis.
No more Mr. Maxvill—”

“Jesus Christ,” I blurted.

“What’s so amazing about that?” His voice was suddenly edged. “Jesus Christ what?”

“Well, nothing,” I lied. “It was a long time ago … That’s all.”

“I hope you’re not fucking me over, Paul,” he said with exaggerated gravity. “I’m a very busy fellow and I don’t have time to play silly games. If you know something about all this, do yourself a favor and don’t get me pissed at you …” I didn’t know what to say. “What do you know about Maxvill?”

“Nothing. Just that he was a member of the hunting and fishing club, that’s all. He disappeared.”

“I
know
that. Are you connecting him with Dierker and Boyle?”

“Not beyond that.”

“You think Maxvill was the first to go? Dierker and Boyle the second and third?” He chewed on some more sandwich.

“Look, I’m a drama critic, a patron of the arts. I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”

“Paul, fuck yourself.”

In the months since this business came to an end, I’ve often counted up the turning points, and there were a great many of them. It was all so terribly complex. Every little aspect seemed to have a fulcrum of its own, on which it slowly went out of balance. December 16, 1944. That was certainly one of them, as important as any. It hung before me in neon during the few moments after Bernstein hung up on me, like the
TED
’s in Grande Rouge. Then I called Archie to meet me for lunch.

Norway Creek slows to a crawl at the end of summer. The kids are all back in school, many of the golfers are sufficiently golfed out, and the club returns to the employees, the people who make it run. The dining room was thinned out by one thirty, when Archie arrived, and I’d finished my second old-fashioned. Darwin McGill wandered through, clutching a couple of tennis rackets, eyes bloodshot; he nodded and went on his way, forlorn, nursing himself toward the end. He was brown as a penny, all the damage done inside.

We ordered sliced chicken sandwiches and I told Archie about my chat with Goode and the information from Grande Rouge and Bernstein. He listened quietly, raising his eyebrows at the proper moments.

“December 16, 1944,” he mused. “Well, that’s a break, a real break.” He shook his head, smiling faintly beneath the white fringe. “You just never know, do you? Truth being stranger than fiction and all. The possibilities just radiate out from a thing like this. Exponential growth.”

“It looks like it’s pretty well tied together, Dad,” I said. “Coincidence carries you only so far.”

“I agree. We have to assume there’s a connection.” He peeled back the bread and salted, then peppered the sliced chicken, scraped mayonnaise off the bread, put the bread back on, and then with his knife and fork cut a piece of sandwich. Archie had a method for everything. “The point is, what’s the connection?”

“They went off together?” I ventured. “I mean, it fits with what Boyle was hinting at about Maxvill and Rita … that he had a yen for women generally and, just maybe, for Rita Hook in particular. It fits what we know, Archie.”

He did it to the sandwich again. “But it’s awfully convenient, don’t you think? I know, I know, just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it can’t be true … but everything about this mess has been so obscured, so deep, it’s hard for me to take the easy way out.

“For instance, Paul, if they were going away together, as lovers, why would they leave all that money—one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of hers, according to Ted, and who knows how much of his? On principle? Because they were turning their backs on their previous lives? Very romantic but utterly senseless … No one would do that, surely. Unless they had some other source of income, a cache we know nothing about … Still, I think the money left behind casts doubt on their just pulling up stakes.”

“But why else would they be tied together like this? Why else do they disappear on the same day if they aren’t going away together?”

He made a bridge with his fingertips and pursed his lips behind it. “We must cogitate on that, I expect.” He squinted at me, looking into the past. “And how in the world did Rita Hook, not a particularly prepossessing person, ever amass a fortune of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars? That seems to me as big a question as any. As well as the matter of Blankenship.
Who
was this dreary fellow? We still don’t know why he did himself in, do we? He’s so terribly easy to forget, in death as in life, apparently. Yet he began this whole thing. I suggest you do a bit of work on Blankenship. And don’t look like that, Paul. It’s important.”

We walked back along the path past the swimming pool. It had been drained, lay like the fossil of something very large. Fog wafted across the golf course and as we watched, a ball dropped out of the grayness, plopped on the green. A muffled cry of “Fore!” came from the fairway. “Nice shot,” Archie said. “But such a stupid game.”

McGill trudged across a tennis court behind a wide broom, swishing puddles away. The more he pushed, the more the water drifted back into the same slight depressions.

“Where were you in December of ’44?” I asked.

“Washington,” Archie said.

“That’s where General Goode says he was.”

“I know.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about why Maxvill bothers them so much. Just suppose, somehow, they—Goode and Crocker and Boyle, at least—know where he went. What if Maxvill was in trouble … what if he had done something criminal, maybe embezzled some money? Now, that would explain his decision to hotfoot it and it would explain why they didn’t have to take their other money with them. And say the lads felt his deeds would reflect on them, maybe they were even unwittingly involved. Now, that would frighten them, wouldn’t it? And it might explain Goode’s concern about his goddamn reputation.”

“Very creative, Paul,” Archie said. Our shoes crunched on the gravel driveway. “Not bad at all.”

“And, carrying it a bit further, what if the lads were instrumental in arranging Maxvill’s disappearance? What if they talked him into it?” Archie was nodding at me to go on. “What if he’d done something naughty that didn’t succeed, didn’t make him rich … then what if they went so far as to pay him off just to get him out of the picture? Then he took Rita and with a promise never to come back, poof—they’re gone …”

“Ah, there’s hope for you yet, my son.”

“Could you possibly find out if Goode was in Washington on December 16, 1944? Is there any way to check?”

“Maybe. I could try.”

“Why don’t you? Hell, maybe he was in Minneapolis giving old Carver a send-off …”

Archie just smiled at me and slapped me on the back.

“A
T THE RISK OF LIFE
and limb, I’m going to bring up your prehistory once again. Need I duck?”

She leaned against the balcony, profile pointed, eyes scanning the western horizon, where a pinkish blur lay above the Walker Art Center and the Guthrie. It was typical of the time of year; the only memory of what we’d called the sun came at bluish nightfall, like a bloody wound, and then slipped away when you weren’t looking.

“You make it so hard for me to like you—”

“Wrong. You like me okay. I make it hard for you to love me, sugar.” I curled my lip wolfishly like Bogart but she wasn’t looking. Humor was not her long suit; she thought I was serious.

“I’ve told you,” she said deliberately. “The kind of love you talk about is quite beyond me. At the moment.”

“I was joking.”

“I wasn’t.” The breeze was moist, a faint chill lowering around us. “What about my prehistory?” There was a vague resignation in her voice, not a promising hope for the evening. Our first date.

“Well, your aunt and Carver Maxvill disappeared from the face of the earth on the same day. December 16, 1944. Interesting, don’t you think? Surely not a coincidence.”

“I was four. What difference could it possibly make to me?”

“Difference? I don’t know. I thought you might like to know …”

“Well, think again.” She finally turned to face me. She struck a characteristic pose, arms folded beneath her tiny breasts. She was wearing a chocolate-brown velvet pantsuit, a paisley scarf, her hair pulled back so tight you’d think her eyes wouldn’t close. I focused on the smallpox scar between the dark, thick eyebrows. “You’re the one who’s obsessed by my past. And your assorted murders and disappearances. Not me.”

“Let’s have a drink,” I said. “Salvage the evening. Okay?”

“By all means,” she said softly touching my arm as she went past me into the living room. “Scotch on ice.” She watched me while I poured the drinks, clinked the ice. “Look, don’t pout. It’s the way I am. You want to tell me about Father Boyle. Go ahead, tell me. I’ll pay close attention.” I handed her the fat little glass and she batted a faint smile my way. She was trying. She was doing her best; she was the sort of woman I couldn’t turn away from and dear old Anne knew it better than I ever would.

So I told her about Father Boyle, the old man sitting on his patio with a slug blasting his heart to pieces. She winced at the overly graphic description. She crossed her legs and stared down at her elegant little tan shoes with the dark-brown stitching. I ran out of story at some point and just sat staring at her, the tilt of her head, the slender tanned fingers curling around the glass, the long thigh, the cuff of her belled slacks hanging loose, a glimpse of ankle, the Italian shoes … She looked up finally, saw me watching her, said nothing, sat like a statue, neither happy nor sad, just there. Just breathing. Then I heard her ice rattle in her glass; her hand was shaking. But nobody was saying anything. It was dark in my apartment.

The telephone rang. She jumped, a trace of watered scotch landing on her leg. I reached for the phone on my desk, watching her smooth the spot away.

“Paul, Bernstein here. You old son of a bitch!”

“I’m busy,” I said.

“You sound doped up—”

“Not really. Bust not called for.”

“Look, kiddo,” he said with curious exuberance for a man who worked the hours Bernstein did. “Get this. Turned Boyle’s place upside down, not just where you were but the whole damned house. No pictures, no photo albums, nothing. The man with no past. You were right on the button, baby.” I could see him leaning back in his chair, puffing a cigar, loosening his Sulka tie, waiting. “So, give. What do you think?”

“I think that whoever killed him took the stuff. Now, you’re the hotshot cop—wouldn’t you call that an MO? Whoever kills these people steals their pathetic little pasts …”

Kim was watching me, expressionless, listening.

“Confirms the pattern, I guess.” Bernstein said. “Club members, stolen pictures. But where does the goddamn suicide fit—Blankenship?”

“Mark, you’ve got to do a few things in this life for yourself. That’s one of them.” He told me to fuck myself and hung up.

I finished my drink and said, “Funny thing, everybody who dies gets robbed … Blankenship’s odds and ends, Dierker’s scrapbook, Boyle’s pictures from the old days. Whole thing is tied to the past, funny—”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” she said, standing up. “Let’s go, shall we? The Guthrie awaits.”

The first act of
The School for Scandal
went all right; slow, overly broad, rather too close to a DeMillean model, but all right. Kim laughed moderately—more than I did, if it came to that—and we went to the lobby for the intermission with the storm clouds almost out of sight. We were having a Coke in the front foyer, wedged between the glass wall overlooking Vineland Place and a white wall. Happily we discussed Lady Teazle’s headdress and the very real possibility that it might collapse into the second row, doing someone bodily harm. Kim was enjoying herself more as the evening progressed, coming quietly to life, and I was standing close to her, possessively touching innocent planes and curves of her body with mine. It was all coming right—I felt it inside me—and then I looked up from her face and saw them, birds of prey, watching us. Harriet Dierker and Helga Kronstrom.