The Cavanaugh Quest (36 page)

“Both at the Guthrie and at the park,” he said.

“It was a gruesome evening,” I said.

“She’s very stoic at times. She wondered if she should report hitting the boy and take the consequences. Perhaps I was wrong but I advised her against it. Then I called the police myself to see if there’d been any such accident brought to their attention—there hadn’t been, of course.”

“She could have killed the guy,” I said.

“She sees red sometimes, it’s a complex reaction. She strikes out, acts when other people only think about it—”

“Exactly.”

“It’s her sense of morality,” he said after a lengthy pause. “She is a fundamentalist, rather like me, only she’s got more muscles in her principles … She believes in right and wrong, in loyalty for those who earn it, punishment for those who deserve it.” He stared at me from behind those heavy black plastic glasses, taking my measure, adding me up.

“I have my doubts about right and wrong,” I said. “Whether moral abstractions exist at all in the real world.”

“It’s not an easy business, is it?” he said enigmatically. “But she’s one of those who believe in individual responsibility; Personal accountability.”

“You said the same thing about Tim Dierker,” I said, remembering the phrase.

“Did I? Well, I suppose I was right both times. Tim believed in paying for his mistakes.”

“Is that what he was doing when he went off the roof?”

“Maybe,” he said calmly, puffing slowly. “Who knows?”

I let the idea go and told him what I’d seen at the construction site. He shrunk into the couch when I described the rats, the man trapped with the rats clinging to him, the stench, the faces of the onlookers. I told him Crocker had threatened me in the matter of Carver Maxvill.

“Are you sure you don’t know why Maxvill gets to them all so badly … and not to you? Not to Archie? What has Maxvill to do with them and not with you?”

“Well, don’t forget that your father and I are very marginal figures in terms of our involvement with the club. It would be very simple for there to have been something we didn’t know about … but my feeling is that probably, no matter how unlikely it may seem to you, they’re telling you the truth … their motivations may not be good, but they fit the men we’re talking about.” He tamped the ash down into the bowl and applied a match to the remains.

“Do you think somebody’s killing the club members? I mean, systematically? Or do you buy the coincidence theory?”

“Oh,” he said, “I don’t have much in the way of theories—”

“But you’re one of them, you could be on the list.”

He gave me a surprised look and slid a huge hand back along the stiff white hair. “My gosh, I don’t think I’m on anybody’s list. I think people who are in danger of being murdered must know why, don’t you? Nobody would want to kill me, I’m very sure of that.”

“I’m convinced that there is a pattern, though,” I said, “and I’m also convinced that General Goode and Crocker are in it … Let me try this one on you. What if Maxvill is still alive? Maybe he has a reason for killing them … It popped into my mind and now I can’t quite get rid of it. No body was ever found, no indication that he’s dead … and why did he disappear? No one has ever figured that out either. And the mention of his name drives Goode and Crocker and Boyle and even Hub Anthony crazy.” I chewed up an apple slice from the slush in the bottom of the Pimm’s Cup. “Working from those suppositions, I could be right … if his disappearance was somehow the result of something the clubbies did to him, if they drove him out of town, out of sight, then mightn’t he have waited, his anger festering, until now, thirty years later, he’s having his revenge … taking target practice on his old chums?”

“He’d be very hard to catch, wouldn’t he?” he asked innocently. “If he’s the man who doesn’t exist … I’ve read that most murders are never solved. This could be one of those, I suppose.” He sighed and got up from the couch. “It bothers me, everything about Minneapolis seems to bother me … .Sometimes I think the people are fooling themselves, trying to convince themselves that they’re different, better, cleaner, purer than people in other places. I’m old enough to know it’s not true, not at bedrock—down there it’s just like any place else. But when something rotten works its way to the surface it seems all the worse because so many of us have convinced ourselves that nothing bad can happen here. Maybe it’s simple hypocrisy, but I think it’s deeper, I think it’s an ingrown self-delusion, smugness, self-congratulation … But it’s a hobbyhorse of mine and nobody much agrees with me. Well, don’t let me bore you. I’ve been thinking about Norway as a place to spend my declining years … Oslo or maybe Bergen, a quiet life where I’ll have time to add up my life, find out what it’s been about and if I’ve made any sense of it, learned anything …” He let that thought trail off. A police siren wailed on the freeway and the wind took a gratuitous whack at the remaining geraniums. He knocked his pipe into an ashtray and smiled at me. “Are you planning to keep after this business?”

“Until I hit a dead end, I suppose.”

“Why?”

“I’m beginning to think I’ve forgotten. It’s self-propelling now.”

“Well, don’t let it do something bad to you, Paul. It’s deep and I believe it’s dangerous … but you don’t need advice from me. I’m out of the battle now and I ought to mind my own business.” He stuffed the pipe and tobacco pouch into a bulging pocket and I followed him down the hallway to the door. He turned with his hand on the knob. “Forgive me, but what I really came to talk about was Kim and I must be blunt. What are your feelings about her?”

“Did she ask you to find out?”

“Oh, no, no, she wouldn’t want me talking to you about her at all. It’s just that I can’t help myself, my fatherly instincts. I’m curious. I want to know. But you don’t have any obligation to tell me, I realize that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never known anyone like her, never reacted to anyone this way. She frightens me at times because I think she could hurt me badly … but I can’t stop thinking about her. I can’t seem to control my feelings about her … I’m making no sense, she does that to me.”

“She said she thought you were rather alike. And confound it, you are. I guess it’ll just work itself out, one way or the other.” We shook hands and he left. I felt as if I were drifting in an open boat, no sight of land, my ship long sunk, at the mercy of the sea. The more I thought about Kim, the more confused I became. But it was encouraging to know that she’d spoken to Ole about me, that I did mean something to her. I went to the kitchen and made another Pimm’s Cup and sat down at my desk again. I’d gone over it all so many times: Larry, Tim, Father Boyle, Carver Maxvill, and Rita. Harriet Dierker and Kim and Ole. You try to fit it all together, in different ways, hoping like hell it will finally, accidentally make sense. But it was always a forlorn hope.

Who was Larry Blankenship and why did he cry when he talked with Kim in the parking lot and finally put a bullet in his head?

Why were Tim and Father Boyle killed?

Why did Carver Maxvill and Rita Hook disappear on the same day? Why did they disappear at all? And did they go together?

What was it about Maxvill that scared Goode and Crocker?

Why did Goode lie about being in Minneapolis when Maxvill disappeared?

Why did someone steal the file and the snapshots?

Why did I feel that Billy Whitefoot knew more about the goings-on at the lodge than he was telling?

And where did Kim really fit in? Was she just a bystander or did that role ring false? I thought about the boy on the bicycle … Then I figured, the hell with it. Too complex.

It was dark and the wind was whipping at the swing on my balcony, moving it like a ghost rider, making it squeak. I was just going to begin listing in my mind what I actually knew about the case when I realized how much my head ached and my eyes hurt. I popped three Excedrin, glared at my empty refrigerator, opened
The Baseball Encyclopedia
and closed it listlessly, turned on the Twins game just in time to hear a windblown fly ball by Danny Thompson go for a home run. Thompson was, to my knowledge, the only shortstop with leukemia ever to play in the big leagues—not an enviable distinction but a reflection on the kind of guy he was. I paced out onto the balcony, shielding my eyes against the microscope debris swirling upward, sucked toward Heaven.

The telephone rang at the other end, rang and rang and rang, and when she answered it, I could hear music and people laughing and talking. She had a hard time hearing me.

“Paul,” I said. “Paul, the guy who took you to the fights last night, then on to the porno show and the demolition derby—”

“Oh,
that
Paul … Hold on let me take this in the bedroom.
To
the bedroom, thirty-foot cord, I’m walking down the hall now, past the cheering throng and the lasagna cooks in the kitchen, around the corner past the bathroom’s tuneful flushing … and into the inviolate chamber itself the virgin queen’s very own bedroom … Hi, Paul, how’s tricks?”

“Is this the featherweight champion of the Guthrie Lobby?”

“In the flesh, throwing a victory party.
Body and Soul,
Canada Lee getting socked in the head once too often and getting those awful headaches, and John Garfield telling George Macready that he’s not afraid because everybody dies …”

“My God,” I said.

“Oh, there are sides to me you’ve never dreamed of, Critic. It’s the only movie I know but I really know it … Fatalistic Flicks of the Forties …”

“You’re nice but you may be drunk,” I said.

“Not really but I’m having a party. This is what comes out when I push the phony, awful, rotten, giddy hostess button. You have my apologies. I did so want to keep this face a secret—”

“You’ve wanted to keep them all secret, Champ.”

“Not true. Not the up-to-date me.” She turned her mouth away from the telephone and said, “Okay, okay, I’ll be out in just a minute. Personal call.” Then she turned back. “You haven’t told me …”

“What?”

“Tricks—how are they?”

“You really want to know?”

“I don’t know, do I?”

“I’m lonely and I’m getting scared—”

“Of being lonely?”

“No, of becoming dependent.”

“On?”

“You.”

“Oho, you were right, I didn’t want to know.”

“Why didn’t you ask me to your party?”

“Well, two reasons. You’re not a university person, a colleague, so to speak. And to the best of my recollection, you’re not a war-gamer. So you’d be hopelessly out of place on my guest list, which is made of university war-gamers. We are fighting the Battle of the Bulge right in the living room—”

“To Led Zeppelin?”

“Not my fault. A guest is using it for inspiration.”

“Well, much to your surprise, I wouldn’t be at all out of place. Not a bit.”

“You’re a war-gamer? You astound me …”

“No, no. But I am a world class lasagna eater. Heh, heh, that’s my little joke.”

“Can you bear it, then?”

“What?”

“Coming down, seeing me at my worst, putting on five pounds of lasagna?”

“Yeah, I can.”

“Well … hurry, then.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t the Battle of the Bulge but the German invasion of Russia that was going on when I got to Kim’s apartment. The game was called Panzer Blitz and all it needed for that last soupçon of verisimilitude was Anne standing in a corner hurling gasoline-powered Messerschmitts on the players’ heads. It was a casually dressed, heavily bearded, low-breasted group deeply involved in the specifics of blocking roads, getting tanks out of swamps, training artillery from hilltops, and trying to move troops in trucks. Led Zeppelin had given way to the Beatles and the volume was down; it was apparently time to think and conversations were carried on in hushed tones. There were maybe twenty people clustered around the table, some nibbling on lasagna and salad and debating the finer points of what seemed to be a set of rules more involved than the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Kim came from the kitchen to meet me, wearing Levi’s and a red-and-blue-striped rugby shirt with a white collar. It was awkward; we didn’t know whether to kiss, hug, or nod. She settled for smiling and taking me by the hand and leading me into the kitchen, which looked and smelled like a rather good Italian restaurant.

“I’m glad you called,” she said, chopping out a square of lasagna and dishing salad onto a white plate. “I was thinking about you, about what an awful night I gave you … wondering if you thought I’d gone mad, hitting old ladies and running down perverts. Here, try this white Chianti, it’s perfect with lasagna … Did you think I’d gone mad?”

“No, I didn’t really. But I thought you were being put to a pretty severe test.”

“Well, I don’t normally behave so violently.” She shrugged, put an end to it. She looked at her watch and I munched, more or less content. “This thing may go on forever, once they get started. You want to go watch? I’m not really playing—I’ve done Panzer Blitz so many times I just don’t think there are many variations I haven’t tried …” We went in together and watched. She couldn’t help herself; in a few minutes she was arguing with a dark, very heavy man wearing what appeared to be a fright wig. They couldn’t agree on strategy and I leaned back against the wall to finish my dinner. The wine was dry and sharp and cold. I watched her; it occurred to me that in the eyes of anyone who might have noticed, she must have seemed my girl, my girlfriend. I wanted her badly; seeing her with other people, people who knew her in everyday life, murderless and nonviolent—seeing her rubbing shoulders and arguing and laughing animatedly and picking up dirty dishes and whispering confidentially to one of the women, seeing her lean forward to get a better view of the game, straining against the Levi’s, catching a glimpse of her tiny brassiered breasts beneath the heavy material of the rugby shirt, it all worked on me, hammered at the distance we’d both been keeping between us. I finally cut it out, turned the record over to “Oobladi, Ooblada,” and took my dishes to the kitchen. A small man with a pointed beard and horn-rimmed spectacles was eating a piece of lasagna with his fingers. He looked up and smiled at me.