The Cavanaugh Quest (42 page)

Kim and Larry obviously had known nothing of their original sibling relationship when they married. Kim didn’t know yet. But it seemed to me that I had come up with the reason Larry had killed himself: Somehow he had found out the truth. Life had played him for a chump all along; nothing ever worked out right, not his career, not his marriage, not his childhood … and the final belly laugh from above was too much. The empty apartment must have mocked him, the new Thunderbird he couldn’t pay for must have jeered, the silent telephone must have hammered his last hopes to pieces, leaving him crying to his ex-wife in the parking lot and the child stashed away out of sight and the lie inherent in his neat summer clothes—it was all a dirge for the end of Larry Blankenship’s unsuccessful attempt at living. Then he’d discovered that the woman he’d loved and married and lost was his sister and then he’d written his considerate little note and shot himself to death.

I knew it was true. And there was a connection to the murders of Tim Dierker and Father Boyle; there had to be. There was no sense in half a pattern. The next thing I had to know was the identity of the father or fathers … Was it Ted for Larry and Carver Maxvill for Kim? Or not?

We began our descent through a gray cloud bank which didn’t part until the red landing lights jumped up beneath us and the wheels locked down into place.

I was afraid.

If the knowledge of the incest had moved Larry Blankenship to kill himself, what might it do to Kim? And could I bring myself to tell her? Loving her as I did, what the hell was I supposed to do?

By the time I fell into my bed the murderer had extended the serial …

I
WAS DUMBFOUNDED, UTTERLY CONFUSED
after a night of intermittent dozing. The wind roared at the windows like a hungry beast and the humidity weighed you down; dawn came slowly, gray and windy, but the sun followed, turning the freeway a salmon pink, and the wind and I sat on the balcony staring into the spaces between me and the downtown towers. My mind refused to attack. I called Archie and we arranged to meet at Norway Creek for breakfast.

He was cool and fresh in a seersucker jacket, collar open with some white chest hair curling up toward his throat, mustache trimmed, white hair slicked back, a paisley silk square in his jacket pocket. My nose still throbbed. He listened quietly, carefully operating with knife and fork on his eggs Benedict, as I told him the story of my Chicago adventures and the sad conclusions I’d drawn.

When I lapsed into silence, he motioned toward my plate and told me to eat. Outside a foursome was coming up the fairway and spiked shoes clattered on the veranda. The sun was unnaturally bright. It made my eyes ache.

“Well, you’ve turned the key, I think, yes, you have.” He leaned back and a lit a cheroot. “You’ve given us some room to move around in, very good work, Paul … I know it’s hard on you with this Kim business.” He stepped lightly there; Archie looked on romance as something that got in the way of the plot, whether in the coils of fiction or reality. So it surprised me when he forced himself to ask me how serious I really was about her.

“Serious,” I said. “I love her. She made me realize I still had that capability in my bag … It’s important to me, she’s important to me.”

“I see, more or less. You realize that, like most such undertakings, it’s exceptionally ill advised. The woman’s erratic behavior is not a closely guarded secret.”

“I know. I’m not giving her a grade, you know. I’m in love with her.”

“Well, there you are, then. You’ll have a problem, presumably you realize that. You’re an adult. Good luck to you!”

“It’s all part of life’s rich pageant,” I said.

“I expect you’re right on the button with the way you’re reading things,” Archie said, turning from the discomfort of the emotional life to the safety of a puzzle which with luck would yield to intellect and reason. “They’ve almost
got
to be brother and sister. It’d be a pity—in terms of plot construction only, of course—if they weren’t, if there really had been another brother-and-sister act at the same orphanage at the same time Kim and her brother were there. I can’t seriously consider the possibility, it makes hash of everything.

“And being brother and sister, it seems that Larry’s discovery of incestuous marriage might be enough to drive that unhappy citizen to suicide. Important question is, how did he find out? We’ll have to find the answer eventually.

“The matter of the father or fathers—now, that’s quite thorny, isn’t it? Patricia Wilson says the father of the second child, the girl, was quite probably something of a swell … and we know for a fact it wasn’t Ted. Ted was told by Rita that it was Patricia Wilson’s baby … Was Ted the father of the first child, the son? Who knows? It may not even be important—to anyone other than Kim and Larry. But who fathered the girl? Who was the swell, the ladies’ man, Rita’s ticket out of Grande Rouge? Pretty damn well jumps out at you, doesn’t it, son?”

“Carver Maxvill,” I said.

“Right. It’s a nice snug fit. Kim is Maxvill’s daughter.” He signaled for more coffee and when we were alone again, he sighed and used his lips, planning what he was going to say. “It’s a tangle,” he went on, “but I think I know who the killer is,
know
at least in my guts.” He smiled and went on.

“First, start with Rita’s money, the hundred and fifty thousand dollars she left behind in the bank for Ted—she may have gotten sentimental about Ted and left him that as a present … as long as she had more on the way. But how the devil did she get the first hundred and fifty thousand? Remember we discussed it before? Well, I’ve worked on it and, Paul, I believe you were on target, there’s only one way that makes any sense … blackmail. Payoff. Extortion. The club—who else, when you get right down to it?—the club was paying her off … it was the only imaginable source of that kind of money she could tap. I don’t know
why
they’d pay her … But we don’t have to know yet. We can make the assumption that the club coughed up the money. Over quite a lengthy period of time, though I certainly never knew about it in my club days … that puzzles me rather, that I could be so close to something, however fleetingly, and not know it … it makes me realize how little I actually had in common with them.

“Anyway, what is it that happens to blackmailers? They either connect for the big, final payoff and go away … or they get killed by their victims. My bet is that she connected for the big one … mainly because I can’t see these guys killing her. I suppose it’s a blind spot, but they don’t seem the type at all … No, they’d pay before they’d kill. With Maxvill, her lover, on her side, she connected for the final installment. By 1944 the lads could well have afforded it … who knows how much, another hundred and fifty thousand maybe? She left the first bankroll for Ted and the kids, never knowing he’d farm the kids out to an orphanage, and she and Carver went off free as the breeze. Alone, plenty of money, they had made life pay off for them …” Archie leaned back and stroked his mustache, grinning with a kind of grudging admiration. “Think of it, Paul, think how happy they must have been, imagine how powerful they must have felt, Bonnie and Clyde pulling off the biggest heist of all and no cops in jalopies hot on the trail. You’ve got to hand it to ’em, don’t you? Rita and Carver beat the system. She finally got out of Grande Rouge.” He poked his sunglasses down his nose, his eyes twinkling at me over the rims.

“Well, that’s the last time something happy happened,” I said sourly. I couldn’t stop worrying about Kim, what she had in store for her. A man rolled in a long one and did a jig on the eighteenth green. “So how did the happy thief become a murderer, Arch?”

“He got old, his wife, Rita, died, he came back to Minneapolis out of loneliness, a need to return to the scenes of his youth—whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter—and what does he find? Think of it, picture the old man who has abandoned his children and lived his life on stolen money … he comes back like Rip Van Winkle, life has gone on, his pals have grown old, too, and to his horror he discovers that they have
allowed
his daughter to marry her brother—after all,
they knew,
and they have had their revenge.” He was wound up now, rolling. “Pure opera, Paul! The club has punished him for blackmailing them by allowing the incestuous marriage of his daughter … for all we know of his son and his daughter, he
could
have fathered both children.” He looked at me again. “Showstopper, what? They have blighted not only Maxvill’s life, but Larry’s and Kim’s and their child’s as well. Now, if that’s the way Maxvill sees it, murder is a very logical response, don’t you agree?” He softly tapped the table with his finger. “Mark my words, we’ve got it figured out, Paul. He’s going to kill them all … .He’s gone off the edge, they’re all guilty … and it’s the incest that’s unhinged him.”

“It makes sense,” I said. “But why does it have to be Maxvill?”

“What do you mean? I’ve just told you—”

“But why not Rita? Who says it isn’t Rita that’s come back? Her motive is just as good as his, better … they’re her babies.”

Archie’s mouth dropped open and he scowled.

“Well, god damn it,” he whispered. “That never occurred to me … I’ve been absolutely hypnotized by the man in the case.” He took a bite of his lower lip. “It could be the woman …”

We drank our coffee in stillness, listening to the chatter of the brunch crowd beginning to gather.

“Crocker said he knew who the murderer is,” Archie said.

“Right,” I said. “And it could just as easily be one as the other …”

“But the pictures of Maxvill … the file being stolen.” Archie clung to the idea. “But,” he said grudgingly, “I see your point.”

We went out toward the pool on the neatly kept path, children and mothers anxiously using up what might be the last good family day at the club for that summer. Voices were higher pitched, as if the tension of the winter’s certainty up ahead were getting to them. Leaves were already beginning to drop in places. The hot sunshine was a bonus and there were large white clouds to the west, and who knew when it would begin to squall and turn cold?

There was a club tennis tourney winding up and Darwin McGill sat edgily at the top of the scorer’s high chair. He was as dark as an Indian and I remembered he was dying, or said he was, but then, who wasn’t? Archie sat at a table with a shade umbrella on the flagstone terrace above the tennis courts. “We’d better talk about Kim,” he said shyly, facing up to it. “What are you going to do about her?”

“Well, I’m in for the distance,” I said, dropping heavily into a chair beside him. The fringe on the umbrella flapped overhead. “It’s not a whim on my part. But God knows, she throws me nothing but curves … once in a while a big fastball, a big piece of truth up the middle, almost like a confession, as if I’ve succeeded in wringing it out of her, she’s done it a couple, three times … but mainly curves, nipping at the corners, getting strikes but only giving me little edges of truth. It’s unsettling, Dad, I don’t know who she really is … every time I get a handle on her she slips away, turns out to be somebody else. I don’t know how to pin her down.”

“She’s pretty well pinned down now, I’d say,” Archie said, soothing me with the calmness of his voice. “She’s a complex woman who has led a peculiar sort of life, more changes and uncertainties than most people go through in seventy years. She’s had no rest, Paul, no time to sit and think and put it together … Think about it—who is she most like in this entire matter? Who would you pair her with, of all the people we’ve come across and heard about?”

He toyed with the crease in his slacks, folded his arms across his chest, and watched the tennis match and the clouds piling up just beyond the edge of the city. I sat quietly, confused.

“Her mother,” Archie said somberly. “She’s got a lot of Rita Hook in her, Paul. A drive to get rid of her north country upbringing, the ability to cancel out one deal and make another, to go from one man to another, bettering herself. Bettering herself in every way, by going to school, by broadening her friendships and her knowledge. Think, of it, just the facts of it … She’s on her own, she’s making her way with whatever she has at hand. First, there was the need to get away from Grande Rouge. And she did it. Then there was Billy Whitefoot so she wasn’t all by herself in the threatening city, then Larry Blankenship and a full step into middle-class respectability; then Ole Kronstrom and a world of money and privilege and leisure … She’s got guts, the guts of a burglar, just like her mother. Now, she’s giving you a pretty good looking over … younger, plenty of money, a certain standing …”

“You sound like Harriet,” I said. “You make her sound like a calculating, cold-blooded monster—”

“Nonsense, I said nothing of the kind and I won’t have you say I did … I was analyzing a character—that is, a person—in an objective manner from the evidence at hand. I was making no accusations of any kind.” He tweezed his lips between thumb and forefinger, tugging on them. “In point of fact, I’m rather in awe of her. She’s obviously got a hell of a backbone, real gumption. She’s strong, Paul, in a way that you and I will never be strong. She’s
had
to be strong … that’s the point of what I’m telling you. Don’t worry about her—she’s got a lot of sides to her character, you’ve seen some of them, and she’s adaptable. She does what she has to do to survive. She’s not going to come apart in the face of the truth. So don’t be frightened of what you’re afraid is her fragility. If she were fragile, breakable, she’d have gotten broken a long time ago. If you’re worried about her learning the truth of her parentage and her relationship to Larry, forget it—she can take it.”

“All right,” I said, “supposing all that’s true, I’m still afraid … I don’t quite know what I mean, but I’m afraid that something may happen to her—”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m afraid that she’s in danger, too. Now, damn it, don’t look at me that way, I can’t help it. She’s so elusive, so mysterious, she’s connected with the whole thing in such peculiar, convoluted, coincidental ways. I’m afraid she’s going to get sucked all the way in … I’m afraid that she’s going to become a victim.” I looked away at the tennis action; they seemed to be playing faster, trying to beat the threat of rain, but the sun was still hot. “It’s just a feeling, that’s all.”