The Cavanaugh Quest (51 page)

“Has he ever been there when Kim was there?” I asked.

Ole nodded again.

“I’m coming with you,” he said. “It’s my boat.”

We were fed irrepressibly into the rush-hour traffic made worse by the fog and the beginnings of an oily rain. It was dark by six o’clock and we’d come upon a three-car accident which cut the traffic flow to one lane. An ambulance was taking on a stretcher. Another mile ahead a semitrailer had jackknifed against the median fence and again only a single lane was passable. Faces contorted in anger and frustration behind clouded windows, wheels spun on the wet pavement, a purple gasoline spill spread out from the truck. Three police cars, red lights spinning, stopped us entirely while a tow truck slid and burned rubber trying to right the leaking behemoth.

It was another hour before we had gotten free and were heading into the rain toward the St. Croix. Cooper’s Falls, where the boat docked, was almost another hour’s drive under the wet conditions and we listened to WCCO as we pushed on. The story of General Jonathan Goode’s murder was on the news but they didn’t really have much. There was a tape of Mark Bernstein saying that there really was no comment he could make at present and no, he didn’t know if there were going to be any more prominent citizens murdered but he certainly hoped not. Then he coughed.

By Stillwater traffic had all but disappeared and we dropped down the long hill into the town, past the neon lights glowing through the fog, back onto the highway, where visibility was cut to almost nothing. I couldn’t get it over thirty because I just couldn’t see, so we sweated it out, silent, listening to the Twins at Tiger Stadium in Detroit.
Be safe,
I thought to myself,
be safe and be on that goddamn boat.
Hub was out there, too, fighting the fog, looking for her. Had he thought of the boat? I speeded up at the thought, felt the right rear tire slide off onto a muddy shoulder when I nearly missed a turn, and fought myself to slow back down. I opened my window and felt spray hit my face. Willie Horton hit a three-run homer for the Tigers in the bottom of the third when I was ten miles from the Cooper’s Falls marina.

“Here it is,” Ole said a bit later from the backseat. Archie jerked, came up from a snoring doze. “Take this gravel road.”

I felt the change in the surface of the road. The lights picked up high grass at the side of the road, barbed-wire fencing above a gully. Gravel flew up underneath the car. Archie leaned forward. “Slow down, for God’s sake … I think those are fresh tracks ahead of us … What am I saying? What do I know about fresh tracks?”

There was a light glowing at the entrance to the marina. I stopped when Ole gave me the word, turned off the engine. We got out and stood still in the fog. You could sense the boats, smell them and hear them moan as they moved in the water, waves slapping at the hulls. We made our way slowly out the slip beside the forty-foot Chris-Craft cabin cruiser with its gleaming brass and white paint and polished wood reflecting the blurred light from the fog lantern hanging on a post. There was a light glowing from the cabin.

“Kim,” I called. “Kim, are you there?”

We waited, then Ole climbed aboard. The boat swayed gently in the water; rain sifted against us.

“Somebody’s here or has been here. I don’t leave lights on.”

I was afraid and fear was passing through all three of us like a blade. All we had to do was open the door and step down into the cabin where the light burned. I was frantic to find Kim, to reach her before Hub Anthony did, yet I hesitated, looked from Ole to my father.

Archie pushed his hands down into the Burberry’s commodious pockets. When he took his right hand out, it was filled with the revolver the killer had left for Kim.

“And what do you plan to do with that?” Ole asked softly.

P
EERING INTO THE EYE OF
the barrel, I felt time drawn up tight, standing still, the deck shifting slowly beneath us. I braced myself, searched out my father’s face. Archie returned my gaze, eyes flat and hard.

“If Kim Roderick is in there,” he said, “I’ll put this thing away and we can all breathe a sigh of relief and have a beer. If it’s somebody else, I want a gun.”

“All right,” Ole said. “But I’d just as soon you didn’t shoot up my ship.”

We’d hung back as long as we could. Archie leaned forward and opened the door to the main cabin and let it swing back. There was a funny, harsh smell in the enclosure and someone was sitting on the upholstered bench at one side, leaning against the bulkhead next to the stairway that went down to the galley. The light hung from the ceiling and cast shadows which moved ominously with the rocking of the boat. The light brushed across the face looking at us. It wasn’t Kim.

“Hub!” Archie exclaimed, clutching the revolver. He took a step forward, stopped nervously as Hub Anthony slowly raised a limp hand in greeting. He made a sibilant moaning sound. As we stepped closer, we saw why.

It looked like another theory shot to hell. The front of his wheat-colored boating sweater was soaked with the blood. He had been shot by somebody who had failed to kill quickly for the first time.

We drew close, Archie muttering under his breath, and it was obvious that there was nothing we could do. Blood had soaked into his khaki slacks, welling up around the belt line. As you got closer, you sniffed the sweetish blood. We stood over him. “Sit down,” he croaked softly, “you make it dark, too dark …” His arm dropped.

“Who did this to you?” Archie said.

“Oh, no,” he said, “none of that. It’s over now, it’s better this way, much better; nothing left to worry about, doesn’t make any difference anymore—”

“Who?” Archie repeated. “How long have you been sitting here like this?”

“Long enough,” he rasped, “long enough to know I’m not leaving here … this is it for me. What a joke! I’m sorry, Ole, sorry about the mess …”

“Hub,” Ole said slowly, “Hub, who shot you?”

“What difference does it make?” Hub said, his hand fluttering at his chest, blood clotting on his fingers. “I can’t tell you, it’s right, it’s all right … .I’m the last, no more killing now … It’s over at last …”

“We know,” Archie said. “We know about what happened at the lodge, about Rita and Maxvill.”

Hub Anthony nodded.

“Goode actually killed them—” He broke off, coughing wetly, his body quaking, his handsome aristocratic features knotting in pain. “But we all went along with it … collective guilt, all willing accessories, hid the bodies in the goddamn ice cave … what a night that was … How did you find out, for Christ’s sake?”

“Rita wasn’t alone that night,” I said, and his eyes shifted to me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “She had Running Buck watch the whole thing … but he never told, not until he was dying, then he got it off his conscience and told Billy Whitefoot. Billy told us …”

A dreadful grin flickered on his pain-distended face. “Jesus, he knew all the time, that’s rich, that’s a good one … Billy, Billy …”

“She was blackmailing you, wasn’t she? She and Carver, that’s why you killed them—” I stopped: His face bore a puzzled, confused grin.

“Carver? Carver blackmailing us? No, no, no, you haven’t got it right at all …”

Ole passed him a hammered silver flask; Hub washed it across his mouth and immediately began coughing. Pinkish foam collected in the corners of his mouth. He shook his head violently, wiped his hand across the lips, glared at the watery stain on his tan fingers as if it offended him. He tried to straighten his back against the bulkhead, exerting himself, Archie’s arm helping to steady him, but it was too much, he was wounded too badly. As he strained upward, something seemed to break inside his chest, and thick dark blood gushed out of his mouth, poured down his chin, and soaked into the sweater. Ole groaned behind me and the sleeve of Archie’s Burberry went dark.

There was a terrible obscenity in seeing Hubbard Anthony’s natural grace and elegance awash in his own gore. My premier tennis partner, Christ’s sake, a murderer murdered, leaking like something in a packing plant, his chest pumping blood, foaming like surf on his chin, his life draining away. Who had shot him? If the killing wasn’t done, I thought again of myself. The killer had had a crack at me and missed. And maybe it wasn’t over, after all.

The hemorrhaging had stopped finally and Hub was laughing without making a sound, his even white teeth dark red with gouts of blood clinging like leeches.

“Not Carver,” he whispered, vastly amused now that the end was at hand and we’d made a joke. “Not old Carver … she was blackmailing all of us, Carver, too, all of us … aw, hell, it was a long time ago, Arch, people were different then, they cared about the way things looked … we were very young, naive, didn’t know what the hell was going on … And Rita …” A smile crossed the blood-streaked face. Ole was edging toward the door, groping for a handhold, his face ashen. “Rita was a woman of the world, she knew how to use us … how to make us pay …”

I leaned forward, ignoring the fresh smell of blood. His fingers were sunk into the folds of his sweater, clutching his chest.

“But what did she have on you, Hub?” I cleared my throat. I looked into his eyes, squinting in pain, sunk deep into his face. “What did she know?”

He looked away, grimacing, moaning. Archie had tried to look at the wound but it was hidden, secret. It was swamped in blood, matted, much too far along. Archie stared at his hands, dismay on his face.

“Oh, God,” Hub said, a haze of delirium shielding him from reality, “oh, God, I’m going to die and I’m so damned hungry … I haven’t eaten for two days, too scared … I knew I was going to get it, but I didn’t know who was going to do it … Jon, I thought …” Tears began to slide down his cheeks. He didn’t want to say good-bye, was fighting it. “Shit, now I’m done for and all I can think is I’m never going to have another sandwich, another Reuben … another hot pastrami on an onion roll and some coleslaw …” He looked up at me and winked slowly. “I know, Paul, I know, I’m sounding crazy, no great last words … You’ve got to lose some weight and shape up your backhand, learn to hit through on your backhand, don’t be afraid to hit it hard … Oh, God, I’m so hungry …”

Archie was sobbing to himself, wiping tears away and bloodying his face in the process.

“Why was she blackmailing you, Hub?” I had to know. I had to know what Rita knew. It was like picking a dead friend’s pocket but I kept at it.

“Christ, you’re so dense,” he whispered wetly. “She was our woman … Rita was our whore, we all used to screw her … all the time, passing her around, some weekends she’d never have a stitch on from Friday night till Monday morning … we’d take turns, I don’t think we ever satisfied her … we’d have her till we dropped …” He chuckled; it stuck in his throat. “That was our deal, we paid her plenty, gave her bonuses, she salted away a lot of money over those twelve, thirteen years … we were paying her a thousand a month, Tim and Jim and Jon and Marty and Carver—fifty a week from each of us, we got our money’s worth … it was the Depression, a lot of money for her …” His eyes were closed now, he was quiet, hands still, voice droning on. He was composing himself for wherever he was going.

“She had two children and we increased the money each time, we wanted to be fair with her … somebody’s rubber broke or didn’t get put on …” There was more bubbling red laughter, eyes squeezed shut.

“My God,” I said, “who, was the father? Larry’s father? Kim’s?”

“That’s life’s little joke, isn’t it? Who could tell? How would we ever be able to know? We used her all the time, somebody was always running up and having her …”

I shrank back, exhausted. I felt myself falling away in disgust. Was it what they had done? Or was it that … I loved Kim, that I knew what it had done to her, how it had shaped her life? I wasn’t a big believer in tragedy among the common folk, but it struck me that there was tragedy in this, fate working itself out, winding like a snake around an innocent, a child. “But you killed her,” Archie said. “You were paying her. Why kill her?”

“She wanted more, another hundred and fifty thousand, in one lump … we couldn’t handle that, it was too much … she threatened us, she had pictures she’d taken of us and we’d taken of her … it was the old story, our wives would get sets of the pictures, our friends, our enemies, she was really sticking it to us … well, Jon had a bellyful, he’d brought this gun Patton had given him, he killed them … Carver tried to protect her, he thought killing her was nuts … so Jon shot him and then he shot Rita … we all went along with it. What the hell else were we going to do?”

“So who shot you?” It was Ole.

“There’s been enough killing … it’ll stop here. Let it all die with me … We got about what we deserved. It all just caught up with us …”

“Who killed you?” Archie asked, insistent, badgering. “Who?”

“Aha, I’m not killed yet … but I sure am hungry …”

That was all. Hubbard Anthony was dead.

Archie and I had grown accustomed to death and Ole Kronstrom was not the type to panic. Together with the awful relief of those left alive, we went down to the galley and Ole brewed coffee and spiked it with brandy. It steamed in the tight quarters and we drank it silently, avoiding one another’s eyes.

Finally Archie said into his cup, under his breath, “Another theory, my last, down the drain. Wrong on all counts. Nothing but victims … no killer.” He sighed and inspected the blood all over his raincoat. “And now we find out that, no matter how you cut it, they deserved to die. Where does that leave us, then?”

“Not wanting to find a murderer,” Ole said, clinking his spoon against the cup. “Executioner, I should say.”

“But he’s still loose, whatever the hell you call him,” I said. “Don’t forget, he tried to kill me …” I looked from one to the other. The old men were worn thin. “The thing is, who is it? There’s nobody left … But Kim’s still in danger. If he hasn’t found her yet.”

“Maybe,” Archie said. The enthusiasm was gone. He was through.

“Give me the gun,” I said to Archie. He fished it out of his pocket and I put it in mine.

We decided to leave the boat and report the death of Hub Anthony the next day. Ole would simply go out to work on his boat and discover the body, stiff and cold. We finished the coffee, went past the remains, turned out the light, and climbed back on deck. A biting cold was coming with the fog and rain. We were carrying on the obfuscation the club had begun forty years ago when they began making their deals with Rita. I swung over the side and felt solid ground again.