The Cavanaugh Quest (14 page)

“It’s Harriet Dierker,” I said. She was wearing rust-colored nail polish, like ten pieces of exotic candy. “She was distraught by Larry Blankenship’s suicide, she asked me to look into why he might have done it.”

She nodded. “I can believe that, yes. Mrs. Dierker is an unstable woman. Poor thing.”

“She believes that you caused Larry’s suicide, that you in some way drove him to it. She told me a long, desperately involved story about your relationship with Larry …” I shrugged. “I don’t know what’s true. Or if any of it’s true. Which is why I was asking questions.” It was a beautiful room in the sunlight and the coffee smelled freshly ground. I never drink coffee black but this stuff was all right.

“
I
didn’t cause Larry to kill himself,” she said calmly, only marginally involved. “He was born with the need to kill himself, Mr. Cavanaugh. Did you ever hear the story about the scorpion and the frog?” I shook my head. “Well, the scorpion and the frog both arrived at the riverbank at the same time. They both wanted to get across but the scorpion couldn’t swim. So he asked the frog to carry him across on his back. The frog, carefully keeping his distance, said that he’d like to help out but he couldn’t because if he let the scorpion get on his back the scorpion would sting him and kill him. Well, the scorpion argued that what the frog was saying made no sense because if he killed the frog he, too, would drown. Now this made perfect sense to the frog, who listened a while longer and finally said okay, he’d carry the scorpion across. So the scorpion climbed on the frog’s back and they set out across the river. Way out in the middle of the river the scorpion stung the frog and as they were both dying, about to drown, the frog croaked out his last words, ‘Why did you sting me? You’re going to drown as a result,’ and the scorpion looked at him sadly and said, ‘I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.’ ” She licked crumbs from her fingers and looked away, into the sunshine. “It was Larry’s nature, that’s all. He had to kill himself.” Her voice was remarkably even.

“Harriet Dierker believes you are also involved in her husband’s murder. She says that you said something to him at Larry’s funeral that he went home and sat down and cried over his scrapbook and hit her and went up on the roof and somebody threw him over the edge … She says you’re involved in a murder.” I got up from the couch. The river looked clean from the twenty-fourth floor.

“All I can say is that I haven’t the vaguest idea of what she’s talking about.” She spooned out a chunk of grapefruit. “Mr. Dierker told me how sorry he was about Larry, that’s all. I thanked him and he left. He and some of his friends were very good to me when I was a frightened teenager who’d never been to the big city before. But that was almost twenty years ago. Do you realize that? I am thirty-five years old, Mr. Cavanaugh …” She leaned back and crossed one ankle over a knee and slipped her foot into a tattered loafer. “Some of the wives were very hateful toward me …”

“With some reason, I understand. I mean, you do have a record of going through men pretty damned quick.” I felt a twinge of perversity: I wanted to break through the wall of composure. I didn’t have a reason. It was a purely destructive impulse, maybe because she made me feel like such a slob. “First Billy Whitefoot, then Larry, now Ole Kronstrom.”

She just sat there putting on the other loafer, forcing it over her heel. She pushed the cart away.

“Since you don’t know me,” she said very quietly, “I wonder why you would say such things, why you would accept them so readily. I wouldn’t if I were in your place. I wouldn’t want to run the risk of making such a mistake, you know? Why not jump to the conclusion that I’m the injured party, that men go through me? I’ve had two children, you must be aware of that since your researches have been so thorough … It all depends on your point of view. Everything in life seems to depend on your point of view. Objective truth is an illusion. History teaches us that.”

“Does it?”

“Yes, it does. Look, I’m perfectly willing to help you. Your concern is something which is absolutely none of your business—it intrigues me, it really does.” For the first time she wore a faint smile. I was beginning to think she was rather beautiful in a tight, inhibited way. “But I don’t quite know how. Do I know why Larry killed himself? No, I don’t, beyond the fact that he was a doomed man, a man whose unhappiness was as much a part of him as his unfailing hope. Of course, yes, our marriage breaking up hit him hard but, good heavens, it was never going to get any better. He was a waiter, a maybe man, a hoper, a passive man with no sense of his own worth, no dignity. I am a doer, I am aggressive when I’m required to be, I’m a person with a very good idea of my own worth and dignity. I care what I think of me.” She pursed her lips, thinking. “Larry. Do you know what he was doing there in your apartment building? Do you want to know?”

“Did you ever visit him?” I remembered what Bill Oliver had said. I remembered the scene in the parking lot which had stuck so firmly in his mind, remembered it as if I’d seen it myself.

“Yes, I came by to see him a few times, mainly in my role of psychological counselor. He was fully aware of the difference between us, at least eventually, but he thought he could prove himself to me by pulling himself back together. He insisted on believing that I might come back to him, no matter what I said, no matter how carefully I reasoned with him.” Her face was composed, serious, as if she had resigned herself to reasoning with me. There was a tiny round smallpox scar between her thick, dark eyebrows. She was massaging her knee absentmindedly with her right hand, the rust-colored nails moving across the faded denim. “But I figured that if I befriended him enough to make him confident, to help him feel secure again after our breakup, then he could make it on his own without me. He needed some success … Then he’d be all right.” She sighed, recalling past agonies. “Well, Larry got a good job, an account man working in a middle-sized advertising agency. I really believed he was catching on there …” She smiled. “He started wearing their double-knit suits, the white belt, and the shiny white shoes—I know, I know, don’t make faces. It sounds pathetic and in a way it was, but it meant that he was fitting in. He grew long sideburns. He was becoming happy in spite of himself. But it never got that far. The recession hit, advertising budgets were cut, and the agencies had to begin laying people off. He was the newest man with the newest sideburns and the newest Thunderbird, so they let him go and told him not to worry, it was only temporary, they’d be asking him to come back as soon as business picked up.” She stood up and went to the window, where we both stood looking out into space in the middle of a sad story.

“So there he was with his new unpaid-for Thunderbird,” she went on quietly, “gas was up to sixty cents a gallon, he didn’t have a paycheck, and he just went to bed, acted out his own self-fulfilling prophecy. He was convinced he was a failure and he kept making it come true.” She turned to look at me, underlining her dismay. “Can you imagine, Mr. Cavanaugh? Here was a man in some degree of difficulty and instead of going out to find another job, he stayed up in that nasty little apartment sitting by the telephone, watching his silly game shows in the morning and adding up what he’d have won if he’d been playing for real, and in the afternoon he watched the soap operas, all the time waiting for the phone to ring …” She paced the circumference of the room, pacing off the steps, picking an apple out of the bowl and taking a neat little bite. She shook her head. “He really thought the agency was going to call him back, that it would just be a matter of weeks and he’d be back on the job … so innocent.” She’d circled all the way back and was standing beside me now; she held out the apple and I took a bite. It didn’t strike me as the kind of gesture she’d normally make; it reminded me of a peace offering.

“I’m talking way too much. You’re like an analyst I used to have, very nondirective. You don’t say any thing and I just keep talking. I must be nervous, mustn’t I? I’m not usually very communicative about this sort of thing. Ask me about the commando raid on the heavy-water plant in Norway and I’ll talk your head off …”

“Is that what you’re studying?”

“World War Two’s my specialty.” There was a peculiar lavender cast to her eye, speckles, maybe it was the sunlight. “I’m doing my dissertation on resistance movements in the Scandinavian countries. And I’m warning you. I hate people who say it isn’t a very ladylike subject. I’m not very ladylike, not in that sense.”

“Why history in particular?”

“The past, I guess. I’m fascinated by the way the past changes shape and coloration and significance as the years go by. How the past affects the present, that kind of thing.” She turned away self-consciously, took another bite of apple, and didn’t offer me any this time. “Anyway, Larry just began to disappear as a human being and it was very painful for me, a terrible thing to watch, and what could I do?”

“Well,” I said, venturing another needle, “you could have gone back to him—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said sharply. “Don’t you see, haven’t you been listening to me at all? I’m not going to disappear, Mr. Cavanaugh. I started out pretty far back in the race but I’ve worked hard, I’ve held up through tough times, and I’ve learned I can make my life what I want it to be. It hasn’t been particularly easy and maybe it never will be. But I’m a bright, capable person—I’m not very warm, I’m not overgiving, but I’m not scared to be thirty-five and I’m not going to disappear either. My God, going back to Larry would have started my own disappearing act, it was obvious. I won’t contribute to that—I’ve come too close twice, with Billy and then with Larry … In any case, I visited him, I tried to cheer him up, and I failed miserably. Yes, it occurred to me that he might kill himself but I misjudged him, I didn’t think he’d do it because that would have been the final failure, it would rob him of all the enjoyment another forty years of failing would give him …” Another woman might have shed a tear at this point but not Kim.

“That’s harsh,” I said.

“Just realistic, that’s all.” She knew I was judging her; I could see it in her face. There was a battle going on inside her head and I figured it was between her own inclinations and the desire to disarm me and get me out of her hair. And yet there was something about her that made me feel calm. The morning was drifting away and I liked being there with the bust of Washington and Klimt’s gold-leaf lovers. She went back and sat down on the couch. I watched her, not wanting to notice her as a woman, not wanting to notice the way her hips swelled to pull the Levi’s tight and the rich dark hair and the tan ankles and the sexy old loafers. “What else?” she said.

“What about Tim Dierker? Why would Harriet say that it was something you said that sent him off the deep end when he got home?”

“Really, you’ll have to ask her, won’t you? Tim expressed his sympathy”—I could see the slow, agonizing walk across the green grass with the smell of clover and the clouds moving across the sun, as if the old man were walking toward his death—“and I asked about his health, the usual things. We just talked for a moment. Meaningless funeral talk.”

“Can you imagine why he was killed, then?”

“You said you knew him. How can you ask? Mr. Dierker just wasn’t the kind of man who made enemies. He was a booster, a joiner, the kind of man who works hard each year on something like the Aquatennial … Who could want to kill such a man? He just wasn’t the type.”

“Look, I found the body, Miss Roderick.”

“I’m sorry. I realize that somebody must have killed him—I didn’t mean to be insensitive. But he just always
seemed
to be such a good man—”

“But he didn’t want you and Larry to get married, did he? His wife said the marriage sent him into a decline. From which he never quite recovered, she says. Why did he oppose the marriage? You were two of his favorite people, by all accounts.”

“I never discussed it with him. I’m not at all sure that what you say was true.” She was staring at me, coolly, remote.

“Maybe this is an easier one. Why did Tim and his friends take such good care of you?”

“They weren’t taking care of me, Mr. Cavanaugh,” she said, an understandable edginess chewing at the corners of her voice and slowly invading her eyes. “They were helping me. They helped Billy. Did they need any particular reason? Why not just look on us as borderline charity cases? And anyway, I worked very hard. I made a good impression, I’ve never thought it was any more than that. What can I say? I applied myself to what I was supposed to do … why not settle for the plain, obvious truth? Too simple for you?”

“Not at all. It’s just that the simple truth so often turns into something else. It’s like history, remember? It changes with time, becomes something altogether different the more you look at it.”

“Well,” she said, looking at the Cartier tank watch on her strong left wrist, “I’ve got to get over to the university. Any more questions?” She was smiling. The interview was almost over.

“Only one,” I said. “I’d like to hear your life story.”

She laughed aloud, shook her head. “Oh, no, not that. Never, much too boring. Anyway, I don’t even know you, Mr. Cavanaugh.”

“You said I’m not your type. Maybe we never will know each other.” I gave my boyish, rueful grin a try and deeply regretted it. “But I enjoyed this morning. And I appreciate your giving me so much of your time. You didn’t have to. Anne said I’d like you …”

“I am fond of Anne,” she said, moving toward the door. “She’s living her own life, too. We have that in common.” In the doorway she smiled a little mechanically. “Good-bye. And forgive my telephone call. Please.” She was still smiling when the door clicked shut.

I moved the Porsche over to the Sheraton-Ritz driveway, gave the keys to the doorman, and went down the outside stairway to the pool. The tables were almost deserted at the tail end of summer. The lifeguard gave me a surprised glance, tugged at the seat of her swimming suit, and went back to her book. I sat in the sunshine and ordered a gin and tonic and a well-done hamburger. The lifeguard, whose name was Sheila, had long tapered legs and broad shoulders and a mahogany tan. She had spent the entire summer reading Graham Greene thrillers and was working on
The Confidential Agent.
I’d suggested the reading program. She came over finally and scraped her chair across the cement. “Poor D,” she said hoarsely, “he’s having a hell of a time.” She bent down the corner of a page and put the book on the metal table. “What are you doing?” she asked.