The Cavanaugh Quest (17 page)

She chuckled, applying the tiny paintbrush to her pointy nails.

“Well, he’s got to pull his socks up and get on with it,” Archie trailed off, muttering. He looked back to his block-letter printing, wiped his hands across his seersucker slacks, leaving a faint, dusty rainbow. “How many times in your life do you get a chance like this? I haven’t been this close to a murder in thirty-five years, not a civilian murder anyway. Makes my teeth ache, I wish I could get into it … Ah, hell, I don’t know what I wish. My fictional murders”—he waved at the bookshelves—“they’re satisfying, too. I always know what’s going on in them.” He undertook serious cheroot smoking and we lapsed into silence, staring at the blackboard. Archie sneezed in the chalk dust.

“We’ve forgotten another factor, a particularly curious one,” Archie ventured slowly. “Maybe the link … Somebody cleaned out the personal effects—whatever they were—from Larry’s apartment. The same somebody who stole Tim Dierker’s scrapbook? Does that tie it together, Paul? Something was stolen from each of those apartments …”

“Hurray for Archie,” Julia said as Archie beamed.

“Fenton Carey would be proud of you,” I said. Fenton Carey is Archie’s fictional reporter/detective, hero of what seems a thousand bizarre adventures, all dealing with murder.

“Indeed, I expect he would,” Archie said. “I’ll fetch some fresh coffee,” he said happily, and headed jauntily from the room.

“What do you think?” I said to Julia.

“I think that Archie Cavanaugh never stops thinking, theorizing, wondering. Here, would you screw this cap back on? My nails are wet.” She wafted her hands through the air. “And, Paul, could you close the doors? And light the fire?” I got up and went about it. “He’s just beginning, you know,” she went on. “He’s determined to treat this like one of his plots. I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually figured it out. Deep down, he’s still the indomitable Fenton Carey. The difference is only that Fenton Carey will always be forty. Archie’s awfully good when he gets to the blackboard. And he’s got a perverse mind. He just might figure it out, one way or another. His theory about the possible line—I hadn’t thought of it. But it makes sense. Maybe.”

I lit the crumpled newspapers under the birch logs and watched while the curling bark popped, caught fire. Archie came back with the Chemex coffee beaker and poured.

“Of course,” he said as he passed out the cream and sugar, “there’s Carver Maxvill. I’d actually forgotten about him. But I’ve heard the story, even though we weren’t living hereabouts anymore. And in those days people dropped out of my life fairly frequently—hell, it was wartime, I was working with people like Jon Goode in Washington and London, running agents into France and Norway and Germany and Greece and Yugoslavia, and some of those men died … So the fact that a man I’d known briefly years before had just opted out wasn’t so terribly thought provoking …

“But in retrospect, in terms of the hunting and fishing club and the fact that the stolen scrapbook points to the club, Carver Maxvill takes on a large aspect.” He put the coffee gear on his desk and placed a disc on the Panasonic Technics turntable with the little rubber feet. Quietly the Debussy thing for the saxophone began; Archie had the knack of making me completely relaxed. Julia had sugared and creamed my coffee and handed it to me.

“Now, if I were plotting this thing,” he went on, choosing a piece of lavender chalk, “I would be very drawn to Carver Maxvill.” He lettered the name quickly, decisively, dotting the
i
with a bang that broke the tip off the chalk. “I get most of my plots from the newspapers, anyway. A body turns up in a lake, no identification available, and I read the papers or call a friend on the force and watch what develops, who the guy turns out to be, and it almost always turns into something that could be made into a novel right on the spot. People lead the most extraordinarily complex lives, more often than not because what happens to them in the present began somewhere in the past, mired in interrelationships which twist and turn through the years, back and back and back to events which are almost forgotten. The past … Paul, it’s a good lesson to learn. The past is loath to relinquish its hold on people’s lives. It’s always a question of something coiled and hissing under the smooth surface … always something that somebody doesn’t want revealed.” He chuckled over the rim of his coffee cup. “Even in Minneapolis, believe it or not.

“So I find myself drawn to Carver Maxvill—just as a colorful possibility, a supposition. But he was a member of the club, and the scrapbooks, Timothy’s and Martin Boyle’s, tie the club into it.” He got up and brought out the old scrapbook we’d gone through the other day. “Now, let’s see, I must have a picture of Carver in here …” He flipped the heavy black pages, stopped. “There he is, that’s him. I didn’t even register on him when we were looking before.” His finger rested on a blond man, long-haired, in baggy pants with a tight belt, a white T-shirt, and dark glasses. His face was rectangular, even, and without the severe shadows in the sun he might well have been handsome. He appeared in a few other snapshots, approximately the same man. “Doesn’t tell us a hell of a lot, does it? Well, a picture is only a picture.” Archie watched the blackboard for a while, either thinking or expecting the blackboard to make a run for it.

“Now, it stands to reason that he’d be in Timothy’s photo collection, as well. He begins to show some signs of taking his place in the dance. Juicy prospect, indeed, if we let our imaginations go a bit. Suppose he’s still alive and out there, a different man after all these years. Suppose he’s come back. Suppose he went to see Larry Blankenship and after he left, Larry killed himself—suppose he got back into the apartment and took something that connected him to Larry … and what if he then went to see Timothy Dierker?” He was smiling, happy, knee-deep in his own element. “Ah, well, it’s a line of inquiry, you’ll surely grant me that.”

When I staggered sleepily to the door, my moth-eaten old Rolex told me it was two minutes to midnight. There were certain things in my life I trusted: my
Baseball Encyclopedia;
my old Rolex, which knew nothing of watches that told the date or drew their power from quartz chips; the Porsche, which refused to say the hell with it and die.

“Let me think about it some more, Paul. And don’t give up on your little chats with the interested parties. When in doubt, remember Fenton Carey and push on. As my English cronies used to say during the war, it’s early days. Be patient.” He slapped my back and sent me into the night. On the way back to town I listened to the music from
A Man and a Woman,
wished I looked like Jean-Louis Trintignant doing Bogart, and let my mind drift back to Peanuts Lowrey running down fly balls in the vines at Wrigley Field. Very peaceful.

There had been dry snow blowing on the platform, swirling in the lights and stinging my face and sifting down inside my coat collar the night I killed the old man in Finland. He had worn a black overcoat flapping around his ankles and the fur collar was dusted with snow; he’d believed he was safe at last, had come carefully through the snow-packed, squeaking streets of the village. I’d watched him from an alleyway, shaking with fear and sick to my stomach, tanked up on vodka, my toes nearly frozen. He’d walked as quickly as he could, clutching a worn briefcase to his chest, looking behind him and expecting the worst. By the time he got to the station he’d begun to believe he was going to make it and I’d puked the vodka into the snow. It made my head clearer and clammy sweat soaked through my clothing. My joints ached; it was hard to walk.

We were the only passengers. A wood-burning stove glowed, spit when the old man brushed snow off his coat. He caught my eye, his round spectacles flat and shining in the light. He sniffled into an old gray handkerchief and sat on an uncomfortable hardwood bench. Together, in the hot stillness, we waited. Just the two of us. My Rolex, old even then, said eight minutes to eleven when he scuttled over to the counter and bought his ticket. I stood behind him, mutely bought my own ticket. At four minutes to eleven he went onto the platform, holding the briefcase like an infant, protectively, determined. He went cautiously toward the tracks, peered down the darkness. I moved close to him, as if I, too, wanted the first glimpse of our way back to Helsinki. There was a powerful light mounted on the front of the engine and at two minutes to eleven we saw it, poking through the blowing snow, making a halo of whiteness in the darkness …

I was remembering it all because I was going to see General Jon Goode. It was early and bright with the morning sun slanting on Lake Harriet, turning it into the beginnings of flat silver that replaces summery gold. It was funny, the way that worked. I’ve never figured it out. Maybe it was me; my stomach felt just the way it had all those years ago and I had Jon Goode to thank for the memory.

What I’d done that night to save my own life had been something less than a success: Part of me, part of my humanity, had died with the old man. When it was over I was remote from life, cool to the passions of happiness. Maybe that was what I sensed in Kim Roderick, what drew me to her. Maybe that was what Anne had meant.

General Jon Goode met me at the door of the lofty brick home where he lived alone. The paint on the columns and window ledges was pristine, the walk straight, and the lawn neatly, precisely trimmed. A man in a vest and work pants was at work on a hedge with old-fashioned manual shears, beside him a wheelbarrow full of sacks of fertilizer and potting soil and tools. Goode smiled grimly, frigid lines chipped out of the rock of his face, and wished me a good morning. In his gray sweat shirt and sweat pants and striped Adidas running shoes, he had the quality of a miniature cut from a book of paper soldiers, square shoulders, small square head with its thick gray, close-cropped hair. His nose bisected his rectangular face vertically, with gray eyebrows and narrow mustache trisecting it horizontally. His ears were small and fine, shell-like, and even the tips of his tanned fingers were delicately squared off. He positively reeked of self-control, a viceless, taut, distant man.

“Good timing, Paul,” he said as I followed him back to his sun porch, which throbbed with plants and hung heavy with the output of a pair of whirring humidifiers. “I’ve just finished my morning’s run around the lake, like clockwork. The shape I’m in”—he chuckled dryly, settling into a wicker chair and waiting for me to sit opposite him—“the shape I’m in, I’m likely to live forever. Never felt better. I’d offer you coffee but, like smoking, I’ve gone off the stuff. The less you put in your stomach, the better off you are. I fast one day a week and …” He considered me appraisingly and frowned. “You’d do well to fast yourself, Paul. Two days a week, that would be my advice. You’ve really got to get a grip on yourself or it’ll be too late.” He gave his excuse for a grin and rubbed his hands together. “Well, what can I do for you, Paul?” The son of a bitch had just spent an hour running and he wasn’t even breathing hard. I gave him the folderol about writing the nostalgia story; it was beginning to sound so false to me that I cringed at repeating it.

“So I’m just gathering recollections about the club,” I said. “Dad got me onto it, then I talked to Tim Dierker, just before he took the big fall …”

“Awful thing,” he said brusquely, pouring orange juice from a glass pitcher into a cut-glass goblet on a wicker table beside his chair. A Swedish ivy drooped over the tabletop from a basket above. He gestured to me with the goblet and sipped the juice.

“But death doesn’t bother you quite so much, as it does other people, I mean. Not with the life you’ve led.” There was an edge in my voice and the way I felt about General Goode was working its way toward the surface of the morning. Goode ignored it, if he noticed it at all.

“Death is waiting for us all,” he said philosophically, arrogantly, as if he were wise in the ways of dying, as I suppose he was. “Death is the winner in the end and the sooner we stop fidgeting about it, the better off we are. I’ve seen a death or two in my time, men cut off in their prime and that’s a bad business, but Tim … Tim had a long and prosperous run for it. It’s not his death that upsets me, but the manner of it, yes, that’s upsetting. Result of a permissive society, some people say, and they may be right—hoodlums pushing old men off rooftops, violence in the streets, it’s everywhere. Neighbor of mine was out walking around the lake one evening a month or so ago. Our lake,
my
lake, goddamn it! And he was beaten, robbed, left out in the rain to die … car after car went by him as he crawled toward the street, nobody helped. I found him in the fog the next morning, unconscious, fractured skull and pneumonia, but alive.” He sipped some more juice and crossed his slender, gray-clad legs. “Hoodlums ought to be dealt with the way we did it in the army, in combat, or on a mission. I’ve seen bullies, criminals, psychotics—shot to death by their fellows and I shut my eyes to it … Simple justice, I’d say.” He leveled his pale eyes at me. “You’re right, I don’t look at death like most people. Death had been a part of my job. But that doesn’t lessen my sorrow at Tim’s death. Don’t confuse my feelings, Paul, because you don’t understand them.”

“Is that an order, General?”

“A request, Paul.”

I shrugged. I knew all about his requests. I asked him to tell me about the hunting and fishing club.

“I’m no fisherman. I’m a hunter, fulfilling the general destiny of man …”

“Ah, bullshit, General,” I said. “Don’t be obscure.”

“What’s the matter, Paul? Get out of bed on the wrong side?” He summoned up the taut little smile and poured some more orange juice. From a milk-glass bowl he scooped out a handful of pills, shoveled them into his mouth, and downed them with two long drafts of orange juice.

“What do you mean, the destiny of man? That sounds suspiciously like crap—”

“Men are predators, it’s our nature to hunt. We’re only animals, after all. There’s a predator lurking inside each of us and it’s the wise man who deals with the impulse. That’s one of war’s most beneficial aspects, provides a runoff for our aggression. The need to hunt, to kill, to strike at the crucial moment decisively, irrevocably—that’s to accept the nature of the human species …”