The Cavanaugh Quest (18 page)

“And you can’t change your nature, is that it?”

“Now you’re getting it, Paul.” The gardener had made his way along the hedge and was working his shears rhythmically beneath the screens of the porch. “That killing instinct, it’s the same damned instinct that leads a man to collect. To collect rare books or stamps or beautiful guns—it’s a version of the old killing instinct, a sublimation of it.”

“Behavior is changed, modified,” I said. “But not nature.”

“On the button, Paul.”

“Did you ever kill anyone? Personally, I mean.”

“I never talk about that kind of thing. Never.”

“I don’t blame you.”

I poked around in club matters for a bit, getting nowhere. “Going over the club members,” I said, “I ran across one I can’t find. Fellow called Carver Maxvill. I’m told he disappeared, whatever that means.”

General Goode pulled back fractionally, straightened in the chair, and set his goblet down.

“What the hell has that got to do with anything? How should I know what happened to him? He used to come up north with us, odd fellow. I wondered if he were a queer for a while, but I suppose that was uncharitable of me … But I was in Washington most of the time then. I don’t know anything about what happened to him. I don’t really care.”

“It’s funny,” I said. “No one wants to talk about the poor bastard, old Carver Maxvill. Father Boyle gave me a couple of funny looks and asked me to leave.”

“Well, I’m not asking you to leave, Paul, but I do have an institute board meeting on tap in about half an hour.” He glanced at the round gold watch with a butter-colored strap that blended into his tan. “I’ve got to take a shower.” He stood up, came up to my shoulder, but his presence was commanding.

“One last thing—”

“You sound like Columbo on the television, luring his guest star to death row …” He laughed quietly, moving out of the plant room into the long dark hall. I heard a power mower fire up in the backyard.

“Why would the murderer—who was no hoodlum, by the way—why would he steal Tim Dierker’s old scrapbook?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“Well, I think it had something to do with the club, it fits, he kept all those old pictures from up north in it … and his wife told me that he was crying and looking at the scrapbook just before he was killed …...”

“Listen to me, Paul.” He stopped, put his hands on his narrow hips. “You’re on your way into a swamp, I’m afraid. You’re wasting your time. Tim’s murder didn’t have anything to do with the club, which is what you seem to be implying. We were just an innocent bunch of friends, young men who enjoyed getting away from it all … Nothing sinister at all.”

I stopped again at the doorway. “Did you know Larry Blankenship? Or his wife?”

“I knew Larry through Tim Dierker. Not well.”

“Well enough to attend his funeral.”

“A favor for Tim. Wanted a turnout, the man had no family of his own, from what I understand.”

“And his wife?”

“I knew who she was, from Norway Creek. Nice enough kid, hard worker, that’s all.”

“You didn’t know where she came from?”

“My God, why should I? She’s nothing special to me.”

General Goode was growing impatient, which gave me considerable pleasure. He was controlling himself, however, which wasn’t.

“Well, when you can spare the time, I’d like to hear some of your memories of the north country, what it was like thirty, forty years ago …”

“Pretty much like it is now, I’d think. It doesn’t change much up there.”

“You don’t happen to have any snapshots, by chance? For the piece I’m writing.”

“Oh, there’s a box of them around somewhere, I suppose. In the attic. Or maybe they got thrown away—I don’t live much in the past, Paul, I don’t think about the past much.”

“I wouldn’t either, I’m sure, if I were you.”

He’d had enough of me. Failing the opportunity to court-martial me, he began to close the door in my face.

“I don’t think I can help you,” he said, all smiles gone. “I’m sure of it.”

The Crocker estate was only hinted at from the highway that circles through the village of Long Lake, curves back into the hills rising from the lake itself. There were fieldstone gateposts and a white fence which looped over the hills and disappeared in the middle distance among stands of trees; farther back still, glimpsed through the trees, was a green-tile roof, acres of green-tile roof with one chimney after another. The driveway clocked out to 1.4 miles, by which time I felt as if I’d passed at least one national border  and was among another kind of people altogether. I was driving over crushed rock, watching horses wander across the white-fenced fields, two children in jodhpurs and boots strolling among them. A huge turnaround with a dry fountain in the middle fronted the house, which lay in a crescent of three wings. There were several automobiles lying carelessly about the grass and rock, as if sprinkled: Crocker’s gunmetal Mark TV with the sun roof open, a red Cadillac Eldorado with the white top down, a Ford station wagon, a Mercedes 450 SL in gold, an old Thunderbird … I put the Porsche in the shade of a tree and hoped no one would be offended by it. It was one o’clock.

I was standing there like an idiot, staring at the vastness of the house, the multitude of long windows, wondering where to begin my search for Crocker, when my second gardener of the day came earnestly around the nearest corner. On the whole, it beat pounding the sidewalks of the inner city in search of a poverty-stricken killer who did his dirty work for money or out of habit or social pressures or indifference for his fellowman.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, this elderly gent with calluses on his hands and a stub of corncob pipe stuck in his mouth. “Are you Mr. Cavanaugh?” I ’fessed up. “Mr. Crocker said you’d be coming and I should tell you they’re back by the pool. Just make your way around this corner and you’ll see them. Just join right in.” He sucked on his pipe and watched me around the corner.

The day was changing the way they do toward the end of summer, the sunshine of morning giving way to furling banks of white clouds rolling across the crystal-blue sky like surf. A breeze had sprung up and flickered in the trees, worried at the striped-canvas awnings along the back of the house, above the rattan and glass and fieldstones. The lake looked gray as a cloud blotted out the sun.

A large oblong swimming pool lay midway between the house and the lake, maybe a hundred yards from either, and there was a bathhouse with patio and screened-in porch, a tennis court past some poplar trees closer to the lake, a stone barbecue area with tables and chairs and more canvas umbrellas. Smoke was drifting up from the gas-fed black barbecues and I could smell it as I began trekking across the thick soft lawn. Maybe twenty people of various ages and sizes dappled the area, which was so large they looked vaguely lonely, as if there’d been a party and nobody came. It was a long-enough walk to try to figure out who they were. Crocker in white shorts and a Harry Truman Hawaiian shirt was tending the grills; his wife in a flowing drapery of terry cloth was sitting with a couple of women a generation younger, all obscured behind sunglasses; husbands threw a football around with teenage boys; a couple of beautiful rich teenage girls sauntered back from the tennis court with their tawny hair and bodies flowing like syrup, positively edible. Some other people were standing by a dock way down at the lake, heaving lengths of rope back and forth, tussling to either untie or make fast a sailboat. A couple of small children flailed away at croquet balls, swinging their mallets with malicious abandon. The royal family at their leisure. I wondered if they were having fun and decided it was a stupid, middle-class question if ever I’d heard one. In their place, I sure as hell would have been having fun.

Crocker was by himself and nobody seemed to have noticed me in my chino slacks and red checked shirt with the epaulets you couldn’t see because I was wearing a beat-up denim sport coat. I hadn’t done the beating up. It came that way from France and cost me more because somebody else had obviously spent a lot of time kicking it around an empty room. Radical chic. And I was disappointed in myself for being so smitten by it.

James Crocker, with wavy white hair, heavy features, black horn-rims, and a gold University of Minnesota ring with a red stone roughly the size of a horseshoe, ground my hand in his and returned it marked damaged goods. It was a bad beginning; a kick in the nuts was the only possible civilized response. But he seemed a gruff, kindly man who probably doted on John Wayne movies and loved hanging around his construction sites in hard hat and gear. There were ten chickens laid out on the grills, sizzling and turning reddish brown.

“My famous barbecue sauce,” Crocker said, licking some of it from his stubby fingers. “Family tells me it’s wonderful, but what the hell can they say, hunh? Got the recipe down on the Johnson spread during his Presidency, real Texas-style barbecue sauce …” He grabbed a towel and wiped his hands, reached behind him and untied his smeared apron.

“I’d have thought you were a Republican,” I said.

“I’m a winner,” he said, rumbling some thunder in his deep chest. “I’m for whoever’s in office. Basic principle of mine, since all politicians are alike in the end. They’re no damned different than anybody else. Look, you want to talk, let’s leave these goddamn chickens …” He motioned to a ten-year-old. “Hey, Teddy, come here, do your grandpa a favor. Watch the chickens, okay?”

Teddy nodded. “How?”

Crocker gave him a dipper, pointed to the stainless caldron. “When they get to lookin’ dry and crinkly, dribble some of this red stuff on them. Nothin’ to it. Got it?” Teddy said he had it and Crocker led me off across the sloping lawn toward the lake.

“Love to have my family around me,” he said reflectively, hands jammed in the back pockets of his shorts. “It’s about the only kind of immortality you can have, I figure, through the generations you leave behind you when you go. At my age you get a new perspective, you see the end up there ahead of you … Doesn’t scare me the way I used to think it would. I’ve always been a realist and I know there’s no escaping it. So I enjoy seeing the young ones who’ll be carrying on for me. I want them to remember Jim Crocker with some pride.” We stopped to watch an impromptu softball game that was just beginning. The two tawny girls were running sort of awkwardly around, showing off their bodies, and I felt a twinge of panic for their fathers. “Now, what was it you wanted to see me about, Paul?”

“Well, it started out as an article I wanted to do on the thirties, the hunting and fishing club you fellows had up north … but then I sort, of stumbled into the Blankenship suicide and Tim Dierker murder.”

“What’s Blankenship got to do with it? I don’t quite get the connection.”

“I don’t really know. Harriet Dierker thought it had something to do with Blankenship’s wife. Sort of nebulous, but she asked me to find out a couple of things, snoop around a little. I was doing a halfhearted job and then Tim gets pushed off the roof … The thing is, Tim was acting very strangely the day he died. You remember, it was the day Larry Blankenship was buried. Kim talked to Tim at the funeral, then Tim went into a funk for the rest of the day, got drunk against doctor’s orders and the last time Harriet saw him he was going through his photograph album, sort of wallowing in the past, crying—”

“Damn shame,” Crocker said quickly, a catch in his voice, a sentimental man. “Poor Tim’s health was shot to hell. Who knows what was going on in his mind? The body and mind go together, one begins to fail and as likely as not the other starts to go, too.” He shook his huge head. “But I still don’t see what’s so unusual. Tim was dying. He comes home from a funeral, he’s depressed, his mind wandering around in the past, the old days when he was well and hearty, gets loaded and has a crying jag—seems pretty easily explained to me.”

“The thing is, the murderer stole the scrapbook.”

“Ah, who cares? Some nut, that’s all.”

“No, it won’t wash, Mr. Crocker. Not some nut, not an act of random violence. Somebody lured Tim up onto the roof, gave him a push. Somebody Tim knew, or so it would seem, not someone he feared.”

“Well, I sure as hell don’t have any candidates.”

We’d reached the shoreline and were pacing along the damp sand toward the dock. The sailboat was well out into the lake and the clouds were gaining on the sun. The breeze off the water had a snap to it. We walked the length of the dock and leaned on the railing. Shouts drifted from the water, from the other estates. If Gatsby had settled in Minnesota, where he belonged, he would have grown up and become James Crocker, contemplating eternity from the bosom of his dynasty. Crocker had made his money, building on his football fame. He’d worked his ass off so his descendants might have the opportunity, at least, to be wastrels. He waved to the lads on the boat, his sons, and they waved back, tacking or whatever you do against the wind. I’m no sailor. They could have been sinking, for all I knew.

“What do you think of Harriet Dierker?”

“Gabby. Sweet, though. Give her credit for that. She never really got over not having any children. I think she liked to pretend that Blankenship was their child, at least at one time.”

“She told me that Kim Roderick, his wife—”

“I know who she is,” he said, grinning sourly. “Pack of trouble, that girl. Temptress. Anyway, so I’m told …”

“Harriet told me that Kim had something to do with Blankenship’s suicide and Tim’s murder.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he exploded, his surprise going off like a bomb, “like what? She threw Tim off the building, I suppose? What an imagination! Oh, I can believe she drove that poor bastard of a husband to kill himself. I can believe that easily enough. From what I’ve heard and seen she’s just that kind of woman. Makes good use of her sexiness, you know—”

“Some people tell me she’s sexless.”

“Some people think that’s sexy, that act of hers. She uses her looks, that cool quality … Let me tell you something … I’m a happy man, happy with my life, but she even tempted me. Thank God, I’ve got too much sense. She was much too close to home, thanks.”

“How about Ole?”