The Cavanaugh Quest (31 page)

The morning was darkening, another ominous, oppressive day with clouds and the smell of rain. I gave in and called Kim’s apartment. She answered sleepily and I told her I had some bad news. She groaned. I pictured her in bed, rubbing her eyes, stretching her athlete’s body.

“Father Boyle—another member of the club—they found him shot to death last night. At his home.” I explained the circumstances briefly.

“Do they know why? I mean, was it something simple like robbery?” There wasn’t much hope in her voice.

“No, they don’t know anything.”

“Does Ole know yet?”

“Bernstein said he’d be talking to all of them, in the way of a warning, I suppose. He’ll probably question them all again. Pretty closely, I imagine.”

“My God,” she sighed. “When did it happen? Last night?”

“No, they think a day or two before. He just sat there dead on his patio for a while. Nobody noticed.”

“Well, I’d better get hold of Ole. He may want to talk about it.” She paused. “But I don’t see why it has to be connected with the club, do you? I mean, there may be some other rationale behind it … maybe Boyle and Tim Dierker were involved in something else that led to this. I don’t know.” We chatted aimlessly for a few minutes, then I asked her something personal.

“Why didn’t you tell me that Billy was up in Jasper?”

For a moment I thought the line had gone dead.

“What business is that of yours?” She’d hit the switch again; life and warmth had ebbed out of her voice in seconds.

“I don’t know. I just thought you might have mentioned it. I got a tip that he was up in Jasper and I went up to see him—”

“About me?” She was controlling her anger again, rigid. I knew her mouth was tightening.

“No, not at all.” I wished I hadn’t brought it up; her reaction made me realize how much I wanted her liking and approval. Affection, that too. “But, you see, his … guardian, I guess you’d call him—Running Buck—took Billy out there, to the lodge, to do odd jobs and whatnot, he’d met those people, I thought he might be able to remember something about them … About either Maxvill or your aunt’s disappearance. You’d have saved me from relying on pure chance if you’d just told me what you knew about him, where he was—”

“I’ve told you I want you to stop this,” she snapped. “I’ve taken you into my confidence, I’ve told you more about myself than … well, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to discuss it with you anymore.”

“Kim, listen to me. I care about you. I’ve shared things with you, it hasn’t been a one-way deal. I’m not investigating your life, not anymore, even if that’s how I started out … I’m trying to find out who’s murdering these people, how it’s tied to the club and my father and the rest of them.” I heard her breathing. I had to convince her. I couldn’t lose her now and I knew how she was, that she could for whatever reasons inside her psyche be gone in an instant, irrevocably gone. “Try to understand me, what I’m after. It’s not you I’m digging at … I want you in my life, Kim. I want to be in yours. Trust me.”

“You infuriate me,” she said.

“I don’t mean to. I don’t want to …”

“Well, I don’t know what to say. Was Billy of any help?”

“No, not really. I think he knows something, it was there behind his eyes, but he wasn’t telling me. He thought I tricked him, by not telling him I knew you. We finished up in the red, on the hostile side. It just worked out that way. I think he’s got something on his mind and it’s bothering him.”

“He’s hard to understand,” she said. “He’s an Indian, he doesn’t open up easily. And there’s bitterness, too. I gave him some of that, I suppose.”

“He spoke very highly of you. Very highly.”

“I thought you didn’t—”

“It came up, that’s all. And … well, I saw your daughter.”

“Sally.” She pronounced the name clearly, without inflection.

“She’s a charming girl, a Gemini—she and I are both Geminis.”

“She’s got to get out of there,” Kim said. “She can’t be a professional Indian. Like her father.”

“She’s very beautiful,” I said. “She looks like you.”

“Yes.”

“Are you still angry with me?”

“I don’t know—it isn’t anger, Paul, it’s a kind of fear. I feel terribly threatened by you. Your ceaseless, pushing determination. You make me feel as if I’m not making myself clear. I feel drawn to you—I would certainly never, ever have gone to anyone else the way I went to you at the lodge … but I didn’t think twice about it, I didn’t worry about being rejected, I wasn’t afraid that you’d have a girl with you, I just flung myself into it, went to call on you. So I admit that, that I’m drawn to you … which by itself I find frightening. I wonder, what will I do if our relationship becomes sexual, if you expect me to respond sexually? Will I be able to do it? I can feel myself start to sweat just thinking about it … And there’s my fear, I don’t know what else to call it, my fear of my old life, the old times, and the way you keep picking at it. That frightens me, angers me, my life is my own—and you are invading it. I don’t know what to do, that’s all. If I don’t see you again, will my problems be solved? I don’t know … but I want to see you. Every time we talk, more of my life seems to get peeled back, more of my privacy torn away …”

I sat watching the fog mass over the park, dropping down like spray through the treetops. Her voice quivered at the end and when I tried to speak my mouth was dry.

“Look, come to the Guthrie with me tonight. They’re opening something or other, I’ve got to review it. Will you? Can you? I don’t know about Ole.”

“I’ve told you, Ole is my friend. He has nothing to say about what I do, where I go, he’s my friend. Yes. I will go to the Guthrie with you tonight. I’ll come for you, we can have a drink at your place.”

“You don’t mind coming here, to this building?”

“Come on, Paul, don’t be absurd. Seven o’clock?”

“Fine.”

“You see, I’m from the old school,” she said, a smile in her voice for the first time. “I believe in facing up to things, doing what you have to do, doing the things that frighten you.”

“So you’re going to do me?”

“We’ll have to see. But I’m no chicken. So, I’ll see you at seven and you can reveal the latest murder bulletins.”

I’d wanted to ask her about Blankenship, where the hell he fit into the story, but, talking about fright, she’d pretty well conditioned me. I was afraid of her, afraid of upsetting her and losing her for good. I wasn’t at all confident about how many more run-ins she’d be willing to put up with—maybe none. That scared me. Which made us two frightened people. I had all sorts of questions about Larry Blankenship but if he stood between me and the woman, the hell with him.

The adrenaline rush I’d gotten from going through Kim’s morning therapy got me on the street again. I felt like a tiger and tackled the tough one first. I flicked on WCCO to hear Ella Fitzgerald singing “I’ll Be Seeing You” and that got me around Lake of the Isles and Lake Calhoun, moving the Porsche like a burrowing ferret through the fog, past the mushy glow of stoplights, across the flow of traffic on Lake Street to the sudden hush of the lake itself, gray and choppy beneath the blur of fog, a man and his dog at the end of a jetty watching the droop of a bamboo pole. Peaceful. Quiet. Only the clunking of the Porsche’s guts loused up the morning and I vowed to turn Anne loose on the damn thing.

General Goode’s gardener looked up from a pile of fertilizer and told me it wouldn’t do any good to ring the doorbell because the general wasn’t home. I looked at my watch.

“He’s doing his roadwork,” I said. “Right on schedule.”

“Sure is,” he said. His eyes were sunk deep in his lined face, a permanently dirty face, as if he wore his occupation at all times. “Been down there about half an hour.”

I left him to his fertilizer and rolled the Porsche down to the cupped old bandshell and slid it to a stop by the shuttered popcorn stand, full of life one day and nothing but peeling paint and padlocks the next. The green benches stood before the stage and I walked through them, along the pier, listening to the water slap the pilings. It was hushed, as if everything had died at the end of summer. From across the water a bell rang and sailboats bobbed in and out of fog banks, sails furled, masts thrusting up like toothpicks in leftover canapés at a leftover party. I walked out into the fog, to the end of the wooden planks, and when I looked back the popcorn stand had disappeared. I was alone in the fog and I wasn’t absolutely sure I liked it. Wonderful place for a murder.

I walked back to land and sat down on one of the green metal benches. Quiet, lap, lap, lap …

I could hear him coming long before I could see him, the sound of the Adidas running shoes pounding the walkway. He was hitting a pretty good pace, muttering cadence under his breath, and when he saw me his internal discipline kept him from showing surprise. He jogged on over and stood looking down at me, gut sucked tight, breath beautifully controlled. A violent boot in the groin would have done wonders for him.

“Rather inclement,” he said, “and no concert scheduled. Do you just like to sit in the fog? Or are you waiting to see me?” He released a humorless grin from his dwindling store; at his age they were running out, and he gave them grudgingly, coldly.

“Yes, I am, General,” I said. “Hoping to continue our wonderful talk from the other day. I figure each time one of the club gets murdered, I’ll drop by and see if you’ve remembered any more about the old days.” He grimaced at the heavy irony. “Father Boyle seemed harmless enough, didn’t he?”

“He was harmless. We’re dealing with a psychopath—and if you’re assuming there’s a connection between Tim’s death and Marty’s, you’re reaching. Really reaching, Paul.” He stood with his hands on his hips, fine perspiration on his flat forehead. “You’ll find it was a disgruntled Catholic student who decided there was no God and Father Boyle a fraud, something in that line. People sometimes get killed.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Has Bernstein been out to see you this morning?”

“He’s coming after lunch. To no avail, I’m sure.”

“Boyle wasn’t harmless, General. You can pull that with Bernstein, not with me. I know all about you and Crocker. You got hysterical after I talked to you and went tear-assing over to Prospect Park to give him hell, to get him to shut up about Maxvill—”

“You actually followed us?” He drew his flat, regular eyebrows together. “Incredible, simply incredible. What do you think you’re doing, Paul?”

“And after you got through yelling at Boyle, I talked to him. And the poor old bastard told me all about you two blowhards and how Carver Maxvill scares hell out of you … Then, with all the subtlety of our famous Finland adventure, General, you had Hub Anthony soft-soap me at the Minneapolis Club. Jesus, talk about obvious! Do you get that from being a general?”

“I suppose you’ve told Bernstein all about this?” Sometimes I couldn’t help admiring him; he controlled his anger because he wanted to know where I was, what I was thinking. But there was an animal wariness in the normally expressionless eyes.

“What if I had? He doesn’t give a damn about somebody who disappeared thirty years ago. Carver Maxvill’s buried so deep in the past, Bernstein will never find him. And what would he do if he did find him—a guy who’s been gone for thirty years? What I’m curious about is this: Why do you guys worry about him so much?”

The sound of the bell drifted out of the fog. General Goode put a foot up on the bench, draped an arm casually across his thigh, and leaned toward me.

“I don’t like the past being dragged up again,” he said. “Nothing more than that, Paul, an unpleasant incident, a man vanishes, and now you are apparently obsessed with making some connection between the club and their deaths, between
us
and the deaths.” He took a deep breath. “Perhaps we overreacted, Paul, perhaps we should have just let it go … I’m sure we should have. But we did what we did. What can I say? My God, I was in Washington when the man disappeared.”

“Well, it’s gone too far,” I said flatly. “You’re not the only people interested in Carver Maxvill.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Brace yourself. Somebody stole the file on Mr. Maxvill from the newspaper’s library. Stole it.” That one got to him. “Now, I wonder who could have done that. A murderer, maybe?”

General Goode had paled beneath his tan, face tightening like the fellows on horses in public places, heroes made of bronze. One more turn of the screw enjoyed. He turned abruptly and went to the edge of the water, arms folded, staring out across the lake, waiting for reinforcements. He believed that men are predators, that it is their nature to hunt and kill. If he’d looked inside my head, he’d have been terrified. He’d have believed he was right. I went and stood beside him.

“Why don’t you explain about Maxvill?”

“There is nothing more to explain. We should never have made such a big thing out of it …”

“You know, you’re going to stonewall yourself right into the grave, Jon.”

“You’re mad. Disturbed. Are you threatening me, Paul?” He wouldn’t look at me; his eyes searched the fog.

“A prediction, not a threat.”

“You are mad.”

“I don’t send men to kill other men. I may be mad but you, Jon, are something very like a monster. If you would tell me the truth, whatever it is, you might save your life … but they’re gonna get you. The monster destroys himself.”

He finally turned toward me, half smiling, and put his arm on my shoulder. I looked at him in surprise.

“If there is a secret,” he said, “if there is, I feel quite sure you’d never understand. Only old men would understand.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Now, I must finish my run, Paul. One last word on the subject—I don’t fear death. When you’re old and almost finished there are worse things than death. All that’s left is what your life has meant, your reputation, what it’s added up to. You know, you see, that you’re going to die. The one thing that you leave behind is the memory of you. You want to leave it … intact.”

He chuckled and began to jog away into the fog.

Suddenly I was alone again.

I got back to my place at noon and called Grande Rouge. Jack came to the telephone with the hubbub of lunchtime at the Chat and Chew behind, his voice gravelly. He was excited and just a little smug.