The Cavanaugh Quest (52 page)

We drove back to Minneapolis and dropped Ole at his darkened parking lot. It was midnight and the city was quiet in the cold rain.

“I’ve got to find Kim,” I said.

“You’re the one to do it, Paul. You’re the one now …” Ole shook my hand.

I drove Archie back to my place. I got him bundled up under blankets. I made him a hot toddy and told him to go to sleep. He looked like an old man. He smiled halfheartedly and accepted the toddy.

“I’ve got to find her, Dad, you know that. I love her …”

“It’s over, Paul,” he said sleepily. “It’s over for me, anyway, the ones who had to die are dead. Very nicely rounded off … Take the gun, go find Kim, but I think the killing is over … Just find the woman, that’s all. That’s all that’s left … You see, Billy—we forgot about Billy. And he doesn’t know Kim’s gone … He wouldn’t kill her, would he? What they did to her … that’s why he killed them.” He ran his tongue over dry lips, closed his eyes. Tired.

I kissed my father impulsively and went downstairs to his car. There was someone standing in the shadows outside in visitors’ parking. The rain splattered on the tarmac and I felt the hair on my neck stiffen. The shadowy figure moved, came toward me. I flattened myself against the wall, rain dripping in my face. I felt for the gun. The figure stepped into the light. It was the Pinkerton man. He smiled and went inside.

I knew where I was going. I knew where Kim was and I was trying to arrange the whole story in my weary mind. I had to drive north and there was so little time.

I
HEADED OUT ON THE
freeway toward Duluth in the dead of the cold, wet night, wipers working methodically across the vast expanse of glass fronting Archie’s automobile. The rain spit out of the darkness and I drove twenty-mile stretches without seeing another pair of headlamps. Franklin Hobbs was cooing his way through the night on WCCO. Frank Sinatra sang “Time After Time” and I remembered the words from high school romances. Al Hibbler sang “Unchained Melody” and I let the huge car take over. I felt oddly peaceful, alone, free of surprises and things I could neither control nor understand. I still wasn’t having much success at getting a moral fix on what had been going on but I realized with a sense of ironic detachment that I was at least able to be calm while considering it. My nose didn’t hurt much anymore. I was tired but I wasn’t dead and that put me ahead of the game.

As the invisible night slipped past outside, I hummed to the music and thought about it all, calmly, rationally, analytically. There was, in the first place, the enormity of what the lads had done to Rita and Carver that night at the lodge. Frightened, frustrated—but also arrogant, full of the certainty that they could kill and get away with it. Why? What made them so sure, so confident? I was no psychologist; I made no pretense of knowing the answer. The fact was they’d done it and they had gotten away with it, almost … A quirk, a freak had brought them to grief, an old man who might just as well have taken his secret to the grave. And even if he’d only made his deathbed confession, it took the unlikely marriage of Kim to
both
Billy and Larry to crystalize the mordant joke.

In the second place there was the awesome retribution visited on the lads from thirty years’ distance. They had sat on their guilt so long, had let the insulation of time cut them off from the unpleasantness; it must almost have passed into misty legend, even for them. Remembered like wartime experiences, heroics and cowardice, the moral imperative of the act long since bled dry. It had happened and there was nothing to be done; there would be no summons from the icy grave.

But they had been unfortunate: Someone had not been quite so willing to let bygones be bygones, someone had carried the past inside, the seeds of retribution, someone whose morality demanded an accounting. And so had waited for them at the end.

At some sticking point, in one determined, unforgiving soul, the caldron had finally boiled over.
You will not go free,
an inner voice had said, authority echoing,
You will pay for your sins.
I shook my head and wiped my eyes; too Biblical. Still, the idea was about right.

But who had known it all? And why had it come so long after the fact?

The Maxvill theory had fit so beautifully: Back from the chasm of anonymity, life in shambles and nearing the end, he had struck back and finished them off. But he’d been dead for thirty years.

The Goode theory had made sense, too. He’d been a killer all his life and now, in a spasm of fear, he saw his comrades threatening to clear the fields of their consciences … A collective conscience or only one, it made no difference: The truth from whatever source was working its way back to the surface after all those years of safety … But then someone killed him, too.

The Hub Anthony theory made a kind of sense as well as seeming to be the only, one left: Everyone else, was dead,
ergo
the one remaining … etc. The judge, the man with the most to lose, the final irony of elegance and style driven to foulest murder; he had fit the killer-from-within-the-group scenario. And at that point you took whoever happened to be left and made the facts fit. But he was shot to death, too.

They were all dead and Agatha Christie would have loved it. Their lives had gone rotten early on and yet they had lived them out, trying to hide the truth with respectability. Martin Boyle … I remembered our discussion of evil, cast now in an entirely different light. A
priest
… A football hero, a soldier, a judge, a businessman …

Someone hadn’t forgotten. Someone hadn’t let them off the hook.

Billy. Why had he never really crossed my mind? Because he was an Indian, because I was a part of Minnesota, because an Indian was our invisible man? Because a motive never occurred to me … because he wasn’t one of
us,
those of us who seemed a part of the present? Because he had seemed to help, because he’d finally been the one who had revealed the most to us, most dramatically?

What did I know about him, after all?

For one thing, he still loved Kim. He held nothing against her, found her guilty of nothing. He lived with their daughter—the image of Kim—always before him. He hadn’t remarried. And he knew what they’d done to her mother, to her life … he knew about Larry, the fact that Larry was Kim’s brother. If he loved Kim still, he didn’t need more of a motive than that …

And he knew about death. He knew what had happened to his father; any Indian in Minnesota had had his brush with death. And he probably honored a code of behavior; he felt certain compulsions. He may have accepted the necessity for retribution. And who knew what he felt about the overall justification for killing some rich white men? Surely he knew the story of the club’s raid on the Indian whorehouse.

Once you made the assumption that he could kill, it all made sense. A motive of love and hate. And nobody had ever checked his alibi. From Jasper he could easily have made his forays into Minneapolis, made his kill and gotten out … the invisible man. He could even tell us the story of the club’s murders without fear. In the first place, it stood to reason that no killer would make such a revelation, drawing himself into matters when he might have stayed clear, and, in the second place, by telling us Running Buck’s story he was able to put into words the justification for his actions—proving once again, if only to himself, that he was an executioner, not a murderer …

Billy. The idea played in my mind, darting here, there, like a figure in a shooting gallery, the one you could never quite hit.

I wasn’t altogether sure I was safe. I might still be a candidate for the role of Last Victim. But I knew that I would rather have it be me than Kim, which is, I suppose, a commentary on what rediscovering love can do to your mind. It wouldn’t be Kim, not if I could help it.

Perhaps I was slow to see the truth of it, the only pattern that made sense. I’ve trekked back and forth over the same ground hundreds of times since that night, trying to discern an alarum, a flare in the night which might have warned me … but hindsight is irrelevant. I don’t know if it should have occurred to me earlier or not; in any case, it hadn’t, not until I was north of Duluth and it was a dark-gray five o’clock in the morning. That was when I finally realized who had been killing these old men … I almost smiled at it. Not quite, but almost. It had a very pure, cold kind of beauty to it. It chilled me. I felt as if icy water were closing all around me, numbing and tightening off all feeling, all sensibility, all ideas of right and wrong. I had to get to Kim before something awful happened.

I left Archie’s car in the shelter of some high, ragged brush and picked my way along the wet, sandy path toward the miniature castle she’d shown me. The rain had stopped and a stiff breeze strafed the beach, whipping the whitecaps on the steel-gray lake. I trudged on, head down, hands pushed into pockets, the gun feeling cold and alive, like a docile reptile. I was out of breath when I slid across the wet stone shingle and reached the castle. There was a fire going under a pot of coffee and two cups were placed neatly on a flat rock.

I stood beside the wall, sheltering from the wind, and saw the bronze Mark IV above on the level of the narrow roadway. I could see them down past the edge of the rock slabs, standing on the beach looking out at the vicious, swirling lake. She wore Levi’s, her army jacket, and her hair was loose, blowing in the wind. Her arms were crossed across her chest and she strode slowly along the sand, gulls swooping around her, water advancing toward her. He walked beside her, watching the sand.

She was still alive and I felt a long sigh escape me, my body relaxing. I watched her pace slowly along the rock shelf, spray exploding as she moved. Fog banks a mile out were moving inland.

She looked up finally and saw me, walked toward me, across the seventy yards of rock and beach. He stood alone, watched her moving away. I took her in as she came nearer; the flat gaze of her eyes, the purposeful walk, the slender boyish body I’d never known. When she was near, I stepped forward and held her; her arms went around me, her face beside mine, her grip strong and lingering.

“You’re all right,” I said. “I was so afraid I’d be too late, you’d be dead and that would be all there was …” I heard her breathing, felt the rise and fall of her in my arms, “Oh, God, I love you,” I said. “I love you and I don’t know what to do about it …” My emotions were being turned inside and out. I felt raw, exposed, cheated, fooled, finished. I was in over my head, had been from the beginning, and now it was too late. I knew too much not to know all of it.

I kissed her and she finally pulled her head away, looking away toward where he stood, straight, far away with gray water beyond.

“I knew you’d come. I asked Billy to come wait with me,” she said, watching my eyes. “I knew you’d find me if I came here and waited … but I didn’t want to be alone.” She smiled, looked away, rubbed her nose in the wind. “You’re like an extra side of myself—I wish I knew what that meant, for better or worse … I knew I’d never be able to hide from you … or hide anything from you.” She took a few steps past me, turned at the entrance to the tiny castle. “I’ve made us coffee, Paul.” I followed her inside. She stripped off the army jacket. She wore a heavy blue oiled wool sweater and knelt by the fire, poured me a cup of steaming black coffee. I wanted her near me forever. It was all unspeakably sad. “Well,” she said, “is it time to talk it through?”

“Yes.” I sat down on the rock ledge so I could look down at her small, perfect face, watched as she pursed her lips and sipped the coffee. She was perfect. There was color in her cheek, a glitter in her eyes, her dark hair shone. “You might as well tell me the whole truth this time. They’re all dead now … You and I are the only ones left, kiddo. Two survivors. And him.” I nodded toward the lake.

“Is the killing over?” she asked.

“Oh, I think so. Unless you or I get it in the denouement. What do you think? Is it over?”

“We’ll see, I suppose. It’s like everything else in life. Game’s never over till the last man’s out. Isn’t that what you baseball fans say? Till the last man is out?”

I nodded. “Take me through it … You’ve never told me all you know, Kim. And I realized a couple of hours ago that you know it all. Don’t you?”

When she had finished telling me the story, she stood up and stepped outside. There was a yellow haze in the sky over the lake and the breeze was warmer. I smelled the lake and the wet sand and the beach grass. She looked back at me, took a deep breath, and strolled back down toward the water’s edge. I stared after her, then sank back down beside the fire, filled my cup with the coffee’s dregs, and went outside. The sun was struggling to burn a hole through the fog. I saw my shadow on the castle wall and leaned there, watching her get smaller. My hand wasn’t shaking and I wasn’t breathing hard. I wondered if Billy was still there, waiting. It didn’t make any difference anymore.

She knew the whole story and laid it out for me with the kind of precision that was her custom. She had put it together herself. It was, like everyone else’s theory, perfect.

In 1931 the hunting and fishing club had been formed and the lodge near Grande Rouge had been built. That same year Rita married Ted Hook, bar owner and disabled veteran of the Great War, many years her senior. During the winter of 1931-1932 the club hired Rita Hook to run their lodge for them, do the cooking, keep it shipshape and attended year round. At the same time, she struck a bargain with the well-reared young blades from Minneapolis: She would serve as a ready and willing sexual partner for the entire group; it was a package deal for the enterprising Mrs. Hook, for which she was paid the handsome sum of one thousand dollars per month.

Late in 1932 Rita Hook gave birth to a son, Robert, and it was assumed that Ted Hook, not so frail as he appeared, was the father. In fact, Kim later learned, the father was a member of the group, though it was quite impossible to say which member. The group, as far as Rita’s services were concerned, consisted of Timothy Dierker, James Crocker, Father Martin Boyle, Jonathan Goode, Hubbard Anthony, and Carver Maxvill.