The Cavanaugh Quest (2 page)

“Guy fuckin’ shot himself right in the lobby!” Fritz concluded abruptly.

“How long ago?”

“Half an hour, maybe.”

“Did you know him? Was it the guy who passed you and went into the mail room?”

“I guess so … but, hell, he smiled at me, nodded, when he went by me. Seems funny as hell. I didn’t see the dead guy close up, y’know, but he had one of them light-blue summery suits on and so did the guy I saw go past me …” He shook his head. “But the guy said hi, nodded, real friendly. Then he goes out in the lobby and shoots hisself …”

“Did you recognize him?”

“Well, yeah, not by name—but I seen him before, going up and down in the elevator.” Fritz wiped sweat off his forehead and left a bar of grease in the horizontal wrinkles of his supplicant’s brow. “Bannister? No, something like Battleship but that’s not it.” He looked around as the elevator door opened. Margaret, one of the cleaning ladies, got out in her green smock and blue shorts.

“Marge,” he said, “what is the guy’s name? The dead guy? Something like Battleship …”

Margaret looked like a dowager even when she was on the trash run, stopping at every floor. She had iron-gray hair swept back and wore glasses on a chain around her neck and was always calm. Her costume was completed with blue tennies, yet she always appeared to be going to or coming from the Symphony Ball.

“Blankenship,” she said. “Larry Blankenship.”

Hubbard Anthony whisked in a sharp breath and said, “Oh, Jesus, not Larry!”

But there wasn’t time just then to investigate the slightly glazed, uncharacteristic cast in Hubbard’s eye because the little group by the still-warm remains of Larry Blankenship was breaking up and the well-bred inhabitants of the building were backing away, trying to look as if they weren’t really interested in such an unseemly business. Bill Oliver’s gaunt face looked pale and his mouth was clamped shut; a great many rich, elderly people lived in the building so he was used to an occasional death, but guns going off in the lobby was something else, something you didn’t get used to.

The plainclothes cop turned out to be Mark Bernstein, a homicide dick I’d spent some time with while I was writing a book about a celebrated murder investigation and trial a few years before. He was forty-five or so, powdered and cool, neatly barbered with a fringe of hair over the collar and a long handsome face. He always reminded me of Craig Stevens, who used to play Peter Gunn on the tube. He nodded when he saw me and gave a tight-lipped grin.

“No book in this one, Paul,” he said. He nodded to Judge Anthony, who was still distracted, ashen-faced. I suppose Hub’s sudden pallor was the first thing that struck me as peculiar about the whole Blankenship story, other than Blankenship’s manner of departure. The corpse meant nothing to me but Hub was a friend.

“Low marks for neatness, though,” I said.

“Nobody cares about neatness anymore,” Bernstein said.

“What actually happened? Why are you here?”

“I was in the office, that’s all. Slow Sunday afternoon. The call came in and I figured what the hell, I’d go out myself. All we had was a guy’d been shot …”

I followed along beside him. Bill Oliver was heading on into the office and we went with him. Bernstein looked at my tennis racket. “You win?”

“Nope, the judge here did it to me again.”

“I never get a chance to play tennis anymore,” he said.

“You’re too damned busy trying to become mayor in your spare time. Dumb priorities. Tennis you can play all your life, being mayor is a sometime thing.”

“Bullshit,” he said. He was sensitive about his political ambitions and I didn’t really think he was wrong. Anything is better than being a homicide dick, even being mayor.

Nobody said we couldn’t tag along so Hub and I went on into the office. Pat Oliver had gotten there first and was putting the desk chair in place. She looked worried, her deep-set eyes downcast and hiding. She sighed heavily and leaned against the filing cabinet and watched the lads in white with stretchers go in to wrap up their bundle.

Bernstein said, “May I see this letter, please?”

Oliver picked it up off the neatly arranged desk and handed it to him. “Goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. His jaw was rigid and his pale blue eyes flickered nervously from Bernstein, who was reading the note, to me. “He comes in here, Paul, and says hi to Pat and me, just as normal as hell, all dressed up like he’s going out to dinner or something, fresh clean suit, tie, like all he’s got on is brand new … I could smell the Old Spice. He says he’s got this for me, hands me the envelope, and I figure it’s rent or something. Rent’s the only thing people come in here with in an envelope, and I don’t even give it a second thought. I took it from him, said, ‘Okay, Mr. B.,’ and he just smiles and goes back out. Fritz is coming in at the same time and he’s going on with some song and dance about the goddamn air conditioner and I’m opening the envelope and I read the note and I can hear Fritz talking, at first it doesn’t take—and then, holy shit, I get the point and right away the gun goes off …”

His voice was shaking and he was short of breath. He shrugged his square farm boy’s shoulders and took off his bifocals. He grabbed a Kleenex from the desk dispenser and began polishing them. “Christ, I hardly knew the guy, but still, it hits you when a guy does that to himself in your goddamn lobby …” He turned to look out of the window where the sun’s waves jumped and quivered on the cars.

Hubbard sat down in a straight-backed chair. He hadn’t said a word since his quiet little exclamation in the lobby. I knew him well enough to know that he was getting himself under control by an expenditure of will; I’d seen him do it on the tennis court, counteracting a bad shot or a miscalculated placement I’d returned for a winner.

Bernstein bit his lip and said, “Funny, very funny, this one,” and shook his head.

“So what does it say?” I asked.

He handed it to me.

“Read it out loud,” he said. “Slowly, conversationally. I want to hear what it sounds like.”

It was written in green Flair ink on cream-colored stationery of high quality. His name, Lawrence Blankenship, was printed in simple, unexaggerated capital letters across the top of the sheet, centered. No address, no occupation. Just the name. Very classy.

“ ‘Dear Mr. Oliver,’ ” I read. “ ‘I’m very sorry to cause you the inconvenience of doing this in your lobby but I do have my reasons. As you know, I live alone. It bothers me to think that my body might go undiscovered for several days and suffer the unhappy effects of hot weather. Particularly with this lousy air conditioning. So accept my apologies and my goodbyes to you and Mrs. Oliver. Sincerely, Larry Blankenship.’ ”

Nobody said anything and I read it again to myself.

Bernstein went to the window facing into the entranceway and the lobby. They were bringing the stretcher out, all covered up, and that was the end of Larry Blankenship.

But of course it wasn’t. It was only the beginning.

I built us a pitcher of Pimm’s Cup No. One with brandy, apples, cucumber slices, and lime wedges, sloshed over a seventy-nine-cent bag of sanitary ice cubes, all in a silver pitcher that had long ago been a wedding present and which I had stolen from what had once been my own home. Hubbard was sitting in an Italian deck chair with his feet tilted up on the rim of a flowerpot. I put the pitcher on a little plastic cube between us, poured two glass mugs full, and sat down on a porch swing I’d stolen from my father’s garage. The best things in life are quite frequently the things you steal.

He sat staring into the evening sky, the sun slanting across the skyline of Minneapolis to the north, a view set off by the towering glass monument to Investment Diversified Services. The lake below us in Loring Park was green and ducks paddled about in geometric precision which you could see only if you were far enough above. The breeze on the shady side of the building almost made you forget the heat. Hub’s face looked as if it had melted from the cheekbones downward, forming a pouch of jowls where his chin was tucked back against his long throat. At just that moment I figured I could have taken him, 6-0, 6-0.

“So who the hell was he?” I finally asked.

Hubbard sighed and sipped his Pimm’s Cup. He wiped his lank white hair back straight, the way it was combed. I’d seen pictures of him up north in the thirties with my father, the two of them standing grinning at opposite ends of a string of bass or whatever it was they caught up there. He was tall and thin then, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows, and he hadn’t changed much in nearly forty years. His hair had been black then, shining in the sunlight that hid his eyes in dark shadows.

“Larry Blankenship was an innocent, an authentic innocent. A victim.” He paused, looking off the balcony, sipping, trying to sum up a man’s life to someone who’d never met him. “It was almost a pathology, his instinct for finding a way to be hurt in any given situation, by everyone he became involved with … The way some people are looked upon as being trouble, trouble for everyone else, well, Larry was always trouble for himself. Maybe he wanted to be hurt. I’m sure a two-bit psychologist would say he was self-destructive …”

“That theory looks pretty good right now,” I said.

“Perhaps, but I don’t really believe he was that complex, at least he never struck me as a deep person. He just wanted everything to turn out all right but it never seemed to. I’m sure he was an identifiable type. But saying he was a loser wasn’t quite fair.”

“Who said he was?”

He stuck a cigarette into his inconspicuous little holder and lit it, beginning to relax and move death a convenient distance away. The inner vista was fading but I’d never seen it before, had never known he was prey to such things.

“His wife, for one. She wasn’t being unreasonable either, not from her point of view. He must have seemed a loser to her. At least when she said that.” He shook his head.

“You knew him well, then?” I wasn’t following very well and from inside my apartment I could hear the Twins game on the radio. They were in the twelfth inning at Oakland and Carew had just laid down a bunt and beaten it out. Rollie Fingers was pitching for Oakland and Larry Blankenship was nothing to me. He was a dead guy and I was just trying to provide some company for Hub. Larry Blankenship was just a name and two penny loafers under a blanket and an eccentric suicide note.

“Off and on, I kept running across him. Larry and his wife just kept turning up at the edges of things. His wife was the kind of woman who makes a strong impression on people. But that didn’t work out for him either—they’re separated or divorced by now. And they had a child who didn’t turn out right. A mongoloid, something wrong like that, put away in a home somewhere. I don’t believe I ever actually knew the details. Just things I heard … Larry and Kim weren’t ever at the center of things and of course they were much younger, your age or even a bit younger, she was younger, I’d think. Maybe thirty-five now. And Larry must have been forty or so. I’m not at all sure my figures are right. But I couldn’t be far off.

“Larry was in sales at the beginning, had a job working for some people I knew. He was a fair-haired lad who was making it on his own, went over into the marketing end of things … but there was always a problem of some kind that would come up. I don’t think I ever heard his name come up in a really happy conversation. There was always a soap-opera quality about him.” He crossed his ankles on the flowerpot, drained the Pimm’s Cup. I filled his mug again.

Darwin struck out on a Fingers change-up and Hisle hit a long fly to, center. Two out and Killebrew was up, the designated hitter. Fingers got a quick strike on the outside corner away from his power and I longed for the summers of the Killer’s youth when there wouldn’t have been enough left of Fingers to clog a drain. Strike two.

“And then I heard his name down in the lobby and it hit me rather close to home. I wouldn’t have thought he meant a thing to me, Larry Blankenship, just the name of a troubled man … but when I saw him dead, then the circle of his life seemed so sadly complete. Such a bitter waste. Maybe the tennis wore me down, made me susceptible. Maybe I’m just getting old. How the hell should I know?”

Fingers made a mistake with a fastball, let it get inside, and the old man pulled the trigger. Reggie Jackson was going back, back, and the announcer was screaming that it might be, it could be, it was. The Twins suddenly had a 4-2 lead and Hubbard Anthony hadn’t noticed. I controlled my enthusiasm but it was there, the summer joy of a man who wasn’t young anymore. Me and the Killer. Without giving it a thought, I wondered if Larry Blankenship had been a baseball fan.

“Coincidence always has interested me,” Hub went on, his voice oiling up with the drink. “I’m always amazed at how much of it I’m asked to believe in when I’m sitting on a criminal case. A met B by sheer coincidence and was observed by C, who put an incorrect interpretation on the meeting—it happens all the time and the problem is you never know when it’s true and when it isn’t.

“Last week I saw Kim Blankenship at Norway Creek. She was playing tennis with the pro, McGill, and I was having lunch on the porch with your father, as a matter of fact. A very nice Rhine wine, I think, with the Dover sole
amandine,
my treat, and your father said he thought that was Kim Roderick down there on the courts—Roderick, that was her maiden name, of course. So there she was, playing just as well as ever—”

“How the hell did
my father
know her maiden name?”

“Oh, Kim had been a waitress at the club when she was in her teens, used to bring lemonade down to the pool, and eventually she became lifeguard, then McGill’s assistant, giving lessons and working in the pro shop … I said she was the sort of person, both as a girl and as a woman, who made a strong impression on you.” He leaned his head back, eyes squinting shut to give himself a better view of the past. “You’d never see Kim Roderick loafing. She was always busy, being helpful, making herself useful. Self-improvement was what my generation called it, always bettering herself … talking about her correspondence-school courses …” There was admiration in his voice as if he were a boy again with long black hair all shined back with Brilliantine, stuck on a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. On the radio Bill Campbell shut out the Athletics in the bottom of the twelfth for the win but my boys were still also-rans.