The Cavanaugh Quest (46 page)

“You don’t know where she is, I take it?”

“Not a clue.”

“If she comes to you, keep her there and call me. Will you do that?”

“If you answer my question.” I remembered another reason why our marriage went crash.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

I reached Ole Kronstrom at home.

“Why, no, Paul, I haven’t heard from her since I dropped her off last night. Is anything wrong?”

I told him she’d gone, omitting the gun and the note.

“She’s very independent,” he said slowly. “She might have felt—may I be frank?”

“Sure.”

“She may have begun feeling claustrophobic, that you were closing in on her. She gets that way, gets to feeling that her options are being taken away. Then she simply gets out for a while, to reestablish her own freedom … My advice is not to worry, not to close in. Let her go, let her know she’s free. Do you see my point?”

“I don’t think it applies here,” I said.

“No, I don’t suppose you do,” he said calmly. “I don’t blame you. All I can say is not to worry. I trust her judgment, she sees the long view of things, the realities of a situation. She has a way of knowing where the importance of a thing really lies … she’s better that way than almost anybody I’ve ever known. She never leaves a job unfinished. She hasn’t just left you to stew, she wouldn’t do that. When she goes for good, you’ll be the first to know. Be patient. All you can do is wait.”

I felt like screaming.

The day was interminable. The heat kept shoving, a bully who took the form of a thick, gray film. I took two showers, paced, drank, and sat at my desk looking through the snapshots of Kim playing tennis that Anne had given me so long ago. I fantasized about making love to her and cursed myself for never having forced the issue. What if I never had the chance again? I wanted her and she was gone.

In the evening I tracked Bernstein down. He was sitting in his cubicle drinking iced tea and eating a pasteboard sandwich. He wiped his forehead and the Kleenex came away dirty. I declined a bite of the sandwich, which he tried to pass off as tuna salad. He threw it toward his metal wastebasket and missed.

“Same gun,” he said. He sneezed and blew his nose. “Goddamn weather, hot and cold, stormy, I firmly expect a rain of toads tomorrow. Same gun killed Boyle and Crocker.” He stared at me, his eyes watering. I sat like a stump so he leaned his head back and poured Murine into each eye. When he faced me, it ran down his cheeks like tears. “Same gun,” he muttered. “Smith and Wesson thirty-eight.”

I thought about the gun. I wondered what Archie had done with it.

“Gee,” he said. “Stop by anytime. You really brighten up the place.”

The rain had begun again and felt hot and dirty. No stars, no moon, and the Porsche looked as if it were sweating from the inside. I tried to delay going home. I drove past Riverfront Towers with a dull ache in my chest, slowly up Hennepin, where the hookers had been driven into doorways, where you could catch the flash and glitter of rhinestones on their hot pants. There was a tear in the fabric of the car’s top and it dripped incessantly behind me, like a finger tapping to be let out of the rear end, the grave. I was soaked with my own sweat and the rain blowing in the windows. There was no hope in any corner of the city. It twitched in the wetness like something that had forgotten to die and was proving an embarrassment to the tourist board. So I finally made an illegal left across Hennepin and pulled into the driveway to my underground garage. The electric gizmo that opened the door was floating around on the floor. I ducked down to get it, fished it out from beneath the seat, and leaned back tiredly. Streetlights caught the rain like sprays of jewelry. It dripped from the leaves on the trees and coursed in the gutters. I was hypnotizing myself when the passenger window and the front windshield exploded. As the glass flew wildly around inside the remains of the car, I heard the blast of the gun. The remaining sheet of windshield grew a cobweb of minute cracks and slowly fell apart across the hood, down the dashboard, across my legs.

Lights off, a car I’d barely noticed pulled away from the curb about thirty yards up the street, sped past behind me, and was gone in the rush of rain.

I tried to push my way through the back of the seat, my eyes squeezed shut, every muscle screaming in terror. I waited a few seconds, opened my eyes, and everything was quiet. No more shots, the street deserted, only the hissing of tires on the freeway interfering with the drumming of the rain. Wind was blowing rain through the places where the windshield and side window had been and my pants were shaping themselves to my legs. Everything about me was wet. When I got out to inspect my rapidly disintegrating automobile, my shoes squished like waders and I thought very carefully,
Somebody just tried to kill me.
I was shaking and climbed back behind the wheel and got the poor thing into the garage and put it to bed. There was glass all over and the car looked like a bathtub that had gone wrong.

Somebody just tried to kill me.
It had happened in a speck of time, death blowing through my car, and now it was gone with no cries of outrage.

In all probability Carver Maxvill had just tried to kill me. Being beaten up was one thing. This was something else altogether. In the lobby of the building the ancient Pinkerton man was sitting with the hound of the Baskervilles snoozing at his side.

“Did you just hear anything?” I asked. “A backfire? Sounded like a gunshot?”

He shifted his ample behind and scratched his head. The dog stirred and broke wind. “No, can’t say as I did but then, I was making my rounds. Why?” Worry crossed his bland, perplexed face. A couple of months before, a tenant had been mugged outside under the marquee, in a brightly lit area. Fido and his keeper had slept right through it.

“Nothing,” I said. “My imagination.” I walked to the elevators.

“Say, you got broken glass on your pants there,” he called after me, beginning to suspect me of an obscure crime. Was breaking glass a crime? He was following me in the deep carpeting. He bent down and picked up a gleaming sliver. “See? Glass right here …”

I nodded. The elevator came. I got in. He peered after me, the dog sauntering up to him sneezing. I waved good-bye and the doors closed.

Archie was still up and took my call in his study. I told him what had happened and he whistled softly. “Well, well,” he said. “We’re getting close. I don’t think he wanted to kill you … I doubt if he’d kill for self-preservation. He’s got a reason to kill and killing you doesn’t fit—he’s not a criminal, you know, not in any conventional sense. He’s an avenging angel. And he wants you to get out of his way … He must be watching very closely. He may have watched you go to Bernstein’s office. He can’t afford to have the police getting too close—so he tries to scare you off …”

“Cutting it pretty damn close, I’d say.” I was still picking glass out of my hair,’ and my stomach was still clinging to the inside of my chest. “It worked. I’m scared.”

“I should hope so,” Archie said. “Now go to sleep. I’ll try to think of what to do … maybe we should back off entirely. There are limits to everything. This isn’t worth dying for.” Thunder cracked over the lake, a mortal blow, by the sound of it, and it gnashed at my ear across the line.

I lay on the bed with the lights off and waited for sleep. It was a long wait. You didn’t survive a murder attempt every night, after all. So I lay there cringing in my bed, frightened out of shape, a perfect example of conditioning.

C
ROCKER’S FUNERAL WAS A MAJOR
event, the cortege tying up traffic for half an hour in a heavy mist, headlamps blurring dimly, motorcycle cops holding cross traffic at a standstill. I went to the cemetery, one of several hundred, sticky and uncomfortable and praying for a breeze that refused to come. I was too far from the graveside to hear what was said so I marveled at the size of the crowd, remembered that he’d set his goons on me, and figured he might have a tough time getting in upstairs.

The thought kept gnawing at me: He said he knew who the murderer was … so why couldn’t he protect himself? Unless it was bravado, unless he hadn’t known.

I searched the crowd in the hope that Kim might have come but that was a waste and only made me hotter. Hub Anthony nodded to me from twenty yards away and pointed to a pair of large straight-ahead types on either side of him and winked. Bernstein was taking no chances. Hub had his protection and so did General Goode, who looked very small and intense as he bowed his head, flanked by two guys who could have picked him up and used him for a pipe cleaner. Archie stood with Ole Kronstrom, both looking cool and composed, almost angelic. Bernstein had offered them protection but they had adamantly refused. In any case, we were all protected because the crowd was alive with coppers looking for Carver Maxvill. They didn’t know what he looked like but that didn’t stop them from being obvious, giving out with a lot of long hard stares and consulting one another in hushed tones. It was hopeless. Carver Maxvill could have spoken the eulogy and they wouldn’t have recognized him.

But the thought stuck in my mind as I slowly scanned the crowd: Is there a murderer here somewhere, enjoying the fruit of his labor but with work still to be done? I hoped Kim had gone absolutely to ground to wait it out. Otherwise, somehow, he’d find her …

At lunch Julia wore a perplexed frown and put her hand over mine. It was past one o’clock and the crowd at Charlie’s was thinned out and we were all munching on peppered beef and potato salad. Archie was working on his second martini and it was dark and quiet and Julia said she understood how I must feel about Kim’s disappearance.

“But she’s one of the independent breed,” she said. “She takes care of herself, I expect, and doesn’t like being dependent on men to take care of her. If she’s actually in danger, then she’s done the right thing. She’s probably just sorting things out, deciding what to do. I have a feeling about her—if she believes she must, I can even see her killing to save herself … I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds, dear.”

“That’s what I told him,” Archie said. “She’s a smart cookie, she saw the flame coming closer. She backed off.”

I asked Julia what she thought the incest revelation would do to Kim, to any woman.

“There’s no point in generalizing about it, Paul. Different women would react differently. Kim hasn’t had an easy time with the men in her life, this thing would just be another blow … If you mean do I think she’d crack, no, I don’t. A sheltered woman might go to pieces under the same circumstances, but not this woman—she’s toughened. She’d cope with it, one way or another.”

“You know, that note Maxvill left for her,” Archie said. “That’s the only really clumsy thing he’s done … he obviously can’t bring himself to hurt her directly.” He leaned back and patted his mustache, sipped at the martini. “It’s really quite an awesome pattern he’s working on, murders on the one hand, suicides on the other … God, you’ve got to hand it to him, mad as a hare but what a determined son of a bitch!”

“I’m worried about her all the same,” I said.

“Of course you are,” Julia said. “It would be wrong if you weren’t. But you’ll see her again, it’s all going to turn out. Just hold on and see what happens … She’ll get through all this, mark my words.”

“That’s what I told him. Patience. It’s like being in the eye of the hurricane … Suspense.” He smiled. “Suspense is my business but I’ve never done better than this.”

Julia took off in her car and Archie and I went back to my place. In his way, I think he was worried about me. He didn’t want me to have to be alone. And the attempt on my life, whether serious or as a warning, was bothering us all. He had encouraged me to stay on the case and now he wondered if we’d gone too far. Diminishing returns and all. What was left for us to gain? What had there ever been in it for us? All I wanted now was to get Kim back.

It was three o’clock when the telephone rang and we were able to stop waiting and get moving again. I didn’t recognize the voice at first, though there was something familiar about it. I said yes, I was Paul Cavanaugh.

“This is William Whitefoot. You paid me a visit not long ago. An unsettling visit. It’s been on my mind ever since you left.” There was no warmth, no humor, no touch of life in his voice, but he seemed slightly short of breath, as if placing the call were making him nervous.

“Is Kim with you?” I blurted. Why else would he call? Archie looked up sharply.

“No, she’s not here. Why would she be here, for heaven’s sake?” He was genuinely puzzled and my hopes slipped away. I felt myself sag.

“She’s gone off,” I said. “No problem, I was just curious. What can I do for you, Mr. Whitefoot?”

“You can get in your car and meet me at the lodge tonight. The club’s lodge. You can make it in five hours or so. That’s what you can do for me.”

“Why?” It was my turn to be puzzled.

“I have something to tell you … Look, it’s important or, believe me, I wouldn’t have … called you. As far as I’m concerned, the less I see of you, the better I like it. But it’s been eating at me ever since we talked … now Crocker’s dead, that makes three of them, right? So I’d better get this off my chest and you’re the lucky recipient. And don’t ask me to tell you over the phone—absolutely out of the question. As far as I’m concerned, every Indian in Minnesota and the Dakotas has got a tap on his phone.” He took a breath.

“All right,” I said. “I’m bringing my father. He’s in this as deep as I am …”

“He was in the club, wasn’t he?”

“Not in the inner circle. But he knew the men who were. If I come, he comes.”

“Okay. He’ll be interested, in any case. I’ve got a late-afternoon meeting here but I’ll get there as soon as I can. If I’m late, just wait. I’ll be there.”

He hung up and I turned to Archie. I felt alive again.

For Archie our trip north was like a journey backward through time. It was as if the years were falling away and he was going north for a week of fishing forty years ago, when there was no freeway, no pollution, no murders staring you in the face, and you were young. That was the key to it, being young. An ambitious young newspaperman with the idea that he could write books, an ex-football hero, two canny young businessmen figuring they could make it in the paint business, a pair of bright University of Minnesota lawyers, ramrod-straight career army man, a convivial young priest with the knack for putting people at their ease … they’d all been young, with the years stretching ahead, a landscape of hope and possibility, a lifetime in which to make their marks and leave their tracks to prove they’d been there. Youth made up for a lot and the Depression was something that hadn’t hit them badly at all. They didn’t know it then, but they would turn out well in all cases but one. Life would smile and the newspaperman would become a famous mystery novelist, the football player and the businessmen and a lawyer and the priest and the soldier—they would reach those goals that seemed so important forty years before. Only one, the second lawyer, remembered in snapshots as the blond, long-haired one in baggy pants with a tight belt and the handsome rectangular face, only he would be denied his hopes whatever they might have been.