The Cavanaugh Quest (44 page)

“It wouldn’t surprise me … we don’t know if he saw Larry, but he might have. So, a definite maybe. You may never hear a word from anybody but we can’t count on the easiest way out. We’ve got to expect the worst and hope for the best. But I’ll bet somebody told Larry. That somebody might tell you—it could be brutal. It’s better to have you prepared.”

She nodded and capped the bottle.

“Do you think he’s my father?”

“Probably.”

“Do you think he murdered Tim and Father Boyle?”

“He’s the leading candidate.”

“Okay.” She stood up. “I’m sorry for the things I said to you.”

“Do you want me to stay?”

“No, it’s all right. I’m going out on the St. Croix, on Ole’s boat. We’ll be on the river until later this evening. I’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”

“Call me when you get home,” I said. “Please.”

“I will.”

She went out to the living room and apologized to Archie. She assured us again that she’d be fine, that she’d call me when she got home. I kissed her at the door.

In the elevator, Archie said, “Jesus, I hope Ole’s not the killer.” I told him I hoped not, too.

Whoever it was, he now had three to his credit and we were just about to find out.

A
RCHIE SUGGESTED THAT WE DRIVE
past the Crocker construction site on our way back to the club, just to see what the devil was causing all the commotion.

The area had cleared out and a passerby would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary. There was one police car parked in the shade across the street, an unmarked green sedan behind it, and a
Tribune
reporter I knew by sight was standing by the trailer picking his nose. No fuss; everything smoothed over and the rain holding off in the west. The dehydration of my body and soul informed me that it was ninety. Dust blew in whirlwinds making it a very bad place for Mark Bernstein, who was turned out in a royal-blue polyester blazer suit, a phony crest on the pocket, shiny white shoes and belt. He saw us coming and stood staring at us, shielding his eyes against the sun and the crud blowing around and lousing up his suit. His hair spray wasn’t working and a cowlick had exploded out of a twenty-dollar haircut. He was very unhappy.

“I feel like a cop in a movie,” he said. “Every time something bad happens I look up and here come the heroes in their rattling crappy old car, full of funny remarks …” He kicked at the dust and dirtied his assistant’s black oxfords.

“How’s it going, Mark?” I said brightly, but it didn’t feel right. It wasn’t that kind of day at all. Twenty-four hours before, I’d just decided to go to Chicago and lose my innocence. There hadn’t been a lot of laughs since then. “What’s going on?” The guy from the
Trib
snapped a picture of the Crocker trailer, edged closer to us.

“Tell him to get the hell outa here,” Bernstein snapped to his helper, who marched off to accost the reporter. He swiveled back to us, squinting. “James Crocker, football hero and pillar of the Establishment, got it in the eye last night. In there.” He jerked his thumb at the trailer. “Shot in the right eye. Killer locked the body in with Crocker’s own key and very neatly left the key under the little steps by the door. Guy named Watson, a veep at Crocker Construction, came down to the site today to check and found his boss in the trailer sitting there with brains splattered all over the wall behind him and dripping down his nose. No, you don’t want to go in there, it smells funny and the body’s gone now, anyway …”

“Have you found any trace of Maxvill yet?” Archie asked. My mouth fell open. I couldn’t help it.

“No. I’ve got three men combing through the hotels and rooming houses, interviewing anybody who might have sold him that gun or answered any questions, anyone who might have known him … lawyers, men he worked with and for, but nothing so far.” He coughed in the dust and led us into the shade beneath a big overhanging oak that hadn’t been killed yet. “If you’re right, if it is Maxvill, he’s got hellish nerve, real cool MO. He just sort of comes in the night, plugs ’em, evaporates. Somehow he must have known Crocker was going to be here alone last night … we’ve got that pinned down because there was somebody from Crocker Construction here with him until almost midnight. The killer could have got him anytime after twelve midnight—I’m waiting to get the outer limit but it’ll take a little time. Somebody knew he was going to be here alone …”

“Or somebody was watching and waiting,” I said.

“Probably the latter,” Archie said. “I see Maxvill as a man of great patience, willing to wait his chance and then carry it out in a very orderly way.”

“Well, he’s beating us, three to zip,” Bernstein said tiredly. He patted the full hairdo, delicately trying to squash the errant strands. “Would you believe I’ve got to speak to Women for a Saner Society on Tuesday? Can you imagine the kind of questions they’re gonna ask, can you? ‘How can you expect us to vote for you if you can’t find the killer of three of our leading citizens?’ ” He seemed to see the question as something palpable, rising out of the dust to confront him. “Shit, madam, we’re doing our best but we are handicapped by our lack of intelligence and courage.’ The next question will be about the rats and I will point out that to my knowledge no rat has committed a crime.” He winced. “That’s not true, of course. Several of them apparently ate a good deal of one of Crocker’s men right at the beginning … that’s bad enough, right? Well, this morning the guy died. They’re calling it shock, people always buy shock as a cause of death, shock from loss of blood, but … the word downtown is that the rats are carriers of something supernasty—no, don’t say typhoid and rabies, just don’t say it, whatever you think. Because that would be just too god-awful to be true. ‘Why?’, you ask, I’ll tell you why … because the sanitation creeps discovered yesterday afternoon that the rats, heh heh, are gone, gentlemen, gone and they did not take Northwest Airlines, they walked out the back door, which we apparently didn’t know there was one of—” He took a deep breath and hitched up his natty self-belted trousers. “They are simply out and about, among us, hungry and scared and maybe just a little touchy since we have, after all, unleashed chemical warfare on their mommies and daddies and kiddies … Mad rats, what every politician needs … not even Nixon was visited by a plague of rats. He got Gerry Ford and Gerry Ford told him not to worry, he’s suffered enough. I get three murders by a ghost and an army of disease-carrying rats …” He walked away to find his helper. Archie turned to me.

“I’d say our theory looks better than ever. The pattern is just as steady as a rock. It leaves Goode and Hub Anthony as the last two club regulars.”

“And you and Ole Kronstrom as associates.”

“Mmm. Well, you know what I think about that.” Another unmarked car appeared and a couple of fellows from forensic got out and Bernstein followed them into the trailer.

“It’s funny,” I said. “I told him he was going to get it next and he said he knew who the murderer was, told me to get out of danger myself. Me …”

“He may have had a point. You’re the guy who’s been stirring everything up …” Archie was cupping his hands and lighting a cheroot.

“I don’t think I’m in any danger,” I said, meaning it. “It’s too farfetched. I’m a bystander. But I wonder if Crocker was right. I wonder if the murderer came as no surprise.”

Archie looked reflective and shrugged.

Bernstein came back out and rejoined us, sat down on a green bench, and stretched his arms along its back.

“I’ll know by nightfall if it’s the same gun that did for Boyle. I know damn well it is.”

“What about Goode and Anthony?”

“I’m putting protection on both of them. It may deter him, it may, but he comes across to me as a pretty determined man. Man with a gun.”

“Any sign of a struggle in there?” Archie asked.

“Nope. Just sitting in his chair, a lamb. Just like Boyle. They all three just went willingly, no fuss … they must not have been able to believe it, that this person could possibly kill them. It’s an odd angle … but then the whole thing is nuts!”

Back in the car we sat sweating, trying to find a comfortable position. The Porsche was fresh out of those, sorry. “Unless it’s Rita, not Carver,” I said. “They might have figured she couldn’t kill them …”

“Well, it all adds up to the same thing, doesn’t it? Same crimes, method … just a different killer. Probably pretty close to the same motive.”

“Sure, but the cops are looking for the wrong person. The wrong sex …”

The Porsche gave a mighty wheeze, smashed itself in the carburetor, and trundled forward.

“You’ve got to get a new car,” Archie said pleasantly. “You realize that, of course.”

“Anne wants to play with the carburetor.”

We shoved our way into the sluggish highway traffic and at a light Archie leaned over and said, “It doesn’t make the slightest difference whether they’re looking for a man or a woman.”

“Why not?”

“They’re not going to find the killer, man or woman.” Archie chuckled and leaned back, an old man who figured he’d seen it all.

As it turned out, he hadn’t.

I went back to my place, turned on the television just in time to see some disgruntled, amazed commentators trying to think of what to say about the pardoning of Richard Nixon. They were having tough sledding, indeed, and kept switching to interviews with American citizens who felt collectively that it was all some sort of bad joke. I congratulated them on their perception and built a pitcher of Pimm’s Cup, took a plastic cup and my portable Panasonic and went up to the rooftop swimming pool. I had it almost to myself and turned on the ball game. There was a lot of static and off to the west I had a great view of the blackening sky. The Twins were winning behind Joe Decker and I lay down in one of the plastic chairs, looked toward the sun, and closed my eyes. My new nose bandage was a great improvement and the heat and the constant strong breeze felt fine.

Crocker’s murder hadn’t been a complete surprise but I felt a jab of guilt about my last conversation with him. My hatred had boiled over, I had as much as wished him dead, and now he wasn’t going to preside over the dynasty in which he’d taken such obvious pride. I thought of all the chickens he wasn’t going to barbecue and all the sailboat excursions on Long Lake he wasn’t going to take, the remembered cheering of the crowd he wasn’t going to hear. The sudden death of the old has an entirely different kind of poignancy about it, gentler, more bittersweet, but nonetheless real and affecting. Three old men were gone, one young man. The world wouldn’t really miss one any more than another; who, precisely, would the world miss?

Murder. Had the three old men deserved to die? It was entirely possible. Murders were characterized by their motives; murders were as different as the reasons behind them. I was a product of situation ethics. Rigid morality was foreign to my nature. Kim had propounded the same attitude that day up on the North Shore. I had killed the old man in Finland because I was down to the last nub, choosing between extinguishing him or myself. I found it harder to accept forgiveness of myself than of others but objectivity told me that these three old men might have deserved to die. Our theory about Maxvill, whether he was mad or extraordinarily sane, provided him with what might be a hell of a justification for murder. But murder … How far could you ride on situation ethics?

In the end, time outlived us all, left us for dead. Time moved relentlessly forward, the one enemy which looked as if it were insurmountable. Maybe that explained why we were so easily lured into and captured by the past; it was as if we could catch time in a bottle, as Jim Croce had sung before time made off with him, hold it still and keep it from running out. Everywhere you looked people were gazing backward: The chic young things and the somewhat older things were wearing Gatsby white that summer and spending countless millions of hours in darkened theaters where Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway were mixing it up in
Chinatown
’s approximation of 1937 Los Angeles. Men were wearing ice-cream suits and women were slinking about with feather boas and gowns with built-up shoulders and blood-red lips and Bette Midler was singing from all the record players at all the parties.

We were all in the middle of a nostalgia craze, longing for a time which we now knew for a fact we’d survived, unlike the present. We’d gotten through the thirties, individually or as a nation, so it must not have been quite so bad, after all.

Well, I wondered, how about that? Everything connected with the murders and suicide I’d been working on … everything had begun back in the thirties, that wonderful and simple time everyone was always talking about. There’d been no atomic bomb, they said, and our ambitions had been in the proper scale and we’d not yet been disillusioned by whatever was supposed to have disillusioned us in the past forty years. It had a nice resonant sound to it, instant sociological analysis turned out for cocktail parties where everybody was wearing the right clothes and listening to Bette Midler sing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.”

But it hadn’t been quite so wonderful for Rita Hook and Ted, for Carver Maxvill, for all the rest of the lads going up to the lodge to get away from their wives. Maybe they’d all been nostalgic for something, too. Maybe that searching of the past for bits of reassurance was always with us. Maybe it never really made any more sense than it did just then to me.

Something unpleasant had happened back there and all of them, the living and the dead, had been involved in it. Some had been blackmailed, some had disappeared, and some had come all the way to 1974 to keep their appointments. My mind was sorting through it all, ever more slowly, until I gave a hell of a sigh and fell asleep.

It was cold when I woke up, raindrops splashing on a sunburn and sending chills and gooseflesh along my ribs. Tiny waves lapped at the sides of the pool and the sky overhead was almost black, split by stitches of ice-white lightning’ over the city. Voices floated up to me from people on balconies, ice clinked in tumblers, and laughter swept on from one party to another. I stood up, picked up my pitcher and radio, and headed for the stairway. I stood for a moment where Tim Dierker had taken the fall, shook my head to get rid of the memory of the crumpled body and the dent in the hood of the Pontiac and the wet gray slipper in the rain, and groped my way down the dark stairways. Thunder broke behind me and I flinched, looked back, and saw another jagged slash of electricity rip at the night. I wondered what the hell was coming up next.