The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  “Cyril. Yes, all right. Cyril got into it because he calls me every week, no matter where he is—Europe, Africa, anywhere. A couple of weeks ago it was Cairo, before that Munich, before that Glasgow, London … every week I get a long distance call and it’s Cyril. Last week he called me from Buenos Aires and I told him about what I’d found. …”

  “What did he say?” I was hypnotized by her recital.

  “It was strange,” she said, remembering. “First he laughed for a long time and when I asked him why he was laughing he said that it was all very funny because life was so carefully constructed, detail upon detail.” She thought back: “Yes, detail upon detail. And then he gave me some instructions. He said I shouldn’t mention it to anyone. No one at all.” She lit a cigarette and sat down opposite me in the squeaky wooden swivel chair.

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “Only that he’d get in touch with you and that he’d be back here in Cooper’s Falls this week. He said he’d be talking to me in person and he said something else. He said that it was no surprise to him … but he didn’t say what it was.”

  I puffed my pipe and she said it was comforting to watch me puff my pipe and I said everyone should have a crutch. She laughed. “What do you think he meant?”

  We could hear the town clock chiming noon, muffled in the snow.

  “Life is so carefully constructed, detail upon detail. … Well, I’m damned if I know,” I said. “But apparently whatever you found, and God only knows what it means, it fitted with some theory of his. But why was he in Buenos Aires? And why didn’t he get here on the twentieth?”

  “The snow,” she said. “That’s the logical explanation.”

  “Yes, of course it is. The snow.” I tamped the ash. “Can you come out to lunch?”

  She smiled. “I’ve got to finish my day’s work. I’m very compulsive.”

  “Well, why don’t I stop back before I go to the house? You can come with me. We’ll surprise him together.”

  “All right.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “Only what he always says.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That he loves me, John.”

  Eight

  MY HEAD WAS ACHING WHERE the man in the sheepskin coat had clubbed me. When I left the library I walked back up Main Street, feeling snow blowing in my face. Trying to sort through what Paula Smithies had told me was making my head worse, so I climbed the steps to Doctor Bradlee’s office over the drugstore. My childhood overtook me again as I smelled the antiseptic aroma I remembered so well. Everything was like that, full of emotional responses.

  Doctor Bradlee’s fingers pressed against the soft, squishy swelling underneath the thick layer of hair. I winced.

  “Aha, that hurts, does it?” He had acted as if I’d been in for a visit just last week. He was an old man now, seventy something, but tremendously composed: bald, well over six feet, a serge suit and vest, plain gold cufflinks, nose like a banana, and piercing, intelligent eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He breathed softly, always spoke with a very faint intimation of a smile at the corners of his thin-lipped mouth. Harry Bradlee had seen a great deal in his time.

  He probed some more with his fingertips. “Looks as if somebody hit you with a … poker, perhaps? Heavy and sharp enough to break the skin. Nasty, but I expect you’ll be all right. Any vomiting? Recurring nausea? You’d better tell me how this happened.”

  As I did, he finished attending to the wound, scratched out a prescription, and arranged himself carefully behind his desk. Through the window I could see that snow was falling hard again. He listened, leaning back, watching me, hands anchored around the arms of the chair.

  “You didn’t report this to the police in Madison?” There was a hint of incredulity in his voice.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I know I should have but, my God, it was the middle of the night, I was dead tired, it was over, and I just wanted to lie down and go to sleep. And I didn’t want to run the risk of having to stay in a Madison hospital a couple of days.”

  “Impatience,” he said softly. “What a curse it must be. I remember the night you were born out at the house. Your grandfather was very excited and impatient.” Doctor Bradlee smiled at me and stood up, his shoulders stooped with age. “When I finally came down those long stairs he was waiting in the foyer for me, waiting to hear the news, and when I told him he took me into the library, where your father was sound asleep on a couch and we toasted you, all three of us, with champagne your grandfather had had on ice for a week.”

  I nodded. He patted me on the arm and told me to get some extra sleep, take some of the pills if my head got worse, and to check back in a couple of days. He hadn’t bothered to ask why I was home after so long a time. Maybe time had no particular meaning for him.

  I stopped back at the library in midafternoon. Paula was typing file cards and smiled brightly, saying she had finished her tasks for the day and could be ready to leave in five minutes. While she busied herself in the back I glanced through some mystery novels, noted a couple of exotic titles, and hummed quietly to myself. I saw no point in asking to see the boxes of stuff from the house. It was none of my business: the Nazi thing was ancient history as far as I was concerned.

  We drove back to the house in her car, a spiffy little yellow Mustang convertible; she called it her freedom symbol. She’d bought it in California and driven it back to Cooper’s Falls. We stopped at a grocery store where I bought a few things for the cottage larder. The snow was positively gaudy, gathering an entire new thickness on the road. What the wind had blown from the trees was being replaced. The soldier in the park was only a vague shape, marching ever onward. My ancestor read his book.

  The snow in the driveway was deeper. The lawn seemed to be a glacier. It took several minutes to plow through it but the Mustang was a determined little bastard and made it. Living through storms of this sort was like living through a war, and Paula and I were smiling when we got into the front hall, stomping our feet and shaking snow off.

  “Well, he’s not here yet,” she said. “Let me make some coffee. Or would you like a drink?”

  “Coffee would be fine. I just don’t drink anymore, except for brandy or port.”

  “You should be very proud of yourself, John.” She walked away from me toward the kitchen. She had long straight legs and I was admiring them when she looked back at me. “Why not lay a fire?” she said.

  I put a match to the wood stacked in the library grate, warmed my hands before the flames. Darkness was coming on outside. The heavy drapes were drawn back and what lay beyond was a vast emptiness. When she came back in with the coffee I said: “Paula, I’m worried about Cyril. Why hasn’t he arrived?”

  “Look, why don’t you call the telephone office? See if there have been any long-distance calls. And check the telegraph office. You haven’t been here to receive any messages and he may have tried to get hold of you.”

  We sipped the hot coffee, the fire crackled, and neither the telephone office nor Western Union had any record of incoming messages or calls. There was nothing to do but wait, and our conversation was desultory, random reminiscences.

  Finally, to kill time, I said that I wanted to go upstairs and see my old room, go through my books, see if it was all still the same.

  “Let me go with you,” she said. “I don’t want to be down here all by myself. Do you mind? That wind is driving me a little bit crazy.”

  I turned on the lights in the front hall, flipped the switch that should have turned them on in the second-floor hallway. Nothing happened. The lights upstairs must have been burned out. No one had used the second and third floors in a long time.

  “It’s strange being back here again,” I said. “It gives me goose pimples.”

  “I know. I haven’t been here since Cyril … brought me here. Years ago. …”

  She followed me up the long stairs Doctor Bradlee had descended thirty-four years ago with
the news of my birth. It was the same now. The house never changed.

  In the hallway we stopped, accustoming our eyes to the gloom.

  “John, there’s a light down there.”

  I turned and saw the glow, the strip of light across the floor and on the wall. Something banged against the back of the house in the wind. I felt for the wall switch but it didn’t work either.

  I could hear her breathing as she followed me down the hall toward the light. The light was coming from what had been my grandfather’s bedroom. The closer I got the stranger I felt and I laughed nervously. “This is ridiculous. Why are we tiptoeing around?” We laughed in unison and she took my hand, squeezing it. Her palm was cold and damp. We went into the room together.

  My brother Cyril was sitting in one of a pair of wing-backed chairs by the windows. His eyes were closed. He had slid or tilted to one side, his head lolling down on his shoulders, left arm extended stiffly over the arm of the chair.

  “Cyril!” I shouted involuntarily.

  Paula held my arm and bit her lip. “Oh, my God—”

  It was perfectly obvious that my brother Cyril was dead.

  Nine

  DOCTOR BRADLEE ARRIVED OUT OF the blowing snow an hour and a half later, stomping his feet in the hallway, complaining about the intense cold. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said as I took his heavy herringbone overcoat, “and on top of it all my car wouldn’t start, just too damned cold for man, beast, or machine. Where’s Paula? I’d better see her before I examine the deceased.” It was an odd turn of phrase: he was talking about my brother Cyril.

  Paula was sitting in the library staring into the fire. She had stopped crying and had drunk some brandy. We’d sat together in the library and waited, shocked and saddened, uneasy. My first reaction was one of curiosity rather than sorrow, actually, a result of the shock of coming upon him that way.

  I poured some brandy for myself and waited in the parlor while Bradlee tended to Paula. When he came out, his face was drawn and tired; he was not as young as he used to be. “She’ll be all right,” he said. “She’s quite strong. Awful experience for her, though. How close was she to your brother?”

  “Quite close, apparently,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, picking up his black pigskin Gladstone bag, the same one from my childhood full of rows of pill bottles, stethoscope, a blood pressure device.

  “Well, you never know, do you?” He walked out into the foyer and turned to me: “Where is he?” I nodded toward the stairs and he motioned me up, then followed.

  Bradlee stood looking at my brother’s body for a while. Cyril was wearing Levis, a white Oxford-cloth button-down shirt with the sleeves half rolled up. An identification bracelet he’d worn since his fourteenth birthday dangled from his wrist. On the table between the two wing-backed chairs stood a bottle of Courvoisier and a snifter with traces of brandy in the bottom. The bed was slightly rumpled, as if Cyril had catnapped.

  Bradlee was bending over my brother, staring into the dead eyes, pulling the lids back. He was shaking his head, touching my brother’s dead flesh. I walked across the room, stood at the window. My eyes flickered around the room, rested on the fireplace: charred remains of a fire, now cold and dead and fluttering in the downdraft. Had it been smoke I’d seen that morning after all, rising through the blowing snow?

  “How long has he been dead?” I asked.

  “Some time,” Bradlee said, eyebrows furrowed. He fixed me from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Might be twenty-four hours, it’s really quite impossible to say until we take a closer look.”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “John,” Bradlee said slowly, rubbing his great banana nose with a forefinger, regarding Cyril’s body, “there’s something about this … it doesn’t ring true to me and I can’t quite put my finger on it. Apparently his heart stopped beating and he slumped over and died.” He shook his head. “But … you say you didn’t know he was home?”

  “No. I thought he hadn’t gotten here yet. I was in the house last night and he wasn’t here then.”

  “How do you know?’

  “Well, I didn’t see him, I didn’t hear him.”

  “I’m going to notify the police. Now don’t look that way. I’m merely going to report the death. In a case of this type, when we don’t know when or how he died I suggest that we find out.” He touched my sleeve. “Just to satisfy ourselves. We’ll have to have an autopsy. You’ll have to agree to that, my boy.”

  I nodded.

  While Bradlee used the telephone, I fed logs into the library fireplace and told Paula what had happened upstairs.

  “Does that mean that Doctor Bradlee thinks there might be something wrong?” She shivered against the back of the chair and drew her legs up underneath her. The wind howled outside.

  “God knows,” I said.

  “I wonder what he was going to do here? It’s so ironic. He came all the way from Buenos Aires to talk to you and to me, and now he’s dead. So absurd, so futile. …”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. I’d felt a prickling of my skin as she spoke. Bradlee was standing in the doorway, consulting his gold pocket watch which hung from a gold chain across his vest.

  “I’ve called Olaf Peterson. He’s new since your time here, chief of our little police force. He was a detective down in the Cities, made a name for himself in cracking a couple of murder cases, and then married an heiress involved in one of the cases and was suddenly a wealthy man, member of the White Bear Yacht Club, the Minneapolis Club because of his father-in-law, and he said the hell with being an underpaid, hardworking cop. Anyway, he came up here to live on a farm with a house overlooking the river and some of us asked him to help us out with our piddling little police work, on an advisory basis if nothing else, and now we pay him a dollar a year to be our police chief. He seems to enjoy it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he’d come on over and take a look if he can get his car out. It must be getting worse out there.”

  I put a Beethoven quartet on the phonograph and we all sat in the library, quietly, unable to get the idea of Cyril overhead, slumped, dead in a chair, out of our minds. The Nazis and my grandfather looked down at us from the library walls. Eventually we heard a car through the storm, saw headlights poking at the blowing snow. It was the third car in front of the house, snow piling up on them, and when I opened the door I saw that Olaf Peterson was driving a black four-door Cadillac sedan. He was smoking a cigar as he charged hurriedly up the walk.

  “How are you?” he said. “I’m Olaf Peterson.” He shook my hand.

  Ten

  OLAF PETERSON DID NOT come out in the snow to stand around chatting, exchanging pleasantries about the Minnesota weather. He asked Bradlee where the body was and I followed them up the stairway. Paula was staying in the library. Peterson was of medium height, wore a rust-colored suede trench coat cut elegantly with a few strategically placed button flaps. He was dark, almost swarthy, more like a figure from the Levantine than from the fjords. He had a thick black mustache which curled down around the corners of his mouth. He was not at all what I had expected.

  Standing in the master bedroom again, I watched him survey the scene with his chin cupped in a dark, hairy hand. His spatulate fingers were well manicured. He’d opened his trench coat, revealing a navy-blue fisherman’s sweater underneath and a yellow shirt collar poking up against his chin. He had a very short, thick neck.

  “Your brother,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “You found the body,” he said. “You didn’t move anything.”

  I nodded.

  “Miss Smithies—” He paused. He looked at Bradlee. “What was her late husband’s name? Phillips?”

  Doctor Bradlee nodded.

  Peterson walked closer to the table at Cyril’s side, stared down at the snifter and the corked bottle of Courvoisier. He knelt and looked at the lamplight through the bottle of Courvoisier. He pursed his lips and began to think
out loud, a quality to which I became inured. “For the sake of argument, let’s say he opened this bottle—that it was a fresh bottle. This house has no regular, full-time occupants drinking a bit of brandy now and then, so we have the odds with us there. There is very nearly half a bottle of brandy that has been drunk.” He looked up smiling broadly, incongruously, reminding me of a standup comic delighted by his own old and weary joke, laughter in the audience. “Now, there is either a hell of a lot of Courvoisier inside Cyril Cooper or”—he paused for some kind of effect—“or there was someone else sitting here drinking it with him. And if there was someone else here, I’d like to talk to him.” He beamed and then immediately dropped his smile and scowled at me: “This is the part of being a detective I simply love. The easy part, Mr. Cooper. Obviously, you’ve had a nasty shock tonight. You didn’t kill him yourself, did you? No, I didn’t think so.”

  “I’ve driven all the way from Boston in answer to a telegram from him,” I said. “He wanted me to meet him here on the twentieth.”

  “You’re late, Mr. Cooper.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He jammed the poker into the ashes, clanged it against the grate.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t late. I arrived last night, late last night.”

  “And why didn’t you find him then, I wonder?”

  “Because he wasn’t here. At least—”

  “You were in this room last night, then?”

  “No, I—”

  “But you were in the house last night? You slept here?”

  “No.”

  “No? I thought you said you arrived last night. Perhaps I am merely confused. …” His back was to me. Bradlee was extracting a cigarette from a gold case, tapping it on the lid.

  “I did arrive last night. I came into the house about eleven o’clock, poked around downstairs for a few moments, then took a bottle of brandy from the library and drove down to the cottage by the lake and slept there.”

  “And you didn’t see your brother?”