The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  “Now, now, John,” Arthur said gruffly. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “If they’re not still here,” I went on, “then we’ll know why Paula was killed. Do you see?”

  “If she was killed. If!” Arthur sounded very determined. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

  “You think maybe she had a heart attack?”

  “There’s no need for impertinence.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “But let’s look for the boxes.”

  Together we made short work of the main floor and found nothing out of the ordinary. “The storm cellar,” I said. “She said she found the boxes in the storm cellar.” We couldn’t find the door which would presumably have led to the cellar. Frustration set in. “Where the hell—”

  Then I saw it: an eight-foot-high newspaper rack seemed to be leaning an inch or two away from the wall. I pulled at it, swinging it out into the room, revealing an opening in the wall leading down into darkness. There was a light cord hanging inside the opening. When I pulled it, a dim light went on at the top of the stairway of narrow stone slabs and another in the cellar. “Come on. I don’t want to go down there alone, for God’s sake.”

  He ducked low and followed me down the steps, our hands sliding along the stone-layered wall of the storm cellar. The floor beams over our heads could not have been more than six feet from the dirt floor. We stooped in the middle of the dim room, windowless, musty, smelling of the dirt floor, very cold. Arthur sneezed. “Damn,” he said.

  Boxes were arranged against two of the walls, but they were uniformly sealed with masking tape. There was a stool in one corner, a couple of old wooden bookcases standing empty, and in the middle of the room were three boxes, brown cardboard, ragged with age, their tops drawn back, tape hanging limply, cut open. On the sides of each of the boxes, carefully printed in black crayon, were the words AUSTIN COOPER.

  “Well, there they are,” I said.

  Arthur bent back the lids and regarded the contents. There was a scuttling sound somewhere in a dark corner and I jumped, startled.

  “Nerves,” Arthur said, pulling a copy of Gone with the Wind out of one of the boxes. “Just a rat, John, just a very cold rat, or a mouse. Not a murderer.”

  “The boxes have been partially emptied,” I said.

  There was a frigid draft coming from somewhere and I could hear the wind ripping at the old building.

  “Yes,” he said.

  We opened them all and found more books, some family photograph albums. “No packets of Nazi documents. No strange letters, no diplomatic pouches. …” He looked at me. “If there ever were any. She could have been letting her imagination run away with her.”

  I shook my head.

  “I know, I know,” he said soothingly. “But there’s no point in our going off half-cocked.”

  “We’re not.” I pointed at the third cardboard box. Under an empty file folder, secure and almost hidden, there was a gray metal strongbox. “That’s one of the boxes she mentioned to me. I’d bet on it.”

  “I didn’t hear her mention a metal box,” Arthur said, coughing into a fist.

  “Well, she told me about it the first time we discussed it. She very specifically mentioned a metal box and I’ll bet this is it.” I took it out and pulled at the lock. It was shut fast, locked.

  Arthur looked perplexed. “Well, I just don’t know.”

  Above our heads the floorboards creaked. At first I thought it was the wind; then they creaked again and I heard a footfall: someone was standing at the desk beside Paula’s body.

  Arthur’s eyes flicked coolly across mine.

  “We’d better get upstairs.”

  “There’s someone up there.”

  “Precisely. And we can’t stay down here forever, in any case. Perhaps some poor patron has come to check out his week’s reading.”

  Cautiously we climbed the stone stairs.

  The newspaper rack had swung back against the opening to the storm cellar and as we pushed it away I heard a man’s voice, speaking very calmly.

  “Step out into the room very slowly. Or I’ll probably kill you.”

  Slowly, the moving panel revealed Olaf Peterson standing ten feet from us, a revolver aimed at arms length toward the middle of Arthur Brenner’s ample chest.

  Peterson’s face was expressionless until it began to take on a look akin to petty irritation coupled with a weary amusement. He lowered the gun. Brenner stepped into the room and I followed, clutching the metal box.

  “This is utterly absurd,” Peterson said as if he were talking to himself. “They get my car started, I take a chance that Miss Smithies might still be at the library—just an off chance, a whim. I decide I’ll drop in, no particular reason, just the feeling that perhaps she hasn’t told me quite everything. Right? I open the library’s front door and I’m back in the funhouse. Miss Smithies is dead, strangled I would guess, at her desk, and Abbott and Costello are mucking about in the basement—” He raised a hand. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean the Abbott and Costello crack, it’s just that it’s been a long and trying day.” He turned around and walked away from us to the heater, then to the desk where Paula remained as we had left her. “Do you realize that there has not been a murder in Cooper’s Falls in forty years, gentlemen? Forty years—until John Cooper comes home and right away he can’t turn around without falling over another body. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. …” His volume lessened and he turned to look at Paula’s body. “What’s the story on this one?”

  “We had an appointment to see Paula,” I said. “We got here half an hour ago and found her like this.”

  “What have you been doing for half an hour, Cooper? What? What were you doing in the basement? Brenner, for God’s sake, why didn’t you come back to the office? What, what, what in hell is going on here? Talk to me, gentlemen, talk to me!”

  “There’s quite a lot to it,” I said.

  “I’m sure there is.”

  “It’ll take some time. …”

  “Oh, God,” he said, shaking his head, fingers clenching. “There’s no telephone here. Can you believe that, no telephone in the library? You fellows just have a chair, a box, something, and I’m going to call the office, get Danny over here to wait for Bradlee.” He stood in the doorway huffing, arranging his thoughts. Then his face cracked into that unexpected grin, sharp and predatory. “The plot thickens, Cooper.” And then he went outside.

  “We’ve got to tell him,” I said.

  Arthur nodded, heavy flesh sagging away from his cheek and jawbones. “No real choice,” he said, resigned. “I hope he has enough sense not to let it all out again.”

  When Peterson came back he was clapping his hands against the cold. “Snowing like hell again. All right, do you want to start your little tale here or wait until we get back to the office?”

  “Let’s wait,” I said. “It’s long and I want to get it right.”

  We waited in silence until Doctor Bradlee and Danny, Peterson’s assistant, arrived. Bradlee looked sad and tired, caught my eye, and gave me a weary smile. “I’m sorry, John,” he muttered. Danny, all curly hair and bright blue eyes, seemed to be enjoying the excitement. Peterson told him to do whatever Bradlee told him to do and we all set off in Peterson’s Cadillac.

  Fifteen

  THE COURTHOUSE WAS DARK AS we followed Peterson up the creaking wooden stairs to his office. The building was still overheated. Peterson flipped on the lights, threw his coat on a chair, and jerked open the window facing the street. Snow blew in, silt-fine, rattling on the sill and hissing on the radiator.

  “We’re all alone now,” he said patiently. “So start talking.”

  “Paula knew why Cyril came home,” I said, “and why he wanted me to come home. She found some strange material in boxes of Austin Cooper’s stuff at the library. She told Cyril when he called her last week and his response was to say he was going to come home and that he was going to get me home, too.”

  “
Strange material? You’re a writer, you can do better than ‘strange material,’ Cooper.”

  “She wasn’t sure but it had to do with my grandfather’s political activity, his involvement with the Nazis. There were letters, documents, official-looking papers. She could identify some names, or so she told me, but apparently they were in German and she didn’t understand what it all meant. But when she told Cyril about it he said he was coming back.”

  “Letters, documents, papers. …”

  “Diaries my grandfather kept. And she said there was a metal box that was locked.”

  “The metal box you are holding,” Peterson said.

  I handed it to him and he put it on his desk, tapping the lock.

  “We’ll have to get it open. What do you know about this, Mr. Brenner?”

  “Only what John has told you.”

  “You didn’t talk to Paula Smithies?”

  “I talked with both John and Paula at the hotel.”

  “But that was the last time you saw her?”

  “Yes, the last time.”

  For almost an hour Peterson went over my every move since returning to Cooper’s Falls: my arrival, my first conversation with Paula at the library, the discovery of the body of my brother Cyril, my conversations with Paula during the night, and our meeting with Brenner. Back and forth he crisscrossed everything I said, then switched to Arthur, then asked for a rundown on my grandfather’s involvement. Then it was my father, his career, his marriage, his issue, his heroic death. Over and over again. What had we done when we reached the library? Why had we walked? Which of us had seen Paula first? Had we checked the main floor thoroughly? There was nothing but a metal box, none of the other items?

  “Do you know what this means, class?” Peterson sat down and took a cigar and sighted down its length. “It means we’ve got trouble, is what it actually means. It means my wife is going to be very irritated with me because I’m going to have to work late tonight. It means that we’ve got somebody who has knocked off two people in a couple of days—I mean there’s no real point in pretending that the two murders are unrelated, right? Right. So, we’ve either got a nut on our hands or somebody with a hell of a motive.” He paused for effect, lit his cigar, and puffed leisurely, regarding it like a friend whose name he couldn’t place. “I don’t think it’s a nut. Anybody who’d come to that conclusion would in fact, be a nut. Nope. Somebody’s got a perfectly good reason for killing two presumably harmless people. But then, they weren’t harmless to the person who killed them, were they?”

  There was in the commonplace setting an unnerving aura of total unreality: murder is such a large fact that your mind simply rejects it. Cyril was dead. Paula was dead. Absurd.

  “Now, what do the missing documents mean?” Peterson asked.

  “I’m tired,” Brenner said. “Must you formulate your theories on my time?”

  “I need your advice, counselor. Be patient.”

  Arthur sighed, yawned.

  Peterson repeated the question, watching me.

  “Whoever killed Paula took the documents,” I said.

  “Is that why she was killed? For the documents?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Are we learning something?” Peterson asked.

  “I daresay,” I said.

  “We have hypothesized that Paula Smithies was murdered because someone wanted some old Nazi documents. She was killed because she may have learned what was in those papers. She was killed because … it was better for somebody that she be dead.”

  “Peterson, this is all reminiscent of some strange kind of therapy. I think it’s making me sick.”

  “Cooper, somebody made your brother and Paula Smithies dead. Better to be sick. But we’re going to figure it out, indeed we are.” He flicked an inch or so of ash into a glass ashtray. “And why was Cyril killed?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “He knew something about those documents. That’s why he came home. That is why he summoned you home. ‘Family tree needs attention.’ But somebody killed him before you got here, before he talked to Paula. Whoever talked to him … killed him. Somebody knew he was coming home. You knew. And Paula knew. Now Paula’s dead, Cyril’s dead, and by all rights you should be dead in a snowdrift on a Wisconsin highway. Aha, piques your interest, doesn’t it? Whoever tried to kill you was part of this whole damned thing, I’d goddamn well bet my wife’s money on it.”

  Eventually the interrogation ended. Arthur bade us an exhausted good-evening and Peterson and I watched him lean into the blowing snow. Peterson saw me to the door.

  “Take care of yourself. I want you to see this through.”

  I nodded.

  “Big day tomorrow. We may have some news from Buenos Aires. And we’ll crack that metal box.” He slapped me on the back. “Cooper, seriously—I’m sorry about Paula Smithies. I’m not unfeeling about it. But I’m excited by it and I can’t help it. It’s my nature. But I am sorry for what you’re going through. I really am. Would you like a lift home? Why don’t you stay at the hotel?”

  “No, I’m going home. I’ll pick up my car and go back to the house. Thanks, anyway.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning, then. We’ve got to make some arrangements for funerals. I hope Danny handled Miss Smithies’ mother. Jesus, I’ve got a long night ahead of me.”

  I went across and picked up my car from Arnie. He explained what happened to the heater but I didn’t care. It was nearly ten o’clock and there were bodies all over the stage. I just wanted to get home, to be safe again.

  I felt myself drawn to the big house. I stood at my grandfather’s desk staring at the place where Paula had been sitting the night before. What had she hoped for? I wondered. How had she wanted it to work out? Doubtless she’d wanted to marry my brother Cyril: that must have been the end in view. A husband dead in Laos, a kind rescuer in my brother—a romance, a teen-age dream which had somehow come true. And then Cyril was suddenly snuffed out, meaninglessly, and she had had to absorb the shock. Had she had time to understand his death, to begin to search for an alternative? I had kissed her and held her, knowing she was desperate. I had wanted to comfort her, to give her something stable to hold on to in her shock. I thought about the Peck and Peck kilt, the huge safety pin. I had felt something else for her, too. She’d made me realize I wasn’t burned out inside. And then somebody had strangled her and closed her eyes and left her for me to find. It was insane, and it made my chest ache in frustration and anger and undirected hatred.

  I was crying. I couldn’t stop crying.

  I was crying for Cyril and for Paula and for myself.

  I went to the kitchen and made coffee and heard something banging loose on the back of the house. I went back to the library and sat down in my grandfather’s chair. The wind howled outside. I walked into the parlor, into the vast echoing hallway, into one room after another, turning on lights. A formal dining room, another drawing room, a music room, the gun room. My grandfather had been a trapshooter, firing out across our own lake. In the music room I stopped and considered the photographs arranged on the tops of the cabinets.

  My father in tennis dress: white duck trousers, tennis sweater knotted around his neck, white shirt open at the throat, shaking hands with the great German tennis star von Cramm, the perfectly handsome blond, blue-eyed Aryan who had had no time for Hitler. And my mother. …

  She was, I suppose, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen and there were dozens of pictures of her in the music room. I was six years old when she was killed in the Blitz: I’m not sure if I actually remember what she looked like or if these photographs of her were what seemed to be my memory. She had a fine long nose, gracefully wavy blond hair, and a slightly angular quality: pictures of her swimming on the beach at Cannes showed long slender legs, a flat belly, small high breasts. She has a frank look in her eyes, unafraid and unimpressed by the camera. On one wall, by itself, was a huge oil portrait of her painted by my father. She is wearin
g a very simple mauve cocktail dress, low-cut, and she has that characteristic look of unconcern as if she is looking past my father to someone standing in a doorway. My father was a very able painter and his love for her is apparent in the painting.

  My father and my mother were dead, too. The delicate little blond girl in the photographs, sometimes laughing, sometimes solemn, sometimes distracted by a small terrier at her feet—my little sister Lee, the image of her mother. I was the unhappy bastard who got left behind.

  I went back to the library.

  The telephone rang.

  It was Arthur Brenner.

  “I just took a chance you might be in the house and still awake.” His cold was worse. “I’m at home playing with my porcelain and drinking a toddy as you suggested. I’m working on what is the crowning work of my career in porcelain, a re-creation of Flowerdieu’s Charge. Do you know the story?” He was trying to take my mind off things.

  “No.” I slumped back in my grandfather’s chair. “No, what’s the story, Arthur?”

  “Flowerdieu’s Charge,” he said. “It was a gratuitous act of courage, utterly quixotic. The last British cavalry charge. Took place during the Great War, of course. Charged the German lines with drawn saber, rode through them, wheeled, and rode back again. Lad got the Victoria Cross. Posthumously, of course. Flowerdieu did what he was meant to do and died the death Fate had ready for him. There’s a death waiting for us all, John. …”

  “I know, Arthur,” I said.

  “Are you all right?’

  “I’m all right. I’m just shocked, I suppose. So many people are dead.”

  “We’ll all be dead soon enough,” he rumbled. “It’s just a matter of seeing it through, trying to believe in something. The difficulty, of course, is that there’s not a goddamned thing really worth believing in. At least I’m afraid not. Causes leave much to be desired. …” He had had more than one toddy and his mind was wandering.

  “You ought to get to sleep.”