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 wa
s 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.
“Upwardly mobile,” I said. “That’s what they’d call it now. Chronic overachiever.”
Hubbard stood up and ejected his cigarette stub into my Cinzano ashtray.
“Well,” he said, “there were those who thought she was a little pushy. Never could see it myself.” He shrugged. “Let’s go. I’m bushed.” He looked it.
By the time I got back a wind with wetness in it had come up and the old wooden swing on my balcony was moving by itself. I kicked off my tattered penny loafers and padded out to watch the storm coming across the western suburbs. The purple clouds reflected darkly in the face of the IDS building and the downtown lights glowed yellow. It was still hot but I could see the rain like a frail curtain hanging on the outskirts of the city.
I was thinking about Larry Blankenship and his wife, Kim, the sad little pile of lifeless flesh which had been the sum of what he’d left behind. Hubbard Anthony had called him a natural victim, a man determined to be a victim, and his wife had called him a loser. That was all I knew about Larry Blankenship and even that clung like a scab on the side of my consciousness. It was seeing the body that did it; take away the body and it would have bothered me no more than any of a thousand other sad stories you’re always hearing somewhere.
Lightning walked across the horizon like a regiment of stick soldiers and I flinched at the crack of thunder. Then the rain began to swish past the balcony and I took a deep swallow of Pimm’s Cup. Headlamps probed at the swirling rain below me and I went inside and put an old Freddy Gardner saxophone record on and went back to my chair hearing the lonely, elegant, sad music. I suppose the music was a stupid idea because it only deepened the mood which had grown so steadily since the sunshiny afternoon of tennis.
But what the hell. I was giving up to it, the sense of reflection, more and more lately. Closing in on forty, I’d decided that life was no longer quite the endless parade of possibilities it once had seemed. Every time I turned around I caught sight of another option being shot to pieces. Still, I was better off than Larry Blankenship. As far as options went, Larry Blankenship was fresh out.
Unhappy marriages are all alike. I wondered if all marriages are unhappy. Probably not, but then you never knew. Kim and Larry, in their upwardly mobile way, had tried to make it on their own. She’d made herself useful at Norway Creek, where no one was upwardly mobile because no one in Minneapolis had found anything higher to aspire to. They must have served as wonderful models for Kim Roderick as she made her move from waitress to tennis instructor. How many passes had the rich made, how many by the sons of the rich? How many tennis lessons had turned into something else?
I’d finished the pitcher and I was thinking like Scott Fitzgerald in his “Winter Dreams” period. Freddy Gardner kept playing, now “Roses of Picardy,” and I was withstanding a mixed-media assault. A woman on another balcony was laughing, a woman who sounded like Anne, from whom I’d stolen the wedding-present pitcher. I hadn’t seen her in several weeks but the laugh was like hers and she had hated my Freddy Gardner saxophone records. Thank God, we’d had no children. Maybe I was lucky, not a victim; Larry and Kim had had a child and naturally there’d been something wrong with it. Naturally. And it had been stuck away somewhere. And his wife had called him a loser and had left him and a while later he blew his brains out in my lobby. It was the saddest story I’d ever heard and the wind had changed, shifting to blow across the park toward me. I was getting wet so I went back inside and left the sliding door wide open to keep me in touch with nature. I was a romantic; Anne had hated romantics. But then she was one of those from the Norway Creek Club who had nowhere left to go, at least not upward. Those people, by and large, are not romantics, are not so afflicted with what is clearly a condition of the middle classes. Kim and Larry probably had had fairly advanced cases. I’d have bet on it.
I didn’t much like the way my mind was running. The thunder was smashing steadily at the city like artillery trained on the enemy campfires and lightning kept going off like rocket fire. I went down the dark hallway, hung a left, took off my clothes, switched off the telephone, turned on the old wicker lamp by the bed, opened the windows, which sent the curtains billowing, and lay down on the bed with The Baseball Encyclopedia, which meant that I was afraid of the night.
Two of the most important treasures anyone can find in life are, one, something which can effectively take your mind off yourself and, two, something which can put you to sleep when the nighttime is your adversary. For $17.95 The Baseball Encyclopedia does both and consequently, dollar for dollar, it is the most valuable object ever devised by man. On page 687 I began rummaging through the career of one of my favorite players of the forties, Bill Nicholson, also known as Big Swish, who played the outfield for the Cubs from 1939 until 1948, when, almost sacrilegiously, he was traded to the Phillies, where he ended his career in 1953.
When my father had been a professor at the University of Chicago I had frequently gone to Wrigley Field, where the green vines grew thick on the outfield walls. Nicholson had been a six-foot, 200-pounder with a reputation as a home-run hitter, though his totals don’t realize that World War II baseball was sort of a make-do-with-what-you-could-find proposition. When I was ten years old, in 1944, and when Nicholson was thirty he led the National League with 33 home runs, 116 runs scored, and 122 runs batted in. I’d never heard of anybody quite like Bill Nicholson before and one day while I stood watching some teenagers play baseball on a vacant lot I heard one of them refer to the one who was batting as Big Bill Nicholson. I felt my heart jerk and I swallowed hard, inconspicuously edging around the sun-bleached grass until I could see if this guy really was Bill Nicholson; after all, the Cubs had an off day before Brooklyn came in and maybe this was how he spent his spare time. But it wasn’t Bill Nicholson, of course. It was a big muscular kid with boils on the back of his neck and he could hit hell out of the ball. But he was a long way from being Bill Nicholson.
It was thundering again and rain was spraying through the window onto my bare feet. The huge volume had slipped down on my lap and my eyelids felt as if somebody were rubbing sand into them but my brain hadn’t cut out yet. I was still thinking about Larry Blankenship and wondering why it all works out for some people and doesn’t work out at all for others. It was a train of thought which could drive you crazy and maybe nothing really worked out for anybody. Maybe that was why everybody got so tired.
2
I HAD SHOWERED BUT WAS still in my underwear and gaping robe when I went to fetch the morning Tribune from the hallway. Her voice came like the muffled caw of a bird; everything about her was birdlike, the sharp darting nose, the gray feathery hair, the overquick jerks and snaps of her head. “Why, Paul”—quick breath, mouth snapping shut betw
een words, eyes poking about in a random pattern, flighty—“how are you this morning?” It was her perfunctory way of getting to whatever was really on her mind. She was rubbing her nose with a Kleenex, ready to begin the next remark.
“I’m fine, Mrs. Dierker,” I said, “just getting my paper.”
She always looked as if she’d only just that moment come across a conspiracy of some significance. I’d known her all my life, through my parents. The Dierkers had recently sold their elaborate Lake of the Isles mansion and moved into the building, waiting for the end. Harriet Dierker looked as if she had a way to go.
“Well, I’m so upset I don’t know what to do …” She twisted her hands, an elderly woman acting like a child, tailoring the performance to her audience. “Tim just sits there and eats his Rice Krispies, dribbling cream on his Pendleton robe, telling me to calm down—it’s so frustrating, so upsetting. And he’s not at all well, you know. There’s been something particularly bothering him lately.”
I looked bland. She always sounded the same, whether discussing the weather or a natural disaster.
“You’ve heard about what happened yesterday, haven’t you?” Her voice eased out in a long phony chord of consolation, exaggerated. She didn’t really care, I’d always thought, but pretended that she cared. She was the Spirit of Gossip; she would have fitted well into The School for Scandal.
“Ah …” My mind wasn’t really connecting yet. I was trying to hold my robe together. “I don’t know …”
“In the lobby, Paul,” she said accusingly, “Larry Blankenship killed himself!” She found another Kleenex in her alligator bag. She was wearing a striped Peck & Peck knit, lime green and yellow and blue, with matching blue shoes. She always looked like that, perfect in a rather hideously premeditated way.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 2
