The Cavanaugh Quest

by Thomas Gifford

  “Pa thinks I’m crazy; he wouldn’t even talk to me this morning … but I want to know why Larry Blankenship killed himself. I really want to know, Paul. What did she do to him? I know she killed him, as surely as if she’d pulled the trigger.

  “Why don’t you find out for me?”

  When I thought about it later, it didn’t surprise me that Harriet Dierker would ask me to do such a nebulous, largely fractured sort of thing. It was precisely the sort of thing she would ask, unhesitatingly, without giving the question’s implications any serious consideration. Her mind worked that way; she wanted to know and she asked me to find out.

  But looking back on it, tweezing through the effects which the search for her wretched answer had on my life, yes, I do wonder at my ever having gotten involved. Like a pulsing swamp, it sucked me in and set me wondering if I were in some way defective in my resistance. So many things have seeped up around me while I wasn’t paying attention. There is a kind of stickiness that overcomes you eventually when you realize that things have taken a peculiar turn. By then it has always been too late. Once, in an echoing, damp night I killed an elderly man in another country … Once I married Anne. And just once I really paid attention to Harriet Dierker.

  It would be unjust to blame her, though. If there had been no more to it than our balcony-and-brioche conversation, I’d have to let it go. Larry Blankenship’s death would have given me pause and I would have doubtless remembered the story of Kim Roderick, but nothing more. I had other things to think about. I could have spent the summer reviewing the new movies, seeing what the Guthrie was doing, striking up hopeful acquaintances with moody actresses who would be there for a season and go conveniently away at the proper time. I had done most of that, as a matter of fact, and I’d interviewed the television personalities coming through and I played tennis and looked with dismay at my Porsche and lunched by the pool in the sunshine at the Sheraton Ritz. I pretended I was only thirty. I experienced the peculiar sensation of someone you recognize through a shifting curtain of people and realize with a flicker in your chest that it’s you you’re seeing, you when you were ten years younger, moving through time like a ghost. Not better, not happier, but more hopeful. Hope had been all around you then and more often than not it had looked like a woman.

  Which brings back the dying end of summer and the Kim Roderick thing. As I say, it grabbed me before I really knew what was happening and it wasn’t just Harriet. Pa got into the act, too. He called me later the same day when I was staring at a legal pad, pen poised, trying to think of something new and rotten to say about the Lou Reed album I was supposed to be reviewing. Lou Reed brings out the worst in me and I feel better for it.

  If you can imagine a hearty groan, you know what Pa Dierker sounded like. I could believe he was dying but I couldn’t quite take it seriously.

  “Paul, this is Tim Dierker. Ma said she was talking to you today about Blankenship’s mess. That right?”

  “She was,” I said, admiring the way Pa got right to the point.

  “Well, she’s just gone out and I want to disabuse you of whatever crap she was … telling you. Ma’s so full of crap most of the time. Get over here. I’ll set you straight and you can make us each a gin and tonic.”

  Until they moved into the building I hadn’t seen Tim in five or six years. He’d once been a big, loosely put-together man with freckles and reddish hair. With illness he’d collapsed inward as such men do, as if the plug had been pulled and his gusto had all run out. The red hair was a yellowed white and sparse on a long oval face with cheeks sinking against the hollows of his elongated skull and the freckles had coagulated into brown disks which rested like coins on the parchment face. Red veins had exploded outward from his bony hawk’s nose. He looked as if he’d been hurled forward from within his body and shattered the windshield of his face. He was wearing a cowboy shirt with one of those awful string ties held in place by something that looked like a turquoise napkin ring. Baggy old corduroys and furry slippers of indeterminate age completed the ensemble and his hand, weakly shaking mine, felt dusty.

  “There.” He gestured vaguely toward the kitchen counter, where the Tanqueray and Schweppes stood like soldiers beside the limes, the ice trays, the old paring knife. “Make ’em. I gotta sit down.”

  I built them quick, listening to the sound of the television in the other room. Hogan was suggesting to Captain Klink for the two millionth time that he just might be ticketed for the Eastern Front if word got back to Berlin. It was a funny show. I could hear the laughter but Pa Dierker was sitting in the dark corner of the room, scowling, wheezing. Expensive, very bad paintings hung in odd, conflicting areas of wall and made the room look empty. He sat in a Naugahyde tilt lounger, a rich old man who wasn’t enjoying the sunset years. Somehow he made his corner of the room look like a documentary film about abuses in the nursing-home industry. “Siddown, Paul, and give me the drink. Did you put gin in mine?”

  I nodded.

  “I forgot to tell you I’m not supposed to drink. Ah, well, I’ll tough it out.” He took a deep swallow. He’d been a hard drinker once and at least you never lost the knack.

  “Forget what Ma told you.” He clicked a handset and the sound of Hogan’s Heroes died. No more applause.

  “How do you know what she told me?”

  “I know. Poor Larry. Pa looked on him like the son we never had, that witch of a wife drove him to kill himself, their marriage broke Pa’s health …” He made a sour face. “Direct hit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, she runs off at the mouth and I learn it by heart. God hasn’t blessed me with deafness, the one affliction I could make use of. But no, she talks and I listen and I know she’ll just keep saying the same thing until there’s nobody … left to hear it.” He took another deep drink and coughed wetly, turning gray beneath the exploded blood vessels. “It’s all bullshit.”

  “You mean she made it up?”

  “I didn’t say that, Paul. But she gets it all out of focus. The facts are … old. They deserve to die. Larry killed himself; he’s dead.” He stared at the silent television picture. “Who cares why anymore?”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Me? How should I know, Paul?” He was grinning, overtly wily, possibly gaga, for all I knew. He looked suddenly as if he were playing a game I hadn’t been told about.

  “She said Larry’d stopped in to see you a few times. What did he want? Did he act like a man who was going to kill himself?”

  “How should I know? What do I know about suicides?”

  “Did he talk about his wife?”

  “Yes.” He grinned. “He rambled on about his wife. Shit!” he snorted. “Why can’t we just leave women out of it? He was through with Kim; that was all over.” The craftiness of the rodent gleamed behind his dull eyes. “Why would he care about Kim anymore? Women! Ma and her goddamned imagination …”

  “Your wife doesn’t agree with you, Tim. She was upset about this whole thing. She said you were disturbed when Blankenship came to see you. Somebody’s confused. She asked me to find out why he killed himself—she thought his wife was behind it.” It seemed like a pointless conversation but Tim’s face grew sly again.

  “Maybe Kim did kill him.” He chuckled bleakly. “How should I know?” He coughed and sipped. “You’re not going to do anything about it, are you? You’re a goddamn writer, not a detective … or a psychiatrist …” His pale remote eyes left the television set. He was squinting at me from a past he was hinting at and simultaneously concealing and his breath was short. Watching a sick man who seemed to be nuzzling into senility was making me nervous; being watched by a sick man apparently getting sicker by the minute was worse. I looked away, came face to face with a coppery goldfish in an old-fashioned bowl. I looked back at the old man.

  “I wouldn’t know what to do,” I said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “Good.” He sighed. “You’re a hell of a lot better off out of it.” He p
ressed the button and Captain Klink was back explaining to the Gestapo why the priceless secret rocket had blown up. Laughter. “Much better off, believe me …”

  “What is this Kim like?” I said.

  “A woman. What else is there to know?”

  “Did she love him?”

  “Larry … God, yes, she loved him. I’d bet on that.”

  “But you didn’t want him to marry her?”

  “It was a long time ago. Maybe I was just … giving him the benefit of my experience with marriage.” His breathing was becoming increasingly labored.

  “Did Larry solicit your advice?”

  “Once too often.” He wheezed.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Listen, you … beat it! Just beat it and forget all about it. I mean that, you.” He seemed to have forgotten my name.

  “Well, I guess that’s that, then.”

  Pa Dierker didn’t say any more. The goldfish had lost interest in us and was peering at a little piece of green stuff floating around in his bowl. I got up and left Pa with his canned laughter. There were pathetic little bits of gray fluff from his slippers on the carpet; it reminded me of a doll losing its stuffing. Watergate had increased my vocabulary: Pa was stonewalling it. Why?

  I was taking the hook. It was drifting down my gullet like an X-ray probe, something scary, and I was beginning to realize it. I was sitting at my typewriter, staring past it at the setting sun reflecting in the IDS tower, which brooded over Minneapolis like a derisive gesture. Twenty-four hours had passed since Hubbard Anthony and I had sat on my balcony, twenty-four hours—the sum total of my experience of Larry Blankenship and Kim Roderick. I hadn’t known them; suddenly I knew too much about them. Thinking about it tired me out. I decided to go for a walk.

  There was a light on in the manager’s office, very peculiar for the evening. Bill Oliver was sitting at his desk puffing on a cigar and staring into space. He waved and I went in.

  “You’re working long hours,” I said.

  “Nervous as a cat,” he said, peering at the ash, leaning back in his leather chair. “This goddamn Blankenship thing.”

  “What about it?”

  “People asking questions all day, wanting to hear all about it. People with theories. Mrs. Dierker bent my ear for an hour this afternoon. I just couldn’t get rid of her. Jesus, what a nut case she is …”

  I laughed. “She spent breakfast with me telling me the guy’s life story. And his ex-wife.”

  He looked up sharply. “Me, too. I don’t know what she expected me to do about it.”

  “Did you ever meet his wife?”

  “Well, at least I saw her. Not to meet. I think it was about the only times I saw him with anybody—he was usually just alone, he’d always smile, say hi, friendly fella, always by himself.” He got up restlessly, stood staring out of the window with his hands jammed down in his hip pockets.

  “What was she like?”

  “Good-looking,” he said to the window. I could see the reflection of his cigar in the window; the ash had fallen off and it glowed like a pulsing flare. “Dark hair, real tan, trim. Like an athlete, like she was in real good shape …

  “But I didn’t pay as much attention to her as I might have because the second time she was here, hell, just a few days ago, it was him I was watching. Blankenship, the poor bastard. He was crying, or damned near to it, face all red and going up and down like you do if you’re trying not to cry. I mean, a man doing that—I guess I was embarrassed for him. He was sort of following her; he had his hand on her arm and he was all messed up—his tie was loose and he looked all rumpled—his face was red, and she was so calm, looking straight ahead, not hurrying, not trying to get away from him. She wasn’t mad, you know? Just sort of businesslike, perfectly dressed …” He looked back at me, his head wreathed in smoke. “Some women are like that, never a hair out of place; that’s the way she was.”

  “What did she have on, shorts or slacks—”

  “No, a dress, with a belt, linenlike, dark blue, no sleeves, just long tan arms …” He stopped, remembering.

  “I’d say she made quite an impression on you.” I could hear what Hub Anthony had said.

  “Yeah, by God, I guess she did.” He nodded. “More than I figured she did, I guess.”

  “So what happened? She’s striding deliberately on and he’s about to cry. What next?”

  “Well, he followed her out into the parking lot and they stood talking beside her car. She seemed to have a calming effect because he stopped talking and sort of pulled himself together.”

  “Did they touch?”

  He gave me a funny look, like I was talking dirty.

  “Well, I told you he sorta grabbed her arm, like he wanted her to stop and talk. She didn’t touch him.” He paused and frowned. “I thought at the time, what was she saying to him? Y’know, first I thought she was his girlfriend—anyway, the first time she was here.”

  “Logical,” I said. I wondered where my mind was poking.

  “Sure, but that second time, that was different. I mean, that was no lovers’ quarrel. She wasn’t showing her feelings—she didn’t look like she had feelings. God, she didn’t even seem to be embarrassed by the way he was acting. Then I thought they might even be brother and sister—hell, I didn’t know. Today Mrs. Dierker tells me the story. Ex-wife. It figures, I said to myself. Now why didn’t that occur to me? The building’s full of ex-husbands and ex-wives …”

  “Like me,” I said.

  “Well, sure, like you. And when she told me that, sure as hell, I knew she was right. Perfect.”

  He looked at his watch, put his huge hands on the desk, and pushed himself upright, all six four of him.

  “Ten o’clock,” he said. “Let’s go topside, get everybody out of the pool. Lock up. Come on.”

  It was cool and breezy on the roof and you could see the stars like a planetarium diagram. The water glowed turquoise from the pool lights and if you watched it lapping at the sides, you began to think the building was tipping. A couple of guys in thick terry-cloth robes were talking in one corner, plastic tumblers and an ice bucket between them on the cement and a telephone plugged into an outlet for the convenience of big-time executives. They saw us, waved their hands all weighted down with University of Minnesota class rings, started to pick up their party gear.

  Bill got a pole with a hook on the end of it and began to fish for the lifesavers bobbing on the water. While he attended to his housekeeping duties, I leaned on the waist-high wall and looked southward out over the freeways and the quivering, jittery lights of the suburbs stretching away past Metropolitan Stadium and the Minnesota River. None of what I could see had any meaning to me; it had to mean something to somebody but I couldn’t imagine what to whom.

  I was surprised at Bill Oliver’s ability to put me in that scene in the parking lot. He’d hit on the keys, the points which made me recognize what he’d been describing. I’d known women like that, tremendously controlled because the only alternative was to come utterly apart. And Larry, the sap with no hint of how you kept yourself protected, at arm’s length from the disagreeable things. The scene in the parking lot made Harriet Dierker’s estimate of the situation look reasonably acute. It made me wonder why old Larry was crying. It made me wonder what the hell Kim had done to him.

  She was out there somewhere in the night.

  In the elevator, when it stopped at my floor, I held the door and said, “What kind of car was she driving?”

  “A gold Mark IV.”

  I decided not to go for a walk. I went to bed, opened The Baseball Encyclopedia, and began to read about Peanuts Lowery, another old Cub.

  3

  I AWOKE AT FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning, the wind swirling the curtains. It’s windy where I live, up so high, even when the night is calm. I couldn’t sleep. The Baseball Encyclopedia lay beside me. I got up, took a quick shower while listening to Franklin Hobbs on WCCO, drank some of last ni
ght’s coffee, and ate a huge breadlike doughnut from a restaurant called Sammy D’s. At four forty I was pushing the Porsche through the cool gray of early morning, when the streetlights blink a little disinterestedly and the lonely people are having bacon and eggs at places like The Hungry Eye and the bleary old drunks just give it the hell up and die down on Nicollet Island. The perverts are falling asleep in Loring Park; even perverts have to sleep sometimes: Bothering little boys and girls is no picnic, not even in Loring Park.

  My office is down a corridor out of sight of the city room. It’s almost always quiet in my office because I don’t work against rigid deadlines. I write my stuff and when it’s done I feed it to the arts and entertainment editor, who frowns because he envies me my freedom, and then it runs in the paper. I have a contract that says nobody gets to cut my copy, which only goes to show you what a joke a contract can be. A good deal of what I write cannot possibly make any sense to my readers; sometimes it just stops in the middle of a sentence because a salesman brought in an ad at the last minute and changed the space allotments. In the beginning I used to read my stuff in the paper, at least until I knew what was going to happen to it—and then I stopped. The alternative was an early apoplectic’s grave. My editor was and is a gruff man built a good deal like a Mayflower van. I used to complain about things to him and he laughed, slapped me on the back in an ill-concealed attempt to dislocate my shoulder, and said, “Ah, fuck it, nobody reads this kinda shit anyway.”

  Nobody was moving about in my part of the building. I unlocked the door to my treasure cabinet, where the new books and records are inevitably the subject of stealthy thieves who come by night to improve their minds. The books stood staring at me, daring me to read them. Every other one seemed to be a biography of a Nazi. I shut the door, sat down, and typed twenty-three pages of reviews from my notes. Very fast, lots of mistakes. It was eight o’clock when I finished and the building was throbbing with noise and movement. Nobody paid any attention to me. I am the invisible man, I am not their comrade. In their eyes, what I do is not to be confused with work. They know I am not a newspaperman but they do not quite know what I actually am.