“Archie’s gone. His Sherlock Holmes meeting.”
“Right.” I drank some iced tea. “What about Kim? What do you think? Was she a monster?” I was too tired to chat.
“Well, yes and no, Paul.”
“Come on, Julia, what the hell does that mean?”
“Everybody’s a monster to someone. Don’t you think? And everybody has his own monster. So, yes and no.”
“Why did he kill himself, then?”
“Love or money, those are the usual reasons, aren’t they?”
“But which?”
Julia shrugged. “Why not ask Kim?”
After I popped three Excedrin I kissed her forehead and flung myself recklessly into the hot night.
4
DARWIN MCGILL WAS A HANDSOME man but something had gone wrong in the vastness behind his large brown eyes. His skin looked like a very expensive piece of luggage, dark brown from the sun and unnaturally smooth, but puffed out from too much time spent in the bar at Norway Creek, which was where I found him. The room was dim and almost empty with the big Casablanca ceiling fans slowly rotating above us and the doors thrown open to the patio, pool, and putting green beyond. A few members sipped at tall ones in frosted glasses outside and a couple of teenagers splashed in the pool, the underwater lights casting ominous shadows across their faces and flinging rippling shadows against the thick oaks bordering the golf course. McGill looked up as I sat down on the stool beside him, nodded, crooked a finger at the bartender.
“Jack,” he said, “another gimlet for me and …” He glanced at me.
“Gin and tonic,” I said, and Jack went away. It was cool in the bar and the sweat on my neck was drying. “How’s it going, Darwin?”
“The way it always goes,” he said grimly, a slight slur in his speech. “Spend all day in the sun chasing whitey, get too damn tired and dehydrated for a man my age, and take all night replacing the sweat with gin.”
“You’re just down,” I said. “You’re in fantastic shape.”
“Bullshit.” He frowned, rattled the remains of ice cubes in his glass while waiting for the fresh one. “Bad news today, I’ve got good reason to be down … Liver’s gone bad, Paulie, and you know what that means. Doctor tried to break it gently. Botched it, of course.” He sighed and waited while Jack put our drinks down on club coasters. “I cried for thirty-five minutes and then gave a lesson at eleven o’clock. He said I didn’t have to cut out the booze—it wouldn’t make much difference one way or the other—but a bit of moderation might be in order.” He gave me a sour little grin. “How can men be doctors, having to give people the bad news?”
“Well, they get to give them the good news, too,” I said.
But he was in a mood and not to be cheered; was it as bad as he seemed to think? I’d always found him a jock, utterly outside of my sphere of caring, but it was disheartening to hear the dribs and drabs of his story while my mind was full of Blankenship and Kim. My mind wandered, with my eyes, across the room with its glossy tables and padded, leather-backed chairs, the potted palms, the dusty Moroccan architecture, all arches and whatnot. Anne and I had finished more evenings in the room than was good for us, a fact which put us well into the company of so many of our friends whose marriages had come undone.
“My wife has left me, y’know. Called me a chaser, called me a cradle robber. Said I’d be hanging about school yards and offering them candy soon. I couldn’t believe my ears, the stupid woman.” He yawned. “I’ll never forgive her for leaving me, for beating me to it. She was a mistake from the beginning … You’re not married anymore, are you?”
“Nope.”
“This place is turning into a goddamn singles bar,” he reflected. “The only married people are the old ones.” An eye gleamed at me. “Do you figure there’s a lot of wife swapping or ex-wife-swapping going on here?”
“My God, I don’t know. I sure as hell don’t want a wife, my own or anyone else’s.”
He clasped my arm. “You tell ’em, Paulie.” He sipped his drink and added sorrowfully, “I spend most of my time in the pro shop now, nothing to go home to, not even an argumentative bitch. Funny how you can miss even a bitch …”
McGill’s relationship with his wife had been stormy for as long as I could remember, something the members sometimes chuckled over. She was always accusing him, not only in private, of messing about with the women and girls he coached. She may well have had grounds, too, but no one ever made a scandal and Darwin inevitably rode out any marginal squalls. If he hadn’t been such a fine player and teacher, he would probably have been fired; he was good, though, and personally well liked, so he survived the years. He must have been fifty-five.
“What do you know about Kim Roderick?” I asked. “You taught her the game, didn’t you?”
He nodded, glass to his lips. “She picked it up quick and kept getting better. If she were fifteen years old today, what with all the indoor courts and improved competition, she might have made the tour, the Slims or something. TV would have picked up on her because she’s so pretty, and she’s got the personality to win, kind of a Rosemary Casals game, short but strong, good musculature, hits a big overhead, death on lobs.” He was talking like a pro now and I could see his mind recalling her making the shots. “Not too fast but she gets into good position, goes for the winners, very fast reflexes. And on top of that she’s a fucking killer. She’s in her mid-thirties now but she’s still got that nasty quality … a lousy loser, let me tell you.”
“You still play with her?”
“Yeah, matter of fact, I do. She beat me last week, ran me back and forth all day, wore me out, and then just beat hell out of me. I know exactly what Riggs felt like in the Astrodome … The expression on her face never changed, it was like she was doing an exercise. I’ve known women who screwed that way, mechanically, never show the slightest emotion.”
We were on our next drink and the mood was right. “Did you ever sleep with her?”
“Oh, hell, no—not for want of trying, though. Hell, Paul, you know how it is, she worked for me, I saw a lot of her every day, I couldn’t help putting a little move on her every now and then. You really can’t blame me, can you? That’s one of the best things about a job like this. Then, before you know it, it’s your life, not just your job, and there’s nothing you can do about it and your liver gives out …”
“What was she like then back when you were making your moves?”
Darwin McGill’s hair was dark and wavy, flecked with gray, and he slid strong dark fingers through it like an old movie star. He grinned, remembering, and shook his handsome head, flashed the white teeth.
“It depends when you’re talking about. She changed, y’see.” He scooped up a handful of Spanish peanuts and suggested we go outside. He was still lean but there was a little thickening about his waist. I was sorry about his poor damn liver. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he seemed to think. The breeze was cool, the sky bright and spattered with blinking stars which had actually burned away and died a million years ago. He smiled at some of the patio sitters who spoke his name and then we were on the grass, which was moist in the night. The last purple fingers had lost their grip on the western sky. He was heading instinctively for the shadowy bulk of the tennis courts, the high fences.
“When she first showed up here, she was just kitchen help, then she did some waiting on tables, then she came to me in her spare time wanting me to teach her the game. She was very serious and very quiet and determined, very pretty. So I figured, what the hell, I’ll spend a little time on her—I admit it, I liked to watch her move around and work up a sweat. I figured she was safer game than a member—you start messing around with members, wives and daughters, which I’ve done, God knows, you’re running a real risk. You could get fired if you got caught at it … Well, she picked up the game, really showed me something, and she began to loosen up a bit, get a little friendlier, than a lot friendlier—hell, the thing was she wanted to be my assistant.
/> “She was doing nothing more or less than a little cockteasing and I sure as hell went for it. She seemed to have some real supporters among the members and when I suggested that she’d be a real help to me running the shop, working with some of the members when I was booked solid—when I went to them with the idea, they said fine, she’d be a help, all right. She really impressed them, I think, industrious as hell.”
We’d reached the courts and he hooked his fingers into the fencing and leaned against it as if he were counting the six courts. It was quiet; nothing moved but the wind in the willows.
“Once she was working in the pro shop I sort of waited for a chance and one night it came. I tried a little straight-ahead stuff with her, she yanked away from me and the buttons came off her blouse like machine-gun fire. She wasn’t saying anything and I’d had a few drinks and didn’t know when to quit. I kept at her and pulled her brassiere off and there were these tiny round tits, smooth, with big stiff nipples …” He sighed and turned around to look at me. “I don’t know why I stopped. Maybe it was because she didn’t look flustered, maybe it was because she’d always seemed so distant and seeing her naked was so … unnatural, I guess. Anyway, I was really shocked at what I’d done.” He shook his head as if he were reliving the confusions of that moment years before.
“She just looked at me, watched me looking at her chest, and told me that I was just one step from losing my job and facing a criminal action. She was so composed, Paulie, I just felt like I wanted to hide. She said she had friends among the members who would have me dismissed and give her all the legal advice she wanted. She didn’t seem angry or out of breath or anything. I’ve never felt such a chill—I thought my dick was gonna just drop on the floor.
“I apologized and she said never to mention it again, to forget it. She just stared at me for a while, then she put her brassiere back on right in front of me, took a brand-new tennis shirt out of the cabinet, pulled it on over her head, threw the ripped blouse into a wastebasket, and left. I was absolutely terrified, for my job mainly. But she never did anything about it, nothing more was ever said … but she was a true-blue bitch, I’ve never seen anything to match it. She didn’t have a pot to piss in but she was right at the head of the class and I’ve had to deal with a lot of rich, nasty people in this job. She just threw me the hell away, looked right through me from then on … She doesn’t forget, not ever. Billy Whitefoot really got the full curse, poor son of a bitch. The job she did on him was goddamn incredible. Then when he was all used up, she moved on to Ole Kronstrom and that poor asshole she married, Larry what’s-his-name.”
We eventually walked back toward the clubhouse.
“What brought her up, anyway?”
“Her husband killed himself the other day. Nobody seems to know why. I was just curious.”
“Women. She probably drove him to it.”
“That’s a popular view.”
“Yeah, I can see how she’d make a guy do something like that. Well, she’s one of a kind.”
On the driveway he put his hand on my arm.
“Look, you’re not going to tell this stuff to anybody, are you? I mean, not your father or his cronies? They’re the ones she meant when she said she had friends …”
“No, Darwin, I’m not going to tell anybody.”
“I’d appreciate it.” He chuckled in the dark. “I’ve got enough problems, Paulie. It’s all catching up with me.” Before he went back into the bar, he said something funny: “Women, if they didn’t have cunts, they’d be hunted.”
I left him alone with his liver and another gimlet and called Anne. I asked her if I could stop by for a minute on the way home. She said it was okay with her; she was just putting a steak on the grill. I asked her to make it two.
The house sat on a hill behind a vine-covered stone wall with a sharp drop of brambles collapsing downward steeply to Lake of the Isles. I pulled up the narrow driveway with the shrubberies’ claws reaching hungrily for my face, clattering at the sides of the car. The house, which had had a peculiarly crumbly look about it for years, was dark but when I went in I saw the dim glow from Anne’s workroom. The place smelled of airplane glue and there was a Moody Blues record playing. She was bent over a trestle worktable with a complicated lamp jutting out over the fuselage of a large Messerschmitt ME 109 she was repairing. The table was covered with spines of balsa wood, pliers and tweezers and little pots of paint and tubes of glue and wires and Exacto knives and dirty hand rags. A dead joint had burned away in an ashtray, leaving the faint memory of her homegrown grass hanging in the air. She looked up and for a moment I didn’t quite recognize her: She had had her black hair cropped very short and it had been years since I’d seen her without a wig of one kind or another.
“Hi,” she said. “I put the steaks on. Hand me that beer, will you, please?” She put down the needle-nosed pliers and looked at the dismantled airplane the way someone else might sadly inspect a bird with a broken wing.
“Have a crash?”
“A beaut,” she said. “Sheared off a wing and took the undercarriage out. Shit.” She sighed and swigged at the Coors she always brought back from her trips to Aspen, where her parents had a million-dollar retreat. “Well, it’s time to be philosophical—it’s the tinkering that’s fun, right? And how’s that antique carburetor system of yours working?”
“The car runs,” I said. “What can I say?”
“You really should let me look at that for you. The timing is probably all shot to hell, too.”
“I suppose.” She handed me the beer and I remembered too late that it would be sickly warm. She’d probably been pulling at the same can since noon.
“God, how can you live in a world where you don’t know how anything works? You don’t know how your car works, or your television set, or the presses at the paper, or anything … Doesn’t it make you nervous, Cav?”
“Lots of other things make me nervous.” We’d had this conversation before. Many times. Several hundred times. “Knowing would make me nervous.”
She shook her head. Above us a red Focke-Wulf hung by piano wires swayed in the breeze. The night moved stealthily in the brambles outside.
“Let’s go check the steaks,” she said, wiping crud off her hands. “You want to split a joint? Homegrown organic shit,” she offered as a final inducement.
“No thanks.”
“Me neither,” she said. “I’m beginning to believe all the brain-damage stuff.” She was wearing a T-shirt with the big red Rolling Stones tongue dangling obscenely between her breasts; tight Levi’s across her broad, firm hips. Barefoot she was within an inch of six feet. As she passed me, she brushed her lips across my mouth and I could taste the warm beer on her.
The huge kitchen was all ancient butcher block, dirty dishes everywhere, a collander with a wilted clump of lettuce that was probably a week old. She took another Coors out of a case on the counter; impossibly, she always just forgot to put it in the refrigerator; it wasn’t that she even liked warm beer. She asked me if I wanted one and I made a face. She shrugged—“It’s your funeral”—and we went out the back door. The steaks sizzled over reddish coals, there was a glass bowl full of lettuce and tomatoes and green peppers and bits of cheese and pepperoni, and a Dansk bucket with ice and a bottle of something in it, all proving that she could still get it together if inclined to do so.
She ate like a starved lion, demolished her salad. “Come on, eat,” she said. “I made this for you …” She smiled while I ate, finished before me, and lit a normal Winston and leaned back, legs crossed. The small lawn seemed isolated, dark, quiet, nestled between the bramble cliff and the moldering three-story mansion. Something ran across the back, near the thicket, something small and furry.
“Did you just want a free meal?” she asked, relaxed, her voice mellow. “Or is there something on your mind?”
“Something on my mind, something I’m getting into with no particular reason. Just things people have been saying …” I
didn’t quite know where to begin.
“So?”
“Larry Blankenship—do you know the name?”
“Of course,” she said patiently. “He was married to a friend of mine.”
“Well, he killed himself a couple of days ago.” She froze the cigarette on the way to her mouth and stared at me, her face a mask of surprise and paling shock. “What?”
“He shot himself in the lobby of my building.”
“Well, for God’s sake … Larry. He was such a simple guy, so worried about everything.”
“I wanted to ask you about your friend Kim Roderick.”
“What about her? Do you know her?”
“No, I don’t know her, but somebody mentioned that you knew her. People have been telling me that she may have driven Blankenship to kill himself …”
She shook her head and dragged on the cigarette. “No, I don’t think so. I’m not saying Kim wouldn’t be capable of doing that to a guy—but not to Larry.” She shook her head more vehemently, stubbed out her cigarette. “If you’d said that poor Indian kid, Whitefoot, had killed himself or drunk himself to death, that I could have attributed to Kim, at sort of second or third hand, you know. But not poor Larry … he was a Kigmy—”
“A what?”
“A Kigmy. Remember Al Capp? He had the Schmoos and the Kigmies. The Schmoos were just too good to be true—they laid bottled Grade A milk and when you broiled them they tasted like sirloin; fried, they tasted like chicken. The Kigmies were the perfect masochists—they wanted only to be kicked, that was their mission, they were there for the world to take out aggressions on, just waiting to be kicked. He made people nervous. And Kim usually treated him pretty benevolently—sort of like brother and sister. It was hard for me to imagine them in bed, he was so passive. But, then, she was always terrified of sex—or, anyway, I’d have bet on it. She seemed frigid to me, she always seemed so tightly controlled …” She cocked an eye at me. “You’d have liked her, maybe. She was—is—very neat, determined, but there were signals every so often that something pretty spooky was going on underneath. That would appeal to you.” Her eyes gleamed with the happy malice of people who knew each other overly well.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 7
