Prospect Park is a slightly tacky high-rent district sequestered among trees and narrow curving streets, just off the bustle of University Avenue where Minneapolis and St. Paul converge in an array of warehouses, an Octopus Car Wash, some fast-food joints. The houses are large and canted against hillsides, the sidewalks are full of cracks and sprouts of grass, and you can walk to the University of Minnesota. Most of the park’s residents are academics of one kind or another. Looking over their lives is a tower rising up from the crest of the hill at the park’s center. When I left the Porsche sagging disconsolately beside the crumbling curb, the tower had lost its pointed top in fog coming up off the Mississippi across the East River Road.
Father Boyle’s house was a large old frame affair that looked comfortable and needed paint. I climbed the two long steep flights of steps and was puffing when I rang the bell. It took some time but Boyle himself, leaning on a cane, finally answered it. He was wearing baggy tweed pants, a white shirt with the collar open to make room for heavy jowls, and a heavy cardigan. He had a stubble of white beard on his cheeks, a cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth, and in the light from the hallway his eyes had an unhealthy opacity which turned what had once been bright blue to a luminous gray.
I introduced myself as Archie Cavanaugh’s son and he smiled broadly, the face of a garrulous man who loved to talk, motioned me inside, where the smell of cigar smoke had permeated everything, the walls, the draperies, the furniture. He had been the church’s emissary to the university’s student body for long time. He was accustomed to visitors, practiced at making them feel at ease. He wheezed and mumbled as we went the length of the hallway, keeping a running conversation going all by himself; he waddled, spoke with a hint of brogue, and I wondered how he got around the golf course.
“Come on,” he said, leading me into a large bookish room at the back of the main floor. “My study,” he rumbled, “I hope you can stand the heat. It dries out the air on these foggy nights and my leg likes it hot and dry. Siddown, siddown. I’ll get us a nip.” He had a fire going in an oversize brickfront fireplace with his immense, bloated leather chair pulled up close. A small gout stool stood in front of the chair. While he got a tray of glasses and bottles I settled on a couch Freud might have used and checked the surroundings; threadbare Oriental rug, dark woodwork, leaded glass in the windows and bookcases, the remains of a pot-roast dinner on a heavy round table, an aged painting of an English countryside with a fox hunt in full cry. He came back and set the tray on an end table. “Irish whiskey, two fingers, it’s my drink,” he said. He put a recording of Chopin mazurkas on the Thorens turntable, flicked a couple of switches on the Pioneer receiver, and the sound began purring softly from speakers which bulked darkly in corners. With a deep, contented sigh he eased himself down into the overflowing chair and propped his slippered foot onto the stool. He toasted me with his glass, radiating the sensuality of a truly self-indulgent man, and asked what he could do for me. I told him that I was a friend of Tim Dierker’s, that I’d had a talk with him just recently, that I was upset by his death. He frowned, nodding.
“It was the manner of his going, eh? We’re all about to cross that bar, all of us elderly folks, and death doesn’t hold quite the fears it once did … but to die the way Timothy did, now, there’s an unpleasant death. Upsetting, yes, it is.” He puffed at the wet-ended cigar, closed his eyes. “A Detective Bernstein, fella running for mayor, called me today, asked me what I made of it … What the devil could I say? What could I make of it?”
“I suppose he wanted a lead on a motive,” I said.
“Violence—we live in an age of brute force, don’t we? And since when has evil needed a motive? Crime, I’m thinking, is less involved with motive every day. We breed it here, in this time and this place, an incalculable evil. Don’t you agree? My friend Father Patulski lives here with me, is fascinated by the existence of evil, acts as if it’s something he’s newly discovered—tonight where is he? Having a second look at The Exorcist. Can you beat it? Once wasn’t enough for him …” He shook his head at Patulski’s innocence. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t recognize evil, it’s always been there, hasn’t it? Now and again it rears up, spits at us, takes a life or corrupts a soul, submerges once again. Ah, I live with it … Patulski believes in the power of goodness and faith, evil therefore attracts him. I believe in the power of evil, the banality of it, and I am almost bored by it. Evil sometimes wins, which is what Patulski cannot quite understand. Timothy Dierker, my old friend, is thrown off a high building—faith won’t change that, will it? Dead as a doornail and we’d better hope his soul was in decent repair …”
“Are you talking about some abstract evil?” I asked. “A man, someone he knew, took him up on that roof and pushed him off, someone with a reason. Bernstein is not impressed with philosophical evil, I’m afraid. He wants to know who wanted Tim Dierker dead—”
“I know who did it,” Father Boyle said. I blinked. “A tormented soul, Mr. Cavanaugh, and does it matter just whose? Milton said it and it applies.
So farewell hope, and, with hope,
farewell fear,
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost.
Evil, be thou my good.
“Someone has said, ‘Evil, be thou my good,’ and killed Tim Dierker. Find that poor soul and for whatever good it does you, you’ll have found a murderer.” He drank his Irish whiskey and lapsed into silence, staring opaquely into the fire. “Patulski should be here. He could talk of the possessed, how evil infests a man …”
“Did you ever read Conrad’s Under Western Eyes?” I asked, dredging up an old quote.
“No, I never have. Though I expect Patulski has, a fellow countryman and all.”
“Conrad had an idea about evil, too, Father. He said, ‘The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.’ Maybe I’m a subscriber to that one.” The heat was making me sticky. A breeze wafted from an open window; I felt it shimmer along the back of my neck.
“Conrad believed in men,” he said slowly. “I believe in the Devil. Among others. A personification of evil, the Devil. The problem is he has all the good times, or so I suspect … He whispers behind the leaves, he rides outside and takes the hindmost, he is the author of confusion.” He belched deep in his chest and looked at me. “Anyway, the man is dead and you want a reason why and you can’t prosecute the Devil. I understand. I was merely indulging myself.” He dribbled more whiskey into his tumbler.
“Do you have a scrapbook, a photo album? I was going through my father’s the other day, looking at his old photographs of the bunch that used to go up north … I’m thinking of writing a piece on the north country and maybe using a photograph or two from those days to illustrate—” I wanted to get him on another track altogether. I didn’t know what was going on in his mind or how much he had been drinking before I got there. I wanted to see his scrapbook, though, without alarming him.
“Somewhere,” he rumbled again, almost sleepily. He brushed the white stubble; he seemed so much older than Archie. He seemed a man who had lived hard, unusual for a priest. He pushed himself out of the chair and, leaning on his cane, hobbled to a cabinet beneath a bookcase. After rummaging among stacks of papers, folders, journals, and magazines, he pulled a thick volume free of the litter. “Here,” he said. He pushed the dinner dishes away and flopped the album down on the table. “I haven’t looked in this book for twenty-five years, young man …” I stood beside him as he slowly turned the pages past vestiges of a life which meant nothing to me. There were pictures of him with a series of young girls, invariably attractive across the years, then the young theological student in the company of others like himself. No more girls, at least not for picture taking. It must have been difficult for him: Why had he taken the turn he did? His faith was in the Devil, not man, but maybe that was whiskey talking, or maybe he’d meant merely that this trust was in the abstract, not the refuse of everyda
y life. How do you ever know what anybody else means anyway?
“There’s Archie,” I said. “This is the stuff I wanted to see.”
His face was changing ever so slightly, as if the yellowing photographs were soaking up what life remained in him, as if the vigor of them drained away the strength of the old man he had become. “A long time ago, too damn long ago.” He sighed, his breath whistling in his throat. I heard him muffle a belch, smelled his whiskey breath as he bent near me. The photographs were much the same as Archie’s, the same scenes of camaraderie. Sociably I asked him to identify the various people; I wanted him to keep the album out so I could wander across the photographs in search of something which could strike me as anyway out of the ordinary—something a murderer would haul away with him. I knew it was almost pointless since I had no idea what I was looking for, but you never knew. He went through several rows of pictures, identifying people I knew. In one he gave the woman who kept house a name: “Rita,” he said, just “Rita.” And later, looking somewhat embarrassed by the attention, an ageless-looking Indian in a worn leather jacket and work pants; “Willie, he was our guide, hunting or fishing, he knew that country better than any map. Lived up there all his life. Absolutely at home, the deeper into the woods, the better. Willie …” The memories were draining him off. I could feel him growing remote from me, as if he were slipping back into a lost and plainly preferable time.
“My God,” he said softly, thinking aloud, “there’s Carver Maxvill. Poor old Carver. I hadn’t thought of him in years and years …” He bent lower over the album, bringing the old days into better focus.
“Who was he?” I asked. “I hadn’t heard of him before.”
Father Boyle looked up sharply, accusingly. I’d become suddenly an unwelcome intrusion. “What?”
I pointed with my finger. “That one,” I said, “who was he?”
“Maxvill, Carver Maxvill. He dropped out of the club long ago—that’s all.”
“My father never mentioned him.”
“Not important. They probably didn’t really know each other.” He shrugged, rubbed his eyes. “Not important. I can’t ever remember him.” He straightened up. “I’m tired, young man. End of interview.” He was gruff; he had undergone an abrupt change, startling me. He slammed the album shut, a mist of fine dust rising like faint specters. He shuffled across the skimpy carpet to the cabinet and shoved it roughly back in among the books and papers. “All this stuff depresses me,” he muttered. “I’m old and unwell and that’s that, Mr. Cavanaugh. No more prying into the past.” He was a different man. He had even paled.
He stood staring at me, the friendliness gone from his face, his stance, his manner. He had become an almost ominous hulk, staring at me with the Chopin going on and on.
“Funny thing about the scrapbook,” I said. “Tim Dierker had one, for instance. He was looking through it yesterday afternoon.” I’d caught his attention. “The last time his wife saw him he was sitting in his chair looking at pictures just like yours … and crying. Now, doesn’t that strike you as curious, Father? Why would he be crying?”
“Not so curious, no, not at all. I could have cried myself.” He was moving me into the hallway. “I understand exactly why he was crying.” His cigar had gone out, sticking out of the corner of his mouth like something held tight in a trap.
“Well, how about this one, then? Maybe you can help me out … The album disappeared when Tim went off the roof. The murderer, you see, stole it. That’s right, stole it, took it away with him. Now, the question is why. Why would the murderer want an old photograph album? What could there have been among those photographs? Now, that is curious, isn’t it?”
Frighteningly, he began to quiver as if stricken with a palsy. He lurched at me, leaning heavily on his cane, passing a hand across his pale face where his nose shone like a hot coal.
“Are you all right, Father?”
He nodded, brushing me away.
Finally he said, “Go away, just go away. I’m overtired, worn out. Just leave me alone.” He leaned on a small table before a mirror, swallowing dryly; there were two of him just then, like distorted figures in a fun house.
“One last thing,” I said heartlessly, standing in the doorway. “Do you know Kim Roderick? What do you think of her?”
“Of course I know her … knew her. We all knew her at Norway Creek, Mr. Cavanaugh.” He coughed and threw the cigar out onto the lawn. I was forced out the door onto the stoop. The screen door closed; he was still a shape behind it; I could hear his rasping breath.
“But what did you think of her? What kind of person was she?”
“I have nothing to say on the subject,” he wheezed, his voice growing weaker. He was sick and Tim Dierker had been sick. I should have been a doctor but I wasn’t. I seemed to make everybody feel worse. “Not now, not later, not ever. The past is dead … And you have taken advantage of my hospitality. Archie would be … disappointed in you. Archie would never take advantage, never.” He gasped.
“Are you all right, Father? Can I do anything for you?”
He made a spitting noise and slammed the heavy inner door.
I drove around the town for a while, listening to the Porsche’s peculiar noises in the fog, hearing the old Sinatra recording of “Time After Time” on Franklin Hobbs’ late-night mood-music show, vowing to dig out my own copy. The thing that stuck in my mind was Father Boyle’s fear, the change in his attitude once we began thumbing through the photographs. Fear—that was what I called it on reflection, but it could have been something more acute. Panic. Or more generalized: shock. But, whatever the degree, it all belonged to the same family of reactions and it didn’t fit with the priesthood, at least not in my innocence. What frightens a priest?
Father Boyle had been coping ably enough with Tim Dierker’s death. It was later that he began to come unstuck. But I couldn’t cut it much closer than that. Had he seen what I’d been looking for, the reason Tim’s scrapbook had been stolen? And if he had, why hadn’t he explained it to me?
I always had plenty of questions. It was the answers that gave me trouble. What had turned him around?
And who was the new guy, what’s his name? Carver Maxvill?
I had the distinct feeling that I was the only person who was really interested. Boyle wanted the past to stay dead and Bernstein wanted to be mayor and I wanted to find out what was going on. I would have welcomed someone to talk it over with but I was tired and it was late so I finally went home, discovered that the Twins had dropped two, and took Roy Smalley to bed with me. No hit, no field, but he had been the shortstop of my youth. I should have been a White Sox fan. They had Luke Appling. Now, there was a shortstop …
6
RIVERFRONT TOWERS IS TALL WITH lots of geometry in its appearance, its shadow falling across the no-man’s-land of scrub brush and oily roads and debris which lies like a trench between Minneapolis and the Mississippi. Riverfront Towers is a self-sufficient environment rising out of a not particularly pleasant sea of concrete, railway stations, cheap bars, derelicts’ dying grounds, and soot-coated warehouses. But Riverfront Towers denies it all: It gleams in the sunlight and offers cheery surcease from the gray day and the cold; its fountains catch the spins of colored lights in a million refractions and the sidewalk is made of tile like marble and its inhabitants pride themselves on living in the city, in the welter of the city. Riverfront Towers, with its endlessly peering security system and army of guards and high fences and rooftop gardens and maximum lockup underground garage, is absolutely as close to the real city as Jupiter or Wayzata or the IDS boardroom.
The doorman matched the building: tall, newly scrubbed, and businesslike. Once I had identified whom I wanted to see and he had checked his various lists, he personally let me into the lobby and told me that Miss Roderick was playing tennis on court number four. I should just go out and sit down by the courts, he said, she was expecting me.
Kafka would have recognized the lobby. There was no
sign of human habitation. Somehow the plants flourished against the glass and steel walls; even the ashtrays were clean. Strategically placed black leather couches looked as if they’d never been used. I went outside into the courtyard, where the scent of flowers dropped over you like a gladiator’s net and the sun fed the trees and shrubbery and beds of random color. I could hear a fountain splashing and the sound of tennis balls being whacked to and fro.
There were eight courts but only two were in use. Kim was playing on a corner court and I moved along the shadowy platform where ice cream tables stood beneath a long striped awning. A sign said that lunch would be served from eleven thirty. I sat down at a table near a large potted tree and watched. She had her back to me and she played intensely without noticing my arrival; her opponent wore a white floppy hat, moved his feet while giving his body a rest, and looked a lot like the Riverfront Towers pro. She moved gracefully, her thoughts anticipating the flow of the game and her body swinging along with it, nothing jerky. Her strokes were strong but he was beating her badly; he carried her through a rally of eight or ten strokes on each point, then put her away with a little cross-court backhand or a lob she’d return into the net or a passing shot as she decided to come to the net. Then, shaking her head, pigtails tied with yellow yarn, she’d go back to the service. She was serving every point and I had a perfect view of her; she got the ball very high over her head, bent back, and swept the racket through, came into position on the balls of her feet, bouncing lightly, moving quickly to the return. She was very slender from the waist up with long arms which helped her get to the ball; from the waist down she was strong and long-muscled and you could see the flex in her thighs and buttocks as she got her weight into the shot. She wore a one-piece A-line dress, pale cream with yellow trim, a white terry-cloth sweatband on her wrist, and a flowered bandanna wrapped around her forehead. She came to play.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 10
