We walked back along the path past the swimming pool. It had been drained, lay like the fossil of something very large. Fog wafted across the golf course and as we watched, a ball dropped out of the grayness, plopped on the green. A muffled cry of “Fore!” came from the fairway. “Nice shot,” Archie said. “But such a stupid game.”
McGill trudged across a tennis court behind a wide broom, swishing puddles away. The more he pushed, the more the water drifted back into the same slight depressions.
“Where were you in December of ’44?” I asked.
“Washington,” Archie said.
“That’s where General Goode says he was.”
“I know.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about why Maxvill bothers them so much. Just suppose, somehow, they—Goode and Crocker and Boyle, at least—know where he went. What if Maxvill was in trouble … what if he had done something criminal, maybe embezzled some money? Now, that would explain his decision to hotfoot it and it would explain why they didn’t have to take their other money with them. And say the lads felt his deeds would reflect on them, maybe they were even unwittingly involved. Now, that would frighten them, wouldn’t it? And it might explain Goode’s concern about his goddamn reputation.”
“Very creative, Paul,” Archie said. Our shoes crunched on the gravel driveway. “Not bad at all.”
“And, carrying it a bit further, what if the lads were instrumental in arranging Maxvill’s disappearance? What if they talked him into it?” Archie was nodding at me to go on. “What if he’d done something naughty that didn’t succeed, didn’t make him rich … then what if they went so far as to pay him off just to get him out of the picture? Then he took Rita and with a promise never to come back, poof—they’re gone …”
“Ah, there’s hope for you yet, my son.”
“Could you possibly find out if Goode was in Washington on December 16, 1944? Is there any way to check?”
“Maybe. I could try.”
“Why don’t you? Hell, maybe he was in Minneapolis giving old Carver a send-off …”
Archie just smiled at me and slapped me on the back.
14
“AT THE RISK OF LIFE and limb, I’m going to bring up your prehistory once again. Need I duck?”
She leaned against the balcony, profile pointed, eyes scanning the western horizon, where a pinkish blur lay above the Walker Art Center and the Guthrie. It was typical of the time of year; the only memory of what we’d called the sun came at bluish nightfall, like a bloody wound, and then slipped away when you weren’t looking.
“You make it so hard for me to like you—”
“Wrong. You like me okay. I make it hard for you to love me, sugar.” I curled my lip wolfishly like Bogart but she wasn’t looking. Humor was not her long suit; she thought I was serious.
“I’ve told you,” she said deliberately. “The kind of love you talk about is quite beyond me. At the moment.”
“I was joking.”
“I wasn’t.” The breeze was moist, a faint chill lowering around us. “What about my prehistory?” There was a vague resignation in her voice, not a promising hope for the evening. Our first date.
“Well, your aunt and Carver Maxvill disappeared from the face of the earth on the same day. December 16, 1944. Interesting, don’t you think? Surely not a coincidence.”
“I was four. What difference could it possibly make to me?”
“Difference? I don’t know. I thought you might like to know …”
“Well, think again.” She finally turned to face me. She struck a characteristic pose, arms folded beneath her tiny breasts. She was wearing a chocolate-brown velvet pantsuit, a paisley scarf, her hair pulled back so tight you’d think her eyes wouldn’t close. I focused on the smallpox scar between the dark, thick eyebrows. “You’re the one who’s obsessed by my past. And your assorted murders and disappearances. Not me.”
“Let’s have a drink,” I said. “Salvage the evening. Okay?”
“By all means,” she said softly touching my arm as she went past me into the living room. “Scotch on ice.” She watched me while I poured the drinks, clinked the ice. “Look, don’t pout. It’s the way I am. You want to tell me about Father Boyle. Go ahead, tell me. I’ll pay close attention.” I handed her the fat little glass and she batted a faint smile my way. She was trying. She was doing her best; she was the sort of woman I couldn’t turn away from and dear old Anne knew it better than I ever would.
So I told her about Father Boyle, the old man sitting on his patio with a slug blasting his heart to pieces. She winced at the overly graphic description. She crossed her legs and stared down at her elegant little tan shoes with the dark-brown stitching. I ran out of story at some point and just sat staring at her, the tilt of her head, the slender tanned fingers curling around the glass, the long thigh, the cuff of her belled slacks hanging loose, a glimpse of ankle, the Italian shoes … She looked up finally, saw me watching her, said nothing, sat like a statue, neither happy nor sad, just there. Just breathing. Then I heard her ice rattle in her glass; her hand was shaking. But nobody was saying anything. It was dark in my apartment.
The telephone rang. She jumped, a trace of watered scotch landing on her leg. I reached for the phone on my desk, watching her smooth the spot away.
“Paul, Bernstein here. You old son of a bitch!”
“I’m busy,” I said.
“You sound doped up—”
“Not really. Bust not called for.”
“Look, kiddo,” he said with curious exuberance for a man who worked the hours Bernstein did. “Get this. Turned Boyle’s place upside down, not just where you were but the whole damned house. No pictures, no photo albums, nothing. The man with no past. You were right on the button, baby.” I could see him leaning back in his chair, puffing a cigar, loosening his Sulka tie, waiting. “So, give. What do you think?”
“I think that whoever killed him took the stuff. Now, you’re the hotshot cop—wouldn’t you call that an MO? Whoever kills these people steals their pathetic little pasts …”
Kim was watching me, expressionless, listening.
“Confirms the pattern, I guess.” Bernstein said. “Club members, stolen pictures. But where does the goddamn suicide fit—Blankenship?”
“Mark, you’ve got to do a few things in this life for yourself. That’s one of them.” He told me to fuck myself and hung up.
I finished my drink and said, “Funny thing, everybody who dies gets robbed … Blankenship’s odds and ends, Dierker’s scrapbook, Boyle’s pictures from the old days. Whole thing is tied to the past, funny—”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” she said, standing up. “Let’s go, shall we? The Guthrie awaits.”
The first act of The School for Scandal went all right; slow, overly broad, rather too close to a DeMillean model, but all right. Kim laughed moderately—more than I did, if it came to that—and we went to the lobby for the intermission with the storm clouds almost out of sight. We were having a Coke in the front foyer, wedged between the glass wall overlooking Vineland Place and a white wall. Happily we discussed Lady Teazle’s headdress and the very real possibility that it might collapse into the second row, doing someone bodily harm. Kim was enjoying herself more as the evening progressed, coming quietly to life, and I was standing close to her, possessively touching innocent planes and curves of her body with mine. It was all coming right—I felt it inside me—and then I looked up from her face and saw them, birds of prey, watching us. Harriet Dierker and Helga Kronstrom.
They wore long gowns, Ma Dierker’s blue gown matching her hair. Helga, in pink, looked horsey enough to win at Santa Anita; she smiled at us and those awful stained teeth took on a nightmare quality.
Helga was leaning down toward Harriet, straining, to whisper in her ear, trying to talk her out of something. Harriet, gray-faced, didn’t seem to hear, her eyes darting from me to Kim and back. She advanced.
“I see you’ve found her, Pau
l,” she said, high-pitched, quavering. “Aren’t you afraid? You must be so brave …”
“Mrs. Dierker,” I said, “please …”
Kim was suddenly standing apart from me, bracing herself, feet apart as if preparing to ward off a physical attack.
Harriet’s head pecked forward, eyes sparkling behind her blue plastic frames. Helga’s hands fluttered, a hapless magician trying to make it all go away.
“I asked you if you weren’t afraid, Paul.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
Harriet let out a piercing, derisive laugh and a bearded man in a maroon tuxedo turned to look conspicuously. I felt my chest constricting; we were cornered and the two women blocked our escape.
“I told you, Paul, she’s the kiss of death, you know that …” Her smile was deeply ridged, fixed in place like something a thousand years old, long devoid of its original meaning. She hadn’t yet looked at Kim, who stood and waited, eyes straight ahead.
“Please, Mrs. Dierker—”
“’Why, she drove poor Larry to put a bullet in his head … and he was her husband. At least until she took up with Ole. Isn’t that true? Aren’t those the facts? Helga, who knows better than you?”
As she raved, a spray of spittle settled before her and I smelled liquor.
“Come with me, Harriet,” Helga said, trying to stay calm, “you don’t want to do this.” Helga looked at me pleadingly. “This is the first time she’s been out since Tim … she’s overwrought, seeing her like this …”
“I may be overwrought,” Harriet said distinctly, her voice progressively higher, shriller, “but I am not a murderer!” A girl in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, with deep, heavy breasts, nudged her boyfriend, tugged the fringe on his leather jacket, nodded toward us. “And I am not a paid slut! A whore!”
Kim’s head, small and dark, shook in a spasm of fright or anger. She clamped her teeth, her jaw flexed.
“That’s enough,” I said. “Excuse us, please,” and I began to push past but she wouldn’t move, jabbed my chest with a clawed, blue-veined hand. She was disfigured by her hate and grief. Helga looked away.
“No, I will not excuse you. This Woman—” At last she glared at Kim, who was backed against the white wall, the tan draining from her fine, delicate face. “This woman killed my husband … and now she comes out in public, among decent people, and expects to go about freely … A murderer …”
The Guthrie house manager was pushing past the crowd, some of whom snickered at the scene, smiled at their good luck to be so close. “Typical Guthrie opening,” someone said, “all the nuts come out.” The man in the maroon tuxedo curled his lip, a wit.
“Harriet! Leave them alone.” Helga verged on tears.
“Is she your whore now, Paul? Is that the way you behave? I send you to learn how she killed her husband, you pretend to be my friend … and then you make her your whore? Can you afford it?” She moved to the side, took aim at Kim, who stared impassively at her. “Did you kill the priest, too? Did you? First Larry, then Tim, then the priest?”
“For God’s sake,” I shouted at her, raising my hand to frighten her into silence. I took Kim’s hand. She shook it loose.
Helga reached for Harriet’s arm but she slapped at her hand. Helga began to cry, eyeliner coursing down her cheeks like black rust on a very old building.
“Don’t touch me,” she cried at me, “don’t you dare raise your hand to me …” Harriet had turned the corner, her mind coming unstuck. “You bitch,” she screamed at Kim, “you whore, slut …” Spittle flecked her thin lips but she was past caring.
The Guthrie man had reached us, red-faced in a too-tight crested blazer, looking both frightened and horrified. “Now just what the hell’s going on here?”
“Better than the show inside,” someone said. Others were drifting away in embarrassment; some were closing in on us.
Harriet made a sudden move, lurching past me toward Kim, and before I even began a reaction, Kim’s open palm flashed up and slapped Harriet’s face, the flat sound of a cleaver’s side on a piece of meat. The blue glasses floated past me, bounced on the floor while Harriet sagged backward, screaming, a line of blood trickling across the bridge of her nose. She reached for Helga, missed, and toppled over, sitting down heavily at the feet of the Mickey Mouse girl, who jumped back to make room for the falling body. Harriet’s head smacked down hard on the girl’s sneaker, thus averting a fractured skull. Suddenly it was quiet in the lobby, the only sound Helga’s sobbing as she leaned over her prostrate friend.
“Get a stretcher,” the Guthrie man yelled to a thunder-struck usher.
Harriet was leaning on an elbow, struggling to right herself with Helga’s aid. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” she moaned.
Kim fixed me with a blank look. “Too bad,” she murmured.
“What?” I didn’t know where to look.
“I’m leaving.” Kim pushed past me, very nearly stepping on Harriet’s hand. I picked up Harriet’s blue glasses and handed them to Helga. She dropped them again.
I caught up with Kim on the steps outside. She was standing quietly, taking a deep breath, arms folded. Through the glass windows I could see the glowing lobby, white like a surgery room, the two old women being attended to by more Guthrie ushers. We were forgotten, the observers filing back inside for the second act.
“Just not our night,” I said lamely. “Are you all right?”
“Of course,” she said, moving off along the sidewalk, toward the steep hill with the parking lot at the top. “There’s very little I can’t handle at this point in my life. But, my God, what a deranged woman … I can understand her, though, I know what she’s thinking.”
“She’s gone off the edge—”
“Not really, not so far as you’d think. She’s acting on the evidence of her eyes. She’s misled, but to herself she makes sense … She’s a little obvious, I’m afraid.” She stopped and looked at her right hand, holding it open before her. “It stings but I suppose it’s all right. Nothing broken.”
“I suppose Harriet’s okay,” I said. “I’m sorry it had to happen.”
“Sometimes things happen to me. You’ll get used—”
“What?”
“Nothing.” She unlocked the Mark IV and we sat for a moment smelling the leather. “I’d better go home and take a bath and get rid of this feeling. What will you do about your review of the play?”
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Let’s get a drink or something. I don’t want you going home, being alone right now—it’s better to unwind with somebody after a shock like that.”
She nodded and slid the Lincoln down the hill, past the theater with its empty lobby, across Hennepin, alongside Loring Park, which I look down on from my tower. She braked abruptly at the curb. She took a deep breath and passed the back of her hand across her forehead.
“I feel a little strange,” she said softly. “Disoriented.” She looked at the globes glowing dimly in the park. “Maybe we could walk for a moment.”
The little lake was flat, a mirrored reflecting pool, and there was no one in sight. I took her hand, said, “It’s not really a good idea to walk here at night, freaks and creeps wandering around.”
She shook her head; her hand was limp, she was breathing deeply, regularly, getting her equilibrium reinstated. I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t feel right myself, adrenaline overloading my system. We walked across the damp, thick grass, past a bench, to a path at the lake. We walked slowly, quietly, and didn’t see the man on the bike until it was too late to escape. He came whirring out of the dark like a phantom, one moment indistinguishable from the faint breeze, on top of us the next, skidding to a stop in front of us. I yanked Kim back, out of the way, and the voice, high and clear, like a choirboy’s, cut across the quiet darkness.
“Why don’t you get her out of the park, buddy? I know why guys like you bring them down here at night … I know, I’ve seen you in the bushes … Why don’t yo
u do it at home and keep it out of the park?” He remained on the bike, not more than an arm’s reach away, in Levi’s and a windbreaker, his voice high and expressionless as if he weren’t involved with what he was saying, like a guide in a museum which bored him. Kim’s hand tightened on my arm and she moved against me.
“What in the world are you talking about?” I asked, my anger blurred by surprise.
“You and your whore, who else? Did you pay her yet? Ten bucks? Twenty-five? Look, I don’t give a shit what you do with her—just get it out of the park, okay? My job is keeping the park clean, keeping creeps like you and your goddamn whores out of it—”
“You’re insane. She’s a friend of mine.” Anger was welling up in me. The boy wasn’t threatening us, and he was obviously insane, riding around in the park insulting people, one of the freaks and creeps.
“Don’t bullshit me, okay? You paid her, she’ll do whatever you make her do.” He was grinning behind the monotone and I could hear a bat squeaking in trees. It was the grin that did it. I pulled away from Kim toward him and he dropped his bike, took a step back, and braced himself, fists clenched. “You want to make something out of it? It’s okay with me … just remember you started it. I didn’t do a damn thing to you.” There was an edge of taunting laughter in his voice and I felt as if I’d stepped into a dream sprung directly from ptomaine poisoning.
Whether I’m cowardly or rational I don’t know, but my little orgasm of anger passed and I felt foolish, staring into his eyes. He was a real person, grin fixed, a little quaver in his voice, raspberry jello for a brain.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 26
