“When did you last see her, Mrs. Wilson?”
“That last time she came to Chicago, of course …” She paused, head cocked to one side, listening for the echoes of her past. “The year before the war, 1940 that would be … when Shirley was born. I never saw her again.” She gave me a vague, good-natured smile, long removed from the battle. “I’ve been alone ever since. My eyesight began to go about ten years ago … thank heavens, Rita had sent me some money and I’ve been able to make ends meet. It was such a shock, Rita going away and leaving me with no relations at all … but she’d taken good care of me. Tell me, Mr. Cavanaugh, has she sent you to me? Is Rita all right? I’ve always thought she was out there somewhere … very bad, a very pitiful woman …” She turned to me again, expectantly, the smile timid, like an animal in a shrub.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Rita hasn’t sent me. I’m very sorry. That’s not why I’ve come.”
“I guess I didn’t really think you had,” she said, the grin fixed. “I was just … hoping. Just had a feeling.” She hooked the handle of the cane over the arm of the chair, folded her hands in her lap, the fingers stroking the bright knobby rings. The light outside was dimming as the sun dropped and the large trees cut out the rays. An air conditioner hummed in the next room. The room was neat, uncluttered, dusted. Her chin sank toward her chest. Hers was the smile of the just.
I was exhausted and felt myself sinking back against the hard wooden chair. I wiped sweat off my forehead. A car screeched to a stop outside, honked, roared away. I looked at the old woman, struck by how everyone seemed to be so alone. It was the human condition, I supposed, but I’d never been more bleakly aware of it than I had in the last couple weeks. It had begun with the loneliness of Larry Blankenship’s death and it had just kept growing—the sense of loss. People just kept vanishing; others were left behind, and life struggled on as best it could. Patricia Wilson couldn’t see me. I watched her in the dusky early evening, trying to imagine her as a young woman, wrapped up in her sister coming to Chicago to have her babies.
“Well,” she said suddenly, emerging from her reverie, “why did you come? You’re still here, I can hear you breathing …”
“I wanted to ask you about Rita’s babies, Mrs. Wilson … we’re trying to trace them, trying to get some identification cleared up. They went through an orphanage, went their separate ways … Whatever happened to them, as far as you know? Have you ever heard from them?”
“No, no, I never have. Rita wasn’t much for keeping up, letter writing and such. Not her style.”
“Was Ted the father? Of both of them? Is that possible?”
“Oh, now, I don’t want to speak ill of absent friends,” she said primly. “People lead their own fives. I only met this Ted once, he was much older than Rita or me, and he seemed to be in bad health … wheezing and coughing all the time. Didn’t look strong enough to father any children, but appearances can be deceiving, can’t they?”
“But didn’t Rita ever confide in you, let slip some clue? It’s very important to know if someone else was the father … someone Rita may have loved?”
“Let me think,” she murmured, “let me try and recollect … Rita was a high liver, a risk taker, don’t you know? She was never satisfied with her lot in life, not even as a child, that was why she was willing to marry an old wreck like Ted, for what she hoped would be his money … but the joke was on her, Ted never really made much and poor Rita was always looking for a way out—she was a very warm, friendly girl, hot-blooded, too, if the truth’s to be told. She always had an eye peeled for something better, she had a roving eye. She met my Donald once and she looked him over pretty carefully … and I saw him looking her over, too, I wasn’t blind then, but there was no time for them to misbehave. But she was always looking for a way out of the north country … she didn’t know how to go about it, though. And she had me as a model, I got out and look what it got me, a sailor named Donald Wilson who went away—”
“So there were other men in her life? Somebody besides Ted Hook?”
“I told you, I can’t malign the memory of my poor little sister.” She peered at me, perplexed, as if she could see. I figured she didn’t get the chance to talk much about her past: Who’d want to listen? She was alone. So I waited for the urge to communicate to get the better of her. “But the truth is the truth, isn’t it, Mr. Cavanaugh?” I said it was. “And the truth is that Rita was only as good as she had to be, she had a feel for things, sensitive and like that, y’know? I think she liked the menfolks, that’s the truth of it, cross my heart.”
“What do you think happened to her? Really.”
“Went off with a man. What else? Let’s face it, that’s what Rita would do, isn’t it?”
“Are you sure she never let on about who the father might be? Who fathered the children? Who she ran off with? Try to remember, Mrs. Wilson … it’s not going to hurt Rita now. But it’s important to some other people. Try.”
“Let’s see, once in ’32 and once in ’40 … well, she never let on to me, not directly, but he was a swell, a high-class fellow—I got that impression from her, she was sort of sly about it, little hints here and there, and there was the money she sent me … it had to come from somewhere, didn’t it? And I always thought to myself that she had a man. It seemed to me, from the kind of a twinkle she had, that it was all part of a plan that was going real well … for instance, she was never upset about those babies, never acted like she didn’t want them, she never said she wanted an abortion, nothing like that …”
“She must have run off with the father,” I said.
“Stands to reason,” she said tiredly, the high voice not used to all the talking. “I don’t have any facts, mind you, but it stands to reason, the way I see it. It must have been a real love affair, real romantic—why, it started and lasted all those years, until ’44 and who knows how long after that?”
It was dark outside. I stood on the stoop and thanked her for her time and her trouble. She smiled her empty smile and as I watched, it faded.
“Rita’s dead,” she said, bitterness surfacing at last like garbage on a pond. “I feel it, I know it. Rita’s dead. She’s been dead for a long time. I’ve always known that. I lied to myself, people do that, don’t they?” Her false teeth clicked in the darkness, where she spent all her hours. “Thank you for talking with me, listening to me.” Before I could answer she’d closed the door. A threatening breeze rustled the parched leaves. There was rain in the air, the smell and feel of it. It was a quiet street and I headed back toward traffic, my perspiration soaking my clothing, cooling as I walked. There was nothing left to do in Chicago.
I grabbed a sandwich at a joint near the university and caught a cab to O’Hare in time to take the 11:30 flight back to the Twin Cities. The cabin was hot and sticky and my eyes burned. My head ached. My stomach was jumpy and I felt groggy from what I realized I had learned. Or thought I had learned. The cabin was dark while most of the passengers yawned and trusted their lives to fate. I got a gin and tonic in a flat plastic cup, wiped my dirty face with a white napkin that came away gray and smudged. I closed my eyes, took a long sip of the drink, and dared to think for the first time all day.
Larry Blankenship was born in 1932, orphaned in 1944, when he appeared at the Sacred Heart Orphanage in Duluth and went subsequently to the Blankenship family in. Bemidji, where he picked up his new name. Those were the facts.
Larry had brought a little sister with him to the Sacred Heart Orphanage, a girl of four or five who could therefore have been born in 1940. She was left behind in the orphanage when Larry went to Bemidji. She was Kim’s age, just as Larry was the same age as Kim’s never-found male cousin. Those were the facts.
Ted Hook had said that both of his household’s children, born in 1932 and 1940, a boy of his own and Rita’s and a girl born to Rita’s sister in Chicago, had been placed in an orphanage in Duluth—the Sacred Heart Orphanage, acknowledged by Kim herself. There are crucial mo
ments when possibilities become likelihoods and I was staring at one. There was no hard proof and I knew it, but I’d have wagered a good deal that Larry Blankenship had begun life as Robert Hook, that he and Kim were brother and sister, that there had not been a threesome at the orphanage at all. It fit so handsomely and its facets fired back the kinds of reflections you’d expect in a murder case. Surely Kim and Robert were in fact the son and daughter of Rita Hook, not cousins; little Robert and little Shirley, born eight years apart at Merrivale Memorial Hospital in Chicago while Patricia Wilson paced the hallway outside, thankful for at least the fleeting contact with her risk-taking younger sister who was no better behaved than she had to be. There had never been another boy who became Larry Blankenship, who had also had a little sister … No.
The question of the father took on added significance as I sucked the crescent of lime and listened to the powerful throb and roar of the jet engines. Ted had assumed that the son was his and Rita’s, the daughter Patricia Wilson’s. He had been fooled on the daughter; why not on the son, as well? Could the father of one also have been the father of the other? Could Carver Maxvill have been the father?
If I could have considered it as a puzzle, from a safe, objective distance, I might have been fascinated. But I loved the little daughter … who had become the wife in an incestuous marriage, which had produced a child who was spending her life in an institution because her parents had been brother and sister …
I had another drink and looked out into the moonlit night, occasional clusters of lights blinking at me from the Wisconsin countryside below. If I had been an observer once, even until today, I wasn’t anymore. Kim was part of these murders, part of the vast, improbably, immensely human pattern. I remembered the beginning of it, the suicide in the lobby and the birdlike woman telling me that Kim Blankenship/ Roderick was a murderer … Well, the information had been inaccurate but it was all tied together somehow and Harriet Dierker had known it.
Time had damaged Larry and Kim (Robert and Shirley, if you prefer; to me they were Larry and Kim), had torn them apart, disguised them, hurled them back at each other a quarter of a century later. By then, with only the Norway Creek Club members in common, they were strangers … Norway Creek—she had worked there and Larry had gone to work for a member and gained entry through the front door. They were strangers when they met, Norway Creek their only common ground. The thought bedeviled me, the irony of Norway Creek’s being involved in such goings-on. I was naive to be shocked by that, of course, but the club was like the city, wrapped carefully in a cloak of rectitude and morality and proudly proclaimed goodness, as if morality were something you conferred on yourself cosmetically, to hide your sins.
Kim and Larry obviously had known nothing of their original sibling relationship when they married. Kim didn’t know yet. But it seemed to me that I had come up with the reason Larry had killed himself: Somehow he had found out the truth. Life had played him for a chump all along; nothing ever worked out right, not his career, not his marriage, not his childhood … and the final belly laugh from above was too much. The empty apartment must have mocked him, the new Thunderbird he couldn’t pay for must have jeered, the silent telephone must have hammered his last hopes to pieces, leaving him crying to his ex-wife in the parking lot and the child stashed away out of sight and the lie inherent in his neat summer clothes—it was all a dirge for the end of Larry Blankenship’s unsuccessful attempt at living. Then he’d discovered that the woman he’d loved and married and lost was his sister and then he’d written his considerate little note and shot himself to death.
I knew it was true. And there was a connection to the murders of Tim Dierker and Father Boyle; there had to be. There was no sense in half a pattern. The next thing I had to know was the identity of the father or fathers … Was it Ted for Larry and Carver Maxvill for Kim? Or not?
We began our descent through a gray cloud bank which didn’t part until the red landing lights jumped up beneath us and the wheels locked down into place.
I was afraid.
If the knowledge of the incest had moved Larry Blankenship to kill himself, what might it do to Kim? And could I bring myself to tell her? Loving her as I did, what the hell was I supposed to do?
By the time I fell into my bed the murderer had extended the serial …
19
I WAS DUMBFOUNDED, UTTERLY CONFUSED after a night of intermittent dozing. The wind roared at the windows like a hungry beast and the humidity weighed you down; dawn came slowly, gray and windy, but the sun followed, turning the freeway a salmon pink, and the wind and I sat on the balcony staring into the spaces between me and the downtown towers. My mind refused to attack. I called Archie and we arranged to meet at Norway Creek for breakfast.
He was cool and fresh in a seersucker jacket, collar open with some white chest hair curling up toward his throat, mustache trimmed, white hair slicked back, a paisley silk square in his jacket pocket. My nose still throbbed. He listened quietly, carefully operating with knife and fork on his eggs Benedict, as I told him the story of my Chicago adventures and the sad conclusions I’d drawn.
When I lapsed into silence, he motioned toward my plate and told me to eat. Outside a foursome was coming up the fairway and spiked shoes clattered on the veranda. The sun was unnaturally bright. It made my eyes ache.
“Well, you’ve turned the key, I think, yes, you have.” He leaned back and a lit a cheroot. “You’ve given us some room to move around in, very good work, Paul … I know it’s hard on you with this Kim business.” He stepped lightly there; Archie looked on romance as something that got in the way of the plot, whether in the coils of fiction or reality. So it surprised me when he forced himself to ask me how serious I really was about her.
“Serious,” I said. “I love her. She made me realize I still had that capability in my bag … It’s important to me, she’s important to me.”
“I see, more or less. You realize that, like most such undertakings, it’s exceptionally ill advised. The woman’s erratic behavior is not a closely guarded secret.”
“I know. I’m not giving her a grade, you know. I’m in love with her.”
“Well, there you are, then. You’ll have a problem, presumably you realize that. You’re an adult. Good luck to you!”
“It’s all part of life’s rich pageant,” I said.
“I expect you’re right on the button with the way you’re reading things,” Archie said, turning from the discomfort of the emotional life to the safety of a puzzle which with luck would yield to intellect and reason. “They’ve almost got to be brother and sister. It’d be a pity—in terms of plot construction only, of course—if they weren’t, if there really had been another brother-and-sister act at the same orphanage at the same time Kim and her brother were there. I can’t seriously consider the possibility, it makes hash of everything.
“And being brother and sister, it seems that Larry’s discovery of incestuous marriage might be enough to drive that unhappy citizen to suicide. Important question is, how did he find out? We’ll have to find the answer eventually.
“The matter of the father or fathers—now, that’s quite thorny, isn’t it? Patricia Wilson says the father of the second child, the girl, was quite probably something of a swell … and we know for a fact it wasn’t Ted. Ted was told by Rita that it was Patricia Wilson’s baby … Was Ted the father of the first child, the son? Who knows? It may not even be important—to anyone other than Kim and Larry. But who fathered the girl? Who was the swell, the ladies’ man, Rita’s ticket out of Grande Rouge? Pretty damn well jumps out at you, doesn’t it, son?”
“Carver Maxvill,” I said.
“Right. It’s a nice snug fit. Kim is Maxvill’s daughter.” He signaled for more coffee and when we were alone again, he sighed and used his lips, planning what he was going to say. “It’s a tangle,” he went on, “but I think I know who the killer is, know at least in my guts.” He smiled and went on.
“First, start with R
ita’s money, the hundred and fifty thousand dollars she left behind in the bank for Ted—she may have gotten sentimental about Ted and left him that as a present … as long as she had more on the way. But how the devil did she get the first hundred and fifty thousand? Remember we discussed it before? Well, I’ve worked on it and, Paul, I believe you were on target, there’s only one way that makes any sense … blackmail. Payoff. Extortion. The club—who else, when you get right down to it?—the club was paying her off … it was the only imaginable source of that kind of money she could tap. I don’t know why they’d pay her … But we don’t have to know yet. We can make the assumption that the club coughed up the money. Over quite a lengthy period of time, though I certainly never knew about it in my club days … that puzzles me rather, that I could be so close to something, however fleetingly, and not know it … it makes me realize how little I actually had in common with them.
“Anyway, what is it that happens to blackmailers? They either connect for the big, final payoff and go away … or they get killed by their victims. My bet is that she connected for the big one … mainly because I can’t see these guys killing her. I suppose it’s a blind spot, but they don’t seem the type at all … No, they’d pay before they’d kill. With Maxvill, her lover, on her side, she connected for the final installment. By 1944 the lads could well have afforded it … who knows how much, another hundred and fifty thousand maybe? She left the first bankroll for Ted and the kids, never knowing he’d farm the kids out to an orphanage, and she and Carver went off free as the breeze. Alone, plenty of money, they had made life pay off for them …” Archie leaned back and stroked his mustache, grinning with a kind of grudging admiration. “Think of it, Paul, think how happy they must have been, imagine how powerful they must have felt, Bonnie and Clyde pulling off the biggest heist of all and no cops in jalopies hot on the trail. You’ve got to hand it to ’em, don’t you? Rita and Carver beat the system. She finally got out of Grande Rouge.” He poked his sunglasses down his nose, his eyes twinkling at me over the rims.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 33
