The Cavanaugh Quest

by Thomas Gifford

  Walking briskly, he reached the lake and began to jog. He was following his usual pattern, a creature of discipline and habit. He tucked the canvas bag under his arm. The waves sucked at the shore. He felt the tension leaving his body as his feet lightly hit the path. He was in perfect condition, in body and mind.

  Twice around the lake would do it. Then to business. So concentrated was he on the blending of muscle and lungs and brain, beating out the rhythm of his step, that he failed to notice the large automobile which slid past him in the fog, its headlights blurred, its shape moving like a dream just beyond consciousness. He didn’t notice that it pulled down off the road into the parking lot by the curved shell where the bands of summer played so merrily. The lights snapped off. The general kept running, coming closer to the green benches, the shuttered popcorn stand. He heard his own breath, sensed the dinghies bobbing on the water to his right. He was watching the ground, enjoying the hint of tiredness he knew he could overcome. There was no end to his confidence. He squeezed the canvas bag with the revolver close to his body.

  For some reason we’ll never know, he glanced up. Someone in a raincoat was standing in the path ahead of him. Someone with a gun.

  26

  “SO MUCH FOR THAT THEORY,” Archie muttered into the turned-up collar of his Burberry. He was beside himself, powerless, mystified by the continuing demolition of his theories. It was cold by the lake. Bernstein had called us at eleven o’clock; we were trying to nap at my apartment. Now he was slouched over the body lying on the path. One bullet had been fired into the center of Jon Goode’s face and gone out the back of his neat little head, which was conspicuously less neat now. He lay on his back in the path, arms flung out at his sides as if at the last moment someone had decided not to crucify him after all and had drilled him instead. The canvas bag had already been taken away to the police laboratory. Bernstein lit a cigarette and threw the match into a puddle.

  “Detective Bernard Schultz went upstairs to check on the general at nine o’clock, having heard no action from the bedroom.” He paused for dramatic effect. “The general was not only gone, he was probably already dead. Officer Hathaway hadn’t seen anything at the front of the house. The goddamn fog was just about impenetrable but it finally occurred to them that the old bastard might have sneaked out to do his roadwork. They found him about an hour ago. I called you out of habit. If I had to go look at a murder victim without you, I’d be lonesome.”

  Archie and I were so far into concealing evidence by now that we couldn’t open our mouths for fear of saying the wrong thing. I shrugged. “What do you make of it?”

  Bernstein made a hopeless hand gesture.

  “Looks like your Carver Maxvill got his limit early today. It’s funny. The son of a bitch is just invisible … we’ve rousted all the elderly tourists and traveling salesmen in the Twin Cities and all we’ve got is a bunch of old bastards who hate us. I don’t know, maybe it’s somebody else … but who?” He kicked at a bench leg and looked over at the body with its crowd of cops and a coroner and a photographer. Fog lapped across the parking lot, fuzzing all the edges.

  “Anyway, we’d better take pretty damn good care of Judge Anthony—he’s the only survivor if you’re right about you and Ole not counting—Christ, a judge! Bjornstad is calling out to his place now, just making sure he’s still there …”

  Archie nodded. “I’m sure we’re not in it. But Hub … yes, you’d better keep checking, keep him closely guarded.” He clamped his jaw shut, running a finger across his mustache, smoothing it down. Bags under his eyes looked as if they were packed for a world cruise.

  “No bright ideas, Paul?” Bernstein favored me with a quirky, slanted smile. “No smartass remarks?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, I’ve got one other happy bit of news. A four-year-old boy was bitten by a rat yesterday, eight blocks from the sight of Crocker’s fucking folly … Try and put the lid on that.” He coughed hard, bending over his hand. “I’ve got another one for you, I went to the doctor this morning. My cold, you know? It’s not a cold. He called it walking pneumonia.” He glared at me from bloodshot eyes. “Kiss me, you fool.” Then he walked away and forgot about us.

  I went to the car, thankful that it wasn’t the Porsche, and Archie followed me. Inside, the heater on, he chewed on the lower fringe of his mustache and rubbed his eye.

  “Well,” he said, “we couldn’t tell him … how the devil could we have explained it all? And as far as Kim goes, even if he could find her, his protection isn’t worth a tinker’s damn.”

  “Do you want to check in with a new theory?” I asked. He lit a cheroot and blew smoke out the window. Bernstein and his men were just shadows behind the fog.

  “It’s no longer a theory,” he said. “It’s over. You were right—it was the man with the most to lose, not the man with a killer streak. It’s Hub … there’s nobody left.”

  “I played tennis with him the day Larry—”

  “Don’t be fatuous and don’t try to reconstruct everything the man’s ever said to you … It’s Hub. Process of elimination. All that remains is to see how he plays it out. Does he pretend to be the terrified next victim or—”

  “Does he go after Kim?”

  Archie looked at me sideways. There was no twinkle left in his eyes, only weariness.

  “He’s not safe as long as she’s alive and the note he left in her apartment proves he knows it.” Archie licked his lips, adjusted the cheroot. “I’d say he gets loose and goes after her.”

  I was sick to my stomach from lack of sleep and worry. Now there was no time to rest. We had to find Kim before Hubbard Anthony did.

  My last angry meeting with General Goode crossed my mind as we left the scene of his murder. His killer had gotten him right about where I had spoken with him as he materialized out of another morning’s wet fog. He was the only man in the world I actually hated, the blank-faced kind of hatred that isn’t very demonstrative but never lessens or changes or dies. He had stunted my life, made me one of his tools, and looking at his corpse and the shredded opening in the back of his head, I was very glad that he was dead. He deserved to die violently and the world was a measurably better place without him. He had called all men predators: Right or wrong, it was one of the predators who got him.

  But the extent of the carnage was outside my ken. How, in a rational world, could all these men have been killed, men I’d spoken with, whose eyes I’d seen and voices I’d heard, whose lives I’d briefly peered into? They didn’t exist anymore, yet only a short time before, they’d been there—rotters and scoundrels, perhaps, but alive … Murderers, but alive …

  Their faces flashed before me. I was tired and it was like seeing an old movie, a reprise of the faces of the dead, laughing and smiling in better days … They hadn’t been able to escape the past; the thought read like something very near an immutable law. You cannot outrun the past, and as Tim Dierker had believed, in the end you are finally accountable for your life and deeds. In the end, one way or another, you paid up.

  After all the poking around I’d done, the conversations that had seemed to me to have so little point at the time, after all the time wasting and finding a woman to love and catching the Twins’ broadcasts and running back and forth to Archie’s and discovering I was still capable of loving and worrying about someone—after all that, it all seemed to be spinning away from me, too fast, uncontrollable. There didn’t seem to be any time to think. We knew the story now, what had been there behind the countless veils of subterfuge and evasion and lies. We knew who everyone really was and what they were trying to hide and we knew it was worse than we could ever have imagined. We knew that lives had been built on the decay and corruption of what men had done, that lives had been forever tainted and had finally rotted through and split open and the putrescence had seeped out. And it was lethal and the rats had been sent scurrying. There was no time to shift it, grab hold and cope with it …

  “Hub,” I sai
d. “For Christ’s sake, Hub—how could it be Hub? I remember how shaken he was the day Larry killed himself, how shocked when he realized who it was …” I remembered the sunny, perfect end-of-summer day, how he’d waited me out and worn me down, beaten me on the shade-dappled tennis courts at Norway Creek. I hadn’t known Kim then. I hadn’t even begun. But he was also the one who’d later told me to lay off, to stop picking at the past and scaring Father Boyle and Crocker and Goode. Then he’d had to kill them: They were too shaken; he couldn’t trust them to pull themselves together, close ranks. So he had to kill them all, even the one who had been a killer himself and was George Patton’s kind of soldier.

  “It’s Hub,” Archie said sourly. “So stop nattering away about it. It won’t change. Keep your mind on finding Kim.”

  “I know, I know.”

  The fog never did lift completely. From my balcony it stretched away like an inhospitable sea washing across Minneapolis, swallowing it. Archie drank coffee and I waited while the telephone rang in Grande Rouge. It was finally answered by a woman with a short temper.

  “May I speak with Ted Hook?” I asked.

  “You gotta be kidding,” she snorted. “He can’t hear on the phone, he won’t talk on the phone at all. Anyway, he’s taken to his bed—maybe for the last time, too, wheezin’ and coughin’.”

  “Perhaps you can help me, then?”

  “You’d better hurry it up, then. We’re gettin’ ready for a banquet. Whattaya want?” she snapped. If she were one of Ted’s relatives, I shared his disgust.

  “It’s about Mr. Hook’s daughter, or niece … Does she happen to be there? Visiting Ted?”

  “Would that be the snotty one from the Cities? What’s her name?”

  “Kim,” I said. “Is she there?”

  “Nope and thank God for that. I don’t mind telling you, she’s a pain, always yelling at us about not taking care of the old man … No, she ain’t here—”

  I hung up, looked at Archie, shook my head.

  I called her apartment. Nothing.

  I called Anne. Nothing.

  I was about to dial another number when the telephone rang. It was Mark Bernstein and he was coughing, his voice muffled. He was calling from Hub Anthony’s library and he sounded as if he’d had enough.

  “He’s gone.” His voice whistled through stuffed nasal passages. “He found out about Goode an hour or so ago and so help me God he got away from here in the meantime. How many Excedrin can you take at a time, anyway? I’ve taken eight since I got up and my head’s killing me … So we’ve got to find him—”

  “How did he do it? You had men there, didn’t you?”

  “Jesus, what difference does it make? I can’t get a straight story out of these guys … One of them was in the john with an upset stomach, the other was off diddling himself, I don’t know. I’ve got a bulletin out on his car but I’m not much counting on it. Anyway, I thought you might like to know … If Archie gets any ideas about where he might go to hide, get hold of me.” He coughed. “Poor bastard’s probably scared to death. I should be in the hospital. Walking pneumonia, bullshit. I’m half dead. Good-bye, Paul. Good-bye forever and when you think of me in years to come, smile …” The line went dead.

  Archie said, “Don’t tell me. Hub’s gone.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Figures. Hope blooms eternal … escape. And it’s hopeless, Hub.” I couldn’t look at him.

  I called Ole Kronstrom at his office. I asked to see him. He told us to come down. He’d be in later, at four o’clock.

  The day was dripping away and Archie and I stayed awake by fueling up with lunch, force-feeding ourselves at Charlie’s, washing it down with gallons of coffee. We got to Ole’s office on the dot and he was alone, unwinding a muffler and hanging up his wet raincoat. He looked as tired as we did. I told him about General Goode and about Hub Anthony’s disappearing act. Archie revived, now that he was on the scent, and told Ole that we had reason to believe that Hub Anthony would be the final victim if we didn’t find him at once. He was so convincing that I almost believed him. We alone knew Hub was a murderer, not the final victim.

  Ole looked up, leaned back in his desk chair, said nothing.

  “We also have reason to believe that Kim may be in some danger,” I said.

  “Oh, you do?” Ole Kronstrom closed his eyes and made a bridge with his fingers. “Kim in danger,” he mused. “May I ask from whom?”

  “The man who killed everyone else.”

  “Any names come to mind?”

  “No names,” Archie said quickly. “Whoever it is, he must be stopped. That’s all.”

  “But why would Kim be in danger? What has she to do with all this?” Ole opened his eyes slowly. “I’m confused …”

  “Are you?” Archie asked. “How confused are you, Ole?”

  Ole leaned forward in his chair, picked up a pipe, and began to fill it from a humidor. He smiled slyly, slowly shaking his head. He said, “Well, let’s say just slightly confused.”

  “We’ve got to find her,” I said, watching them being obscure with each other. “You’re more likely to have an idea where she might be than anyone else … think, where does she go when she gets away from it all? She goes off by herself habitually, you told me that … But where?”

  He fit the pipe and I smelled the thick latakia. He tamped the ash down with a stubby, calloused forefinger. While, we waited, he pushed out of his chair and stood before the window. He was broad and powerfully built; age had made him settle on his foundation, not wither.

  “I suppose she could have gone to the boat,” he said doubtfully. “She could be there, I suppose … she might feel safe there. She likes it there.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. Archie stood up. “Has Hub ever been on your boat?”

  Ole nodded glumly. “Yes, he loves it. Fancies himself quite a good sailor …”

  “Has he ever been there when Kim was there?” I asked.

  Ole nodded again.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said. “It’s my boat.”

  We were fed irrepressibly into the rush-hour traffic made worse by the fog and the beginnings of an oily rain. It was dark by six o’clock and we’d come upon a three-car accident which cut the traffic flow to one lane. An ambulance was taking on a stretcher. Another mile ahead a semitrailer had jackknifed against the median fence and again only a single lane was passable. Faces contorted in anger and frustration behind clouded windows, wheels spun on the wet pavement, a purple gasoline spill spread out from the truck. Three police cars, red lights spinning, stopped us entirely while a tow truck slid and burned rubber trying to right the leaking behemoth.

  It was another hour before we had gotten free and were heading into the rain toward the St. Croix. Cooper’s Falls, where the boat docked, was almost another hour’s drive under the wet conditions and we listened to WCCO as we pushed on. The story of General Jonathan Goode’s murder was on the news but they didn’t really have much. There was a tape of Mark Bernstein saying that there really was no comment he could make at present and no, he didn’t know if there were going to be any more prominent citizens murdered but he certainly hoped not. Then he coughed.

  By Stillwater traffic had all but disappeared and we dropped down the long hill into the town, past the neon lights glowing through the fog, back onto the highway, where visibility was cut to almost nothing. I couldn’t get it over thirty because I just couldn’t see, so we sweated it out, silent, listening to the Twins at Tiger Stadium in Detroit. Be safe, I thought to myself, be safe and be on that goddamn boat. Hub was out there, too, fighting the fog, looking for her. Had he thought of the boat? I speeded up at the thought, felt the right rear tire slide off onto a muddy shoulder when I nearly missed a turn, and fought myself to slow back down. I opened my window and felt spray hit my face. Willie Horton hit a three-run homer for the Tigers in the bottom of the third when I was ten miles from the Cooper’s Falls marina.

  “Here it is,” Ole said a bit
later from the backseat. Archie jerked, came up from a snoring doze. “Take this gravel road.”

  I felt the change in the surface of the road. The lights picked up high grass at the side of the road, barbed-wire fencing above a gully. Gravel flew up underneath the car. Archie leaned forward. “Slow down, for God’s sake … I think those are fresh tracks ahead of us … What am I saying? What do I know about fresh tracks?”

  There was a light glowing at the entrance to the marina. I stopped when Ole gave me the word, turned off the engine. We got out and stood still in the fog. You could sense the boats, smell them and hear them moan as they moved in the water, waves slapping at the hulls. We made our way slowly out the slip beside the forty-foot Chris-Craft cabin cruiser with its gleaming brass and white paint and polished wood reflecting the blurred light from the fog lantern hanging on a post. There was a light glowing from the cabin.

  “Kim,” I called. “Kim, are you there?”

  We waited, then Ole climbed aboard. The boat swayed gently in the water; rain sifted against us.

  “Somebody’s here or has been here. I don’t leave lights on.”

  I was afraid and fear was passing through all three of us like a blade. All we had to do was open the door and step down into the cabin where the light burned. I was frantic to find Kim, to reach her before Hub Anthony did, yet I hesitated, looked from Ole to my father.

  Archie pushed his hands down into the Burberry’s commodious pockets. When he took his right hand out, it was filled with the revolver the killer had left for Kim.

  “And what do you plan to do with that?” Ole asked softly.

  27

  PEERING INTO THE EYE OF the barrel, I felt time drawn up tight, standing still, the deck shifting slowly beneath us. I braced myself, searched out my father’s face. Archie returned my gaze, eyes flat and hard.

  “If Kim Roderick is in there,” he said, “I’ll put this thing away and we can all breathe a sigh of relief and have a beer. If it’s somebody else, I want a gun.”