The Cavanaugh Quest (13 page)

“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 …

R
IVERFRONT 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.

Watching her, I remembered what Anne had said: She was my type—and frigid, whatever that was supposed to imply. I wondered if Anne were right. On either count.

I’d been watching for about half an hour, wondering how this woman had come to affect so many lives in such a variety of ways, when I saw her charge the net and be caught flat-footed, ready to volley, as another passing shot whistled beyond the reach of her racket. “Shit!” she hissed, and the word sizzled in the silence for a moment, then she was laughing soundlessly with the man at the net. He slapped her on the back and they walked the length of the net, picked their gear off the slatted bench. “Tomorrow, Kim,” I heard him say, “same time, same place, and I serve …” He was already calling to a Mrs. Watson on the first court, moving away across the green carpet in the sunshine.

Kim was coming toward me, dark-blue eyes level, mouth a straight line, slipping a blue Slazenger cover over her Wilson T-2000. I got up, glad I’d put on a blazer and gray slacks; she made me feel messy because she’d just finished playing tennis with a pro and everything was in perfect order.

“I’m Paul Cavanaugh,” I said. She shook my hand firmly and fell in beside me, going back along the path I’d come.

“You’re the man at the funeral,” she said, looking ahead of her, smelling of sweat and perfume. But it might have been the flowers again. There were streaks of sweat on her smooth, tan cheek and working the way down the back of her neck. “The man on the hill watching us. I saw you.” She opened the door into the cool lobby. “You certainly have been busy, haven’t you?”

“Moderately,” I said. I couldn’t tell if she was being hostile or not. Maybe just curt. Maybe she was just lousy at human relationships. Every syllable, every step, every tense swing of the racket, every breath made me feel like an intruder. A messy intruder. The doorman was holding the door for someone as we swept past and he respectfully pronounced her name, she nodded, on up two stairs, along the glassed hallway to the elevators with their black doors gleaming wetly, like live things opening to swallow us up.

We were alone in the little ascending room. It was perfume. The sweat was drying on her face. She untied the bandanna, kept her eyes on the floor indicator. Nobody said anything. I looked at her legs. Her socks were rolled down over the tops of her tennis shoes. She reached down impatiently and wiped a trickle of sweat on the inside of her dark thigh.

Her apartment was on the twenty-fourth floor and it was dark, cool, quiet. She led me into the living room and said, “I’m going to take a quick shower. Make yourself at home. Then we can get all this taken care of.”

I said that was fine, she should take her time, and she said she had lots to do today, she’d be only a minute. The draperies were pulled across floor-to-ceiling windows which faced east and got the full morning sun. The room was large, spare, linear, modern with lots of three-quarter-inch glass and chrome and steel and mirrorlike cylindrical floor pots with greenery of several varieties poking upward, spreading out, overflowing, turning toward the sun-fight. A huge glass bowl of fruit stood on a rolling glass cart. I heard water running in the shower, a door closing. Boston ferns, dieffenbachia, split-leaf philodendrons, spider plants. There was a single very large graphic on one wall: a print of a Klimt poster, lots of gold in it. On a white fluted pedestal in one corner: a large copy of Houdon’s remarkable bust of George Washington. Several Simulations Publications war games were stacked on a glass shelf: Borodino, World War II, War in the East, Kampfpanzer. No ashtrays. On a blue-and-white-flowered couch—the only item in the room that wasn’t severe, straight, sharp or cool and distant—a copy of the
Tribune
was open to a story headlined
INDUSTRIALIST’S DEATH A MYSTERY: MURDER OR SUICIDE?
There was a picture of Tim Dierker taken a good ten years ago, smiling, confident, red hair combed back on the high forehead. I heard the shower go off. I didn’t know what to do; any movement was bound to louse up the room.

She appeared suddenly in faded blue jeans and dark-blue Lacoste tennis shirt, moving silently on bare feet that caught my eye, white below the line of tan. She had a pair of loafers in her hand. The pigtails were gone and a wide blue headband held her hair back.

“Open the drapes,” she said. “Pull the cord on the side. Would you like some breakfast?”

“No thanks.”

“Coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Sit down, I’m just going to throw my breakfast together out here.” I heard her clattering about, then she was pulling the glass cart out from the wall into the bright sunshine on the blue-and-white couch and after several sections of grapefruit, she broke off a corner of toast and said, “Okay, let’s get this thing straightened out, Mr. Cavanaugh. Darwin McGill and your former wife both mentioned that you’d been asking questions about me, about my past life. I am a very private person. I value my anonymity. I don’t want people digging into my life …...” She chewed the toast and sipped the black coffee. “Now, what are you after?” She finally acknowledged me, looking into my eyes.

“All right, right off the top, Miss Roderick. I’m curious as to what you may be able to tell me about Larry Blankenship’s suicide and Timothy Dierker’s murder—”

“By what conceivable authority? You’re a drama critic, a writer.” She turned back to her breakfast, a woman uneasy with people. She wasn’t laughing, not even with outrage.

“I have no authority whatsoever,” I said.

“I’ve already talked with the police, that Bernstein who’s running for mayor. He called me as a formality, he said, wanted to know if I had any thoughts as to why Mr. Dierker”—she glanced down at the newspaper—“either might have killed himself or why someone would have wanted to murder him. Mr. Bernstein and I had talked before, about Larry’s death. In any case, I told him I was at a class the night Mr. Dierker died, at the university, and had a dinner engagement after class ended. What more could you want to know, even if you had the authority, and why? We don’t know each other.” She broke off another bite-sized morsel of toast and began chewing. “So why?”