The Cavanaugh Quest (29 page)

“Well, I’ve taken up a lot of your time—and I’m sorry, Mr. Whitefoot, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Maybe it’s fate,” he said. “I haven’t talked about all this in a long time. I suppose it can be argued that it’s good for me to get it out, cleans the system.” He’d returned to an academic cool which irritated me, the way the mask changed from time to time. It made the next bit easier.

“There was one other question.”

“Yes?” He puffed calmly.

“Do you remember anything about the night Rita Hook disappeared?”

It was better than I could possibly have hoped. He looked as if I’d driven a nail into his forehead; he blinked, his teeth drove down on the pipe stem spraying a bouquet of gray ashes onto his shirt, his dark eyes summoned up storm winds. “I mean, it’s such a bizarre story, isn’t it? People don’t just disappear that often, do they? It kind of sticks in your mind—it’s sort of an adjunct to the history of my father’s hunting and fishing club.” He just sat still, watching me, something behind the mask I couldn’t identify. Fear? Hatred? Betrayal? “I don’t know, I thought maybe Running Buck might have said something to you about that.”

“Nope. Nothing. I don’t know anything about it.” He was ushering me toward the door. He slipped a dark-blue windbreaker across his wide, square shoulders. “You’re back to wasting your time.”

“Did you hear about one of your old benefactors, Tim Dierker? Somebody murdered him.”

He closed the door to his office. “Yes, I read about that in the papers. It’s a shame. Life’s a lottery.” He was cold now, businesslike, sorry he’d talked to me at all. He was a blank wall. I was used to it. He might as well have been a member of the club, just stonewalling it in the best tradition of the day.

He followed me out to the counter, where I’d confessed to being a Gemini. The pretty girl came up to us and spoke. “We going home, Daddy?” She flashed a toothy, dazzling smile at me.

“In a little while, honey. We’ll stop at the Burger Shack. You go ahead and finish what you’re doing.”

He followed me out to the front door, onto the top step.

I went down to the sidewalk. There was no handshake. I looked back up at him.

“Nice-looking girl you’ve got there,” I said. “Your daughter?”

“She’s a good kid. Very bright.”

I nodded. “She looks like her mother.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She looks like her mother. She looks like Kim.”

His eyes narrowed. He watched me get into the car, restraining his curiosity. I had an enemy and I wasn’t quite sure why. I drove back to Minneapolis, got there in the early evening. I wondered why Kim hadn’t told me that Billy was up in Jasper, but then what business was it of mine? And I kept seeing her and her daughter, the similarities I’d seen at once, another connection between past and present.

When I got back to my apartment the telephone was ringing.

There had been another murder.

“W
E’VE GOT ANOTHER STIFF. BRAND-NEW
one … well, I take that back. I don’t know how new this one is. You want a viewing?” Bernstein sounded weary and hoarse, as if he were coming down with a cold. Too much campaigning. He coughed.

“Who is it?” It was still dark in my apartment. I’d heard the ringing as I got off the elevator.

“I want it to be a surprise, Paul. Fifteen minutes.” He slammed the telephone down and I threw my suitcase on the bed, brushed my teeth, drank half a can of beer, and went downstairs to wait. It took him eleven minutes. He was alone in an unmarked green Ford.

“Have a nice holiday?”

He looked at me grimly, dug a Sucret out of the wrapper, and popped it into his cheek.

“People who want to be mayor don’t have nice holidays,” he said. “They make speeches. They stand in the rain and eat beans and hot dogs. They get sore throats and wish they were dead. Where were you?”

“Up north.”

“Can you prove it?” He was only half joking.

“Yes. Kim was with me.” I liked that, the intimate implication. He looked at me, snorted.

I shut up. Bernstein was wearing a bright-red nubby sports coat, a pink shirt, pinkish plaid slacks, red-and-white shoes with a shiny gold buckle. He needed a new
costumier.
We hit the freeway at a gallop, took the University Avenue exit, and squirmed into the labyrinth of the crescents curling beneath the Witches’ Tower in Prospect Park.

There was a police car and a police ambulance pulled up at the bottom of the long stairway to the brooding, dark house, windows black and sightless.

Father Martin Boyle was sitting on his back patio, grass poking up through the cracked cement. A half-eaten sandwich had turned to stone on a plastic plate, a glass of flat beer looked like an enormous urine sample, a thick cigar had burned down to a bulging stub, leaving an ash collapsed behind it like a slug. His flesh looked like gray putty, his head draped forward on his chest like a scraggly, white-haired albatross. The front of his white shirt had blossomed like a blackish-red flower, petals of dried blood opening outward from a hole burned in the left side.

A police photographer was taking pictures in the light of bright, glaring portable lamps on stands. The coroner puffed on a cigarette and belched softly as I watched him. A couple of cops told me to keep my distance, presumably not to demolish clues and such. Bernstein leaned against the back of the house, blowing his nose. He pointed to a rusty, chipped lawn chair which was drawn up to the metal table, facing the corpse of Father Boyle.

“Somebody sat down in the chair,” Bernstein said softly, “and probably chatted with Father Boyle for a bit, then took out a gun and shot him through the pump. Bang. Father Boyle goes to Heaven.”

On a rickety tray table a few feet away a small black-and-white Sony flickered in the night. The Twins were playing baseball on Channel 11.

“TV’s been on ever since he died. But nobody in the neighborhood noticed. What a world …” He went off to have a word with the coroner and came back. “Looks like he died a few days ago, two, three days, maybe more. He’ll have to take him apart to get closer than that. Christ, what a job!”

Father Conrad Patulski was somewhat younger than Boyle, a small, delicately constructed man with thin red hair, freckles, and large pink ears. He seemed emotionally uninvolved, smelled of root beer, a bottle of Hires clutched in his tiny hand. He kept scratching his head and wiping foam off his upper lip. He’d come home from a holiday visit to this family, found the body—he called it “carnage,” as if the fact of it made him shrink inside himself—and called the police.

Bernstein asked him questions. I watched the technicians with their busywork, my mind centered on memories of Father Martin Boyle. I had enjoyed him because he went his own way, indulged his weaknesses, and looked at life slightly askew. I enjoyed him because I’d talked of evil with few men and Father Boyle I’d won over to my way of thinking, or to Conrad’s, at least partially. I remembered the way he’d reacted to the visit from the jolly boys in their flap over the mention of Carver Maxvill … Father Boyle hadn’t really given a god damn and there was something else he’d said … But it had slipped my mind.

It struck me as a scene from another planet, as if the accompanying baseball game on television were part of a mysterious ritual for the dead. In the end they unfolded Father Boyle, as best they could, plopped him awkwardly onto a stretcher, and struggled away with him. A man dusted for fingerprints, someone else peered at the earth around the patio for footprints, another was depositing everything from the sandwich’s remains to dust from the second lawn chair in a variety of envelopes. It looked a lot like something on television with everyone waiting for Peter Falk or Telly Savalas to come upon the scene.

Bernstein finally beckoned to me. The night had begun thundering and a breeze had risen in the treetops.

“Look, I’m going to have to get hold of the members of this goddamn club. Just to be on the safe side. Two of them are murder victims.” He looked into my eyes and behind the weariness I could see the seedling of panic putting out its feelers. “Paul, the only reason you’re here is because I like you in spite of my better judgment, because you’ve been sort of involved in this mess from day one—sort of, Christ—and because you’re not on the police beat.

“You’re a private citizen, not a newspaperman. Because we’re gonna have to go easy on this one.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “
Homicidim seriatim
—that mean anything to you?”

“Serial murders,” I said.

“Right. In this case, members of this ridiculous hunting and fishing club who are getting killed. Throw out the suicide, forget that. We’ve got two murders, men in a small group … Once this gets out, the membership part of it, the media can make a real dog-and-pony show of it. Who will be next? That sort of crap. It’ll become better than the comic strips. Now, I don’t want that to happen, Paul … but I’m going to have to warn all these old farts. Will you tell your daddy?”

“Of course,” I said.

“He’ll understand, of all of them, he’ll be the one who understands it …” He sighed. “Good, I feel awful … he probably wrote a novel just like it.” He waved me away with his hand. “He probably knows who did it already. Go ahead, use the phone, call him, get outa here. Go to bed, you shouldn’t catch what I got …” He went away into the mob of waiting cops and I called my father.

“Archie,” I said. “Siddown. I’ve got some bad news.”

“Your mother’s in town,” he said sourly. Archie wasn’t an alarmist. “It cannot be worse than that, sonny.”

“Well, depends on your point of view.”

“So what is it? You’ve got cancer? I’ve got cancer? What?”

“Somebody murdered Father Boyle.” There was a long pause.

“Ah … how? Wait, don’t tell me. He was pushed from his pulpit and plummeted to his death three feet below?”

“I’m not kidding,” I said. “Somebody shot him on his patio. Just found him … he’s been dead for days. Just sitting out there watching television.”

“Marty … well, you’d better come out. How was your trip? You been talking to people, as suggested?”

“Look, I’ll tell you when I get there.”

“Put on your thinking cap, Paul.”

Julia was doing needlepoint, curled in one corner of the airy flowered couch in Archie’s study. Her presence was acting as a calming influence on Archie, who was bubbling over with enthusiasm. It was that sense of excitement which surprised me, but I should have known Archie better than that. He was standing in the doorway watching lightning crackle and pop across the lake. He turned to face me as I went in, his pink face split with a grin, white brush of mustache dancing on his upper lip, hands jammed in the hip pockets of his seersucker slacks, rocking on his heels.

I slumped in a soft chair, stretched my legs, yawned impolitely, and told Archie I thought he wasn’t showing much respect for the dead.

“Balderdash!” he said succinctly. “You’re a sentimentalist. At my age you’re an idiot to whimper about things like this. Marty could just as easily have wheezed himself to death, or choked on one of his endless eating orgies, or fallen dead drunk down his front steps … He’d given up on life years ago, he was a shadow man. He’s gone. Good-bye, Marty. See you soon.” Julia smiled into her needlepoint, a startlingly beautiful representation of a 1920
Vogue
magazine cover, all peacock feathers and a daring lady who appeared to be ten feet taller than her Bugatti roadster. Archie had begun to pace, Patton addressing his troops.

“I know …” He watched us, setting us up, and I imagined Fenton Carey doing his number in
The Dog It Was That Died,
one of Archie’s best. “I know … there will be more murders.”

Julia said, “I knew it,” and didn’t miss a stroke.

“God, that’s a relief, Arch,” I said.

“There will be more murders,” he repeated weightily liking the sound of it. “You must see that we’re on to something, the kind of thing that almost never comes along in the banality of … real life. Sequential murders are very, very rare outside the underworld. And I’d wager almost anything—my reputation if it came to that—that there will be more murders. Possibly several murders if the killer is working his way through the entire club … That has occurred to you, hasn’t it, Paul?”

I nodded. “Thinking cap,” I said, tapping my forehead.

“Well, it is precisely this kind of occurrence which is irresistible for the amateur, that’s us. By applying my experience as a writer and reporter, Julia’s good sense, and Paul’s … er … stout back and willingness to do the legwork, there’s no telling—”

“My God, you’re making us sound like an Ellery Queen novel,” I said.

“You scoff but you will stay to wonder at it all,” he said. His mind was racing, as if he were overdosing on an actual murder case after creating so many in his mind and on paper. “I can tell you for certain that the police are absolutely lost. They have none of the special knowledge we have of the club, the relationships which exist between the victims and the victims-to-be.” He blew a stiletto-thin blade of smoke before him and pointed in our general direction with the cheroot. “The police are not particularly good on cases like this, exotic cases. They have so little experience of them, they are untrained to deal with what you might call the esthetic brand of murder … It is extremely unlikely that an informant will come forward in this case unless, of course, the killings of Tim and Marty were hired murders by professionals—then, for whatever reason, one of the police sources may come up with something and lead the cops to the hit man. But, good gracious, these seem very unlike the work of professionals—”

Julia interrupted. “Why not let Paul give us the details, Archie?”

“In a minute,” he said, pushing on. “I’m trying to convince you two that I’m not being foolish, grinning and babbling my way into senility over this. Be patient, Paul. I’m in mid-point …”

“Right,” I said.

“Without a tip, then, the police investigation almost assuredly will run into heavy going. When they are driven to fall back on deductive reasoning—rather than prints, MO’s, clues, names on file, and so on—then the poor devils begin to come undone. They’re not trained to be psychologists or historians, both of which are required here, and they
are
trained to weed out whatever imagination they have … I’ve known only one cop in my entire life who had imagination, real creativity, a man named Olaf Peterson, used to work here in Minneapolis but he married rich and cleared out to a little place called Cooper’s Falls, but that’s another story—anyway, the police are just trained away from using their imagination, from indulging in luxuriant hypotheses, because technology has tyrannized them, they’re slaves to all their machines and to their stool pigeons … not much romance in it anymore. But still, once in a while there comes a case like this one, which I believe will prove to be impenetrable, a thicket of complexity and brambles which will drive the machines back in confusion and will not yield to science!” He stumped over to his desk in search of a match.