The Cavanaugh Quest (34 page)

“Well, Donny”—I chuckled knowingly—“she won’t take any shit. But, then, she’s not suing anybody either. So have a nice day.” Then I called the office and told them to have somebody else see the show and write the review because I’d come down with something. He didn’t believe me and said so and I hung up. Bad telephone manners.

I was in the shower trying to figure out Kim’s behavior the night before, half in awe at her violent reactions and half frightened, when Archie called. I stood dripping in the hallway, looking out at what seemed to be a summer sun. The wind was whistling and shaking my geraniums.

“It was easier than I thought,” Archie said. “They’ve got all sorts of old files in Washington and one of my old comrades-in-arms detailed some poor bastard to check on Goode’s 1944 Christmas.” He paused and sipped at his morning coffee. “Where do you think he was?”

“Archie,” I said threateningly.

“He was in Minneapolis. Departed Washington on the tenth of December for Minneapolis, leaving a telephone number where he could be reached, and didn’t return to Washington until the night of December 26. All there in black and white. Nice, wouldn’t you say?”

“Very. So why did he lie?”

“Why, indeed? Lovely plot we’re building.”

“But what does it mean?”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re just collecting tidbits of information. Finding out what it means comes later. For now, be satisfied that we know Jonnie lied and that he was on the scene when Maxvill disappeared. And Rita. Why is she always an afterthought? Well, anyway, keep it all in mind.”

“My mind’s in danger of shorting out, Dad.”

“One other thing. Have you found out anything about Blankenship? Where he came from? Who he is … was?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m going to have a go at that. I’ve got a source or two … Paul?”

“Yes?”

“Fun, ain’t it?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

“If you don’t get personally involved,” he said. “What are your plans for the day?” He couldn’t imagine my doing anything but working on our case.

“Crocker,” I said.

The wind and heat hit me in the face like a wrecking ball. Bill Oliver was standing in the parking lot peering at the fountain, which had ceased working altogether. A bird sat on the fountain nozzle and stared back at Oliver. Neither one of them looked at me as I went past and climbed into the oven I used for a car.

A heat haze hung in the air about six feet over my head and the wind shook the car before I started it. It wasn’t summer and it wasn’t fall; it was worse. WCCO informed me that it was ten o’clock and the temperature was already eighty-six with wind hitting gusts to forty-five. Crocker’s office had told me he was at the North Side site, which meant he was hard-hatting it on a huge plot of earth a block off Lyndale North, where a new high-rise complex of office buildings, retail outlets, and apartments was going up. Turning into the Hennepin/Lyndale bottleneck, everything—the purple mass of the Walker, the rich green of the park where our marauder had appeared last night, the gray spires of the Basilica—was blurred behind the heat, like a world packed in cotton wadding. I curled around the Highway 12 exit and continued on up Lyndale past the Farmers’ Market and the Munsingwear plant, past the low-income housing that already seemed to be coming unstuck right there in the middle of the best of all possible worlds. Behind me the cancerous black roofing factory, long an eyesore and a source of constant civic hysteria, squatted, malignant, mocking.

The huge maroon-and-gold sign, exact duplicates of the University of Minnesota colors, loomed two stories high above a flat, scrubby vacant square block—three block capital C’s, in gold outlined in maroon, with
CROCKER CONSTRUCTION COMPANY
beneath it and
THE GLORY HILL PROJECT
beneath that, followed by rows of specifics as to cost, funding, a sketch of the final
megillah
as it would look in a couple of years, all spanking new. No sketch of it being torn down twenty years later for the rapid transit system or the domed soccer stadium.

I cruised the length of the three blocks facing west, then hung a right for the two-block depth of it, then back along its eastern three blocks, around and around, listening to Dick Haymes sing Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night,” which had been very big in 1937, according to Roger and Charlie on WCCO. The park which was being demolished was crowned by a huge green hummock laced with tall shade trees, oak and maple and elm, and latticed with walkways, a perfect spot for sledding in the white winter months. Progress was having its day, however, and another neighborhood was being bombed out, leveled, and department stores and sleazy plastic steak houses and car washes and fragile cheap-jack apartments were going to make life better for everyone. 1937 … I circled the area again, looking for any signs of a headquarters trailer among the dozens of maroon-and-gold vans, trucks, trailers, cars, pickups. 1937, the radio lads told me, found the Duke of Windsor marrying Mrs. Simpson on June 3, Amelia Earhart vanishing in July in the middle of the Pacific, and the
Hindenburg
exploding on May 6—a very big year. Of special interest thirty-seven years later, in the summer that Richard Nixon finally got caught, was the note that on December 20 the Supreme Court had ruled that tapped telephone conversations could not be made public. Then Fred Astaire sang “A Foggy Day” and when it was over, my daily history lesson complete, I put the Porsche in the shadow of a likely-looking trailer and went in search of James Crocker, the footballer who made good.

Dust was blowing and the wind bore the groan of the earthmovers working on the green hill. A tree went down while I stood there, feeling dirt mixing with sweat on my forehead, and my old blue blazer was sticking to my back and turning a funny color. Crocker came out of the trailer, slipping his maroon hard hat onto his head; he wore dark aviator glasses, khaki work clothes, and boots. His sleeves were rolled up on dark tanned arms covered with curly gray hair like steel wool. He was frowning and seeing me didn’t help. But he was alone and couldn’t avoid me.

“What the hell are you doing here? Writing a review?” He was very different from the family man barbecuing chicken for his grandchildren. He was larger, harder, and the deep lines in his face gave him a cruel aspect. He was carrying a walkie-talkie handset in a gigantic reddish paw.

“No,” I said. “Just wanted to apologize for getting everybody so upset the other day. Hub told me I’d struck a nerve somewhere.”

He grunted, put the walkie-talkie down on a trestle table covered with elevation charts, and lit a Lucky Strike.

“And I’m sorry you took it out on Boyle. He meant no harm, I’m sure. Now he’s dead … Too late for you to apologize for yelling at him.” I watched him for a reaction but it wasn’t easy with the wind and the dust. His glasses were crusted with a fine layer of it. He stared at me and finally flung the match away. He didn’t seem inclined to speak so I went on trying to think of myself as Humphrey Bogart needling Ward Bond, trying to force the issue.

“Now that two of the old gang have been murdered,” I said, “I wondered if maybe you’ve remembered anything more about the dear dead days beyond recall, like about Maxvill … Really”—I forced a snicker—“it’s amazing the way his name gives you guys the shakes.”

“Are you going to keep talking to me, Mr. Cavanaugh?”

“I thought I would,” I said.

“Well, then, you’re going to have to follow along. Fellow on the dozer, up there on the hill, says something funny’s happening and wants me to take a look. So, let’s go.”

We set off up Glory Hill, just the two of us, other workmen and drivers busy with their own duties, and soon we were out of the dust, on the green grass, in the pools of shade, beginning the slow climb.

“Are you keeping it a secret, too?” I asked. “Whatever it is about Maxvill—?”

“I’m afraid you’ve been misled and while we’re talking about apologies, I figure I owe you one on this Maxvill deal. The general and I obviously were off the track on that, but try to look at it our way. We’re both hardheaded men, working in the real world, where things like reputations, old scandals and irregularities—they can crop up and get people talking, and we had enough of that when Carver went off in ’44, For instance, I had Carver doing a little legal work for Crocker Construction in the thirties, a lot of people thought of him as one of the firm … then he ups and disappears, and that combined with his reputation—”

“What reputation?”

“Well, hell, half the people who knew him figured him for a goddamn homo and the other half knew damn well he was a chaser, always after some silly-ass waitress or bar girl, so his reputation wasn’t so hot. But what the hell, I used to say, he wasn’t a bad guy—hell of a shot, really a crack shot with a pistol or rifle or shotgun, and that always impressed me … and he wasn’t a bad lawyer, either, come to think of it. Funny, he wasn’t an outdoorsman, but when he felt like it, he was the best flycaster and the best shot of the bunch … Anyway, Father Boyle wouldn’t give two hoots about stuff like business reputations, probably didn’t occur to him that people like Jonnie and me would want to keep his name out of things—”

“What did he do, embezzle money from Crocker Construction?”

He stopped and thrust a thick finger with a broken nail at me, but he was smiling. “See, that’s what I mean! First damn thing you think of is embezzlement, old Carver took the money and ran, is that it? Hell, no, he didn’t take any money … but rumors like that spread all over town. Which is exactly what I want to keep quiet now. Got it?” He sat down heavily on a cement bench just off the path. “Rest a minute. I got me one of those pacemaker things stuck under my collarbone here, but there’s no use in climbing so fast it blows out …”

“Do you think he’s dead?” I asked.

“By now? He might be. I don’t think he was dead then, hell, no … he ran off …”

“With Rita Hook?”

“What?”

“Do you think he ran off with Rita Hook?”

“Well, for Chrissakes! Rita Hook!” He was pale underneath the tan and in another age, before Medtronic developed the pacemaker, he might have been dead. Now he was just resting. “A name from the past, that one is. Carver and Rita, what an idea! It never occurred to me—”

“Why not? They disappeared the same day, December 16, 1944. Seems that it might have crossed your mind.”

Crocker’s face clouded and he took a last hit from the Lucky.

“Same day,” he mused. “I guess that’s right, never really stuck in my mind, I guess, because by the time the Grande Rouge law questioned us it was the next week, almost Christmas, and we were all wondering where the hell Carver was and not worrying much about Rita … I mean, what the hell was Rita to us? Cook and housekeeper …”

“Just Carver’s type, wouldn’t you say?”

He squinted at me and took off his sunglasses, wiping the dust from them with a red bandanna.

“You sound like you’re building up to something,” he said.

“Nope, just collecting bits and pieces.” I stood up. “You see, I think everybody’s lying to me about Maxvill.”

“Why the hell would I lie about him? What is there to lie about?” He shook his head, looking up at me, hooking his glasses behind his ears, hiding his eyes.

“I sure don’t know. Maybe Carver’s alive … maybe Carver’s the one who stole his file from the newspaper morgue—”

“Jon told me about that,” he said. “Funny thing.”

“Not too funny, actually. What if Carver were alive and what if he stole the file? Do you see what I mean?”

“No, I don’t.” Up ahead of us, toward the top of the hill, the sky seemed to be fluttering like a tattered awning. It was the birds skittering out of the treetops, frightened of something. I heard their cries.

“Well, if Carver stole that file, then he probably stole the snapshots from Tim and Father Boyle … which means that he killed them.” I watched the birds swarming above, as if their minds or communicative sense were one, each interlocking with the other. “Can you imagine why Carver Maxvill would be coming back to kill his old buddies? One at a time? Is that the secret, what you all did to him?” We were trudging uphill again and sweat was running down inside my pants leg.

“Aw, hell, you’re way out in left field,” he growled. “That’s plain nuts—anything happened to Carver, he brought it on himself—”

“What did he bring on himself?”

“Look,” he puffed, “and god damn it, let this be an end to it, I don’t know what happened to Maxvill and there’s no point in bringing it all up again …” His face had regained its color and was flushed now.

“But Rita was his type, you admit that …”

“Jesus, yes, I guess she was. More or less. She was a very easy woman, Rita was—”

“Good-looking?”

“I suppose she was, when she was all fixed up. We saw her when she was working around the place mostly—”

“When did you see her when she was fixed up and looking her best, then? When she was with Carver?”

“I don’t remember, I just don’t remember.”

“And you’re not worried?”

“About Carver? Hell, no …”

“Besides Carver. You’re not worried?”

“What about?”

“What about?” I repeated. “My God, two men have been murdered and another killed himself … Somebody seems to be wiping out the jolly boys, Mr. Crocker, and you’re a card-carrying jolly boy—”

“General Goode told me you’d say that,” he said knowingly, “and the answer is simply that there’s no connecting the two killings—”

“You actually believe that? Two apparently motiveless murders of two longtime friends, two sets of snapshots taken … and you don’t think there’s a connection? Nobody, but nobody, could really believe that … not you, not Goode, not Bernstein, nobody.” I was grinning at him beneath the crying birds, which he didn’t seem to notice. The street level was far away below us and we were thirty yards from the top of the hill his machinery was ripping to bits. “Tell me, can’t you remember something more about Blankenship—does he fit the pattern? Is his suicide linked to the murders? To Carver and Rita? In any way? Why the hell don’t you just tell me?”

He walked on, breathing hard, and I put my hand out to stop him and he struck at it, quickly, heavily, with a paw.