The Cavanaugh Quest (38 page)

“He gets the message,” the observer said tonelessly. He yawned audibly, bored.

“You’d better see about that nose,” the hitter said.

They went away and I lay in the roadway beside the car for a while, trying to get a grip on reality. I’d been beaten up, a novel experience. My stomach hurt and my nose was surely broken. So I lay there taking stock, breathing through my mouth. I got the message all right: Crocker wanted me to keep my nose out of his business. When the truck had cruised past me, I’d seen it in the moonlight, maroon and gold with the lettering across the door:
CROCKER CONSTRUCTION COMPANY.

W
HEN I WOKE UP THE
next morning, I wondered for a moment if it had been a nightmare. I lay in bed, hanging like a spider at the end of his filament between sleep and consciousness, pondering my condition, curious as to the noise I was hearing, a whistling, scraping rattle. When I began moving, I knew it hadn’t been a dream: Little darts of pain across my abdomen quickly became great awful arrows and the peculiar sound was coming from my mouth, which tasted like the inside of the Porsche’s carburetor. When I stood up, my head fell off and rolled under the bed. I tripped over it when it rolled on out the other side, gingerly replaced it, and, peering at it in the bathroom mirror, disowned it altogether. My eyes were swollen and red; spreading outward from the bridge of my nose was a pale purple bruise seeping away almost to the outside corners of my eyes. I didn’t even try to inhale through what had in the old days been a usable, if undistinguished, nose.

I soaked my face with ice cubes wrapped in a hand towel, achieving a certain numbing of facial pain. My gut felt as if I had been sawed in half by an especially clumsy magician and inadequately stuck back together. I found a package of Q-tips and tentatively inserted one in a nostril, wiping out blood and mucus and some other stuff gentlemen would never imagine discussing. It was clearly no time for home remedies so I called Max Condon, my only doctor friend, and when I finally got to his office, he repaired what was reparable, packed my nostrils, clucked at my nocturnal habits, droned on about some goddamn fish he’d caught on a trip to Acapulco and was having stuffed, and put a symbolic bandage across my nose.

“You look like Jack Nicholson in
Chinatown
,” his nurse said with irritating good humor. I mentally gave them both the finger and went home, called Kim without any answer, and crawled back into bed hugging my bloodstained pillow.

It was dark when I woke up and I’d lost a day. I did a couple of four-minute eggs and amused myself for half an hour trying to pick off the recalcitrant bits of shell.

The telephone scared me half to death. It was Archie. He said he had some news so I struggled into the Porsche and headed back out on Highway 12. I had dropped four Excedrin into the eggs and my tummy now felt funny both inside and out.

We settled in Archie’s study, as we were doing with considerable regularity these days. It was cozy and I held the stage for a telling of how I’d come to resemble the Swedish Angel following a tough match during which Man Mountain Dean sat on his head. Archie humphed, gnawing on his cheroot, when I revealed my assailants as mugs from the Crocker Construction Company. Julia was amused. “Man of his word,” she said. “And no waiting. Just a good thrashing—plenty macho! Frontier justice.” She patted my arm, poured coffee. “Don’t despair.” Then, to Archie: “Does this mean that Jim Crocker is the murderer, dear? I’d never had thought
that
of him … Unless it’s some kind of vigilante thing, righting wrongs and whatnot, I can see him taking matters into his own hands if he believed it
had
to be done …”

“I don’t know,” Archie mused. “Crocker’s deeper than people think. And he’s used to having his own way … I can see him killing somebody, no doubt of that, but not dropping them off buildings … and not stealing snapshot albums and rifling the newspaper files. Hell, he’d just sock ’em with a big fist and wait for the cops. How’s your nose, Paul?”

“It hurts. Now, what’s your news?”

Archie had been moving fast since the previous morning and everything had been dropping into place. He’d begun his search for Larry Blankenship—“who the hell he was, that might give us an idea of why he killed himself”—with an old friend of his who was the president of the advertising agency where Larry had worked briefly before being laid off. On his job application and insurance forms Larry had listed as his parents a Mr. and Mrs. Clyde Blankenship of Bemidji, Minnesota. Archie hired a private pilot to get him up to Bemidji and wait while he found the Blankenship home, a humble but respectable Depression bungalow where scientology had been practiced since the fifties by Mr. Blankenship, a bookkeeper for a large hardware store, and Mrs. Blankenship, a substitute elementary-school teacher. They were both quiet, uncommunicative people, solemn, put-upon by life but bearing up nicely, thank you.

Larry Blankenship was not their natural child and they had been very happy to get him through an adoption service, even though he’d been rather old—twelve years old, actually—and hard to place. He’d been a conscientious boy, hard-working, quiet; he had been an average student; “high average,” Mrs. Blankenship had corrected Clyde, with a nice way of talking to grown-ups, very respectful.

The difficult part of the interview had been the fact that they had not known of his death. There were no tears: He’d been gone for some time, had written only a few letters a year, a card at Christmas. “And always a remembrance on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day,” Mrs. Blankenship, Edna, had said, dry-eyed. “They were amazing people,” Archie had said, “simultaneously dead and alive, no smiles, no tears, nothing. Could Bemidji do that to people? Or Scientology?” Remembering that he was trying to trace Larry back as far as he could, Archie had kept digging. Larry had come to the Blankenships from the Sacred Heart Orphanage in Duluth in the fall of 1945. Archie left them on the front stoop of the little bungalow with its neatly trimmed lawn and precise flower beds and the concrete birdbath which had become a planter a quarter of a century ago. That had been Larry’s idea his senior year in high school. He loved geraniums, bright-red geraniums, his favorite flower. No, they knew nothing of the family Larry’d come from, of course not. “It was none of our business, was it?” Edna said. “He may have been twelve, but he was our baby. We even named him … I always favored the name Larry, such a happy name. He was our Larry for a while. Then he left. Children grow up, leave the nest, that’s the way of life, isn’t it?”

By midafternoon Archie was in Duluth, finding out that the Sacred Heart Orphanage was a dead end. The old orphanage building had burned to the ground in 1958, shortly after the move to a new building on the northern outskirts of town. No great damage had been done by the fire, the children and staff having moved out the week before. But the great mass of records had been lost and were irreplaceable. It was all a long time ago as far as the present staff was concerned. But when Archie was leaving, one of the sisters had a thought: She remembered that Sister Mary Margaret, who had been in charge of admissions in the forties, was now residing in a convent rest home near Dubuque, Iowa. Archie got the name of the residence and was told not to expect too much: Sister Mary Margaret must be close to ninety. He could imagine the chances of her remembering a certain lad, someone from thirty years before, one from among so many.

While I was being beaten on the nose beside Lake of the Isles, Archie was sleeping soundly in the Julian Motor Hotel in Dubuque. His pilot, intrigued by the adventure, had the room next door, marveling at the eccentricities of the famous mystery novelist. In the morning Archie had found Sister Mary Margaret, hard of hearing, but sharp-eyed, watching a game show on television in the residence common room.

After two hours of shouting Archie sagged in his chair, grinned weakly at Sister Mary Margaret, and let her return to the television: The soap operas were beginning. She had remembered the boy, he was there in the cupboard of her memory, darting into view for an instant, then retreating, wiped away by time. But she did remember, in the first place because so few children came to Sacred Heart at such an advanced age. She remembered the name of the family he went to, the Blankenships, once Archie mentioned it, but not the boy’s own name. She remembered him as a lethargic boy, puffy, always eating when he shouldn’t have been, tending toward the sullen, but not an outright complainer, resentful, but easily led, one who did what he was told to do … yes, he’d gone to Bemidji, and she remembered that there had been something sad, something unusual about that—some thing about the boy …

But she couldn’t remember what it was. A blank.

Still, we knew a good deal more about Larry than we had before. He had simply
appeared
; Maxvill and Rita had
disappeared.
He had been added, they had been subtracted. He had no beginning, they had no end. Archie smiled at the symmetry of it, wondered if it was all part of some glorious plot concocted by some celestial novelist. He liked it.

“We don’t quite know where the puffy lad who became Larry Blankenship actually fits but we’re closing in on him,” Archie said. “We’re closing, I can feel it. It’s working just like it does on paper for Fenton Carey … I’m really quite amazed, life imitating art, don’t you see?”

Julia turned to face us from the French door, hand on hip, smoothing her hair with the other hand. “Kim and her cousin, the boy, were in an orphanage in Duluth. Weren’t they? Yes, we’ve established that … Could it have been the same one?” Her eyes roamed between us. “Don’t you see, don’t you see how beautiful it is? What if Kim, age four or five, had actually known this twelve-year-old orphan boy? Maybe all three were friends … And all those years later, all grown up, Kim and Larry found each other again … and fell in love …”

“Sounds like an opera,” Archie growled. “She was only four. Even if it was the same orphanage and she did know him, they’d never recognize each other twenty-five or thirty years later … Impossible. You’ve got to keep to the path of reason, dear Julia, eschew flights of fancy.” He smiled benignly.

“I know, I know,” she admitted, fingering her lower lip, “but it does make a lovely story. If you forget the ending, anyway. A fairy tale, I know.”

“It is a nice story,” I said consolingly. “And I’d believe almost anything about her … she hasn’t led the most conventional of lives. She seems drawn to the irregular, the dramatic, as if she were being controlled by an astrological destiny. Seems fated, if you know what I mean.” I let it trail off since it made no sense and caught Archie peering at me over his Ben Franklin spectacles.

“Could we return to reality, girls?” he said. “Fiction Writing One is excused, Advanced Criminology is called to order. Let’s consider our killer.” He stood up, rolled the blackboard out, wiped away some accumulated scribbles, and with red chalk printed the name
MAXVILL
in capitals. “I see a couple of possibilities, each of which has something to recommend it. Personally, instinctively, I’m being seduced by the Maxvill theory … Why the devil should we for a moment assume he’s dead? No logical reason for it. No, I reckon he’s alive—and he’s my number one candidate … the more I think about it, the better it looks. It all fits. I can make it at least a working hypothesis.

“It begins way to hell and gone back there, with Carver Maxvill and Rita Hook.” He chalked her first name in capitals across from his. “There was Maxvill up at the lodge and in Grand Rouge, sort of on the prowl sexually. He takes up with Rita Hook, true to his form—she’s someone of a distinctly lower class—just his meat, so we’ve heard. And he flaunts this relationship among the other members, maybe makes his pals jealous … in some way, somehow, this relationship threatens or irritates the group. And the group responds by expelling him and her with him—” He held up his hand to still objections. “It’s a hypothesis, Paul, so relax. I grant it’s heavy going in here, looking for specifics, but I have some ideas. In any case, the group exerted pressure on him to leave, call it expulsion or something else. They may even have paid him off to take his wench and beat it, become a nonperson, an anonymity,
disappear
… So he and Rita leave, with some of the group’s money, presumably given to them, but just possibly extorted in some way … The years go by.” Archie stopped and lit a cheroot with a wooden match and clouded his head in smoke. “The years go by and in his hiding place something happens to Carver Maxvill, perhaps his mind snaps, that seems a possibility when you think of the enormity of what our killer is perpetrating here, and he surveys the wreckage of his life, his nonpersonhood, and he decides to revenge himself on the men who had the power and the fortune to erase him from the book of life … He could prove his continued existence by these violent acts. The last things his victims would know would be the fact of his endurance …”

“My God,” I said, “that might even account in a crazy way for the stealing of the photo albums, the file from the newspaper—he’s making sure, he’s symbolically drawing attention to himself!”

“Oh, such heavy thinking,” Julia said, but there was a sense of excitement in her voice, as if we were coming upon the truth more or less by surprise.

“Revenge or love,” Archie said triumphantly, pacing back and forth before the blackboard, clutching the red chalk and gesturing with it. “The most likely motives by far for an instance of
homicidim seriatim
… Stop and think, any serial murder must involve a group, an alliance of individuals, who have somehow, whether in reality or in a demented imagination, injured or threatened someone so terribly, so unforgivably that the only possible response is the systematic elimination of the offenders. Think how the world must appear to the killer, a crimson smear … he is beset and hounded by these people, these monsters who have despoiled his life.” Archie took a deep breath, excited by the onrushing ideas which seemed to make so much sense. “Consumed by this need for revenge, our man Maxvill comes out of the woodwork—maybe he’s alone now, maybe Rita is dead by this time, maybe there’s nothing left of his life and he broods on the ruins, looks at what it has all come to … and he sees how much of it these men have stolen from him …”