The Cavanaugh Quest (45 page)

I curled up with
The Baseball Encyclopedia
and the old Ray Milland/Charles Laughton thriller,
The Big Clock,
on the tube. The rain drummed steadily outside and dripped from the balcony above and I didn’t think once about any of them, not even Kim. I’d missed the ten o’clock news on purpose so I didn’t know how much of the Crocker story had gotten out. Bernstein was probably doing his damnedest to keep the lid on at least overnight.

The telephone scared me half to death.

It was Kim. She was scared half to death, too. I knew it was Kim but I couldn’t quite figure out what she was saying; the words came with a rush, interspersed with gasps, and finally I shouted at her to stop. She hung there on the other end of the line, panting.

“Listen to me,” I said. “Tell me first, are you all right at this very minute? Right now?”

“Yes,” she answered cautiously, her voice shaking. “But …” She was sobbing in her throat and she couldn’t get the words out. I’d never heard a human voice so tight, strangled.

“Are you at your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Are you safe?”

“I don’t … yes, I’m safe.”

“All right. Now give it to me slowly—what’s the matter?”

“Will you come down here right away, Paul? Please? Right now …”

“Of course, I’m leaving, I’m on my way.” My mouth was dry. Curtains whipped in the wind over my bed.

“Paul … he’s been here. In my apartment.”

“Who?”

“That man … the man you said was the … that man, Maxvill. Oh, God”—she broke off an escalating cry—“he was here …”

Thunder smashed at the city like a mailed fist. You could feel the jolts in your bones and the rain was driven like spikes into the gleaming, slick paving. It bounced on the streets, spraying upward, drumming against the underslung Porsche. The world looked as if it were melting and running out there beyond the windshield and the wipers couldn’t make the glass come clear. Cars pulled over to the curbs and storm sewers backed up, making every dip a lake, and the Porsche had to be eased through carefully. By the time I got to Riverfront Towers the brakes were gone.

She buzzed me in while the doorman yawned, looked morosely at the Porsche in the no-parking zone. Wind whistled around his doors like placating, unwanted guests begging entry. She met me at the door. Her face was tear-streaked. Her hands were cold and when the windbreaker fell open, her nipples jutted out like buttons beneath her T-shirt. She hugged herself, shaking, and led me inside. She pointed to the glass coffee table.

Black and dangerous, seeming about to uncoil and strike, a short-barreled Smith and Wesson .38 revolver squatted on the glass We looked down at it and our reflections framed it.

“It was here when I got home,” she whispered. “I haven’t touched it … He was here while I was gone. Right here, where I
live,
for God’s sake …” She held out her hand, a small sheet of notepaper fluttering. “He left this.”

I took it from her, gingerly holding it by the edge. It was a printed message, written with a red Flair pen.

L. KNEW WHAT TO DO. DO YOU?

“It was underneath the gun, I pulled it out … He used my own pen.” She pointed to a pot of the fiber-tipped pens in various colors. Thunder shook us with an unholy racket and rain sprayed noisily on the balcony furniture. She clutched at my arm, fingers tightening. “Paul,” she said, her voice held way too tightly, about to go wild, “he wants me to kill myself … as Larry did.” She shook away from me, nervously wiping her face with one hand, sniffling, tears of fright spilling over again. “It’s got to be him … that man. And he’s crazy, Paul, insane.” Her body shook. She leaned against the wall, small and terrified, her teeth chattering, her eyes huge and blank. She was trying to get control of herself and the situation. She was failing by inches.

I herded her into the kitchen and pushed her into a chair. She put her feet on a rung and hugged down against her knees, making herself even smaller. Her elegant face, which showed emotion so rarely, remained passive, but everything else about her said she needed help. I poured coffee and she warmed her hands on the cup. Every time the thunder struck she jerked and when the hot coffee ran down her hands, she showed no sign of feeling it.

“You were right. Everything you said was right.” She sipped the scalding black coffee. “It’s Carver Maxvill and he has gone mad. He knows about Larry and me and he blames us as much as the men in the club … He’s killing them. He expects his son and daughter to kill themselves.” She gave way and began to cry, making no attempt to hide her face or wipe the tears away. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she moaned. “He wants me to do what Larry did … he’s my father.”

I held her and she leaned against me, gasping for breath through her tears like a child. I thought about the gun, the carefully printed question, and comforted her when the thunder cracked like doom, applause for Carver Maxvill. He’d been there, in that apartment; he’d killed James Crocker in the dead of night, then vanished for the day, kept watch on all of us, waited until we’d all gone away, then had boldly gotten into the apartment by means of a credit card applied to the easy lock and left his message and the gun.

I knew it was the gun used on Father Boyle and James Crocker. Esthetic consistency demanded it. It was part of a master plan. It was something out of one of Archie’s books. The whole business was a perfect setup; he’d counted on her to break, to do what Larry had done, what I’d feared she might do on her own. But Carver Maxvill wasn’t leaving anything to chance when he could help it along. He was out there now, waiting for the shot. I couldn’t cope with that kind of madness. If anyone had been an innocent victim of chance, it had been Kim, or Shirley, or whatever,
his daughter.
But he didn’t see it that way. Unwittingly, she was an accomplice in the crime against nature, against Carver Maxvill’s last faint hopes. She had to die. He couldn’t pull the trigger on his daughter, but he knew she had to die …

I locked her in the apartment and went downstairs to check with the doorman about any unusual men seen in the lobby area. He hadn’t but suggested I check with the underground parking attendants. When I did, I discovered that the garage was a sauna and the doors to the in/out ramps had been locked in the open position to bring some fresh air inside, however hot. Beads of moisture had gathered on the beams and the single uniformed attendant had soaked through his shirt. Anyone could have walked into the area, waited for a legitimate resident, and gotten inside the elevator well with no trouble. No, he hadn’t noticed anyone in particular, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone. He was sorry but he’d have passed out if he’d kept the doors closed. I nodded and went back upstairs.

Kim was in the shower and I poured two vodka and tonics and when she came out, we sat and drank them and I told her about Crocker. She took it well, apparently composed and quieted by the shower and the drink and the passage of time. I didn’t want to stir her emotions. I kept a lid on everything, didn’t touch her or say anything personal, anything about us. Finally she began to fade a bit, eyes drooping, and I followed her as she padded into her bedroom, her bare feet leaving little damp tracks. I insisted on staying the night. I kissed her cheek and she curled on her side beneath the sheet, which settled down, molded around her body.

I went back to the living room, opened the sliding door onto the balcony, and went out feeling the spray of rain. It was still throbbing against the day’s heat, sheets of water draped over the city. Lightning lit up the skyline, reflected like the finger of death in the sterile face of the IDS tower. But it was starting to cool off and I left the door open, lay down on the couch facing the rain, and watched it bouncing on the railing until I fell asleep, thinking about Kim, my love, in the next room.

The sun was shining when I woke up; the humidity made me feel like something that had been found at the bottom of a very nasty fishbowl. And when I looked, I discovered that she was gone. The bed was empty, the closet door was open, there was an uncharacteristic hint of disarray which smacked of fear and hurry … She was gone, all right. I walked back out to the balcony and looked down at the city crawling through the September heat down below. I didn’t know what to do. She’d gone to ground …

The gun and the note lay on the glass tabletop. I was alone.

F
EELING NUMB AND LOST AND
deserted, unloved and unwanted, I wearily went up the street to the Sheraton-Ritz for breakfast. It was cool and I read the morning paper, which was a mistake. They were having a fit about the murder of “the third leading citizen of the city in a matter of days.” Bernstein went so far as to say the police had several pieces of information and were seeking at least one primary suspect. It all sounded like a stall and the editorial page said as much. There was a biography of Crocker with pictures dating back to the football star in his funny old uniform. It was an exercise in nostalgia as James Crocker marched across the history of the city, parlaying his touchdown days into a thriving construction company which became the city’s largest shortly after the end of World War II.

There were sidebars recapitulating the coverage of the Dierker and Boyle murders, but little was made of the connection among the victims. Archie had been right: The hunting and fishing club was what tied them all together, what made it a
homicidim seriatim,
and anyone investigating the murders would have to excavate through forty years of trivia to get to anything that made sense. Archie was right: Barring a fluke, Bernstein was never going to solve it or find Carver Maxvill. It just wasn’t part of the pattern.

After breakfast I called Archie, told him that Kim was gone and the circumstances surrounding her departure, and drove out to his house. A thick gray haze hung overhead. You couldn’t take a deep breath and I wondered what had happened to the early autumn I’d been complaining about.

The radio told me that the rat scare was over, that all of the little devils had been exterminated on the spot. Would anybody believe it? Sure they would; bad things just didn’t happen here and facing up to a mass murderer was putting enough strain on the civic psyche. Meanwhile, the rats were doing some serious house hunting. The lid was on and only one man had died. Of shock. What a way to go.

Archie and I sat in the shade trying not to move. Julia was out and we watched the action on the lake and pondered what to do. Between us, on a wrought-iron table, I’d placed the gun and the note.

“I think we’d better just leave the gun out of this,” Archie said, stroking his mustache. “We’re on our own. We don’t know for sure where it’s leading … the gun could, undoubtedly would, drag Kim right into the heart of it. Unnecessary, don’t you think? Once Bernstein knows she’s gone and starts asking questions, who knows what he might get to thinking? Better not to complicate matters …”

“We’ve got to find her,” I said. “She’s afraid. She’s running for her life … and he’s after her, he wants her dead.” My voice sounded weak, unsure, a particularly accurate representation of my condition.

“You underestimate her, I think. She surveyed the situation and decided she’d be better off out of sight. She’s probably quite right … But I am rather surprised at Maxvill’s going this far. The answer, I suppose, is that he is quite deranged. It’s a very Old Testament kind of idea, the sinner must die, regardless of surface innocence … ‘Nuts’ is the word that comes most quickly to mind, I should think.”

“
You
underestimate Maxvill, I think,” I said. “If he wants her dead, he’ll find her and kill her. Jesus, Archie, think of what she’s going through, what she’s had to survive to get her life to this point—and now she’s in danger of losing it all …”

“Mmm,” Archie murmured. “Well, perhaps you’re right. Where do you think she went?”

“How the hell should I know? Far, I hope, for her sake.”

“I think not. I think she’ll stay close. She knows it has to do with her, she won’t leave. She’s got to stay close if she ever wants it to end.” He shrugged. “Just a hunch. Anyway, leave the gun and the note with me.”

“I want to find her.”

“If she wanted you to find her, she’d have told you where she was going. Whatever her reasons, she wants you well out of it … she’s wanted you out of it from the beginning. But she let you bully her, let you force your way into her life. Now she draws the line, she must go out on her own. She may be trying to protect you … if she loves you. There’s a logic to it. So let’s wait. It’s all we can do, wait and see what happens.” He wiped his forehead with a white towel. “Cultivate patience, Paul. There’s always a time when patience is the only answer.”

I left Archie working calmly on the notes for his next book, the gun and the note beside him, birds twittering in the trees, white sails carving the lake below. I felt hectic and tattered and aimless. When I got back to town, I pulled into the overgrown tunnel of leaves and shrubs leading to the turnaround in front of our old house. Anne was sitting in a front window smoking a joint and playing in a window box. Without looking up, she took a hit and said, “My God, I could hear you a block away. That car could kill you. And in that vein, who’s killing all these people, Paul? I hear you’re nosing around in it.”

I stood on the gravel looking up at her.

“Kim tell you?”

“Yup. She was your type, after all, wasn’t she?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what type she is. I don’t know
where
she is at the moment … Have you seen her?”

“Not since last week. We played tennis, talked … She asked me some questions about you. Are you in love with her?”

“What did she say about that?”

She pushed around in the wet dirt with a trowel. She had mud halfway up her arms. Even the joint was muddy. Her hair was tangled; she was sweating through her Viking T-shirt. She grinned faintly.

“She’d never say anything like that. But I fancy I can read her, at least a little. I don’t know what she thinks about you, but she sure as hell does think about you. Very unusual for her. Do you love her?”