The Cavanaugh Quest (49 page)

I saw pale wood behind the ice.

Heart pounding, I joined him, cracking the ice and pulling it away. It was the packing case, slowly appearing beneath our frenzy, pale and rough and preserved, the wires connected at the side, wires rusting and frozen tight. I grabbed the first one, felt it tear a fingernail, felt my hand finally lose its feeling from the cold. It took us fifteen minutes to pry the wires back and when they were undone, we stood back looking into each other’s eyes, afraid at the end to open it.

Archie had been watching. As our energies and courage flagged, he stepped between us, a wet, bedraggled, frail old man. Without a word he reached forward, took hold of the case’s lid, and with a mighty tug yanked it open.

They were frozen. Frost clung to them like white moss. Her face was caked with brown blood. The flesh had sunk against the bones …

“It’s them,” Archie said.

T
HE FACE OF THE WOMAN
in the case lingered in my mind like childhood’s nightmares, the visage of grinning, mocking death. There was no illusion of life, no after image of the woman she’d been. The flesh, while preserved, had dehydrated as the years had passed and the skin had sunk back against the skull, pulling tight, leaving the dried eyeballs to bulge obscenely from their sockets. The teeth protruded in a travesty of a grin and the dark brown blood on her face had turned dry and flaky. The head had been twisted at an unnatural angle when the bodies were forced to fit in the packing case and Maxvill’s face had been buried in the collar of Rita’s coat; they formed a heap of clothing and crisscrossed limbs, like a tumbling act that had come suddenly to grief and never been untangled.

Billy was gone. It was well past midnight and the fire had burned low. Archie and I sat quietly, shocked into silence, slowly drying out, scraping caked mud from our shoes and clothing. The rain drummed steadily on. I pitched parched log into the failing embers and the bark ignited, curling in a burst of flames. I rubbed my eyes and tried to ignore the ache in my bones.

Archie and I had jammed the packing case closed, rewired the fastenings by the light of Billy’s torch. The Indian, shrugging in disgust at more of the white man’s inexplicable goings-on, had left us, gone to the entrance of the cave to wait while we reburied the dead. Then the three of us slipped and slid back down from the ice cave and took some time to recover by the fire. Billy washed his hands of the whole mess. He said his conscience was clear; it was up to us what was done about it. He left without shaking hands but there had been no particular malice. He just wanted to be rid of us and our vile little night games. I didn’t blame him. His face seemed to say that if we wanted to cover it all up again, that was our business. White man’s business …

I kept thinking of the thing in the packing case as Rita Hook … wife of Ted, sister of Patricia, mother of Kim and Larry, lover of Carver Maxvill. She had never gotten away from Grande Rouge after all. She’d been waiting on ice for thirty years to be found and now that we had come there was nothing for us to do. No recourse, no justice, no way of extracting payment for her mean, solitary going. She had gone to the trouble of posting a lookout, a witness in case anything bad happened to her, and he had seen the worst happen, had watched her run for her life and not make it, had called it white man’s business. And he had kept his secret to himself.

We finally left the place of ghosts, climbed into Archie’s big car, and slowly wheeled through the mud back toward the real world. I didn’t even look back at it. I knew what it looked like. I drove across the killing ground, where the bodies had fallen, and I didn’t figure I was coming back.

We were making the right turn at Grande Rouge, still in the middle of the night, when Archie finally spoke.

“Well, we were wrong. Carver Maxvill was an innocent man. Innocent and dead the whole damned time!” His voice crackled, anger spilling over. “It fit, it was so perfect … Jesus, I’d have sworn we had it. It
should
have happened that way. I don’t care … plots are my business, for God’s sake!”

“We’d better rethink,” I said. “There’s still a killer loose …”

He grunted assent.

“I figure Kim told Larry the truth about their relationship, that they were brother and sister, and that’s why she instigated the divorce. Makes sense, right?” I was exercising all my self-control when I spoke of Kim; inside me there was a long wail of fear for her safety, the wish that I’d made her understand more clearly, deeply, what I felt for her. But Archie wouldn’t have been impressed and I’d have gone to pieces had it come out. And it would have done her no good. The best I could do was keep as clear a mind as I could.

“She told him that much of it,” I went on. “No one in the club knew that anyone had witnessed what they did that night … Almost thirty years had come and gone, it must have nearly passed from their memories … but suppose Larry listened to Kim and didn’t like what he heard, argued with her, refused to believe her—and to convince him she let him have the rest of it, the story that the group had murdered their mother. You can imagine what that must have done to his poor, downtrodden soul. So, as one last attempt at normality, say he went to one of the club, hoping against hope to be told that it wasn’t true, of course it wasn’t true; just the ravings of a dying Indian … He tries to talk Kim out of it in the parking lot, where Bill Oliver sees them, but she’s adamant—that’s her nature, facing up to the blows that come your way, overcoming them …

“But it’s not Larry’s way. He wants to be told they’re not the blows they appear to be. So who would he naturally go to to corroborate or disprove what Kim had said?”

Archie stirred. “Tim Dierker. He lived in the same building.”

“Of course, Tim Dierker. Thoughtfully, Larry doesn’t want to run the risk of disturbing Harriet, so he asks Tim to come to his apartment. The gray fluff on the floor … Tim leaves it when he visits Larry. And Larry puts it to him. He may not tell Tim where he heard the story, but he asks him if it’s true … Are he and Kim brother and sister? And did the club kill Rita and Maxvill?

“I can see it now, Dad. Old Tim is a dying man, he’s in an alcoholic fog most of the time, he’s been sitting around looking at his scrapbooks, remembering the way it was … the
good
times … and now this specter arises, like a messenger of God, asking him to confess his sins … giving him the
opportunity
to confess, to leave with a clean slate. So the old man breaks down—yes, he says, yes, we did it, we thought we had our reasons, and we killed them and we hid the bodies where they’d never be found … And yes, we knew that all we could do was see to it that Rita’s children were taken care of, we kept track of both of you, we sent money for your education, we knew who you were, where you were … and when chance brought Kim and Larry together, as strangers, it wasn’t just a coincidence. Kim naturally went to them at Norway Creek, her benefactors … and maybe the story Tim told Harriet about Larry just showing up one day was just plain bullshit—a man like Tim could have arranged for Larry to hear there was a good job at the paint company. And hiring Larry would have been another way of salving what must have been a pretty beaten-up conscience …”

The road unwound through the dark like a tape. The rain blew in gusts across my vision and we were utterly alone. The smell of the lake seeped in everywhere, like a fragrant gas, keeping us alert.

“When Kim and Larry met and, against the odds, fell for each other, what the hell could Tim do? What could any of them do?

“Well, we know what Tim did. Harriet told us—he did everything he could to dissuade Larry from marrying her, he went into a decline when he failed, but he couldn’t actually tell Larry the truth. So he sat by and let it happen … And now Larry’s worst fears have been confirmed, his life is a ruin, as he sees it, and it finally drives him to suicide.” I looked over at Archie, who was nodding slowly. “So that makes three lives Tim’s got on his conscience … He in turn unburdens himself to the group, tells them that Larry knew. What do the members of the club do? Say they all know, say they all go into a kind of collective shock—they don’t know what to do but they’re afraid, they’re old men, one of them may spill the beans … perhaps Tim actually blithers on about it, says he’s got to tell, that there’s been enough death, that they can never escape the guilt of what happened thirty years before … Now they’re all in a moral quandary, the atmosphere is such that the truth might actually come out … All of them but one. One knows damn well how he feels, he doesn’t want any nonsensical, sentimental idiot telling the truth. They could all still be ruined, the scandal would stand Minneapolis upside down. And one of them cannot even bear the possibility of such disclosures. So he kills Tim when the pressure gets to be too much. And having killed one, it becomes easier to eliminate the others—something has damn well snapped inside his head, he sees his old pals weakening, loosening their grip, so he kills them. He figures there’s less danger in that than in letting them live. All it takes is one to tell the truth, to show the authorities where the bodies are buried … The question is, which one? Does he have to kill them all?”

Archie said, “Who’s left? We know it’s not Tim, it’s not Boyle, and it’s not Crocker … You take Ole and me out of it and it leaves Jon Goode and Hub Anthony. Simple elimination. They’re both under protective guard. One of them is a killer and the other is the next scheduled victim—can you imagine what’s going through their minds? The killer must be frantic. He’s got to get loose, penetrate the other’s protection, kill him … and he’s got to pray to God the other one hasn’t told the whole story. Good Lord, talk about desperation!”

“Which one is it?” I asked. “Who’s got the most to lose?”

“I think that’s the wrong angle,” Archie said. “Which one has the killer mentality? That’s the man we want.”

“Dierker was killed because he was a dying man with nothing to lose by telling the truth,” I said. “Boyle was killed because he was religious and who knows what a priest might do in this kind of squeeze? Crocker knew who the killer was, yet he wasn’t worried—this man surely wouldn’t kill him, Crocker figured he was as tough as the killer, figured the killer knew he wasn’t going to tell and was therefore safe. So much for Crocker’s belief in friendship and being chums together …”

“It’s Goode, of course,” Archie said tonelessly.

“Obviously,” I said. “Born killer.”

We drove quietly through the small, dark towns, past the all-night filling stations with their lonely, desolate gas pumps, the single light bulbs dangling behind rain-spattered windows. Deep night, a steady cold rain, northern Minnesota; just about the end of the world. A kind of loneliness all its own and it matched what was going on inside me.

Kim wasn’t going to kill herself. But Goode was going to go after her. I knew it. Larry had had to find out the truth from someone and Jon Goode was no fool. He’d figured it out. He’d left the note and the gun. And if he figured out that much, he’d know she wasn’t going to kill herself. She was no Larry, no weakling. He was going to have to hit her.

We should have had the son of a bitch pegged from the beginning. Of all people, I should have known. Goode was a killer, up close or by remote control. People dying was his way of life. Mercy wasn’t among his qualities. Never had been.

“Goode was the one who did the shooting,” Archie said, as if he were reading my mind. “They were all guilty, of course, but Goode was the only one with the guts to pull the trigger on Maxvill and Rita. Probably enjoyed it.”

Poor Rita. The blackmailer. But what in the world did she have on them? Why had they paid so long? Were we ever going to know? Carver and she, the lovers—they were blackmailers together. What in the world had the lads done?

We put the movements of General Jon Goode together from evidence that became available later. This is what he was doing as we stopped for breakfast at a small town off the freeway north of the Twin Cities. The rain had slackened to a heavy mist and the morning at six o’clock was a murky gray. Fog hovered a few feet above the fields stretching flatly away on either side of the roadway. We settled tiredly into a wooden booth. Archie’s face was gray and lined, his eyelids drooped, he sipped anxiously at his hot coffee.

General Goode arose early that same morning, moved stealthily around the master bedroom, which ran the length of his home on the second floor. A window and small balcony faced Lake Harriet. At the other end of the bedroom French windows with translucent curtains stretched at top and bottom on antique brass rods opened onto a sun deck which had a fine view of his backyard rock garden and faded flowers.

Downstairs a plainclothes detective dozed lightly before a television set.
Sunrise Semester
was providing a low background din and every few minutes the detective’s eyelids fluttered open to prove to himself that he wasn’t asleep. The aroma of hot freshly perked coffee saturated the first floor, and the detective, who had brewed it at five o’clock, when the danger of sleeping was greatest, roused himself to work at his second cup. He wasn’t asleep but he wasn’t awake either and if Jon Goode made any noise, the cop didn’t hear it.

Another police officer was stationed in a patrol car parked directly in front of Goode’s house. He was wide awake reading a Ross Macdonald novel,
The Zebra-Striped Hearse,
and spent several moments chatting with the newspaper boy at six forty-five. He did not see any movement from the house and certainly was unaware that General Goode had left the premises.

Which wasn’t surprising, considering the fog growing thick with the coming of morning and the fact that the general made his exit down the fire escape ladder from the rear sun deck. He wore Adidas running shoes, gray sweat pants and sweat shirt, a yellow nylon jacket with a string-tied hood. He dropped softly to the wet grass, crossed the yard, went through a break in the privet hedge, traversed the back lawns of two neighbors, and appeared three hundred yards down the street from the parked police patrol car. He was hidden by three hundred yards of nearly palpable fog.