The Cavanaugh Quest (6 page)

Nobody was moving about in my part of the building. I unlocked the door to my treasure cabinet, where the new books and records are inevitably the subject of stealthy thieves who come by night to improve their minds. The books stood staring at me, daring me to read them. Every other one seemed to be a biography of a Nazi. I shut the door, sat down, and typed twenty-three pages of reviews from my notes. Very fast, lots of mistakes. It was eight o’clock when I finished and the building was throbbing with noise and movement. Nobody paid any attention to me. I am the invisible man, I am not their comrade. In their eyes, what I do is not to be confused with work. They know I am not a newspaperman but they do not quite know what I actually am.

I went out into the newsroom, dropped the copy into a wire basket on Mayflower van’s desk. He looked up, squinted down his punched-out nose, bit through the plastic end of his Tiparillo. He said, “Shit,” but he was looking at my copy. “Choking to death on a plastic-tip thing,” he said, scowling. “A fitting end, God knows.” I went away.

Later I stood by Lake of the Isles in the sunshine staring at the green mounds rising sweetly in the water, enough to stir the poet’s pen. It was a beautiful day and I sat for a while on a bench. When I got up to leave, it occurred to me that I’d made love to a woman on that bench one summer night several years before. I looked hard at the bench but it looked like all the other benches. Mosquitoes had tended our pleasures that night.

I walked back across the grass, across the street toward the Kenwood tennis courts, where I’d left the car. A kid with a bike was looking at the car. “Is that yours?” he said. I admitted it. “Boy, it’s really a mess.” He rode away.

I got in behind the wheel. Tight fit, got to lose a quick twenty. I was nervous.

Why the hell did Larry Blankenship kill himself?

Events were conspiring against me, like Caesar’s pals.

I yanked the Porsche into the fire lane by the lobby entrance and there was Mark Bernstein looking like something from a British sex scandal: His image makers were getting him used to dark pinstripes with suppressed waists, paisley foulard ties, and off-white shirts with spread collars. There was still something of the squad room about him but he was beginning to catch on. He didn’t look comfortable yet but he wore his new getup with a confidence which suited a mayoral candidate.

“You can’t park there,” he said.

“I know, it’s a blight on the building. Should be one of your typical Mark IV’s.”

“You miss the point. It’s a fire lane.”

“I don’t think I’m going to vote for you, Mark. You’re ahead of your time. Fascism is still out.”

We walked into the lobby. I followed him into Bill Oliver’s office. Then the three of us took the elevator to the fourteenth floor. Bernstein told me I shouldn’t be there but then he dropped it; we’d known each other too long. Maybe I would vote for him in the end.

Oliver unlocked the door and we went inside.

Blankenship hadn’t gone in much for decorating. The place looked as if he’d been passing through, like the inside of a cardboard box. There was a new pasteboard card table that sagged in the middle, a plain wooden chair, a rather large cactus which struck me as balding and obscene. That was the dining room. There was a leather club chair with a rip in the seat cushion, a telephone on the floor beside it, a desk, a stack of unopened newspapers, a poster from the Guthrie taped to the white wall, a small black-and-white Sony, some copies of the
New Yorker,
a well-thumbed
Playboy,
a pack of Old Golds, one of those awful yellow beanbag chairs, a large candlestick with a bayberry’s remains hunkering about an inch above the rim, a puddle of wax on the floor around its base. That was the living room. It looked as if a man had been slowly dying in it, a minute at a time.

Bernstein looked at it for a surprisingly long time, considering the sparse furnishings. He took a Vicks inhaler out of his pocket and sniffed it. “No punch left,” he said. “I always forget to get a new one. Just like ball-point pens.” He turned and went into the kitchen. “Mine never write. Never.”

Toaster with crumbs all over the top, an expensive frying pan with a crust of egg fried against the sides, a loaf of bread which appeared to have turned to stone after giving birth to enough penicillin to stop an epidemic of clap, a mug with a cream culture growing on top of a coffee slick. Plastic dishes in the cupboard. “Jeez, Bill. Smells bad,” Bernstein said.

“Probably food in the disposal,” Oliver said. “Put his garbage in and forgot to run it.”

The bedroom had been done by the same fine hand. An unmade bed, a chest of drawers, a bottle of Old Mr. Boston brandy with an orange-juice glass beside it, a stack of books on another cheap, unpainted desk, a pocket-size transistor radio, two suits in the closet, several striped shirts, a couple of ties draped over the doorknob, a pair of black shoes with plastic trees squeezed into them. The bathroom: a can of Gillette Foamy, a straight razor, a bottle of Aqua Velva. Bernstein was staring into the bathtub.

“Scuff marks,” he said.

“What?” Oliver looked up.

“The man was in the bathtub with his shoes on,” Bernstein said. “That’s all.”

Oliver looked at me. I shrugged. Bernstein was detecting.

I said, “If I’d lived here, I’d have killed myself, too.”

Bernstein pursed his lips, unbuttoned his suit coat, and put his hands on his hips. He looked at the scuff marks awhile longer and walked back into the living room. “Me, too,” he said. He looked at the desk, picked up a piece of scratch paper from beside the telephone near the club chair. He brushed off some gray stuff which lay in lumps here and there on the floor; some kind of dust or fluff.

“Somebody has been here,” he said to the piece of paper. “Somebody has cleaned this place out. The drawers of the desk, both desks, are open and empty. Nobody has just
nothing.
Not like this. Everybody has something. Letters, bills, address book, just some damn thing.” He bent down and picked up a gob of the gray stuff, peered at it, and put it carefully on the card table.

“Why are we here?” I said. “It’s not murder. It’s suicide, a guy killing himself. So why are you looking for clues?”

Bernstein opened the sliding doors onto the balcony. The sun was bright and cheery, the trees green, the air clean.

“Why?” I said.

He lit a cigarette, cupping his hands as Peter Gunn would have done, and exhaled. “Do you know a Mrs. Timothy Dierker?”

Bill Oliver laughed, shook his head. The rooms had made him pale, the feel of death. But he couldn’t help laughing.

“Yes,” I said.

“She asked me if I’d look around. So I am looking around. She tells quite a story.”

“Yes, she does,” I said. “To me. To Bill. To you. Very persistent lady.”

“She said there was something funny about Blankenship’s death. She was certainly upset … Since I had to get hold of his wife, or ex-wife, anyway, I thought I’d just come and take a look. We’ve got a will he’d made out a couple of weeks ago, left with his attorney, and he leaves everything to his ex-wife …”

“Lucky lady,” I said.

“Well, he didn’t have much.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“By phone. I told her what happened.”

“What did she say?” I was having a funny little biological reaction, a nervous flutter behind my ribs which I couldn’t explain.

“She said she was sorry. She said she wasn’t surprised. He’d been depressed lately.”

“Was she calm?”

“Very.” He looked at his watch. There was an American flag on its face and it didn’t go with the suit. “Let’s go downstairs. She said she’d meet me here at eleven.” In the elevator he said, “She said she wanted to make an inventory of what was in the apartment. She’ll have to sign for the stuff.”

Kim Blankenship had not arrived by eleven forty-five and Bernstein stood up. “I’ve got to speak at a VFW luncheon.” He turned to me. “Not a word, Cavanaugh, not one word.” I walked outside with him. It was hot and dry with the kind of wind that can make you sick to your stomach.

“You’ve been stiffed, Mark,” I said.

“Well, it happens. Funeral preparations maybe.” He walked to his car and I strolled along with him.

“This strong silent number,” I said. “Are you sure it’s the real you? I’d have thought something a bit warmer, chummier—”

“I wish I hadn’t come,” he said, ignoring me.

“Why’s that?”

“Because then I wouldn’t know that somebody had been emptying out Blankenship’s apartment …”

“Is that a crime?”

“Yes, Paul. It’s called theft. Often involves unlawful entry.”

“Nobody forced that door.”

“All right. So somebody has a key.”

“Or the door was unlocked.”

“But why? What did they take? I just wish I hadn’t come.” He looked into the sky, looked at his watch, and got into the car. “Paul, would you get your car out of the goddamn fire lane?”

My father, Archie Cavanaugh, is seventy-one years old and he never gets bored, never casts a backward, wistful glance at the past. His mind simply doesn’t work that way, and while I envy him, being with him is still a tonic. Maybe, I wonder, when I’m seventy-one I’ll be like him—wishful thinking if ever I indulged in it. The past clings to me like a starving, hollow-eyed waif, and I’m used to it by now.

I headed west on the Highway 12 tangle between the Guthrie and Loring Park and the Basilica, out past the nasty gore of the auto dealers and franchise fish shops and Shakey’s Pizza and the General Mills complex where Betty Crocker keeps on keepin’ on year after year, cake after cake, past a restaurant built at considerable expense to look like a mine shaft where I once survived the most wretched lunch of all time, past Ridgedale, where Dayton’s has established its latest beachhead in the battle for my dollar, on toward Wayzata, where the Republicans pretend that Minnesota is not a bastion of the Democratic machine and Robert Taft and Harold Stassen slumber like Siegfried waiting for the call.

Archie lives on a knoll which provides a sweep of green down to the shores of Lake Minnetonka on one side and a rolling meadow on another, the white frame house snuggled in among maples and oaks with an air of quiet calm, the kind of place where Ozzie and Harriet could live happily ever after with little David and little Ricky, and Ozzie would never have to go to work. There’s a frog pond with lily pads in back and a large flower garden. Inside, Archie has some good paintings, an army of panic buttons in case of burglars or worse, a leather pig to rest his feet before the library fireplace. He’s got all the things he’s ever wanted; he’s got it about as good as things can be at seventy-one.

I plopped the car into a puddle of shade and went in the front door. It was a hot day but cool in the house, not the cool of whirring machines but the work of country shade and breezes. Archie was working in the library with the French doors open wide onto a flagstone patio. He was writing furiously on a legal pad—looked up and winked—and I stood gazing but across the emerald lawn with the sprinkler laying down plush wet arcs. Archie hadn’t always had money and what he’d wound up with he’d made himself. During the thirties he’d worked at the
Star-Journal
in Minneapolis and taught at the University of Minnesota, where he’d met my mother when they were undergraduates. Shortly before the outbreak of war in Europe he’d gone to Illinois and then on to Washington to do intelligence work during our part of the war. While he was spending some time in London, my mother fell in love with a naval officer at the Great Lakes training station near Chicago and went off with him, taking me, of course. Archie had not been unduly distressed since he’d become fascinated with his new line of work; he amiably kept in touch with us throughout the war years and from 1946 on I spent summers with him in Chicago, where he’d gone back to being a journalism professor and I went to Cub games.

In 1950 he published a textbook in reporting which made him independent and very well off, indeed. It is frequently said that reporting today, for better or worse, owes its nature to my father, who of late had been insisting that he really got people headed toward the New Journalism decades ago but forgot to give it a name. Which may be true; I certainly don’t know. He came back to the University of Minnesota in the fifties and quit the academic world in 1960, when he was fifty-seven, because he wanted to write mystery novels, which he’d been doing ever since—with a newspaper reporter as his continuing hero, which with television and film and paperback rights made him a millionaire more than once. He was working on a critical volume surveying and analyzing the genre since the debut of Raymond Chandler; that’s how he was spending the summer. He was doing a chapter on the Englishman Michael Gilbert that day, the lawyer who writes them on the commuter train. Copies of
Smallbone Deceased, Close Quarters,
and
Overdrive
made an orderly stack on his desk. Galleys of a brand new one,
Flash Point,
were less tidy.

He finished his thought, capped his old art deco fountain pen, and leaned back, smiling beneath his white mustache.

“Gilbert knows very well what he is about,” he said, “an exceedingly orderly mind.” I nodded. He wanted me to stay to lunch and we went out and sat by a wrought-iron table near the frog pond. A haze rested lightly across the fields and I could hear the hum of insect life all around. White sails danced like knife blades on the flat, blinding bright lake.

Julia, my father’s secretary and dear friend, brought us salads and a bottle of cold Blue Nun and sat down to join us, cool and calm in a blue denim shirtwaist. Everything was so quiet and gentle and my father talked about Michael Gilbert and Julian Symons for a while as we ate. There were large white-and-orange shrimps in garlic and oil among the lettuce. Julia said she was sorry, but she preferred Dorothy Sayers, and my father said it was because Ian Carmichael was doing so well as Wimsey on the tube. He added that there was no need for an apology, she shouldn’t try to hide her intellectual pretensions, and we all chuckled rather dottily. Matey, we were all matey.

Finally I got down to cases: “What do you know about Tim Dierker?”