THERE MUST HAVE BEEN FIFTY weeping willows lining the long drive that led to the imposing Italianate villa west of Minneapolis in what a gas station attendant called “the lake country.” The private road was straight as Pat Boone. Some of the willows’ drooping branches swished at the top of the car, which was now a rented Chrysler Fifth Avenue. Or was it a New Yorker? It was white with red leather upholstery and a little compass overhead that indicated I was heading due south. Great little gadget. Set out for Charleston and wind up in Albany.
It was hot in Minneapolis, pushing past ninety, as I drove out Highway 12. The towns had names like Wayzata and Minnetonka and I expected a ravishing Indian maiden to appear around each bend in the road. So much for expectations. Once off the main road I found the lakes, wound my way among them, watching the sailboats in the bright sunshine. More sailboats than I’d ever imagined could be gathered in a single place. More little blond girls with deep tans and headbands holding their straight yellow hair in place. More Volvo and Mercedes station wagons and super Jeeps that ran over twenty grand. If this wasn’t the good life, deep in the kingdom of the robust preppies, then I didn’t know what the hell it was.
But the road up toward the Whitney estate was somehow apart from all that. This was orderly and old-seeming, like a comparable road in certain parts of France, and when I’d passed beneath the arch made by the willows I got the full impact of the chateau or villa: architecture has never been my strong suit but I knew right away it wasn’t as big as Versailles. The forecourt was surrounded by large statues of VIPs from Bulfinch’s Mythology. The air was still and hot, and dust hung in the air marking my arrival. That little summer squeaking sound, crickets or locusts or something, filled the world. Thirty cars were parked at the edges of the fine gray gravel, each nosing into puddles of shade left by the oaks and evergreens and sycamores and maples. When I cut the engine and stepped out into the heat my knees buckled slightly. I didn’t think Minnesota was supposed to be so hot. Another miscalculation. Walking toward the front of the house I heard, in addition to the insects squeaking, faint music from somewhere. Someone who had the air of staff appeared at the front door, waited for me with a faint welcoming smile.
“You would be Mr. Tripper, sir?”
“I would indeed.”
“I’m Dobson, sir. I took your call. The directions were accurate, I hope.”
“I’m here, Dobson.”
“Very gratifying, sir. Mrs. Whitney wonders if you might join her on the sun porch before you meet the others. This way, sir.”
He was white-haired and fit, looked like a man who relaxed with a sprightly forty miles of cross-country skiing on subzero weekends. I followed him inside, where it was cool and dim and preposterously spacious. A knight in armor stood at the bottom of a ten-ton carved wood stairway and the only light came from the sun glowing behind a stained glass window one landing up. Unless I was missing something, the window seemed to depict a wooded glade bordering a lake where a very manly and solemn brave was paddling a canoe. Fish leapt in the water. There may have been more to it—settlers with muskets in ambush, maybe?—but I was too busy following Dobson to fill in the details. I’d spoken with Dobson the day before, after I’d left Donna Kordova, and then with Cotter Whitney’s private secretary, who’d informed me that Whitney would be pleased to have me drop by the house when I got to town. Then I’d called Dobson again a couple of hours before from the Twin Cities International Airport to get the directions. Most of what I knew about Minneapolis came via The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but I did remember a bit of trivia about the airport. It was where they’d made the original film Airport. You could win a lot of saloon bets with that one. The mind is a swamp of such irrelevant information, but I can’t help that.
The sun porch was enclosed and effectively cooled but gave the impression of being part of the outdoors. The furniture was old wicker in dark brown, the colors were all pale, blue and beige and lime and lavender. There were lots of plants, big green leafy affairs, and there was a pretty woman in a wheelchair that was also wicker and very old. Dobson announced me and, like Jeeves, shimmered away. Beyond the expanse of windows there were what looked like hundreds of people scattered across a long sloping lawn that led down to a lake. It was a large lake by my humble standards. You could just barely see the rim of fir trees low on the horizon marking the opposite shore. There were some brightly colored sails on the blue water and a motorboat sent up a plume of white foam and a cabin cruiser sat at anchor. The lake must have been connected by a channel to other lakes and waterways. People were swatting a shuttlecock or playing croquet, others stretched in the sun, and some were standing around a couple of cooking fires munching huge sandwiches and drinking gin and sangria and having a hell of a good time. They all managed to look like the largest advertisement ever created for the good folks at Orvis.
“I’m Eleanor Whitney.” She held out her hand. It was tan and the Piaget on her wrist was gold with diamonds and emeralds. “I don’t mean to keep you from my husband, but I wanted so much to meet you and I am a bit isolated in here.” She pushed herself away from the table where she’d been writing letters. There was also a black plate with some exquisitely arranged bits of food on it. Something that had been shaved into delicate curls. She had a wonderful wide smile. The tan was almost too good to be true. Her hair was streaked blond and worn in a soft page boy. She asked me to sit down. “My husband and I fell in love to the music of your brother, you see. Cotter was working in the family business here in the Twin Cities then, just a trainee, but”—she smiled again—“you might say his prospects were good. His father and grandfather wanted him to work his way up, even if it only took a year. The accident of birth—there’s nothing quite like it, is there? In any case, we loved your brother’s music and we saw him both times he played here … at the Guthrie and then at the old Met Stadium.” She looked out the window at the crowd of friends swarming across her lawn. I figured she wasn’t seeing them just then but rather something that had happened long ago. I wondered which one was her husband. “I used to love to dance … Cotter was never much for dancing. Now that my dancing days are behind me, he’s discovered he really doesn’t mind dancing so much after all. One of life’s little ironies. We loved your brother’s music … and the thought never crossed our minds that someday Cotter would be operating the company that brought JC Tripper to the world. Milling and lumber, that’s what our families had always done. But times change, diversification became the rule of the day, and we swallowed the Magna Group … quite a digestive trick.” She gave me that big smile. “No, we’d never thought such a thing would happen, nor Cotter’s father passing away and Cotter taking over—and we couldn’t have imagined JC Tripper dying. It was easier to imagine our own deaths in those days than to contemplate the deaths of people like Tripper and Joplin and Hendrix and Lennon. We were a remarkably silly generation for all our great causes. No sense of proportion about anything. But I mustn’t bore you with the fruits of my solitary reflections.”
“You’re not boring me,” I said. “I never imagined my brother’s death either. Some people seem to be doomed to immortality—”
“Doomed? That’s an odd word to use. Like doomed to good health … doomed to have the use of your legs.”
“Well, immortality wouldn’t be much of a bargain,” I said. “People get tired, they long for the big sleep.”
“I suppose you’re right, Mr. Tripper. But still—when your brother died, there it was, front pages, all that mystery, the exotic setting … it must have been very difficult for you.”
“I wish I could dramatize it for you, but I was such a mess—well, I didn’t distinguish myself. I hardly remember any of it. I was having a very bad year.”
“I had rather a bad year myself,” she said. “I thought it was important to be young and pretty and rich and daring. I should have settled for young and pretty and rich. The young and pretty would go soon enough anyway—”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, it looks like they’re all still pretty much intact.”
“Mmm. Well, I’m a thirty-nine-year-old cripple with good bones and a nice tan.”
“And you’re rich. Surely that’s a comfort.”
“Of course. But I don’t really appreciate it. Rich people seldom do in my experience because the rich people I know—I really don’t know anyone else, actually—have always been rich. The thought of being poor is a kind of unimaginable abstraction to them. And to me. Our grandparents, they understood poor.”
“Nothing’s ever perfect.”
“You’re making fun of me for being rich.”
“Just a little.”
“But you can’t make fun of me for being a cripple.”
“No, I can’t. But at least what cripples you is visible. You can see it, others can see it, you get credit for it. A lot of cripples I’ve known were crippled in other ways. Worse ways, I’m afraid.”
“That may be easier for you to say since you’re walking around on two good legs.”
“Let’s leave my legs out of this.”
She laughed. “If you insist. But I was about to tell you about my bad year. You don’t mind my rattling on? It always seems so much easier to talk with a stranger. Probably because one’s old stories are new to them. Do you mind? I could send you off to find the lord of the Manor—really, would you rather?”
“No, I wouldn’t. I’m probably falling in love with you.”
“For the money?”
“It couldn’t hurt.”
“Candor can be so irritating. But back to my bad year and my theory about daring. Those were daring days, whether it was drugs or fast cars or going without a bra or burning your draft card or running for Canada or going south for civil-rights marches and risking the redneck ambushes. It was important to be daring. I didn’t really have the nerve to be daring. So I was foolhardy and managed to cripple myself in the most prosaic way imaginable. I dived from some stupid boat in some stupid lake and hit a shelf of rock and that was that. I’ve been in a wheelchair since the year your brother died. And I’ve been starved for daring and/or foolhardiness ever since. Are you hungry, by the way? Why don’t you try some of my sushi? We have a Japanese cook who is simply wonderful … go ahead, please, be my guest. This is my second plate and I’m stuffed. Here, I’ll pour the last of this wine. Treat it as an appetizer. Cotter’s roasting pigs, so you’ll be having a pig sandwich for the main course. Barbecue sauce. You’ll taste it for a week. So now I’ve told you why I wanted to meet you. I must say that we were terribly upset by your brother’s death … I was pretty depressed myself, crying a lot, wanting to die, and then JC Tripper actually did die and the result was that I came back to reality and began to deal with it—JC died and it made me realize I wanted or needed to live … I had a young child, a loving husband, the best care—”
“And very good prospects,” I said.
“And very good prospects. I owe some of my life to your brother’s music and his death. I never got to thank him, now I’m at least telling you. How do you like the sushi?”
“Delicious. Different from any other I’ve ever tasted.”
“I can almost guarantee that,” she said. “It’s fugu. My chef smuggles it into the United States. He goes home to visit his family in Japan and somehow brings it back with him. Fugu.”
“Would it screw up your sense of gratitude if you found out my brother was still alive?”
She stared at me for a moment, then said, “Is that purely hypothetical?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“You mean he may be alive?”
I nodded.
“And that’s why you’re here to talk to Cotter. Well, good luck to you. He’s not really into the performers but he’s into money … I wonder if JC Tripper is worth more to the MagnaGroup balance sheet dead or alive? Well, I’m sure Cotter will be interested. If not himself very interesting to you—”
“Well, maybe it’s a wild-goose chase, but I want to know if my brother is still alive. You can’t blame me.”
“Did you love him? Were you close to him?”
“We were close. I’ve got a lot of reasons to love him and few to hate him. But more than anything else I want to get it settled, once and for all. He’s dead or alive—which is it?”
“Finish your lunch, Mr. Tripper.”
I finished the delicately curled shavings of raw fish and the pungent sauce.
“I told you how hard up I am for daring these days. Well, you and I have both just done something rather daring. Fugu is the most dangerous fish on earth to eat. It’s also known as puffer or blowfish. You’ve seen the translucent flesh, really exquisite in taste and color. But the guts, the ovaries, and the liver and whatnot are full of something called tetrodotoxin, which is a pretty good bet to kill you if you eat it. The cleaning is a bit of an art. A hundred fatalities a year in Japan from eating fugu.” She took a deep breath and clasped her hands in her lap. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Well, it’s probably the most dangerous thing that will happen to you all day.”
“Don’t forget the pig sandwich.”
“That’s why I said probably. Well, I’ve taken up enough of your time. If your brother’s alive, I hope you find him. It’ll be considerably easier to find Cotter. He’s the least daring-looking man out there, but don’t underestimate him—he can be an utter devil. He’s short, stocky, not much hair. And there are the pants. He’s wearing a pair of pants made of patches of different fabrics and colors. A Brooks Brothers fashion statement. You can go out through this door.”
She held out her hand and I kissed it. I didn’t know why exactly. Maybe because daring was important to her.
I liked that in a woman.
Cotter Whitney was standing alone beneath the vast crown of a huge, towering oak tree not far from the water’s edge. His hands were jammed down in his trouser pockets. The trousers and the man wearing them were exactly as advertised. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He wasn’t at all tan. He was an indoors type of guy. Plump, unassuming, a little sweaty but very, very clean. The top of his head, with a few strands of dark hair drawn across it, was red with sunburn.
He saw me closing in on him and waved a small plump hand at me. “Mr. Tripper, how very good of you to come all the way out here to the boonies. Dobson told me you’d arrived.” His eyes slid past me, back up toward the house, to the windows of the porch looking out across the party, the lawn of milling brightly clad guests and the yellow canvas tent where a dance floor had been set up. “I wish Ellie would come out and join the party.” He sighed. “She won’t do it; I’ve tried everything. Did she mention that this is part of her birthday weekend? This shebang here, she insisted we do it. I just don’t understand her sometimes … tomorrow night’s the formal dinner party, a few close friends, she’ll be fine for that. But these people, they’d love to see her, pay their respects. She’s known many of them all her life, but she won’t come down in her chair …” He looked at me inquisitively. “Do you understand women, Mr. Tripper?”
He shook my hand. The soft white hand clamped on mine like a vise. I had the feeling he could win a lot of money arm wrestling if anybody arm-wrestled where he hung out.
“Your wife and I shared a lunch of fugu. Beyond what that tells me I’m not qualified to discuss her psychology. As far as women go, I’m with the man who said a woman’s mind is a treacherous swamp.”
“Fugu. Gosh, I wish she wouldn’t eat that stuff. I mean, what’s the point?” He shifted gears. “Let’s go for a walk. These folks don’t need me. They’re having a fine time.” He smiled at me, putting on a new face. With his moon face and horn-rimmed glasses he looked about twenty, presiding over a frat party. “I wondered when you were going to show up. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“I think I’m on the wrong page here. You were expecting me?”
He leaned down and picked up an errant croquet ball and pitched it back in the general direction of the players. Somebody suggested to Mary that next time she not hit the damned thing quite so hard. “It’s not like baseball, darling,” the voice said and there was a spasm of girlish laughter.
“Well, I thought you were bound to show up sooner or later.” He wore old penny loafers, kicked them through the long grass. “I assumed Allan Bechtol would send you out here.”
“You know Bechtol?” I was sounding like an idiot even to myself, but things kept popping up out of nowhere. People were always telling me things, but they never told me everything.
“Know him? Sure I know him. Heck, he’s the main reason we’re trying to take over his publisher. I’m a great fan of Allan Bechtol’s work. You may not know it, but we’re great readers out in this part of the world. We’ve produced lots of writers, too, some of the big ones. Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald; Tom Heggen wrote Mister Roberts; Max Shulman wrote Barefoot Boy with Cheek and created Dobie Gillis, that Tom Gifford fellow wrote The Wind Chill Factor and Judy Guest wrote Ordinary People, there’s that Rebecca Hill up in St. Cloud, there’s Jon Hassler, and Garrison Keillor, though frankly he gets on my nerves … I mean we read and write out here. So my mind turned to publishing and Allan Bechtol. Well, he’s not one of us exactly, but he worked for WCCO radio a million years ago and when it comes to writing he’s a honey, better than Ludlum for my money. So, anyway, I got to know Bechtol, put him on the board of the MagnaGroup, got to know him as a man. MagnaFilms has got two of his novels in development right now. So, yes, I know Bechtol, I figured he must have sent you to talk to me, brief me, whatever.” He looked up at me expectantly. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark glasses. We passed a bunch of youngsters in the care of a couple of teenagers in swimming suits who were shepherding them into canoes. Much splashing and laughter. Cotter Whitney was looking past my shoulder. I turned. An airplane was turning over the trees, banking far across the lake. Pontoons hung from the wings. At the distance it looked like a great rare bird with very big feet.
“Brief you about what?”
“Look, it sounds to me like Allan didn’t put you all the way into the picture. But you can level with me. We at Magna are up to our ears in the JC Tripper industry … heck, we are the JC Tripper industry, everything about JC Tripper is of surpassing interest to us. When Allan told me he was going to write a novel about a dead rock star who turns up alive—well, he hit the jackpot with me. Allan and I are now in this together, you might call it a joint venture.”
The airplane—or seaplane, I should say—was slowly circling the lake, wobbling a bit like a fat bee trying to get his gyrocompass in working order. Both Whitney and I were watching it, hearing the shouts of the kids splashing around with the canoes. Whitney muttered something under his breath and waved at the teenagers in charge of the kids. “Get those canoes out of there,” he said just loud enough for me to hear. Then he turned his attention back to me.
“Joint venture?” Everything I said sounded sort of simple-minded to me. I felt like a dummy who had lost his ventriloquist.
“You’re getting half a million, correct? Seems like a lot to me, if you don’t mind my saying so, but I’m new to all this. And in the light of Allan’s sales, well, half a million may be fair, if he gets a big book out of it. Anyway, half of it is Magna’s money. So”—he ducked his head a trifle sheepishly as if he weren’t altogether comfortable saying such things—“you might say you’re working for me, heh, heh.”
“What do you know about this idea that JC’s alive somewhere? Who starts this kind of rumor? Are there things I’m not being told? Everyone’s so committed to the idea that he’s out there … all this money being thrown around—”
“Know? I don’t know a darn thing. That’s why I’m putting up a quarter of a million dollars—to find out if he’s alive or not. It’ll turn out that the whole half million comes out of my hide sooner or later, as an advance or something, if I know Allan Bechtol.”
“How do the murders fit into your scheme of things?”
He favored me with a blank stare.
“The murders,” I repeated. “The woman in New York, friend of mine, worked with me on the first JC pieces … then Shadow Flicker, the disc jockey in LA—”
“Oh my gosh, the murders, yes, sure, where do they fit in? Well, beats me. Heck, this is Minnesota. I don’t know much about murders. In New York and LA, they’re pretty standard equipment, right? But here? Murders? Out of my league. Do they have anything to do with finding JC Tripper?” He shrugged, pushing his hands deep into the pockets of his spectacularly weird trousers. “You’re the man who’s going to find out.” The thought seemed to comfort him. Sally Feinman would have loved the whole scene.
“And what if I find him? Just what if … what then?”
“Now you’re talking, Mr. Tripper. This is what I like to hear. Positive thinking. Did you ever read Hubbard?”
The name meant nothing to me. “Hubbard?”
“L. Ron Hubbard. Scientology. Oh, it’s all a bunch of garbage, as Ellie keeps reminding me, but still … I’ve read him. There’s something there. Give it a quick read. Life problems. Positive thinking. It’s that kind of thing—”
“All I know about L. Ron Hubbard is that there was a place on Melrose, I think it was, long time ago, may not be there anymore, they sold plaster fawns and mythological gods and golden gnomes and stuff for your yard—they used to sell these big plaster busts of L. Ron Hubbard in that stupid little hat he wore—”
“I know the place.” He smiled. “You may have noticed the various deities surrounding my forecourt out front—got those at the place you’re talking about. It’s a small world, isn’t it, Mr. Tripper?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Now, if JC’s found alive … JC Tripper back from the Other Side. Not a bad title for his return album, Back from the Other Side. He would be a considerable asset to MagnaDisc, would he not? Money, Mr. Tripper, it all comes down to money, just as my father and grandfather always told me. And, of course, it would, I’m afraid, impact on Freddie Rosen. Can we be frank …” His eyes wandered up to the seaplane, which was circling away from us again, its wings at an angle, banking. “Freddie is, to be brutally honest, past it. We have to face it.”
“It’s no problem for me,” I said. But suddenly I was thinking of Sammy the Shit and Freddie Deuce and Donna Kordova out at the marina in her new condo, all Freddie’s people.
“MagnaDisc is in big trouble. Freddie is a relic of another age, an age of gold chains and bell-bottoms and, heaven help us, Carnaby Street. An age gone by, in short. Did you ever see the man? It’s embarrassing. He’s a rusted golden oldie, he’s pretty creepy—”
“I get the idea,” I said. “He wouldn’t fit in here today. Is that what you’re saying? You’ve really got it all over him when it comes to pants.”
“And Freddie has run MagnaDisc into the ground. We just can’t have that, can we? We are all answerable to our boards, our shareholder. So, if we find JC and pension Freddie off, we can get MagnaDisc back with the program, back where the Magna name belongs. On top.”
“All this planning and thinking based on a bit of fiction,” I said. “My brother is dead. It’s crazy, my friend.”
“Crazy? Well, we shall see. But somebody sent that song … Somebody trying to prove a point. Now … we can’t help wondering, who? And what is the point?” His gaze moved away from me again, back up into the sky over the lake. “Well, look at that … Jesus-fucking-Christ!”
I saw his point.
The seaplane was shuddering as it came closer and closer to where we stood, sinking toward the lake past a couple of sailboats, the plane looking older and older the closer it came, the wings struggling, seeming to bend and flex as the pilot fought to level off. The single cyclopean engine was choking to death. The nose pushed upward, a final spasm, then dipped toward the water, the wings at a thirty-degree angle. And then it hit.
The tip of one wing caught the water. The plane began to spin slowly like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the carnival. One fat pontoon, looking like a big sausage, slid deep into the water and broke off, but by then it had skewed the plane, slowing and then stopping the spinning motion. The plane wobbled irresolutely forward and began to settle as it edged closer to the dock. The spray it had sent up was settling across the fuselage, twinkling in the glare of the sun. The thick snubbed nose with the big propeller was nosing down. The pilot was pushing the hatch open before the water pressure sealed him inside. He struggled out, trying to get a foothold on the strut and the remaining pontoon. He was a big kid and looked vaguely familiar behind the big lenses of his sunglasses. He wore a blue denim work shirt and chino slacks and Reeboks. He was clutching three green seat cushions.
The canoes were coming in closer now, the pilot shouting to the teenagers guiding them. The crowd, exclaiming in a single voice as crowds often do, had moved down across the grass to watch the unexpected entertainment. The danger, for a few moments so very possible, had passed and people were laughing, kidding Whitney about the flyover, asking where the parachutists would be landing. Whitney stood still, watching, as the pilot threw the seat cushions into the canoes. The plane was going down fast, the lake sucking it toward the deep mud at the bottom.
The pilot had a deep tan and wore a headband. He was laughing now, exchanging shouts with the kids in the canoes. He was about thirty yards from shore. With tremendous elan he stepped off into the water and began swimming toward the dock. The canoes accompanied him and a welcoming committee of party guests moved down toward the weather-beaten old dock.
Whitney looked at me and heaved an enormous sigh of relief. “What next, I ask you?” he said. “Will you excuse me? All these folks could make the dock go … I don’t want this party to become a legend.” He scuttled off toward the dock, calling to his friends, trying to wave them off the old wooden structure.
I’d seen it all but I was running it back in slo-mo, trying to differentiate one moment from another in my mind. There was no point in my going down to get a close-up. The swimmer reached the dock and was hoisted up. No one seemed to be concerned at what had happened, how narrowly something horrible had been avoided. All that remained of the plane now was the tip of one wing and the tail, and as I watched the lake got them, too.
The canoes reached the dock and the seat cushions were handed up to the pilot, who took them. He was smiling and talking to Cotter Whitney as others crowded around him, clapping him on the back as if he were a local hero. Finally Whitney led him through the jostling guests and on up across the lawn. The pilot had suffered a cut above one eye. He was still holding those valuable cushions.
I waited near the bank until the crowd had filtered back up across the sweep of green acreage. I watched one pontoon floating quietly on the still surface of the lake. I went down to the dock and found the spot I was looking for, knelt down, and peered at the rutted wooden planks. I wetted my finger and placed it in the dusting of fine white powder. It had all but been ground away by the passage of so many feet. I recognized the taste, of course, but it had been a long time. It wasn’t just a guess on my part. I’d seen a white smudge on one of the cushions as the pilot had passed me, walking with Cotter Whitney.
William Randolph Stryker, Manny’s son, was the pilot.
I remembered his telling me he occasionally did some jobs for Freddie Rosen.
Was this one of them?
Did Cotter Whitney know what was going on?
Whitney, hell … did I have any idea what was going on?
Murder. Drugs. And the widespread belief that a dead rock star was still alive. But how did it fit together? Or didn’t it …?