RIVERFRONT TOWERS IS TALL WITH lots of geometry in its appearance, its shadow falling across the no-man’s-land of scrub brush and oily roads and debris which lies like a trench between Minneapolis and the Mississippi. Riverfront Towers is a self-sufficient environment rising out of a not particularly pleasant sea of concrete, railway stations, cheap bars, derelicts’ dying grounds, and soot-coated warehouses. But Riverfront Towers denies it all: It gleams in the sunlight and offers cheery surcease from the gray day and the cold; its fountains catch the spins of colored lights in a million refractions and the sidewalk is made of tile like marble and its inhabitants pride themselves on living in the city, in the welter of the city. Riverfront Towers, with its endlessly peering security system and army of guards and high fences and rooftop gardens and maximum lockup underground garage, is absolutely as close to the real city as Jupiter or Wayzata or the IDS boardroom.
The doorman matched the building: tall, newly scrubbed, and businesslike. Once I had identified whom I wanted to see and he had checked his various lists, he personally let me into the lobby and told me that Miss Roderick was playing tennis on court number four. I should just go out and sit down by the courts, he said, she was expecting me.
Kafka would have recognized the lobby. There was no sign of human habitation. Somehow the plants flourished against the glass and steel walls; even the ashtrays were clean. Strategically placed black leather couches looked as if they’d never been used. I went outside into the courtyard, where the scent of flowers dropped over you like a gladiator’s net and the sun fed the trees and shrubbery and beds of random color. I could hear a fountain splashing and the sound of tennis balls being whacked to and fro.
There were eight courts but only two were in use. Kim was playing on a corner court and I moved along the shadowy platform where ice cream tables stood beneath a long striped awning. A sign said that lunch would be served from eleven thirty. I sat down at a table near a large potted tree and watched. She had her back to me and she played intensely without noticing my arrival; her opponent wore a white floppy hat, moved his feet while giving his body a rest, and looked a lot like the Riverfront Towers pro. She moved gracefully, her thoughts anticipating the flow of the game and her body swinging along with it, nothing jerky. Her strokes were strong but he was beating her badly; he carried her through a rally of eight or ten strokes on each point, then put her away with a little cross-court backhand or a lob she’d return into the net or a passing shot as she decided to come to the net. Then, shaking her head, pigtails tied with yellow yarn, she’d go back to the service. She was serving every point and I had a perfect view of her; she got the ball very high over her head, bent back, and swept the racket through, came into position on the balls of her feet, bouncing lightly, moving quickly to the return. She was very slender from the waist up with long arms which helped her get to the ball; from the waist down she was strong and long-muscled and you could see the flex in her thighs and buttocks as she got her weight into the shot. She wore a one-piece A-line dress, pale cream with yellow trim, a white terry-cloth sweatband on her wrist, and a flowered bandanna wrapped around her forehead. She came to play.
Watching her, I remembered what Anne had said: She was my type—and frigid, whatever that was supposed to imply. I wondered if Anne were right. On either count.
I’d been watching for about half an hour, wondering how this woman had come to affect so many lives in such a variety of ways, when I saw her charge the net and be caught flat-footed, ready to volley, as another passing shot whistled beyond the reach of her racket. “Shit!” she hissed, and the word sizzled in the silence for a moment, then she was laughing soundlessly with the man at the net. He slapped her on the back and they walked the length of the net, picked their gear off the slatted bench. “Tomorrow, Kim,” I heard him say, “same time, same place, and I serve …” He was already calling to a Mrs. Watson on the first court, moving away across the green carpet in the sunshine.
Kim was coming toward me, dark-blue eyes level, mouth a straight line, slipping a blue Slazenger cover over her Wilson T-2000. I got up, glad I’d put on a blazer and gray slacks; she made me feel messy because she’d just finished playing tennis with a pro and everything was in perfect order.
“I’m Paul Cavanaugh,” I said. She shook my hand firmly and fell in beside me, going back along the path I’d come.
“You’re the man at the funeral,” she said, looking ahead of her, smelling of sweat and perfume. But it might have been the flowers again. There were streaks of sweat on her smooth, tan cheek and working the way down the back of her neck. “The man on the hill watching us. I saw you.” She opened the door into the cool lobby. “You certainly have been busy, haven’t you?”
“Moderately,” I said. I couldn’t tell if she was being hostile or not. Maybe just curt. Maybe she was just lousy at human relationships. Every syllable, every step, every tense swing of the racket, every breath made me feel like an intruder. A messy intruder. The doorman was holding the door for someone as we swept past and he respectfully pronounced her name, she nodded, on up two stairs, along the glassed hallway to the elevators with their black doors gleaming wetly, like live things opening to swallow us up.
We were alone in the little ascending room. It was perfume. The sweat was drying on her face. She untied the bandanna, kept her eyes on the floor indicator. Nobody said anything. I looked at her legs. Her socks were rolled down over the tops of her tennis shoes. She reached down impatiently and wiped a trickle of sweat on the inside of her dark thigh.
Her apartment was on the twenty-fourth floor and it was dark, cool, quiet. She led me into the living room and said, “I’m going to take a quick shower. Make yourself at home. Then we can get all this taken care of.”
I said that was fine, she should take her time, and she said she had lots to do today, she’d be only a minute. The draperies were pulled across floor-to-ceiling windows which faced east and got the full morning sun. The room was large, spare, linear, modern with lots of three-quarter-inch glass and chrome and steel and mirrorlike cylindrical floor pots with greenery of several varieties poking upward, spreading out, overflowing, turning toward the sun-fight. A huge glass bowl of fruit stood on a rolling glass cart. I heard water running in the shower, a door closing. Boston ferns, dieffenbachia, split-leaf philodendrons, spider plants. There was a single very large graphic on one wall: a print of a Klimt poster, lots of gold in it. On a white fluted pedestal in one corner: a large copy of Houdon’s remarkable bust of George Washington. Several Simulations Publications war games were stacked on a glass shelf: Borodino, World War II, War in the East, Kampfpanzer. No ashtrays. On a blue-and-white-flowered couch—the only item in the room that wasn’t severe, straight, sharp or cool and distant—a copy of the Tribune was open to a story headlined INDUSTRIALIST’S DEATH A MYSTERY: MURDER OR SUICIDE? There was a picture of Tim Dierker taken a good ten years ago, smiling, confident, red hair combed back on the high forehead. I heard the shower go off. I didn’t know what to do; any movement was bound to louse up the room.
She appeared suddenly in faded blue jeans and dark-blue Lacoste tennis shirt, moving silently on bare feet that caught my eye, white below the line of tan. She had a pair of loafers in her hand. The pigtails were gone and a wide blue headband held her hair back.
“Open the drapes,” she said. “Pull the cord on the side. Would you like some breakfast?”
“No thanks.”
“Coffee?”
“Sure.”
“Sit down, I’m just going to throw my breakfast together out here.” I heard her clattering about, then she was pulling the glass cart out from the wall into the bright sunshine on the blue-and-white couch and after several sections of grapefruit, she broke off a corner of toast and said, “Okay, let’s get this thing straightened out, Mr. Cavanaugh. Darwin McGill and your former wife both mentioned that you’d been asking questions about me, about my past life. I am a very private person. I value my anonymity. I don’t want people digging into my life …...” She chewed the toast and sipped the black coffee. “Now, what are you after?” She finally acknowledged me, looking into my eyes.
“All right, right off the top, Miss Roderick. I’m curious as to what you may be able to tell me about Larry Blankenship’s suicide and Timothy Dierker’s murder—”
“By what conceivable authority? You’re a drama critic, a writer.” She turned back to her breakfast, a woman uneasy with people. She wasn’t laughing, not even with outrage.
“I have no authority whatsoever,” I said.
“I’ve already talked with the police, that Bernstein who’s running for mayor. He called me as a formality, he said, wanted to know if I had any thoughts as to why Mr. Dierker”—she glanced down at the newspaper—“either might have killed himself or why someone would have wanted to murder him. Mr. Bernstein and I had talked before, about Larry’s death. In any case, I told him I was at a class the night Mr. Dierker died, at the university, and had a dinner engagement after class ended. What more could you want to know, even if you had the authority, and why? We don’t know each other.” She broke off another bite-sized morsel of toast and began chewing. “So why?”
“It’s Harriet Dierker,” I said. She was wearing rust-colored nail polish, like ten pieces of exotic candy. “She was distraught by Larry Blankenship’s suicide, she asked me to look into why he might have done it.”
She nodded. “I can believe that, yes. Mrs. Dierker is an unstable woman. Poor thing.”
“She believes that you caused Larry’s suicide, that you in some way drove him to it. She told me a long, desperately involved story about your relationship with Larry …” I shrugged. “I don’t know what’s true. Or if any of it’s true. Which is why I was asking questions.” It was a beautiful room in the sunlight and the coffee smelled freshly ground. I never drink coffee black but this stuff was all right.
“I didn’t cause Larry to kill himself,” she said calmly, only marginally involved. “He was born with the need to kill himself, Mr. Cavanaugh. Did you ever hear the story about the scorpion and the frog?” I shook my head. “Well, the scorpion and the frog both arrived at the riverbank at the same time. They both wanted to get across but the scorpion couldn’t swim. So he asked the frog to carry him across on his back. The frog, carefully keeping his distance, said that he’d like to help out but he couldn’t because if he let the scorpion get on his back the scorpion would sting him and kill him. Well, the scorpion argued that what the frog was saying made no sense because if he killed the frog he, too, would drown. Now this made perfect sense to the frog, who listened a while longer and finally said okay, he’d carry the scorpion across. So the scorpion climbed on the frog’s back and they set out across the river. Way out in the middle of the river the scorpion stung the frog and as they were both dying, about to drown, the frog croaked out his last words, ‘Why did you sting me? You’re going to drown as a result,’ and the scorpion looked at him sadly and said, ‘I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.’ ” She licked crumbs from her fingers and looked away, into the sunshine. “It was Larry’s nature, that’s all. He had to kill himself.” Her voice was remarkably even.
“Harriet Dierker believes you are also involved in her husband’s murder. She says that you said something to him at Larry’s funeral that he went home and sat down and cried over his scrapbook and hit her and went up on the roof and somebody threw him over the edge … She says you’re involved in a murder.” I got up from the couch. The river looked clean from the twenty-fourth floor.
“All I can say is that I haven’t the vaguest idea of what she’s talking about.” She spooned out a chunk of grapefruit. “Mr. Dierker told me how sorry he was about Larry, that’s all. I thanked him and he left. He and some of his friends were very good to me when I was a frightened teenager who’d never been to the big city before. But that was almost twenty years ago. Do you realize that? I am thirty-five years old, Mr. Cavanaugh …” She leaned back and crossed one ankle over a knee and slipped her foot into a tattered loafer. “Some of the wives were very hateful toward me …”
“With some reason, I understand. I mean, you do have a record of going through men pretty damned quick.” I felt a twinge of perversity: I wanted to break through the wall of composure. I didn’t have a reason. It was a purely destructive impulse, maybe because she made me feel like such a slob. “First Billy Whitefoot, then Larry, now Ole Kronstrom.”
She just sat there putting on the other loafer, forcing it over her heel. She pushed the cart away.
“Since you don’t know me,” she said very quietly, “I wonder why you would say such things, why you would accept them so readily. I wouldn’t if I were in your place. I wouldn’t want to run the risk of making such a mistake, you know? Why not jump to the conclusion that I’m the injured party, that men go through me? I’ve had two children, you must be aware of that since your researches have been so thorough … It all depends on your point of view. Everything in life seems to depend on your point of view. Objective truth is an illusion. History teaches us that.”
“Does it?”
“Yes, it does. Look, I’m perfectly willing to help you. Your concern is something which is absolutely none of your business—it intrigues me, it really does.” For the first time she wore a faint smile. I was beginning to think she was rather beautiful in a tight, inhibited way. “But I don’t quite know how. Do I know why Larry killed himself? No, I don’t, beyond the fact that he was a doomed man, a man whose unhappiness was as much a part of him as his unfailing hope. Of course, yes, our marriage breaking up hit him hard but, good heavens, it was never going to get any better. He was a waiter, a maybe man, a hoper, a passive man with no sense of his own worth, no dignity. I am a doer, I am aggressive when I’m required to be, I’m a person with a very good idea of my own worth and dignity. I care what I think of me.” She pursed her lips, thinking. “Larry. Do you know what he was doing there in your apartment building? Do you want to know?”
“Did you ever visit him?” I remembered what Bill Oliver had said. I remembered the scene in the parking lot which had stuck so firmly in his mind, remembered it as if I’d seen it myself.
“Yes, I came by to see him a few times, mainly in my role of psychological counselor. He was fully aware of the difference between us, at least eventually, but he thought he could prove himself to me by pulling himself back together. He insisted on believing that I might come back to him, no matter what I said, no matter how carefully I reasoned with him.” Her face was composed, serious, as if she had resigned herself to reasoning with me. There was a tiny round smallpox scar between her thick, dark eyebrows. She was massaging her knee absentmindedly with her right hand, the rust-colored nails moving across the faded denim. “But I figured that if I befriended him enough to make him confident, to help him feel secure again after our breakup, then he could make it on his own without me. He needed some success … Then he’d be all right.” She sighed, recalling past agonies. “Well, Larry got a good job, an account man working in a middle-sized advertising agency. I really believed he was catching on there …” She smiled. “He started wearing their double-knit suits, the white belt, and the shiny white shoes—I know, I know, don’t make faces. It sounds pathetic and in a way it was, but it meant that he was fitting in. He grew long sideburns. He was becoming happy in spite of himself. But it never got that far. The recession hit, advertising budgets were cut, and the agencies had to begin laying people off. He was the newest man with the newest sideburns and the newest Thunderbird, so they let him go and told him not to worry, it was only temporary, they’d be asking him to come back as soon as business picked up.” She stood up and went to the window, where we both stood looking out into space in the middle of a sad story.
“So there he was with his new unpaid-for Thunderbird,” she went on quietly, “gas was up to sixty cents a gallon, he didn’t have a paycheck, and he just went to bed, acted out his own self-fulfilling prophecy. He was convinced he was a failure and he kept making it come true.” She turned to look at me, underlining her dismay. “Can you imagine, Mr. Cavanaugh? Here was a man in some degree of difficulty and instead of going out to find another job, he stayed up in that nasty little apartment sitting by the telephone, watching his silly game shows in the morning and adding up what he’d have won if he’d been playing for real, and in the afternoon he watched the soap operas, all the time waiting for the phone to ring …” She paced the circumference of the room, pacing off the steps, picking an apple out of the bowl and taking a neat little bite. She shook her head. “He really thought the agency was going to call him back, that it would just be a matter of weeks and he’d be back on the job … so innocent.” She’d circled all the way back and was standing beside me now; she held out the apple and I took a bite. It didn’t strike me as the kind of gesture she’d normally make; it reminded me of a peace offering.
“I’m talking way too much. You’re like an analyst I used to have, very nondirective. You don’t say any thing and I just keep talking. I must be nervous, mustn’t I? I’m not usually very communicative about this sort of thing. Ask me about the commando raid on the heavy-water plant in Norway and I’ll talk your head off …”
“Is that what you’re studying?”
“World War Two’s my specialty.” There was a peculiar lavender cast to her eye, speckles, maybe it was the sunlight. “I’m doing my dissertation on resistance movements in the Scandinavian countries. And I’m warning you. I hate people who say it isn’t a very ladylike subject. I’m not very ladylike, not in that sense.”
“Why history in particular?”
“The past, I guess. I’m fascinated by the way the past changes shape and coloration and significance as the years go by. How the past affects the present, that kind of thing.” She turned away self-consciously, took another bite of apple, and didn’t offer me any this time. “Anyway, Larry just began to disappear as a human being and it was very painful for me, a terrible thing to watch, and what could I do?”
“Well,” I said, venturing another needle, “you could have gone back to him—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said sharply. “Don’t you see, haven’t you been listening to me at all? I’m not going to disappear, Mr. Cavanaugh. I started out pretty far back in the race but I’ve worked hard, I’ve held up through tough times, and I’ve learned I can make my life what I want it to be. It hasn’t been particularly easy and maybe it never will be. But I’m a bright, capable person—I’m not very warm, I’m not overgiving, but I’m not scared to be thirty-five and I’m not going to disappear either. My God, going back to Larry would have started my own disappearing act, it was obvious. I won’t contribute to that—I’ve come too close twice, with Billy and then with Larry … In any case, I visited him, I tried to cheer him up, and I failed miserably. Yes, it occurred to me that he might kill himself but I misjudged him, I didn’t think he’d do it because that would have been the final failure, it would rob him of all the enjoyment another forty years of failing would give him …” Another woman might have shed a tear at this point but not Kim.
“That’s harsh,” I said.
“Just realistic, that’s all.” She knew I was judging her; I could see it in her face. There was a battle going on inside her head and I figured it was between her own inclinations and the desire to disarm me and get me out of her hair. And yet there was something about her that made me feel calm. The morning was drifting away and I liked being there with the bust of Washington and Klimt’s gold-leaf lovers. She went back and sat down on the couch. I watched her, not wanting to notice her as a woman, not wanting to notice the way her hips swelled to pull the Levi’s tight and the rich dark hair and the tan ankles and the sexy old loafers. “What else?” she said.
“What about Tim Dierker? Why would Harriet say that it was something you said that sent him off the deep end when he got home?”
“Really, you’ll have to ask her, won’t you? Tim expressed his sympathy”—I could see the slow, agonizing walk across the green grass with the smell of clover and the clouds moving across the sun, as if the old man were walking toward his death—“and I asked about his health, the usual things. We just talked for a moment. Meaningless funeral talk.”
“Can you imagine why he was killed, then?”
“You said you knew him. How can you ask? Mr. Dierker just wasn’t the kind of man who made enemies. He was a booster, a joiner, the kind of man who works hard each year on something like the Aquatennial … Who could want to kill such a man? He just wasn’t the type.”
“Look, I found the body, Miss Roderick.”
“I’m sorry. I realize that somebody must have killed him—I didn’t mean to be insensitive. But he just always seemed to be such a good man—”
“But he didn’t want you and Larry to get married, did he? His wife said the marriage sent him into a decline. From which he never quite recovered, she says. Why did he oppose the marriage? You were two of his favorite people, by all accounts.”
“I never discussed it with him. I’m not at all sure that what you say was true.” She was staring at me, coolly, remote.
“Maybe this is an easier one. Why did Tim and his friends take such good care of you?”
“They weren’t taking care of me, Mr. Cavanaugh,” she said, an understandable edginess chewing at the corners of her voice and slowly invading her eyes. “They were helping me. They helped Billy. Did they need any particular reason? Why not just look on us as borderline charity cases? And anyway, I worked very hard. I made a good impression, I’ve never thought it was any more than that. What can I say? I applied myself to what I was supposed to do … why not settle for the plain, obvious truth? Too simple for you?”
“Not at all. It’s just that the simple truth so often turns into something else. It’s like history, remember? It changes with time, becomes something altogether different the more you look at it.”
“Well,” she said, looking at the Cartier tank watch on her strong left wrist, “I’ve got to get over to the university. Any more questions?” She was smiling. The interview was almost over.
“Only one,” I said. “I’d like to hear your life story.”
She laughed aloud, shook her head. “Oh, no, not that. Never, much too boring. Anyway, I don’t even know you, Mr. Cavanaugh.”
“You said I’m not your type. Maybe we never will know each other.” I gave my boyish, rueful grin a try and deeply regretted it. “But I enjoyed this morning. And I appreciate your giving me so much of your time. You didn’t have to. Anne said I’d like you …”
“I am fond of Anne,” she said, moving toward the door. “She’s living her own life, too. We have that in common.” In the doorway she smiled a little mechanically. “Good-bye. And forgive my telephone call. Please.” She was still smiling when the door clicked shut.
I moved the Porsche over to the Sheraton-Ritz driveway, gave the keys to the doorman, and went down the outside stairway to the pool. The tables were almost deserted at the tail end of summer. The lifeguard gave me a surprised glance, tugged at the seat of her swimming suit, and went back to her book. I sat in the sunshine and ordered a gin and tonic and a well-done hamburger. The lifeguard, whose name was Sheila, had long tapered legs and broad shoulders and a mahogany tan. She had spent the entire summer reading Graham Greene thrillers and was working on The Confidential Agent. I’d suggested the reading program. She came over finally and scraped her chair across the cement. “Poor D,” she said hoarsely, “he’s having a hell of a time.” She bent down the corner of a page and put the book on the metal table. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Waiting for my drink,” I said, “and thinking about a woman.”
“Me?” She was stroking her arm, touching herself without realizing it, the way athletes habitually do.
“No, someone else.”
“Is she pretty?”
“My God, you’re such a chauvinist,” I said. “Can’t you think about a woman in any other terms than how pretty she is?”
“I suppose I can, sure. Just curious.” She coughed; she had had a cold all summer long. She hated the water but what she did, she contended, beat working. “Is she?”
“Very pretty, in a sort of funny way. Not obvious.”
“Is she nice?”
“I don’t know. Some people think she’s a monster. Other people think she’s okay. I don’t know what to think …”
“You can’t trust your feeling,” she said. “You think too much. You should follow your gut reactions—but you’re too inhibited. You’re always trying to validate your experiences, that’s your problem.” My drink arrived and she took a sip, sucked the lime slice out of it, and kept it.
“That doesn’t mean anything, Sheila. Validate my experiences? Jargon, kiddo. I may be inhibited but you’re a prisoner of your jargon.” My hamburger came in a little wicker basket. She took the first bite and went back to her book, as if I weren’t there. A siren swept past up above us, on street level. The hamburger was rare and I pushed the basket back to her. I closed my eyes and leaned back, feeling the warmth of the sun. I could hear her chewing, turning pages, breathing.
I thought about the way Kim had handled our chat, how she’d sat so primly on the couch—no, not prim, but so carefully, physically guarded as well as mentally. I heard her voice, the careful pronunciation, the little pauses, the solemn cadence. She occasionally pursed her thin lips between words and frowned at the corners of her mouth and her eyebrows grew so gracefully, like the perfect grooming of an animal who had nothing better to do than be perfect. I kept seeing her face, the straight nose, the lavender in her eyes, the crescent of smallpox.
I opened my eyes. Sheila was gone. I remembered what Helga Kronstrom had said in the doorway of Dierker’s apartment. Did they know the woman I’d spent the morning with? How many Kim Rodericks were there?
I called Ole Kronstrom’s office from a pay phone in the hotel’s lower lobby. He said he had a free hour and he’d be glad to talk. There was warmth in his voice, a comforting quality after a morning of playing peculiar games with Kim Roderick, games quite possibly without rules.
His office was high up in the First National Bank building so I walked. It didn’t occur to me that I was still prying into Kim Roderick’s life; I didn’t yet know how her mind worked. As far as I was concerned, she had satisfied my curiosity and was slipping out of the equation. Her role had been created by Harriet Dierker and life had revealed it as a figment of her imagination. But my subconscious was whirring away on its own. There was one question which did matter at the back of my mind. Why had she stood still for all my snooping when it had obviously irritated her the night before?
Mainly I wanted to know who killed Tim Dierker.
And there was always the chance I could validate an experience or two along the way.
The name on the door said OLE KRONSTROM: BUSINESS CONSULTANT, nothing else. The secretary was a perky white-haired woman in a tailored suit which bespoke a life-long charge account at Harold’s. I gave her my name, she smiled and told me to go right on in, Mr. Kronstrom was expecting me. If Kim Roderick had ruined him financially, then ruination was a very relative matter.
He was sitting in an Eames chair with his feet cocked up on the leather footrest, facing the glass wall with its view of the IDS building and the top of the rest of Minneapolis. He turned quickly and got up smiling, engulfed my hand in his, which was about the size of a catcher’s mitt, and pointed to a chair. The Wall Street Journal was open on his desk top but the Tribune lay across it, open like Kim’s to the old photograph of his late partner. Ole Kronstrom had a lot of stiff white hair, the pale large-featured face of so many Scandinavians, and an aura of good health. On his desk there was a black-and-white photograph in a gold frame: He and Kim stood side by side in ski togs on the balcony of a chateau with something which looked suspiciously like an Alp in the distance behind them.
“I’d gotten the impression you were retired,” I said after I’d told him how sorry I was about Tim Dierker. “But this …” There were manila file folders stacked on a long cabinet, file cabinets, piles of mail in the in/out trays.
“Oh, my, no,” he said in a high, hearty voice. “Once I left Tim I’d intended to do a great deal of traveling, catch up on all the things I’d wanted to read for thirty or forty years, and generally find out if I was still alive.” He chuckled deep in his broad chest.
“So I traveled and read and proved to myself that I wasn’t quite dead yet. Then I got the itch. Clipping my coupons—pardon the cliché, but you know what I mean—wasn’t very satisfying after a lifetime on the job. I looked around, checked out a thing or two, and came up with this little enterprise. I wanted to work at something where I could do some good and this was perfect. I’m a business adviser, but only to our senior citizens, those who have found themselves forcibly retired before they were ready for the home—if you see my point. My clients want advice about setting up their own companies, all sorts of undertakings, lots of interesting problems. One elderly couple—just to give you an example and then I’ll stop boring you with my own little passions—this one elderly couple decided to go into the jewelry-making business. Gorgeous stuff, all made from Swedish horseshoe nails. By jiminy, that one caught my eye. They were going about it in a small way, selling at little art fairs and the like … well, that was a couple of years ago. Now we’ve got them doing in excess of one hundred thousand dollars a year, supplying shops all over the Midwest, investing in some very nice bonds, building up quite an estate for their grandchildren, wintering in the Bahamas … and still working the little art fairs they enjoy so much.” He paused and rubbed his nose energetically. “You get an idea of the kick this kind of thing gives me. I’m an enthusiast, Mr. Cavanaugh, always have been. Hell of a salesman, I was. And still am. Clients pay me a few percent, not enough to hurt me taxwise, and it beats a vacation any day. Fun, that’s what it is.” He sat back down in the Eames chair and turned toward me. “You look surprised?”
“Well, I am,” I said. “You’re not quite what I’d expected.”
“How’s that, pray?” He leaned forward with his elbows on the desk blotter and his hands kneading each other, his big mouth smiling slightly, the sun behind him blacking him out. He wore glasses like Nelson Rockefeller’s, black plastic and just off center.
“I’m going on what Harriet Dierker had to say,” I began, and his big laugh boomed off the walls like cannon fire and he shook his head.
“Well, you’re starting off in the hole, young man, I’m sorry to tell you. Harriet’s quite a gal but she never has known what the heck she’s talking about!” He brushed his huge hand across his mouth, lessening the smile, shook his head. “This must be a terrible time for her and I don’t mean to poke fun … but she does have some flaws that used to drive Timothy crazy, I mean more than most wives. Never stopped talking, for one thing, and had a positive ache—you know what I mean by ache?—well, she had one for gossip. Thing was, she never got it quite right, always misunderstood what she heard. About three-quarters of the time Harriet was out there in left field getting hit on the head with fly balls …”
“She depicted you as a broken, ruined man,” I said.
“Well,” he sighed, reality intruding on his heartiness, “that’s wishful thinking and I’m sorry she feels that way. I suppose you’ve noticed that some people have a way of making the world fit their ideas about it. Harriet’s that way. My wife, Helga, she’s not that way so much—more of a down-the-line martyr, you know? These women, they’re all so wronged, so determined to be the wronged party …” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles like a little boy and leaned back in his chair. “Some women seem to feel, and stop me if I’m boring you, but they seem to feel that putting in their time is enough. They marry, put in their time, and never mind the quality of the time, and then they seem to think you owe them something. It’s a peculiarly feminine trait, maybe we men have made them that way because we’ve treated them like employees … I don’t know. Awfully well-paid employees, with permanent access to the company funds—then, when the thirty years have been put in, the husband conveniently dies and the women go to Palm Springs to do some serious bridge playing at long last.” He was nibbling on his glasses. “Well, it’s the way of life, isn’t it? I’m not complaining and I’m not angry. But I’m relieved that I didn’t keel over in harness. I’m glad I lived long enough to figure out the game and get out of it.” He came back to the present. “So what can I do for you, Mr. Cavanaugh? And may I congratulate you on your taste in fathers, by the way?”
“Actually, Harriet Dierker was one of the subjects I had in mind. She asked me to look into the death of Larry Blankenship, that’s how it began, and then Tim was killed and she told me, or your wife did—they were together—that the deaths were connected …”
“And what’s your interest?”
“Curiosity, not enough to keep me busy … I’m a writer, maybe I can smell something. I don’t know. But the murder of Tim has sort of locked me into it, for the time being. I had a talk with him the other day … and now somebody’s killed him. I’m curious.”
“All right. You’re an interested observer and your father writes mystery novels, a perfect team.” He smiled perfunctorily and got to business. “Harriet Dierker isn’t a liar, Mr. Cavanaugh, she simply has an untidy, imprecise mind. Most of the time she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Add to that her innate malice, her feigned concern for others’ misfortune, and you’ve got her to a T.”
“Nothing she says seems to be quite true,” I said.
“That’s right.” He poured two glasses of water from a pitcher on his desk. I heard ice cubes rattle. He wet his lips.
“Can you imagine why anyone would want to kill Tim?”
“No. He was a kind man. If he made a mistake or treated anyone badly, he made it right. If he had a code, that was it. Personal accountability. He was human but he was a man of honor. That simple. Wanting to kill him? It’s hard to imagine.”
“You’ve known him for a long time?”
“Oh, yes, socially and in business. We go back a long way, our wives and ourselves.”
“The hunting and fishing club, you were one of them, too?”
He paused and looked at me head-on, thoughtfully.
“I was never much involved with the club, now that you mention it. My memories of Timothy have nothing to do with the club. My attitude about it was a good deal like your father’s. Adolescent hijinks going sour when you grow up. I was never comfortable with the club. Oh, hell, at first it was good, fun to get away from our jobs and our wives … Funny thing, Harriet was one of the primary reasons there ever was a club! Timothy just had to get away from her. So he pushed the club idea … It was fun, yes, at the beginning, an adventure, we felt like kids off on our own for the first time. Then, well, it changed and I figured it was a pain in the ass …”
“How did it change? What went wrong?”
“Men in groups are to be avoided,” he said as if he were stating a physical law. “The men changed after the beginning. The club, the lodge began to represent something I didn’t care for—a release from normal behavior, a place they could go and be themselves, that’s what some of them said, that we could go up to the lodge and be ourselves. Well, hell, I finally told them one night that if this was what they really were, they could all go to hell … I’d had a drop to drink, of course, but still, I was right. They were getting into some cutthroat card games, they visited a whorehouse up on the Range … it all just got a little raw for my blood. It’s my nature, I didn’t take to it. What they did was their nature, I guess.” He opened a drawer and took out a blackened old pipe and stuffed it with Prince Albert, packing it down with his forefinger.
“Did you ever hear the one about the scorpion and the frog?” I asked. He just went on packing but a grin spread quietly across his face, deepening the wrinkles, softening the Scandinavian toughness.
“Do you know that one, too, or have you been talking to Kim? I told her that one. It’s a favorite of mine. I believe it, too, you can’t change your nature. Behavior yes, but nature no.” He lit the pipe, drew noisily, and wreathed his head, in curls of smoke. Air ducts began pulling at the smoke immediately. “That was the problem with the club, anyway. Their nature got the best of them, I guess, and the night I got mad at them they got pretty sore at me.” He shrugged and I heard his teeth click on the pipestem. “So I left my gear right there, went out, and got in my car and came home. It seemed the best way to handle it … I only went up a few times after that, nobody ever said anything about it to me, but the group kind of tightened the circle with me on the outside. As I say, your father wasn’t really one of them either and of course he moved away. Once your father was gone the fun was completely out of it for me. I’m not a worldly man, I suppose, and whoring and such is not my idea of a rip of a time …”
“What about Father Boyle?” I asked. “Surely, he took an equally dim view of what was going on.”
Ole Kronstrom was shaking his head slowly.
“I’ve known Marty Boyle for a long time, like the others, and I’ve never really understood what made him tick. Of course, I’m not a Catholic and that may have something to do with my inability to understand him. I’m a fundamentalist Lutheran, as you might guess, and Catholics are far too sophisticated for my blood. But even for a Catholic, Marty’s too worldly to fit into my view of churchmen generally.” He puffed thoughtfully.
“You mean he did what the rest of them did?”
“I’m not saying that. And I’m not judging anyone. I’ve always figured that every man is alone with his own conscience in the end. Beyond that I’m not much of an expert on Marty Boyle.”
“I talked with him last night, at his home. He didn’t seem at all well …”
“Gout, I understand. Funny illness for a priest.”
“I made him sicker, I’m afraid.”
“Why, for heaven’s sake? Or how?”
“I got him talking about the club. The thing is, Tim Dierker was looking through his scrapbook the night he was killed. And he was crying. Harriet saw him. But when they went over the apartment after his death the scrapbook was gone. The murderer apparently took it. Stole it. Must’ve had a reason.”
He tamped the ashes down into the bowl and applied another match, sucking dryly.
“I wonder why,” he said.
“That would seem to be the question. I told Father Boyle and asked him if he had a scrapbook, one which might contain pictures taken up at the lodge. He did, he got it out, and we looked at it, and then he went all funny and threw me out …”
“Strange. But, ah, let me ask you, what would the connection be? Between Timothy’s death and the lodge?”
“Just that the scrapbook had his pictures. Along with other stuff from various vacations he and Harriet had taken years ago. I couldn’t see any point in connecting their trip to Banff, for instance, with all this.”
“All this?”
“Right, all this. You see, I’m working on an assumption which could be all wrong. But what if there’s some thread between Larry Blankenship’s suicide and Tim Dierker’s murder? Then it would all seem to somehow draw closer—Larry, Tim, the club.”
“Quite an assumption, though.” He was watching me through the blue smoke.
“Another little oddity. Boyle mentioned a man named Carver Maxvill, a new character. Do you know anything about him.”
“My gosh, Carver Maxvill. Now, that is a name out of the past. Sure, he was the fellow who up and disappeared one day. Just went off, I suppose. He was an original member of our group, a lawyer, quiet fellow. I knew him least well, I think. I’ve forgotten who was closest to him … Hubbard Anthony maybe, they were both lawyers.”
“He disappeared? What does that mean?”
“Just that. Caused a commotion when it happened, about thirty years ago, Judge Crater kind of thing. One day he was there, the next he wasn’t. Gone without a trace. But I’m no authority. I hadn’t run across him in years, not since I’d stopped going on club outings. You could look it up in the papers, though. But he couldn’t figure in this thing, he’s not your connecting thread, he hasn’t been heard from, quite literally, in decades.” He smiled a trifle wearily, as if all the memories were just this side of boring him. “As far as Marty’s scrapbook goes, it may have been a case of guilt which gave him a turn. Haunted by the past. It’s possible is all I’m saying.”
“Well, anyway, Carver Maxvill isn’t the thread. I’m thinking that Kim Roderick may be the common denominator.” He didn’t react, just puffed calmly, watching me. “Oh, I’m reaching, I realize. But she was a part of their lives, you might say. Larry’s wife. And Tim took an interest in her, took her under his wing.”
“I see,” he said. “Kim. Which is why you’re here.”
“One reason. And you were right. I did hear the one about the frog and the scorpion from her. I talked with her this morning.”
“And what did you think of her? You’re so close to her age, I’m genuinely curious.” He waited. Very patient fellow, Ole Kronstrom.
“She was a bit of a surprise, actually. I’d been led to expect something else—”
“By Harriet?” he said, a chuckle just being born.
“Yes, by Harriet.”
“Her batting average isn’t so hot, is it? First Kim, then me.”
“No, it’s not. I liked her. She’s distant, I don’t think she much enjoyed talking to me. But why should she have, for that matter? Harriet had told me that you’d been preyed on and destroyed by Kim, financially and morally ruined …” I let it lie there for a moment and then he picked it up.
“You know, I’m not a man to deal in confidences. I’ve always kept to myself, refused to gossip or to listen to gossip, never talked much about myself to others. Stoic Swede, Helga used to call me. She could never make me angry, she said I always kept everything to myself. And she was right enough about that—I’m not an open man, not candid about my innermost thoughts and feelings. Naturally, I’ve never had anyone I could talk about Kim to … I’ve wanted someone, at times, but there wasn’t anyone. Now”—he looked over the tops of his glasses, rather shyly—“if I want to, I can talk to you, can’t I?”
“I wish you would,” I said. Describing himself, he might just as well have been describing Kim Roderick. “If you can spare me the time.”
“For a chance like this?” He chuckled and peered inquisitively into the gray ashes, pressed them down, and lit a third match, got the dregs going again, and waved the match in the air.
“Quite naturally, given the state of human nature,” he said, settling back in the embracing chair, “people assume that I’m an old fool having a final fling with a very young woman, though Kim is at least a decade older than she looks. People assume that we have made a trade, her body for my money. It happens often enough, so why not to Ole Kronstrom, the sanctimonious old fart of a Swede? The joke is that they are wrong. Ours is not a father/daughter relationship by any means but neither are we lovers, you see? Friends. Never lovers. I’ve never slept with her. I’ve never seen her naked body … and I don’t care. I have had no use for sex for many years. My needs died early. Quirk of fate and, contrary to what you may think, a blessing. People always say some fellow is a poor devil, can’t get it up anymore, you’ve heard them. Let me tell you, when desire itself ends, by definition you don’t miss it. There’s no sense of longing—you’ve lost interest. Literally.
“So Kim and I are very quiet together, very relaxed, we read together or she tells me about a new movie we should see or she talks to me about her courses at the university. Kim doesn’t want a close physical relationship any more than I do. We enjoy each other, we go to Europe, we have a fine time. I love Kim, she loves me, but it’s not what Harriet thinks … It’s been my good fortune to know Kim, to be at peace with her. Do you grasp what I’m saying? Am I making myself clear?”
“Helga and Harriet believe that Kim killed Larry Blankenship and Tim Dierker. One way or an other …”
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me at all, Mr. Cavanaugh. Not at all. Harriet is a gossip, neurotically so, maybe psychotically so, for all I know. Helga has been hurt. She won’t get over it now and she’d enjoy my feeling guilty. I don’t, however, and I won’t. Harriet and Helga mean nothing to me …” There was a pinkness rising in his cheeks and his eyes were narrowing as he talked. “I’m profoundly grateful for Kim, for what she has meant to me. I’m an old-fashioned religious man, from a farm in North Dakota, direct line from Sweden, and I have my share of faith, a strong belief in God.” He sighed, short of breath. “You cannot pay attention to people like Harriet and Helga. You’ve got to take control of your own life, make your own destiny as best you can … that’s what Kim is to me, she’s what’s going to see me through to the end …”
“What about what she did to Billy Whitefoot? Think of the shape Blankenship was in at the end.”
“Have you been listening to me, Mr. Cavanaugh?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Well, then, think about what I’ve said. Purge yourself of some of your preconceived ideas. She’s not the woman you’ve been told she is … Talk to Billy Whitefoot. He went back up north somewhere … And think, for heaven’s sake …”
It was time for me to go. The sun was gone behind the IDS tower.
“Did you keep a scrapbook?”
“Good Lord, no. What a thought.”
“Look, you’ve been very patient,” I said, “and I appreciate it. Just one last question: Where is she from? What’s her background? Do you know?”
“The north country is a maze, Mr. Cavanaugh, at least to me. You’ll have to ask her, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I don’t suppose it’ll come to that. Just my curiosity.” We shook hands and he gave my hand an extra little squeeze. He was a nice man. I thanked him again and went away, the funny man who kept asking questions. I was exhausted.