ARCHIE AND I WERE IN Bernstein’s office by eight thirty and the Candidate was all in off-white, prompting me to make a smart crack about his virginity. He retaliated by being terribly amusing about the condition of my face. When he got serious, wanting to know why it happened, I said my face had gotten between the wall and a squash ball; he gave that a fishy look but he was too busy to pursue it. We filled him in on our night’s theorizing and he took it calmly, endlessly clicking the top of a ball-point pen. He admitted it was as good as any scenario he’d concocted and said he’d start two of his two-headed lads checking hotels for recent arrivals. He got a description of the young Maxvill from Archie, chewed on the pen for a while, and shook his head.
“Well,” he said finally, “I’m not the only guy in town with his dick in a wringer. Your friend Crocker is up to here in rats … I don’t know who’s worse off.” He sighed and propped his white shoes up on the desk, a vision of pristine otherworldliness in the generally swinish confines of his cubicle.
“The voters of Minneapolis,” I said. “They’re worse off.”
“That’s good, Paul,” he said. “That’s a good one, all right.”
We left Bernstein straightening his bright-red tie in a tiny makeup mirror on his desk. Outside Archie shoved his hands into his hip pockets and rocked on his heels. “I’ll never understand how the cops ever get anything done right. I won’t deny that they do—they do. But how?”
He headed for the Minneapolis Club and I headed up toward the North Side to check on the rats. The sun had burned through an early cloud cover and it was getting hot early. I could smell Crocker’s Folly a couple of blocks away and there was plenty of activity when I got there. A couple of television cameramen were wandering around with gear resting on their shoulders, stockpiling footage for voice-overs. The white-coated mad scientists were doing Karloff and Chaney bits but behind them stood rows of sinister white canisters. The crowds hadn’t changed; they looked as if they’d all been hypnotized by some sort of hovering ray gun whipped up twenty years ago by George Pal’s special-effects unit. Perhaps that was how the rats had gotten there in the first place, lowered on little rope ladders from ominous, whirring Martian spaceships … The pain in my nose was obviously affecting my brain. I trudged through the dust and came upon a large young man who caught my eye and looked quickly away; he was wearing a maroon-and-gold Crocker Construction shirt and surprisingly enough, I recognized him. I’d have thought it had been too dark, but I knew him. I followed him across the worn-down, browned-out remains of the grass and caught up in front of the main maroon-and-gold trailer. He was bending over a tool case pretending to be busy. He looked up because I was very nearly standing on him.
“Hi, champ,” I said.
“What?” He squinted upward, dust in the tanned creases of his face.
“I said hi,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just wanted you to know that if I ever get the chance I’m going to pick me out a nice two-by-four and make jelly out of your face. I’ll probably never get the chance, though.” I tried to keep it conversational but I was getting a nasty acid drip going in my stomach. “But you ought to know when somebody bears you ill will. Who knows, maybe I’ll hire a couple of gorillas to do it for me. Think about it … and when you get home at night and it’s dark and you have to park your car, you’d better check the bushes, baby.”
He stood up and walked away. Crocker was piling out of a Crocker pickup and did a double take when he saw me and my bandaged face.
“I was just talking to the creep who does your hitting for you,” I said, closing on him. There was a deep glimmer of distrust in his eyes, almost fear. He brought his hands up to his belt as if preparing to ward off a suicide charge. I grinned at him.
“You’re so scared,” I said, “that I’ve stopped worrying about you. You really disgust me. I’m not easily disgusted, but you do the trick. You see my face, Crocker? I made a point not to tell Bernstein about how it happened … I didn’t want him to start thinking about you. He might have put protection around you so the killer can’t get to you. As far as I’m concerned, you look good as a target.”
He stared at my bandage, his mouth working behind tight lips. His massive, rough-hewn head shook as if taken by a palsy. The fists clenched, relaxed, clenched. He couldn’t bring himself to speak.
“Are you working yourself up to a conniption or just pretending? What have you got to be mad about? I’m the one with the smashed face …”
“Get away from me,” he said at last, forcing it out between teeth like millstones. His hands swept across in front of his thick chest, as if the breeze would take me away.
“What are you going to do? Have one of the lads beat me up? Christ, you’re so stupid, Crocker. You could save your life and get the killer caught if you’d just go to Bernstein … You smell of fear. And cowardice.”
“I am sorry,” he said suddenly, “about your face. There’s no point in denying it. It’s not easy for me to apologize … but I couldn’t think of what else to do. You don’t understand, Cavanaugh, and there’s no real reason you should …” He grunted glumly, the anger completely gone. He amazed me; it was the last thing I’d expected. The color had left his face as surely as if a vampire’s shadow had flitted across his jugular. “I’m a blunt man. But I couldn’t order you to drop this thing and get the hell away, to safety—no, it’s not cheap melodrama, Critic. You don’t believe me, but the closer you get to it, the closer you get to danger for yourself …”
“Your concern is very moving,” I said, but the conviction of my sarcasm was as bloodless as his face. A heavy truck ground its gears coming down the hill, its tires shredding the grass. It was carrying a load of brown fur. The aroma of dead rats penetrated even my nose. It reached the bottom of the slope and stopped. White-uniformed sanitation workers tied a canvas tarpaulin tight over the mound of dead things. My stomach slid sweatily and I looked back at Crocker.
“The only danger I’ve encountered was from you,” I said.
“It won’t happen again, I promise you. I know, it won’t fix your face, will it? There’s nothing I can say. I’m sorry.” He turned away, leaned a huge hand on the trailer for support.
“You look like hell,” I said.
“Just tired.” His voice was as gray and lifeless as his face, his lips. “Got to pace myself, that’s all. Fucking rats. When I sleep, I dream about them.”
“You should go home. They don’t need you here.”
“You don’t understand, I’m the boss. This is my company, my goddamn mess. I belong here. I rest in the van here … I’m staying all night … They tell me we may have it licked by nightfall. I’ll stay on tonight.” He was almost talking to himself, reassuring himself. “It’ll be quiet then. You just get the hell out of here and forget about all of us …”
“Can’t forget Carver Maxvill,” I said. “Can you?”
“Who? He looked up numbly, trying to get me in clearer focus. “Who did you say?”
“Carver Maxvill. The man who’s come back …”
He searched my eyes for several seconds, his broad, weathered face expressionless, and then began doing an old man’s death rattle which turned into a throaty, rolling chuckle. He flushed and leaned back against the trailer, where the sun caught him in the eyes.
“You dumb son of a bitch,” he said at last, half choking on his quiet, bottled-up laughter.
“You’re next on his list,” I said with fading authority.
He kept on chuckling, a ruddy look seeping into his face, bringing back his tan.
“What’s so funny?”
“Funny?” He wiped his eyes, leaving a dirty smudge. “Nothing, nothing … It’s just that I know who the killer is, that’s all.” He coughed deep in his lungs. “Shit, I guess it is funny … I don’t know. Just haul your ass off this site, that’s all. And say your prayers, Cavanaugh, you poor bastard …”
I went back to my place. My face was on fire and my eyes ached. I popped a couple of the pain pills Condon had prescribed and took a shower, Archie’s signal to call. He’d gone home and gotten a telephone call from the little old nun in Dubuque.
“Quite an old lady,” he said, measuring his words. “Memory like a damned elephant. She said she remembered what was so sad about Larry’s leaving the orphanage …”
“So?”
“Well, the thing was, he had a little sister—she thinks it was his sister—a little girl anyway, and this little girl, just a wee thing, who was terribly dependent on him … apparently she came unglued when Larry was taken away, or went away, whatever …” He paused, then filled the silence: “Well, I just thought I’d tell you, keep you current. You’ve got to admit it’s a sad story, right?”
“Yeah. Sad.” I sat there at my desk, dripping wet, wondering. The pain pills weren’t working.
Kim was sunbathing when I called from the lobby and when she opened the door, she’d slipped a pale-yellow shirt over a tan bikini which blended into the color of her smooth flesh. She gave me a quick shy kiss and ten minutes later we were sitting on her balcony eating cantaloupe halves filled with pineapple, strawberries, and cherries, and sipping icy Chablis. A day earlier it would have made me feel happy and cared for, a member of the human race. She murmured concern over my injuries. I nodded. Our normal roles were reversed; she was the one trying to ease the situation and give it warmth while I was off in a world of my own thoughts, disturbed and remote.
She was facing the sun. A fine dew of perspiration stood out on her forehead and when she leaned forward to pour me more wine, the front to the shirt belled open and gravity drew a streak of sweat between her tiny breasts. She was making conversation and I nodded sporadically but I wasn’t listening. I was trying to sort out what my priorities were, love or curiosity, and were they in conflict? I didn’t want to drive a wedge between us: It had been so difficult to bring it this far. But I had to know the truth.
“All right,” she said matter-of-factly, setting down her empty wineglass and dabbing her lips with the lime-green linen. “What’s the matter? I can’t talk to myself forever, you know. So what’s troubling your poor smashed-in face?” She smiled very slightly.
“Are we in love?” I blurted. “I don’t mean to lean on you, I don’t want to frighten you away … but there are a couple of things I have to do and before I do them I want to know what there is between us. One moment, when I’m with you, it seems that we are—in a funny way, sure, but real just the same—then, when I’m alone, I think I’m being foolish.” A helicopter swirled past the balcony, roaring angrily, shining like a metallic prehistoric predator in the sun. “Now I guess I’ve got to know … I’m sorry.”
She leaned back, pushing her sunglasses up her moist, straight nose. I couldn’t see her eyes and felt as if I were revealed, naked under her gaze.
“Why is it that you suddenly need some definite answer?” she asked. “What are you going to do? Not something foolish that you’ll regret, I hope … that I’ll regret …”
“You’re just going to have to trust me. I can’t go into it.”
“I told you our relationship couldn’t be normal. I warned you. I’m not ready, not able … you can’t say I’ve led you on.”
“No. But the undertow has been one of secrecy, I’ve had to pry at you … if I hadn’t cared about you, I’d have said the hell with you. But I did care, do care. I’ve tried to guess at your feelings, I’ve accepted bits and pieces and scraps of emotion. And that’s all right, it’s a small price to pay if I can keep you. You’ve brought me back to life … I’d reached the point where I couldn’t imagine being close to anyone, certainly not a woman, and you’ve changed all that. I believed that the only woman I could ever love was a woman who could fill my attention, make all others irrelevant, and I was sure that no such woman existed.” I took a deep breath, rattled on. “I was wrong. There’s you. But that’s not enough … I’ve got to know what’s coming back, from you to me …” I waited but she simply stared at me, the sunglasses flat and black against the sun. “There’s got to be some kind of honesty and openness between us. Real honesty.”
“Don’t you believe what I tell you?” she said edgily. “The whole point is that my secrecy has nothing whatever to do with our relationship. I have been honest about everything that counts between us—I haven’t ever lied to you about my feelings or kept them secret. I’ve told you about my personal problems, you know I’ve told you things about myself that only you know, I’ve made myself emotionally vulnerable … What more can you want? I’m not an expert on love, I’m not experienced in it … I’ve only wondered why my past has been so important to you, what it has to do with you. I still don’t know why but my feelings for you have even gotten me past that obstacle.” She leaned forward and emptied the Chablis into her glass, held the rim to her lower lip. “I think what I feel for you is love, Paul. If it has to be given a name, as you seem to think it does … you’re great on giving things names. I’m not. Why is it all so important to you—my past, giving what’s between us a name? I’ve never understood that. You’re not the only one who’s been in the dark …” But even in all this there was a curious quality of circumspection, guardedness, as if there were lavers of plot to her life I’d never dreamed of. Instead of making me see reason, she fed my curiosity, the sense of unease in which I’d come to live. I watched her sip the wine, saw a muscle jump in her soft, smooth cheek. For a moment, a shadow across her face, she looked as she had the night she’d driven into the boy on the bicycle: unrepentant, cool, a distant arousal as if thrilled sexually by danger and the threat of death.
“I don’t know why,” I said, “I’ve forgotten … I only know that it’s all important to me. I wouldn’t have come here to pursue it otherwise. It was now or never, maybe.”
“Well, I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you again.”
“What was your mother’s name?”
“Rita Hook.”
“No, Kim, not your aunt … your mother.”
“Why do you do this to me?” She put her hand to her mouth, the long fingers quivering. “It makes all your protestations of love seem false … calculated.”
“A simple question. What was your mother’s name?”
“Wilson,” she said. “Patricia Wilson.” The quaking of her hands had been communicated to her voice. “But she died when I was born.”
I stared off across the city with its landscape of deserted railway terminals, renewal projects, and the towers of the University of Minnesota in the distance. When I looked back toward her, she was crying, tears seeping out beneath the dark lenses. I scraped my chair back, went and knelt beside her. She wouldn’t turn to face me. I touched her hair, kissed her cheek, and when I got up and left, she was still sitting on the balcony, her pretty linen napkin rolled into a tight ball and held tightly against her lips, tears sliding relentlessly down her beautiful, somber face.
I went back to my apartment, packed an overnight bag, and just made the two o’clock Northwest flight to Chicago. By three thirty, thanks to a twenty-five-dollar cab ride, I’d found the Merrivale Memorial Hospital on a tree-lined street not far from the University of Chicago. It was small and old and private, looking more like a discreet residential hotel than what it was. With my face giving off signals, the lady behind the information desk tried to direct me to the outpatient area but I held firm in search of the records office.
A middle-aged woman, in what used to be described as a severe suit when people still wore them, was watering a split-leaf philodendron in a small office at the end of a long dingy hall. A window gave on a tiny shaded courtyard. I watched a nurse push a bundle of ailing human being around the path in an old wicker-backed wheelchair. The lady in the suit finished with the drooping plant, sighed, and blinked huge watery eyes floating behind thick spectacles. “The problem is, I’m very much afraid, a lack of sunlight in this office and there’s not much I can do about that, is there? And what can I do for you?” She checked a large Timex watch on a thin wrist and smiled at me with a mouth that remained oddly pursed. I got the feeling that her philodendron problem was about as close to grief as she got.
I told her I had come all the way from Minneapolis to check on a matter relating to an inheritance, orphans, a bit of quick embroidery which was so old a line that it may not have occurred to her to doubt me. I lied badly but made a show of inspecting the undersides of the plant’s leaves as if I knew what I was doing. I implied vaguely that I represented a firm of attorneys.
“It’s a question of two sisters,” I said, “and two children born in this hospital quite a long time ago. Both children were orphaned and two people have now turned up with claims on an inheritance.” I grinned beneath my bandaged nose.
“How very Dickensian,” she said, eyes brightening enthusiastically. “Are you a private eye?”
“No, not really.” I shrugged diffidently, leaving her in doubt.
“I thought you might be … your nose, the bandage. I’m sorry, I sometimes leap before I look.” She sat down primly at her desk, her fingers checking the wisps of gray hair dangling from her bun. “Now, precisely what do you need to know?”
It wasn’t difficult once I got it rolling. I gave her Patricia Wilson’s name first, noting that she presumably had a child, female, at Merrivale in 1940. Would she be good enough to check? The green file cabinets, their tops covered with cactuses in clay pots, lined one wall. It wasn’t a big hospital; all the records were in those cabinets. I watched the courtyard, the old men sitting on a slat bench in bathrobes, doling out bread crumbs to pigeons. It was unbearably hot and humid in the tiny office. There were streaks on the inside of the window. I hadn’t noticed how uncomfortable I was until I had to wait while she searched. It took forever.
Finally she gave me a perplexed look. “Nothing! No Patricia Wilson, not in 1940, never. We do all our filing by last names—we’ve got two Patrick Wilsons both deceased, but nary a Patricia. Could she have been admitted under another name, by chance? A maiden name?”
“I don’t know and I don’t know how to find out,” I confessed. “But there’s the other sister—let’s check her. Name was Rita Hook … she was here in 1932, reportedly gave birth to a boy. She was a resident of Grande Rouge, Minnesota, and Patricia Wilson’s sister.” My voice seemed to be droning on, coming from someone else. I was watching the scene, sweating and feeling light-headed. I was afraid. She knelt down and began flipping through folders. The last fly of summer banged against the window like a machine bent on self-destruction.
“Well, now, that’s odd,” she said, straightening up, a knee cracking. “Very odd, indeed. This is Rita Hook’s file, all right … but what we’ve got here isn’t what you’ve described. How peculiar …”
“What’s wrong?” I said, my voice dry.
“Well, your Rita Hook, your resident of Grande Rouge, local next of kin Patricia Wilson, sister, she was here in 1932—gave birth to a boy just as you suggested. Robert, eight pounds, two ounces, father one Ted Hook, Grande Rouge, Minnesota … that’s all right here …”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Well, that was only her first visit,” she said slowly. “Somewhere along the line you’ve gotten your facts askew … Eight years later, in 1940, it wasn’t Patricia Wilson who came here to have a baby … it was Mrs. Hook again, Rita Hook, and Patricia Wilson was again listed as local next of kin.” She peered up at me over the edge of the tattered manila folder. “Don’t you see? Mrs. Wilson was next of kin, not the mother … this Rita Hook person was the mother both times, a boy, that was little Robert in 1932, and then little Shirley in 1940 …”
“And nobody died?” I asked. “The little girl’s mother survived the birth?”
“Oh, my, yes,” she said, a faint note of shock in her voice. “You don’t look so well, though. Here, sit down …”
“It’s my nose. I get flashes of pain—”
“Here, have some water.” She handed me a tumbler from a tray on a bookcase. The water was warm and dust floated on it. “Can I get you an aspirin?”
“No, no, I’m fine.” I took a deep breath.
“Well, at least no one died,” she said consolingly. “That’s good.”
I nodded. She gave me the address listed for Patricia Wilson thirty-four years ago. I thanked her, picked up my overnight bag, and went back out into the wet, steaming afternoon. I wasn’t stopping to think. I just wanted to keep moving.