FEELING NUMB AND LOST AND deserted, unloved and unwanted, I wearily went up the street to the Sheraton-Ritz for breakfast. It was cool and I read the morning paper, which was a mistake. They were having a fit about the murder of “the third leading citizen of the city in a matter of days.” Bernstein went so far as to say the police had several pieces of information and were seeking at least one primary suspect. It all sounded like a stall and the editorial page said as much. There was a biography of Crocker with pictures dating back to the football star in his funny old uniform. It was an exercise in nostalgia as James Crocker marched across the history of the city, parlaying his touchdown days into a thriving construction company which became the city’s largest shortly after the end of World War II.
There were sidebars recapitulating the coverage of the Dierker and Boyle murders, but little was made of the connection among the victims. Archie had been right: The hunting and fishing club was what tied them all together, what made it a homicidim seriatim, and anyone investigating the murders would have to excavate through forty years of trivia to get to anything that made sense. Archie was right: Barring a fluke, Bernstein was never going to solve it or find Carver Maxvill. It just wasn’t part of the pattern.
After breakfast I called Archie, told him that Kim was gone and the circumstances surrounding her departure, and drove out to his house. A thick gray haze hung overhead. You couldn’t take a deep breath and I wondered what had happened to the early autumn I’d been complaining about.
The radio told me that the rat scare was over, that all of the little devils had been exterminated on the spot. Would anybody believe it? Sure they would; bad things just didn’t happen here and facing up to a mass murderer was putting enough strain on the civic psyche. Meanwhile, the rats were doing some serious house hunting. The lid was on and only one man had died. Of shock. What a way to go.
Archie and I sat in the shade trying not to move. Julia was out and we watched the action on the lake and pondered what to do. Between us, on a wrought-iron table, I’d placed the gun and the note.
“I think we’d better just leave the gun out of this,” Archie said, stroking his mustache. “We’re on our own. We don’t know for sure where it’s leading … the gun could, undoubtedly would, drag Kim right into the heart of it. Unnecessary, don’t you think? Once Bernstein knows she’s gone and starts asking questions, who knows what he might get to thinking? Better not to complicate matters …”
“We’ve got to find her,” I said. “She’s afraid. She’s running for her life … and he’s after her, he wants her dead.” My voice sounded weak, unsure, a particularly accurate representation of my condition.
“You underestimate her, I think. She surveyed the situation and decided she’d be better off out of sight. She’s probably quite right … But I am rather surprised at Maxvill’s going this far. The answer, I suppose, is that he is quite deranged. It’s a very Old Testament kind of idea, the sinner must die, regardless of surface innocence … ‘Nuts’ is the word that comes most quickly to mind, I should think.”
“You underestimate Maxvill, I think,” I said. “If he wants her dead, he’ll find her and kill her. Jesus, Archie, think of what she’s going through, what she’s had to survive to get her life to this point—and now she’s in danger of losing it all …”
“Mmm,” Archie murmured. “Well, perhaps you’re right. Where do you think she went?”
“How the hell should I know? Far, I hope, for her sake.”
“I think not. I think she’ll stay close. She knows it has to do with her, she won’t leave. She’s got to stay close if she ever wants it to end.” He shrugged. “Just a hunch. Anyway, leave the gun and the note with me.”
“I want to find her.”
“If she wanted you to find her, she’d have told you where she was going. Whatever her reasons, she wants you well out of it … she’s wanted you out of it from the beginning. But she let you bully her, let you force your way into her life. Now she draws the line, she must go out on her own. She may be trying to protect you … if she loves you. There’s a logic to it. So let’s wait. It’s all we can do, wait and see what happens.” He wiped his forehead with a white towel. “Cultivate patience, Paul. There’s always a time when patience is the only answer.”
I left Archie working calmly on the notes for his next book, the gun and the note beside him, birds twittering in the trees, white sails carving the lake below. I felt hectic and tattered and aimless. When I got back to town, I pulled into the overgrown tunnel of leaves and shrubs leading to the turnaround in front of our old house. Anne was sitting in a front window smoking a joint and playing in a window box. Without looking up, she took a hit and said, “My God, I could hear you a block away. That car could kill you. And in that vein, who’s killing all these people, Paul? I hear you’re nosing around in it.”
I stood on the gravel looking up at her.
“Kim tell you?”
“Yup. She was your type, after all, wasn’t she?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what type she is. I don’t know where she is at the moment … Have you seen her?”
“Not since last week. We played tennis, talked … She asked me some questions about you. Are you in love with her?”
“What did she say about that?”
She pushed around in the wet dirt with a trowel. She had mud halfway up her arms. Even the joint was muddy. Her hair was tangled; she was sweating through her Viking T-shirt. She grinned faintly.
“She’d never say anything like that. But I fancy I can read her, at least a little. I don’t know what she thinks about you, but she sure as hell does think about you. Very unusual for her. Do you love her?”
“You don’t know where she is, I take it?”
“Not a clue.”
“If she comes to you, keep her there and call me. Will you do that?”
“If you answer my question.” I remembered another reason why our marriage went crash.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
I reached Ole Kronstrom at home.
“Why, no, Paul, I haven’t heard from her since I dropped her off last night. Is anything wrong?”
I told him she’d gone, omitting the gun and the note.
“She’s very independent,” he said slowly. “She might have felt—may I be frank?”
“Sure.”
“She may have begun feeling claustrophobic, that you were closing in on her. She gets that way, gets to feeling that her options are being taken away. Then she simply gets out for a while, to reestablish her own freedom … My advice is not to worry, not to close in. Let her go, let her know she’s free. Do you see my point?”
“I don’t think it applies here,” I said.
“No, I don’t suppose you do,” he said calmly. “I don’t blame you. All I can say is not to worry. I trust her judgment, she sees the long view of things, the realities of a situation. She has a way of knowing where the importance of a thing really lies … she’s better that way than almost anybody I’ve ever known. She never leaves a job unfinished. She hasn’t just left you to stew, she wouldn’t do that. When she goes for good, you’ll be the first to know. Be patient. All you can do is wait.”
I felt like screaming.
The day was interminable. The heat kept shoving, a bully who took the form of a thick, gray film. I took two showers, paced, drank, and sat at my desk looking through the snapshots of Kim playing tennis that Anne had given me so long ago. I fantasized about making love to her and cursed myself for never having forced the issue. What if I never had the chance again? I wanted her and she was gone.
In the evening I tracked Bernstein down. He was sitting in his cubicle drinking iced tea and eating a pasteboard sandwich. He wiped his forehead and the Kleenex came away dirty. I declined a bite of the sandwich, which he tried to pass off as tuna salad. He threw it toward his metal wastebasket and missed.
“Same gun,” he said. He sneezed and blew his nose. “Goddamn weather, hot and cold, stormy, I firmly expect a rain of toads tomorrow. Same gun killed Boyle and Crocker.” He stared at me, his eyes watering. I sat like a stump so he leaned his head back and poured Murine into each eye. When he faced me, it ran down his cheeks like tears. “Same gun,” he muttered. “Smith and Wesson thirty-eight.”
I thought about the gun. I wondered what Archie had done with it.
“Gee,” he said. “Stop by anytime. You really brighten up the place.”
The rain had begun again and felt hot and dirty. No stars, no moon, and the Porsche looked as if it were sweating from the inside. I tried to delay going home. I drove past Riverfront Towers with a dull ache in my chest, slowly up Hennepin, where the hookers had been driven into doorways, where you could catch the flash and glitter of rhinestones on their hot pants. There was a tear in the fabric of the car’s top and it dripped incessantly behind me, like a finger tapping to be let out of the rear end, the grave. I was soaked with my own sweat and the rain blowing in the windows. There was no hope in any corner of the city. It twitched in the wetness like something that had forgotten to die and was proving an embarrassment to the tourist board. So I finally made an illegal left across Hennepin and pulled into the driveway to my underground garage. The electric gizmo that opened the door was floating around on the floor. I ducked down to get it, fished it out from beneath the seat, and leaned back tiredly. Streetlights caught the rain like sprays of jewelry. It dripped from the leaves on the trees and coursed in the gutters. I was hypnotizing myself when the passenger window and the front windshield exploded. As the glass flew wildly around inside the remains of the car, I heard the blast of the gun. The remaining sheet of windshield grew a cobweb of minute cracks and slowly fell apart across the hood, down the dashboard, across my legs.
Lights off, a car I’d barely noticed pulled away from the curb about thirty yards up the street, sped past behind me, and was gone in the rush of rain.
I tried to push my way through the back of the seat, my eyes squeezed shut, every muscle screaming in terror. I waited a few seconds, opened my eyes, and everything was quiet. No more shots, the street deserted, only the hissing of tires on the freeway interfering with the drumming of the rain. Wind was blowing rain through the places where the windshield and side window had been and my pants were shaping themselves to my legs. Everything about me was wet. When I got out to inspect my rapidly disintegrating automobile, my shoes squished like waders and I thought very carefully, Somebody just tried to kill me. I was shaking and climbed back behind the wheel and got the poor thing into the garage and put it to bed. There was glass all over and the car looked like a bathtub that had gone wrong.
Somebody just tried to kill me. It had happened in a speck of time, death blowing through my car, and now it was gone with no cries of outrage.
In all probability Carver Maxvill had just tried to kill me. Being beaten up was one thing. This was something else altogether. In the lobby of the building the ancient Pinkerton man was sitting with the hound of the Baskervilles snoozing at his side.
“Did you just hear anything?” I asked. “A backfire? Sounded like a gunshot?”
He shifted his ample behind and scratched his head. The dog stirred and broke wind. “No, can’t say as I did but then, I was making my rounds. Why?” Worry crossed his bland, perplexed face. A couple of months before, a tenant had been mugged outside under the marquee, in a brightly lit area. Fido and his keeper had slept right through it.
“Nothing,” I said. “My imagination.” I walked to the elevators.
“Say, you got broken glass on your pants there,” he called after me, beginning to suspect me of an obscure crime. Was breaking glass a crime? He was following me in the deep carpeting. He bent down and picked up a gleaming sliver. “See? Glass right here …”
I nodded. The elevator came. I got in. He peered after me, the dog sauntering up to him sneezing. I waved good-bye and the doors closed.
Archie was still up and took my call in his study. I told him what had happened and he whistled softly. “Well, well,” he said. “We’re getting close. I don’t think he wanted to kill you … I doubt if he’d kill for self-preservation. He’s got a reason to kill and killing you doesn’t fit—he’s not a criminal, you know, not in any conventional sense. He’s an avenging angel. And he wants you to get out of his way … He must be watching very closely. He may have watched you go to Bernstein’s office. He can’t afford to have the police getting too close—so he tries to scare you off …”
“Cutting it pretty damn close, I’d say.” I was still picking glass out of my hair,’ and my stomach was still clinging to the inside of my chest. “It worked. I’m scared.”
“I should hope so,” Archie said. “Now go to sleep. I’ll try to think of what to do … maybe we should back off entirely. There are limits to everything. This isn’t worth dying for.” Thunder cracked over the lake, a mortal blow, by the sound of it, and it gnashed at my ear across the line.
I lay on the bed with the lights off and waited for sleep. It was a long wait. You didn’t survive a murder attempt every night, after all. So I lay there cringing in my bed, frightened out of shape, a perfect example of conditioning.