The Wind Chill Factor (9 page)

He walked out of his office with me and down the stairs without speaking. At the door he stopped and smiled at me. “Look, I have to say this. Don’t leave town. We’ve got a murder case and an attempted murder. I’ve notified the police in Wisconsin, gave them the description of the two men as you gave it to me, and the description of the car they were driving. Maybe they’ll turn up something and we can begin making some of those little connections.”

He pulled on his trench coat and we stepped out onto the front stoop of the courthouse. The cold air felt good after the overheated office.

“I’m forty-three years old,” he said, pulling on his gloves, which were skintight and had little holes cut out over the knuckles, highly impractical I thought. “I was the boy wonder of the Minneapolis Police Department. I was the boy wonder for almost fifteen years, long time to be a boy wonder. Most of the cops didn’t much like me and I wasn’t really a very good cop. But I had a flair for murder cases—a couple of big ones, lots of headlines built into them, and some little ones, the kind that usually go unsolved because nobody cares about the people who get killed or the people who do the killing. I always cared, Cooper, not out of any great moral concern or outrage. Not at all. But because murder is such a madly desperate act, a final solution, human beings under some sort of ultimate pressure. I just love murder cases, that’s all.

“A murder case,” he went on, “is like a computer, a very complex computer that very nearly has a life of its own and it just refuses to work until you feed it the right program. But once you start to figure it out, the case, or the computer of murder, comes to life and begins to squirm and curse and shake its fist at you.” He had been staring down at the snow and suddenly glanced up, characteristically quickly. “Ah, you may recognize the fact that I have merely paraphrased two of the oldest clichés of murder literature. That is, that the crime is similar to a jigsaw puzzle and you have to fit the pieces together. And Holmes’ delight as he cried, ‘Come Watson, the game’s afoot.’ But both clichés are absolutely true. My computer analogy is merely up to date. And admitting that I enjoy murder is only a little more overt than Holmes.”

The Cadillac was parked at the curb, covered with snow. He opened the door.

“I’m going to see Mrs. Smithies, or rather Miss Smithies. Christ,” he implored the storm, “who can keep it all straight? Maybe she’ll be able to tell me something I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t know.” He waved a glove at me and slammed the door.

As I stood watching him, the car wouldn’t start.

Eventually he got out, muttering.

“Stop smiling,” he said. “Go get your head X-rayed.”

Doctor Bradlee took me over to the antiseptic little nineteen-fortyish clinic and X-rayed my skull and we stopped in at the Cooper’s Falls Cafe for coffee. It was empty. A few sounds came from the kitchen. A waitress sat at the end of the counter smoking a cigarette.

“In my role as county coroner,” he said, “I performed the autopsy on Cyril. Peterson told you the result. People suppose that doctors are very hardened about such things, but it’s not true. I was performing an autopsy on a boy I brought into the world and it was a very sad business.” He sighed and shook his head. “Somebody murdered him and I suppose we’ve got to find out who did it. Funny, but I don’t think I’m going to feel much satisfaction when we find out who.”

“That’s along the lines of what Peterson was saying.”

“What do you mean?”

“He said he wondered what difference it all made in the end.”

“Strange thing for a cop to say.”

“Peterson is a pretty strange cop.”

“That’s an understatement.”

I walked back to my car wondering why Cyril had been in Buenos Aires. When I got to the car I changed my mind and walked back across the deserted and glacial street toward the courthouse with its windows patches of blurred yellow through the snow. The wind was giving me one of those instant Minnesota earaches.

Alice was typing something on an official-looking form.

“Is he in?” I asked.

“Well, hello, there,” she said, smiling. “Yes, he’s here. I’ll just give him a buzz.” The door to Peterson’s office was closed.

When I went in, Peterson was speaking into the telephone with his eyes closed.

“A what?” he asked. “A Jensen Interceptor? Well, Jesus Christ.”

I sat down.

“No, the newspapers haven’t got anybody here. I haven’t told them. I’m not obliged to call the Twin Cities when something happens here in Cooper’s Falls. You know that. This is my murder, Danny, and you’d better not let it leak. I don’t want all those silly bastards getting lost and freezing to death out there somewhere on the wrong road. Right, bye-bye, Danny.”

He looked up at me.

“I have a very eager assistant, Cooper, who has a great many silly ideas. However, while checking for fingerprints out at your place, he looked in the garage and discovered how your brother got here. A lovely little dark brown Jensen Interceptor, of all things.” He slapped his palm on the desk and smiled. “Pardon my saying so, but the son of a bitch had real style. A Jensen! Twenty-two thousand bucks for a car they’d fit in the palm of your hand!” His face clouded over. “I suppose you get the car, too.”

“I suppose.”

“What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I had a thought.”

“All right, Cooper, what was your thought?”

“Why not start checking back on Cyril’s movements? Why not see when he arrived from Buenos Aires, what he was doing there, whom he saw when he got there, where he came from. …”

Peterson was smiling at me with his hands behind his head.

“Tell me, have I struck you as being an inordinately stupid man? Really, be honest with me. I can take it. Lots of ego at work here.”

“No, of course not. For a cop.”

“Well, then, what do you think I’ve been doing today, Cooper? Sitting here abusing my dong, perhaps? Or chasing Alice around the desk?”

“Your wit leaves me weak, Peterson.”

“I’m sure. But rest assured that we are trying to find out the answers to all your questions.”

“Good.”

“You see, I’ve developed a pip of a theory. Want to hear it?”

“I don’t suppose I have much choice.”

“I think the reason your brother came home is sitting there in Buenos Aires. I don’t know what it is. But if we don’t know at this end why he came home there’s a mighty fine chance we’ll find why in Buenos Aires. Therefore, and toward that end, I’m breaking the budget with my trusty telephone. I’ll soon be in touch with the Buenos Aires police and shall we hope they speak English?”

“Let’s.”

“Go, Cooper, go. I’ll be in touch with you.”

I stopped in the doorway. Alice was listening.

“Did you talk to Paula?”

“My car wouldn’t start, remember? It’s very cold out there and my car is only human. There is no telephone at the library. No, I have not spoken with Miss Smithies and, in any case, I don’t quite know what I’d ask her.”

I shrugged and went back outside. It was four o’clock and pretty dark all of a sudden. I noticed a light on in Johnson’s Garage earlier and decided to run the car in and see if Arnie Johnson could take a quick look at the heater. There was a light on in Arthur Brenner’s office, which overlooked the street, so I figured he must have had his nap and was up now. I didn’t want to get involved in having a drink with Arthur. I didn’t want to start having drinks with anyone: it would be too easy in this kind of tense situation.

I got in the car and it wouldn’t start.

I got back out and said fuck and shit several times, directing my remarks to the storm rather than to the Lincoln, and stamped off up the street toward the garage.

Arnie was tinkering with a station wagon. “My God,” he said when we got done shaking hands, “that’s terrible about your brother, Mr. Cooper. You just never know, but my Christ, murder!”

“Yes, it’s terrible all right. How did you find out, Arnie?”

“Oh, hell, you know this town. Everybody knows, I reckon. I must’ve heard it when I was over to the cafe for lunch. You know how it is, hotel switchboard, girls can’t help but hear things, nurses up at the clinic, girls over in the courthouse, things like this you just can’t keep quiet. Only thing saving us from the boys from the Cities is the snow. First time in, oh, hell, since the Second World War, the highways are closed. That’s right,
completely
closed—highway department just threw up their hands, said the hell with it, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better, the roads are just clogged with cars, abandoned. So I reckon we’re just about the only folks know what happened. But, sure as hell, everybody in Cooper’s Falls knows about it.”

I told Arnie about my car and he went out in his tow truck and I watched him all the way, hooking it up, pulling it back in. He lowered it while I watched, closed the doors of the garage, and listened while I told him I’d had an accident and that I wanted him to make the heater work. He said he would and I walked back out into the snow and leaned against the wind. It seemed five hundred miles to the hotel and I wondered what the weather was like in Buenos Aires. I wondered if the cops spoke English.

A
RTHUR BRENNER AND I SHOVED
along in the snow. We had the street almost to ourselves. Arthur was an enormous hulk in a gray belted macintosh which could easily have dated back to the 1920s. The wind had died down and Arthur was grumbling, snuffling.

“You sound like hell,” I said. “You ought to be in bed with a hot toddy.”

He nodded, grunted. “I’m just too old, John. Seventy, and it’s hard to believe. If you ever start feeling sorry for yourself just remember me, eye to eye with seventy years and that’s real trouble and not a damned thing you can do about it. And now here I am caught up in all this damned nonsense. Do you think Cyril could have killed himself? Strange terminal disease, perhaps?”

“I don’t think so. There would have had to have been a container of some kind, something to hold the stuff that did it, and they didn’t find one. And there’s all the hocus-pocus with the brandy glasses.”

“Peterson told me about that,” he grunted. “Sounds damned farfetched to me. But I suppose it makes sense. Peterson’s an obnoxious man but no fool, that’s certain. But here we are traipsing through a blizzard on a fool’s errand if ever there was one and all for what? I know what’s in these papers. Nothing but a bunch of personal letters from people like Goebbels and Himmler and Goering. And perhaps even Hitler himself. But nothing of value to anyone but an autograph collector, nothing of historical note, nothing worth all the publicity of reviving your grandfather’s unsavory past. Just a bunch of wastepaper that Austin should have had enough sense to throw out years ago.”

“Do you have any theories, Arthur? About any of it?”

“No, I don’t. I can’t imagine why he came home, I can’t imagine why someone killed him, I can’t imagine who would kill him. It all makes very little sense to me, but then I’m not as young as I used to be and I’m probably becoming senile.” He grunted. “At my age I’m beginning to wonder what difference it makes anyway.”

At the end of the street the delicate old library stood like a warm and friendly haven. The lights shone brightly through the windows and I remembered how warm it had been when I walked in out of the cold the day before and found Paula Smithies. I was thinking of her mouth, of kissing her as we went up the stairs and opened the door.

I went in first and Arthur was right behind me.

Paula was sitting at her desk, her head resting on her forearm, which lay across the desk blotter, as if she were catnapping. It had been a long night, a trying night, and she must have been exhausted.

“Paula,” I said. “Paula, wake up.”

I could hear Arthur wheezing with his cold behind me and I touched her shoulder, felt the hair on my neck crawl and bristle. There was something wrong. “Paula,” I repeated, shaking her shoulder. There was no life in her, no flicker of movement.

Arthur leaned over me. “Has she passed out?”

I turned her head; her eyes were closed peacefully, her face was calm, and I knew the way you know the worst things that Paula Smithies was dead.

“Arthur,” I said, my voice coming from a long way off, “she’s dead.” I felt him take my arm and lower me into a chair. My stomach turned. My legs were shaking. I was conscious of the heat—I was suddenly dripping wet.

Arthur bent over her. I saw him pry an eyelid back, feel for a pulse. Then he simply stood staring at her. “You’re quite right. This girl is dead.”

He slid a hammered silver flask from a pocket inside his mac and handed it to me. I sipped the brandy and felt it shock me back to life. He sat down on the library table and unbuttoned the coat; his face had tightened, was no longer the complaining mask of an old man.

“Give me that,” he said and pulled at the flask. He wiped a huge hand across his mouth.

“What are we going to do?” I said after a while.

“Well, there’s no telephone here and we’re going to have to notify Peterson. That is, he’s the man you tell this sort of thing to in Cooper’s Falls.”

“I think we’d better look for the boxes she was going to show us. We’d better find out if they’re still here.” I paused, but my thoughts were stumbling on, trying to pick out a path. “If they’re not still here, if they’ve been taken. …”

“Now, now, John,” Arthur said gruffly. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“If they’re not still here,” I went on, “then we’ll know why Paula was killed. Do you see?”

“If she was killed. If!” Arthur sounded very determined. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

“You think maybe she had a heart attack?”

“There’s no need for impertinence.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “But let’s look for the boxes.”

Together we made short work of the main floor and found nothing out of the ordinary. “The storm cellar,” I said. “She said she found the boxes in the storm cellar.” We couldn’t find the door which would presumably have led to the cellar. Frustration set in. “Where the hell—”

Then I saw it: an eight-foot-high newspaper rack seemed to be leaning an inch or two away from the wall. I pulled at it, swinging it out into the room, revealing an opening in the wall leading down into darkness. There was a light cord hanging inside the opening. When I pulled it, a dim light went on at the top of the stairway of narrow stone slabs and another in the cellar. “Come on. I don’t want to go down there alone, for God’s sake.”