The Cavanaugh Quest Read Free Page A

flowerpot. I put the pitcher on a little plastic cube between us, poured two glass mugs full, and sat down on a porch swing I’d stolen from my father’s garage. The best things in life are quite frequently the things you steal.
    He sat staring into the evening sky, the sun slanting across the skyline of Minneapolis to the north, a view set off by the towering glass monument to Investment Diversified Services. The lake below us in Loring Park was green and ducks paddled about in geometric precision which you could see only if you were far enough above. The breeze on the shady side of the building almost made you forget the heat. Hub’s face looked as if it had melted from the cheekbones downward, forming a pouch of jowls where his chin was tucked back against his long throat. At just that moment I figured I could have taken him, 6-0, 6-0.
    “So who the hell was he?” I finally asked.
    Hubbard sighed and sipped his Pimm’s Cup. He wiped his lank white hair back straight, the way it was combed. I’d seen pictures of him up north in the thirties with my father, the two of them standing grinning at opposite ends of a string of bass or whatever it was they caught up there. He was tall and thin then, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows, and he hadn’t changed much in nearly forty years. His hair had been black then, shining in the sunlight that hid his eyes in dark shadows.
    “Larry Blankenship was an innocent, an authentic innocent. A victim.” He paused, looking off the balcony, sipping, trying to sum up a man’s life to someone who’d never met him. “It was almost a pathology, his instinct for finding a way to be hurt in any given situation, by everyone he became involved with … The way some people are looked upon as being trouble, trouble for everyone else, well, Larry was always trouble for himself. Maybe he wanted to be hurt. I’m sure a two-bit psychologist would say he was self-destructive …”
    “That theory looks pretty good right now,” I said.
    “Perhaps, but I don’t really believe he was that complex, at least he never struck me as a deep person. He just wanted everything to turn out all right but it never seemed to. I’m sure he was an identifiable type. But saying he was a loser wasn’t quite fair.”
    “Who said he was?”
    He stuck a cigarette into his inconspicuous little holder and lit it, beginning to relax and move death a convenient distance away. The inner vista was fading but I’d never seen it before, had never known he was prey to such things.
    “His wife, for one. She wasn’t being unreasonable either, not from her point of view. He must have seemed a loser to her. At least when she said that.” He shook his head.
    “You knew him well, then?” I wasn’t following very well and from inside my apartment I could hear the Twins game on the radio. They were in the twelfth inning at Oakland and Carew had just laid down a bunt and beaten it out. Rollie Fingers was pitching for Oakland and Larry Blankenship was nothing to me. He was a dead guy and I was just trying to provide some company for Hub. Larry Blankenship was just a name and two penny loafers under a blanket and an eccentric suicide note.
    “Off and on, I kept running across him. Larry and his wife just kept turning up at the edges of things. His wife was the kind of woman who makes a strong impression on people. But that didn’t work out for him either—they’re separated or divorced by now. And they had a child who didn’t turn out right. A mongoloid, something wrong like that, put away in a home somewhere. I don’t believe I ever actually knew the details. Just things I heard … Larry and Kim weren’t ever at the center of things and of course they were much younger, your age or even a bit younger, she was younger, I’d think. Maybe thirty-five now. And Larry must have been forty or so. I’m not at all sure my figures are right. But I couldn’t be far off.
    “Larry was in