The Wind Chill Factor (7 page)

“Oh, it must be there somewhere,” I said.

She turned back to me, flexing her body. “Does it bother you?”

“No, not at all. I never think about it.”

She slid back down in the chair, stared at me glassily. “What do you think of Mr. Peterson?”

“He’s a smartass. An egomaniac and probably quite mad.” I yawned. The sound of the wind and snow beating against the house had become part of my consciousness.

“What do you think he thought about it? What did he want you to go to the kitchen for?” She yawned too, shaking her head.

“I think he was showing off.” I wondered if that was what I really thought or only what I wished. “He did a little number upstairs about how much brandy was left in the bottle that came right out of Sherlock Holmes. In the kitchen he showed me a brandy snifter and some garbage. I don’t know what the hell he was talking about but he’s a compulsive show-off, so he’s bound to tell me tomorrow.”

It was one o’clock and I went to the kitchen and popped a couple of pain pills Bradlee had given me. Paula heard the water running and came out and took the tranquilizer.

“I should go home,” she said.

“All right.” As I helped her into her coat I said: “What about the documents, Paula? Peterson’s going to have to know, I imagine, sooner or later.”

“I don’t know why,” she said, buttoning up, collecting her leather patch bag and gloves. “What have those things got to do with Peterson?”

“Nothing, if Cyril died a natural death. But the way Bradlee reacted to the condition of the body, and then the way Peterson nosed around … well, I don’t know, Paula, but if there was anything funny about Cyril’s death—then Peterson’s going to want a lot of answers to a lot of questions. And one of the questions is going to be, why did Cyril decide to come all the way home from Buenos Aires?” We were standing in the foyer looking at each other. I kept thinking that she was a very attractive woman, that Cyril had known a good thing when he’d seen it. She seemed so self-sufficient.

“Well, we can talk about it in the morning. Arthur would know what we should do.”

We went out to start her car. It was deep under snow and I tried to brush it off with my arm. It was dry, soft like dust, incredibly cold. Paula slid in behind the wheel and turned the key, producing that aggravating grinding noise, again and again. I went behind the car to sweep the back window. The grinding got fainter and fainter. I went back to her and she looked up, smiling vaguely. “Well, surprise.”

“It’s too cold,” I said. “It’s not going to start, so forget it.”

“I’ll have to stay the night.” Our breath hung in the air before us. Wind chewed at the naked branches of the trees overhead, blew snow in my face. Shaking her head in a spasm, she said: “I can’t stay in the same house with Cyril, please, John, I can’t.”

“We’ll go down to the cottage.”

The way to the cottage was completely drifted. It was the sort of night you read about people losing their way twenty yards from the safety of their homes and freezing to death in the snow. We sank almost to our knees in it, slogged onward, Paula trying to follow in my tracks. There was almost no moon, no light at all, but finally we staggered onto the small porch. “God,” she gasped. “Are we here?” Everything was becoming increasingly unreal. It was as if we’d entered another life, full of cold and death and menace, and we were very tired.

Immediately I laid fresh fires in the living room and the bedroom, poured us brandy, made sure the doors were locked. “You can sleep in the bedroom.” I got the fires going. “I’ll take the couch out here.”

“All right,” she said slowly. “I can feel those tranquilizers. They’re just creeping right up my spine, or down it.” She giggled. “You’ve got to excuse me. I’m getting punchy.” She paused. “We just found Cyril a few hours ago.” Tears streaked her cheeks. We were standing in the doorway to the bedroom and I put my arms around her and held her against me.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said. “We’re going to get it all straightened out tomorrow. It’ll stop snowing and we’ll go to town and get everything straightened out.”

“I hope so.” She turned her face to me and I kissed her softly on the mouth. Her lips were dry and she clung to me like a child. I stroked her hair. Then I told her to go to bed and I went back into the living room. The couch faced the fireplace and the room was getting pleasantly warm. I found a blanket in a closet and threw it across the couch. I went to the front door, unlocked it, peered outside at the thermometer. The reading was twenty-eight below zero and with the wind God only knew what the wind chill factor must have been. Sixty, seventy below.

I came back in, locked the door again, and went back to the bedroom door. Paula was in bed, smiling at me, covers pulled up to her chin.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She nodded slowly, slipping under the tranquilizer. “I’m all right. And thank you for being so nice to me.” Her voice was low and soft. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

I went to the chair and picked up my robe. She reached out and took my hand. “Kiss me goodnight,” she mumbled. I leaned over and brushed my lips across her cheek and she smiled, young-looking and terribly vulnerable, a woman who had been through a lot in her lifetime and had somehow not been spoiled by it, had handled it all. And my brother Cyril had loved her.

“Tomorrow we’ll take this whole thing to Arthur,” I said from the doorway, “and he’ll tell us what to do. Arthur will take care of the whole thing.” But she was asleep and couldn’t hear me.

I
N THE BRIGHT GRAY HAZE
of morning Paula and I stood in the snow and watched the men from the funeral home bring Cyril out the front door and slide him into their black van. The young men who were doing the carrying slipped in the snow with their burden, swore under their breath, cheeks and ears whipped cheery winter red by the wind. One of them came over to me, muttered something, and with stiff fingers I had to sign something. I had to shake the ballpoint pen: the ink was too cold to feed out onto the paper. Then they drove slowly away like a ship carving its way through deep breakers.

The Lincoln started on the second try. It was forty degrees below zero. I let the immense engine idle for several minutes while we went inside and finished our coffee and toast. We didn’t say much but she smiled at me rather shyly from time to time as if she was remembering last night’s kisses, not Cyril’s death.

The heater didn’t work, of course, so we huddled in the front seat and I let the 462-cubic-inch engine with its 340 horsepower slowly off its leash. It shimmied slightly in the snow and then began inching forward. It was a long way through snow that was over the bumper but as long as I held back on the gas pedal it just kept burrowing ahead, past the trees in a wide arc and on up the grade to the road. The road to town had been plowed and I accelerated just enough to send us hurtling through the barrier of piled frozen snow.

Arthur Brenner’s life was divided into halves, each of which gave him great, enduring pleasure: his office in the Cooper’s Falls Hotel, where he was a man of affairs, where he practiced law, where he wrote his articles and advised those who sought his counsel, and his home, which was where he indulged himself in the art of porcelain—the creation of porcelain sculptures, firing, painting, displaying them. I had heard him say, when questioned about his hobby, that a man with the patience and nerve and steadiness of hand to master porcelain was not an altogether inappropriate choice to lead one through the pitfalls and menaces the law sometimes held.

And, now, holding the door for us, he looked all that I had remembered and hoped for. He was a tall man of considerable girth, gray hair thinning over a broad land face, a face quick to open laughter which made him seem at times younger than his seventy years and at other times implacable and eternal. He smiled now, held out his hand to Paula, then to me. The office was comfortable: the draperies were pulled back, allowing that bright grayness into the room; the ceilings were fourteen feet and the bay window looked out onto Main Street, commanding an unobstructed view of its entire length.

He led us to a grouping of three chairs in the bay of the window and when we were both seated in the comfortable chintz-covered chairs he lowered his own 250 pounds into the third.

“Let me say first how very sorry I am about Cyril. It’s a sad homecoming, a hell of a note.” He cocked his massive head and peered at me from behind heavy-lidded eyes. “How are you? You look wonderfully well, but Doctor Bradlee tells me you were set upon and left for dead by highwaymen. Can such things be?”

I related the curious matter of the inefficient thugs and he sat massaging a close-shaven jowl, shaking his head, widening his eyes in amazement at the proper moments. He popped a match on his thumbnail and rolled a cigar on his tongue, lighting it evenly. When I finished he leaned forward and looked from one of us to the other, bushy eyebrows raised. “
Can
such things be?” He sighed. “Of course they can. Life is full of such acts of violence, meaningless, tortured, psychotic. But still … I sicken at the thought of it. Are you recovering adequately? Good. You’re a very fortunate fellow they were so sloppy in their work habits.” He blinked at me as if he were looking past me. “There’s really no excuse for your being here after such an elaborate charade.” I remembered it; it seemed for an instant to be happening again: I felt the impact, felt the Lincoln slipping away in the snow. …

Arthur was speaking again and I hadn’t been listening.

“I beg your pardon, Arthur?”

“I say, why did Cyril want you to meet him here? What was the purpose of his summons?”

“That’s what we want to talk to you about. You see, I had no idea of the purpose of any of it, none whatsoever.” Paula was looking out the window, apparently wrapped in her own thoughts, despair: I wondered if she would eventually break down from the shock and what must have been her deeply felt grief. “And I wouldn’t have known at all if I hadn’t stopped in at the library yesterday morning. Sheer coincidence. I went to the library and found Paula.”

Paula came out of her reverie without hesitation; she’d been listening after all. “And I told John two things about Cyril. I told him that Cyril and I had been lovers for years, that we had been in weekly contact for a long time no matter where Cyril had been. And I also told him why Cyril had asked him to come back.”

Arthur Brenner leaned back contentedly in the sea of chintz and lifted his right leg up onto an embroidered gout stool. His nose was red from his cold and he produced a wad of Kleenex from his sweater sleeve. He was wearing a heavy cardigan with leather buttons, a tattersall checked shirt, a heavy brown-knit tie. His whole bulk shuddered when he blew his nose and watching him I felt like a small boy again.

“And why was that, Paula?” he asked, his voice soft and reassuring. “Why had Cyril asked John to come home?”

“Because of what I found in the boxes,” she said, “boxes from the house, things that had been in Austin Cooper’s estate. You see, they’d been packed up in boxes years before, twenty or thirty years before at least, and they must have been stored away in an attic … or a basement, somewhere.” She cleared her throat, toyed with a slim silver bracelet. “Anyway, the boxes had been shipped down to the library—for the librarian to sort through them. There was nothing but magazines and books so far as anyone looking at the boxes could see. But the thing was, the librarian’s job here has always been a sort of part-time thing and instead of being sorted out and catalogued the boxes were stored away in the storm cellar beneath the library. No one ever bothered to look at them until I went down to the cellar a couple of weeks ago.”

“But, my dear,” Arthur said patiently, wheezing slightly, “what was it that you found in those boxes?” He smiled. “Surely not Austin’s old love letters.” He chuckled quietly and took Paula’s hand, hid it in his own huge hand. “That would never have been reason to come home.”

“There were diaries, Mr. Brenner, diaries of Austin Cooper’s trips to Germany, France, Spain, England, and Scandinavia during the 1920s and 1930s.”

Arthur shook his head, as if to say
not good enough.
“Well-tilled soil I should say, very well tilled, indeed.” He pulled on the huge black cigar. “Nothing else?”

“Yes, there was something else.”

“And what was it, my dear?”

“There were documents in German. I couldn’t read them, of course, but there were names—very famous names, some I didn’t know, and they were addressed to Austin Cooper. There were envelopes with seals and no stamps as if they had never been intended to go through the mails. It was all—I don’t quite know—very
official-
looking, if you see what I mean.”

Arthur raised himself slowly out of the chair and walked carefully to the window, stared down into the street. The light shifted with the movement of blowing snow but the gray glare remained. His head was wreathed in thick cigar smoke. Paula looked at me inquiringly.

“Yes, I see what you mean,” he said finally, “but I don’t understand this business of documents. You say this is why Cyril asked John to come home? Curious, I should say. Curious at the very least.”

“He laughed when I told him and then he said he thought it was funny, that life was so carefully constructed, detail upon detail. He told me I shouldn’t tell a soul. He said he’d contact John and be here in person to talk to me this week.” She smiled weakly. “He sounded so happy that he was going to be here … we’d been talking on the telephone for so many months.” Brenner turned to her expectantly. “He called me each week” she said, “from wherever he was—Cairo, Munich, Glasgow, London, and finally this last call from Buenos Aires.”

Arthur thumped his hand on the back of the chair.

“I don’t understand it. Why in the name of God would he come all the way back here, summon John all the way from Cambridge, just because you came across a bunch of Austin’s old Nazi junk? Who gives a damn about Nazis anymore, anyway?” He snorted, Kleenex at the ready. “And that solemn portentous telegram,
FAMILY TREE NEEDS ATTENTION
, now what the devil does that mean? And then he comes home secretly, goes upstairs, has a brandy, and dies. By gad, if Cyril were here I’m afraid I’d be short-tempered with him. All this obscurity!”