The Wind Chill Factor (8 page)

“The point is,” I said, “that we don’t know why he decided to come back, nor why he asked me to come back. We know certain facts but we don’t know the one big fact:
why
.”

He slowly levered himself down into the chair. Except for a flareup of gout, Arthur Brenner did not seem an old man.

“You know as well as I do that Cyril Cooper was never capricious, Arthur. If he wanted me back here, well then he had a perfectly good reason. The problem is that we have not been able to figure it out.”

Paula looked at me, then at Brenner, touched the huge safety pin on her blackwatch kilt. “Cyril knew something we don’t know, then.”

“Of course he did, my dear,” Arthur said. “He knew why the devil
he
came back—which is everything at this point. Well, there’s the will,” Arthur said, changing the subject. “Fairly simple, really, John. You get it, most of it. Several million dollars, my boy, and what do you think of that?” A smile split the broad face and his eyes glistened. “You see, there was no one else to leave it to … although, and I thought it odd until this morning, there was one other substantial bequest.” He fixed Paula with those pale blue eyes. “One-quarter of a million dollars for you, my dear.” As I watched him I saw that there were tears welling up in his eyes. Quickly he snuffled and blew his nose, furtively wiping them from the corners of his eyes. The Coopers were his family.

Finally, Paula began to sob quietly, her fingers clenching and working in the kilt. As for myself, I had not quite taken in the fact that I was suddenly a multimillionaire. The whole thing seemed faintly absurd. It was Cyril’s money; the family’s had been mostly wrapped up in foundations.

“Well, I suppose we’d better take a look at those damned documents,” Arthur said grimly. “Damned nonsense and a waste of time.” He sighed. “But I can’t see what else there is to do, can you, John?”

“No, I can’t. We’re going to have to look at the damned papers.” I hated it, the thought of prying into Austin Cooper’s Nazi world. I hadn’t realized how much I hated it all, but as I sat there in the chintz, it hit me, waves of revulsion. What had Austin Cooper’s peculiar political preferences to do with me? But there it was. In the end you never escaped your past. It lay in wait for you, somewhere in your future.

Arthur looked at his watch, went slowly to the desk, and consulted his calendar. “I have an appointment at one o’clock and I will certainly want a nap after that. What do you say to five o’clock, Paula? John, you could perhaps stop by here at four thirty and we could go to the library together. Paula?”

“Yes, I’ll be at the library. … I think Cyril would have wanted us to turn to you.” She had dried the tears. I was very happy that Cyril had left her some money. At least, she would never have to worry about money again.

We left Arthur together and in the lobby I heard someone call my name. When I turned, the fellow behind the desk smiled obsequiously at a Cooper boy and said that there was a call for me.

It was Olaf Peterson.

“How’s the head, Mr. Cooper?”

“All right,” I said noncommittally.

“Well, that’s good to hear. We’d hate to lose another Cooper. You’re the last of the Coopers, you see, the very last one.”

“Did you want something, Mr. Peterson?”

“Well, yes, I did. I’d like you to stop by my office over here in the courthouse. We’ve gotten an autopsy report and I think you’ll find the results, ah, diverting.” There was a grin implied in his voice. The man had no sense of decency.

“Diverting, Mr. Peterson?”

“More than a little. Why don’t you come on over now and I’ll buy you lunch, how’s that?”

“All right,” I said.

Paula and I were walking down the steps to the Lincoln, which still stood in the No Parking zone, against the growing drift. I told her what Peterson had said and she sucked in her breath. “Murder.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” I said lamely.

I drove slowly through the veil of snow until I reached the library, standing like something from an Ingmar Bergman film.

Impulsively I leaned across the cold space between us and touched Paula’s face, turning it to mine, and kissed her again. She didn’t move away.

“I like kissing you,” I said.

“It’s all my money,” she said.

“No, no, I don’t believe it is.”

“Well, I like kissing you, too. It must be the Cooper charm. I’ve had the full course, John.”

She finally moved away to get out of the car. “It’s very strange, kissing you like this. It doesn’t seem quite real.”

“I know,” I said, “but there it is.”

“You know when we were trying to figure out why Cyril came back? Up in Arthur’s office?’

“Yes?”

“Well, I had a theory about it, too.” She laughed reticently. “I thought maybe I was the reason he came back.”

I didn’t know what to say.

She squeezed my hand.

“See you at five o’clock.” Then the door slammed and she was swallowed up by the snow.

P
ETERSON’S OFFICE WAS ON THE
second floor of the old frame courthouse. Inside, the dry wooden floor creaked noisily underfoot and the radiators hissed and pounded. Snow-soaked overcoats hung on a rack in the front entry. A typewriter clacked away in some records office. Stepping into the hallway, I felt as if I’d entered a tomb.

A middle-aged woman sat at a desk in the anteroom to Peterson’s office. Half a sandwich lay on wax paper beside her typewriter. I could smell hot coffee. Like most people in Cooper’s Falls the woman was vaguely familiar.

“Oh, Mr. Cooper,” she said. “Mr. Peterson is expecting you. He asked me to find out if you wanted a turkey sandwich or a meatloaf sandwich and how you wanted your coffee.” She grinned expectantly like a woman of good heart who had at one time many years before tried to teach Cyril and me to dance.

“Turkey, cream, and sugar,” I said and walked on into Peterson’s office. He was sitting in a swivel chair behind his desk with his feet up on the windowsill. It was stuffy in the room; the radiator was gurgling, sounding as if it needed a Bromo. Peterson was wearing a navy blue turtleneck and his concession to fashion was making him sweat. He was staring out the window at the snow and a copy of Dashiell Hammett’s
The Glass Key
lay open in his lap.

“You know, Cooper,” he said without looking at me, “this kind of a storm, this really brutish kind of a storm, does funny things to my mind. Do you know what I mean?” He glanced up and grinned, then let his face collapse into seriousness. “I look at all the snow and it makes me realize how insignificant men are in the face of a storm like this. I wonder how important it is to find the person who murdered your brother—what in hell difference does it really make, anyway? We’ll all be dead soon enough anyway.”

“Murdered,” I said.

He nodded. He fumbled for a cigar and didn’t have one. “Alice,” he called, “do I have any cigars out there?”

“Not unless you brought some in this morning,” she answered.

“Ah, Christ.” He sighed. “Did you tell Alice what you wanted for lunch?”

“Yes. I thought you were taking me out.”

“Not in this weather, Cooper,” he said, rubbing his deep-set eyes and swiveling around to his desk, which was cluttered with folders, envelopes, papers. “You’d have to be crazy to go outside in this weather.”

“You said something about murder.”

“Indeed I did. Your brother was poisoned, very painlessly, with a nicotine derivative of some kind. I know very little of forensic medicine. I just believe what they tell me. But somebody did for him, just about the time you were getting there.” He shuffled papers, regarding the mess. “I was quite right about the brandy.” He caught my eye, ran his finger around inside his turtleneck. “Very little brandy did your brother drink. Ergo, somebody else did.”

I sat mute.

“Curious little thing,” he mused. “Damn! I wish I had a cigar. You don’t happen—no, you’re a pipe smoker, aren’t you? Well, it looks very much like whoever killed your brother—and, of course, he could have poisoned himself but that seems somewhat far-fetched—drank some brandy with him, administered the poison, and then cleaned up.”

Alice appeared with a plastic tray and our lunch, set it on the clutter between us, and left quietly.

“You recall our little trip to the kitchen last night?”

I nodded.

“And what did I show you?”

“Brandy snifter and some garbage.” Fighting my irritation at his insufferable bloody ego, I fixed my eye on a team picture of the Minnesota Vikings hanging on the wall. There was another photograph of a huge black head and the top of a football shirt and it was inscribed “To Olaf Peterson from his friend Alan Page.”

“Right, brandy snifter and some garbage. Now—go ahead, eat your sandwich, won’t hurt you. Won’t taste very good, but it isn’t poisoned, anyway. Now—that brandy snifter had caught my eye when I looked in the cupboard because all the other glasses were covered with dust. You see? Only the brandy snifter was dust-free—it had obviously been washed. Which tended to confirm my theory that your brother had not drunk all that brandy himself.”

He bit into his own turkey and lettuce sandwich and washed it down with some coffee, making a loud sipping sound.

“As I’ve said, this is the fun part, Cooper, all this theorizing and what not. This is where I excel. I hate to chase people, shoot at them, arrest them. God! Awful stuff for a man to do. Well, anyway, there was that little bit of garbage, too—cigar butt and ashes. We found cigars in your brother’s coat pocket, so they’re no lead for us, but obviously he didn’t smoke two cigars, then run downstairs and empty them into the trash. That would be hard to believe, don’t you see?

“So there was someone up there in the bedroom with your brother, someone who drank some brandy, tried to conceal the fact that he’d been there by removing his brandy glass and washing off any offending fingerprints and by emptying the contents of the ashtray—two rather feeble attempts, but then whoever it was had no reason to think anyone would question the cause of death.”

He was right. The turkey sandwich tasted like cardboard but I didn’t mind because I was worried about the blisters in my mouth from the hot coffee. Peterson’s attitude made it difficult to remember that we were talking about my brother. I fished in my pocket for the bottle of painkillers Doctor Bradlee had given me for my head. I asked him if he had any water and he summoned Alice.

“Head still bothering you?”

“Yeah, it aches a little.”

“It’s the tension. But you ought to have an X ray just in case. Damn head injuries can come back on you, days, weeks, months later. I got shot in the head once and I had attacks of nausea for a year.”

Alice arrived with the water in a paper cone that was beginning to leak. “Hurry,” she said, “or you’ll get all wet.” The water, of course, was warm.

“I just spoke with Brenner,” Peterson said. “Tells me that you’re all of a sudden a millionaire.” He smiled.

“I understand you know that feeling.”

“Oh, very nice, Cooper. Touché. But there’s one big difference in my newfound wealth and yours.”

“And what’s that?”

“Mine didn’t make me a murder suspect.”

I grimaced. “Think of my head, remember the tension theory.”

“I’m serious.”

“I don’t give a good goddamn how serious you are, Peterson, I really don’t.”

“You told me you didn’t kill your brother. Now I’ve got to figure out something else.”

“I’ll bet you’re going to tell me.”

“Are you a liar?”

I laughed because there was little else to do.

“Look at it from my point of view. I have no idea of your relationship with your brother, maybe you hated him, maybe he was a son of a bitch, how should I know? But I do know your family has a bunch of Nazis and God only knows what else skulking around in the closet.”

“One Nazi,” I said.

“And I do know that you were in the house when your brother was very probably murdered. I do know that his will left a fortune to you and I do know that that makes you one very logical suspect.”

“I can’t argue with that except to say that I didn’t do it.”

“I know, I know, you probably didn’t, but you see my predicament? You see what I’ve got to work with here?”

I put the sandwich down, drank some coffee, and stood up.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said patiently. “I have to talk about my problems, I’m compulsive about it. Never got around to getting a shrink but too compulsive to shut up. Drives my wife crazy. She’s a psychologist. Anyway, sit down and stop looking insulted. It’s sure to get worse.”

He searched through his desk drawers and found one of his thin cigarettes and popped a gold Dunhill lighter, exhaled, and leaned well back.

“Now, of course, there are other possibilities. Have you considered the fellows who waylaid you on the highway? I can’t begin to make any connections between what happened to you and what happened to your brother—except the obvious ones. You
are
brothers and you were both victims of violence within a twenty-four-hour period, give or take a couple of hours. But there are some mighty imposing obstacles in our path, like who could have known you were coming home and like what is there common to you and your brother which would make anyone want to kill both of you? I thought about it all right, and I didn’t get anywhere.
No where.
There are just too many things I don’t know.” He shook his head, puzzled by the effort he had apparently expended without result. “We don’t know why your brother came back! That’s what’s so irritating. We don’t know why he wanted you here. And we don’t know why he was in Buenos Aires. I asked Brenner about that. He said he knew of no interests your brother had in Buenos Aires, or anyplace else in South America.”

“I don’t have the foggiest,” I said. “I don’t know anything about his business life. Only that he traveled a lot, all over.”

“Like where did he travel?”

“Cairo. Munich. Glasgow. London. All over. Everywhere. He had lots of deals going on. Work was his pleasure, his holiday. It was a good life and he lived it very well.”

“Cairo. Munich. Glasgow. London.” He was disgusted. “Alice,” he yelled, “will you please get this garbage out of here!”