Act of Fear df-1

by Michael Collins

  ‘This is getting to be a habit,’ the captain said. ‘A bad penny. Nobody likes bad pennies. You sure there is a Jo-Jo Olsen?’

  There was a faint edge to Gazzo’s voice. I knew that it did not mean anything. It was a reflex. I was not a visitor this time. I was a man picked up looking for a murder victim, at the scene of the crime, and the captain’s voice automatically took on the hard edge, the hint of suspicion. Gazzo could not help it, the way an old fighter cannot resist a bell.

  ‘How did the Driscoll girl die?’ I asked. ‘The lieutenant forgot to tell me.’

  I was beginning to feel like a puppet on a string. No matter what I did I ended up asking questions like a straight man in a nightclub routine. All my efforts so far had only uncovered more possible mayhem to lay at Jo-Jo Olsen’s door.

  ‘Multiple bruises and contusions that led to fatal brain damage,’ Gazzo said. ‘In other words she was knocked around by someone with heavy hands.’

  ‘There seems a lot of knocking around in this,’ I said.

  Gazzo was thoughtful. ‘No robbery, no forcible entry.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Sometime last Saturday, the M.E. says. We found her on Monday. That manager, Walsh, found her. When she didn’t show for work he called her. He got no answer so went around. At least, that’s his story. He had a key.’

  Now I knew what had been strange about Walsh. I also heard the first solid motive for murder and runout in this whole mess. One woman, two men. Classic. Only it had been the Driscoll girl after Jo-Jo, according to my reports, which made the motive fit Walsh a lot better than Jo-Jo.

  ‘Is Walsh clear?’

  The captain stared at his ceiling. ‘Who’s ever clear? He was at home with his family in Port Washington on Friday night. Early Saturday he took his boat out alone. He was out all day. Says he was cruising eastward on the sound. No one saw him he can be sure of. Stayed overnight on the boat somewhere near Port Jefferson and got home about noon on Sunday.’

  ‘He could have cruised west into the river,’ I said. ‘There’s a marina at about Seventy-ninth Street.’

  ‘That there is. He didn’t dock there, not officially.’

  ‘Nothing to stop him dropping anchor near shore.’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘How come it took so long to discover the body?’

  ‘Miss Driscoll was an oddball. A lot of men, but no real friends. There’s one girl friend, a Peggy Brandt, who lives a few blocks away. The Brandt girl tells us that Driscoll had a yen for men, so no one was surprised if she did not answer her phone on a week-end. On top of that, the Brandt girl says she called Driscoll on Saturday afternoon and got the impression that a man was already there, so didn’t call back.’

  ‘Saturday afternoon?’ I said. Jo-Jo had gone on Friday. Or had he? He had left Chelsea, but had he left the city?

  ‘How does Olsen fit in this one?’ Gazzo said.

  I explained the various leads to Driscoll. ‘Petey seemed to think she could know something. He wasn’t sure. The picture I get is that the girl was trying to marry Jo-Jo.’ I thought about it all. Pete had pretty much said that he thought Driscoll might know something. ‘Maybe someone else followed the same trail I did, Captain. Maybe they asked questions too hard.’

  ‘It has the look,’ Gazzo conceded. ‘Only someone was with her on Saturday who she knew. Guys have played hard to get before and then turned around and killed when the dame looked elsewhere.’

  I had thought of that one minute after I ran into Sergeant Doucette. ‘How come you didn’t make Jo-Jo in this before me?’

  Gazzo rubbed his stubble. ‘No names. We couldn’t find any address book or notes in her place. The Brandt girl says she never did hear the last names of most of Driscoll’s men, except Walsh. It seems that Driscoll was chasing a couple of guys with a ring in mind, but that they were ducking, so she took up with Walsh. Walsh had been after her for a while.’

  ‘No address book?’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t keep one,’ Gazzo said.

  Gazzo did not believe that either. Who would steal her address book? Some guy who wanted his name out of it. Or maybe two hoods looking for clues to where a boy was?

  ‘I like Walsh for a killer,’ I said.

  ‘So do I, but the book says I need some proof.’

  ‘How about the two who beat up Vitanza? It’s the pattern, and she knew Olsen.’

  ‘I’ve got an open mind,’ Gazzo said.

  ‘But you like Jo-Jo best?’

  The captain sighed. ‘I’ve got to like him. Motive, opportunity, and he’s on the run. You know that’s how it works most of the time. They hit, scare, and run. Maybe there’s even more to it, but it looks like he stopped on his way and belted the Driscoll girl out.’

  ‘Just because he’s on the run?’

  ‘That’s a good start, but I’ve got this too.’

  The captain held up a tiny miniature red racing car. Even from where I sat I could see that it was almost perfect in detail. There was a loop at the rear end. The loop was broken. The car was battered and scratched as if carried in a pocket a long time. It looked like a Ferrari.

  ‘You said Olsen was a bug on racing,’ Gazzo said.

  ‘Especially on Ferraris,’ I said.

  I looked at that miniature racing car. It was obviously some kind of good-luck piece. A charm, a talisman. Some luck.

  ‘It was under her body,’ Gazzo said. ‘There was also a handkerchief with bloodstains on it — and grease. Looks like he wiped her face before he knew she was dead. The handkerchief is too common to trace. A lot of cigarette butts. An empty bourbon bottle, wiped clean. Beer cans, also wiped.’

  Jo-Jo had run. Jo-Jo was a fanatic on racing cars. Jo-Jo worked around a grease pit. Bottles and beer cans did not sound like two hoods asking questions. The address book, if there had been one, was missing. That sounded like someone who knew Driscoll.

  Gazzo sighed. ‘It fits, Dan. I had no lead to Olsen, it happened way out of his neighbourhood.’

  ‘But I brought him to you,’ I said.

  ‘You’re helping him a lot,’ Gazzo said.

  I was really helping Jo-Jo. So far I had helped tie him potentially to a murder close to home and definitely tied him to a murder victim a long way from home. I was doing fine.

  ‘I’ve changed the pickup on Olsen to suspected of murder,’ the captain said.

  Chapter 11

  You go on the probable in this world, I’ve said that before. Captain Gazzo was going on the probable of what he had. From where the captain sat, it was logically Jo-Jo. But I had another seat and another factor. I had the character of Jo-Jo Olsen as it had been emerging as I went along, and in my book Jo-Jo Olsen was not probable.

  It can be misleading to talk only to a man’s friends or a man’s enemies, but no matter how I sliced the pie it still came out that Jo-Jo Olsen was not a violent type. Nothing made it probable that Jo-Jo Olsen would lose his temper over a woman. Possible of course — anything is possible — but not probable. The way it came out in my mind was that Jo-Jo might lose his temper over a racing car, but not much else. Even if he did, his reaction would not be violent.

  And violence was the key.

  I stood in the afternoon heat and sun of the city outside police headquarters and looked at the whole picture, and it was all violence. The quick and efficient violence against Patrolman Stettin. The unplanned violence of the burglar that had killed Tani Jones. The calculated violence for a purpose that had put Pete Vitanza into the hospital. The peripheral violence of Swede Olsen. The menace of violence that were my two shadows. The infinite potential of violence that was Andy Pappas. The animal violence of a Jake Roth or Max Bagnio under Pappas’ orders. Naked violence from end to end. I could not place Jo-Jo Olsen into that picture.

  But the only one connected to Nancy Driscoll was Jo-Jo.

  If my logic was to be more than wishful thinking, I needed a connection between the Driscoll girl and some other factor in the affair; o
r I had to rule her out of the case by labelling an outsider as her killer, someone who had no other connection to Jo-Jo Olsen or anyone else in this affair. Someone like Walsh. If someone outside all the other problems had killed Nancy Driscoll, then there would still be no concrete connection of Jo-Jo to any specific crime. I would be no worse off. If I could bring someone I already knew into a connection with Driscoll, I could be better off.

  There was only one place to go for an answer — the people who had known Nancy Driscoll. Maybe the police had missed something. They do miss something sometimes, although not really very often. But this time they had been asking without knowledge of Jo-Jo. I went back into headquarters and up to Gazzo’s office. I got the addresses of the Brandt woman from the captain’s pretty sergeant, on Gazzo’s okay. I went back into the heat and hailed a cab. I had two addresses for the Brandt girl. I gave the office address, since it was only afternoon, and sat back with the window open and let the wind blow against my face and tried to think of nothing.

  It did not work. It never does. My mind whispered around and around the same point — I was missing the key. I tried to think of Marty. That wasn’t hard. She was easy to think about. But my mind saw her as if in a silent movie, her body and her face moving, but the offstage voice whispering that there was a key to all this, and that I should have seen the key by now. One small, out-of-normal incident gnawed like a worm in my brain. I could not place it. And there were a host of larger hints. They talked to me, but they did not say anything. My mind was not receiving. I forced myself to think of anything.

  The wind, I thought of the wind on my face in the oven of tall buildings and crowded people that was midtown New York. It was a strong, hot wind as the taxi moved as fast as it could. Like the sirocco that had blown through a room I had tried to sleep in once near Palermo. Or the wind from the desert on a stopover I had made in Libya. There is a sobering sense of mortality in thinking about places you have been, strangers you have lived among. All things pass, and you will pass with them. There is a sadness in it, and without sadness there is no sense of life. Life is limited, and there is all the good and most of the bad. Life is arrival, departure and change, and those who never move do not live.

  The taxi driver had to turn around and tell me that we were at my address. I paid him and got out. Miss Peggy Brandt worked in the Union Carbide Building. It towered tall and glass and steel, high above Park Avenue. I went into the lower lobby and rode the escalator up to the real lobby and the elevators. I read the directory and took an express elevator to the thirty-second floor. Miss Brandt worked inside expanses of glass, chrome, leather, carpets four-inches deep, and the brittle smile of a blonde receptionist. The gorgeous guardian of the gate made me cool my heels. Miss Brandt appeared, and her face took on a shell the instant she saw me. Her eyes flickered to my empty coat sleeve. She was tall, pretty, and calm. I explained my business. She led me down a soundless hall, deep in carpet, to an empty conference room.

  ‘What do you do here, Miss Brandt?’ I asked. I was interested. It was a trick to keep her friendly, but I was interested, too. I have always been interested in women who are in the struggle between the womb and the brain. In some ways it is the war of our time, for women at least, and a lot of the time for the men too. If a woman wants only one or the other, there is no trouble — for man or woman. But if she tries for both, then the war is on, and there is a price to pay for her and for the man.

  I’m an editor,’ she said. ‘I’ve already told the police all I know, Mr Fortune.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I just wanted a better picture of Nancy. I’m looking for a murderer, and I have to know who was murdered.’

  Peggy Brandt crossed her very nice legs. She arched her back. Her breasts thrust out. I took it all in. She was not interested in me, I was much too old for the male she had in mind, but she automatically put herself on display, showed the wares, as women who still want to be the female chosen by the male always do. They were good wares.

  ‘I’ve tried to think,’ Peggy Brandt said, ‘but it’s hard. Nancy was a strange girl. No, she wasn’t strange, she was too damned usual. Have you seen her apartment?’

  I nodded. Peggy Brandt saw that apartment in her mind.

  ‘She had to have it all: the furniture, the prints, the proper place,’ the girl said. ‘Time was passing, you understand? She had seen too many movies about bright young married people. She read the women’s magazines and dreamed about living that fine, suburban life.’ There was an edge of scathing contempt in Peggy Brandt’s voice, mixed with a faint regret. She was in the war all right. Inside she must have looked like a battleground of maimed desires. ‘She was a poor girl, from a poor family out in Queens. Corona, I think. Semiskilled workers: beer and bowling, eat at the kitchen table, wear undershirts and make love in the back seat of the car. She had no skills, no career or desire for a career. She couldn’t afford the things she considered she had to have, so bought cheap imitations. The men she knew were all wrong; men like her father and brothers. When she found a man she thought would be right he never seemed to want to marry right away. The only men she met and wanted were men who had come from the same background but were fighting to get out and had ambitions and did not want to marry yet.’

  ‘Like Jo-Jo Olsen?’ I said.

  ‘Jo-Jo?’ the girl shook her pretty head. ‘I don’t know any Jo-Jo. I guess you mean this Joseph. I never knew his last name. Nancy did not talk much. I knew she had a man named Joe, younger than she. She liked him a lot, I think. You never could really tell with Nancy. I mean, the man himself wasn’t as important as the picture she had of the man and herself in a cosy marriage nest. But I think she liked him, at least she thought he was the man who could give her the life she wanted. I got the impression that he was in no hurry. She was. I never saw a girl in so much hurry.’

  I listened. Whenever we talk about someone else we are really also talking about ourselves. If you listen closely enough to what a person says about someone else, you can get a pretty good picture of what that person thinks of himself, what view of life the speaker has. Peggy Brandt was talking about Nancy Driscoll and what the Driscoll girl had wanted, but she was really considering what she, Peggy Brandt, wanted. She was wondering if she was in a hurry, or if she should be in more of a hurry. If, perhaps, she wasn’t missing something, if her career was, after all, that important.

  ‘Jo-Jo was in no hurry,’ I said, prompted. ‘He had ambitions. He was going to be a racing driver.’

  ‘Yes, Joseph liked cars,’ Peggy said. ‘Nancy used to tell me how they would live all over the world. But she couldn’t get him to marry her, I suppose. Anyway, she started dating almost anyone. She was something of a tease, I think. Girls who have only marriage on their minds often are. I don’t think they mean to tease, but they just don’t understand that love and marriage do not always go together to all people. Nancy told me of a few nasty scenes with the men she started dating.’

  ‘Any names?’ I broke in. ‘Someone who might…’

  ‘No, I told the police I never knew their names. She was bitter about this Joseph, and every day she seemed to get more anxious about getting old and not yet married to the right man to give her the good life. She did foolish things, from the little she told me. I got the impression she was trying with every man she met.’ The Brandt girl stopped. She uncrossed and recrossed her fine legs, absently rubbed her thigh. She was thinking about every man she met. ‘Then there was Walsh.’

  ‘She was his mistress?’

  The Brandt girl nodded. ‘She told me. Walsh had been after her for a long time. I don’t know, Mr Fortune, I think she sort of snapped. Inside, you know? She was in such a hurry. The men she knew were so nothing. Young boys who could give her little and did not want to marry. Walsh couldn’t marry, but he could give her something. One day she just took it, said yes to him. She said she was tired of waiting.’ She looked straight at me. ‘It’s illogical, Mr Fortune, but there is a type of woman who won’t l
et a potential husband touch her before he makes it marriage, but will sleep, at last, with a man who cannot even think of marriage.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  It was an old and sad story. A nice and proper young virgin who is lonely, anxious, in a hurry. She wants not a man but marriage — and she wants a man, too. She is bored, feels empty, cheated. Somehow she cannot make love to a man who might marry her before they are married. It’s a block in her. Then she meets a man who cannot marry her, who only wants her for sex and adventure, and all her desires come out without the check of possible marriage. It becomes a paradox. She has an impregnable barrier deep inside against passion without marriage, and it takes a strange twist because suddenly marriage does not exist, cannot happen, and the need becomes naked without the barrier. Her barrier is against passion before marriage. Without the potential of marriage, suddenly there is only passion.

  ‘Do you think Walsh killed her?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Fortune. Who knows what happened between them? He came to her apartment. She went on trips on his boat. She even went on business trips with him sometimes. It was strange, but the way she talked about Walsh I had the feeling that she separated her life with him from her pursuit of a husband. A man might not understand that.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me anything more about that Saturday?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said ‘A girl like Nancy doesn’t confide much. She lives in a kind of dream world. Every male was a goal, every female a rival.’

  ‘What about a woman?’ I said. ‘As the killer?’

  ‘I think I’m about the only woman she knew.’

  ‘Mrs Walsh?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Mr. Fortune.’