Walk a Black Wind

by Michael Collins

  “Five-eighty West Ninety-fourth. That’s at Riverside.”

  It was a long drive, but it would take longer to get a taxi at this hour. I went back to the garage, ransomed my car, and drove up in the night past the Park that was bare and still in the prewinter cold, the people hurrying as the temperature dropped unseasonally and caught them.

  The building at Ninety-fourth and Riverside Drive was an old graystone apartment from the last century. It was not where I would have expected Carl Gans to live. There was a reserved, muted class to the building, and its lobby, was as clean as a Dutch housewife’s doorstep. Gans had apartment 4-D. I rode up in a lumbering old elevator, and wondered even more about Gans living in such a quiet building. Somewhere inside the bouncer was a man who wanted a solid, quiet life among successful, educated people. Because a man has only muscles to earn a living, it doesn’t mean that somewhere inside he can’t have a wish to be something else.

  Apartment 4-D was at the far end of the first cross corridor. I was halfway down the corridor when the shots came from ahead. Three shots, the noise amplified by the solid walls. The door to 4-D was ajar. I began to run, bringing out my old pistol.

  I stopped running—my pistol wasn’t there. I had left it in my bag in the car. I swore at myself and my crazy dislike of guns. But I didn’t swear hard. With a gun, I might have charged into 4-D, a perfect target for a killer who heard me coming. Without a gun, I went on carefully. I might lose time, and lose the killer, but that was better than losing the whole game—the only game I had, my life.

  I pushed the door all the way open slowly. No one shot. The apartment was dark as I went in. I heard a faint sound somewhere at the rear. I walked through as silently as I could, feeling naked without a gun. The rear service door in the kitchen was open. I went out to the back landing with my stomach in my toes. I listened, and heard nothing at all.

  That scared me. I had heard a sound, and now I heard nothing. Was someone close and silent, breathing hard but slow, waiting with a gun? I moved to the stairs through air that felt like a heavy wall.

  Far below there was a faint sound—a door closing somewhere at the bottom of the service stairs. My quarry was gone. My stomach got lighter. I was some detective. A man with a gun had just escaped me, and I felt good. There’s no exhilaration for me in danger, and when I’m let off the hook, I’m happy.

  I went back inside, and found Carl Gans on the floor of a dark room hung with framed photos of fighters he had known. There was almost no blood. His chest oozed a little blood from three small holes no larger than a pencil. A .25- or .22-caliber gun. Bullets that size could hit a man ten times and cause no real damage. I kneeled down.

  “Gans? Who was it? Can you hear me?”

  He breathed hoarsely, blood liquid in his throat, but he breathed. I smelled the whisky—a lot of whisky. His single glass stood on a table beside a bottle. He had been drowning his loss of Zaremba. It explained how he had been surprised in his own apartment.

  “Gans?” I said.

  His eyes were closed. He didn’t open them. He was in some other world, facing what neither of us could know, but already gone from this world where men like me asked questions and worried about who had shot him.

  His lips barely moved as if he didn’t want to make any movement. “Dark. Behind me. No face. Shot.”

  His voice was oddly clear, firm in its light, hoarse way, and still faintly slurring with the whisky in him. He didn’t ask who I was. That made no difference to him now.

  His lips moved, “Raul Negra. She asked about Negra. The Crawford kid, Raul Negra. October, fifty-seven. October tenth, fifty-seven. October tenth, fifty-seven. October—”

  His breathing became irregular, with long and short gaps. I waited for the next breath. It didn’t come. He died without a sigh or a cough.

  I stood up and went to call Captain Gazzo.

  Gazzo sat in Carl Gans’s lighted living room. I had told him all I’d learned. He already knew about my client. He was letting that pass. His men worked over Gans and the room.

  “Gans worked for Abram Zaremba a long time,” I said. “Now they’re both dead. Gans was one of the men Francesca made a play for in New York. I came to ask questions. Maybe someone didn’t want Gans to answer any questions. He was the last stop on her search for her father—maybe. Unless maybe Zaremba was. Maybe a lot of things. We don’t know enough yet.”

  “Ralph Blackwind,” Gazzo said. “I don’t get many Indians, only those Mohawks over in Brooklyn when they go on a spree. So now we go through it again, check them all out: Harmon Dunstan, his wife, your client, the Bazer girl, the Crawfords, Frank Keefer, Joel Pender, the lot. Jonas’ll be busy.”

  “Don’t forget Anthony Sasser and Carter Vance.”

  “I won’t forget them. What about my missing month?”

  “Somewhere out west, I think,” I said. “She had Indian jewelry when she had nothing else. Fifteen years is a long time, but the answer, for her and for us, has to be where Ralph Blackwind started. The beginning of the trail that led her to New York. Auburn Prison should have the information. Where he came from, his past.”

  “I’ll get after it,” Gazzo said. “Any guesses, Dan?”

  “None. I’m charging down blind trails. At least there are some trails now.”

  The M.E. came up. “Three shots in his chest. Two knicked the heart. Bad luck. Could have missed just as easy, and then all he’d have had was an itch. Short range, a .22-caliber, probably a vest-pocket or purse gun. The bullets are still in him, no power to go through. Two look in fine shape. Just find the gun to match, and you’ve got your man. Have fun.”

  The M.E. wasn’t callous, only experienced. A man who lives where death delights every day has to find a way to stay working for his money. He walked away to tell his men to take the body, and Captain Gazzo stood up.

  “I’ll call when I have word,” Gazzo said to me.

  It was a dismissal. Gazzo wanted to get his mind back to the slow, tedious routine that solves most cases. I didn’t think it would solve this one. Neither did he. He looked at his men who were working on the room without much hope.

  I went down to my car, and drove home. When I got there, I tried calling Marty again. No answer. It had been a lonely two weeks for me. I cooked myself some dinner—hamburger and peas with too much bread. Then I went to bed. The drug, my bruises, and the bullet furrow in my head had caught up to me.

  I lay thinking of Marty, and of Felicia Crawford out in the night somewhere, but there was no profit in any of that. So I thought of Muriel Roark and her muscular dancer’s legs up in Dresden. It was a nice thought to sleep on.

  19.

  The telephone woke me up. The sun was up, and the wind from my open window was almost warm. October weather—winter and spring coming and going in autumn.

  “Fortune,” I said into the receiver, wishing for the ten-millionth time that I had two arms and could get a cigarette while holding a phone without the contortions I had to go through one move at a time, the phone tucked under my chin.

  “Gazzo, Dan. Got a pencil and paper?”

  I gave up on the cigarette, got the pencil and paper.

  “Go ahead, Captain,” I said.

  “Ralph Blackwind was born at the Pine River Agency, Pine River, Arizona, on July 12, 1929. Lived there until he went into the army in April 1950. Want the prison report?”

  “I’d like to hear the official version, yes.”

  “Convicted of assault-with-intent-to-murder, December 1953, sent to Auburn. Difficult prisoner, bad record of fights. He escaped with three others in October 1956. A prison guard was killed. Two prisoners were killed, one apprehended fast, but not Blackwind. The surviving prisoner stated Blackwind was drowned in a lake. No body found at first, intensive all-states manhunt continued for months without any trace of Blackwind. Body finally located in lake that matched Blackwind every way that could be matched. Search for him continued less intensively for two more years. Declared officially dead
in 1959.”

  I was silent, “It sounds pretty convincing.”

  “Yeh, it does, but you never can be sure without a positive body all the way,” Gazzo said. “At the time of his escape, his known relatives were his father, Two Bears Walk Near, at the Pine River Agency; a brother, John Two Bears, also Pine River Agency; and a sister, Woman Of Two Bears, Pine River Agency. They were all checked out and watched. His friends too.”

  “Where is Pine River?”

  “In southeast Arizona. Nearest town is Fort Johns, about six hundred people strong. Nearest big cities are Flagstaff, and Gallup, New Mexico. Phoenix is the only real city near, after that it’s covered wagons. The Agency itself is a small reservation, maybe two hundred people on a lot of land. Apache, the Indian people say, but they admit the names sound more like Navajo.”

  “What about our suspects and Carl Gans’s killing?”

  “Most of them have no alibis. Only Anthony Sasser, and I wonder about him. He was close to Zaremba, stands to cash-in on Zaremba’s holdings, and has the only real alibi. Not even your client, John Andera, has one this time. We’ll follow up.”

  His voice wasn’t optimistic. Somehow, a big piece was missing—the key piece. Maybe it was out in Arizona.

  “I guess I take a jet,” I said.

  “Take your snake-bite kit, too,” Gazzo said, and hung up.

  Now I had my cigarette. I didn’t want to go to Pine River, or even to Phoenix. I’m a city man. But I called, and got a seat on a jet that left for Phoenix in two hours.

  We’re a homogeneous nation now, and Phoenix has culture and country club suburbs where the middle-class rich throw parties just like those of East Orange or Bridgeport. The automobile began the homogenizing, the movies carried it ahead, and the jet and TV completed the process. The rough pattern of misshaped grits we used to be is smoothed into a thin gruel from one end of the bowl to the other, sugared by comfort.

  I went right out on a smaller plane to Flagstaff, and hired a car there. I drove out east along route 66, and the difference came to meet me. Outside Phoenix the land was still there—the “west” they know even in Vladivostok. A dry land of buff-and-red-ocher color with its wiry gray brush; the long, flat mesas; the red cliffs; the high blue sky bleached almost white by the sun. You could still imagine the yipping bark of the Cheyenne and Apache riding down on the wind and dust. A strong wind, blowing the dust, and a feeling of winter that would pile snow like a sheet of lava here. A snow that would isolate the Indians and ranchers for months sometimes, and only their knowledge, and today the helicopter, would keep them alive. A barren, dead land where no one should live, and our largesse to the Indians. If it could grow even grass, we’d steal it.

  I turned off on highway 77, and then onto a blacktop county road through the one-street town of Fort Johns, and finally into the town of Pine River that didn’t even have a street. It was a ragged double row of adobe shacks and hogans along the blacktop road. Dry dirt yards were littered with pieces of broken machines and cast-out appliances. There was a flat-roofed adobe restaurant festooned with signs, and a single one-pump gas station facing it across the highway. The blacktop road led straight as an arrow between the shacks, and vanished into a completely empty distance.

  I parked at the restaurant. Indians sat against its walls. They wore jeans, sheepskin jackets, and broad-brimmed white stetsons—all identical except for their boots. Behind the restaurant some Indian women sat in a circle, wearing the voluminous, decorated Indian dresses with long, full skirts. Two younger girls stood apart from them wearing jeans and shirts like the men. The older women ignored them.

  Inside the restaurant two men ate at a long counter, both Indians. The woman behind the counter was also Indian.

  “I’m looking for the Pine River Agency,” I said.

  “Why?” she said.

  “I want to find a man named Two Bears Walk Near.”

  “He’s an old man. He might be dead. I don’t know.”

  “I’ll find out,” I said.

  “You’re looking for the two women? Only one of them’s there now. The other left.”

  “How do I get there?” I said.

  “Two Bears Walk Near is very old. A chief, if we had any chiefs anymore. You want his son, John Two Bears.”

  “I want Ralph Blackwind,” I said.

  She wiped her hands on the old skirt she wore. “You go a mile south, a gravel road to the left. Two miles in is the trading post.”

  One of the men who had been eating got up and went out without paying. I followed him out. The Indian crossed the highway to the gas station and went inside the office. I got into my rented car, and drove the mile to the gravel road. A battered sign read: Pine River Agency.

  The gravel road rattled my teeth all the way. It was full of holes and boulders I had to drive around. It wound down through deep arroyos until there was no more sign of the highway behind me, or of any life I knew. I was back in another century. Smoke seemed to rise out of the rocks themselves in the distance, no buildings in sight. Until I came over a rise and saw a rocky valley on the banks of a dry river bed. There was a rambling adobe building with a sign: Trading Post, Pine River Agency. A few smaller adobe shacks, and some hogans, were scattered up the slopes of the valley with a few pinto ponies and two good horses wandering among them.

  I parked and went into the trading post. A tall Caucasian sat at a desk behind a store counter. He was alone, and I realized that I had seen no one in the whole small valley.

  “I’m looking for Two Bears Walk Near,” I said.

  “He’s old,” the man said without turning.

  He was adding a column of figures. They didn’t seem to add to what he wanted, so he began to add them again.

  “Also Ralph Blackwind,” I said.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  “I usually am, but I try.”

  He turned and looked me over. “Good for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Did Ralph Blackwind ever come home?”

  “Naturally,” he said. “An Indian always comes home to the land.”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  “Their spirits return,” he said.

  He hadn’t even looked at my missing arm. He turned back to his column of figures, began to add them again.

  “Where do I find Two Bears Walk Near? I know he’s an old man. It’s all right.”

  “You listen,” he said.

  “Then say something,” I said, as two people walked in the trading post door. A man and a woman.

  He was a small Indian with long hair held by a hair-band. Perhaps twenty-four, he wore the same Levi’s, jacket and cowboy boots. The woman also wore jeans, but the kind from Saks-Fifth, and her sheepskin jacket was too big for her: Felicia Crawford. Now I knew what that Indian in Pine River had done in the gas station office—called them here at the agency.

  “Hello, Felicia,” I said.

  “This is Paul Two Bears,” Felicia said. “My cousin.”

  “Dan Fortune,” I said, and held out my hand.

  He didn’t take it. “You had a long trip,” he said.

  “Not if I get some answers,” I said.

  Felicia said, “Francesca was here for two weeks that first month, Mr. Fortune. She told me in her first note. Just that it was wonderful here, a great moment, she knew who we were. So I came to see.”

  “That’s all she said? All you knew? Not about your father?”

  “Not then, no.”

  “Now you know,” I said. “What else did Francesca learn?”

  The young Indian, Paul Two Bears, said, “She talked to my grandfather. He says he’ll talk to you too. Come on.”

  I followed them out. The man at the desk was still adding his column of figures. I had the feeling that he would sit and add all winter until he got the answer he needed, or until the answer was so obsolete it could be forgotten. He didn’t look discouraged. He sat back, lighted a cigarette, and considered what to do next to make the figures add
to what he needed.

  Paul Two Bears and Felicia led me down a worn path, and across the dry river bed. Nothing grew anywhere. The only animals were the horses. There were no electric lines, no gas pipes, and the only telephone line reached the trading post and stopped there.

  “Is there ever water in the river?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” Paul Two Bears said.

  Felicia said, “When the white ranchers upriver open their dams because they have too much water. The whole river is dammed, the ranchers own the water. They’ll kill any man who tries to get it from them, make them share with the Indians.”

  “How many Indians are there here?”

  “In the area, thousands,” Paul Two Bears said. “On the Agency just two hundred and ten. It’s all ours.”

  He laughed as he waved an arm to encompass the whole, barren countryside, and we climbed the opposite bank. The trail wore up over the rim of the valley, and down again into a narrow arroyo where three hogans clustered. We went into the middle hogan. An old man sat on rugs against the rear wall.

  “This man has come to talk, Grandfather,” Paul Two Bears said to the old man.

  The old man was short and heavy. His dark brown eyes were alert in a face incredibly wrinkled and creased with ridges that looked as hard as rock. His face was the color of wet leather. He watched me with his lively eyes.

  “About what you told my sister,” Felicia said, and added, “Grandfather.”

  The word was awkward on her lips, strange to her, but eager, too. The old man smiled at her, and spoke to me:

  “What I told her was for her.”

  He had a soft, clear voice with no real accent. An educated voice. He was dressed in older Indian clothes as if he had spent his life here, but his voice had been other places. I guessed that he was very old, as everyone said.

  “She’s dead,” I said. “I want to find who killed her.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “To know that the person won’t kill anyone else.”

  The old man thought about it. “She was my granddaughter. It’s good to find a granddaughter at my age. This one here is also my granddaughter. She is alive. Is there danger for her?”