Walk a Black Wind

by Michael Collins

  “He went to L.A., but was nearly spotted. So he got fake Mexican papers as Raul Negra, and came to me. The police had been around to me a lot, I didn’t think they’d come again, and I owed Ralph. I gave him a job in my stockroom. But the police did come again, and Ralph decided it was too risky, and left. I haven’t seen or heard from him since—almost fifteen years. I don’t regret what I did, but I’d hidden a fugitive murderer, and I’ve been scared ever since the Crawford girl came around and then was killed.”

  He gulped at his drink. “What I did was a crime. I’ve worked too hard and long to build my business. I won’t lose it. It’s all I have.”

  “You’ve got a wife, too, but you chase women.”

  “A wife, but no woman,” Dunstan said. “Maybe that was why I helped Ralph then, too. He’d had a raw deal from a woman. But he was a man, he fought. I never could. I’ve got a good business, lots of money, a good home, but I had no luck with my woman, not even back then, and there’s nothing I could ever do about it.”

  He sat down on a bar stool. “You see, I love Grace. I always have. I want her, but she never wanted me—not the way I want her to want me. She makes a good home, a comfortable life. A good companion and hostess, and nothing else.”

  At another time I might have had something to say about his troubles, about his wife and him. But if he was telling the truth, he wasn’t important to me now. He didn’t count.

  “What did Blackwind look like then?” I said.

  “Older. His jaw had been broken, scars on his face, his hair blackened, his skin very dark to look Mexican. I barely knew him. He spoke Spanish except to me.”

  “Where did he go after he left your job?”

  Dunstan licked at his lips. “I sent him to Zaremba.”

  He didn’t look at me now. “All right, I lied. I was Zaremba’s investment counselor for ten years. I broke with him six years ago. I haven’t even talked to him since. But when he was killed too, I was scared, and I lied.”

  “Did Carl Gans know you’d sent Ralph Blackwind to Zaremba?”

  “I don’t know. I never knew what happened to Ralph, or what job Zaremba gave him. I didn’t want to.”

  “Kitchen helper, for a time at least,” I said. “What else have you lied about, Dunstan? Were you spying on Francesca?”

  “Not spying, hanging around like a hungry damned puppy. I was ashamed to tell, and scared, too.” He looked at me. “I was watching her place that night, watching for men, you know? Like a sick adolescent!”

  “Did you see any men?”

  “Yes. Around eight P.M. A tall, blond guy maybe thirty. He met her on the street in front of the building, and he went up with her. He was there over an hour. He didn’t come back while I was watching. I gave up around eleven P.M.”

  “You didn’t go up yourself?”

  “No! I swear I didn’t!”

  “Next time tell it, save yourself a week of worrying.”

  “Next time? No next time. Not for me. I know now.”

  He was right. For him, the rest would be repetition. I started for the living room door, and met Grace Dunstan on her way in. I nodded to her, but I didn’t speak. I had nothing to ask her that she would tell me.

  She put down some packages, took the drink Dunstan gave her, and they sat side by side on the bar stools. Neither of them spoke. Yet I sensed that if either of them went away, the other would crack open with emptiness. They had little together, but nothing at all apart.

  I went out to my car.

  I drove toward the city, and thought about the Dunstans. There are many kinds of marriages, and most of them not the kind made by the simple people without problems who never lived except in the shiny pages of women’s magazines. The Dunstans had no real marriage at all, yet there was something that held them together like a vise.

  I stopped at a pay booth to call John Andera’s office. He was there. I told him to meet me at my office, and he was waiting when I arrived. We went up to my office.

  “You have something to report, Fortune?” Andera said.

  His face was composed, but his hands were tense, and his cloudy blue eyes watched me like a man who wants to hear an answer, and yet doesn’t because he won’t really like it.

  “Francesca was in New York looking for her real father,” I said, and told him everything I had learned. “Did you know Ralph Blackwind, or Raul Negra fifteen years ago? Did she ask about either of them?”

  “Her real father?” he said, and that stunned look came back into his eyes, maybe thinking that Francesca hadn’t been interested in him at all, had used him. “No, I never knew any Ralph Blackwind, or Raul Negra. I’m sure. But … yes, she did mention a Raul Negra. I remember now. It was casual, you know? We were talking about minority employment, and she wondered if my company hired Mexicans. She said she knew a Raul Negra who had worked for us. I didn’t know about him.”

  “Who owns Marvel Office Equipment?” I said.

  “Two or three men.”

  “Is one of them Abram Zaremba? Or was he an owner?”

  “Yes, he had a minority interest. I never met him.”

  Abram Zaremba. The trail of Ralph Blackwind seemed to lead all around him. The trail and the murders. And if it all led to Zaremba, it led to Dresden too—or somewhere close.

  I said, “Francesca did three things—she opposed the Black Mountain Lake project in Dresden, she saw the man who killed Mark Leland, and she went looking for her real father. Two of those things seem to go straight to Abram Zaremba, and I think Mark Leland will lead to Zaremba too.

  “Her real father is a fugitive, a wanted killer, who is safe because he’s supposed to be dead. Francesca knew he was alive, and started looking for him, turning over old rocks. As far as we know, the last time he saw her was eighteen years ago when she was under three. Would he know her? Would he care if he did? A fugitive whose safety was staying ‘dead’?”

  I let Andera think about that. He thought, and he had that man-hit-by-a-train look again. “Her father? You think that’s possible, Fortune?”

  “Fear can make monsters out of even simple people, and most of us aren’t simple,” I said. “Or she could have seen more than she told the night Mark Leland was killed. She could have known something bad about the Black Mountain Lake project. I don’t know, but one of those things killed her, or maybe they’re all tied together, all really one thing.

  “They all seem to focus on Abram Zaremba, and he was killed, too. Ralph Blackwind’s trail ends at Abram Zaremba. Anthony Sasser, that businessman friend of the Crawford’s who was put on the crime commission, and who tailed me and beat me up in New York, worked with Abram Zaremba, and was close to Francesca. Mayor Martin Crawford worked with Zaremba, too. So both of Francesca’s ‘fathers’ were in Abram Zaremba’s orbit. Maybe it’s all cause and effect. No matter what killed Francesca, the chain began when she was approached by Mark Leland. He went to her because she was Mayor Crawford’s daughter, and Crawford was tied to Abram Zaremba’s scheme for Black Mountain Lake, but the result was that she learned she had a real father.”

  John Andera looked past me at the fine view of the air-shaft wall outside the one window of my office.

  “What will you do, then?” he said.

  “Report Ralph Blackwind to the police. Now that they know he’s alive, they’ll find him. I think he’ll be somewhere around Abram Zaremba’s organization. I think he’s been close to Zaremba for fifteen years. I think he’ll be found now, but I hope we’re in time.”

  “In time?” Andera said.

  “Carl Gans and Zaremba may not be the last victims. They weren’t in Dresden when Mark Leland died, and they didn’t know Francesca. If she knew more about Leland’s death than she told, someone else must have found that out and fingered her, and that someone must know who killed her.”

  “You know who?” Andera said.

  “Not yet, but I will,” I said, and said, “Then there’s Felicia Crawford. She’s following the same trail Francesca did,
and that might make her a target too.”

  Andera said, “Then you better hurry.”

  “I’ll hurry,” I said. “After I get my expenses.”

  I gave him the expense account I’d worked up on the jet from Phoenix. He paid it without asking a question, it was only padded a little. After he’d gone, I counted the money for a time. I was tired. I didn’t feel like moving. There are some cases that leave me feeling low as they inexorably unravel like a ball of yarn dropped from a tall building. Like watching a movie where a mob hangs an innocent man. You know the mob will be punished later, but what good does that do the dead man? You walk away feeling cheated. It’s all wrong.

  But I called Gazzo, told him about Arizona. He would go to work finding Ralph Blackwind. So would I.

  22.

  It was just dark when I arrived in Dresden again, and a rain had begun. A slow rain, silent and without wind, that dripped from the bare trees. The flowers around the small-time playboy Frank Keefer’s house were sodden.

  Celia Bazer answered my ring. “They’re inside,” she said.

  Her eye was still bruised, and I wanted to ask her why she stayed, but she wouldn’t really have an answer. Because we all need something or someone, and at least Frank Keefer was a good man when the lights were out, and that was better than a man who was good nowhere. She read my mind. It’s not hard.

  She touched her eye. “He’s nice most of the time. He’s always disappointed, and then I’m here, and he lets me help him. He’ll support me, and he’ll stick, even if he strays sometimes. When his schemes blow up, he runs to me. We’ve got each other.”

  They had each other, and the Dunstans had everything but. Take your choice, find the miracle of both at, once, settle for a little of each, or live alone. It usually works out.

  Frank Keefer and his uncle, Joel Pender, were in the living room. Pender watched the TV morosely, and Keefer sat alone with a beer. All the mimeographed throwaways were still piled everywhere, and the mimeograph machine was covered and dusty.

  “What happened to the throwaway scheme?” I asked.

  “We printed them wrong, no one would pay,” Keefer said, shrugged. “Joel had the wrong sale date, we were a day late getting them out. Who could use them? We spent the advances, no one’ll pay us for another try. What the hell.”

  There was no fight in Frank Keefer for the moment. Joel Pender was put together with different glue. His thin shoulders were squared where he watched TV, as if prepared to go on undaunted—something good would still come along.

  I said, “You came from out west, Pender?”

  “Wyoming. The other side of nowhere.”

  “You came here less than fifteen years ago?”

  “I forget,” he said.

  I let it go for the moment, turned to Frank Keefer.

  “You lied again about New York and Francesca, Keefer,” I said. “You met her, talked to her. You were seen.”

  He drank some beer. “Okay, I saw her. I tried once more for her, she threw me out. That’s all.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not a fool, you knew you had no chance when she dropped you up here. You went down there because you and Pender were scared of what Pender had told her when he was drunk. You’d been trying to find out where she was to be sure she wouldn’t tell where she’d found out about her real father. You were scared of what the Mayor would do.”

  I turned on Joel Pender. “You have a hold on Mayor Crawford, right? It’s what got you the city jobs. But you blurted it out to Francesca that night. What did you really tell her, Pender? Just that she wasn’t Crawford’s daughter, and who her real father was, isn’t enough to give you a hold on the Mayor.”

  Celia Bazer and Keefer watched me and Pender. Keefer looked like he was enjoying watching Joel Pender squirm now.

  I said, “I can tell Crawford you told the girl.”

  Joel Pender was a man who never gave up. In a way I had to admire the tenacity of the little man.

  “A deal? If I tell you, you keep quiet all the way?”

  “All right,” I said. I didn’t think it mattered much.

  Pender swore. “I was here long before fifteen years, more like twenty. In those days I gardened for old Emil Van Hoek. I knew Katje. She come home in 1950 with her tail down and her belly up. The Van Hoeks wanted her to stick with the Indian, make a go for the kids. Katje wasn’t having none of that, no sir. She wanted her share of the goodies. She took up with Crawford. He’d known her as a kid, but there was a big difference between a seventeen-year-old Van Hoek, and an eighteen-year-old married woman with twins. Crawford made his pitch, Katje said whoopee, but there was a problem, right?”

  “She was married, had twins,” I said. “You can get an annulment with children if you try early enough, but it wasn’t easy even then.”

  “Right, so they had to fake it and fix it all the way,” Pender said. “The Van Hoeks wouldn’t help, said they’d even fight it. That would have stopped it for sure. So Crawford moved it away to Utica, faked residence and witnesses, and fixed the judge, too. I was a witness for them. We all swore the Indian ran out on Katje before he was sent to Korea, swore he reneged on wanting kids, hinted she’d been alone long enough so the twins weren’t his. It worked, and that was my hold on Crawford. I mean, the fraud could be blown like tissue any time, all the sworn dates and facts were wrong.”

  “The Van Hoeks kept quiet after opposing it?”

  “Katje didn’t tell them until after she married Crawford. That left the Van Hoeks in a bind. If they talk, they hit Katje with fraud and bigamy. So what could they do?”

  “Why did Crawford and Katje do it? Why not wait?”

  “I figure Katje told Crawford no fun until the ring. I guess he couldn’t wait, right? I figure she was afraid he’d slip away to some eager broad in Albany. I think she was scared of the Indian, too, and didn’t want to wait and tell him she was through when he came back. I figure she thought if it was all done, she was remarried, he wouldn’t kick up a bad fuss for the reason the Van Hoeks didn’t—it would get Katje in real trouble.”

  It was a good point. A man might fight if he came home and was asked for a divorce at once. But how many young men, in reality married only a few months and separated for years, would cause trouble against a fait accompli for children they’d never known, and a woman who was already with another man? And passion makes people do many things, take risks.

  “That’s what you knew?” I said. “All of it?”

  “That’s enough,” Pender said, “especially after they used the Indian’s caper against Katje and the girls to make him keep quiet, too. The Indian could have crucified them all the way, in and out of court, if he hadn’t shot old Emil Van Hoek. I mean, he was Katje’s real husband still, right, with the annulment a fraud? Only he shot Emil Van Hoek, and that made it a felony-kidnapping, and gave Crawford the weapon to send the cops after them. When the Indian was caught, Crawford could make a deal—he’d defend the Indian, get the kidnapping charge dropped, if the Indian kept quiet about the annulment.”

  Pender reached for Frank Keefer’s beer, took a drink, wiped his thin mouth. “What would you of done? I guess the Indian didn’t care by then, and kidnapping got the chair, at least life. With him shooting old Van Hoek, the annulment fraud wasn’t going to help him if Katje swore he’d taken her and the kids by force, with a gun. So he went along, and they got all the charges dropped except the lesser one for shooting old Van Hoek. That they couldn’t drop all the way, and it sent the Indian up.”

  “You told Francesca all of that?”

  “I told her, damn me, and Frank went down to try to make sure she kept quiet about where she heard it. Crawford never wanted it to come out, even if the Indian is dead.”

  “No,” I said. “The Indian isn’t dead, Pender.”

  The dark, scrawny man blinked like an owl. “Not dead? You’re crazy. He got killed in that prison break.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s what old Emil Van Hoek told Fr
ancesca—Ralph Blackwind hadn’t been killed fifteen years ago. Blackwind had written him once, maybe feeling bad about the shooting, who knows? The old man never told until Francesca came to him with your story. It was like bowling pins, Pender. Once the first one fell, they all came down. You blew it open.”

  Pender didn’t speak. His thin face looked as if he couldn’t speak. He was thinking about Mayor Crawford, and his future, and that his drunken anger had started a chain that had led to Francesca Crawford’s death. If it had. Maybe he was thinking more about a live Indian, a real father, and a dead daughter.

  “Alive?” Frank Keefer said. “Fran was looking for him, and she knew about the fake annulment? I mean—”

  “Blackwind knew about the annulment eighteen years ago,” I said. “You’re both sure that was all Francesca knew? What did she say about her father when you saw her the day she died, Keefer?”

  “That I could get lost for good, that she’d found her real dad’s trail. She didn’t say he was alive, but she said that someone was watching her. That was why she moved in with Celia. She didn’t know who was watching her, but that businessman pal of Mayor Crawford’s, Tony Sasser, had come to talk to her.”

  “Anthony Sasser talked to Francesca in New York!?”

  Keefer nodded. “She said he came to bring her home, but she told him she was looking for her real father—that was her home.”

  “When was Sasser there? Damn it, why didn’t you tell that sooner! When was he there?”

  “Maybe a week before she got killed,” Keefer said. “And I don’t get mixed with Tony Sasser, no sir. I live here.”

  I went out of there fast.

  But before I left, I saw the look on Joel Pender’s face that told me that the uncle didn’t think that any of them were going to do much living in Dresden anymore. On my way, I passed all those piles of useless mimeographed sheets. All a day late. It would always be a day late for Frank Keefer and Joel Pender, and they lived in perpetual fear—the fear of failure.