Walk a Black Wind

by Michael Collins

Celia Bazer had a fear too—the opposite fear. It was there in her eyes—the fear that Frank Keefer might lose his fear, that he might succeed some day. He was hers only in his failure, the failure her only insurance that he would always need her.

  My fear was Anthony Sasser.

  23.

  The Crawford mansion was alight through the trees in the steady rain. I parked in front. A maid opened the door, took me into the living room. The Crawfords were there, both of them—Katje Crawford in a dark red slack suit that suited her lean body, and Crawford drinking.

  “Felicia was here,” Crawford said. “She told us.”

  “Is she still here?”

  “No. She went to a motel with that young Indian,” he said, and shook his head. “It’s almost impossible to believe.”

  I said, “That Ralph Blackwind’s alive after you both tried to bury him eighteen years ago?”

  Katje Crawford sat up straight. “He attacked us. He almost got the girls killed. He shot my father. I had a right to my own life. We had made a mistake, he should have seen that. Instead, he went crazy, and afterwards Martin defended him, got him less punishment than he deserved.”

  “You cut him out of your big life like a wart,” I said. “The annulment was a cheat and a fix. Crawford had the money and power to do it. You fixed everyone, but Blackwind came home, and you had to fix him somehow. Your hands were dirty, and he could sink you, but you were lucky—he did a stupid trick, and he shot your father. So Crawford made a deal. Some deal! You got silence and your fine, rich life, and Blackwind got ten-to-twenty years in prison! A kid who’d just spent two years in a prison camp, was half out of his mind, couldn’t take more prison so flipped and made a break, killed a guard, and finished himself. Only he fooled you, he didn’t die.”

  Crawford was up, pacing, and I saw that ineffectuality in him again. There was a kind of anguish in his fleshy face, as if he was seeing himself eighteen years ago, younger and running fast with ambition.

  “He didn’t care, Fortune,” he said. “I made the deal, yes, and it wasn’t fair, but he didn’t care, and what else could I do? I remember he said, ‘Katje wants you, not me. That’s it. Take her.’ Could I let it all ruin everything we had, all we would be? The children too? I swear to you that I got him the lightest sentence anyone could have under the circumstances. He’d shot Emil Van Hoek, almost killed him.”

  Katje Crawford smoothed her slim red slacks. Her face was like stone, and yet there was conflict in her eyes, as if she was remembering not only the trouble eighteen years ago, but also those good months in New York over twenty years ago.

  “He talked about the communal ranch we would build out in Arizona by getting water from the white ranchers,” she said. “He wanted to take me to that wilderness of snakes. Sometimes a person doesn’t know what he or she wants until suddenly the choice is there. I realized I wanted Dresden, with all the comfort and privileges that meant. When I found I was pregnant, I was doubly sure. My children raised in a hogan among lizards? No!”

  I said, “The girls you were so close to? Never too busy with your privileges to mother them?”

  She took a cigarette from another of her jade boxes, lit it. “We don’t always know how things will turn out, Mr. Fortune, and don’t judge me! I corrected a mistake, and I needed the annulment to make sure of Martin. I wanted to marry at once, settle it, and that annulment bound us together even more—we were both guilty of fraud and bribery. What happened later wasn’t our fault.”

  “No, he played into your hands,” I said. “He was a violent man, and he probably still is. Maybe more violent now. You must have been really scared when you found out he was alive, and maybe not so far away.”

  “Afraid? Why?” Katje Crawford said. “If he is alive, he hasn’t come near us for fifteen years. Why would he now?”

  Crawford said, “We didn’t know he was alive until Felicia told us tonight. How could we have known?”

  “Because Anthony Sasser found Francesca in New York a few weeks ago, and she told him.”

  “Sasser?” Martin Crawford said. “Found Francesca?”

  “He talked to her. She told him she was looking for her real father, so you had to know then that Blackwind was alive.”

  “No,” Crawford said. “Sasser never told us. No.”

  The big Mayor looked at his wife. Katje Crawford stared back at him with a kind of shock, immobile for a moment.

  “He didn’t tell me,” she said.

  I said, “You didn’t send him to find her?”

  “No,” Crawford said, “why would we? She was an adult.”

  The implication didn’t have to be said, but I said it:

  “Then he had his own reasons.”

  I let the words sink into them, and then I said, “Felicia might know all that Francesca knew. Some of it, anyway. What motel is she in right now? How far?”

  “The Delaware Motel,” Martin Crawford said. “Not far.”

  Katje Crawford stood up. “I’ll find Tony, talk to him. I’ll find out.”

  She started from the room before I could move. She walked fast with her athletic stride, and was gone before I realized what she was doing. I began to go after her.

  “Let her go,” Martin Crawford said.

  The pistol in his hand wasn’t small. It was a Colt Agent, a pocket .38 with a two-inch barrel and a lot of power.

  “Let her go to Sasser,” Crawford said. “She’ll find out, or stop him, or whatever has to be done. Only her, Fortune.”

  He sat down slowly in a big antique chair, the pistol still steady on my chest. I remembered the first time I had met Anthony Sasser in Dresden—when he had been alone in this big house with Katje Crawford while Crawford was at a meeting.

  “They’re lovers?” I said. “Your wife and Sasser?”

  “Yes,” Crawford said. “I’ve known for some time. He’s younger, stronger, and he’ll go farther than I will. In a way he almost runs the city now, I really work for him. She’s been bored with public life for some time. Tony is much more exciting—in business and in private.”

  “She gets what she wants?” I said.

  “Usually,” Crawford said, his voice toneless as if he didn’t much care. “There are two basic kinds of women, Fortune. One kind wants ‘male’ attention, needs to have a man want her. She wants his ‘maleness,’ and she’s likely to end up with a hard life. Those women marry the dreamers, the searchers, the wanderers who follow their own destiny all the way. Men who might be gamblers or tycoons; daredevils or hobos; heroes or criminals. It’s potluck, win or lose.

  “The other kind of woman wants everything a man can give her except his ‘maleness.’ Status, money, place, appearance, social graces. She judges a man by the position he can give her in the world, his potential to make her life a success. She doesn’t care about him as a male, that’s peripheral, and she’ll do better in life because she chooses the man who will best give her what she wants—the externals. A cool woman concerned with form not substance, and a weak male who will work for form not substance. Katje chose me, and she got what she wanted. I’m a success; important, rich, with position and power. Only sometimes, when such a woman nears forty, she suddenly wants a ‘male,’ and finds she doesn’t have one. She’s killed what maleness her man had, and now she has no man. So she finds one. The late passion, the excitement she never wanted.”

  When he finished his speech, words he must have been saying to himself over and over for years, he seemed to study the blue pistol in his hand as if it was fascinating. He wasn’t seeing the pistol. Maybe he was analyzing the quality of his speech, he was a politician, after all. I saw the pistol.

  “She’ll go to Sasser,” I said. “She’ll tell him we know he saw Francesca in New York. But we don’t know why he went to Francesca, and Felicia is still in Dresden. If Sasser—”

  He was up, the pistol down. “The motel, we’ll go—”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll go. You go and find Sasser if you can. Find him, and ho
ld him. I’ll go to Felicia.”

  I went out into the rain and to my car.

  The Delaware Motel was old and shabby in the rain. The clerk on the desk said that Mr. and Mrs. Paul Two Bears had unit five. Felicia wasn’t a halfway girl anymore.

  There was light in unit five, and Felicia answered my knock. She had a somber expression, serious, as if she had been talking about serious matters.

  “You’ve found something, Mr. Fortune?” she asked.

  “Something,” I said.

  She still wore her jeans and the sheepskin jacket, they were part of her now. Paul Two Bears sat in a chair. There was no liquor in the room. They had been talking.

  I said, “What did you tell your parents, Felicia?”

  “Everything,” she said, “and nothing. They wanted to know what I was going to do. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Then why come back here at all?” I said. “Maybe to finish revenging Francesca’s murder? Kill the killers?”

  Paul Two Bears stood up, but I saw no weapon. Felicia’s handbag was on the table. I moved nearer to it.

  “Carl Gans was killed with a .22-caliber gun,” I said. “At Pine River they’d lie for you, say you’d never left. Do you know that Anthony Sasser found Francesca in New York, and a week later she was dead? Is Sasser next on your list?”

  The outside door opened behind me. I didn’t turn. The door closed, and Felicia stared over my shoulder. Her face was enough to tell me that the newcomer had a gun on my back.”

  “Hello, Andera,” I said, not turning. “I expected you.”

  Felicia said, “Who is he? What does he—?”

  “My client,” I said. “John Andera.”

  24.

  John Andera spoke from behind me. “You two leave now.”

  “Leave?” Felicia Crawford said, and there was alarm in her young face. I saw something else in her face too—a vague, sudden wonder. A tendril of what—recognition? Confused groping on her face. She said, “I’m Felicia Crawford.”

  “I know who you are,” Andera said. “Pack your things. Go on. Don’t come back. Both of you.”

  Paul Two Bears began to pack their few things, throwing the clothes into the two small suitcases. Felicia just stood.

  “I want to stay,” she said. “I want to talk.”

  “No,” Andera said. “Just get out, now.”

  I said, “Can I turn around, Andera?”

  “Turn around,” he said.

  He was a few feet inside the closed door. A different man. Instead of his quiet sales-rep’s suit, he wore a black jump suit, soft black canvas shoes wet with rain, a black raincoat, and a black soft hat. In the dark he would be invisible. His blue eyes were hard and clear, his face without expression except for a faint, constant twitch at the corner of his left eye—a tension tic, automatic when he was tense, alert. He was looking at Felicia, not at me, and behind his blank expression he was still bleeding inside.

  He said, “Go away, Miss Crawford. Don’t call the cops if you want Fortune found alive. Go a long way.”

  “Will he be found alive anyway?” Felicia said, still with that hesitant wisp of recognition, maybe with hope.

  “Maybe, and maybe not,” Andera said. “I don’t know. But if you send the cops, he will be dead. No other way.”

  I said, “Go on, Felicia. It’s too late. Go back to Pine River, or go home, or go anywhere else you can live. Go on.”

  Paul Two Bears stood with the suitcases. Felicia took his arm, and they walked to the door. As they passed John Andera, she started to speak, but Andera shook his head, jerked his pistol toward the door. He reached out, touched her shoulder with his empty hand. Paul Two Bears took her out.

  The door closed, and John Andera sat down. He nodded me to a chair. I sat, and he rested his pistol in his lap. He rubbed at his eyes with both hands as if they hurt. I made no move. The pistol seemed forgotten, but I didn’t think it was, and I would have no chance against him. Not him.

  “You knew I’d follow,” he said. “All that about another man who’d fingered Francesca, about Felicia being in danger, and the act of accusing her here. It was all planned.”

  “If I’d guessed right, you had to be somewhere near,” I said. “You followed me before to Abram Zaremba.”

  “You’re a good detective. That’s one reason I hired you. People told me you were good, stubborn.”

  His voice and manner had changed. Charisma is a word overused in recent years—that personal magic in a man that arouses special loyalty in his followers. Andera had a kind of charisma now. Not leadership, but confidence. He would do his job, all the way. No arrogance or pride, just a fact. If he took a job, it was as good as done. He was a man who lived a double life by reflex. He didn’t think about it. In my office he had been John Andera, sales representative. Now he was someone else.

  “She’s a nice girl,” he said, “Felicia. What will she do?”

  “She’ll be okay. Maybe back to Pine River. Would you like that? It’s what you really wanted, wasn’t it? Your people, your home. Before Korea, before Katje Van Hoek.”

  I kept my eyes toward the pistol on his lap, but that was just habit. If he was going to shoot me, I couldn’t stop him.

  He said, “It’s what I’ve missed most, I guess. The land, the space. It’s a rough land, you’ve seen it. Not fat and soft like here.”

  “He Who Walked A Black Wind,” I said. “A good name. Your father is proud of that name. He’s not so proud of Ralph Blackwind as a name, and he wouldn’t like John Andera at all.”

  His smile was thin. “A crazy trick, going out into a tornado like that. I was young. The army made me change the name to Blackwind. Names are magic to us, you know that? When I changed the name, I lost the magic. The old men would say what happened then had to happen because I lost my name.”

  “Maybe they’re right,” I said.

  “Why not? It explains as well as anything,” he said, and was silent for a moment. “How’d you figure me out? You knew when you came back from Pine River, didn’t you? Or maybe you never believed my story from the start.”

  “No, I believed your story, more or less. It could have been true, and you paid me enough for it to have been all a lie, too. I couldn’t decide then.”

  “When did you decide?”

  There was a sense of strangeness, almost eerie, in the way we sat there talking like two casual travelers on some comfortable train rolling through the night toward a distant destination. Both pretending we were oblivious to the pistol in his lap, the murders like a weight on the quiet room.

  I said, “I began to notice something—no one had ever seen you with Francesca, no one had ever heard of you. There was no trace of you in her life before the day you walked into my office. You’d made your relation to her as brief and recent as possible, no visits to her place, but someone should have seen you sometime, at least have heard your name. She had a roommate, people were hanging around, watching her. She’d talked, written a few letters. But you didn’t show up anywhere, not a whisper. It was strange if your story was true.”

  “Yeh,” he said, as if he’d known the risk.

  “Then,” I said, “for everyone else there was some outside corroboration of what they told me. Everyone interconnected with past and present and each other—except you. Nothing put you into the picture except your own story. The trail of her father that Francesca followed led to the Emerald Room—but not beyond on any evidence. She was still working there when she died. Only your word said she’d ever talked to you about Raul Negra or Blackwind.

  “Your story of meeting her at a party didn’t exactly fit. She wasn’t after romance or fun, she was hard on her purpose like a hound on a hot scent. There was no hint she’d traced her father beyond the Emerald Room. On the other hand, the story of Raul Negra’s big shoot-out made it pretty sure that Blackwind had gone at least one more step after the Emerald Room, but maybe not a step past Abram Zaremba. My hunch was that Blackwind had gone to wor
k for Zaremba in another job back there fifteen years ago—and still had that job. You told me that Zaremba was a part owner of your company.

  “I remembered that Katje Crawford had said that Ralph Blackwind had a great love of children. Working for Zaremba, you could hover around Dresden, but keep out of sight. It came to me that Marvel Office Equipment, and you, were that next, last step on the trail. But Francesca hadn’t taken the step. She hadn’t found you—you had somehow found her. I thought about my being shot outside my office. Why had I been shot at? It looked to me like Sasser, or anyone else, only wanted to know who had hired me. So why shoot me? The answer was that no one had shot at me, the shots had been for you. Why? Because you were Ralph Blackwind, the real father.”

  He sat and nodded as if admiring my work, my reasoning. I believed that he was doing just that. He was a professional, a man who appreciated solid work and reasoning.

  “Your face is dark enough,” I said. “Not too dark, your mother was half Caucasian. Dye takes care of graying, darkens hair. You’re taller—probably you wear two-inch lifts in your shoes. The blue eyes are tinted contact lenses. I sensed from the start that your voice had been heavily trained, your speech worked on. Not a recent disguise to fool me, no. You’re a fugitive, have been for fifteen years, the disguise is your normal appearance now, part of you, and you had a complete plastic surgery job on your face a long time ago.”

  “As soon as I had the money and the contacts,” he said. “That money Zaremba gave me for saving his bacon the night of the Emerald Room holdup. Zaremba had the contacts, a really good plastic surgeon. I didn’t recognize myself after he took care of the scars, the busted bones. He had to make a lot of deep wrinkles, but that just helped. I thought I was home safe, the final piece of luck. Ralph Blackwind was a lucky man after all. It shows that you never know about life.”

  He sat and rubbed at his eyes again. I guessed that the contact lenses that made his dark eyes blue bothered him when he was tired, disturbed. He said, “Luck. It was all luck after the escape, a fluke. Up at that Catskill lake where we were hiding after the breakout, I ran into a tramp. The fool recognized the prison clothes, tried to capture me. I killed him. I’m an expert, the army taught me well. I changed clothes, dumped him in the lake with my identification on him. I weighted the body, but it didn’t sink right away. Chance, you see?