Walk a Black Wind df-4

by Michael Collins

  “I couldn’t have been,” Keefer said. “I wasn’t there. Anyway, I couldn’t have-”

  “Shut up, Frank,” Pender said, and to me, “Who saw Frank?”

  “Maybe Abram Zaremba, or one of his men checking up on Francesca,” I said. “He was killed last night, and where were you two last night?”

  “Commissioner Zaremba?” Frank Keefer said, shaky.

  Joel Pender had nothing to say.

  I said, “It looks like Zaremba could have known who murdered Francesca. She saw the killer of Mark Leland, who was investigating the Black Mountain Lake project. Maybe Zaremba was having her tailed, at least, just to be sure she knew nothing vital. She was down in New York for a reason, I’m sure-hiding, using a false name, meeting older men. For all I know she could have been mixed with you two in some scheme to stop Zaremba, a little blackmail, or-”

  Frank Keefer said, turned to Joel Pender, “Tell him, Joel! Tell him what Fran was doing. I don’t want to be tied in with any murder of Commissioner Zaremba, no way!”

  “I told you shut up,” Pender said.

  His voice was quiet, but his eyes were busy. He was balancing the risk against the gain-the calculation and infinite patience of a small weasel who would crawl ten years on his belly if he had a reasonable assurance that at the end he would make others crawl.

  “I’ll tell you what we figure the kid was doing in New York,” he said, “if you keep quiet about who told you first. Okay, Fortune? I’ll deny it anyway.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Frank Keefer mopped his bloody mouth like a woman seeing the first gray hair. Celia Bazer still stood in her corner as if she felt safer with two walls close. Pender leaned toward me, sincere. I guessed it was an act he’d practiced.

  “I was drunk or it’d never happened,” Pender said. “She come here that night all shook up. Said she’d found out her dad was a fraud cheating the public to help men like Commissioner Zaremba and get rich himself. She said she knew I knew about the Mayor, and she wanted me to tell her. Some legal trick in the Mayor’s past Leland had told her about. She didn’t know what it was because Leland hadn’t known. I said I didn’t know anything, and Frank tried to calm her down. So then she turned on Frank and said she was through with him!

  “She said we were all liars and cheats, too, and Frank was a lousy gigolo. We were worse than her dad or Zaremba because we worked for them like parasites, did their dirty work. She was in one hell of a state, and when she told Frank they was finished, I got so mad I lost my head. Our big chance, see? Marry into the Mayor’s family, be someone in this town. Gone for a lousy girl kid thought she was too good for us, too good even for the Mayor! So damned holy about the Mayor being a cheat and all. I just saw red, damn her!”

  He shook his head, and his small eyes were mystified, as if he would never understand how a smart man like himself had been so stupid, had been goaded into saying what he had not wanted to say. He shrugged up at me.

  “So I told her,” he said. “I told her she lived on the Mayor, went to college on the Mayor, learned all her big, pure ideas on the Mayor. So he got something for himself out of his job, why not? If he was a fraud and a cheat, she lived on him, and there were men a lot worse than the Mayor. I told her she should get down on her knees to the Mayor for giving her all she had because he didn’t have to give her spit!”

  Pender stopped again. He was having a hard time telling it even now. I didn’t push him. He sighed.

  “I was drunk, see, so I told her what no one ever told her before. I said if she thought the Mayor was a crook, maybe she ought to know there was a lot worse crooks like murderers, kidnappers, and psychos-and she was the kid of one of those! She was the kid of a guy who shot her grandfather, got her shot, and damned near got her mother killed, too!”

  He looked at me. “I told her Crawford wasn’t her real father. Not hers, and not Felicia’s. Her old lady was married before, a long time ago, and her real father almost got them all killed, and went to prison for twenty years for it!”

  In the silence of that room piled with the mimeographed dream of a quick profit for two losers, I suppose we all had our own thoughts. Pender chewed his lip, probably still wondering why he’d blurted it all out to Francesca in drunken anger over three months ago. A secret that explained why Pender got jobs from Mayor Crawford. Keefer was probably thinking only of himself, of the loss of his hopes for marrying big. Celia Bazer seemed to be wondering how she’d feel at such news.

  I was seeing pieces of a puzzle fall into place like greased parts of a complex machine. Francesca’s excitement. Her oblique talk about identity-it had been real, not just metaphorical: her real identity at stake. Her sudden trip-a girl who’d always felt different, neglected, a rebel, the ugly duckling. Looking for a real father. What all the men in New York she’d met had in common was clear-they were all over forty. Except Abram Zaremba, who was older, but she hadn’t really met him, only gone to work at his restaurant in a job she didn’t need. So the Emerald Room was, somehow, connected to her father. It explained everything, except why she had been using a false name, and maybe Mark Leland’s murder still explained that. Maybe she wanted to find a lost father for more than her identity-for help in trouble, too.

  “Tell me the whole story, Pender,” I said. “What else did you tell Francesca?”

  “That’s all,” Pender said. “Her old lady was married young, busted up, married Crawford, and then the first guy came around and started a shooting match and went to jail for it. Happened before I was around here, I only got it secondhand. Only I was here three years later when the first husband busted prison and got killed in the escape.”

  “Francesca’s real father is dead?” I said.

  “Like a dinosaur,” Joel Pender said, and laughed. “Those girl twins was lucky, Crawford brought ’em up like white women, when their real old man was a crummy Indian from some two-bit reservation out west.”

  “An Indian?”

  “That’s how I heard it. Man, that must of sat big around here. No wonder Katje Crawford dumped him.”

  “How did Francesca take it?”

  “Like I’d slapped her. Said I was a liar at first. I told her go ask old Emil Van Hoek if her folks wouldn’t tell her, and I figured they wouldn’t. Bad blood, that was what she had, and she was going around calling the Mayor a fraud when he’d brought her up like his real own kids.”

  “You think Francesca went looking for her real father,” I said, “even though he was dead?”

  “Sure she did. Maybe she didn’t believe me, wanted proof.”

  Celia Bazer said, her voice low from the corner, “Maybe she wanted to know about him, her real father, know who he was. Maybe she just wanted to know what really happened.”

  She said it as if she, if she had been Francesca, would have wanted to know who her father had been, what had really happened a long time ago.

  “All right,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere. I don’t think Mayor Crawford’ll thank you for telling her.”

  Frank Keefer said nothing, went on gingerly touching his broken face which was all that interested him. Pender glared an inner anger at himself for being so stupid, for getting drunk and losing his temper. Celia Bazer stood silent in her corner, maybe hoping no one would think of her after I was gone, not until it was time to go to bed.

  15

  I drove thinking about a girl who went looking for a dead father. Yes, Francesca would have done that. A man might die, but he left a shadow, a life, a place of his own, relatives, all the things a girl who felt rejected and different would want to know. Death ends only a man, not the life he had lived, the place where he had belonged. Above all the place-somewhere in this world where, maybe, his daughter could belong, too, as she had never belonged among the Crawfords, and Van Hoeks, and Black Mountain Lake projects for the benefit of Abram Zarembas.

  Would that search have killed her? It depended on what she turned over in the search, on a lot of things I didn’t know. Did
Felicia know? I thought Felicia did-part of it anyway. Not as much, maybe, but enough to make her want to know who had hired me and what I knew. Enough to send her on the same search herself?

  I stopped to call Lieutenant Oster. He had news.

  “They picked up your client, John Andera, down in New York,” Oster said. “He was on a selling trip in Philadelphia. It checks out solid with witnesses down there. His alibi is good for the Crawford girl, too-another business trip.”

  “What about Mrs. Grace Dunstan?”

  “Not so good for her. She was in New Haven, but no one saw her from eight P.M. last night until past one A.M. She could have driven to Dresden. Harmon Dunstan isn’t covered for the time of Zaremba’s death, either.”

  I told him what Joel Pender had told me. “Is it true?”

  “As far as I know. Before my time,” Oster said, and there was a pause. “Mayor Crawford isn’t going to like Pender. It’s old dirty linen. Dead and buried.”

  “Maybe not so buried,” I said. “Where do I talk to the grandmother? Old Mrs. Van Hoek?”

  “She’s got a cottage on the Mayor’s place. What do you think she can tell you?”

  “I’ll know when I ask her.”

  “Take it easy, Fortune.”

  “I always do, Lieutenant,” I said, and hung up.

  I drove on to the Crawford mansion, parked up the road. The small cottage was in the rear among the trees, the rain dripping onto its roof. I knocked. The woman who opened the door after a time was tall, thin, white-haired, and dressed in a formal black dress without any decoration. The white hair was in a severe bun, and her long, thin face was severe too.

  “Yes?” she said, and added, “You’re that detective.”

  “Dan Fortune, Mrs. Van Hoek. Can we talk?”

  “About what?”

  The question wasn’t challenging, only neutral, implying that she had nothing to talk about. I saw that her severe manner was more disassociated than stern. The manner of someone who lived alone with her own slow thoughts.

  “About Francesca and your husband,” I said.

  “I never knew anything about Francesca. Mr. Van Hoek is dead,” she said, and turned away as if that settled it all.

  I followed her into a small Victorian room that had an aura of timeless insulation. She sat down, as timeless as the room, and neither looked at me nor away from me. She didn’t seem surprised that I had not closed the door behind me and gone away, but her eyes seemed uninterested by me. I had an impression that we were both in the same room, but in different times, therefore invisible to each other.

  “Your husband died suddenly,” I said.

  She looked toward a window and the rain. “Mr. Van Hoek took many years to die.”

  “He talked with Francesca just before he died,” I said.

  The rain on the windows seemed to fascinate her. “I liked the rain as a girl. It was so warm in the attic of the big house where we played. That was before I met Mr. Van Hoek. Katje and the Mayor have the big house now. It’s not the same house, that was torn down years ago. I live here. As long as I live I have a home here. Katje is a good daughter.”

  “Did Mr. Van Hoek tell Francesca about Katje’s first husband, Mrs. Van Hoek?”

  “I don’t know. Leave me alone, please.”

  She sat in her chair as if she didn’t want to move, not ever, for fear of breaking time into small pieces, of losing her own image in the shattered mirror of time.

  “Katje’s first husband was an Indian?”

  “A nice boy. She brought him home twice. She was defiant, you see? He was a soldier, away from home. She had it annulled. The best way. The Mayor was better for the children.”

  “You opposed the marriage? The Indian boy?”

  “There were the children. He was a nice boy, but we couldn’t make her try. She knew what she wanted to do.”

  “You wanted her to make the marriage work?”

  “She knew better. You can see that. We have a fine home.”

  “But he came back, the Indian. Made trouble?”

  She moved her head in a sharp jerk. “Leave me alone, please. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  I heard steps coming toward the cottage. At the window, I looked out and saw a small man with silver-gray hair coming toward the cottage under an umbrella. He walked stiffly, like a judge-or a senior lawyer. How did I know? I don’t know, but it was an impression, and his face was too young for his silver-gray hair and his manner. Prematurely gray.

  I went back to Mrs. Van Hoek as the gray-haired man came into the cottage. He shook his umbrella outside, laid it just inside the door, turned, and came into the living room smiling and rubbing his hands against the October cold. He saw me.

  “Who are you?”

  “Dan Fortune, Mr.-?”

  “Carter Vance. You’re the private detective? What the hell are you doing with Mrs. Van Hoek?”

  His diction didn’t quite match his silver hair or his formal clothes. Neither did his age-about forty or so. As if he’d built a careful public image to hide himself.

  “I’m talking with Mrs. Van Hoek,” I said.

  The old woman said, “I don’t want to talk to him.”

  “You heard her,” Carter Vance said.

  “Vance?” I said. “Mayor Crawford’s law partner, right? Head of the Crime Commission with Anthony Sasser. I’ll bet you turned up a lot about Abram Zaremba’s dealings.”

  “I don’t understand, Mr. Fortune,” Vance said.

  “Sasser worked with Zaremba, right?”

  “If you’re implying that Mr. Zaremba did anything illegal, be careful. We found no such situation. We did manage to clean up the streets of Dresden, though.”

  “I’ll bet you really cracked down on pickpockets and welfare cheats. Two-bit hoodlums stay clear of Dresden, right? Honest citizens can make an honest dollar in peace and safety so they can pay their taxes for Abram Zaremba’s benefit.”

  “Not all two-bit hoodlums stay clear of Dresden, it seems,” Vance said. “Mrs. Van-Hoek doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “I want to talk to her,” I said, and turned back to her. “If you could just tell me what your husband told Fran-”

  “Fortune,” Vance said.

  He had a gun. A blue Mauser automatic. He waved it toward the door.

  “You better ask Martin Crawford anything you want to know.”

  “You always carry a gun, Vance?” I said.

  “I head a crime commission. I have the need. Now walk.”

  I walked.

  We walked, dripping rain, through the entry hall of the Crawford mansion. Martin Crawford sat in the living room reading the newspaper. He lumbered up when he saw us.

  “Carter? What the devil-?” he said, looked at us both.

  Vance said, “He was in the cottage, annoying the old lady with questions. He didn’t want to leave.”

  Katje Crawford appeared from somewhere. “Put down that gun, Carter. Mr. Fortune is a detective.”

  “A cheap snooper from New York,” Vance said. “I think we can charge him with trespassing. He refused to leave.”

  “He just wants to help us, Carter,” Martin Crawford said.

  “Help?” Vance said. He pocketed his gun, walked out to the glassed-in porch, began to pour himself a drink.

  Katje Crawford came all the way into the living room. She wore a tweed skirt, a cashmere sweater, low shoes, and a golf glove on her right hand as if still hoping the rain would stop.

  “Why did you want to talk to my mother?” she asked.

  “To find out what your father told Francesca just before she left home,” I said.

  “My father?”

  “Told Francesca what, Fortune?” Martin Crawford asked.

  Katje Crawford sat down. “I wasn’t aware that my father had seen Francesca before she left. He was very sick.”

  “What do you think he told her, Fortune?” Crawford said.

  “Something about her real father,” I said.
/>
  It didn’t exactly hit them like a bombshell, no. They had lived with it for a long time. But saying it out like that startled them. They had kept it so far hidden that it must have sounded almost strange to them said out loud. Carter Vance turned at the bar, looked at me and at them.

  “So you know,” Martin Crawford said. “I suppose I knew you would. One tries hard to shelter a child. For Francesca it’s too late, but I had hoped to keep it from Felicia a bit longer. It’s not easy to be a stepfather, it changes a child’s relation to you. To me they’re my children, but I’ve always known they would see me differently if they knew the truth.”

  I said, “Has Felicia come home?”

  “No,” Crawford said.

  There was a world of pain in the single word. Crawford had lost one daughter, or stepdaughter, and his voice said that he didn’t want to lose another.

  Katje Crawford said, “You think my father told Francesca something about her real father, and that’s connected to her death somehow?”

  “I don’t know what he told her, or what it means.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t think what he could have said that would have any bearing, Mr. Fortune.”

  “Can you tell me about it all?” I said.

  Katje Crawford sat and thought for a time. Then she nodded slowly. “Very well, sit down, Mr. Fortune. I don’t see what good it can do, but I expect you’ll go on searching until you know the story.”

  I sat. Martin Crawford leaned back in his chair, his hands over his eyes, as if he didn’t want to hear. Carter Vance sipped his drink out on the porch.

  16

  “His name was Ralph Blackwind,” Katje Crawford said, and smiled thinly. “I think the name fascinated me. It was so strong, ethnic. I was seventeen in 1950, in New York alone trying to be a dancer. I had no talent. Too tall, awkward. So many young people desperately want to be what they can never be. As if they purposely choose the dream that must defeat them because they are equipped for it least of all they could do. Perhaps it’s necessary to learn the pain of failure before you can turn back to what you really knew you had to be all along. The real tragedy is the few who go on pursuing a hopeless dream, just good enough for a few small triumphs, hope always just ahead.”