Walk a Black Wind df-4

by Michael Collins

  She stopped to find a cigarette. I waited. She would tell it all in her own way. Out on the porch, Carter Vance was mixing another drink. His own was still half-full, so it wasn’t for him. Crawford sat like a man watching an old movie he’d seen fifty times before and knew by heart.

  “Ralph Blackwind,” Katje Crawford said, smoked. “I met him at a YMCA dance for soldiers. He was handsome, dark-eyed, small and stocky, intense and all male. I was seventeen, in a hurry to be a woman. We were both outdoor people, we used to ride in New Jersey. He wanted a ranch among his people, work with them. Dedicated, coiled like a whip. I’m not a fool, I was failing as a dancer, and I knew it. I needed a new dream, Ralph was it. After a month we were married. But Korea had broken out, and two months later Ralph was sent over there, and I came home. Of course, I was pregnant by then.”

  She looked up at me. “I was pregnant, Ralph was in Korea, and I knew it was wrong, a mistake, an error. The moment I came home, I knew it. Ralph and I-here? With what I knew all at once I really wanted? My life here? It had been a childish dream worse than the dancing. I knew, but Ralph was fighting in Korea. Could I write and tell him? I couldn’t. So the girls were born, twins. Francesca and Felicia Blackwind.”

  The names were exotic in the big, elegant room. They had a wild sound, open and windy in a dry land of desert hills.

  “God,” Martin Crawford said, “how Francesca would have liked that name. We should have told her, Katje, the moment we saw what kind of tough girl she was.”

  “Perhaps we should have,” Katje Crawford said, and said to me, “I met Martin again soon after the twins were born. He’d known me when I was a girl. We fell in love. We were right for each other-the same lives, the same backgrounds, the same plans for the future. What were we to do? I couldn’t divorce Ralph, by then he’d been reported missing in action! Martin was in politics, it would have been suicide to try a divorce. We waited and waited, but Ralph wasn’t found, and the girls were growing. So we had the marriage quietly annulled, and were married ourselves. A year later, Ralph came home.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette. It was almost a vicious gesture. Carter Vance brought her the drink he had made. She took it and drank without looking at Vance.

  “Ralph had been a prisoner of the North Koreans for almost two years. He’d escaped-alone across hundreds of miles of enemy territory. He’d killed many of the enemy, some with his hands. Something had changed in him. He was cold, bitter, a man who could kill easily. Perhaps that had always been part of him, in his history, in his anger at being an Indian.

  “He learned of the birth of the girls, and of our annulment. I suppose something snapped when they told him. A combination of what he’d been through, of the shock of the news. Perhaps it was only a last straw. He talked about death, the horror of war, the horror of the whole world, the insanity of the white man’s world. He wanted his haven-me and his children.”

  She recrossed her legs. “I don’t pretend to think that I acted well to Ralph. I never wrote to him about the girls, I had the marriage annulled without telling him. Yes, I thought he was dead over there, perhaps I even hoped he was, but that was no excuse. I did what I had to do for my own life. We had made a mistake, Ralph and I, and Ralph would have known that, too, if we had tried to go on. I had to correct it. Firm and final. There was no other way.”

  She drank the drink Carter Vance had given to her, and seemed to realize she had it for the first time. She stared into the drink. “I was living with my parents while Martin was in Albany. That weekend, Martin was on his way home, but he hadn’t arrived yet. I’ve always given thanks for that. I think Ralph would have killed Martin.

  “He walked into the house with a submachine gun and a pistol. All I did was move, and he started shooting. He shattered the living room, and hit my father! He almost killed my father. He made me get the children, and drove away with us. We drove all evening toward Canada. The girls had to eat and sleep, so he stopped in a motel in Utica. That was when I learned all about Korea, his escape, his anger at the world. He talked to me all night while the children slept as much as they could they were so afraid.

  “He talked and talked that night, about all his horrors, and about his plans for a ranch in Canada. Nonstop, as if he really were insane.

  “I’ve seen that night in my dreams a thousand times since, and I’m still sorry for Ralph, terribly sorry for what he had become in that war, for what I had had to do. But I have never regretted it. The girls had nightmares for years afterwards. He would have been hounded down eventually, and who knows what would have happened to the girls? I did what was right.”

  She stopped, and sat back in her chair. She lighted another cigarette. She smoked as if that was all, the story over as far as she was concerned-she had done right.

  “How did you get away from him?” I asked.

  “The police came in the morning,” she said, her voice normal now. “Martin had arrived home soon after Ralph took us. He saved my father, and alerted the police. When they found us, Ralph tried to resist, and Francesca was shot in the melee. That was her scar, Mr. Fortune. Under it all, Ralph wasn’t a bad man. When Francesca was hit, he gave up, carried her out to an ambulance himself.”

  I said, “Then?”

  Martin Crawford said, “I defended Blackwind. I had Katje say she had gone with him voluntarily, to talk to him, and I had the kidnapping charge dropped. I got it all dropped-except the assault-with-intent-to-murder on Katje’s father. Mr. Van Hoek had been badly shot, and we couldn’t evade that charge even though he pulled through. Blackwind got ten-to-twenty in Auburn. Three years later he escaped with four other men. One was killed in the escape-so was a prison guard. Ralph and the other two evaded for three days. Two of them were cornered in Hancock, one was killed. The survivor said that Ralph had drowned in a Catskill lake where they’d hidden.”

  “They found his body?”

  “Not at first. They found his weapons at the lake, the food he’d been carrying, but nothing else. So they continued the manhunt for five months. They ran down every lead, every report, everyone who had known Ralph. No trace of him was found, not a whisper that he was alive anywhere. Then divers found a body in the lake, wedged under rocks. It was bloated and eaten beyond any recognition, but it was Ralph’s size, had the remnants of his clothes, and his identification. It had been in the water the exact time. He’s dead, Mr. Fortune.”

  For a time we were all silent. I knew what we were all thinking-was Ralph Blackwind alive somewhere? Perhaps somewhere not very far?

  Carter Vance broke the spell. “I never knew the whole story. He was already dead when I came to town. Awful.”

  Katje Crawford said, “You think that Ralph is alive, Mr. Fortune?”

  “Any time a body isn’t positively identified, you have to consider that, yes,” I said. “What about dental records, scars, wounds, old injuries?”

  Crawford said, “Blackwind had no dental work beyond his childhood, and his reservation had no records. The body was too decomposed to show scars. His brother said he had broken his left arm once, and there was a break in the left arm of the body. Only it was a recent break, and the M.E. couldn’t say if it was a new break or the old one rebroken. The reservation had no X-ray records.”

  “But the left arm did have the break?”

  Katje Crawford said, “He’s dead, Mr. Fortune. How could he have eluded such a manhunt so completely, and how could there have been a body his size in that lake just at the right time? If he was alive, he would have tried to see the girls sometime during the last fifteen years. He had a tremendous love of children, I hadn’t known that about him. In fact, I knew so little about him.”

  “Would Francesca search for a dead man?” I said.

  “Perhaps, yes. For her identity, for the truth about her history. She’d want to know about Ralph.”

  Crawford said, “And she wouldn’t ask us, no.”

  “Was Abram Zaremba connected to Blackwind at all?”

&nbs
p; “Not at all, as far as I know,” Crawford said.

  “How about a Carl Gans? John Andera? Harmon Dunstan? Or maybe Joel Pender, or Frank Keefer, or Anthony Sasser?”

  “No, none of them,” Katje Crawford said. “Tony Sasser wasn’t even in Dresden before Ralph was dead.”

  Crawford said, “Wait. There was a Captain Dunstan at Ralph’s trial, Katje. His commanding officer in Korea, captured with Ralph, remember? He testified for Ralph.”

  “I don’t remember, Martin,” Katje Crawford said. “It’s been fifteen years now.”

  “Are you sure, Crawford?” I said.

  “Pretty sure, yes. Captain Dunstan.”

  “All right, maybe Francesca went searching out her past and a dead father. Maybe it has something to do with why she was killed, and maybe not. It could be a coincidence, or she could have stumbled over something dangerous, or someone could even have made a mistake about what she was after,” I said to them. “But maybe we better remember one thing-if Ralph Blackwind does happen to be still alive, he’s got the murder of a prison guard hanging over him still. He might do a lot to not be found.”

  None, of them had an answer for that. Katje Crawford sat looking at the floor when I left. Maybe she was wondering if none of this would have happened if she had told the girls about their father a long time ago.

  In my car, I drove back to my motel and checked out. As I drove south and east through the rain, it all came into focus. Francesca had been looking for her father. Now Felicia was. Dead or alive, I didn’t know. Maybe that was what the grandfather, Emil Van Hoek, had had to tell Francesca-one way or the other.

  17

  I stopped for lunch on the road, and it was late afternoon when I crossed the Throggs Neck Bridge and drove across the Island to Hempstead. The rain had stopped, the day clear and bright with a touch of early winter in its snap.

  There were two cars in Harmon Dunstan’s garage. No one seemed to be watching this time, but when I rang at the door, not much else had changed. Mrs. Grace Dunstan opened the door in almost the same shirt and slacks, and with the same Bloody Mary in her hand. I had the sensation of time standing still. She looked at me as if time did stand still for her-one day exactly like another, the same things in the same way with no surprises and no need to think about tomorrow because it would be today and yesterday over again. A weariness in her.

  “Mr. Fortune,” she said like fate. “Come in then.”

  Harmon Dunstan sat at the home bar in the immaculate living room, a drink in his slender hand this time. It was late enough now, maybe in more ways than one. Dunstan was less friendly this time, his thin, dark face slack and watchful.

  “You sent the police last night?” the small man said.

  “The Dresden police sent them. Your wife was in New Haven-just about unseen. Where were you?”

  “Calling on a client in Westchester,” Dunstan said. “My bad luck, he wasn’t at home-called away suddenly.”

  “Did you know Abram Zaremba?”

  “No. I don’t like people coming here with threats.”

  “I haven’t made any threats.”

  “You-” He ended it there. The threat was in his mind, and he was smart enough to realize he had revealed that.

  I said, “What did Francesca Crawford really want from you, Dunstan?”

  “I’ve told you all I’m going to, Fortune.”

  Grace Dunstan said, “Talk to him, Harmon. Your women are no real secret. Everyone knows we have an understanding.”

  “Be quiet, Grace,” Dunstan said. It was firm, but gentle. Telling her that she didn’t know what she was saying.

  I said, “What did she want, Dunstan? She made a play for you, yet she lost interest fast. Did she think you could help her to find out about her father?”

  “Her father?” Dunstan said.

  It wasn’t a question, no, not even rhetorical. It was footwork, something to say while he thought. He finished his drink, keeping busy to keep from talking. Grace Dunstan took his glass, and began to refill it. She worked with one hand, drinking her own Bloody Mary while she made his drink.

  “Ralph Blackwind,” I said. “You remember him? You were his captain in Korea. You testified for him at his trial.”

  “Yes,” Dunstan said, “I remember him.”

  “Did Francesca ask about him?”

  “Yes, she asked about him,” Dunstan said. His wife gave him his new drink. He drank. “I told her that Ralph had died fifteen years ago. That he got a raw deal, went to prison, and died. I told her that he was a good man who had deserved better, but that’s the way the ball bounces. She had her mother and a good life, let Ralph Blackwind rest in peace.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That was all.”

  “But it means you knew who she was before she was killed. You knew she was Francesca Crawford not Martin.”

  “Yes, all right, I knew. After she asked about Ralph, I knew. What does it mean? That was all a long time ago. She was a woman here and now, I liked her, wanted her. Ralph was old history. It was the present I was after.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  Dunstan said nothing.

  “Poor Harmon,” Grace Dunstan said. “You didn’t get what you wanted this time, did you? This one got away.”

  Dunstan turned on her. “I liked her, Grace. This was real. You sensed that, didn’t you? You’ve never cared about the women I chased before. You’re not interested in me, so the other women didn’t matter, and for that I thanked you. I need a woman, you don’t need a man, at least not me. So you didn’t care about my substitutes. They weren’t good, but they were better than nothing if I couldn’t have you. But this time you knew it was different.”

  “Did I?” she said. “Maybe you’re right, but she’s dead, and that ends it, doesn’t it? You’ll have to settle for what we have until next time. I’m sorry, really I am.”

  “Sorry enough to come to my bedroom sometimes?”

  She turned away, sharply.

  I said, “You have separate bedrooms? Then your alibis for Francesca’s murder are zero. It’s a big house, with separate bedrooms. Either of you could come or go without being seen or heard. You can’t prove where you were when Francesca was killed. No more than you can prove where you were last night.”

  Dunstan was silent. “Can most people prove where they were when you ask them about any given night?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what, Fortune?”

  “Mostly on luck. The chance they were with someone.”

  “Then we weren’t lucky,” Dunstan said.

  Grace Dunstan said, “We never have been, have we, Harmon?”

  I had the feeling of a man standing high on a cliff looking down at two people walking a solitary beach. No one else was anywhere, yet they walked apart. Each alone in the sea and sky, unable to move together no matter how much they wanted to, or even had to because there was no one else. They walked along side-by-side, but each alone. Each staring at the horizon for someone else to come along, any new face to talk to, to smile with. Yet no one would come, because, for them, there really was no one else. Neither anyone else, nor each other, so doomed to a kind of slow dance together that would end only when one or both were dead. Two people wanting each other, without mercy on each other, and needing each other maybe more than they even knew.

  I said, “You’re sure Ralph Blackwind is dead, Dunstan?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m sure. I know he’s dead, and now I have to leave. No more questions, Fortune, unless you come with the police and more than suspicions you can’t prove.”

  Grace Dunstan drank and watched him go. She put down her glass, smiled at me. It was a stiff smile.

  “He was rebuffed by Francesca Crawford, whether he wants to say so or not. I can tell. He’s right, too, I did take more notice of her than I had of his other women. She wasn’t like the women he usually toyed with. A strange girl, not his type at all. I met her twice, and I didn’t think she cared a
bout Harmon for himself at all. I didn’t know about her father. She puzzled me.”

  “Puzzled you,” I said, “and worried you?”

  She considered the question and me. “Yes, she worried me. The unknown worries me. I live with the familiar, the sure. This house, our money, my furniture. Harmon and I are tied like stones on a short chain, but we’re tied closely. Only I didn’t kill her, Mr. Fortune.”

  “I hope not,” I said.

  I went out to my car.

  18

  I had to park in a garage six blocks from the Emerald Room. I looked for a taxi, but it was five-thirty now, and I walked three blocks looking and waving. After the three blocks, I gave up, and walked to the restaurant. It had just opened.

  The elegant entry greeted me with a cosy warmth that made me want to settle down at the bar for a long stay. Carl Gans didn’t greet me. A bigger man seemed to have his job now. The bigger man saw my duffel coat and missing arm.

  “You want something?” he said.

  “I’m looking for Carl Gans.”

  “He’s off tonight.”

  “Commissioner Zaremba’s murder?”

  “You know, huh?” He had new respect for me. I was in the know, no matter how I looked. “Yeh, Carl took it hard. He’d been like twenty years with the Commissioner. Took a week off.”

  “He went away?”

  “Just in his pad, boozing I guess. Don’t blame him, he done good with the Commissioner around.”

  “You have the address? It’s important, about the Commissioner.”

  “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.