“It’s not a new problem,” I said.
“As old as time. My father died, my mother went to Baltimore as a poor relation, and I went out into the big world. I had culture, style, and good grammar. I was straight out of Jane Eyre. The little lady without money, connections, or salable skills. Only I wasn’t Jane Eyre, the world had changed, and the little lady had changed with it. I got work right out in public because I’m damned good-looking and there’s a market for front these days. I didn’t have to be a governess in a big house with a brooding master I dreamed of marrying. I could be myself.”
Her laugh was warm if not exactly genteel. “Men liked me. I’m the cool type, right? Austere and untouched. That appealed to many men, especially rich older men. I wanted what I wanted. I took it the way I could get it. I enjoyed my life. What did I have to do that I didn’t want to do, that most girls don’t do today? The only essential difference was that I confined my social life to rich men who could move me in rich circles, and that I didn’t pretend that they loved me or that I loved them. In a way I think we’re more honest here. All girls get wined, dined, and given gifts by men they don’t really give a damn about; they only tell themselves they do to feel chaste. Some of what men gave me bought clothes and paid the rent, yes, but that isn’t so unusual these days either. I may not have loved any of them, but I never went with a man I didn’t like. I never had to; maybe I was lucky.” She stopped and seemed to be thinking about her luck. It didn’t appear to make her ecstatic.
“Why tell me?” I said. “I was never ordained.”
“All men are ordained on that subject,” she said. “But I’m not apologizing. It’s over now, but I enjoyed the last four years. No regrets. You’re forming theories, and I want you to form the right theories. Walter seems to love me. I don’t love him in the normal sense, but I’ve never needed love. I like him, and I like to be loved. I think I can do him good. I intend to try.”
“Especially now that he’s really rich.”
“That won’t hurt. I like what money can buy, and that’s most of everything. Perhaps that’s what I’ve been telling you. But he asked me to marry him some time ago, and Jonathan liked me.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Were you part of the squeeze?”
“I’d hardly have been worth Paul Baron’s time.”
“You would be worth a lot to Walter. Or maybe Jonathan wouldn’t have liked you if he had known about the last four years.”
She smoothed her skirt over her lap. “I may have been part of Baron’s pressure, yes. But not seriously. Walter knows all about me. So does Mrs. Radford, and so did Jonathan. Even George Ames knows. I told you I had no apologies. I learned that you can’t live with a false front, why should you? I don’t need Walter so much I would hide myself. As it happens, Mrs. Radford seems to admire me for it all, and so did Jonathan. They seemed to feel that I showed initiative and determination.”
I could believe it, from what I had seen of the Radfords. You didn’t get rich a hundred years ago, or today, in a commercial society by being soft or particularly moral. To the old pirates of commerce, morality was relative. It still is.
“You knew Baron before you met Walter?”
“Of course. We were all invited to his parties to make contacts. He didn’t introduce me to Walter, but I did meet Walter at that party. Are you thinking that one of us killed Paul Baron?”
“Who’s us? The girls here, or the Radford clan?”
“Either.”
“I don’t know the girls, but Baron was trouble for the Radfords. I think he killed Jonathan, and that gives the family two first-rate motives.”
“Revenge? Hardly,” she said, “and if one of them was going to kill Paul Baron, why not do it before he got to Jonathan?”
“Maybe Jonathan tried to do it. And then, after Jonathan was dead, Baron tried to go on with the blackmail.”
She gave me a cool frown, but said nothing.
“Tell me about Carla Devine,” I said.
“I can’t tell you much. She’s relatively new here. She was Paul Baron’s latest conquest. He tried us all at one time or another. He dazzled Carla.”
“Did he try you?”
“Naturally. He didn’t dazzle me.”
“Is Carla here?”
“She didn’t come home last night, the girls tell me. She’s done that before, but she was usually with Paul Baron then.”
“Do you know a friend of hers, a boy with an old, gray coupe? Thin, pale, long wild hair.”
“No. No one like that comes here.”
“Do you know where she might have gone?”
She seemed to think. “She talked about her parents at times. They live in a place called City Island. Mr. Gerald Devine; 42 Throggs Lane.”
“All right, Miss Fallon, and thanks.” I stood.
“You might as well make it Deirdre. We seem to be fated to meet often.” She looked at my empty sleeve. Her eyes were foggy tunnels. “Someday you’ll tell me about your arm.”
“No I won’t.”
“The story is reserved for someone special?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “I’ll walk out with you.”
She went into the next room and came back wearing a perky fur hat on her chestnut hair. She carried a fur coat that had to be sable. She handed it to me. It felt like my income for two years, if I had good years. She didn’t touch me as she slipped into the coat. She didn’t have to. Just being that close, I felt her down to my shoes.
We went out and down in the elevator. She looked like a Russian princess—the rosy princess bundled in fur and boots a boy dreams about when he’s fifteen and reading Tolstoy. She made me dream her naked. That was bad. It would have been bad even if I wasn’t investigating a murder. She didn’t fit with five rooms without central heat.
On the street she gave me her hand. “I think you’re a tenacious man, Mr. Fortune. Be careful. I may try to make you tell me the story of your arm someday.”
I smiled. It was all I could think to do. She walked to a small red Fiat. I watched the Fiat drive off. I think I waved.
17
CITY ISLAND is in the Bronx. It is near Orchard Beach—a strip of brown sand and shallow water where a million people wade on hot summer days like Hindus in the Ganges and feel privileged.
City Island itself is barely an island now, but they still build and berth boats up there. Not long ago it was a true haven from the grime of the city. Today it is just a part of the Bronx: a little less crowded, and with a few more trees.
Gerald Devine’s house was squeezed among shabby wooden-box type houses and a dispirited red brick apartment building. It faced the sullen, scummy water of Long Island Sound. The land in front of the house at the edge of the water was all rock, but there was no grandeur. A sluggish tide lapped like oil at the black rocks. Leafless gray trees looked as alive as laundry poles.
In this bleak landscape where even the snow was gray, Devine’s house shone like a miniature diamond. It was a small, white Cape Cod cottage set in a neat yard that must have been all flowers in summer. The picket fence around the yard was like well-capped teeth. I parked in the swept driveway behind a 1947 Packard Clipper that looked almost new.
The door of the house opened before I reached it. A stocky man with thin, fine gray hair and a pink complexion watched me approach. A crooked smile that had probably been considered roguish when he was young flirted with his thin mouth but didn’t quite take. His blue eyes were small, clear, and questioning.
“Mr. Gerald Devine?” I asked.
“I am,” he said. “Is it Carla you want?”
The lilt of Ireland was unmistakable in his voice. A soft accent, and at another time I might have enjoyed identifying the county. Not now. “I’m not the first, Mr. Devine?”
“Third,” he said. “No one comes after Carla anymore. We see little of her ourselves. Now three come in a morning. It’s trouble, isn’t it?”
“Tell me about the other two,” I said.
/> He rubbed his upper lip. “I don’t know. You better come in.”
I followed him into a small, clean room cluttered with furniture as old as the Packard and just as well-tended. A woman sat in a reclining chair. She had dark, worried eyes. Her black hair showed no gray at all. She was small, dark, and still pretty. She was younger than Devine, but not that much younger. One of the Spanish Irish who never seem old until they suddenly become crones. There was no doubt that she was Carla’s mother.
“Sit down, Mr.…?” Devine said.
“Fortune,” I said. “Dan Fortune.”
He brightened. “Irish?”
“It was Fortunowski. My dad edited it for modern readers.”
The woman’s voice was a whisper. “Is … is Carla in bad trouble? Has she … done something?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just trying to find her to ask some questions. It’s a case I’m on.”
“Case?” Devine said. “You’re a policeman?”
“Private.” I showed him my credentials.
The woman said, “She lives with some girls. On University Place. It’s a fine apartment.”
“Mr. Fortune knows that, dear,” Devine said gently. He leaned toward me from where he sat on a stuffed settee. “The others didn’t have any credentials. You said a case?”
“Your daughter might be a kind of witness, Mr. Devine. Do you know a man named Paul Baron?”
“No. We don’t know anything Carla does in the city. What kind of case?”
“Murder,” I said. “Maybe two murders. Blackmail, too.”
The woman made a sound. Just a sound without a name. Devine clasped his hands between his knees. He looked up and at me, and past me out a window. He had a view of the greasy water, and maybe a scow or a mud flat.
“They have to grow up, you know?” Devine said. “A child, ah, that’s a marvelous thing. Small, pretty, vulnerable and happy. No matter how they cry and you have to smack them, they’re happy little things. They run and jump and swing and throw themselves into the snow. It’s all so marvelous for them. I used to watch her and almost cry. They don’t know, children. About life, death, all that. But they grow up and they find out how short it is, life, and they want their share. It has to be that way. I always understood. Carla wanted a lot of things I didn’t want, her mother didn’t want, so she had to go and find them. You can’t give your child what you have, what you wanted. It’s natural. I never expected her to stay here.”
I said nothing. He wasn’t finished. The woman watched him with those dark eyes as if this were something they had talked about a lot. They had understood, decided that Carla was right, that the risks where worth it for her to live. They were right, of course, but it’s no easier to be right than wrong.
“I didn’t want her to stay up here,” Devine said. “When I bought the land back in ’thirty-three it was almost wild up here. All boats, open fields, and fishing. I like fishing. It’s an optimistic hobby. It was good for her as a child; she had a good childhood. She liked the house; we all did. It was what I worked thirty years to have, and I got it. Paid it off two years ago; it’s all ours now. That was what I wanted: a piece of land, a paid-up house, my own place. We’re boxed in now, and the water’s no good, and the fish are gone, and maybe I should have been told a paid-up house really isn’t much for a man to want, but you believe what they tell you when you’re young. It was a goal, as good as any, I suppose, and I got it.”
He looked at me. “I didn’t expect her to want to stay, though. They find out about life and they have to run off and grab for it fast because they’ve found out. It was right. It was my house, my land, I worked for it. It wasn’t what she worked for. She had to go and do her own work. You just hope she won’t get in too bad trouble. She could drown in the front yard. I wanted her to go. If I had another life, maybe I’d try for something else myself. Something I could take with me; like climbing a mountain or building a bridge in the jungle. Risk more, maybe. Only I hope she’s all right.”
The woman made the sound again. Then she closed her dark eyes. She seemed to sleep. Devine took a breath, unclasped his hands. They were squeezed white.
“As far as I know, she’s all right,” I said. “She may have lied to the police. If she did, she might be in danger. Not from the police. Tell me about the other two men.”
“One was a small man, thin. Kind of sandy hair. He came early before we were up. I didn’t like him; he kept looking all around. I told him Carla wasn’t here and hadn’t been. He was a bit arrogant, but nervous. He didn’t seem to know what to do after I told him she wasn’t here. He finally asked if I knew where she was. I told him no, and shut the door on him.”
“Did he have a car?”
“A green sedan, old. He seemed uneasy when he left.”
I described Walter Radford. “Was he like that?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I would have said older, but I’m not certain.”
“The second man?” I said.
Devine shook his head slowly. “Very different. That was when we began to worry. Two of them, and then what this second man was like. He looked like some animal, a bear. He hardly spoke at all. Just said her name: Carla.”
“Short, broad, with big hands and shoulders like a bull?”
“That’s him. I told him Carla wasn’t here. He pushed me away like a feather and went through the whole house. After he looked, he left. I thought of the police, but what had he done?”
“Did you tell either of them where they could find her?”
“No. I don’t know anywhere except her apartment with the girls.”
“Do you know a boy with a gray coupe? Thin, pale, long hair?”
“No.”
Mrs. Devine opened her eyes. “There was a boy like that. He came here with her once. He called a few times after.”
She got up and went out of the room. Devine and I sat. There were noises out of sight: drawers being opened and closed; the sound of rummaging. Then she came back. She carried a torn scrap of paper. She gave it to me.
“It was in a drawer with her things,” she said.
She sat down again in the same chair and closed her eyes. Devine watched her. I looked at the scrap of paper. It had a name and address: Ben Marno, 2 Grove Mews, 5-B.
I stood up, and Devine watched me.
“She’ll be all right,” I said. “If she comes home, or calls, send her to the police. Make her go.”
“Yeh,” Devine said. “I will.”
I went out to my car. As I drove away, the house was as clean and neat as when I had arrived. But it seemed smaller.
18
I RACED the black clouds down from City Island and lost. When I pulled onto the Triborough Bridge, the interlude of sun was over, and the river was gray below. Downstream the lights were on in all the tall buildings. The wind came up, and a driving snow had started when I stopped around the corner from the East Sixty-third Street building.
I was crossing the lobby when Walter Radford and Deirdre Fallon came out of the elevator. She had changed to a black sheath, but her sable was the same. I wondered if Carla Devine had a sable. What was better, a quiet Cape Cod cottage or a sable? If I knew the answer to that, I’d be rich—or in an insane asylum. Walter wore a dinner jacket and a cashmere overcoat and looked like an adolescent going to a formal.
“Is there any way to keep you away from us?” Walter said.
“No.”
Walter reddened and clenched those anemic fists again. It seemed to be his reflex to any insult of any degree. Someday it would get him hurt. Deirdre Fallon touched his arm. He jerked back like a puppet. Maybe that’s what he was.
“Did you go looking for Carla Devine?” I asked.
“Go to hell,” Walter said.
“I wasn’t first at her parent’s house. I wasn’t even second. One of those ahead of me sounded like you.”
“It wasn’t. I didn’t leave the apartment all day.”
Deirdre Fallon said, “There were two othe
rs, Mr. Fortune?”
“Only one that I’m not sure of,” I said.
I didn’t need any unexplained characters, but that’s the name of the game. You can work six months on a case, only to have it solved when some total stranger walks into a police station in Medicine Bow and confesses to ease his conscience.
“Then you know one of them?” Deirdre Fallon asked.
“An ape name Leo Zar. Baron’s faithful retainer.”
She shivered. “I’ve met him. He scares me.”
We had walked while we talked and were outside by now. The snow came down horizontally on the wind. A black Jaguar drove up. A garage attendant jumped out and brought the keys to Walter. While Walter was tipping him, a silver Bentley glided to the curb behind the Jaguar. Carmine Costa got out. He walked toward us as smoothly as the Bentley drove.
“Miss Fallon, Mr. Radford,” Costa said, and touched his hat. He grinned at me. “Hello, baby, any luck with the sleuthing?”
“All bad,” I said.
Costa was immaculately dressed without a hint of either dressing up or dressing down. He looked more the aristocrat than Walter Radford did—to anyone who didn’t know real aristocrats. The blond Strega materialized behind Costa. I hadn’t seen the bodyguard-and-friend move from the car or anywhere else. The perfect shadow, unmoving behind his boss like a statue in the snow.
Costa sympathized with me. “I heard about Baron. Looks like you got sold a bill, baby. That Weiss will go away forever.” He shuddered, and it wasn’t the cold. It was the thought of prison. I watched him shake off the specter with an effort, and turn to Walter Radford. “How about a lift? I got some business to talk about.”
“We have our own car, Mr. Costa,” Deirdre Fallon said.
I said, “What business, Costa?”
“Not your business, baby.”
“It is if it involves blackmail.”
I’m told that for a peaceful man I take big chances. Maybe I do. Like most men with few muscles, I consider myself fast with the brains, and you have to feel courageous in some area. I’m a pretty brave man with words. Or maybe just a stupid man.
Costa’s smile went away faster than it had come. I got a flash of the violence in him. Not the violence of the hood, but of the old master sergeant. He was breathing down at me before I saw him move. He stood nose to nose. I expected to hear him say, “You, soldier!” next. Quickly as he moved, Strega was quicker. I felt the silent blond muscleman at my left and almost behind me. Something touched my shoulder. It felt like a vise, but it was only fingers. Strega’s fingers. They chewed at my shoulder like a lion’s jaws.
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