Walk a Black Wind

by Michael Collins

  Walk a Black Wind

  Dennis Lynds writing as Michael Collins

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  To Deirdre, in trust

  1.

  Most of us pass through life without ever meeting real danger or fear. We slide from day to day, and nothing very bad happens. We like it that way, I think, even if we do sometimes feel that life is flat. But fear and horror come to some of us, and we meet it in different ways.

  There are some who face it naked and early and come to terms. Nothing ever scares them again, or even worries them. They are the great, the saints, and the monsters. Then there are some who see fear once and are destroyed. If they go on, they are hollow shells. Most neither come to terms nor are destroyed. They simply endure the moment, survive, and never know how they will meet fear the next time.

  The man who came to my one-window office that Thursday in late October had met fear or horror or both.

  “Two weeks ago I met a girl,” he said. “She’s dead, Mr. Fortune, murdered. I want her murderer caught.”

  He was my height, about five-foot-ten, broad and solid in a good blue pin-stripe business suit under a navy topcoat. His olive-colored face was faintly Latin, clean-shaven and deeply lined, but somehow youthful despite the deep wrinkles. I guessed his age at about forty-five. He held a blue homburg where he sat in my one extra chair, and his thick hair was dark brown and coarse. There was no gray in the hair, and his hat was unusual these days. The business card he placed on my old desk explained the hat: John F. Andera, Sales Representative, Marvel Office Equipment, Inc. Salesmen were among the few who still always wore a hat.

  “What was the girl to you, Mr. Andera?” I said.

  His eyes were a cloudy blue as if he had been stunned. He looked like a man who has been hit by a train and isn’t sure yet what damage has been done. Not sure if he was alive or dead, holding himself together inside, breathing carefully.

  “A friend,” he said. “I liked her. I had … hopes.”

  He spoke with a kind of stiff, prep-school diction that was not natural to him. The sound of some faint accent underneath.

  I said, “What was the name originally? My grandfather was Fortunowski when he got off the ship. Sometimes I miss it.”

  He didn’t smile. “Anderoparte. We came from Corsica. My father changed it for business. Will you take the job?”

  “I’ll have to know more about it,” I said. “You only knew this girl for two weeks?”

  He glanced around my cubicle office with its view of an air-shaft wall as if he was surprised I’d think twice about any job. With the shabby office, my rough clothes, and my missing arm, I don’t look affluent, and we are a world based on cash and prospects. Andera had expected me to be hungry to work, but he said nothing. He took two newspaper clippings from his pocket, gave them to me.

  They were both from The New York Times. The first was from yesterday’s late edition, Wednesday. An inch from page nine:

  WOMAN FOUND MURDERED

  Fran Martin, of 280 East Eighty-fourth Street, Manhattan, was found stabbed to death in her bed at 8:30 A.M. this morning by her weekly cleaning woman. Police report that the victim died sometime after midnight last night. No motive is yet known for the brutal slaying of the woman who worked as a cocktail waitress at the Emerald Room on East Sixty-sixth Street. Police are investigating.

  The second clipping was much longer, dated Thursday, today, and had run on page two of The Times:

  MURDER VICTIM DAUGHTER OF

  UPSTATE MAYOR

  The attractive young victim of Tuesday night’s slaying at 280 East Eighty-fourth Street has now been identified as Francesca Crawford, daughter of Mayor Martin J. Crawford of Dresden, New York.

  On his arrival at the Plaza, the Mayor of the upstate city stated that he knew of no motive for his daughter’s murder, and neither he nor his wife could cast any light on the tragedy.

  Mayor Crawford revealed that his daughter had left home three months ago, and had not been in contact with her family since. He could offer no explanation for her living in Manhattan under an assumed name. The Mayor and his wife are now in seclusion at the Plaza.

  Police identified Miss Crawford through her roommate, Celia Bazer, who had been away visiting friends on Long Island. The roommate is now being interrogated, but police emphasize they have no leads.

  Miss Crawford, first identified as “Fran Martin,” was found stabbed in her bed—

  The rest was a repeat of the first story, with more words but no more facts. I handed the clippings back to John Andera.

  “Any ideas why she was killed?” I asked him.

  “No, none,” he said. “I met Fran two weeks ago today at a party. She was alone, I took her to a late dinner. I liked her. I took her out twice more. We … got along. She seemed much older, more mature, than she really was.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Twenty, Mr. Fortune. Just twenty. I went away a few days on business this week, returned on Wednesday for a date with Fran. She didn’t show at the restaurant. I was angry, so didn’t call her. Today I saw that second story.” His thick hands shook. “She had been using a false name. Then she was dead. I had hoped … well, that we …” He stopped.

  “You can prove you were out of town?”

  “Yes, of course.” He had expected the question, and he anticipated my next one. “I’m not married, I have no jealous women, and I don’t know if she had other men. I don’t know anything, that’s why I want you. I can pay well.”

  “For a girl you hardly knew?”

  “How long does a man have to know a girl to know he likes her? I liked her a lot! I’ll pay you a thousand dollars in advance, another thousand when you bring in her murderer!”

  His voice was still steady, but inside he was bleeding hard where it didn’t show but hurt just as much. Inside, he was crying for a girl who hadn’t even given him her right name. Then, that wasn’t so unusual in the fast world of New York.

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said. “You could get a big agency for that, and the police will handle it well enough.”

  “The police have too much work, and I don’t want Fran lost in a big agency’s computers. I want a man who will work for Francesca. I want to do something!”

  “It’s still a lot of money,” I said.

  “Yes, it is. Because I want to make you take the job, and because I want my name kept out of it. I don’t want to be involved.” He said it bluntly. Either he was naïve or bolder than he looked.

  “Even though you can prove you were out of town?”

  “I’m not worried about being thought guilty,” he said. “It’s just that a young girl, a salesman, a few weeks, you understand?”

  I understood. The newspapers, and his office people, would have a fun-time with it. We love to see dirt.

  “All right,” I said. “In murder, I have to work with the police. If I can’t keep you out, I’ll tell you first.”

  Andera thought for a moment, then nodded, and stood up. He counted ten hundred-dollar bills from his wallet. They were all new bills, he’d come prepared from his bank.

  “I’ll come here for any reports,” he said.

  When he had gone I thought about him. He had paid me more than I was worth on any market, and I had a hunch that he knew it. Had he decided how much it would cost to make me take a case I didn’t quite believe? Maybe, but did that mean that his story wasn’t true, or only that he was afraid I wouldn’t think it was true?

  The only way to know was to go to work, and I could always use two thousand dollars. I called Centre Street. They told me Captain Gazzo was on the case. It figured—a mayor’s daughter. Gazzo agreed to meet me at The Medical Exa
miner’s Building on the East River.

  2.

  I walked across town in the autumn afternoon sun, the sharp October wind blowing through my old duffel coat. A wind that had been blowing hard all week, the whole city walking bent.

  Captain Gazzo was at one of the crypts in the basement autopsy room when I walked in. The dead girl in the crypt had not been beautiful, yet there was something very alive about her face even in death. Her long, dark hair framed a face of high, broad cheekbones, and a proud nose like a hawk. There was an Oriental shape to her dark brown eyes. She wore no make-up at all. It made her seem older.

  Gazzo said, “I know all the violence, but I never get used to the young ones. Especially not the girls.”

  “Women’s Lib wouldn’t like that,” I said. “Male prejudice, feeling worse because women are toys, weaker.”

  “Maybe they’re right,” the Captain said. “Maybe I do feel worse because it’s a waste of what some man should have had. A girl should be alive to produce kids for him, or be a decoration to be protected. A girl is our loss, a dead boy is his own loss.”

  Sometimes I still wonder where it comes from, Gazzo’s flow of words that can drown a prisoner. He says he knows—from thirty years of talking to himself.

  “Anything beside the knife wound?” I asked.

  “That’s all. Once through the heart. She never even woke up. The only other mark is this.”

  He moved the dead girl’s long hair. She had a thick, three-inch scar from under her right ear to her jawbone. An ugly, livid scar like a bullet furrow.

  “It’s old,” Gazzo said. “When she was around three, the M.E. thinks. The roommate says she wore her hair tied back, showed the scar. Flaunted it, you know? Makes you wonder.”

  The scar made her broad face seem harder, older, especially with no make-up at all.

  “Anything else in the M.E.’s report?” I asked.

  “No. A healthy girl, no bad habits, no evidence of any recent sex, no bruises. An outdoor type, the M.E. thinks: from her tan, wind-roughened skin.”

  “Can we talk in your office?” I said.

  I wanted to leave. The young ones bother me too. Usually, it’s the very weak or the very strong who die by violence so young. I wondered which she had been.

  The light is always artificial in Captain Gazzo’s office, the shades drawn. He says it fits better with his work.

  “How’d you get on this, Dan?” he asked as we sat down.

  “I knew the girl a little,” I lied.

  I’m a good liar, I’ve practiced in a lot of places where liars have to be good, but knowing when a man is lying is part of Gazzo’s trade. That’s one reason I always work with the police. I need them more than they need me, and by working openly most of the time, I have a better chance of being believed in my lie when I don’t want to work in the open with them. I had the conviction that John Andera’s out-of-town alibi would check out, and that if the police hounded him all he would do was close up and pull out.

  “Another charity case?” Gazzo said. “What do you live on?”

  “Very little,” I said. “What can you tell me, Captain?”

  “Not much. She was in her bed, stabbed once with a long, thin knife. If a killer knew where to push to miss bone, the knife would go through like a hot finger through butter. A very efficient weapon, and this killer pushed on target.”

  “Around midnight on Tuesday?”

  “Give or take an hour. No one saw or heard anything, even though people were awake in apartments on both sides.”

  “How’d the killer get in?”

  “No sign. Apartment’s on the top floor. No fire escape. Nothing on the roof. The girl’s door was on the chain, one window was open. It’s risky, but he must have climbed down from the roof without a rope. An expert, or a lucky amateur. Nothing in the place that didn’t belong to the girl or her roommate. A very neat job.”

  “What do you have to go on?”

  Gazzo shrugged. “Theory, Dan, and that’s about all. A two-bit killing like we get every day. She just moved into the place three weeks ago, told the roommate nothing—not even why she was using a phony name. Wasn’t there much, but was alone most of the time when she was. We’re looking into her actions, but she didn’t have time to do much here. So far, she looks like a solitary kid who did nothing.”

  I said, “She used a false name, but moved in with a girl who knew her? That’s kind of odd.”

  “Maybe,” Gazzo said. “Meanwhile, we go on routine. Some drawers were open, and her handbag was gone. No money around, and she had some. No address book.”

  “Probably it was in the missing handbag,” I said. “Just robbery? Some scared junkie? Or a real pro?”

  “It’s possible. I don’t much like the quick killing for that, or the entry for some junkie, but it happens. Or maybe she was just a runaway girl who mixed in wrong company. The parents are due here any time. I’d like to know more about the time between when she left home, and three weeks ago.”

  “Okay if I hang around?”

  “Hang around,” Gazzo said.

  They came into the office with the confidence of power in a small city. Rulers in their world, and, like most people, they carried their world with them. It was there in the fine suit and imposing presence of Mayor Martin J. Crawford, and in the mink Mrs. Crawford wore over a slim black suit, despite the heat of Gazzo’s office, as if she were making a brief, royal visit. There in their dry eyes and emotionless faces—public faces that looked only at Captain Gazzo.

  “Can we take her, Captain?” Martin Crawford said.

  He was well over six feet tall and two hundred pounds. His soft hands moved when he spoke as if giving orders. He had a lawyer’s eyes that took in everything, but held the results of his judgment to himself until he was sure of where the advantage lay for him in any situation.

  “You can take her home,” Gazzo said.

  Crawford nodded, and then stood there. His lawyer’s eyes were clear, but his big body didn’t seem to know what to do next. Paralyzed by an event that didn’t relate to the world he understood.

  “Martin?” the wife said. “You’ll call the funeral people?”

  “Yes,” Crawford said, reminded. “Of course, Katje.”

  The wife watched him as he went to a telephone. She was a tall, dark-blond woman about forty. Thin and athletic-looking, she played a hard game of tennis or golf I guessed. No prettier than her dead daughter, her handsome face was thinner, and she must have been a patrician dazzler at twenty among cuter, more girlishly pretty girls. Her upright bearing made me think of medieval ladies who defended the castle when their lord was off to the wars.

  She said, “We thank you, Captain. We … don’t really know what to do. She was our oldest, Francesca. We … we’ll always wonder why. What happened? Did it have to?”

  “We’ll find out what happened, Mrs. Crawford,” Gazzo said.

  She gave a small shrug, as if to say that she knew Gazzo would find the killer, yes, but would that really tell her what had happened? Or really why?

  Martin Crawford put down the telephone. “They’ll meet us at the … morgue, Katje.”

  The word “morgue” sounded painful, and Crawford sagged in the hot office, his big face all loose flesh. Mrs. Crawford touched his shoulder. I placed her face and manner—her name was Katje, and she was from upstate New York: a patroon. One of the Dutch aristocrats. Crawford patted her hand.

  “We don’t know why she left home,” the big man said. “We don’t know what she was doing. They have their own minds, the children today. We teach them to think, and they think in ways we can’t even know, much less understand.”

  Gazzo said, “You can’t tell us anything?”

  “Nothing we can think of,” Katje Crawford said. “Francesca was always our difficult child. I never seemed to reach her after she was ten.”

  “Pigheaded!” Martin Crawford said, the anger as much for himself as for the dead girl. “Sometimes she just sat and
stared at us. The best one, I suppose. The best child is often the worst for the parents. A child’s standards and her parent’s standards are often very different, and if the child is tough, they battle.”

  “You battled a lot with her?” I asked.

  They both looked at me for the first time. Martin Crawford nodded.

  “All the time. On everything. She even opposed me on public issues. Housing, conservation, crime fighting.”

  “When did you hear from her last?” Gazzo said.

  “After she left we didn’t hear at all.”

  I said, “Three months? Did you look for her?”

  “No,” Crawford said. “She left a note saying she had gone on a trip. No reason, nothing about where or why.”

  “She had a scar,” I said. “Like a bullet wound.”

  “A childhood accident,” Mrs. Crawford said.

  Gazzo said, “Mr. Fortune just wonders if it could have any bearing. So do we. Did someone shoot at her?”

  “Martin shot by accident. She was two-and-a-half,” Mrs. Crawford said, and she looked at me with a question in her blue eyes. “You called this man ‘Mister’ Fortune. Isn’t he one of your policemen, Captain?”

  “A private detective,” Gazzo said. “Working with us.”

  “Private?” she said. “I don’t understand. You mean someone hired him? Why? Who?”

  “I knew Francesca, Mrs. Crawford,” I said. “I met her here in New York. I want to help.”

  “Help?” she said. “Yes, I see. Thank you.”

  Gazzo said, “Can either of you think of anything in your daughter’s life before she vanished that could help us?”

  “No,” Martin Crawford said. “I mean, where do we start?”

  “In twenty years,” Mrs. Crawford said, “how do we pick out what could help you? Francesca was unusual in many ways—busy, too silent, good in school, intense on her own projects. But she was normal, too, with a lot of friends. Some we knew, some we didn’t. Nothing stands out, Captain. Perhaps if you had specific questions, but until you do …”