Walk a Black Wind

by Michael Collins

  She finished her coffee. “Fran was depressed, and angry, too. She said everyone was useless, no one was any good, and that she was finished with Dresden. She was very down, and when I asked her why, she said I wouldn’t see it her way.”

  She looked up at me again. “Then, the very next day after she said she was going to finish with Dresden, and was so low, she suddenly was all excited again. It was strange, Mr. Fortune. Almost manic, you know? That day she vanished.”

  I waited, but that was it. “You have no idea what had happened, Felicia?”

  “No,” she said. “Fran talked to Grandfather Van Hoek that day, but he was very sick, you know, and she was going away. I wanted to ask him if he’d said anything special to Fran, but he got sicker when she left, and died a few days later. Mother and Dad were with him when he died, but they said he hadn’t told them anything about Fran.”

  “You asked all her other friends if they said anything? Or knew anything?”

  She nodded. “Fran didn’t have many friends in Dresden. We’d been away in college, and the last two years Fran didn’t even come home in the summer. She worked out there in California with field workers. That’s when she started to, dress so wild and strange, too.”

  She finished her cigarette, and looked for somewhere to put her coffee mug down. My coffee table was beside her, but she hesitated, as if she’d never seen a table where you could put down a mug without finding a coaster first.

  “After she left,” I said, “did you hear from her?”

  She nodded. “Twice. She wrote to a friend Mother and Dad don’t know, Muriel Roark, and enclosed notes for me. She told me not to tell anyone, and didn’t give any return address, anyway. All she wrote was that she was fine, was finding out what was real, things like that.”

  “You don’t know where she wrote from?”

  “The second letter was from New York.”

  “Any names? What she was doing? Why she was in New York? Where she’d been that first month away from home?”

  “No,” she said, “nothing like that.”

  “No, damn it!” I swore, stood up. “You came down here because you know something. Enough to make you think I might have some answers you want. Tell me what you know.”

  She stood too. “I don’t know anything.”

  “You said someone followed you. Don’t try to chase down a killer alone. You’ll only get hurt.”

  Her face was pale. “Just … tell me who hired you.”

  “I told you no one hired me.”

  “I … I don’t believe you.”

  “All right,” I said. “I can’t let you risk your own life. You’ll have to convince the police you don’t know anything about Francesca.”

  I went to the telephone. Her hand went into her small handbag. The little, silver, .22-caliber automatic in her hand was like a toy. I have as much courage as most men, and the odds were 99-1 she wouldn’t shoot, and better that she wouldn’t even hit me. At least, those were the odds if she knew much about guns. I didn’t think she knew much, and that scared me.

  “Put it away,” I said. “The police will help—”

  “No!” she cried. “How do I know who you’re really going to call? I don’t know who you’re working for or why!”

  I reached for the receiver. “You call the police, then—”

  The little pistol exploded with a toy bang. The bullet wasn’t a toy. I don’t know where it went. I froze.

  “Stand … still,” she said.

  She picked up her coat, backed to my door, and went out. I didn’t chase her for five minutes. Then I went down to the street. Up at the corner I saw a taxi pull away. I went back upstairs.. It was just after 7 P.M. If I drove fast, I could be up in Dresden before nine-thirty.

  I called John Andera at his office to get his home number. He was still in his office. I told him about Abram Zaremba and the land deal, and that I was going up to Dresden. I’d get my expenses later.

  I packed my old pistol and some clothes in a bag, and went out to rent a car.

  8.

  Dresden is a grimy city of a quarter million on the banks of the broad, shallow North Fork River some miles above its junction with the Delaware. Founded before the Revolution, its red-brick factories on the river date from the industrial boom before the Civil War, and were left behind by areas of better facilities and cheaper labor. Now highways and truck transportation have boomed Dresden again, but the cleaner light industry of today is spread around the city, no longer tied to the river.

  The old factories, and the downtown residential areas, have been left to the poor, the old, and the black. The new skilled workers live out in the hills surrounding the city, and the managers live near the tops of the best hills. Where once it huddled around narrow streets near the river, the city now sprawled into what was farm and forest not long ago.

  It was 9:30 P.M. when I turned off the Thruway. Golf courses, drive-in movies, roadhouses. and shopping centers ringed the city along the county highway, and just inside the city line it curved around a large, dark lake. A wide, blacktop road led in toward the lake. I turned down it.

  It ended at a fenced hunting lodge on the swampy south shore of the lake. Across the swamp I saw the high shadow of an earth dike between the swamp and the deep water of the lake proper, and near the lodge a mammoth pumping station was at work draining the swamp. A sign identified the station as property of The Dept. of Public Works, City of Dresden, 9th Drainage District.

  I lit a cigarette, and sat there for a moment before I drove back to the highway. There was nothing at all anywhere in the swamp but the single lodge.

  Mayor Crawford’s house was at the crest of one of the higher hills of the city. Vast green lawns surrounded large brick and stone houses distant behind iron gates and gravel drives to coachhouse garages. The Crawford house was one of the largest, in reserved Tudor style, set closer to the street than most because there were two cottages behind it. It had the dignity and quiet of long power, an old family.

  The gates across the driveway were open, and I drove in. I parked in front of the house—and saw the green Cadillac. It was in front of the garage. I was sure it was the same Caddy my tail, had driven in New York, and I stared at it. Someone was very careless, or very confident. I got out, and saw the woman inside a lighted, glassed-in side porch.

  She looked out at the night like a lighthouse-keeper’s daughter searching the sea for a lost lover. Her face turned, and I saw that it was Mrs. Katje Crawford. She acted as if she didn’t really see me, or if she did I had no meaning for her. Her face was drawn and distant, like the face of a starving woman. Only it wasn’t hunger, it was a kind of inner pain. I was seeing her private face, and it wasn’t pretty. Her daughter was dead at twenty.

  The front door opened as I walked toward it. A man came out—small, stocky, in a camel’s hair topcoat but with no hat. Swarthy, he had sharp dark eyes and white teeth, and he was the man I’d “ambushed” tailing me in New York. I was certain. He had arrogant shoulders, walked with a confident strut, and the thin smile of his white teeth wasn’t in his eyes. I doubted that his eyes ever smiled. A man with no time to waste on smiling for anything but show.

  “You want something, Fortune?” he said.

  I said, “You’re one up on me. Should I guess?”

  “Anthony Sasser,” he said. “You must have done your homework in the hospital.”

  “After you put me there, Sasser?”

  His dark face was full of contempt. “You want a confession? I didn’t see who shot you any more than you did. Loused me up, too. I wanted to go on tailing you, but after you got hit, I had to get out. Don’t like being around a target.”

  “That’s your story.”

  “Prove it’s not true.”

  “You tailed me, knocked me around.”

  “Sure. You jumped me, you had a gun. What do I do? You asked for it, and you got it.”

  “Why tail me?”

  “The Crawfords asked me. You didn�
��t know me, and they wanted to know who hired you. They’ve got a right.”

  “No one hired me, Sasser.”

  “That’s your story,” he said, mimicking me.

  “You were a professional fighter once?”

  “Me?” His eyes closed up. “Not me. Just a businessman.”

  “You never fought? I can check.”

  “Check,” he said. “You won’t find anything.”

  “Not even amateur? In the gym? Lessons?”

  “I got better ways to have fun.”

  I was sure he had been trained as a fighter—sometime, somewhere. It’s something a man can’t hide. Yet he seemed just as sure I couldn’t find out, as if his past was unknown. I thought about that as I looked toward the big house.

  “You’re at home here it looks like,” I said.

  “Old friend of the family,” he said. “Business, too.”

  “Is the Mayor at home?”

  His whole face stiffened. “No, at some meeting. You want the Mayor? I can drive ahead and show you where.”

  “Mrs. Crawford’ll do for now,” I said.

  He didn’t like that, me talking to Katje Crawford. “Be easy around Katje, Fortune. This is our city, my city. Don’t lean too hard while you’re nosing around without a client.”

  “I just want to help find who killed her daughter.”

  “Sure,” Sasser said.

  He walked past me to his Cadillac. Mrs. Katje Crawford was in the open doorway now. We both watched Sasser drive away. Then I walked to the door.

  “Mr. Fortune, isn’t it?” Katje Crawford said. “Come in.”

  She wore a long, flowing white robe that accentuated her drawn face and forty years. She looked older now, the strain on her handsome face, a rigidity in her athletic body. But she strode ahead of me through an elegant entry hall and across a living room like a public hall in some palace—but a lived-in room, too. Her dark blond hair swung to her stride, the hair too long for her age—a small vanity. We went out into the glassed side porch.

  “Sit down,” she said. “Will you have a drink?”

  “Irish if you have it,” I said.

  She had it, and made the drink herself at a small bar in a corner. There had to be servants, but a patrician didn’t ring for the maid to make one drink for a single guest. Even the porch furnishings were rich antiques in fine taste. It was a taste that comes only from growing up with fine pieces, living with them, appreciating them. I don’t often feel like a peasant, but here I did. We’re not used to that feeling in this country because we have so little real aristocracy, and even they are becoming more “common man” these days.

  She brought my whisky. “Now. You’ll say who hired you?”

  “No one did,” I said. “Is Felicia home yet?”

  “Felicia?”

  “She came to New York to see me. She had a gun. She ran. I think she’s out to find the killer herself.”

  Her face almost collapsed. She stood and rang a bell. A maid appeared.

  “Is Miss Felicia home?”

  “No, ma’am. She left this afternoon, with a suitcase.”

  “Thank you, Paula.”

  The maid left. Katje Crawford’s clenched hands told me that she wanted to ask a hundred more questions of the maid, but one didn’t ask private questions of a maid. When she sat again, the lines of her face had deepened into dark slashes. She sat very still for a minute or more, spoke to herself:

  “How many daughters must I lose?”

  There was no answer to that. She didn’t expect one. She listened to her own answers for a time. I drank my Irish.

  “I think Felicia knows something we don’t,” I said.

  She shook her head as if to clear a spell, and smiled at me apologetically, her silence rudeness to a guest. “I’m sorry, I’ll be all right. Knows something? What could Felicia know? You mean about Francesca? She would have told us.”

  “Francesca wrote to her twice, Mrs. Crawford, asked her not to tell anyone.”

  “Francesca wrote? I see. You think something in a letter?” she said. “But Felicia would have told us—now.”

  “Maybe not. Felicia said that Francesca felt neglected, different, not loved. Felicia could be keeping faith.”

  Katje Crawford winced. She was a dynamic woman, and her thoughts were mirrored in her face, her active body. An energetic, sinuous body younger than her age, and I felt her as a woman. An attraction. That doesn’t happen often to me on a case. But I was aware of Katje Crawford, of her strength. Maybe there had been more of her in her daughter than Francesca had realized. Too much, maybe.

  “Yes, it’s true,” she said. “My fault, but not all mine. Francesca was combative, what Tony Sasser calls a ‘hardhead.’ But I wasn’t the mother to the twins I’ve tried to be to the younger ones. A young matron with her own interests and a rising husband makes a bad mother sometimes. Then, we just weren’t close, not alike. A streak of isolation in the girls, even Felicia. Still, you can’t blame the child. My guilt. What do I do now, Mr. Fortune? For Francesca, nothing. To catch who killed her won’t give me any sense of achievement. But what do I do for Felicia? Where is she?”

  “Help me find Francesca’s murderer fast.” I said.

  She nodded. “Yes. What can I tell you?”

  “What you know about Abram Zaremba and the Black Mountain Lake project.”

  “The project is a needed housing development. We’re growing too fast. What else should I know?”

  “Francesca worked against it?”

  “She had strong ideas on ecology. Is it important?”

  “What about Abram Zaremba?”

  “I don’t know him personally. My husband does, I think. Has all this some connection to Francesca?”

  “Mark Leland had,” I said. “You know about him?”

  “Of course I do,” she said, moved her lean hand in a sharp gesture. “We thought of that at once, Mr. Fortune, but Mark Leland was killed over three months ago. Francesca couldn’t describe the man she saw running from Leland’s car. Lieutenant Oster tried everything with her, she simply didn’t see enough. Some hired killer, anonymous, the Lieutenant thinks. Far away by now. What danger was Francesca to him?”

  “Maybe none, but Mark Leland was investigating the Black Mountain Lake project when he was killed.”

  She sat silent. Then, she got up and went to an inlaid side table, a beautiful piece of work by some eighteenth-century English craftsman. She took a cigarette from a jade box, and lighted it without waiting for me to fumble for my lighter.

  “You think Francesca was killed because of that development? A few thousand acres of swamp land!”

  “She was involved with Mark Leland in more than just seeing a man run from killing him. They’d met, talked.”

  “Talked? Then tell Martin! Tell my husband, he knows about that project. Find out, Mr. Fortune!”

  She came back to her chair, and her legs seemed to give way as she sat. “We have all we want or need, we hurt no one by it, but she had to be militant. Look for battles she was no part of. Man is a scheming animal, that’s what marks us, Mr. Fortune—we strive for ourselves. Perhaps it’s wrong, and perhaps it will kill us all, but it can’t be changed.”

  The life in her face was animated even in despair and anger. I could feel her presence all the way down my back.

  “There’s another possibility in Dresden,” I said.

  “More?” She half-smiled. “You know your work, don’t you? Strange, one wouldn’t guess it to look at you.”

  “A one-armed roustabout?” I said.

  She shook her head. “The one arm is incidental. It gives you a piratical look, nothing more. No, it’s your dress and manner. You seem inconsequential, uneducated, but you’re not at all, are you? You know that my side table is eighteenth-century English, and good. I saw it in your eyes. People underestimate you, don’t they? They confuse a missing arm with a missing intelligence, and I think you foster that image.”

  “It’s
just me, Mrs. Crawford.”

  “Perhaps,” she smiled. “What is the other possibility?”

  “Frank Keefer.”

  She nodded. “I know, but it was never serious. Francesca toyed with him, found him physically interesting. I expect he had other thoughts, but he’s a fool with grandiose ideas.”

  “She dumped him just before she left.”

  “Did she? I didn’t know, but would that make him kill her? She was the golden girl he wanted. Why kill his dream?”

  “Maybe because he couldn’t have her?”

  “Frank Keefer?” At another time she would have laughed. Now she only smiled. “He’s the stupid, dull type who never gives up. To admit that a woman was beyond his grasp, would never have him, would lower his self-esteem so much I doubt if he could consider that possible.”

  “Would he kill to keep her?”

  She hesitated. “I would say no, he hasn’t the necessary moral strength, but I suppose you never can be sure. Anyway, it’s Francesca who’s dead, Mr. Fortune. How would that mean—”

  “Maybe Keefer made a mistake,” I said.

  She was silent again. I stood up.

  “If Felicia comes home, sit on her and call me, okay?”

  The “if” seemed to weigh down the porch, but she nodded.

  “Where can I find your husband now?” I asked.

  “At a meeting of civic leaders at City Hall. He has to go to these meetings, but it’s a terrible bore for me.”

  There was an annoyance on her face as I left, as if thinking of a lot of things that bored her.

  9.

  City Hall was in an old, downtown section of Dresden. An ugly graystone building in late Victorian style. Floodlights bathed it in a glare, and the lawn was manicured in an attempt at some dignity.

  The chill night, the big building in its square, and the dark, narrow streets leading off into a silent, deserted black made me think of London. I could almost feel the fog, hear the mellow musical sound of a London police whistle.

  A night guard at a desk inside called up to the Mayor’s office for me. Two silent black women mopped the lobby floors. It was dim and cold in the lobby, bare, as if designed to prove that the city fathers did not spend taxpayers’ money on frivolous decoration. (We seem to insist that city employees work with none of the shine and comfort of private companies, but happily swallow the plush homes and privilege city leaders have in private life.)