Walk a Black Wind df-4

by Michael Collins

  “I’ll send you a bottle of the best, Willy.”

  “If you got a client, make it cash.”

  “I’ll send something,” I said.

  I felt cheap as I rode up in the shaky elevator. But a thousand dollars, even two, is something a man has to learn to hang on to if he’s middle-aged and never hung on to anything. Self-interest is the game, especially by the mid-forties.

  Inside room 411, I put my ear to the plywood panel that now covered where the door to 409 had been. They must have been just on the other side. Celia Bazer was talking. There was anger in her voice, and something more-fear? Or love?

  “What do you want from me, Frank?”

  Frank Keefer’s voice was deep and smooth. “Maybe I just want you after all, Cele.”

  “Sure. Four years of us, then Francesca and her daddy came into your big eyes, and good-bye for me!”

  “Leave Fran out, Cele. We busted up, I told you.”

  “Maybe you busted up just Tuesday night! The hard way. You want to keep me quiet. You and Joel hate trouble, right?”

  “Leave Joel out, too,” Keefer said, his voice a little ragged this time. “Fran told me to get lost before she ever left Dresden. You remember that. I never saw her again.”

  Celia Bazer’s voice laughed. “Sure, you came down here just to find me. Surprise, Francesca was living with me! Did you come to try for her again, the jackpot? Maybe it looked like you had a chance. Maybe you got afraid of what I could tell her. Maybe you made a big mistake!”

  I could almost feel the threat hanging in the silence inside room 409 on the other side of the thin panel. Frank Keefer’s deep voice broke it:

  “You have a short memory, you know, Cele? Your face was bad the time I busted it. It could look a lot worse.”

  Her voice was thin. “You don’t scare me. You’re scared!”

  But Celia Bazer was scared. It was there in her voice. Keefer scared her-and excited her. That was in her voice, a thickness of desire. She was afraid of him, and she wanted him, too. He heard what I did in her voice.

  “Come here,” his voice said.

  The sounds on the other side of the panel were meaningless except in my mind. I imagined them, a man and woman close together. I saw Keefer holding her roughly, because that would be his pose. Her head was against his shoulder. The need in her voice was now stronger than the fear.

  “You were really through with Fran, Frank? All over?”

  “Three months ago, Cele. I had plans, sure. You can’t blame a man for trying for the bonanza. But she tossed me over, and what does Frank Keefer do against the Crawfords? I told Joel the hell with it, I wanted you. I mean it.”

  His voice didn’t convince me, not all the way, and I imagined his eyes not quite looking at her as she looked up at his face. But that was a projection of how I would act. Keefer was probably looking straight at her and smiling.

  “Frank?” her voice said. “What happened to Francesca?”

  “Don’t know, baby. I got down here Tuesday. I went to your place, no one was there. I called Bel-Mod, they said you were out of town. Wednesday night I went to see if you were home yet. The cops were there, I heard Fran’s name. I got out. Yesterday, I saw the story in the paper.”

  Beyond the wall he began to pace. “She’d been strange a while up in Dresden. Sort of keyed up. When she broke off, she said I was just another big fake. I was mad, so was Uncle Joel-all his big plans for getting in with the Mayor. He got drunk, had a fight with Fran. It was the last I saw of her.”

  Keefer stopped pacing, and there was no sound or movement on the other side of the wall. Until Celia Bazer spoke.

  “Let’s go home, Frank. Get out of this city.”

  He didn’t answer, but I pictured him nodding, and he picked up the telephone. He asked for a bellhop. I left room 411, and went down to the lobby to wait.

  They came out of the elevator with an ancient bellman who struggled with three bags. Frank Keefer carried the other two bags-Celia Bazer was his woman again. While he paid, I went out ahead of them, and ran to the corner to try for a taxi. The first three were taken. I looked back and saw Keefer loading the bags into a flashy red Buick convertible. I saw something else, too.

  As an empty cab stopped for me, a man in a camel’s hair topcoat walked past and got into a green Cadillac parked behind me. The same Caddy I had seen before going into the hotel. All at once I knew he was tailing me. I could find the girl and Keefer in Dresden. I wanted to talk to my tail.

  I gave the cabbie my office address. The Cadillac came behind us, far enough back to make me know he didn’t want to be noticed. The taxi dropped me at my building. I went up.

  My corridor was as dark and empty as usual. That was fine now. I ran into my office, turned on the light, and got my big old pistol. There was a janitor’s closet near the stairs. I made it, left the door open a crack, as footsteps came up.

  He passed like a shadow. I saw good shoulders, but he was two inches shorter than me. I slid out behind him. Sometimes I forget I have only one arm, but this time I had my gun for a club, at least. He heard me, and turned.

  I had a glimpse of a high coat collar, a low hat brim, two dark eyes, and some very white teeth-and no more. He lunged at me without hesitation. I swung my heavy pistol for his skull-and hit nothing at all.

  He was there, and then he wasn’t. Something hit me in the belly. A hard fist in my face. I hit the wall with my back, swung my pistol at him again, and missed again. Two fists hit one-two in my belly, another landed solid on my jaw. He had three arms, at least. I thought how unfair that was as my chin was hit and I landed on the corridor floor on my face.

  5

  He turned me over. I saw a face that was broad and olive-skinned. A gray homburg, gray coat-No! A camel coat…

  “Fortune?”

  He grew smaller and smaller like a mirage fading down a tunnel. His head became as small as a pin, and his thick body stretched up and up to touch the ceiling.

  “Fortune?” he said. “It’s John Andera. You okay?”

  He slipped into focus, became normal size, and I saw that he was standing over me where I lay on the floor of the corridor. John Andera, not the man who had hit me-unless?

  “A man tailed me,” I said, my jaw stiff and heavy. “A little shorter than you, not as broad. Brown eyes, camel’s hair topcoat. Know him?”

  “No,” John Andera said. “What did he want with you?”

  “I was going to find that out by ambushing him.”

  Some ambush. I wondered if I was ever going to learn that even with two arms I’d never have been a fighter. My “victim” had been a fighter, maybe a real one, the way he had moved.

  “Did Francesca know any ex-professional fighters?”

  “I don’t know,” Andera said. “I came for a report.”

  I sat up. My left eye was puffed, my face hurt, and my belly ached. But it was all bruises-too fast to have done much damage. I had gone down, stunned, but not really out. I stood up. It could only have been minutes or less.

  “You didn’t see anyone coming out of here?” I said.

  “No, no one,” Andera said.

  “Come on.”

  I went down the stairs as fast as I could on stiff legs with John Andera behind me. In the gray noon only a few people walked along my street. Andera stood beside me, and I saw the green Cadillac. It was double-parked across the street with its motor running.

  “There!” I said to Andera.

  I heard the three heavy shots as something slammed into my head and the street went black.

  A pale green ceiling, and a chemical smell. The ceiling was supposed to be a dirty ivory, my corridor. Why did my corridor smell of chemicals? I was on the floor of my corridor, I’d been knocked there. I… but why was the corridor so soft, my hand sinking in when I pressed?

  I was on the floor outside my office. I had to be, of course. The man in the green Cadillac had…

  What slammed into my head?

  Sho
ts. I’d been shot!

  The shadow bent over me, close. A face.

  “Did you see anything, Dan? Who shot you?”

  Captain Gazzo not John Andera looked down at me, very close, and he was standing up, so I was high off the floor. How could a man float off the floor on a soft cloud if he was still alive and…

  “Dan? Did you get a look at who shot you?”

  “No,” my own voice said from somewhere.

  “A guess?” Gazzo said.

  “No.”

  The pale green ceiling was a hospital room. The antiseptic smell. A soft, high bed. Now I knew that, so some time must have passed. A lot of time, or a little?

  “How bad am I?” I said to the ceiling.

  A face appeared over me. Captain Gazzo-again or still?

  “That was this morning,” Gazzo said.

  I must have asked him out loud. I hadn’t thought I had.

  “You’re okay,” Gazzo said. “One shot creased your skull good. Probably a forty-five. We found you out cold on the sidewalk. You’ve got a nice groove on your head, and a fair concussion. No real harm, you’re full of dope. You were alone, Dan? You didn’t see who shot?”

  I hadn’t seen who shot. The Cadillac, yes, but there were other green Cadillacs, and I hadn’t seen where the shots had come from. Had I been alone? No, but yes. For now.

  “I didn’t see,” I said. “I was alone.”

  “You’re bruised up from something else, too.”

  “I was hit,” I said. “Earlier. Small man, didn’t know him. He hit good. I’m tired, Captain.”

  It was dark outside when I sat up. They told me it was still Saturday. Still? Then I’d lost Friday already. I managed to eat. John Andera came to see me after dinner. He was nervous and different. His face was neutral. The shock was gone, the stunned look, as if my shooting had steadied him. Or maybe it was only the way he reacted to action and real danger he could come to grips with.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Not bad. You weren’t hit?”

  “No. I didn’t see who shot, I was down on the sidewalk.”

  “What about the green Cadillac?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t notice a Cadillac. There wasn’t one when I got up, when the police came.”

  I said, “Someone is scared of me. It means that Francesca wasn’t killed by chance, or in some robbery. She was killed for a reason someone wants to stay hidden.”

  “But you don’t know who,” Andera said, “or what he wants to hide, so it’s no use to me. What else did you find?”

  I told him about Mayor Crawford and his political fights, what Celia Bazer had said about Francesca and men, and about the blond, Frank Keefer. “Keefer threw Celia Bazer over for Francesca in Dresden, then she threw him over. I don’t think he’d have liked that. Did Francesca ever mention him?”

  “No,” Andera said. “She mentioned no one.”

  “She seems to have been pretty isolated down here,” I said. “What did she talk about on your dates?”

  “Us.”

  “Where did you meet her for your dates?”

  “At restaurants. She didn’t want me to come to her place, I never knew where she lived.”

  “No mention of a Harmon Dunstan or Carl Gans?”

  “Do your women talk about other men on early dates?” Andera said. “Will you need more money, Fortune?”

  “I’m covered for the hospital, mostly. I’ll give you a bill. I’ll probably go to Dresden. That means expenses.”

  “When you need them, tell me. I’ll come back.”

  He left. I lay in the hospital bed feeling all my bruises, and the deep groove in my head hidden under a mound of gauze. Francesca Crawford hadn’t died in a random killing, no.

  I rested and slept all day Sunday. My concussion was gone, and my appetite was fine, and they would let me out on Monday. I was in no hurry. In the hospital I was safe. But I wouldn’t fight to stay in after Monday. I was getting mad, and three days is a long time for a trail to grow cold.

  Captain Gazzo came again after lunch on Monday. I was up in a chair, ready to dress when they told me. Gazzo took another chair, straddled it. I told him about what Celia Bazer had said, but not about Frank Keefer. I didn’t want Keefer chased or picked up yet.

  “We talked to Dunstan, Gans and the Emerald Room,” Gazzo said. “No help I can see. What about who shot you?”

  “Nothing I can tell. I’d just tried to ambush a tail on me, got clobbered. I went down to the street, and wham,” I said. “All I saw of the man tailing me was a camel coat, brown hat, green Cadillac, and fast fists. He may have been an ex-pro fighter the way he handled himself.”

  Gazzo shook his head. “Not enough to help. We’ve combed her neighborhood for anyone who might have seen anything, or for signs of anyone hanging around her place. Nothing we don’t already know, no one saw the killer enter or leave.”

  “Celia Bazer says Francesca was in New York before she moved into the Eighty-fourth Street place.”

  “Sure,” Gazzo said. “She came to town two months ago, took an apartment on Carmine Street. None of the tenants there seem connected to her. She went to that Harmon Dunstan for a job, but got Dunstan himself for a while instead. For two weeks she didn’t work, just dated Dunstan. Then she took the job at the Emerald Room, began to see Carl Gans, and moved to the Bazer girl’s place.”

  The Captain rubbed his tender jaw. “Her job was below what she could have gotten, I can’t see why she took it. She wasn’t running in any kid crowd, she wasn’t after a career, she was solitary but busy, and she told no one anything.”

  “No young men, no female friends except Bazer,” I said. “Unusual. Not the standard young girl in the city for fame, fortune, or husband.”

  “Two men in two months, both old for her, and what do they have in common?” Gazzo said. “Dunstan is a businessman, Carl Gans is the bouncer at the Emerald Room. You tell me?”

  “They’re men,” I said.

  “And both have alibis, more or less.”

  So did my client, and he was a third man-also over forty. That was some pattern. Only I was sure that my client’s alibi would hold up. That didn’t make it a true alibi, but it did mean that Andera was sure no one could break it. And it looked like Gazzo hadn’t turned up Andera yet.

  “Without witnesses, or some solid evidence,” Gazzo said, “nothing down here points to anyone, Dan. I’ve got Sergeant Jonas up in Dresden, but if he doesn’t find anything we can use, we’re stumped. The killer’s a ghost.”

  “Maybe it was only bad luck in the big city.”

  “And the man who shot you is protecting the city,” Gazzo said, leaned over his chair. “There’s a missing month, you know? Between leaving Dresden, and coming here. I can’t send a man without a lead, Dan, but you can tackle that. Do that for me, Dan. Find me that missing month.”

  I nodded. It wouldn’t be easy to trace a hidden month in the life of a dead girl. The way she had stayed to herself, used a false name, we might never find where she’d been at all. While I thought about it, I realized that Gazzo was thinking, too. He was rubbing his face again, thoughtfully.

  He said, “You know who owns the Emerald Room, Dan?”

  “No.”

  “Abram Zaremba,” Gazzo said. “Commissioner Zaremba to you and me. He had some state job once-Fish and Game Commission, I think. He likes to be called Commissioner.”

  I knew the man. Upstate, Abram Zaremba was a man to know. Whatever business you did, Zaremba could help. Power, money, and a lot of influence. No one said he was illegal, exactly, but he had a lot of “friends” who would do anything he wanted done. And Martin Crawford was a reformer, a crusader.

  “I didn’t know he operated in the city here.”

  “He has businesses here. He lives near Dresden, Dan.”

  “You’ve talked to Zaremba?”

  “About a bar waitress with a phony name? I’d just warn him away, and a judge would talk to the Chief. I know
three judges who drink his booze every week. I’d need a reason.”

  “He wouldn’t go to a judge about me,” I said. “I can try a talk with Carl Gans, and look around.”

  Gazzo was silent for a time. He knew what chasing Abram Zaremba could mean, and it was no TV game. He sighed.

  “You’ve got to be some use to me,” he said.

  A joke, but it really wasn’t funny. I might smoke something out when a cop never could-because me Zaremba would be sure to try to stop fast if there was anything to smoke out. A cop might scare him to cover, but I wouldn’t scare him. He’d know what to do with me. I’d been shot once already.

  A detective captain has a hard job. Maybe I could help him, and it was his job to use me even if I ended up dead. It was my job, if I was going to do my work, to take the chance.

  6

  I left the hospital at two o’clock that Monday, too early for the Emerald Room. It was a momentary reprieve, and I took the Long Island Railroad out to Hempstead.

  It’s a suburban town a lot like thousands of small, busy, middle-class cities all across the country. It could be in Colorado, except for a total lack of natural beauty. There was only one Harmon Dunstan in the telephone book. I got a cab, and it took me to a large, pleasant brick house on a quiet street not far from Hofstra University. A flawless lawn surrounded the house under trees that were all but leafless now. An empty swimming pool was at the side next to a large patio under a green awning. There was a busy feel to the house, as if it was worked on a lot.

  As I walked up the brick path, I was aware of eyes at the front window, and a slender blonde of about thirty-five opened the door. Her face had the residue of the too-perfect beauty you see in magazines, and her body was still good. She wore loose slacks and a dirty shirt as if she had been cleaning.

  I said, “I’m looking for Mr. Harmon Dunstan.”

  “About what?”

  “It’s private. I’m a detective. You’re Mrs. Dunstan?”

  She nodded. “Come in then.”

  So Harmon Dunstan was married. To a wife who wasn’t surprised that a detective would call. I followed her into a big living room that was arranged and polished like a jewel. She headed for a home bar in a corner.