Walk a Black Wind df-4

by Michael Collins

  “A drink, Mr.-?”

  “Dan Fortune. Too early for me, thanks.”

  I saw that she was a little drunk. Her blue-gray eyes had a film on them like thin plastic as she mixed herself a Bloody Mary. I heard the man behind me.

  “Too early for anyone,” the man said, but there was no anger in his voice, only a kind of concern. He held his hand out to me. “Harmon Dunstan, Mr. Fortune.”

  We shook hands. It was a hollow gesture, like the polite handshakes of enemy diplomats. He was about five-seven-or-eight, thin and dark-complexioned. Dressed all in gray, in a strangely old-fashioned way-gray fitted topcoat, gray business suit, gray gloves, gray tie, gray homburg, and black shoes, as if he had been about to go somewhere. The elegance of thirty years ago, as if he dressed in a style he had seen and wanted when he was a poor boy, and had never forgotten. Changes in fashion had not affected his dream.

  “Can we talk in private?” I said.

  The wife said, “He’s a detective, Harmon,” and she said to me, “I know about Francesca Crawford. Harmon told me.”

  Dunstan said, “I recognized her picture in the Thursday paper. I knew her as Fran Martin, of course. I told Grace.”

  “You went to the police?”

  “No, I didn’t. They came anyway,” he said. “I had hoped it wouldn’t come out, Fran and me. I’m a financial counselor, a delicate business. I can’t have scandal, you see?”

  But he had told his wife. Why?

  “I have to ask some questions,” I said.

  He sat down, still in his topcoat, as if he’d forgotten he had it on. There was something peculiar about the way he moved. It was his eyes. They seemed to react to what he was doing only some seconds after he had moved. I sensed that he could sit unmoving for hours, and that his eyes never revealed what he was going to do until he had done it.

  “I met Fran two months ago,” he said unasked. “I took her out, bought her some clothes. It lasted five weeks, then she seemed to have no more time for me.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “After she moved, I went to Eighty-fourth Street a few times. She was always busy. The last time was a week ago.”

  “Why did she lose interest?”

  “No explanation. I’d thought that if I tried harder-”

  He didn’t trail off, he just stopped, and I felt I was in some surrealist landscape. The shape of things was wrong. As if some trick had transported the Dunstans, the house, and me to an alien world where the familiar became weird. It was the way Harmon Dunstan was talking about himself and a young girl in front of his wife, a stranger, and the shiny furniture of an ordinary middle-class house. It was the way Grace Dunstan listened without anger, without any reaction at all.

  I said, “You chased her after she lost interest?”

  “I went to see her, yes. Perhaps, if she hadn’t been-”

  “Were you sleeping with her?”

  He didn’t answer. I guessed that he never would, and who could say now if he had or not? If there was any outside evidence of sex, I’d have to find it.

  “Did you know she had other men?”

  “I saw Carl Gans once. No one else.”

  “Not a John Andera?” I described Andera.

  “No, but I wasn’t spying on her, Fortune.”

  “Weren’t you?” I said.

  Something happened to his face. It went soft, loose, like a desperate boy in some hotel with an older woman. His face was coarser, almost fleshy, and he breathed faster. He blinked up at me, but he said nothing.

  “How did you meet her, Dunstan?” I said.

  “She applied for a job in my office. I didn’t have a job for her, but we somehow started talking. She had just come to New York, knew no one. I asked her to have dinner. That’s how it began. She seemed to like me at first, a lot.”

  Grace Dunstan said, “That’s not an invitation Harmon would have missed or refused.”

  “Shut up, Grace!” Dunstan said.

  The wife stared at him, but said no more. Somehow, I didn’t think she was concerned with Dunstan’s philandering at all. It was as if she wondered about Francesca’s quick interest in Dunstan.

  “You both have alibis for Tuesday night?” I said.

  “We were both here at home all night, yes,” Dunstan said.

  It was no alibi, and yet as good as most. Normal for two innocent people to have only each other for an alibi. It would be true of most couples any given day or night. But it left them with no witnesses but themselves, and they sat there solid and together when I left.

  I walked back to the station. I wanted to think-especially about the way Francesca Crawford had seemed to meet certain men. Casually, but not really so casual.

  I carried my duffel coat on my arm when I walked into the Emerald Room this time, and went straight into the bar. I ordered a whisky, aware that I was being watched all the way.

  The middleweight bouncer stood just inside the door. His suit hung loosely from his shoulders. He was all shoulders, narrow hips, no belly, and heavy thighs. His nose had been broken more than once. His blue eyes moved in slow sweeps around the restaurant. Despite his face, his manner was mild and inconspicuous, but nothing was going to happen that he didn’t see almost before it happened.

  He walked in small circles near the door, and each time he passed the telephone booths he paused to feel inside the coin returns. It was the habit of a simple, poor kid who had missed no chance for a lucky nickel to make life better. I saw a waiter walk up to the bouncer. Gans nodded, and came to me.

  “You working on a case, Fortune?”

  I knew what the waiter had said to him. They had run a check on me as I sat there-fast and sure. It made me feel like a worm in a garden with the boots of giants all around wherever I crawled.

  “I came to talk to you,” I said. “About Francesca Crawford.”

  “She said her name was Martin here,” Gans said.

  He looked over my shoulder, doing his job of watching the place. His voice was light and hoarse, but mild.

  “A teaser? She made a play, but no action later?”

  “She liked to talk a lot,” he said dryly. “You working for the family? That mayor and all?”

  “In a way.”

  “Funny, her being a mayor’s daughter. I figured she was no waitress, but she did her job. Knew all about how to wait table in a bar. Like she knew how inside, you know?”

  “Some girls know that in their bones,” I said.

  “Yeh, like that,” he said. “She knew how to handle herself, and no play, so I dropped her.”

  “She talked too much,” I said. “About what?”

  “Nothin’ much. Shows, books, about how I used to fight for the Commissioner only I didn’t have it to go higher than six-rounders so he put me here when we opened. I mean, I talked about that.”

  “You were a fighter? For Zaremba?”

  “Commissioner,” Gans said. “When I got my growth, had to move up to middleweight, I didn’t have the punch. Good enough for a bouncer, but not for a real fighter.”

  He said it simply. I had the feeling that he was a simple man who had muscles to earn his living, and not much else, and that he knew if, and was grateful he had work at all.

  “What else did she talk about?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Gans said. “Just talk, you know? She-”

  A small, balding man in a very expensive dinner jacket stood there. He was over sixty, he face round and owlish, and his eyes were small. A silent man stood behind him and watched only me.

  “What does he want here, Carl?” the older man said.

  “Asking about the Martin kid, Commissioner,” Gans said. “I mean, Crawford. You know, the kid worked here a while and got killed last week?”

  “Why would I remember a waitress?” Abram Zaremba said. “Why does this man come here about her?”

  His voice was firm, but he’d just made a mistake. No one had mentioned that Francesca had been a waitress. Zaremba reme
mbered her, knew about her.

  “I took her out a couple of times,” Carl Gans explained.

  “So? You have an alibi, Carl?”

  “I was here till two A.M.,” Gans said. “I played cards with some of the guys past four A.M.”

  Abram Zaremba made it sound as if he’d never asked Gans about the alibi before, but that could have been an act for my benefit. The alibi could have been arranged by Zaremba, too.

  “Then you’re clear,” Zaremba said, and turned to me. “What’s your name?”

  “Dan Fortune.”

  He looked me over. “Get out of here.”

  He walked away. I was left with Carl Gans.

  “The Commissioner said get out,” Gans said.

  I got out.

  7

  I had done worse than get nowhere. Abram Zaremba knew who I was now, and I knew no more than when I had gone in the club.

  The cold wind that had been scouring the city for weeks blew me to the Lexington Avenue subway. I rode downtown thinking that in upstate cities Abram Zaremba was a very big fish with a lot of interests. Carl Gans worked for him, and he owned the Emerald Room. Was there some connection to Zaremba in the pasts of Harmon Dunstan and John Andera?

  It was early, but I was still weak, so I stopped in a diner on Seventh Avenue where the Monday special was pot roast. While I ate, and rested, I thought that nothing yet really connected Francesca to Abram Zaremba except that she had taken a job at the Emerald Room she had no real reason to take.

  The good pot roast eased my aches, and I walked on to my office to call Captain Gazzo. I wanted to hear that he’d found a lead, any lead, that would keep me from having to go up to Dresden, but I didn’t have much hope-the dead girl had done so little in New York. A runaway girl usually tries to do too much with her freedom. Francesca Crawford had been so isolated, so cryptic, that I couldn’t help feeling that some unknown shape lurked unseen and murderous in the shadows.

  It was an impression, no more, but it was there, and that was why I jumped two feet on the sidewalk in front of my office building when a real shadow moved close in a doorway. Someone came toward me from the doorway. A woman.

  I had no gun, as usual, and I was tensed to run when I saw the ghost. She came into the light of a street lamp-long dark hair pulled back, a hawk nose, faintly slanted eyes, broad cheekbones, and dark brown eyes. Francesca Crawford!

  “Mr. Fortune?”

  While my nerves jumped, my brain told me that there were no ghosts, and if this was Francesca Crawford she was alive. Yet I knew she was dead. By now, buried in Dresden, New York.

  “Miss Crawford?” I said.

  “Yes. Can I… talk to you? Please?”

  Francesca Crawford-except, of course, it wasn’t. No, not quite. There were no ghosts, and Francesca was dead. There was a different “feel” to this girl. The same face, but with make-up, and proper, conservative clothes.

  “Turn your head left,” I said.

  She had no scar under her right ear.

  “Her sister,” I said. “Twins.”

  “Felicia Crawford,” she said. “I want to know-”

  “Not on the street,” I said. “My office in there.”

  She shivered, and it wasn’t the wind. She didn’t like the look of my dark, shabby building. Neither did I. It was too well known to people who followed me and had guns.

  “Come along,” I said, and took her arm.

  She flinched like a deer at my touch, but she let me lead her. She was an identical twin, but the years had accentuated the differences not the identity. She dressed differently, seemed younger, but I sensed that the real difference was inside. Francesca, from what everyone said, had been tough, difficult, the rebel. This girl seemed soft, quiet, the “good” girl who did what she was expected to do. A little weak.

  “How did you know about me, Miss Crawford?” I asked.

  “Mother and Dad talked about you. They told Mr. Sasser you were investigating the… murder. I want to help. I want to know what you know.”

  I remembered the name of Anthony Sasser from Mayor Crawford’s biography in Who’s Who-the businessman who headed the Dresden Crime Commission with the Mayor’s partner, Carter Vance.

  “Your parents sent you?” I said.

  “No, I came on my own. I just left. Today.”

  We reached my apartment, and I steered her up the stairs before she saw that my home wasn’t much better than my office. In my five cold rooms she stared as if she didn’t believe anyone could live there. She didn’t know how even the poor of urban America lived, so how could she, or anyone like her, have any conception of how the poor of the earth lived? The millions to whom my five rooms would be a palace, my income a fortune, and my hash-house meals food beyond their dreams?

  “How about coffee?” I said. “Or something stronger?”

  “Coffee, please,” she said. “You live here?”

  “It has advantages if you don’t want money, comfort, or status,” I said as I plugged in my coffee pot in the kitchen, and then went around lighting my gas radiators.

  “Yes, I see,” she said. “There are a lot of things on the other side of the iron curtain around the Crawford house.”

  It had the sound of a quote, not her own words.

  “Who said it that way?” I asked. “Francesca?”

  “Yes,” she said, and there were tears in her voice.

  I sat down facing her in the living room. She perched on the edge of a chair. I lit a cigarette.

  “You were close to Francesca?”

  “No one was close to Fran,” she said, and there was self-accusation in the words. Her sister was dead, and they had not been close. “I suppose I was closer than anyone, but we didn’t think the same about a lot of things.”

  “Closer than Frank Keefer?”

  “I don’t think she was really close to him at all. She laughed with me at him and his uncle with their big ideas. I think she just, well, wanted him for a time, you know?”

  “His Uncle Joel? What big ideas?”

  “Anything to make money without working. Joel Pender works for my father, a water inspector or something Dad hands out. Most of the time Joel seems to do favors for city officials. So does Frank Keefer when he isn’t selling used cars.”

  “And Keefer hoped to marry Francesca?”

  “Frank Keefer?” She seemed surprised, and then not so surprised. “Maybe he did, but she wouldn’t have married him.”

  “What didn’t you think alike about, Felicia?”

  She sighed. I could hear the coffee perking in the kitchen. She shook her head sadly.

  “Fran questioned everything I took for granted. Even as a little girl we never knew what she’d think or do. Dad said she wanted to be the ugly duckling. He always tried harder to understand her, be nice. It made me jealous sometimes.”

  Her voice was harsh-on herself. She had been jealous, and now her sister was gone. The ugly duckling who had made a display of her scar. A symbol of her difference, her isolation? Under the surface, of course, the duckling was a swan.

  “How did Francesca get that scar?”

  “An accident when we were around three. She used to cry about it when we were little, and later she had nightmares. When we were fourteen she started wearing her hair so the scar showed. She and Mother had a terrible fight. Fran said Mother had always treated her different, so she’d be different, and show her scar to everyone.”

  “Was it true? Your mother treated her differently?”

  “In a way. Mother did pay more attention to Stefanie and young Martin, but it was just that they were so much younger. Stefanie’s only fifteen now, and young Martin is twelve.”

  “You didn’t feel neglected?”

  She shrugged. “A little. I’m the halfway type.”

  In the kitclien, the coffee stopped perking. I went out to pour two mugs. When I brought them back, I gave her one, lit another cigarette, and sat down. The coffee was good.

  “Why did you reall
y come to me, Felicia?”

  Her face was steady. “I want to know who hired you.”

  “No one hired me. I met Francesca, I liked her.”

  “Then I want to help! Mother and Dad are doing nothing!”

  “The police are working. It’s their job.”

  “I want to do more. Mother and Dad don’t care!”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not enough to bring you down here alone. You’ve got some reason to think I might know something specific about Francesca you want to know. What?”

  She looked at my cigarette. I gave her one, lit it. She smoked awkwardly. She had not smoked much, and maybe it was the symbol of a change in her.

  “Fran was excited three months ago, Mr. Fortune,” she said. “Keyed up, eager about something in Dresden. Today, someone followed me to the station. I don’t know who it was, but I think something is wrong in Dresden.”

  “What? Why was Francesca keyed up?”

  She drank her coffee. “I’m not sure, but out in California at college we both got involved in politics and conservation. When we came home this summer, Fran joined the opposition to a big development project in Dresden. It’s in a swamp out on Black Mountain Lake. We used to pick blackberries out there, the land never was worth anything. Now a man named Abram Zaremba owns it. He’s planning a housing development out there, and the city is draining the land, building a highway right through it.”

  She glanced up. “Fran seemed to think that there was something bad about the project. At first, she just opposed draining the swamp, but a few weeks before she left home she told me that the whole scheme could be a fraud, a cheat.”

  “Did she give you a reason for her change?”

  “A young lawyer named Mark Leland told her. He was investigating the project on his own. She talked with him a few times, and then… then he was killed, Mr. Fortune. Murdered in his car. Stabbed, just like Francesca! She was with him that night, and she saw the murderer, but not well enough to help the police. He wasn’t caught.”

  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.”