Walk a Black Wind (11 page)

He howled, a long line of red blood on his cheek, but tried once more. I hit him on the mouth with the gun. Blood spurted at me. He grabbed for his broken mouth, sat down on the floor, and stared up at me in disbelief.

I waved the gun at the scrawny one. “Get over near him.”

The small man went. In the corner Celia Bazer nursed her slapped face. The two men glared at me, Keefer moaning.

14.

“You're a rough pair, you are,” I said. “Why?”

“You always go around accusing people of murder?” the scrawny one said.

Now I saw that his cheap suit had been retailored to look handmade, his shirt was dazzlingly white, and something glittered in his tie. A stickpin, with a chip diamond set to look twice its size.

“You said I killed Fran!” Frank Keefer mumbled through blood and broken teeth. He stared at a tooth in his hand, incredulous and afraid of any injury.

“Did you?” I said.

“Why would he, mister?” the small one said. “That kid was our trip to heaven. If you're here, you know that.”

He had drifter and con man written all over him. His cheap clothes made to look flashy with fake touches a drifter learns in a hundred vagrant tanks. I guessed that there had been times when he'd had newspaper for a shirt and burlap for shoes. The kind of sharp, clever face that always lost out no matter how much he schemed, because he was never quite smart enough to carry a scheme through. But there was violence, too. Violence of the kind that is dangerous when it has a bigger power behind it—bodyguard, vigilante, deputy sheriff.

“You're Joel Pender?” I said.

He didn't like my knowing his name. It was pure habit—a man who automatically tried to hide himself.

“I don't know you, mister,” he said.

“Dan Fortune. I'm a private detective looking for Francesca Crawford's killer. The New York police are in my corner. All I have, to do is whistle.”

“Then whistle and damn you!” Frank Keefer said through his broken mouth. “Look at my face!”

“It'll heal and give you character,” I said. “Why start fights when you can't fight? Maybe you just thought it would be easy to beat a one-armed man? Fight cripples?”

“You were pumping Celia, cripple,” Joel Pender said. He was a sweet man. “Why don't you talk to us straight?”

“Fine,” I said. “Keefer, what did you talk about down in New York with Francesca Crawford? When you visited her?”

“I never went down to Fran—”

Celia Bazer spoke from her corner. “He was in that hotel, Frank. He heard us talking.”

“Heard?” Frank Keefer said, licked blood.

“Heard,” I said. “All of it, including lies. Muriel Roark told you Francesca was with Celia, and you got down to New York on Tuesday—the day she was killed.”

“I never went near her!”

“You didn't know she was alone in the apartment?”

“No! I didn't know Cele wasn't back until after—”

Joel Pender said. “Shut up, Frank. This guy's got something in mind.”

I said, “You thought Celia might be back, would be in her own bed that Tuesday night?”

“I didn't go near the place until Wednesday,” Keefer said.

“No,” I said. “You were seen Tuesday evening. Maybe you came back that night, climbed in the window looking for Celia who would tell Francesca you still had a wife, had served time for wife-beating. You had made a new play for Francesca, maybe she gave you some hope. But if Celia knew, and talked …? So you came to kill Celia. It was dark, you were scared, Celia's bed was occupied. Who else would be in that bed? So you stabbed her—only Celia wasn't back, and you killed Francesca.”

Frank Keefer forgot his bleeding mouth. Only abject fear would make him do that. A fear that saw himself facing a judge, convicted, waiting to be sentenced to some narrow cell for the rest of his natural life—no more schemes, no more women, no more dreams of a golden future.

“You're a liar!” he said.

Joel Pender faced danger a different way—with a sharp, cool calculation. His teeth ready, careful.

“He's fishing, Frank,” Pender said. “If it happened like he says, no one could prove it, and he wouldn't be talking.”

“Unless Frank was seen that night,” I said.

“I couldn't have been,” Keefer said. “I wasn't there. Anyway, I couldn't have—”

“Shut up, Frank,” Pender said, and to me, “Who saw Frank?”

“Maybe Abram Zaremba, or one of his men checking up on Francesca,” I said. “He was killed last night, and where were you two last night?”

“Commissioner Zaremba?” Frank Keefer said, shaky.

Joel Pender had nothing to say.

I said, “It looks like Zaremba could have known who murdered Francesca. She saw the killer of Mark Leland, who was investigating the Black Mountain Lake project. Maybe Zaremba was having her tailed, at least, just to be sure she knew nothing vital. She was down in New York for a reason, I'm sure—hiding, using a false name, meeting older men. For all I know she could have been mixed with you two in some scheme to stop Zaremba, a little blackmail, or—”

Frank Keefer said, turned to Joel Pender, “Tell him, Joel! Tell him what Fran was doing. I don't want to be tied in with any murder of Commissioner Zaremba, no way!”

“I told you shut up,” Pender said.

His voice was quiet, but his eyes were busy. He was balancing the risk against the gain—the calculation and infinite patience of a small weasel who would crawl ten years on his belly if he had a reasonable assurance that at the end he would make others crawl.

“I'll tell you what we figure the kid was doing in New York,” he said, “if you keep quiet about who told you first. Okay, Fortune? I'll deny it anyway.”

“Tell me,” I said.

Frank Keefer mopped his bloody mouth like a woman seeing the first gray hair. Celia Bazer still stood in her corner as if she felt safer with two walls close. Pender leaned toward me, sincere. I guessed it was an act he'd practiced.

“I was drunk or it'd never happened,” Pender said. “She come here that night all shook up. Said she'd found out her dad was a fraud cheating the public to help men like Commissioner Zaremba and get rich himself. She said she knew I knew about the Mayor, and she wanted me to tell her. Some legal trick in the Mayor's past Leland had told her about. She didn't know what it was because Leland hadn't known. I said I didn't know anything, and Frank tried to calm her down. So then she turned on Frank and said she was through with him!

“She said we were all liars and cheats, too, and Frank was a lousy gigolo. We were worse than her dad or Zaremba because we worked for them like parasites, did their dirty work. She was in one hell of a state, and when she told Frank they was finished, I got so mad I lost my head. Our big chance, see? Marry into the Mayor's family, be someone in this town. Gone for a lousy girl kid thought she was too good for us, too good even for the Mayor! So damned holy about the Mayor being a cheat and all. I just saw red, damn her!”

He shook his head, and his small eyes were mystified, as if he would never understand how a smart man like himself had been so stupid, had been goaded into saying what he had not wanted to say. He shrugged up at me.

“So I told her,” he said. “I told her she lived on the Mayor, went to college on the Mayor, learned all her big, pure ideas on the Mayor. So he got something for himself out of his job, why not? If he was a fraud and a cheat, she lived on him, and there were men a lot worse than the Mayor. I told her she should get down on her knees to the Mayor for giving her all she had because he didn't have to give her spit!”

Pender stopped again. He was having a hard time telling it even now. I didn't push him. He sighed.

“I was drunk, see, so I told her what no one ever told her before. I said if she thought the Mayor was a crook, maybe she ought to know there was a lot worse crooks like murderers, kidnappers, and psychos—and she was the kid of one of those! She was the kid of a guy who shot her grandfather, got her shot, and damned near got her mother killed, too!”

He looked at me. “I told her Crawford wasn't her real father. Not hers, and not Felicia's. Her old lady was married before, a long time ago, and her real father almost got them all killed, and went to prison for twenty years for it!”

In the silence of that room piled with the mimeographed dream of a quick profit for two losers, I suppose we all had our own thoughts. Pender chewed his lip, probably still wondering why he'd blurted it all out to Francesca in drunken anger over three months ago. A secret that explained why Pender got jobs from Mayor Crawford. Keefer was probably thinking only of himself, of the loss of his hopes for marrying big. Celia Bazer seemed to be wondering how she'd feel at such news.

I was seeing pieces of a puzzle fall into place like greased parts of a complex machine. Francesca's excitement. Her oblique talk about identity—it had been real, not just metaphorical: her real identity at stake. Her sudden trip—a girl who'd always felt different, neglected, a rebel, the ugly duckling. Looking for a real father. What all the men in New York she'd met had in common was clear—they were all over forty. Except Abram Zaremba, who was older, but she hadn't really met him, only gone to work at his restaurant in a job she didn't need. So the Emerald Room was, somehow, connected to her father. It explained everything, except why she had been using a false name, and maybe Mark Leland's murder still explained that. Maybe she wanted to find a lost father for more than her identity—for help in trouble, too.

“Tell me the whole story, Pender,” I said. “What else did you tell Francesca?”

“That's all,” Pender said. “Her old lady was married young, busted up, married Crawford, and then the first guy came around and started a shooting match and went to jail for it. Happened before I was around here, I only got it secondhand. Only I was here three years later when the first husband busted prison and got killed in the escape.”

“Francesca's real father is dead?” I said.

“Like a dinosaur,” Joel Pender said, and laughed. “Those girl twins was lucky, Crawford brought 'em up like white women, when their real old man was a crummy Indian from some two-bit reservation out west.”

“An Indian?”

“That's how I heard it. Man, that must of sat big around here. No wonder Katje Crawford dumped him.”

“How did Francesca take it?”

“Like I'd slapped her. Said I was a liar at first. I told her go ask old Emil Van Hoek if her folks wouldn't tell her, and I figured they wouldn't. Bad blood, that was what she had, and she was going around calling the Mayor a fraud when he'd brought her up like his real own kids.”

“You think Francesca went looking for her real father,” I said, “even though he was dead?”

“Sure she did. Maybe she didn't believe me, wanted proof.”

Celia Bazer said, her voice low from the corner, “Maybe she wanted to know about him, her real father, know who he was. Maybe she just wanted to know what really happened.”

She said it as if she, if she had been Francesca, would have wanted to know who her father had been, what had really happened a long time ago.

“All right,” I said. “Don't go anywhere. I don't think Mayor Crawford'll thank you for telling her.”

Frank Keefer said nothing, went on gingerly touching his broken face which was all that interested him. Pender glared an inner anger at himself for being so stupid, for getting drunk and losing his temper. Celia Bazer stood silent in her corner, maybe hoping no one would think of her after I was gone, not until it was time to go to bed.

15.

I drove thinking about a girl who went looking for a dead father. Yes, Francesca would have done that. A man might die, but he left a shadow, a life, a place of his own, relatives, all the things a girl who felt rejected and different would want to know. Death ends only a man, not the life he had lived, the place where he had belonged. Above all the place—somewhere in this world where, maybe, his daughter could belong, too, as she had never belonged among the Crawfords, and Van Hoeks, and Black Mountain Lake projects for the benefit of Abram Zarembas.

Would that search have killed her? It depended on what she turned over in the search, on a lot of things I didn't know. Did Felicia know? I thought Felicia did—part of it anyway. Not as much, maybe, but enough to make her want to know who had hired me and what I knew. Enough to send her on the same search herself?

I stopped to call Lieutenant Oster. He had news.

“They picked up your client, John Andera, down in New York,” Oster said. “He was on a selling trip in Philadelphia. It checks out solid with witnesses down there. His alibi is good for the Crawford girl, too—another business trip.”

“What about Mrs. Grace Dunstan?”

“Not so good for her. She was in New Haven, but no one saw her from eight
P.M.
last night until past one
A.M.
She could have driven to Dresden. Harmon Dunstan isn't covered for the time of Zaremba's death, either.”

I told him what Joel Pender had told me. “Is it true?”

“As far as I know. Before my time,” Oster said, and there was a pause. “Mayor Crawford isn't going to like Pender. It's old dirty linen. Dead and buried.”

“Maybe not so buried,” I said. “Where do I talk to the grandmother? Old Mrs. Van Hoek?”

“She's got a cottage on the Mayor's place. What do you think she can tell you?”

“I'll know when I ask her.”

“Take it easy, Fortune.”

“I always do, Lieutenant,” I said, and hung up.

I drove on to the Crawford mansion, parked up the road. The small cottage was in the rear among the trees, the rain dripping onto its roof. I knocked. The woman who opened the door after a time was tall, thin, white-haired, and dressed in a formal black dress without any decoration. The white hair was in a severe bun, and her long, thin face was severe too.