Act of Fear

Chapter 11

You go on the probable in this world, I’ve said that before. Captain Gazzo was going on the probable of what he had. From where the captain sat, it was logically Jo-Jo. But I had another seat and another factor. I had the character of Jo-Jo Olsen as it had been emerging as I went along, and in my book Jo-Jo Olsen was not probable.

It can be misleading to talk only to a man’s friends or a man’s enemies, but no matter how I sliced the pie it still came out that Jo-Jo Olsen was not a violent type. Nothing made it probable that Jo-Jo Olsen would lose his temper over a woman. Possible of course — anything is possible — but not probable. The way it came out in my mind was that Jo-Jo might lose his temper over a racing car, but not much else. Even if he did, his reaction would not be violent.

And violence was the key.

I stood in the afternoon heat and sun of the city outside police headquarters and looked at the whole picture, and it was all violence. The quick and efficient violence against Patrolman Stettin. The unplanned violence of the burglar that had killed Tani Jones. The calculated violence for a purpose that had put Pete Vitanza into the hospital. The peripheral violence of Swede Olsen. The menace of violence that were my two shadows. The infinite potential of violence that was Andy Pappas. The animal violence of a Jake Roth or Max Bagnio under Pappas’ orders. Naked violence from end to end. I could not place Jo-Jo Olsen into that picture.

But the only one connected to Nancy Driscoll was Jo-Jo.

If my logic was to be more than wishful thinking, I needed a connection between the Driscoll girl and some other factor in the affair; or I had to rule her out of the case by labelling an outsider as her killer, someone who had no other connection to Jo-Jo Olsen or anyone else in this affair. Someone like Walsh. If someone outside all the other problems had killed Nancy Driscoll, then there would still be no concrete connection of Jo-Jo to any specific crime. I would be no worse off. If I could bring someone I already knew into a connection with Driscoll, I could be better off.

There was only one place to go for an answer — the people who had known Nancy Driscoll. Maybe the police had missed something. They do miss something sometimes, although not really very often. But this time they had been asking without knowledge of Jo-Jo. I went back into headquarters and up to Gazzo’s office. I got the addresses of the Brandt woman from the captain’s pretty sergeant, on Gazzo’s okay. I went back into the heat and hailed a cab. I had two addresses for the Brandt girl. I gave the office address, since it was only afternoon, and sat back with the window open and let the wind blow against my face and tried to think of nothing.

It did not work. It never does. My mind whispered around and around the same point — I was missing the key. I tried to think of Marty. That wasn’t hard. She was easy to think about. But my mind saw her as if in a silent movie, her body and her face moving, but the offstage voice whispering that there was a key to all this, and that I should have seen the key by now. One small, out-of-normal incident gnawed like a worm in my brain. I could not place it. And there were a host of larger hints. They talked to me, but they did not say anything. My mind was not receiving. I forced myself to think of anything.

The wind, I thought of the wind on my face in the oven of tall buildings and crowded people that was midtown New York. It was a strong, hot wind as the taxi moved as fast as it could. Like the sirocco that had blown through a room I had tried to sleep in once near Palermo. Or the wind from the desert on a stopover I had made in Libya. There is a sobering sense of mortality in thinking about places you have been, strangers you have lived among. All things pass, and you will pass with them. There is a sadness in it, and without sadness there is no sense of life. Life is limited, and there is all the good and most of the bad. Life is arrival, departure and change, and those who never move do not live.

The taxi driver had to turn around and tell me that we were at my address. I paid him and got out. Miss Peggy Brandt worked in the Union Carbide Building. It towered tall and glass and steel, high above Park Avenue. I went into the lower lobby and rode the escalator up to the real lobby and the elevators. I read the directory and took an express elevator to the thirty-second floor. Miss Brandt worked inside expanses of glass, chrome, leather, carpets four-inches deep, and the brittle smile of a blonde receptionist. The gorgeous guardian of the gate made me cool my heels. Miss Brandt appeared, and her face took on a shell the instant she saw me. Her eyes flickered to my empty coat sleeve. She was tall, pretty, and calm. I explained my business. She led me down a soundless hall, deep in carpet, to an empty conference room.

‘What do you do here, Miss Brandt?’ I asked. I was interested. It was a trick to keep her friendly, but I was interested, too. I have always been interested in women who are in the struggle between the womb and the brain. In some ways it is the war of our time, for women at least, and a lot of the time for the men too. If a woman wants only one or the other, there is no trouble — for man or woman. But if she tries for both, then the war is on, and there is a price to pay for her and for the man.

I’m an editor,’ she said. ‘I’ve already told the police all I know, Mr Fortune.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I just wanted a better picture of Nancy. I’m looking for a murderer, and I have to know who was murdered.’

Peggy Brandt crossed her very nice legs. She arched her back. Her breasts thrust out. I took it all in. She was not interested in me, I was much too old for the male she had in mind, but she automatically put herself on display, showed the wares, as women who still want to be the female chosen by the male always do. They were good wares.

‘I’ve tried to think,’ Peggy Brandt said, ‘but it’s hard. Nancy was a strange girl. No, she wasn’t strange, she was too damned usual. Have you seen her apartment?’

I nodded. Peggy Brandt saw that apartment in her mind.

‘She had to have it all: the furniture, the prints, the proper place,’ the girl said. ‘Time was passing, you understand? She had seen too many movies about bright young married people. She read the women’s magazines and dreamed about living that fine, suburban life.’ There was an edge of scathing contempt in Peggy Brandt’s voice, mixed with a faint regret. She was in the war all right. Inside she must have looked like a battleground of maimed desires. ‘She was a poor girl, from a poor family out in Queens. Corona, I think. Semiskilled workers: beer and bowling, eat at the kitchen table, wear undershirts and make love in the back seat of the car. She had no skills, no career or desire for a career. She couldn’t afford the things she considered she had to have, so bought cheap imitations. The men she knew were all wrong; men like her father and brothers. When she found a man she thought would be right he never seemed to want to marry right away. The only men she met and wanted were men who had come from the same background but were fighting to get out and had ambitions and did not want to marry yet.’

‘Like Jo-Jo Olsen?’ I said.

‘Jo-Jo?’ the girl shook her pretty head. ‘I don’t know any Jo-Jo. I guess you mean this Joseph. I never knew his last name. Nancy did not talk much. I knew she had a man named Joe, younger than she. She liked him a lot, I think. You never could really tell with Nancy. I mean, the man himself wasn’t as important as the picture she had of the man and herself in a cosy marriage nest. But I think she liked him, at least she thought he was the man who could give her the life she wanted. I got the impression that he was in no hurry. She was. I never saw a girl in so much hurry.’

I listened. Whenever we talk about someone else we are really also talking about ourselves. If you listen closely enough to what a person says about someone else, you can get a pretty good picture of what that person thinks of himself, what view of life the speaker has. Peggy Brandt was talking about Nancy Driscoll and what the Driscoll girl had wanted, but she was really considering what she, Peggy Brandt, wanted. She was wondering if she was in a hurry, or if she should be in more of a hurry. If, perhaps, she wasn’t missing something, if her career was, after all, that important.

‘Jo-Jo was in no hurry,’ I said, prompted. ‘He had ambitions. He was going to be a racing driver.’

‘Yes, Joseph liked cars,’ Peggy said. ‘Nancy used to tell me how they would live all over the world. But she couldn’t get him to marry her, I suppose. Anyway, she started dating almost anyone. She was something of a tease, I think. Girls who have only marriage on their minds often are. I don’t think they mean to tease, but they just don’t understand that love and marriage do not always go together to all people. Nancy told me of a few nasty scenes with the men she started dating.’

‘Any names?’ I broke in. ‘Someone who might…’

‘No, I told the police I never knew their names. She was bitter about this Joseph, and every day she seemed to get more anxious about getting old and not yet married to the right man to give her the good life. She did foolish things, from the little she told me. I got the impression she was trying with every man she met.’ The Brandt girl stopped. She uncrossed and recrossed her fine legs, absently rubbed her thigh. She was thinking about every man she met. ‘Then there was Walsh.’

‘She was his mistress?’

The Brandt girl nodded. ‘She told me. Walsh had been after her for a long time. I don’t know, Mr Fortune, I think she sort of snapped. Inside, you know? She was in such a hurry. The men she knew were so nothing. Young boys who could give her little and did not want to marry. Walsh couldn’t marry, but he could give her something. One day she just took it, said yes to him. She said she was tired of waiting.’ She looked straight at me. ‘It’s illogical, Mr Fortune, but there is a type of woman who won’t let a potential husband touch her before he makes it marriage, but will sleep, at last, with a man who cannot even think of marriage.’

‘I know,’ I said.

It was an old and sad story. A nice and proper young virgin who is lonely, anxious, in a hurry. She wants not a man but marriage — and she wants a man, too. She is bored, feels empty, cheated. Somehow she cannot make love to a man who might marry her before they are married. It’s a block in her. Then she meets a man who cannot marry her, who only wants her for sex and adventure, and all her desires come out without the check of possible marriage. It becomes a paradox. She has an impregnable barrier deep inside against passion without marriage, and it takes a strange twist because suddenly marriage does not exist, cannot happen, and the need becomes naked without the barrier. Her barrier is against passion before marriage. Without the potential of marriage, suddenly there is only passion.

‘Do you think Walsh killed her?’ I said.

‘I don’t know, Mr Fortune. Who knows what happened between them? He came to her apartment. She went on trips on his boat. She even went on business trips with him sometimes. It was strange, but the way she talked about Walsh I had the feeling that she separated her life with him from her pursuit of a husband. A man might not understand that.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me anything more about that Saturday?’

‘Nothing,’ she said ‘A girl like Nancy doesn’t confide much. She lives in a kind of dream world. Every male was a goal, every female a rival.’

‘What about a woman?’ I said. ‘As the killer?’

‘I think I’m about the only woman she knew.’

‘Mrs Walsh?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Mr. Fortune.’

She stood up and looked at her watch. ‘I have work, I’m sorry.’

I left. I had learned nothing that harmed Jo-Jo Olsen, and nothing that helped him, unless you counted the fact that it did not sound like there was a motive for Jo-Jo. The girl had been after him. Gazzo had not indicated that the girl had been pregnant. It was the kind of killing where the motive and the killer would be discovered at the same time. Sooner or later, one of the men Nancy Driscoll had known would be found without an alibi, with motive and opportunity, and he would be the man. It would take only time. Such cases were the commonplace of police work. Somewhere in the city, or in some other city by this time, a man sweated in a bar and tried to think he would not be caught and tried to remember why he had lost his head and killed a woman he thought he was in love with. He had not been caught yet only because it was amazing how little any of us really know of the lives of our friends when they are not with us. Time, that was all, and the slow routine of the police.

Unless this was one of those one-in-a-thousand killings that was not simple, that tied in with more and bigger crime.

On the chance, I would try Walsh again.

I walked from Park Avenue west to the office of the Trafalgar Travel Bureau. Walsh was not glad to see me. He could tell by my face that I knew more than when I had been in his office this morning. He was nervous. He hurried me into his office as if he felt that all the women in his office were watching him. They were. I guessed that he had had a shot at most of them who he thought would look good in a nightgown and that he knew they all knew about Nancy Driscoll. He was a confused man. He was proud of his conquest of Nancy Driscoll, but terrified of discovery by the wrong people. A nervous lover can be dangerous.

‘I’m sorry about calling the police, Mr Fortune, but…’ Walsh began. He was rubbing his bicep.

‘You thought I was a killer,’ I said. ‘Yes, you did I What happened, Walsh, was she going to blow the whistle?’

Under his tan Walsh was ashen. ‘No! She… she loved me.’

‘You don’t believe that,’ I said. ‘She was bored, she wanted a sugar-baby. How much did she cost you a month?’

Walsh smirked at me. He rubbed at his bald spot. ‘You’re way off, Fortune.’

I noted the disappearance of the ‘mister’. Walsh was being man-to-man, virile.

‘All she wanted was me. I’m pretty good, if you want to know.’

‘I’ll dream about you,’ I said.

He flushed under that fine tan, but his eyes snapped as if in memory of his own prowess. That was what pleased him, his own prowess, not the pleasure of a woman. He was probably pretty good, ego-maniacs often are.

‘I gave her what she wanted, and it wasn’t money.’

‘You gave her what she wanted plus money, if I know women and your kind, Walsh,’ I said.

He flexed his muscles. ‘I gave her some stuff. Why not?’

‘Ask your wife.’

Walsh leaned forward. ‘Leave her out.’

‘What happened? Did Nancy tell you she was running off with Joe?’

‘Joe?’

‘The guy she wanted to marry.’

‘Him? Not unless he changed his mind. Him and his racing cars. Jesus! Can you imagine a guy who’d prefer a motor to the action Nancy could give? These kids, Jesus! She told me once that all they talked about when they came up to her place was racing.’ He smirked again. ‘I didn’t talk about racing.’

‘You knew Jo-Jo?’

‘Who?’

‘Joseph, her boyfriend.’

‘I knew of him, Fortune, no more. Do you think he killed her? Maybe he found out about me and couldn’t take it after all.’

It was a good shot. The thought had occurred to me more than once by now. It had, of course, also occurred to Gazzo. It happened; men are like that. It’s called dog in the manger, and it’s as good a reason for a beating as any; and maybe Walsh was so good in bed the Driscoll girl had been hooked on him. And maybe Jo-Jo had been on the run already and, with his dreams shattered, had changed his mind and tried to take Nancy with him. A sudden shift of power can destroy a man. But I did not want Walsh to get the impression that he had shaken my ideas.

‘I think you killed her,’ I said.

I thought he was going to come over the desk. I braced and looked for a weapon. But he changed his mind and sat back and just watched me.

‘Did your wife worry you?’ I said. ‘Did Nancy get ideas?’

‘The police don’t think I killed her.’

‘They can change their mind.’

‘Not with my alibi.’

‘You’ve got no alibi. Anyone can turn a boat in the other direction.’

‘You have to prove it.’

‘I may try,’ I said. ‘I may do a little snooping around. I may even do a lot of snooping.’

Now he was scared, really scared, but it was not of what I might find.

He leaned at me. ‘You stay away from me! You hear? I don’t want you around my life! I don’t want…’

‘I don’t care what you want, Walsh,’ I said.

He sweated in that good cool office with its big desk and four windows. He changed his tactics from bluster to man-to-man comradeship. ‘Come on, Fortune, give me a break. If my wife… my kids

…’

What he was afraid of was his wife finding out — now. I mean, after all, why get caught now that he couldn’t get any use out of Nancy Driscoll?

‘I don’t care about you, Walsh,’ I said. ‘How about Nancy?’

He wiped at his face with a Kleenex from a monogrammed leather box. I don’t know anything. I called her on the Saturday. All right, I didn’t tell the police that. Why should I? I’m not involved really, and if my wife…’

‘You called her,’ I said.

‘She had this man with her. She was mad, said he was drunk, a rotten drunk kid. She said all men were cheats. This guy was there, you know? I mean, listen, Fortune, give me a break. Lay off my wife, my home. I mean… please?’

I got out of there. Maybe he killed her, and maybe not. (I was sure he had not killed her. His story checked the Brandt girl’s story.) But if he had done it, Gazzo would nail him. It looked like Gazzo was playing it soft, maybe to lull Walsh, or maybe to spare three kids who had hurt no one yet. But if Jo-Jo did not pay off, Walsh was in for a bad time. Walsh did not have a rosy future. That did not make me sad.

I needed something clean. There was only Marty. I called her from the lobby of the building. She was at home. When I heard her voice I had to see her. I had to. I had not seen my shadows all day. Maybe I could chance it. I had to see her if I died for it.

Which is an easy thing to say.