The Brass Rainbow

7

The path led toward two cottages behind the house. Only one showed light. The tall woman led me toward the lighted one.

She wore boots, a loose one-piece wool dress, and nothing else against the ten-degree cold but an enormous red-and-white-striped scarf. She strode out like one of those old fanatics leading a crusade.

Inside, the main room of the cottage was bright and well-furnished. She led me through into a smaller room without even a glance at the expensive furniture. In the small room there were a narrow bed, straight chairs, two worn bureaus, an old desk piled with papers, and a shabby dining table. A monk’s cell.

“Sit down,” she said.

I sat. She sat at the desk. I saw her clearly, and she was a girl: a tall, lanky girl of about twenty-five, with a long solemn face.

“I’m Morgana. You’re investigating Uncle Jonathan’s death?”

“I suppose I am.”

“You think someone here really killed him?”

“I don’t think anything yet. Do you?”

“I think that a total stranger is a bit too convenient. My uncle was a strong and clever man. It strikes me that he was not a man to be killed so easily by someone who had come to squeeze money. He should have been alert in that situation.”

That thought had crossed my mind. “Do you have an idea?”

She crossed her legs. It was an efficient, mannish gesture. She swung her booted leg as if she were about to give instructions to her soldiers. “No, not really. Any Radford or Ames is capable of murder, but I don’t know of any motives. Logically there is my brother, Walter, but it couldn’t have been Walter.”

“Why not, and why logically?”

“He is basically too gentle to hurt anyone, although he hated Jonathan. Jonathan tried to make him a businessman, and Mother tried to make him a cold aristocrat. Because they both failed, they think he is weak, but it isn’t that.” Her leg swung faster to some inner conflict. “When we were both small, we took an oath to right the wrongs our family had done. To do only good. Mother and Jonathan destroyed that in Walter, but they could not make him what they wanted, so he became what he is.”

“What is he?”

“Bitter, corrupt and self-indulgent.” She looked at me. “But the gentle boy is still there; I know that. He couldn’t kill.”

“He has an alibi anyway. If he was really here on Monday.”

“He was. I talked to him.” Her leg swung. “But she wasn’t.”

“She?”

“The cool Deirdre. She gets it all now, you see?”

“Did Jonathan dislike her? Did he oppose her?”

“No, not at all. Jonathan admired her just as Mother does. They admired her strength. Good for Walter, they considered.”

“Then why would she kill Jonathan?”

“There may be things I don’t know. They don’t tell me much.”

“It’s not logical for her to kill a man who liked her.”

“Unless something had changed,” Morgana Radford said. Her leg swung in spasms and her hands twitched. “There’s something dark and animal in her. She looks at Walter like a spider.”

“But she has an alibi. Everyone has an alibi.”

She sighed. “I suppose so. I suppose it was this Weiss. In a way it is a kind of justice. Simple, stupid violence.”

I watched her. “You didn’t like your uncle, did you?”

Abruptly, she stood. She began to pace the Spartan room. “My uncle was an evil man. One of the evil Radfords! Do you know how the Radfords became powerful, rich? On blood! They called it coffee, but it was blood they sold. The blood of Indians, peasants, slaves! They robbed, killed and maimed the darker people of the world so that they could live in ease at home. It still goes on, day after day. Power, greed and self-interest, and Jonathan was the leader of today. A most efficient, strong man. I’m glad he’s dead, and I won’t let them make Walter like him!”

In her shapeless brown dress she looked like some fundamentalist preacher promising fire and brimstone. That’s just what she was. A fanatic. What else she was, I couldn’t say. Maybe she was on the edge of a private darkness, or maybe she was only a sensitive girl in a rapacious family. Fanatics do a lot of harm, but they do a lot of good, too. Maybe most of the good.

“Where were you on Monday, Miss Radford?”

“At work. I’m an officer in the Society of Economic Missions. Our work is to correct the wrongs of exploitation in colonial countries.” She gave me an appraising look. She knew what I was asking. “It’s in the East Fifties. I was there all morning. I came home on the train after Walter.”

“Do you know about any problems your uncle had?”

She shook her head. “No, not really. I did hear Mother say once that Jonathan was becoming a night owl in his old age, but I don’t know what it means. He did seem to take longer business trips recently.”

“Night action and longer business trips? But you don’t know if he was involved in something unusual for him?”

“No, but I wouldn’t be surprised by anything Jonathan was involved in,” Morgana Radford said bitterly. “Anything.”

“Do you know where I can find Walter?”

“Probably at that Costa’s gambling house. Jonathan closed it, but it opened up in the next town. Walter has to gamble, you see? He has to wallow. They did that to him.”

She was no longer talking to me. I left her staring at what had to be some invisible image of Walter Radford. I went back to the house where my taxi waited in the snow. Mrs. Radford was there. “You were speaking to Morgana?”

“Yes.”

She was silent a moment. In the forest some large night bird attacked a small animal. Mrs. Radford said, “She is a strange girl, withdrawn from us. It comes from having no father. She worshiped her only brother. She can’t let him grow up, mature. She sees mature strength as evil.”

There are always two sides, sometimes more, and all sides can be true. Strength can be mature. It can also be evil.

“Walter must assume charge now,” Mrs. Radford said.

“I guess so, Mrs. Radford,” I said. I was thinking that there were pressures in the Radford family. Whether they were a cause of Jonathan’s death, or only a result, I had no way of knowing.

I got into the taxi. Mrs. Radford stood in the snow in front of the house and watched me leave.

Carmine Costa’s casino was a big house on a back road with many small rooms inside. Some of the rooms were for relaxation and booze; six were for action. There were two roulette rooms, a dice room, a blackjack room, a baccarat layout, and a poker room. It was all open. No one cares much about other people gambling. In most police forces the vice squad is separate so that the other squads don’t have to arrest the gamblers and girls they depend on for so much information that solves bigger crimes.

There was little of the frantic madness of Las Vegas. The people here had plenty of money to lose if that would help them to pass the time. Still, there were tense jaw muscles and sweaty palms hidden in dinner jacket pockets. No gambler wants to lose. Not once, not ever.

Deirdre Fallon stood at the dice table as slim as a crystal doll. A white evening dress that fitted her curves from ankle to high neck left no question this time about her hips and breasts. Her hand rested on the arm of a slender man beside her.

He was like his dead uncle, but younger and smaller. He held his body in an arrogant attitude, but the pallor of his face was almost anemic. His dinner jacket was flawless, and there was a superior tilt to his chin, but his eyes were dark circles with brown chips small in the center. His attention was totally on the dice game, and his mouth had a loose, petulant cast.

“Miss Fallon,” I said.

She turned. “Are you following me, Mr. Fortune?”

“No, but it’s a nice thought.”

She wrinkled her nose at me, smiled. It gave me that twinge in my back. She touched the small man beside her.

“Walter. I think Mr. Fortune wants to talk to you.”

He turned fast as if afraid he might respond too slowly and make Deirdre Fallon angry. His shadowed eyes scanned me. He did not like what he saw, and he was not a good enough actor to hide it. Or maybe he didn’t give a damn.

“Fortune? You’re working for that killer? Damn you, he killed my uncle for his blood money!”

“I thought it was Paul Baron’s money?”

“Sure, Baron’s money, but Weiss came crawling to get it! Why don’t you find the money! Find it and you’ve got Weiss!”

His voice was loud, and people were looking at us. Deirdre Fallon put her arm around his thin waist.

“Walter is upset,” she said. “He feels his uncle was killed because of him, and…”

He squirmed. “Deirdre, don’t…!”

“It’s the truth, Walter,” she snapped.

“I know, damn it, but not to him!”

I was the alien, the outsider, in front of whom no Radford should ever drop the wall. Deirdre Fallon did not seem as worried about me. Maybe because she wasn’t yet a Radford. She wasn’t quite in the castle.

“Maybe you could tell me more about this money you owed to Paul Baron?” I said.

He seemed about to answer when the stickman tapped him. It was his turn to roll. He forgot me as if I had gone up in smoke. The dice were in his hands. His dull chip eyes shined. His mouth tightened, became firm, almost cruel. He was taller, as if he had gathered his muscles. He laid a hundred-dollar bill down.

“Shoot a hundred,” he said in a smooth, cool voice that had taken on a faint British accent. He rolled a four.

“Four the point,” the stickman droned. Hard point or easy, winner or loser, they were all suckers to the stickman.

“Another hundred rides on Little Joe,” Walter said. Except he barked it like an officer ordering a bayonet charge.

He was a man at war. A soldier for glory and victory. A man like his ancestors battling heavy seas and steaming jungles. He thrilled to the battle, and it was the game that mattered, not the result. Maybe Deirdre Fallon could bring him out. Maybe no one had ever helped him to find anything worth fighting for.

Deirdre Fallon was watching me. “You look disapproving.”

“A man has to get his kicks,” I said. “I guess Walters One, Two and Three were gamblers, too.”

“You don’t like the suggestion of aristocracy in the numbers?”

“I’m not much impressed by family. My grandfather would have been. He was arrogant about being a Fortunowski of Poland.”

She smiled a nice, open smile. “I would have liked your grandfather. Family is important in a chaotic world.”

“If the family has values.”

“The Radfords have many values. Mostly good ones. Walter simply hasn’t found the right values for himself yet.”

“And you mean to help him find them?”

She smiled again. “Perhaps reshaping men is a disease of women, but Walter loves me, and I’m going to like being a Radford.”

Before I could answer that one, Walter crapped out. I saw him deflate as the pot was raked away and the dice passed. His eyes were deep pools of loss. It wasn’t the pot he stared at, it was the dice in another man’s hands.

Deirdre Fallon took his arm. “We can have a drink and talk.”

His sorrowful eyes looked at her. It was as naked a look as I had ever seen. His whole face said that the dice were gone and there was nothing left in the universe for him but Deirdre Fallon. What more could a woman ask? Especially when wealth, position, and maybe even power went with it?

I followed them into one of the lounge rooms. Deirdre Fallon ordered for all of us: martinis for them, an Irish for me.

“You wanted to know about Paul Baron, Mr. Fortune?” she said.

“I wondered how Walter lost so much to him.”

“By playing bad poker over quite a few months,” Walter said. He had changed again. He was more open, direct, a pleasant young man. He was something of a chamelon, changeable. “Paul was always very nice about accepting my markers.”

“How did you meet him?”

“When my uncle closed Costa, I was shut off everywhere in Westchester. They were all afraid of Jonathan. So I moved into New York and met Baron at a party about seven months ago.”

“Sammy Weiss, too?”

“I met Weiss twice. He hung around some bigger games Baron took me to. I usually played in small games at Paul’s East Sixteenth Street apartment. I told him I’d pay the $25,000 in installments. I thought he had agreed. I told him that Jonathan wouldn’t pay.”

“You didn’t know he was sending Weiss to collect?”

“No. I’d never have let him.”

“Did your uncle know Weiss was only a messenger?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t tell Jonathan about the money this time. Paul must have contacted him directly.”

“How did you plan to pay even in installments? From what I hear, you don’t have any money like $25,000.”

Deirdre Fallon said, “I don’t see how that matters.”

“I don’t know what does matter yet,” I said.

“I hoped to float small loans,” Walter said. “I’m twenty-nine; there was less than a year before I got all my father’s money anyway. People will lend on that even with my record. Baron just wouldn’t wait! He had to send Weiss, and Weiss killed my uncle!”

Deirdre Fallon said, “I’m sorry for your friend Weiss. I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill Jonathan, but he did.”

“He’s no friend, and he’s a cheap hustler, but I can’t see him as a killer. Was Jonathan involved in anything shady?”

Walter laughed. “Not Jonathan.”

Deirdre Fallon didn’t answer me. She was watching something behind me. I turned. Two men in dinner jackets stood over us. The taller of them had an easy smile aimed at Miss Fallon.

“Mr. Costa,” she said.

Carmine Costa bowed. “Miss Fallon, Mr. Radford, nice to have you back. Gives the place class.”

Costa was big, dark and handsome. He had broad shoulders and a narrow waist; clean hands and thick dark hair and snapping black eyes. He seemed to paw the ground like a stallion as he looked at Deirdre Fallon.

“Nothing could do that,” she said with contempt in her voice, “but at least you don’t cheat, or do you?”

“For you I’d cheat myself.”

“You’re a pig, Mister Costa,” she said.

He put his hand on her shoulder and moved it up to her neck. “A boar, Miss Fallon. A wild old boar.”

She looked up into his face, and then reached up with both hands and gripped his wrist as if to pull the hand away. For a second or two she just held the wrist. Walter Radford moved.

“Get your hands off her!” Walter said, and swung at Costa’s face.

The other man with Costa moved like a snake. His hand caught Walter’s wrist before it had gone four inches. Costa barked:

“Strega!”

The man, Strega, dropped Walter’s wrist and stepped back as if he had never moved. I had never seen anyone move so fast. Strega was not as tall as Costa, not as broad, seemed quieter in his dinner jacket, and yet there was no question which of the two was the stronger man. Strega was blond and smooth and there were no marks on his Nordic face, but he seemed to exude pure power. The muscleman, the bodyguard.

Costa bowed. “My mistake, no offense to the lady. Strega, apologize to Mr. Radford.”

Strega inclined his head. “Mr. Radford.”

“Sure,” Walter Radford said. “Okay, Deirdre?”

She nodded. “Mr. Costa can’t help his bad manners. He probably intended a compliment. But we better leave, Walter.”

I watched her lead Walter out. Costa watched her, too.

“There’s a woman,” Costa said. “Right, Strega?”

“Some woman, Sarge,” Strega said.

Costa became aware of me. “You want something?”

“A little talk,” I said, “about Jonathan Radford.”

Costa eyed me. “Sure, why not? Come in the office.”

I followed him toward a curtained doorway.

Strega followed me.