The New Black Mask Quarterly (No 2)

Michael Collins A Reason to Die

Michael Collins’s first Dan Fortune novel. Act of Fear, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best first mystery novel of 1967. In the eleven Dan Fortune novels since, Collins has developed his one-armed private detective into a highly original series character who tests the limits of genre fiction. “Over the last years my genre and mainstream work has been growing together rather rapidly,” Collins writes. “This story, some years in the writing, is another jump in that direction.”

Michael Collins is one of five pseudonyms of novelist Dennis Lynds, who presently lives in southern California. His most recent Dan Fortune novel. Harlot’s Cry, is seeking a publisher, and his Mark Sadler novel, Deadly Innocents, will be published early in 1986 by Walker.

There are many kinds of courage. Maybe the hardest is doing what you have to do. No matter how it looks to other people or what happens in the end.

Irish Johnny’s Tavern is a gray frame house near the railroad tracks in Syracuse, New York. A beacon of red and blue neon through the mounded old snow in the dusk of another cold winter day too far from Chelsea. My missing left arm hurt in the cold, and one of the people I was meeting was a killer.

I’d been in Irish Johnny’s before, on my first day in Syracuse looking for why Alma Jean Brant was dead. Her mother had sent me.

“You go to Irish Johnny’s, Mr. Fortune,” Sada Patterson said. “They’ll tell you about my Alma Jean.”

“What can they tell me, Mrs. Patterson?” I said. I’d read the Syracuse Police Department’s report, made my voice as gentle as I could in the winter light of my office-apartment loft above Eighth Avenue.

“They can tell you my girl wasn’t walkin’ streets without she got a reason, and whatever that there reason was it got to be what killed her.”

“Every girl on the streets has a reason, Mrs. Patterson,” I said.

“I don’t mean no reason everyone got. I means a special reason. Somethin’ made her do what she never would do,” Sada Patterson said.

“Mrs. Patterson, listen—”

“No! You listen here to me.” She held her old black plastic handbag in both hands on the lap of her starched print dress and fixed me across the desk with unflinching eyes. “I did my time hookin’ when I was a girl. My man he couldn’t get no work, so one day he ain’t there no more, and I got two kids, and I hooked. A man got no work, he goes. A woman got no man, she hooks. But a woman got a man at home, she don’t go on no streets. Not a good woman like my Alma Jean. She been married to that Indian ten years, and she don’t turn no tricks less she got a powerful reason.”

“What do you want me to do, Mrs. Patterson?”

Ramrod straight, as thin and rock hard as any Yankee farmer, Sada Patterson studied me with her black eyes as if she could see every thought I’d ever had. She probably could. The ravages of sixty years of North Carolina dirt farms, the Syracuse ghetto, and New York sweatshops had left her nothing but bones and tendon, the flesh fossilized over the endless years.

“You go on up there ’n’ find out who killed my Alma Jean. I can pay. I got the money. You go to Irish Johnny’s and ask ’bout my Alma Jean. She ain’t been inside the place in ten years, or any place like it. You tell ’em Sada sent you and they talk to you even if you is a honkie.”

“It’s a police job, Mrs. Patterson. Save your money.”

“No cop’s gonna worry hard ’bout the killin’ of no black hooker. You go up there, Fortune. You find out.” She stood up, the worn plastic handbag in both hands out in front of her like a shield. A grandmother in a print dress. Until you looked at her eyes. “She was my last — Alma Jean. She come when we had some money, lived in a house up there. She almos’ got to finish grade school. I always dressed her so good. Like a real doll, you know? A little doll.”

Inside, Irish Johnny’s is a single large room with a bandstand at the far end. The bar is along the left wall, backed by bottles and fronted by red plastic stools. Tables fill the room around a small dance floor. Behind the bar and the rows of bottles is a long mirror. The rear wall over the bandstand is bare, except when it is hung with a banner proclaiming the band or artiste to perform that night.

On the remaining two walls there is a large mural in the manner of Orozco or maybe Rivera. Full of violent, struggling ghetto figures, it was painted long ago by some forgotten radical student from the university on the hill above the tavern.

The crowd had not yet arrived, only a few tables occupied as I came in. The professor and his wife sat at a table close to the dance floor. I crossed the empty room under the lost eyes of the red, blue, and yellow people in the mural.

I knew who the killer was, but I didn’t know how I was going to prove it. Someone was going to have to help me before I made the call to the police.

The police are always the first stop in a new town. Lieutenant Derrida of the Syracuse Police Department was an older man. He remembered Sada Patterson.

“Best-looking hooker ever walked a street in Syracuse.” His thin eyes were bright and sad at the same time, as if he wished he and Sada Patterson could be back there when she had been the best-looking hooker in Syracuse, but knew it was too late for both of them.

“What made Alma Jean go to the streets, Lieutenant?”

He shrugged. “What makes any of ’em?”

“What does?” I said.

“Don’t shit me, Fortune. A new car or a fur coat. Suburbs to Saskatchewan. It just happens more in the slums where the bucks ain’t so big or easy.”

“Sada says no way unless the girl had a large reason,” I said. “She didn’t mean a fur coat or a watch.”

“Sada Patterson’s a mother,” Derrida said.

“She’s also a client. Can I earn my fee?”

He opened a desk drawer, took out a skinny file. “Alma Jean was found a week ago below a street bridge over the tracks. Some kids going to school spotted her. The fall killed her. She died somewhere between midnight and four A.M., the snow and cold made it hard to be sure. It stopped snowing about two A.M., there was no snow on top of her, so she died after that.”

Derrida swiveled in his chair, looked out his single window at the gray sky and grayer city. “She could have fallen, jumped, or been pushed. There was no sign of a struggle, but she was a small woman; one push would have knocked her over that low parapet. M.E. says a bruise on her jaw could have come from a blow or from hitting a rock. No suicide note, but the snow showed someone had climbed up on the parapet. Only whoever it was didn’t get near the edge, held to a light pole, jumped off the other way back onto the street.”

“What’s her pimp say?”

“Looks like she was trying to work independent.”

I must have stared. Derrida nodded.

“I know,” he said, “we sweated the pimp in the neighborhood. Black as my captain, but tells everyone he’s a Polack. He says he didn’t even know Alma Jean, and we can’t prove he did or place him around her.”

“Who do you place around her?”

“That night, no one. She was out in the snow all by herself. No one saw her, heard her, or smelled her. If she turned any tricks that night, she used doorways; no Johns are talking. No cash in her handbag. A bad night.”

“What about other nights?”

“The husband, Joey Brant. He’s a Mohawk, works high steel like most Indians. They married ten years ago, no kids and lived good. High steel pays. With her hooking he was numero uno suspect, only he was drinking in Cherry Valley Tavern from nine till closing with fifty witnesses. Later, the bartender, him, and ten others sobered up in a sweat lodge until dawn.”

“Anyone else?”

“Mister Walter Ellis. Owns the numbers, runs a big book. He was an old boyfriend of Sada’s, seems to have had eyes for the daughter. She was seen visiting him a couple of times recently. Just friendly calls, he says, but he got no alibi.”

“That’s it?”

Derrida swiveled. “No, we got a college professor named Margon and his wife. Margon was doing ‘research’ with Alma Jean. Maybe the wrong kind of research. Maybe the wife got mad.”

I took a chair at the table with the Margons. In Irish Johnny’s anyone who opened a book in the university above the ghetto was a “professor.” Fred Margon was a thin, dark-haired young man in his mid-twenties. His wife, Dorothy, was a beauty-contest blonde with restless eyes.

“A temple,” Fred Margon said as I sat down. “The bartenders are the priests, that mural is the holy icon painted by a wandering disciple, the liquor is God.”

“I think I’ll scream,” Dorothy Margon said. “Or is that too undignified for the wife of a scholar, a pure artist?”

Fred Margon drank his beer, looked unhappy.

“Booze is their god,” Dorothy Margon said. “That’s very good. Isn’t that good, Mr. Fortune? You really are bright, Fred. I wonder what you ever saw in me? Just the bod, right? You like female bods at least. You like them a lot when you’ve got time.”

“You want to leave?” Fred said.

“No, tell us why drink is their god. Go on, tell us.”

“No other god ever helped them.”

“Clever,” Dorothy said. “Isn’t he clever, Mr. Fortune? Going to do great scholarly research, teach three classes, and finish his novel all at the same time. Then there’s the female bods. When he has time. Or maybe he makes time for that.”

“We’ll leave,” Fred said.

“All day every day: scholar, teacher, novelist. For twenty whole thousand dollars a year!”

“We manage,” Fred Margon said.

“Never mind,” Dorothy said. “Just never mind.”

I met him in a coffee shop on South Grouse after a class. He looked tired. We had coffee, and he told me about Alma Jean.

“I found her in an Indian bar six months ago. I like to walk through the city, meet the real people,” He drank his coffee. “She had a way of speaking full of metaphors. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the poetry of totally untrained people, got a grant to continue the research. I met her as often as I could. In the bars and in her home. To listen and record her speech. She was highly intelligent. Her insights were remarkable for someone without an education, and her way of expressing her thoughts was pure uneducated poetry.”

“You liked her?”

He nodded. “She was real, alive.”

“How much did you like her, professor?”

“Make it Fred, okay? I’m only a bottom-step assistant professor, and sometimes I want to drop the whole thing, live a real life, make some money.” He drank his coffee, looked out the café window. He knew what I was asking. “My wife isn’t happy, Mr. Fortune. When she’s unhappy, she has the classic female method of showing it. Perhaps in time I would have tried with Alma Jean, but I didn’t. She really wasn’t interested, you know? In me or any other man. Only her husband.”

“You know her husband?”

“I’ve met him. Mostly at her house, sometimes in a bar. He seems to drink a lot. I asked her about that. She said it was part of being an Indian, a ‘brave.’ Work hard and drink hard. He always seemed angry. At her, at his bosses, at everything. He didn’t like me, or my being there, as if it were an insult to him, but he just sat in the living room, drinking and looking out a window at the tall buildings downtown. Sometimes he talked about working on those buildings. He was proud of that. Alma Jean said that was the culture; a ‘man’ did brave work, daring.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“The day she died.” He shrugged as he drank his coffee. “The police know. I had a session with her early in the day at her house. Her husband wasn’t there, and she seemed tired, worried. She’d been unhappy for months, I think, but it was always hard to tell with her. Always cheerful and determined. I told her there was a book in her life, but she only scorned the idea. Life was to be lived, not written about. When there were troubles, you did something.”

“What troubles sent her out on the streets?”

He shook his head. “She never told me. A few weeks ago she asked me to pay her for making the tapes. She needed money. I couldn’t pay her much on my grant, but I gave her what I could. I know it wasn’t anywhere near enough. I heard her talking on the telephone, asking about the cost of something.”

“You don’t know what?”

“No.” He drank coffee. “But whoever she was talking to offered to pay for whatever it was. She turned him down.”

“You’re sure it was a him?”

“No, I’m not sure.”

“Who killed her, professor?”

Outside, the students crunched through the snow in the gray light. He watched them as if he wished he were still one of them, his future unknown. “I don’t know who killed her, Mr. Fortune. I know she didn’t commit suicide, and I doubt that she fell off that bridge. I never saw her drunk. When her husband drank, she never did, as if she had to be sober to take care of him.”

“Where were you that night?”

“At home,” he said, looked up at me. “But I couldn’t sleep, another argument with my wife. So I went out walking in the snow. Didn’t get back until two A.M. or so.”

“Was it still snowing?”

“It had just stopped when I got home.”

“Did you see anyone while you were out?”

“Not Alma Jean, if that’s what you want to know. I did see that older friend of hers. What’s his name? Walter Ellis?”

“Where?”

“Just driving around. That pink Caddy of his is easy to remember. Especially in the snow, so few cars driving.”

“And all you were doing with her was recording her speech?”

He finished his coffee. “That’s all, Mr. Fortune.”

After he left, I paid for the coffee. He was an unhappy man, and not just about money or work.

The scar-faced man stood just inside the door. Snow dripped from his dirty raincoat into a pool around his black boots. A broad, powerfully built man with a fresh bandage on his face. Dark stains covered the front of his raincoat. The raincoat and his black shirt were open at the throat. He wore a large silver cross bedded in the hair of his chest.

“Now there’s something you can write about,” Dorothy Margon said. “Real local color. Who is he? What is he? Why don’t you make notes. You didn’t forget your notebook, did you, Fred?”

“His name is Duke,” Fred Margon said. “He’s a pimp, and this is his territory. A small-time pimp, only three girls on the street now. He takes 80 percent of what they make to protect them, lets them support him with most of the rest. But the competition is fierce, and business is bad this season. He gives students a cut rate; professors pay full price.”

“Of course,” Dorothy said. “Part of your ‘research’ into ‘ordinary’ people. All for art and scholarship.” She looked at the man at the entrance. “I wonder what his girls are like. Are they young or old? Do they admire him? I suppose they all love him. Of course they do. All three of them in love with him.”

“In love with him and afraid of him,” I said.

“Love and fear,” Fred Margon said. “Their world.”

“Do I hear a story?” Dorothy said. “Is everything a story? Nothing real? With results? Change? A future?”

I watched him come across the dance floor toward our table. Duke Wiltkowski, the pimp in the streets where Alma Jean had been found dead.

The pimp’s office was a cellar room with a single bare bulb, a table for a desk, some battered armchairs, a kerosene heater, and water from melted snow pooled in a dark corner. Times had been better for Duke Wiltkowski.

“You sayin’ I killed her? You sayin’ that, man?” His black face almost hidden in the shadows of the cellar room, the light of the bare bulb barely reaching where he sat behind the table.

“Someone did,” I said. “You had a motive.”

“You say I kill that chippie, you got trouble, man. I got me a good lawyer. He sue you for everythin’ you got!”

“The police say she was in your territory.”

“The police is lyin’! The police say I kill that chippie, they lyin’!” His voice was high and thin, almost hysterical. It’s a narrow world of fear, his world. On the edge. Death on one side, prison on the other, hunger and pain in between.

“She was free-lance in your territory. You can’t let her do that. Not and survive. Let her do that, and you’re out of business.”

He sat in the gloom of the cold basement room, unmoving in the half shadows. The sweat shone on his face like polished ebony. The face of a rat with his back to the wall, cornered. Protesting.

“I never see that chippie. Not me. How I know she was working my turf? You tell the cops that, okay? You tell the cops Duke Wiltkowski never nowhere near that chippie.”

He sweated in the cold cellar room. A depth in his wide eyes almost of pleading. Go away, leave him alone. Go away before he told what he couldn’t tell. Wanted to tell but couldn’t. Not yet.

“Where were you that night?”

“Right here. An’ with one o’ my pigs. All night. Milly-O. Me ’n’ Milly-O we was makin’ it most all night. You asks her.”

One of his prostitutes who would say anything he told her to say, to the police or to God himself. That desperate. An alibi he knew was no alibi. Sweated. Licked his lips.

“That Injun husband she got, maybe he done it. Hey, they all crazy, them Injuns! That there professor hangs in Irish Johnny’s. Hey, he got to of been playin’ pussy with her. I mean, a big-shot white guy down there. Hey, that there professor he got a wife. Maybe she don’t like that chippie, right?”

“How about Walter Ellis? He was out in the snow that night.”

The fear on his face became sheer terror. “I don’ know nothin’ ’bout Mr. Ellis! You hears. Fortune! Nothin’!”

Now he walked into Irish Johnny’s with the exaggerated swing and lightness of a dancer. Out in public, the big man. His face in the light a mass of crisscross scars. The new bandage dark with dried blood. He smiled a mouthful of broken yellow teeth.

“Saw it was you, professor. That your lady?” He clicked his heels, bowed to Dorothy Margon. A Prussian officer. “Duke Wiltkowski. My old man was Polack.” He nodded to me, cool and casual, expansive. An image to keep up and no immediate fear in sight. “Hey, Fortune. How’s the snoopin’?”

“Slow,” I said, smiled. “But getting there.”

“Yeh.” The quick lick of the lips, and sat down at the table, legs out in his Prussian boots. The silver cross at his throat reflected the bright tavern light. He surveyed the room with a cool, imperious eye. Looked at Dorothy Margon. “You been holdin’ out on the Duke, professor. You could do real business with that one.”

The Duke admired Dorothy’s long blonde hair, the low-cut black velvet dress that looked too expensive for an assistant professor’s wife, her breasts rising out of the velvet.

“It’s not what I do,” Fred Margon said.

Dorothy Margon tore a cardboard coaster into small pieces, dropped the pieces onto the table. She began to build the debris into a pyramid. She worked on her pyramid, watched the Duke.

The people were filling the tavern now. I watched them come out of the silence and cold of the winter night into the light and noise of the tavern. They shed old coats and worn jackets, wool hats and muddy galoshes, to emerge in suits and dresses the colors of the rainbow. Saturday night.

The Duke sneered. “Works their asses a whole motherin’ year for the rags they got on their backs.” He waved imperiously to a waiter. “Set ’em up for my man the professor ’n’ his frau. Fortune there too. Rye for me.”

Dorothy Margon built her pyramid of torn pieces of coaster. “What happened to your face?”

“Injuns.” The Duke touched the bandage on his face, his eyes fierce. “The fuckers ganged me. I get ’em.”

“Alma Jean’s husband?” I said. “The Cherry Valley bar?”

The Cherry Valley Tavern was a low-ceilinged room with posts and tables and a long bar with high stools. As full of dark Iroquois faces as the massacre that had given it its name. All turned to look at me as I entered. I ordered a beer.

The bartender brought me the beer. “Maybe you’d like it better downtown, mister. Nothing personal.”

“I’m looking for Joey Brant.”

He mopped the bar. “You’re not a cop.”

“Private. Hired by his mother-in-law.”

He went on mopping the bar.

“She wants to know who killed her daughter.”

“Brant was in here all night.”

“They told me. What time do you close?”

“Two.”

“When the snow stopped,” I said.

“We went to the sweat lodge. Brant too.”

“Good way to sober up on a cold night. Maybe Brant has some ideas about who did kill her.”

“Down the end of the bar.”

He was a small man alone on the last bar stool. He sat hunched, a glass in both hands. An empty glass. Brooding into the glass or staring up at himself in the bar mirror. I stood behind him. He didn’t notice, waved at the bartender, violent and arrogant.

“You had enough, Joey.”

“I says when I got enough.” He scowled at the bartender. The bartender did nothing. Brant looked down at his empty glass. “I got no woman. Crow. She’s dead, Crow. My woman. How I’m gonna live my woman’s dead?”

“You get another woman,” the bartender, Crow, said.

Brant stared at his empty glass, remembered what he wanted. “C’mon, Crow.”

“You ain’t got two paychecks now.”

Brant swung his head from side to side as if caught in the mesh of a net, thrashing in the net. “Lemme see the stuff.”

The bartender opened a drawer behind the bar, took out a napkin, opened it on the bar. Various pieces of silver and turquoise Indian jewelry lay on the towel. There were small red circles of paper attached to most pieces. Rings, bracelets, pendants, pins, a silver cross. Joey Brant picked up a narrow turquoise ring. It was one of the last pieces without a red tag.

“Two bottles,” Crow said.

“It’s real stuff, Crow. Four?”

“Two.”

I thought Brant was going to cry, but he only nodded. Crow took an unopened bottle of cheap rye blend from under the bar, wrote on it. Close, Brant’s shoulders were thickly muscled, his arms powerful, his neck like a bull. A flyweight bodybuilder. Aware of his body, his image. I sat on the stool beside him. He stared at my empty sleeve. Crow put a shot glass and a small beer on the bar, opened the marked bottle of rye.

“On me,” I said. “Both of us.”

Crow stared at me, then closed the marked bottle, poured from a bar bottle. He brought my beer and a chaser beer, walked away. The small, muscular Indian looked at the whisky, at me.

“Why was Alma Jean on the street, Joey?” I said.

He looked down at the whisky. His hand seemed to wait an inch from the shot glass. Then he touched it, moved it next to the beer chaser.

“How the hell I know? The bitch.”

“Her mother says she had to have a big reason.”

“Fuck her mother.” He glared at my missing arm. “You no cop. Cops don’t hire no cripples.”

“Dan Fortune. Private detective. Sada Patterson hired me to find out who murdered Alma Jean. Any ideas?”

He stared into the shot glass of cheap rye as if it held all the beauty of the universe. “She think I don’ know? Stupid bitch an’ her black whoremaster! I knows he give her stuff. I get him, you watch. Make him talk. Black bastard, he done it sure. I get him.” He drank, went on staring into the bottom of the glass as if it were a crystal ball. “Fuckin’ around with that white damn professor. Think she fool Joey Brant? Him an’ that hot-bitch wife he got. Business, she says; old friends, she says. Joey knows, yessir. Joey knows.”

“You knew,” I said, “so you killed her.”

There was a low rumble through the room. The bartender, Crow, stopped pouring to watch me. They didn’t love Brant, but he was one of them, and they would defend him against the white man. Any white man, black or white.

Brant shook his head. “With my friends. Not worth killin’. Nossir. Joey Brant takes care of hisself.” He drained the shot, finished the beer chaser, and laid his head on the bar.

The bartender came and removed the glasses, watched me finish my beer. When I did, he made no move to serve another.

“He was in here all night; fifty guys saw him. We went to the reservation and sweated. Me and ten other guys and Brant.”

“Sure,” I said.

I felt their eyes all the way out. They didn’t like him, even despised him, but they would all defend him, lie for him.

The band burst into sound. Dancers packed into a mass on the floor. A thick mass of bodies that moved as one, the colors and shapes of the mural on the wall, a single beast with a hundred legs and arms. Shrill tenor sax, electronic guitar, keyboard, and trumpet blaring. Drums.

“Or did Brant find you?” I said.

The Duke scowled at the dancers on the floor. “Heard he was lookin’ to talk to the Duke, so I goes to the Cherry Valley. He all shit and bad booze. He never know me, ’n’ I never knows him. I tells him I hear he talkin’ ’bout me ’n’ from now on all I wants to hear is sweet nothin’.”

“You’re a tough man,” I said. “I’ll bet you scared him.”

He licked his lips. I watched the sweat on his brow, the violent swinging of his booted foot. He was hiding something.

“I tell him I never even heard o’ his broad. What I know about no Injun’s broad? I tell him iffen she goes out on the tricks, it got to be he put her out. Happens all the time. Some ol’ man he needs the scratch, so he puts the ol’ woman out on the hustle.” The swinging foot in its black boot seemed to grow more agitated. His eyes searched restlessly around the packed room, the crowded dance floor. “I seen it all times, all ways. They comes out on the streets, nice chicks should oughta be home watchin’ the kids, puttin’ the groceries on the table. I seen ’em, scared ’n’ no way knows what they s’posed to do. All ’cause some dude he ain’t got what it takes.”

Restless, he sweated. The silver cross reflected the tavern light where it lay on his thick chest hair above the black shirt. Talked. But what was he telling me?

“Is that when he jumped you? Pulled a knife?”

The Duke sneered. “Not him. He too drunk. All of ’em, they ganged me. He pull his blade, sure, but he ain’t sober ’nuff he can cut cheese. It was them others ganged me. I got some of ’em, got out o’ there.”

“Did you see him out on the street that night, Duke? Is that what you really told him? Why they ganged on you?”

He jerked back as if snakebitten. “I ain’t seen no one that there night! I ain’t on the street that there night. I—”

He stared toward the door. As if he saw a demon.

Joey Brant stood inside the tavern entrance blinking at the noise and crowd. Walter Ellis stood beside Brant. Which one was the Duke’s demon?

It was a big house by Syracuse-ghetto standards. A two-story, three-bedroom, cinder-block box painted yellow and green, with a spiked wrought-iron fence, a swimming pool that took up most of the postage-stamp side yard. Concrete paths wound among birdbaths and fountains and the American flag on a pole and naked plaster copies of the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David.

Walter Ellis met me on his front steps. “The cops send you to me. Fortune?”

He was a tall, slim man with snow-white hair and a young face. He looked dangerous. Quick eyes that smiled now. Simple gray flannel slacks, a white shirt open at the throat, and a red cashmere sweater that gave a vigorous tint to his face. Only the rings on both pinkies and both index fingers, diamonds and rubies and gold, showed his money and his power.

“They said you knew Alma Jean Brant,” I said.

“Her and her mother. Come on in. Drink?”

“Beer if you have it.”

He laughed. “Now you know I got beer. What kind of rackets boss wouldn’t have a extra refrigerator full of beer? Beck’s? Stroh’s? Bud?”

“Beck’s, thanks.”

“Sure. A New York loner.”

We were in a small, cluttered, overstuffed living room all lace and velvet and cushions. Ellis pressed a button somewhere. A tall, handsome black man in full suit and tie materialized, not the hint of a bulge anywhere under the suit, was told to bring two Beck’s.

“Not that I’m much of a racket boss like in the movies, eh? A small-town gambler. Maybe a little border stuff if the price is right.” He laughed again, sat down in what had to be his private easy chair, worn and comfortable with a footstool, waved me to an overstuffed couch. I sank into it. He lit a cigar, eyed me over it. “But you didn’t come about my business, right? Sada sent you up to find out what happened to Alma Jean.”

“What did happen to her?”

“I wish I knew.”

The immaculate black returned with two Beck’s and two glasses on an ornate silver tray. A silver bowl of bar peanuts. Ellis raised his glass. We drank. He ate peanuts and smoked.

“You liked her?” I said. “Alma Jean?”

He savored the cigar. “I liked her. She was married. That’s all. Not my age or anything else. She didn’t cheat on her husband. A wife supports her husband.”

“But she went on the streets.”

“Prostitution isn’t cheating, Fortune. Not in the ghetto, not down here where it hurts. It’s the only way a woman has of making money when she got no education or skills. It’s what our women do to help in a crisis.”

“And the men accept that?”

He smoked, drank, fingered peanuts. “Some do, some don’t.”

“Which are you?”

“I never cottoned to white slaving.”

“You were out that night. In your car. On the streets down near Irish Johnny’s.”

He drank, licked foam from his lips. “Who says?”

“Professor Fred Margon saw you. I think Duke Wiltkowski did too. He’s scared, sweating, and hiding something.”

His eyes were steady over the glass, the peanuts he ate one by one. “I like a drive, a nice walk in the snow. I saw the Duke and Margon. I didn’t see no one else. But a couple of times I saw that wife of Margon’s tailing Alma Jean.”

“Was it snowing when you got home?”

He smiled.

I watched Walter Ellis steer Joey Brant to a table on the far side of the dance floor. Brant was already drunk, but his startled eyes were wary, almost alert. This wasn’t one of his taverns. The Duke watched Walter Ellis.

I said, “It’s okay; we know he was out that night. He saw you, knows you saw him, and it’s okay. Who else did you see?”

The Duke licked his lips, looked at Fred Margon.

“You writes, yeh, professor?”

He looked back across the dance floor to Ellis and Joey Brant.

“I means,” the Duke said, “like stories ’n’ books ’n’ all that there?”

“God, does he write!” Dorothy Margon said. “Writes, studies, teaches. All day, every day. Tell the Duke about your art, Fred. Tell the Duke what you do. All day, every damn day.”

“Like,” the Duke said, “poetry stuff?” He watched only Fred Margon now. “Words they got the same sound ’n’ all?”

“I write poetry,” Fred said. “Sometimes it rhymes.”

“You likes poetry, yeh?”

“Yes, I like poetry. I read it.”

“Oh, but it’s so hard!” Dorothy said. “Tell the Duke how hard poetry is, Fred. Tell him how hard all real writing is. Tell him how you can learn most careers in a few years but it takes a lifetime to learn to write well.”

“We better go,” Fred said.

I watched the people packed body to body on the dance floor, flushed and excited, desperate for Saturday night. On the far side Walter Ellis ordered drinks. Joey Brant saw us: the Duke, me, Fred and Dorothy Margon. I watched him turn on Ellis. The racket boss only smiled, shook his head.

Dorothy smiled at the Duke. “I’m a bitch, right? I wasn’t once. Do your women talk to you like that, Duke? No, they wouldn’t, would they? They wouldn’t dare. They wouldn’t want to. Tell me about the Indians? How many were there? Did they all have knives? Do they still wear feathers? How many did you knock out? Kill?”

The Duke watched Fred Margon. “You writes good, professor?”

“You see,” Dorothy said, “we’re going to stay at the university three more years. We may even stay forever. Isn’t that grand news? I can stay here and do nothing forever.”

The Duke said to Fred, “They puts what you writes in books?”

Dorothy said, “Did you ever want something, wait for something, think you have it at last, and then suddenly it’s so far away again you can’t even see it anymore?”

“I’m a writer,” Fred said. “A writer and a teacher. I can’t go to New York and write lies for money.”

Dorothy stood up. “Dance with me, Duke. I want to dance. I want to dance right now.”

She opened the apartment door my second day in Syracuse, looked at my duffel coat, beret, and missing arm.

“He’s out. Go find him in one of your literary bars!”

“Mrs. Margon?” I said.

She cocked her head, suspicious yet coy, blonde and flirtatious. “You want me?”

“Would it do me any good?”

She laughed. “Do we know each other, Mr. — ?”

“Fortune,” I said. “No.”

She eyed me. “Then what do you want to talk to me about?”

“Alma Jean Brant,” I said.

She started to close the door. “Go and find my husband.”

I held the door with my foot. “No, I want you. Both ways.”

She laughed again, neither flirtatious nor amused this time. Self-mocking, a little bitter. “You can probably have me. Both ways.” But stepped back, held the door open. “Come in.”

It was a small apartment: a main room, bedroom, kitchenette, and bathroom. All small, cramped. The furniture had to have been rented with the apartment. They don’t pay assistant professors too well, and the future of a writer is at best a gamble, so without children they saved their money, scrimped, did without. She lit a cigarette, didn’t offer me one.

“What about that Alma Jean woman?”

“What can you tell me about her?”

“Nothing. That’s Fred’s territory. Ask him.”

“About her murder?”

She smoked. “I thought it was an accident. Or suicide. Drunk and fell over that bridge wall, or jumped. Isn’t that what the police think?”

“The police don’t think anything one way or the other. I think it was murder.”

“What do you want, Mr. Fortune? A confession?”

“Do you want to make one?”

“Yes, that I’m a nasty bitch who wants more than she’s got. Just more. You understand that, Mr. Fortune.”

“It’s a modern disease,” I said, “but what’s it got to do with Alma Jean Brant?”

She smoked. “You wouldn’t be here if someone hadn’t seen me around her.”

“Her husband,” I said. “And Walter Ellis.”

The couch creaked under her as if it had rusty springs. “I was jealous. Or maybe just suspicious. He’s so involved in his work, I’m so bored, our sex life is about zero. We never do anything! We talk, read, think, discuss, but we never do! I make his life miserable, I admit it. But he promised we would stay here only five years or until he published a novel. We would go down to New York, he’d make money, we’d have some life! I counted on that. Now he wants to get tenure, stay here!”

“So he can teach and write?” I said. “That’s all? No other reason for wanting to stay here?”

She nodded. “When he started going out all the time, I wondered too. Research for his work, he said, but I heard about Alma Jean. So I followed him and found where she lived. Then I followed her to see if she’d meet him somewhere else. That’s all. I just watched her house, followed her a few times. I never saw him do a damn thing that could be close to cheating. At her house that husband of hers was around all the time. He must work nights.”

“Did you see her do anything?”

She smoked. “I saw her visit the same house three or four times. I got real suspicious then. I hadn’t seen Fred go in, but after she left the last time, I went up and rang the bell. A guy answered, but it wasn’t Fred, so I made some excuse and got out of there. She was meeting someone all right, but not Fred.”

“Any idea who?”

She shook her head. “He wasn’t an Indian, I can say that.”

“What was he?”

“Black, Mr. Fortune. One big black man.”

Through the mass of sound and movement, bodies and faces that glistened with sweat and gaudy color and melted into the bright colors and tortured figures of the mural on the walls, I watched Joey Brant across the dance floor drinking and talking to Walter Ellis, who only listened.

I watched Dorothy Margon move lightly through the shuffle of the massed dancers. Her slender body loose and supple, her eyes closed, her lips parted, her face turned up to the Duke. I could see a man she denied turn to someone else. A man who could not give her what she wanted turning to someone who wanted less.

Her hips moved a beat behind the band; her long blonde hair swung free against the black velvet of her dress and the scarred face of the Duke. I could see her, restless and rejecting, but still not wanting her man to go anywhere else.

“I can’t tell the dancers from the people in the mural,” Fred Margon said. “I can’t be sure which woman is my wife with the Duke and which is the woman chained in the mural.”

He was talking about himself: a man who could not tell which was real and which was only an image. He could not decide, be certain, which was real to him, image or reality.

“Which man is the Duke on the dance floor with my wife,” Fred Margon said, “and which is the blue man with the bare chest and hammer in the mural? Am I the man at the ringside table with a glass of beer in a pale, indoor hand watching the Duke dance with his wife, or the thin scarecrow in the mural with his wrists chained and his starving face turned up to an empty sky?”

He was trying to understand something, and across the dance floor Joey Brant was talking and talking to Walter Ellis. Ellis only listened and watched the Duke and Dorothy Margon on the dance floor. The Duke sweated, and Dorothy Margon danced with her eyes closed, her body moving as if by itself.

Walter Ellis sat alone in the back of his pink Cadillac. I leaned in the window.

“A black man, she said. A big black man Alma Jean visited in a house in the ghetto.”

“A lot of big black men in the ghetto, Fortune.”

“What was the crisis?” I said. “You said going on the streets was what ghetto women did in a crisis.”

“I don’t know.”

“You offered to pay for whatever she needed money for.”

“She only told me she needed something that cost a lot of money.”

“Needed what?”

“A psychiatrist. I sent her to the best.”

“A black? Big? Lives near here? Expensive?”

“All that.”

“Can we go and talk to him?”

“Anytime.”

“And you didn’t give her the money to pay him?”

“She wouldn’t take it. Said she would know what it was really for even if it was only in my mind.”

The Duke said, “There was this here chippie. I mean, she’s workin’ my streets ’n’ I don’ work her, see? I mean, it’s snowin’ bad ’n’ there ain’t no action goin’ down, my three pigs’re holed up warmin’ their pussy, but this chippie she’s out workin’ on my turf. Hey, that don’t go down, you know? I mean, that’s no scene, right? So I moves in to tell her to fly her pussy off’n my streets or sign up with the Duke.”

I said, “The last time it snowed was the night Alma Jean died.”

Dorothy Margon built another pyramid of torn coasters on the tavern table and watched the Saturday night dancers. Fred Margon and I watched the Duke. The Duke mopped his face with a dirty handkerchief, a kind of desperation in his voice that rose higher, faster, as if he could not stop himself, had to talk while Fred Margon was there.

“I knows that there fox. I mean, I gets up close to tell her do a fade and I remembers that chippie in the snow.”

I said, “It was Alma Jean.”

He sweated in that hot room with its pounding music and packed bodies swirling and rubbing. It was what he had been hiding, holding back. What he had wanted to tell from the start. What he had to tell.

“Back when I was jus’ a punk kid stealin’ dogs, my or man beatin’ my ass to go to school, that there chippie out in the snow was in that school. I remembers. Smart ’n’ clean ’n’ got a momma dresses her up real good. I remembers, you know? Like, I had eyes for that pretty little kid back then.”

The band stopped. The dancers drifted off the floor, sat down. A silence like a blow from a hammer in the hands of the big blue man in the mural.

“I walks off. I mean, when I remembers that little girl, I walks me away from that there chippie. I remembers how good her momma fixes her up, so I walks off ’n’ lets her work, ’n’ I got the blues, you know. I got the blues then, ’n’ I got ’em now.”

“Everybody got the blues,” Dorothy said. “We should write a song. Fred should write a poem.”

“It was Alma Jean, Duke,” I said.

Walter Ellis stopped to say a few low words to the tall, handsome doctor, while I walked down the steps of his modest house and out to the ghetto street. The numbers boss caught up with me before I reached his Cadillac.

“Does that tell you who killed her?” Ellis said.

“I think so. All I have to do is find a way to prove it.”

He nodded. We both got into the back of the pink car. It purred away from the curb. The silent driver in the immaculate suit drove slowly, sedately, parading Ellis through his domain where the people could see him.

“Any ideas?” Ellis said.

“Watch and hope for a break. They’ve all got something on their minds; maybe it’ll get too heavy.”

He watched the street ahead. “That include me?”

“It includes you,” I said. “You were out that night.”

“You know what I’ve got on my mind?”

“I’ve got a hunch,” I said. “I’m going to meet the Margons in Irish Johnny’s tonight. Why don’t you come around and bring Brant, friend of the family.”

We drove on to my motel.

“The Duke hangs out in Irish Johnny’s,” Ellis said.

“I know,” I said.

“I writes me a poem,” the Duke said. “ ’Bout that there chippie. I go home ’n’ writes me a poem.”

The scarred black face of the Duke seemed to watch the empty dance floor as he told about the poem he had written. Fred Margon looked at him. All through the long room the Saturday night people waited for the music to begin again. Across the floor Walter Ellis talked to those who came to him one by one to pay their respects. Joey Brant drank, stared into his glass, looked toward me and the Margons and the Duke.

“Do you have it with you?” Fred said.

The Duke’s eyes flickered above the scars on his face and the new bandage. Looked right and left.

“Did you bring it to show me?” Fred Margon said.

The Duke sweated in the hot room. Nodded.

“All right,” Fred said. “But don’t just show it to me, read it. Out loud. Poetry should be read aloud. While the band is still off, get up and read your poem. This is your tavern; they all know you in here. Tell them why you wrote it, how it came to you, and read it to them.”

The Duke stared. “You fuckin’ with me, man?”

“Fred?” Dorothy Margon said.

“You wrote it, didn’t you? You felt it. If you feel something and write it, you have to believe in it. You have to show it to the world, make the world hear.”

“You a crazy man,” the Duke said.

Dorothy tore another coaster. Across the room Joey Brant and Walter Ellis watched our table. I waited.

“Give it to me,” Fred said.

The Duke sat there for some time, the sweat beaded on his face, his booted foot swinging, while the people all through the room waited for Saturday night to return.

“What happened to Alma Jean, Duke?” I said.

Fred Margon said, “You wrote it; give it to me.”

The Duke reached into his filthy raincoat and handed a torn piece of lined notebook paper to Fred Margon. Fred stood up. On the other side of the dance floor Joey Brant held his glass without drinking as Fred Margon walked to the bandstand, jumped up to the microphone.

“Ladies and gentlemen!”

In the long room, ice loud in the glasses and voices in the rumble of conversation, the people who waited only for the music to begin again, Saturday night to return, turned toward the bandstand. Fred Margon told them about the Duke and the chippie working his territory without his permission. The Duke alone in the night with the snow and the chippie.

“The Duke remembered that girl. He let her work, went home and wrote a poem. I’m going to read that poem.”

There were some snickers, a murmur of protest or two, the steady clink of indifferent glasses. Fred called for silence. Waited. Until the room silenced. Then he read the poem.

Through the smoke haze of the crowded tavern room they shifted their feet. They stirred their drinks. The musicians, ready to return, stood in the wings. A woman giggled. The bartenders hid grins. Some men suddenly laughed. A murmur of laughter rippled through the room. The Duke stood up, stepped toward the bandstand. Fred came across the empty dance floor.

“I like it,” Fred Margon said. “It’s not a good poem; you’re not a poet. But it’s real and I like it. I like anything that says what you really feel, says it openly and honestly. It’s what you had to do.”

The Duke’s eyes were black above the scars and the bandage. The Duke watched only Fred, his fists clenched, his eyes wide.

“It’s you,” Fred said. “Go up and read it yourself. Make them see what you saw out there in the snow when you remembered Alma Jean, the girl whose mother dressed her so well. To hell with anyone who laughs. They’re laughing at themselves. The way they would have laughed if Alma Jean had told them what she was going to do. They’re afraid, so they laugh. They’re afraid to know what they feel. They’re afraid to feel. Help them face themselves. Read your poem again. And again.”

The Duke stood in Irish Johnny’s Tavern, five new stitches in his scarred face under the bandage, and read his poem to the people who only wanted Saturday night to start again with the loud blare of the music and the heavy mass of the dancing and a kind of oblivion. He read without stumbling over the words, not reading but hearing it in the smoke of the gaudy tavern room. Hearing it as it had come to him when he stood in the snow and remembered the girl whose mother had always dressed her so well.

There was no laughter now. The Duke was doing what he had to do. Fred and Dorothy Margon were listening, and no one wanted to look stupid. Walter Ellis and Joey Brant were listening, and no one wanted to offend Mr. Ellis. So they sat, and the band waited to come back and start Saturday night again, and I went to the telephone and called Lieutenant Derrida.

Walter Ellis moved his chair, and I faced Joey Brant across the tavern table. “High steel pays good money, but you haven’t been making good money in a long time. You were home whenever Professor Margon went to talk to Alma Jean. You were home when Dorothy Margon watched Alma Jean. You haven’t been working high steel for over a year. That’s why she went out on the streets. You even had to sell Alma Jean’s jewelry to buy whisky at Cherry Valley Tavern. One of those pieces wasn’t hers, though, and that was a mistake. It was the cross the Duke gave her the night she was killed, the one he wrote about in his poem. You knew someone else had given it to her, but you didn’t know the Duke had given it to her that night, and it proves you killed her. You grabbed it from her neck before you knocked her off that bridge.”

Lieutenant Derrida stood over the table. The room was watching now. The Duke with his poem in his hand, Walter Ellis sad, Fred and Dorothy Margon holding hands but not looking at each other. Derrida said, “It’s the cross the Duke gave her that night, has his initials inside. Your boss says you haven’t worked high steel in over a year, just low-pay ground jobs when you show up at all. When the bartender. Crow, saw we had proof and motive, he talked. You left the tavern when it closed, didn’t get to the sweat lodge until pushing 3:30 A.M. You brought the jewelry to Crow after she was dead.”

Joey Brant drained his whisky, looked at us all with rage in his dark eyes. “She didn’t got to go on no streets. We was makin’ it all right. She got no cause playin’ with white guys, sellin’ it to old men, working for black whoremasters. I cut him good, that black bastard, ’n’ I knocked her off that there bridge when she was out selling her ass so she could live high and rich with her white friends and her gamblers and her black pimps! Sure, I hit her. I never meant to kill her, but I saw that cross on her neck ’n’ I never give her no cross ’n’ I hit her and she went on over.”

I said, “Her mother said she would only go on the streets for a big reason. You know what that was. Brant? You know why she went back on the streets?”

“I know, mister. Money, that’s why! ’Cause I ain’t bringing home the big bucks like the gambler ’n’ the professor ’n’ the black pimp!”

“She wanted to hire a psychiatrist,” I said. “You know what that is, Joey. A man who makes a sick mind get better.”

“Psychiatrist?” Joey Brant said.

“A healer, Joey. For a scared man who sat at home all day and drank too much. An expensive healer, so she had to go out on the streets to make the money she couldn’t make any other way.”

“Shut up, you hear? Shut up!” His dark face almost white.

I shook my head. “We know, Joey. We talked to the psychiatrist and your boss. You’re afraid of heights, Joey. You couldn’t even go to the edge of that bridge parapet and see where she had fallen. You can’t go up high on the steel anymore, where the big money is. Where a brave goes. Up there with the real men. You became afraid and it was killing you and that was killing her and she had to try to help you, save you, so she wanted money to take you to a psychiatrist who would cure you, help you go up on the steel again where you could feel like a man!”

“Psychiatrist?” Joey Brant said.

“That’s right, Joey. Her big, special reason to make big money the only way she knew how.”

Joey Brant sat there for a long time looking at all of us, at the floor, at his hands, at his empty whisky glass. Just sat while Lieutenant Derrida waited and everyone drifted away, and at last he put his head down on the table and began to cry.

Derrida had taken Joey Brant away. The Duke had stopped reading his poem to anyone who would listen. I sat at the floor-side table with Fred and Dorothy Margon. Out on the floor the Saturday night people clung and twined and held each other in their fine shimmering clothes, while in the mural the silent yellow women and bent blue men frozen in the red and yellow sky watched and waited.

“Dance with me, Fred,” Dorothy Margon said.

“I’m a bad dancer,” Fred Margon said. “I always have been a bad dancer. I always will be a bad dancer.”

“I know,” Dorothy said. “Just dance with me now.”

They danced among the faceless crowd, two more bodies that would soon go their separate ways. I knew that and so did they. Fred would teach and write and go on examining life for what he must write about. Dorothy would go to New York or Los Angeles to find more out of life than an assistant professor, a would-be writer. What they had to do.

The Duke has one kind of courage and Fred Margon has another. Joey Brant lost his. Fred Margon’s kind will cost him his wife. Alma Jean’s courage killed her. The courage to do what she had to do to help her man, even though she knew he would not understand. He would hate her, but she had to do it anyway. Courage has its risks, and we don’t always win.

In my New York office-apartment, Sada Patterson listened in silence, her worn plastic handbag on her skinny lap, the ramrod back so straight it barely touched my chair.

“I knew she had a big reason,” she said. “That was my Alma Jean. To help her man find hisself again,” She nodded, almost satisfied, “I’m sorry for him. He’s a little man.” She stood up. “I gonna miss her — Alma Jean. She was my last: I always dressed her real good.”

She paid me. I took the money. She had her courage too. And her pride. She’d go on living, fierce and independent, even if she couldn’t really tell herself why.