Walk a Black Wind

18

I had to park in a garage six blocks from the Emerald Room. I looked for a taxi, but it was five-thirty now, and I walked three blocks looking and waving. After the three blocks, I gave up, and walked to the restaurant. It had just opened.

The elegant entry greeted me with a cosy warmth that made me want to settle down at the bar for a long stay. Carl Gans didn’t greet me. A bigger man seemed to have his job now. The bigger man saw my duffel coat and missing arm.

“You want something?” he said.

“I’m looking for Carl Gans.”

“He’s off tonight.”

“Commissioner Zaremba’s murder?”

“You know, huh?” He had new respect for me. I was in the know, no matter how I looked. “Yeh, Carl took it hard. He’d been like twenty years with the Commissioner. Took a week off.”

“He went away?”

“Just in his pad, boozing I guess. Don’t blame him, he done good with the Commissioner around.”

“You have the address? It’s important, about the Commissioner.”

“Five-eighty West Ninety-fourth. That’s at Riverside.”

It was a long drive, but it would take longer to get a taxi at this hour. I went back to the garage, ransomed my car, and drove up in the night past the Park that was bare and still in the prewinter cold, the people hurrying as the temperature dropped unseasonally and caught them.

The building at Ninety-fourth and Riverside Drive was an old graystone apartment from the last century. It was not where I would have expected Carl Gans to live. There was a reserved, muted class to the building, and its lobby, was as clean as a Dutch housewife’s doorstep. Gans had apartment 4-D. I rode up in a lumbering old elevator, and wondered even more about Gans living in such a quiet building. Somewhere inside the bouncer was a man who wanted a solid, quiet life among successful, educated people. Because a man has only muscles to earn a living, it doesn’t mean that somewhere inside he can’t have a wish to be something else.

Apartment 4-D was at the far end of the first cross corridor. I was halfway down the corridor when the shots came from ahead. Three shots, the noise amplified by the solid walls. The door to 4-D was ajar. I began to run, bringing out my old pistol.

I stopped running-my pistol wasn’t there. I had left it in my bag in the car. I swore at myself and my crazy dislike of guns. But I didn’t swear hard. With a gun, I might have charged into 4-D, a perfect target for a killer who heard me coming. Without a gun, I went on carefully. I might lose time, and lose the killer, but that was better than losing the whole game-the only game I had, my life.

I pushed the door all the way open slowly. No one shot. The apartment was dark as I went in. I heard a faint sound somewhere at the rear. I walked through as silently as I could, feeling naked without a gun. The rear service door in the kitchen was open. I went out to the back landing with my stomach in my toes. I listened, and heard nothing at all.

That scared me. I had heard a sound, and now I heard nothing. Was someone close and silent, breathing hard but slow, waiting with a gun? I moved to the stairs through air that felt like a heavy wall.

Far below there was a faint sound-a door closing somewhere at the bottom of the service stairs. My quarry was gone. My stomach got lighter. I was some detective. A man with a gun had just escaped me, and I felt good. There’s no exhilaration for me in danger, and when I’m let off the hook, I’m happy.

I went back inside, and found Carl Gans on the floor of a dark room hung with framed photos of fighters he had known. There was almost no blood. His chest oozed a little blood from three small holes no larger than a pencil. A. 25- or. 22-caliber gun. Bullets that size could hit a man ten times and cause no real damage. I kneeled down.

“Gans? Who was it? Can you hear me?”

He breathed hoarsely, blood liquid in his throat, but he breathed. I smelled the whisky-a lot of whisky. His single glass stood on a table beside a bottle. He had been drowning his loss of Zaremba. It explained how he had been surprised in his own apartment.

“Gans?” I said.

His eyes were closed. He didn’t open them. He was in some other world, facing what neither of us could know, but already gone from this world where men like me asked questions and worried about who had shot him.

His lips barely moved as if he didn’t want to make any movement. “Dark. Behind me. No face. Shot.”

His voice was oddly clear, firm in its light, hoarse way, and still faintly slurring with the whisky in him. He didn’t ask who I was. That made no difference to him now.

His lips moved, “Raul Negra. She asked about Negra. The Crawford kid, Raul Negra. October, fifty-seven. October tenth, fifty-seven. October tenth, fifty-seven. October-”

His breathing became irregular, with long and short gaps. I waited for the next breath. It didn’t come. He died without a sigh or a cough.

I stood up and went to call Captain Gazzo.

Gazzo sat in Carl Gans’s lighted living room. I had told him all I’d learned. He already knew about my client. He was letting that pass. His men worked over Gans and the room.

“Gans worked for Abram Zaremba a long time,” I said. “Now they’re both dead. Gans was one of the men Francesca made a play for in New York. I came to ask questions. Maybe someone didn’t want Gans to answer any questions. He was the last stop on her search for her father-maybe. Unless maybe Zaremba was. Maybe a lot of things. We don’t know enough yet.”

“Ralph Blackwind,” Gazzo said. “I don’t get many Indians, only those Mohawks over in Brooklyn when they go on a spree. So now we go through it again, check them all out: Harmon Dunstan, his wife, your client, the Bazer girl, the Crawfords, Frank Keefer, Joel Pender, the lot. Jonas’ll be busy.”

“Don’t forget Anthony Sasser and Carter Vance.”

“I won’t forget them. What about my missing month?”

“Somewhere out west, I think,” I said. “She had Indian jewelry when she had nothing else. Fifteen years is a long time, but the answer, for her and for us, has to be where Ralph Blackwind started. The beginning of the trail that led her to New York. Auburn Prison should have the information. Where he came from, his past.”

“I’ll get after it,” Gazzo said. “Any guesses, Dan?”

“None. I’m charging down blind trails. At least there are some trails now.”

The M.E. came up. “Three shots in his chest. Two knicked the heart. Bad luck. Could have missed just as easy, and then all he’d have had was an itch. Short range, a. 22-caliber, probably a vest-pocket or purse gun. The bullets are still in him, no power to go through. Two look in fine shape. Just find the gun to match, and you’ve got your man. Have fun.”

The M.E. wasn’t callous, only experienced. A man who lives where death delights every day has to find a way to stay working for his money. He walked away to tell his men to take the body, and Captain Gazzo stood up.

“I’ll call when I have word,” Gazzo said to me.

It was a dismissal. Gazzo wanted to get his mind back to the slow, tedious routine that solves most cases. I didn’t think it would solve this one. Neither did he. He looked at his men who were working on the room without much hope.

I went down to my car, and drove home. When I got there, I tried calling Marty again. No answer. It had been a lonely two weeks for me. I cooked myself some dinner-hamburger and peas with too much bread. Then I went to bed. The drug, my bruises, and the bullet furrow in my head had caught up to me.

I lay thinking of Marty, and of Felicia Crawford out in the night somewhere, but there was no profit in any of that. So I thought of Muriel Roark and her muscular dancer’s legs up in Dresden. It was a nice thought to sleep on.