Walk a Black Wind

7

I had done worse than get nowhere. Abram Zaremba knew who I was now, and I knew no more than when I had gone in the club.

The cold wind that had been scouring the city for weeks blew me to the Lexington Avenue subway. I rode downtown thinking that in upstate cities Abram Zaremba was a very big fish with a lot of interests. Carl Gans worked for him, and he owned the Emerald Room. Was there some connection to Zaremba in the pasts of Harmon Dunstan and John Andera?

It was early, but I was still weak, so I stopped in a diner on Seventh Avenue where the Monday special was pot roast. While I ate, and rested, I thought that nothing yet really connected Francesca to Abram Zaremba except that she had taken a job at the Emerald Room she had no real reason to take.

The good pot roast eased my aches, and I walked on to my office to call Captain Gazzo. I wanted to hear that he’d found a lead, any lead, that would keep me from having to go up to Dresden, but I didn’t have much hope-the dead girl had done so little in New York. A runaway girl usually tries to do too much with her freedom. Francesca Crawford had been so isolated, so cryptic, that I couldn’t help feeling that some unknown shape lurked unseen and murderous in the shadows.

It was an impression, no more, but it was there, and that was why I jumped two feet on the sidewalk in front of my office building when a real shadow moved close in a doorway. Someone came toward me from the doorway. A woman.

I had no gun, as usual, and I was tensed to run when I saw the ghost. She came into the light of a street lamp-long dark hair pulled back, a hawk nose, faintly slanted eyes, broad cheekbones, and dark brown eyes. Francesca Crawford!

“Mr. Fortune?”

While my nerves jumped, my brain told me that there were no ghosts, and if this was Francesca Crawford she was alive. Yet I knew she was dead. By now, buried in Dresden, New York.

“Miss Crawford?” I said.

“Yes. Can I… talk to you? Please?”

Francesca Crawford-except, of course, it wasn’t. No, not quite. There were no ghosts, and Francesca was dead. There was a different “feel” to this girl. The same face, but with make-up, and proper, conservative clothes.

“Turn your head left,” I said.

She had no scar under her right ear.

“Her sister,” I said. “Twins.”

“Felicia Crawford,” she said. “I want to know-”

“Not on the street,” I said. “My office in there.”

She shivered, and it wasn’t the wind. She didn’t like the look of my dark, shabby building. Neither did I. It was too well known to people who followed me and had guns.

“Come along,” I said, and took her arm.

She flinched like a deer at my touch, but she let me lead her. She was an identical twin, but the years had accentuated the differences not the identity. She dressed differently, seemed younger, but I sensed that the real difference was inside. Francesca, from what everyone said, had been tough, difficult, the rebel. This girl seemed soft, quiet, the “good” girl who did what she was expected to do. A little weak.

“How did you know about me, Miss Crawford?” I asked.

“Mother and Dad talked about you. They told Mr. Sasser you were investigating the… murder. I want to help. I want to know what you know.”

I remembered the name of Anthony Sasser from Mayor Crawford’s biography in Who’s Who-the businessman who headed the Dresden Crime Commission with the Mayor’s partner, Carter Vance.

“Your parents sent you?” I said.

“No, I came on my own. I just left. Today.”

We reached my apartment, and I steered her up the stairs before she saw that my home wasn’t much better than my office. In my five cold rooms she stared as if she didn’t believe anyone could live there. She didn’t know how even the poor of urban America lived, so how could she, or anyone like her, have any conception of how the poor of the earth lived? The millions to whom my five rooms would be a palace, my income a fortune, and my hash-house meals food beyond their dreams?

“How about coffee?” I said. “Or something stronger?”

“Coffee, please,” she said. “You live here?”

“It has advantages if you don’t want money, comfort, or status,” I said as I plugged in my coffee pot in the kitchen, and then went around lighting my gas radiators.

“Yes, I see,” she said. “There are a lot of things on the other side of the iron curtain around the Crawford house.”

It had the sound of a quote, not her own words.

“Who said it that way?” I asked. “Francesca?”

“Yes,” she said, and there were tears in her voice.

I sat down facing her in the living room. She perched on the edge of a chair. I lit a cigarette.

“You were close to Francesca?”

“No one was close to Fran,” she said, and there was self-accusation in the words. Her sister was dead, and they had not been close. “I suppose I was closer than anyone, but we didn’t think the same about a lot of things.”

“Closer than Frank Keefer?”

“I don’t think she was really close to him at all. She laughed with me at him and his uncle with their big ideas. I think she just, well, wanted him for a time, you know?”

“His Uncle Joel? What big ideas?”

“Anything to make money without working. Joel Pender works for my father, a water inspector or something Dad hands out. Most of the time Joel seems to do favors for city officials. So does Frank Keefer when he isn’t selling used cars.”

“And Keefer hoped to marry Francesca?”

“Frank Keefer?” She seemed surprised, and then not so surprised. “Maybe he did, but she wouldn’t have married him.”

“What didn’t you think alike about, Felicia?”

She sighed. I could hear the coffee perking in the kitchen. She shook her head sadly.

“Fran questioned everything I took for granted. Even as a little girl we never knew what she’d think or do. Dad said she wanted to be the ugly duckling. He always tried harder to understand her, be nice. It made me jealous sometimes.”

Her voice was harsh-on herself. She had been jealous, and now her sister was gone. The ugly duckling who had made a display of her scar. A symbol of her difference, her isolation? Under the surface, of course, the duckling was a swan.

“How did Francesca get that scar?”

“An accident when we were around three. She used to cry about it when we were little, and later she had nightmares. When we were fourteen she started wearing her hair so the scar showed. She and Mother had a terrible fight. Fran said Mother had always treated her different, so she’d be different, and show her scar to everyone.”

“Was it true? Your mother treated her differently?”

“In a way. Mother did pay more attention to Stefanie and young Martin, but it was just that they were so much younger. Stefanie’s only fifteen now, and young Martin is twelve.”

“You didn’t feel neglected?”

She shrugged. “A little. I’m the halfway type.”

In the kitclien, the coffee stopped perking. I went out to pour two mugs. When I brought them back, I gave her one, lit another cigarette, and sat down. The coffee was good.

“Why did you really come to me, Felicia?”

Her face was steady. “I want to know who hired you.”

“No one hired me. I met Francesca, I liked her.”

“Then I want to help! Mother and Dad are doing nothing!”

“The police are working. It’s their job.”

“I want to do more. Mother and Dad don’t care!”

“No,” I said. “It’s not enough to bring you down here alone. You’ve got some reason to think I might know something specific about Francesca you want to know. What?”

She looked at my cigarette. I gave her one, lit it. She smoked awkwardly. She had not smoked much, and maybe it was the symbol of a change in her.

“Fran was excited three months ago, Mr. Fortune,” she said. “Keyed up, eager about something in Dresden. Today, someone followed me to the station. I don’t know who it was, but I think something is wrong in Dresden.”

“What? Why was Francesca keyed up?”

She drank her coffee. “I’m not sure, but out in California at college we both got involved in politics and conservation. When we came home this summer, Fran joined the opposition to a big development project in Dresden. It’s in a swamp out on Black Mountain Lake. We used to pick blackberries out there, the land never was worth anything. Now a man named Abram Zaremba owns it. He’s planning a housing development out there, and the city is draining the land, building a highway right through it.”

She glanced up. “Fran seemed to think that there was something bad about the project. At first, she just opposed draining the swamp, but a few weeks before she left home she told me that the whole scheme could be a fraud, a cheat.”

“Did she give you a reason for her change?”

“A young lawyer named Mark Leland told her. He was investigating the project on his own. She talked with him a few times, and then… then he was killed, Mr. Fortune. Murdered in his car. Stabbed, just like Francesca! She was with him that night, and she saw the murderer, but not well enough to help the police. He wasn’t caught.”

She finished her coffee. “Fran was depressed, and angry, too. She said everyone was useless, no one was any good, and that she was finished with Dresden. She was very down, and when I asked her why, she said I wouldn’t see it her way.”

She looked up at me again. “Then, the very next day after she said she was going to finish with Dresden, and was so low, she suddenly was all excited again. It was strange, Mr. Fortune. Almost manic, you know? That day she vanished.”

I waited, but that was it. “You have no idea what had happened, Felicia?”

“No,” she said. “Fran talked to Grandfather Van Hoek that day, but he was very sick, you know, and she was going away. I wanted to ask him if he’d said anything special to Fran, but he got sicker when she left, and died a few days later. Mother and Dad were with him when he died, but they said he hadn’t told them anything about Fran.”

“You asked all her other friends if they said anything? Or knew anything?”

She nodded. “Fran didn’t have many friends in Dresden. We’d been away in college, and the last two years Fran didn’t even come home in the summer. She worked out there in California with field workers. That’s when she started to, dress so wild and strange, too.”

She finished her cigarette, and looked for somewhere to put her coffee mug down. My coffee table was beside her, but she hesitated, as if she’d never seen a table where you could put down a mug without finding a coaster first.

“After she left,” I said, “did you hear from her?”

She nodded. “Twice. She wrote to a friend Mother and Dad don’t know, Muriel Roark, and enclosed notes for me. She told me not to tell anyone, and didn’t give any return address, anyway. All she wrote was that she was fine, was finding out what was real, things like that.”

“You don’t know where she wrote from?”

“The second letter was from New York.”

“Any names? What she was doing? Why she was in New York? Where she’d been that first month away from home?”

“No,” she said, “nothing like that.”

“No, damn it!” I swore, stood up. “You came down here because you know something. Enough to make you think I might have some answers you want. Tell me what you know.”

She stood too. “I don’t know anything.”

“You said someone followed you. Don’t try to chase down a killer alone. You’ll only get hurt.”

Her face was pale. “Just… tell me who hired you.”

“I told you no one hired me.”

“I… I don’t believe you.”

“All right,” I said. “I can’t let you risk your own life. You’ll have to convince the police you don’t know anything about Francesca.”

I went to the telephone. Her hand went into her small handbag. The little, silver, 22-caliber automatic in her hand was like a toy. I have as much courage as most men, and the odds were 99-1 she wouldn’t shoot, and better that she wouldn’t even hit me. At least, those were the odds if she knew much about guns. I didn’t think she knew much, and that scared me.

“Put it away,” I said. “The police will help-”

“No!” she cried. “How do I know who you’re really going to call? I don’t know who you’re working for or why!”

I reached for the receiver. “You call the police, then-”

The little pistol exploded with a toy bang. The bullet wasn’t a toy. I don’t know where it went. I froze.

“Stand… still,” she said.

She picked up her coat, backed to my door, and went out. I didn’t chase her for five minutes. Then I went down to the street. Up at the corner I saw a taxi pull away. I went back upstairs.. It was just after 7 P.M. If I drove fast, I could be up in Dresden before nine-thirty.

I called John Andera at his office to get his home number. He was still in his office. I told him about Abram Zaremba and the land deal, and that I was going up to Dresden. I’d get my expenses later.

I packed my old pistol and some clothes in a bag, and went out to rent a car.