Walk a Black Wind (6 page)

“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.

8.

Dresden is a grimy city of a quarter million on the banks of the broad, shallow North Fork River some miles above its junction with the Delaware. Founded before the Revolution, its red-brick factories on the river date from the industrial boom before the Civil War, and were left behind by areas of better facilities and cheaper labor. Now highways and truck transportation have boomed Dresden again, but the cleaner light industry of today is spread around the city, no longer tied to the river.

The old factories, and the downtown residential areas, have been left to the poor, the old, and the black. The new skilled workers live out in the hills surrounding the city, and the managers live near the tops of the best hills. Where once it huddled around narrow streets near the river, the city now sprawled into what was farm and forest not long ago.

It was 9:30
P.M.
when I turned off the Thruway. Golf courses, drive-in movies, roadhouses. and shopping centers ringed the city along the county highway, and just inside the city line it curved around a large, dark lake. A wide, blacktop road led in toward the lake. I turned down it.

It ended at a fenced hunting lodge on the swampy south shore of the lake. Across the swamp I saw the high shadow of an earth dike between the swamp and the deep water of the lake proper, and near the lodge a mammoth pumping station was at work draining the swamp. A sign identified the station as property of The Dept. of Public Works, City of Dresden, 9
^th
Drainage District.

I lit a cigarette, and sat there for a moment before I drove back to the highway. There was nothing at all anywhere in the swamp but the single lodge.

Mayor Crawford's house was at the crest of one of the higher hills of the city. Vast green lawns surrounded large brick and stone houses distant behind iron gates and gravel drives to coachhouse garages. The Crawford house was one of the largest, in reserved Tudor style, set closer to the street than most because there were two cottages behind it. It had the dignity and quiet of long power, an old family.

The gates across the driveway were open, and I drove in. I parked in front of the house—and saw the green Cadillac. It was in front of the garage. I was sure it was the same Caddy my tail, had driven in New York, and I stared at it. Someone was very careless, or very confident. I got out, and saw the woman inside a lighted, glassed-in side porch.

She looked out at the night like a lighthouse-keeper's daughter searching the sea for a lost lover. Her face turned, and I saw that it was Mrs. Katje Crawford. She acted as if she didn't really see me, or if she did I had no meaning for her. Her face was drawn and distant, like the face of a starving woman. Only it wasn't hunger, it was a kind of inner pain. I was seeing her private face, and it wasn't pretty. Her daughter was dead at twenty.

The front door opened as I walked toward it. A man came out—small, stocky, in a camel's hair topcoat but with no hat. Swarthy, he had sharp dark eyes and white teeth, and he was the man I'd “ambushed” tailing me in New York. I was certain. He had arrogant shoulders, walked with a confident strut, and the thin smile of his white teeth wasn't in his eyes. I doubted that his eyes ever smiled. A man with no time to waste on smiling for anything but show.

“You want something, Fortune?” he said.

I said, “You're one up on me. Should I guess?”

“Anthony Sasser,” he said. “You must have done your homework in the hospital.”

“After you put me there, Sasser?”

His dark face was full of contempt. “You want a confession? I didn't see who shot you any more than you did. Loused me up, too. I wanted to go on tailing you, but after you got hit, I had to get out. Don't like being around a target.”

“That's your story.”

“Prove it's not true.”

“You tailed me, knocked me around.”

“Sure. You jumped me, you had a gun. What do I do? You asked for it, and you got it.”

“Why tail me?”

“The Crawfords asked me. You didn't know me, and they wanted to know who hired you. They've got a right.”

“No one hired me, Sasser.”

“That's your story,” he said, mimicking me.

“You were a professional fighter once?”

“Me?” His eyes closed up. “Not me. Just a businessman.”

“You never fought? I can check.”

“Check,” he said. “You won't find anything.”

“Not even amateur? In the gym? Lessons?”

“I got better ways to have fun.”

I was sure he had been trained as a fighter—sometime, somewhere. It's something a man can't hide. Yet he seemed just as sure I couldn't find out, as if his past was unknown. I thought about that as I looked toward the big house.

“You're at home here it looks like,” I said.

“Old friend of the family,” he said. “Business, too.”

“Is the Mayor at home?”

His whole face stiffened. “No, at some meeting. You want the Mayor? I can drive ahead and show you where.”

“Mrs. Crawford'll do for now,” I said.

He didn't like that, me talking to Katje Crawford. “Be easy around Katje, Fortune. This is our city, my city. Don't lean too hard while you're nosing around without a client.”

“I just want to help find who killed her daughter.”

“Sure,” Sasser said.

He walked past me to his Cadillac. Mrs. Katje Crawford was in the open doorway now. We both watched Sasser drive away. Then I walked to the door.

“Mr. Fortune, isn't it?” Katje Crawford said. “Come in.”

She wore a long, flowing white robe that accentuated her drawn face and forty years. She looked older now, the strain on her handsome face, a rigidity in her athletic body. But she strode ahead of me through an elegant entry hall and across a living room like a public hall in some palace—but a lived-in room, too. Her dark blond hair swung to her stride, the hair too long for her age—a small vanity. We went out into the glassed side porch.

“Sit down,” she said. “Will you have a drink?”

“Irish if you have it,” I said.

She had it, and made the drink herself at a small bar in a corner. There had to be servants, but a patrician didn't ring for the maid to make one drink for a single guest. Even the porch furnishings were rich antiques in fine taste. It was a taste that comes only from growing up with fine pieces, living with them, appreciating them. I don't often feel like a peasant, but here I did. We're not used to that feeling in this country because we have so little real aristocracy, and even they are becoming more “common man” these days.

She brought my whisky. “Now. You'll say who hired you?”

“No one did,” I said. “Is Felicia home yet?”

“Felicia?”

“She came to New York to see me. She had a gun. She ran. I think she's out to find the killer herself.”

Her face almost collapsed. She stood and rang a bell. A maid appeared.

“Is Miss Felicia home?”

“No, ma'am. She left this afternoon, with a suitcase.”

“Thank you, Paula.”

The maid left. Katje Crawford's clenched hands told me that she wanted to ask a hundred more questions of the maid, but one didn't ask private questions of a maid. When she sat again, the lines of her face had deepened into dark slashes. She sat very still for a minute or more, spoke to herself:

“How many daughters must I lose?”

There was no answer to that. She didn't expect one. She listened to her own answers for a time. I drank my Irish.

“I think Felicia knows something we don't,” I said.

She shook her head as if to clear a spell, and smiled at me apologetically, her silence rudeness to a guest. “I'm sorry, I'll be all right. Knows something? What could Felicia know? You mean about Francesca? She would have told us.”

“Francesca wrote to her twice, Mrs. Crawford, asked her not to tell anyone.”