Michael Collins - Silent Scream

“Well,” he said, “be careful, Mr. Fortune.”

He walked away, an old man without fat. I went up to Mia Morgan’s apartment. She was alone. I sat in my coat. She smoked. Her purple lounging pajamas were sleek and thirty, her delicate olive face and long black hair still twenty-two.

“Well,” she said, “you have a report for me?”

“Captain Stern’s pretty violent about you.”

She scowled, petulant. “He doesn’t own me.”

“Who does? Not Mr. Morgan.”

“No one owns me. Did you find the woman?”

“Diana Wood,” I said, and gave my report-what there was. Mia Morgan was listening for more when I’d finished. She wasn’t interested in Harold Wood, Lawrence Dunlap, or Kezar. I hadn’t mentioned Sid Meyer or the black car. I wanted her to ask, reveal herself. She didn’t.

“Go on another week.” She got up, dismissing me.

I got up. “Sid Meyer was murdered tonight.”

She stared. “Someone connected to Diana Wood?”

“Someone who tried to see you the day you hired me.”

She lit another cigarette. “I never heard of any Sid Meyer. If he came to me, I don’t know why, and I never met him.”

I went to her front window, looked down at the avenue. “How about John Albano?” I looked back at her.

“I don’t like that, Mr. Fortune,” she said. “I hired you-”

“Come here.” I turned back to the window.

She looked down, saw what I had-a shadow across the street in the thickening snow. A shadow that smoked. She swore.

She took a breath. “Never mind him. An old woman, he doesn’t matter. Keep after Diana Wood, you understand?”

I got another five hundred, and left. On the avenue the snow was heavy now, and the shadow that smoked was gone.

Jenny Kezar opened the door of 6-C. Her watery eyes were puffed with crying. Irving Kezar wasn’t there. The apartment was a wreck from the police search for the second gun.

“The city’ll pay us,” Jenny Kezar said. “Sure they will.”

“When will your husband be back?”

“Who knows? Maybe a week. He lives other places, too.”

Her voice was bitter, yet almost glad that Kezar lived other places. The world was full of bad marriages.

I went home through the thick, falling snow. Maybe Marty’s marriage would turn bad. Soon. There was always hope.

Something was wrong. A gray dawn. I lay in bed, and my rooms were cold and too silent. The whole city was too silent.

I went to my front windows. The snow had stopped, but cars at the curb were half buried, and up on the avenue there was no traffic. People walked below, thigh-deep in the snow, laughing. All muffled and distant. Heavy snow was the only thing that could silence the city. Clean snow, but it wouldn’t last long.

Over coffee I looked up Irving Kezar in the telephone book. There was an Irving Kezar, Attorney, at an address near City Hall. I wrote it down for later, got into my duffel coat, and went out into the deep snow. It was only seven-thirty, but I knew I would have to walk to St. Marks Place.

People walked out in the middle of the streets as if enjoying a holiday in some friendly village. But by the time I reached the bar across from 145 St. Marks, a hazy sun broke through. I didn’t enter the bar. Harold Wood, wearing his duffel coat, came out of 145 alone. I slipped into the vestibule, rang the Woods’ bell. No answer. I hurried after the husband, caught up to him at the subway.

We rode up to Forty-second Street, went west on Forty-fifth to a building between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. He rode to the fourth floor, I went to five. I walked down. The Engineering Institute, their magazine, Engineering Age, occupied the floor.

The reception desk was empty. I dropped my coat on a chair, walked in as if I belonged. A New York office, no one questioned me. Harold Wood sat in a cubicle marked: Art Director. He was alone-an art director who directed only himself. Small-time.

In the cubicle, he hunched at a drawing table. I watched him make three telephone calls. Before each call he checked to be sure he was alone, then spoke quickly. He sat back, brooding.

A tall, brown-haired girl went into his cubicle. Her thick hair was short and waved, almost matronly, and she wore a demure gray wool dress. She had a round face that was pretty only because she was young-the face of most of us. She carried a container of coffee, gave it to Harold Wood. He smiled at her. His smile was neutral, distracted. Her smile wasn’t neutral.

She went back to a desk with a nameplate on it: Emily Green. She sat watching the art cubicle. What chance did she have against Diana Wood? Yet her interest in Wood was obvious, and she didn’t look like a girl who would let it show without some response. Beauty like Diana Wood’s isn’t always easy to live with.

Harold Wood went to work, and I retrieved my coat. Was Wood just a man brooding over his wife, or was there more on his mind?

At Brown and Dunlap, the desk where Diana Wood worked was clean. She hadn’t come to work. Neither had Lawrence Dunlap, his private door open, his mail untouched on his desk.

The snow clouds were blowing away against the tower of the gray building near City Hall. An old building, full of lawyers. On the tenth floor, Irving Kezar’s office was businesslike, with a businesslike secretary. Mr. Kezar was at his athletic club.

A block away, the club had pool, steam, sauna and massage in the basement; gym, handball, and squash on the second floor. The first floor had a restaurant, bar and lobby where I waited while they paged Irving Kezar-and a series of small card-and-conference rooms, the important rooms.

It was no university club, the men in it weren’t Ivy League. They weren’t executives or blue-chip stockholders. Middlemen. The lawyers, jobbers, sidewalk brokers and hustlers. Always in a hurry-the deal could slip away in an hour-they hustled in and out of the small rooms, dealing. Two poker games were going on, grim and not polite. A club where the sweat wasn’t all in the gym or sauna.

A page took me to the game room. Irving Kezar played ping-pong. He played very well, moving to the flashing ball despite his short legs and paunch. He won, collected the stakes.

“We had a Y club over in Brooklyn,” Kezar said as he sat down, mopped his acned face. “Keep the slum kids out of trouble. I got really good, hustled all my pocket money from suckers before I was fourteen.” He lit a cigar. “Ready to sell your client?”

“You don’t seem broken up about Sid Meyer,” I said.

“I should sit in temple, beat my prayer shawl?” But his beard-shadowed face wasn’t as hard as his words. “Sid was okay, we got along. Sometimes we were family, but he was a loser.”

Sad and uneasy under his shell. Maybe it was death. In the end, we were all losers. Even him.

“There was some reason, Kezar. What?”

He chewed his cigar. “If I knew who your client was?”

“A trade?”

“I got nothing to trade. I’ll buy, though, right?”

“Did Sid Meyer know Diana Wood?”

“You think she’s part of Sid’s killing?”

“What do you think?”

“Hell, all I know is I see her around Le Cerf Agile.”

“Who’s the man in the black car?”

“I’ve been wondering. You see him, Fortune?”

Smooth, he answered everything with another question.

“Lawrence Dunlap, maybe?” I said.

“Her boss? You think that’s it?” He appeared to think.

“You do any importing?” I asked. “Some ties with Israel?”

“Me? I’m an American. One hundred percent. You think Sid was maybe killed by Arabs?” He didn’t smile.

“Diana Wood had a box when she got in that black car,” I said. “A Captain Levi Stern tried to break my arm. He’s El Al, a pilot, and maybe something else. Sid Meyer tried to meet a friend of Stern’s who runs a shop that imports native crafts from all over Africa and the Far East. A woman-Mia Morgan.”