Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind

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.”

“Francesca wrote? I see. You think something in a letter?” she said. “But Felicia would have told us-now.”

“Maybe not. Felicia said that Francesca felt neglected, different, not loved. Felicia could be keeping faith.”

Katje Crawford winced. She was a dynamic woman, and her thoughts were mirrored in her face, her active body. An energetic, sinuous body younger than her age, and I felt her as a woman. An attraction. That doesn’t happen often to me on a case. But I was aware of Katje Crawford, of her strength. Maybe there had been more of her in her daughter than Francesca had realized. Too much, maybe.

“Yes, it’s true,” she said. “My fault, but not all mine. Francesca was combative, what Tony Sasser calls a ‘hardhead.’ But I wasn’t the mother to the twins I’ve tried to be to the younger ones. A young matron with her own interests and a rising husband makes a bad mother sometimes. Then, we just weren’t close, not alike. A streak of isolation in the girls, even Felicia. Still, you can’t blame the child. My guilt. What do I do now, Mr. Fortune? For Francesca, nothing. To catch who killed her won’t give me any sense of achievement. But what do I do for Felicia? Where is she?”

“Help me find Francesca’s murderer fast.” I said.

She nodded. “Yes. What can I tell you?”

“What you know about Abram Zaremba and the Black Mountain Lake project.”

“The project is a needed housing development. We’re growing too fast. What else should I know?”

“Francesca worked against it?”

“She had strong ideas on ecology. Is it important?”

“What about Abram Zaremba?”

“I don’t know him personally. My husband does, I think. Has all this some connection to Francesca?”

“Mark Leland had,” I said. “You know about him?”

“Of course I do,” she said, moved her lean hand in a sharp gesture. “We thought of that at once, Mr. Fortune, but Mark Leland was killed over three months ago. Francesca couldn’t describe the man she saw running from Leland’s car. Lieutenant Oster tried everything with her, she simply didn’t see enough. Some hired killer, anonymous, the Lieutenant thinks. Far away by now. What danger was Francesca to him?”

“Maybe none, but Mark Leland was investigating the Black Mountain Lake project when he was killed.”

She sat silent. Then, she got up and went to an inlaid side table, a beautiful piece of work by some eighteenth-century English craftsman. She took a cigarette from a jade box, and lighted it without waiting for me to fumble for my lighter.

“You think Francesca was killed because of that development? A few thousand acres of swamp land!”