Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind

“She was involved with Mark Leland in more than just seeing a man run from killing him. They’d met, talked.”

“Talked? Then tell Martin! Tell my husband, he knows about that project. Find out, Mr. Fortune!”

She came back to her chair, and her legs seemed to give way as she sat. “We have all we want or need, we hurt no one by it, but she had to be militant. Look for battles she was no part of. Man is a scheming animal, that’s what marks us, Mr. Fortune-we strive for ourselves. Perhaps it’s wrong, and perhaps it will kill us all, but it can’t be changed.”

The life in her face was animated even in despair and anger. I could feel her presence all the way down my back.

“There’s another possibility in Dresden,” I said.

“More?” She half-smiled. “You know your work, don’t you? Strange, one wouldn’t guess it to look at you.”

“A one-armed roustabout?” I said.

She shook her head. “The one arm is incidental. It gives you a piratical look, nothing more. No, it’s your dress and manner. You seem inconsequential, uneducated, but you’re not at all, are you? You know that my side table is eighteenth-century English, and good. I saw it in your eyes. People underestimate you, don’t they? They confuse a missing arm with a missing intelligence, and I think you foster that image.”

“It’s just me, Mrs. Crawford.”

“Perhaps,” she smiled. “What is the other possibility?”

“Frank Keefer.”

She nodded. “I know, but it was never serious. Francesca toyed with him, found him physically interesting. I expect he had other thoughts, but he’s a fool with grandiose ideas.”

“She dumped him just before she left.”

“Did she? I didn’t know, but would that make him kill her? She was the golden girl he wanted. Why kill his dream?”

“Maybe because he couldn’t have her?”

“Frank Keefer?” At another time she would have laughed. Now she only smiled. “He’s the stupid, dull type who never gives up. To admit that a woman was beyond his grasp, would never have him, would lower his self-esteem so much I doubt if he could consider that possible.”

“Would he kill to keep her?”

She hesitated. “I would say no, he hasn’t the necessary moral strength, but I suppose you never can be sure. Anyway, it’s Francesca who’s dead, Mr. Fortune. How would that mean-”

“Maybe Keefer made a mistake,” I said.

She was silent again. I stood up.

“If Felicia comes home, sit on her and call me, okay?”

The “if” seemed to weigh down the porch, but she nodded.

“Where can I find your husband now?” I asked.

“At a meeting of civic leaders at City Hall. He has to go to these meetings, but it’s a terrible bore for me.”

There was an annoyance on her face as I left, as if thinking of a lot of things that bored her.

City Hall was in an old, downtown section of Dresden. An ugly graystone building in late Victorian style. Floodlights bathed it in a glare, and the lawn was manicured in an attempt at some dignity.

The chill night, the big building in its square, and the dark, narrow streets leading off into a silent, deserted black made me think of London. I could almost feel the fog, hear the mellow musical sound of a London police whistle.

A night guard at a desk inside called up to the Mayor’s office for me. Two silent black women mopped the lobby floors. It was dim and cold in the lobby, bare, as if designed to prove that the city fathers did not spend taxpayers’ money on frivolous decoration. (We seem to insist that city employees work with none of the shine and comfort of private companies, but happily swallow the plush homes and privilege city leaders have in private life.)

I found the Mayor’s office on the second floor where he waited for me alone now. It was a big, austere office, and Martin Crawford seemed smaller behind his desk. He also seemed tired. Maybe it was too much civic-minded meeting.

“You have some news, Mr. Fortune?” he asked.

He was the first one in Dresden who’d asked that, who hadn’t been more concerned with who my client was.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We don’t have much to work with.”

He nodded. “The New York police sent a man here. But where do you look for what killed a girl out in a jungle?”

“She’d left home before. Four years in college, even the summers away. She knew how to be alone on her own.”

“College, even a big California farm, is a lot different from New York, Fortune.”

“It is,” I agreed. “Have you heard from Felicia?”

“Felicia?” he said, exactly as his wife had. They say people grow like each other in a long marriage. “What should I have heard from her? She’s not mixed in this!”

I told him what I’d told Mrs. Crawford. “Whatever it is she knows, or thinks she does, she’s scared enough to carry a gun and trust no one.”

“But what? Something about Francesca?”

“I’d say so,” I said. “Something Francesca told Felicia she wouldn’t tell you or your wife. Your wife admits she was apart from the twins. Were you apart from them too?”

His blue eyes seemed to lose light, and his polished public face wentloose like a man who is unsure. There was something about the way it happened that said it had happened before, often. A private face now that hinted at confusion, weakness, ineffectuality. As if his public manner was a facade, a front of confidence, and under it he was hollow and accustomed to having someone else make the real decisions that he carried out with his public smile and lawyer’s eyes.

“I was busy, up in Albany so much,” he said. “I left them to Katje. Then, later, it seemed too late. At least for Francesca. I leaned over backwards to get to know her. She never helped. Yet I think I loved the older girls best, in a way.”

“Felicia could be in danger,” I said bluntly. “Francesca was killed for a reason, and the killer won’t take a chance on Felicia whether she knows anything or not as long as she’s running around acting as if she does.”

“What can I tell you?” Crawford said. “What do I know?”

“About Abram Zaremba and the Black Mountain Lake development,” I said.

His manner changed as if a steel rod had gone up his spine. The impression of softness, indecision, vanished. Whatever gave him that aura of ineffectuality wasn’t in his official work. The lawyer faced me now.

“What concern is that to you?” he snapped.

“It concerned Francesca, right? She fought it?”

“Conservationists! A bunch of juveniles and old women who don’t have any idea of reality. A mayor has many things to consider, Fortune. It was my opinion that the benefits to the city, the desperate need for housing, out-weighed the ecological factors. That was my decision, and it stands unless the people throw me out, which is their right.”

Before he finished his speech, a door to the left opened, and Anthony Sasser stepped quietly into the room. The businessman got around. I wondered if he’d been listening all along in an adjacent office? He moved with ease, a man in his own backyard. He sat down to my left, silent and alert. I ignored him, faced Crawford.

“Who else objected to the project besides conservationists?” I said. “Maybe the taxpayers? Or maybe they would object if they knew how the deal was arranged? You built a dike at public expense, maybe paid Zaremba even for the land you built the dike on? You put a nice road into Zaremba’s lodge. You created a drainage district so the taxpayers can buy bonds, the taxpayer foot the whole drainage bill? Drainage that will make useless land a goldmine?”

“It’s a proper arrangement under our conditions,” Crawford said. “Land is limited here. Zaremba’s land, when reclaimed, will benefit the whole community.”