Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind

An attempted holdup, that might have been more of an attempted business extortion, had been foiled the night before at the Emerald Room by the heroic action of one Raul Negra, a kitchen helper. (That was the name Carl Gans had used, had said that Francesca had asked about-Raul Negra.)

Four men had entered the restaurant just at closing time. They shot the bouncer, Carl Gans, in the leg, killed a bodyguard of the owner, Commissioner Abram Zaremba, lined up the staff, and started to smash the place and rob the registers. Raul Negra, unseen in the kitchen, had crawled out unobserved by the gunmen, picked up the dead bodyguard’s gun, and started shooting. With incredible skill and accuracy, the Times said, Negra used the tables as cover, and shot down all four of the gunmen without being scratched himself.

The police commended Negra, who was a Mexican national and spoke no English, and who said he had learned to shoot in the Mexican army. Commissioner Zaremba, whose lawyer spoke for the hero, rewarded the man with an immediate ten thousand dollars, and a better position’ in his Chicago office. That was all, and though I looked at every issue for another month, there was no further mention of heroic Raul Negra. He seemed to have faded away-I bet he had, and fast.

I didn’t doubt who Raul Negra had really been, or why he spoke no English to the police, and had Zaremba’s lawyers talk for him. He had acted the way a trained, experienced soldier would have, using all the skills learned in a hard war, and all the skills of an Indian who had crossed two thousand miles of populated country without once being seen, or even suspected, by the police-the same way the Apache Masai had not so very long ago.

The reward money coincided exactly with the first money that arrived at Pine River. I wondered what else Abram Zaremba had done for “Raul Negra.” A job, the newspaper said, but what job, and had it been in Chicago? Or had Ralph Blackwind used the rest of that ten thousand dollars to repair, and heavily change, his scarred face, and work a lot closer to Dresden and New York?

The Dunstan house was as I had left it days before, except that one car was gone. I parked my rerented car, and walked up to the door for the third time. This time, Harmon Dunstan opened the door himself.

“Don’t you ever stop, Fortune?”

“When it’s finished. The police checked you out for the murder of Carl Gans?”

“Yes. I had no alibi, neither did Grace. She’s not home.”

“I don’t want her,” I said, and pushed him back into that polished living room. He was small, and dark, but strong enough. “You knew Carl Gans, didn’t you?”

“I never met him, no.”

“But you met Raul Negra. Fifteen years ago.”

He went to the bar, poured his inevitable drink.

I said, “When did Ralph Blackwind become Raul Negra?”

Dunstan looked for a cigarette. I let him look; There was no hurry. He was going to have to talk now.

“It’s not scandal you were scared about, or even involvement,” I said. “It was hiding an escaped prisoner who had killed a prison guard, and maybe the man found in the Catskill lake, too. He came to his old captain-who maybe owed him a big favor or two.”

It was a guess in the dark, but it was the key that opened him up. I had guessed right.

“He saved my life twice in Korea,” Dunstan said, the words coming in a rush now, as if pent up since the night Francesca Crawford had died. “He came here five months after he escaped. He’d been lucky, he said, a freak fluke that they just about believed he was dead, and he was able to work his way back to Pine River like a ghost the way he had made it out of North Korea. He never told me just what had happened, but he’d realized that when it took the police so long to find that body in the lake, they couldn’t be sure just who it was in the lake. He had a real chance, as long, as he made no mistakes. That’s why he left Pine River, he could be found there.

“He went to L.A., but was nearly spotted. So he got fake Mexican papers as Raul Negra, and came to me. The police had been around to me a lot, I didn’t think they’d come again, and I owed Ralph. I gave him a job in my stockroom. But the police did come again, and Ralph decided it was too risky, and left. I haven’t seen or heard from him since-almost fifteen years. I don’t regret what I did, but I’d hidden a fugitive murderer, and I’ve been scared ever since the Crawford girl came around and then was killed.”

He gulped at his drink. “What I did was a crime. I’ve worked too hard and long to build my business. I won’t lose it. It’s all I have.”

“You’ve got a wife, too, but you chase women.”

“A wife, but no woman,” Dunstan said. “Maybe that was why I helped Ralph then, too. He’d had a raw deal from a woman. But he was a man, he fought. I never could. I’ve got a good business, lots of money, a good home, but I had no luck with my woman, not even back then, and there’s nothing I could ever do about it.”

He sat down on a bar stool. “You see, I love Grace. I always have. I want her, but she never wanted me-not the way I want her to want me. She makes a good home, a comfortable life. A good companion and hostess, and nothing else.”

At another time I might have had something to say about his troubles, about his wife and him. But if he was telling the truth, he wasn’t important to me now. He didn’t count.

“What did Blackwind look like then?” I said.

“Older. His jaw had been broken, scars on his face, his hair blackened, his skin very dark to look Mexican. I barely knew him. He spoke Spanish except to me.”

“Where did he go after he left your job?”

Dunstan licked at his lips. “I sent him to Zaremba.”

He didn’t look at me now. “All right, I lied. I was Zaremba’s investment counselor for ten years. I broke with him six years ago. I haven’t even talked to him since. But when he was killed too, I was scared, and I lied.”

“Did Carl Gans know you’d sent Ralph Blackwind to Zaremba?”

“I don’t know. I never knew what happened to Ralph, or what job Zaremba gave him. I didn’t want to.”

“Kitchen helper, for a time at least,” I said. “What else have you lied about, Dunstan? Were you spying on Francesca?”

“Not spying, hanging around like a hungry damned puppy. I was ashamed to tell, and scared, too.” He looked at me. “I was watching her place that night, watching for men, you know? Like a sick adolescent!”

“Did you see any men?”

“Yes. Around eight P.M. A tall, blond guy maybe thirty. He met her on the street in front of the building, and he went up with her. He was there over an hour. He didn’t come back while I was watching. I gave up around eleven P.M.”

“You didn’t go up yourself?”

“No! I swear I didn’t!”

“Next time tell it, save yourself a week of worrying.”

“Next time? No next time. Not for me. I know now.”

He was right. For him, the rest would be repetition. I started for the living room door, and met Grace Dunstan on her way in. I nodded to her, but I didn’t speak. I had nothing to ask her that she would tell me.

She put down some packages, took the drink Dunstan gave her, and they sat side by side on the bar stools. Neither of them spoke. Yet I sensed that if either of them went away, the other would crack open with emptiness. They had little together, but nothing at all apart.

I went out to my car.

I drove toward the city, and thought about the Dunstans. There are many kinds of marriages, and most of them not the kind made by the simple people without problems who never lived except in the shiny pages of women’s magazines. The Dunstans had no real marriage at all, yet there was something that held them together like a vise.