Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind

I stopped at a pay booth to call John Andera’s office. He was there. I told him to meet me at my office, and he was waiting when I arrived. We went up to my office.

“You have something to report, Fortune?” Andera said.

His face was composed, but his hands were tense, and his cloudy blue eyes watched me like a man who wants to hear an answer, and yet doesn’t because he won’t really like it.

“Francesca was in New York looking for her real father,” I said, and told him everything I had learned. “Did you know Ralph Blackwind, or Raul Negra fifteen years ago? Did she ask about either of them?”

“Her real father?” he said, and that stunned look came back into his eyes, maybe thinking that Francesca hadn’t been interested in him at all, had used him. “No, I never knew any Ralph Blackwind, or Raul Negra. I’m sure. But… yes, she did mention a Raul Negra. I remember now. It was casual, you know? We were talking about minority employment, and she wondered if my company hired Mexicans. She said she knew a Raul Negra who had worked for us. I didn’t know about him.”

“Who owns Marvel Office Equipment?” I said.

“Two or three men.”

“Is one of them Abram Zaremba? Or was he an owner?”

“Yes, he had a minority interest. I never met him.”

Abram Zaremba. The trail of Ralph Blackwind seemed to lead all around him. The trail and the murders. And if it all led to Zaremba, it led to Dresden too-or somewhere close.

I said, “Francesca did three things-she opposed the Black Mountain Lake project in Dresden, she saw the man who killed Mark Leland, and she went looking for her real father. Two of those things seem to go straight to Abram Zaremba, and I think Mark Leland will lead to Zaremba too.

“Her real father is a fugitive, a wanted killer, who is safe because he’s supposed to be dead. Francesca knew he was alive, and started looking for him, turning over old rocks. As far as we know, the last time he saw her was eighteen years ago when she was under three. Would he know her? Would he care if he did? A fugitive whose safety was staying ‘dead’?”

I let Andera think about that. He thought, and he had that man-hit-by-a-train look again. “Her father? You think that’s possible, Fortune?”

“Fear can make monsters out of even simple people, and most of us aren’t simple,” I said. “Or she could have seen more than she told the night Mark Leland was killed. She could have known something bad about the Black Mountain Lake project. I don’t know, but one of those things killed her, or maybe they’re all tied together, all really one thing.

“They all seem to focus on Abram Zaremba, and he was killed, too. Ralph Blackwind’s trail ends at Abram Zaremba. Anthony Sasser, that businessman friend of the Crawford’s who was put on the crime commission, and who tailed me and beat me up in New York, worked with Abram Zaremba, and was close to Francesca. Mayor Martin Crawford worked with Zaremba, too. So both of Francesca’s ‘fathers’ were in Abram Zaremba’s orbit. Maybe it’s all cause and effect. No matter what killed Francesca, the chain began when she was approached by Mark Leland. He went to her because she was Mayor Crawford’s daughter, and Crawford was tied to Abram Zaremba’s scheme for Black Mountain Lake, but the result was that she learned she had a real father.”

John Andera looked past me at the fine view of the air-shaft wall outside the one window of my office.

“What will you do, then?” he said.

“Report Ralph Blackwind to the police. Now that they know he’s alive, they’ll find him. I think he’ll be somewhere around Abram Zaremba’s organization. I think he’s been close to Zaremba for fifteen years. I think he’ll be found now, but I hope we’re in time.”

“In time?” Andera said.

“Carl Gans and Zaremba may not be the last victims. They weren’t in Dresden when Mark Leland died, and they didn’t know Francesca. If she knew more about Leland’s death than she told, someone else must have found that out and fingered her, and that someone must know who killed her.”

“You know who?” Andera said.

“Not yet, but I will,” I said, and said, “Then there’s Felicia Crawford. She’s following the same trail Francesca did, and that might make her a target too.”

Andera said, “Then you better hurry.”

“I’ll hurry,” I said. “After I get my expenses.”

I gave him the expense account I’d worked up on the jet from Phoenix. He paid it without asking a question, it was only padded a little. After he’d gone, I counted the money for a time. I was tired. I didn’t feel like moving. There are some cases that leave me feeling low as they inexorably unravel like a ball of yarn dropped from a tall building. Like watching a movie where a mob hangs an innocent man. You know the mob will be punished later, but what good does that do the dead man? You walk away feeling cheated. It’s all wrong.

But I called Gazzo, told him about Arizona. He would go to work finding Ralph Blackwind. So would I.

It was just dark when I arrived in Dresden again, and a rain had begun. A slow rain, silent and without wind, that dripped from the bare trees. The flowers around the small-time playboy Frank Keefer’s house were sodden.

Celia Bazer answered my ring. “They’re inside,” she said.

Her eye was still bruised, and I wanted to ask her why she stayed, but she wouldn’t really have an answer. Because we all need something or someone, and at least Frank Keefer was a good man when the lights were out, and that was better than a man who was good nowhere. She read my mind. It’s not hard.

She touched her eye. “He’s nice most of the time. He’s always disappointed, and then I’m here, and he lets me help him. He’ll support me, and he’ll stick, even if he strays sometimes. When his schemes blow up, he runs to me. We’ve got each other.”

They had each other, and the Dunstans had everything but. Take your choice, find the miracle of both at, once, settle for a little of each, or live alone. It usually works out.

Frank Keefer and his uncle, Joel Pender, were in the living room. Pender watched the TV morosely, and Keefer sat alone with a beer. All the mimeographed throwaways were still piled everywhere, and the mimeograph machine was covered and dusty.

“What happened to the throwaway scheme?” I asked.

“We printed them wrong, no one would pay,” Keefer said, shrugged. “Joel had the wrong sale date, we were a day late getting them out. Who could use them? We spent the advances, no one’ll pay us for another try. What the hell.”

There was no fight in Frank Keefer for the moment. Joel Pender was put together with different glue. His thin shoulders were squared where he watched TV, as if prepared to go on undaunted-something good would still come along.

I said, “You came from out west, Pender?”

“Wyoming. The other side of nowhere.”

“You came here less than fifteen years ago?”

“I forget,” he said.

I let it go for the moment, turned to Frank Keefer.

“You lied again about New York and Francesca, Keefer,” I said. “You met her, talked to her. You were seen.”

He drank some beer. “Okay, I saw her. I tried once more for her, she threw me out. That’s all.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not a fool, you knew you had no chance when she dropped you up here. You went down there because you and Pender were scared of what Pender had told her when he was drunk. You’d been trying to find out where she was to be sure she wouldn’t tell where she’d found out about her real father. You were scared of what the Mayor would do.”

I turned on Joel Pender. “You have a hold on Mayor Crawford, right? It’s what got you the city jobs. But you blurted it out to Francesca that night. What did you really tell her, Pender? Just that she wasn’t Crawford’s daughter, and who her real father was, isn’t enough to give you a hold on the Mayor.”