Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind

Celia Bazer and Keefer watched me and Pender. Keefer looked like he was enjoying watching Joel Pender squirm now.

I said, “I can tell Crawford you told the girl.”

Joel Pender was a man who never gave up. In a way I had to admire the tenacity of the little man.

“A deal? If I tell you, you keep quiet all the way?”

“All right,” I said. I didn’t think it mattered much.

Pender swore. “I was here long before fifteen years, more like twenty. In those days I gardened for old Emil Van Hoek. I knew Katje. She come home in 1950 with her tail down and her belly up. The Van Hoeks wanted her to stick with the Indian, make a go for the kids. Katje wasn’t having none of that, no sir. She wanted her share of the goodies. She took up with Crawford. He’d known her as a kid, but there was a big difference between a seventeen-year-old Van Hoek, and an eighteen-year-old married woman with twins. Crawford made his pitch, Katje said whoopee, but there was a problem, right?”

“She was married, had twins,” I said. “You can get an annulment with children if you try early enough, but it wasn’t easy even then.”

“Right, so they had to fake it and fix it all the way,” Pender said. “The Van Hoeks wouldn’t help, said they’d even fight it. That would have stopped it for sure. So Crawford moved it away to Utica, faked residence and witnesses, and fixed the judge, too. I was a witness for them. We all swore the Indian ran out on Katje before he was sent to Korea, swore he reneged on wanting kids, hinted she’d been alone long enough so the twins weren’t his. It worked, and that was my hold on Crawford. I mean, the fraud could be blown like tissue any time, all the sworn dates and facts were wrong.”

“The Van Hoeks kept quiet after opposing it?”

“Katje didn’t tell them until after she married Crawford. That left the Van Hoeks in a bind. If they talk, they hit Katje with fraud and bigamy. So what could they do?”

“Why did Crawford and Katje do it? Why not wait?”

“I figure Katje told Crawford no fun until the ring. I guess he couldn’t wait, right? I figure she was afraid he’d slip away to some eager broad in Albany. I think she was scared of the Indian, too, and didn’t want to wait and tell him she was through when he came back. I figure she thought if it was all done, she was remarried, he wouldn’t kick up a bad fuss for the reason the Van Hoeks didn’t-it would get Katje in real trouble.”

It was a good point. A man might fight if he came home and was asked for a divorce at once. But how many young men, in reality married only a few months and separated for years, would cause trouble against a fait accompli for children they’d never known, and a woman who was already with another man? And passion makes people do many things, take risks.

“That’s what you knew?” I said. “All of it?”

“That’s enough,” Pender said, “especially after they used the Indian’s caper against Katje and the girls to make him keep quiet, too. The Indian could have crucified them all the way, in and out of court, if he hadn’t shot old Emil Van Hoek. I mean, he was Katje’s real husband still, right, with the annulment a fraud? Only he shot Emil Van Hoek, and that made it a felony-kidnapping, and gave Crawford the weapon to send the cops after them. When the Indian was caught, Crawford could make a deal-he’d defend the Indian, get the kidnapping charge dropped, if the Indian kept quiet about the annulment.”

Pender reached for Frank Keefer’s beer, took a drink, wiped his thin mouth. “What would you of done? I guess the Indian didn’t care by then, and kidnapping got the chair, at least life. With him shooting old Van Hoek, the annulment fraud wasn’t going to help him if Katje swore he’d taken her and the kids by force, with a gun. So he went along, and they got all the charges dropped except the lesser one for shooting old Van Hoek. That they couldn’t drop all the way, and it sent the Indian up.”

“You told Francesca all of that?”

“I told her, damn me, and Frank went down to try to make sure she kept quiet about where she heard it. Crawford never wanted it to come out, even if the Indian is dead.”

“No,” I said. “The Indian isn’t dead, Pender.”

The dark, scrawny man blinked like an owl. “Not dead? You’re crazy. He got killed in that prison break.”

“No,” I said. “That’s what old Emil Van Hoek told Francesca-Ralph Blackwind hadn’t been killed fifteen years ago. Blackwind had written him once, maybe feeling bad about the shooting, who knows? The old man never told until Francesca came to him with your story. It was like bowling pins, Pender. Once the first one fell, they all came down. You blew it open.”

Pender didn’t speak. His thin face looked as if he couldn’t speak. He was thinking about Mayor Crawford, and his future, and that his drunken anger had started a chain that had led to Francesca Crawford’s death. If it had. Maybe he was thinking more about a live Indian, a real father, and a dead daughter.

“Alive?” Frank Keefer said. “Fran was looking for him, and she knew about the fake annulment? I mean-”

“Blackwind knew about the annulment eighteen years ago,” I said. “You’re both sure that was all Francesca knew? What did she say about her father when you saw her the day she died, Keefer?”

“That I could get lost for good, that she’d found her real dad’s trail. She didn’t say he was alive, but she said that someone was watching her. That was why she moved in with Celia. She didn’t know who was watching her, but that businessman pal of Mayor Crawford’s, Tony Sasser, had come to talk to her.”

“Anthony Sasser talked to Francesca in New York!?”

Keefer nodded. “She said he came to bring her home, but she told him she was looking for her real father-that was her home.”

“When was Sasser there? Damn it, why didn’t you tell that sooner! When was he there?”

“Maybe a week before she got killed,” Keefer said. “And I don’t get mixed with Tony Sasser, no sir. I live here.”

I went out of there fast.

But before I left, I saw the look on Joel Pender’s face that told me that the uncle didn’t think that any of them were going to do much living in Dresden anymore. On my way, I passed all those piles of useless mimeographed sheets. All a day late. It would always be a day late for Frank Keefer and Joel Pender, and they lived in perpetual fear-the fear of failure.

Celia Bazer had a fear too-the opposite fear. It was there in her eyes-the fear that Frank Keefer might lose his fear, that he might succeed some day. He was hers only in his failure, the failure her only insurance that he would always need her.

My fear was Anthony Sasser.

The Crawford mansion was alight through the trees in the steady rain. I parked in front. A maid opened the door, took me into the living room. The Crawfords were there, both of them-Katje Crawford in a dark red slack suit that suited her lean body, and Crawford drinking.

“Felicia was here,” Crawford said. “She told us.”

“Is she still here?”

“No. She went to a motel with that young Indian,” he said, and shook his head. “It’s almost impossible to believe.”

I said, “That Ralph Blackwind’s alive after you both tried to bury him eighteen years ago?”

Katje Crawford sat up straight. “He attacked us. He almost got the girls killed. He shot my father. I had a right to my own life. We had made a mistake, he should have seen that. Instead, he went crazy, and afterwards Martin defended him, got him less punishment than he deserved.”

“You cut him out of your big life like a wart,” I said. “The annulment was a cheat and a fix. Crawford had the money and power to do it. You fixed everyone, but Blackwind came home, and you had to fix him somehow. Your hands were dirty, and he could sink you, but you were lucky-he did a stupid trick, and he shot your father. So Crawford made a deal. Some deal! You got silence and your fine, rich life, and Blackwind got ten-to-twenty years in prison! A kid who’d just spent two years in a prison camp, was half out of his mind, couldn’t take more prison so flipped and made a break, killed a guard, and finished himself. Only he fooled you, he didn’t die.”