Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind

“As soon as I had the money and the contacts,” he said. “That money Zaremba gave me for saving his bacon the night of the Emerald Room holdup. Zaremba had the contacts, a really good plastic surgeon. I didn’t recognize myself after he took care of the scars, the busted bones. He had to make a lot of deep wrinkles, but that just helped. I thought I was home safe, the final piece of luck. Ralph Blackwind was a lucky man after all. It shows that you never know about life.”

He sat and rubbed at his eyes again. I guessed that the contact lenses that made his dark eyes blue bothered him when he was tired, disturbed. He said, “Luck. It was all luck after the escape, a fluke. Up at that Catskill lake where we were hiding after the breakout, I ran into a tramp. The fool recognized the prison clothes, tried to capture me. I killed him. I’m an expert, the army taught me well. I changed clothes, dumped him in the lake with my identification on him. I weighted the body, but it didn’t sink right away. Chance, you see?

“The two I escaped with ran up just after the body went into the lake. They thought it was me! A fluke. They even tried to swim out, but by then the body sank. That was when I realized that the tramp was my size, weight and build-give or take a few pounds. Just chance again, Fortune. I thought fast, and let my partners go away-thinking I’d drowned. You know the rest. One of them survived, told the cops I’d died in the lake, and in the end the cops believed it.”

He touched his pistol, fingered it, as if thinking about the police. “Accident all the way. I guess a man has to have that luck to survive a prison break. That tramp just had no relatives, no friends, was never reported missing. When I’d changed clothes, I’d hoped to gain maybe a day or two, no more. After my partners thought I’d drowned, I figured I might gain even a week. But when I read that the cops had dragged the lake but found no body, I realized they might really believe it was me in that lake. After they didn’t find the body for months, I knew I had a real chance. With the plastic surgery, and Zaremba to protect me from being picked up and fingerprinted, I was sure I was safe.”

The pain in his eyes was wide as he looked at me. “Safe! Tight, jumpy, careful, never sure. Up in Dresden as often as I could, but really careful. My kids I’d never had a chance to know, to touch. Then Francesca was dead-killed! I had to know who killed her. Damn them to hell!”

I waited until the echo of his violent voice faded in the small room with the rain steady on the trees outside. My eyes were on his pistol, and I was sweating, but I had to say it.

“You had to know,” I said, “except that you knew who had killed her from the start.”

I could almost see his dark, Indian eyes glitter behind the cloudy blue contact lenses.

I said, “Two of the murders were expert, the work of a professional-because you did them. You’re a professional killer, Andera, and you killed Francesca.”

I said, “If Francesca had found you, you wouldn’t have hurt her. You’d have just run again, vanished. You’ve had a violent life full of killing. You wouldn’t shock or stun easily, but that first day in my office you were stunned, in a kind of shock. You were so anxious to hire me to find who had killed Francesca. Why? A fugitive with a prison guard murder hanging over his head had every reason to stay hidden, stay far away from the police, let them handle the murder of even his daughter. But you risked exposing yourself to the police, and to me. You must have had some very powerful reason.”

“That she was my daughter isn’t enough?” he said.

“No. That would give you sorrow, maybe, but nothing strong enough to risk coming into the open. You had to have a very strong need-like hate,” I said. “Remember I said I’d already decided that she hadn’t found you, you had found her. But you had two newspaper clippings that first day. The first one identified her only as Fran Martin, and if you had known her as Martin, why hadn’t you come to me a day earlier? You were stunned, violent to know who had killed her, but you hadn’t come to me until after the second news story identified her as Francesca Crawford-your daughter.

“I was sure you hadn’t dated her at all, and you hadn’t known her as Fran Martin-you would have come a day earlier to me if you had. No, you didn’t know Fran Martin at all, not until after she was dead. So why had you clipped the story about the murder of Fran Martin? What was your interest in a girl you’d never seen or heard of on the day you clipped the story? Or had you seen her without knowing who she was until the second story?”

His dark face under the black hat was distracted. “Yes, what was my connection to a girl named Fran Martin?”

“None,” I said, “unless you were her murderer. A pro who clipped stories about his victims to keep informed. That second story must have been like being hit by a train. You were raw and bloody inside when you came to me. A man who had killed his own daughter. There was a reason powerful enough to make you expose yourself-to find out who had sent you to kill your own daughter unrecognized in a dark bedroom.”

He didn’t react, not outwardly, as if all reaction was gone out of him by now. Maybe it was, or maybe it was only fifteen years of living as a fugitive always on the alert. But inside his life was bleeding away.

“You didn’t know who had wanted Francesca dead, did you?” I said. “That was all that explained how you acted afterward, and that was when it all fit in my mind. The money you sent to Pine River came at irregular intervals-when you did a job. A lot of money, so it was high-paying work. You stayed safe fifteen years in New York, so you must have had strong protection. You were so sure of your alibis-because alibis are part of your trade. The job Abram Zaremba gave you fifteen years ago was a hired killer!

“A professional killer, that’s what you really are, and you killed Francesca on order. You never know your victims, do you, that’s how it works. This one was special, I think, but it was routine in one way-you didn’t know exactly who you were sent to kill. I don’t know why you don’t know who sent you to kill her, or why you didn’t recognize her-you must have seen her around Dresden-but that has to be how it happened. A pretty rotten coincidence. A nightmare.”

He had no real reason to be sitting there listening to me. I wasn’t telling him anything important to him. Yet he sat, as if he didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to do what he had to do to finish what he had started when he hired me.

“No, not a coincidence,” he said. “Fate, maybe. Sure, fate. A lot of mistakes, moves, coming together because what I did made them come together. In prison I used to read. Some of those old Greek plays: Medea, Electra, Antigone. Fate. Two men meet on a road, one kills the other-it’s his brother! All laid down in the cards because they did what they did.

“I had to meet Katje back then when the odds said I’d never get near a woman like her. I had to go off to Korea. She had to toss me over. I had to go after her when I got back. I had to shoot the one person up here who liked me-old man Van Hoek. I had to have that crazy luck in the escape. I had to be in the Emerald Room to stop that robbery. Zaremba had to own the Emerald Room, offer me the big job-contract killer. I had to not give a damn back then. What difference did it make, that job, to a hunted guy with a prison-guard murder over him? What did I care about a few more killings if I had protection and good money?”

He gripped his pistol, began to slap it over and over against his leg. “No coincidence, Fortune. I just about set it up, made it have to happen! I took the job Zaremba offered back then partly because it would put me in Dresden a lot, I could be near the kids undercover. I could maybe help them, and see that Katje and Crawford did right by them. With my face fixed I got close to Crawford a few times unknown. Even Katje didn’t know me. When I went to meet Tony Sasser a few months ago she was with him. We even shook hands! She didn’t know me at all.”