Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind

I drove on to the Crawford mansion. Martin Crawford was in the living room when the maid let me in. His face looked like he had lost fifty pounds in the last hours. Old Mrs. Van Hoek sat in a chair as if she were trying to stay unseen. I pulled out my big pistol. I aimed it at Crawford.

“Hand me your gun,” I said to Crawford. “By the barrel.”

He didn’t protest. I pocketed the Colt Agent.

“Is he here?” I said. “Sasser?”

“No. He wasn’t at his house or his office. I tried his club, too. Nowhere. Katje isn’t back, either. Is Felicia-?”

“She’s okay,” I said, and told him the whole thing fast.

He sat down. “My God. Ralph… John Andera, you say? He killed Francesca? His own… My God.”

“He’s been around here in the background for years. He says he saw you, and you saw him. You never knew?”

“I never saw anyone like Ralph Blackwind, no! I thought he was dead, I never considered if anyone could be Ralph. He was watching, and then…?”

I turned to the old woman, Mrs. Van Hoek. “Your husband knew Blackwind was alive. Did you know?”

The old woman shrank away from me in her chair. She watched Martin Crawford.

“Tell him what he wants to know, Mother,” Crawford said.

Her eyes were blank. “I didn’t know. Emil always liked Ralph Blackwind, even after Ralph shot him.”

“Your husband told Francesca something. That Blackwind was alive, yes, but what else?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Van Hoek said.

“He almost died, he knew Blackwind was alive, yet he never told. He protected an escaped murderer who’d shot him, tried to kidnap Katje and the girls, nearly killed them? Why?” I said. “Tell me just what did happen that night eighteen years ago.”

The old woman shook her head, no. She was afraid.

“Tell him,” Martin Crawford said from his chair.

When she spoke then, it was like a robot. “We were in the old house. Ralph came. He had guns. He was violent, in a rage. Katje tried to run away. Ralph shot everywhere, with both his guns. A pistol and a submachine gun. One in each hand. He smashed the living room mirror, the lamps, the windows. Emil pushed me down behind a couch. He lay there with me. Katje said she would go with Ralph. She got the children. Ralph made us stay down on the floor out of sight. We didn’t move, Emil and I. They all went out. We heard them drive away. Emil got up from behind the couch. We heard their car stop at the end of the street. Ralph ran back. Emil started to the door. Ralph shot him through the broken window. Emil was badly hurt. A few moments later their car drove away and was gone. Martin came home ten minutes later. He stopped Emil’s bleeding, got a doctor, called the police. They caught Ralph in Utica. Katje had managed to call the police while Ralph was asleep.”

She finished it there. I imagined the violent scene that night-Blackwind half-crazy, firing a submachine gun with one hand, a pistol with the other. Smashing the house in his rage.

“Katje called?” I said. “She turned him in to the police.”

“What else could she do? He was violent, dangerous,” Crawford said from his chair.

I watched him. “Is that how it happened, Crawford? Did she tell it exactly?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I arrived ten minutes later.”

“Did you?” I said. “Or maybe ten minutes earlier?”

He said, “No. They were gone when I got there. Only the Van Hoeks were there, Emil bleeding on the floor.”

“Almost dead,” I said. “Yet he learned later that Blackwind was still alive, had made his escape from prison, and he never told anyone. Why? Why protect a man who’d almost killed him?”

Crawford shook his head. “I don’t know, Fortune.”

“You’re sure you weren’t there earlier, Crawford? What did ballistics say about the bullets that shot Emil Van Hoek?”

“From Ralph Blackwind’s pistol. It was an 8-mm Nambu he’d picked up in North Korea. No mistake possible, a rare gun here. There wasn’t another one in Dresden, I don’t think.”

“His pistol?” I said. “Not the submachine gun?”

“No.”

I said, “You told the story just that way at the trial? Emil Van Hoek, and Mrs. Van Hoek there, told the story?”

“They weren’t at the trial. There was no need. Emil was too sick. Katje testified, and Blackwind admitted going crazy, shooting up the house. The Van Hoeks gave depositions.”

“Depositions?” I said. “Where would Sasser and Katje be, Crawford? Think? Where could Sasser be now?”

“I don’t know,” he said, squeezed his hands together in that chair. “I’ve thought, but I can’t-”

Old Mrs. Van Hoek said, “She meets with Sasser at the lodge on Black Mountain Lake. Abram Zaremba’s lodge. She goes there to him sometimes.”

Crawford began to say something, but I didn’t wait. I ran out to my car. The rain had stopped now. I drove toward Black Mountain Lake and the million-dollar project that, in one way, had started the whole tragedy. The project, and Joel Pender’s drunken stupidity. In one way they had started it all, but in reality it had begun a long time ago when a young Indian soldier married a patroon girl momentarily rejecting her heritage and future for passion. A moment that she had regretted, and started the whole inexorable chain of violence.

Black Mountain Lake glittered darkly like the surface of Pluto with its methane ocean. There was light in the lodge at the end of the county-built private road. I saw the three cars. One was Anthony Sasser’s green Cadillac. I drew my gun, and slipped up to a window of the lodge. I knew who the third car had to belong to. Maybe I wasn’t too late. But I was.

Through the window I saw a large, rustic room. Katje Crawford stood against a far wall in her red slack suit, her handbag held in both hands before her like a shield. John Andera faced her some ten feet away with his gun in his hand. They didn’t seem to be speaking, just looking at each other with closed faces, the death of their daughter, and eighteen years, between them.

Something more lay between them, too. Something real, physical. The body of Anthony Sasser.

Sasser lay on his back in a pool of blood, his dead eyes fixed on the ceiling with surprise and fear. He was dead, John Andera knew how to kill, did not miss.

I slipped around to the front door. It was open. I went inside silently. John Andera heard me when I was twenty feet away in the rustic room, and half behind him to his left.

“I’ve got my gun, Andera,” I said.

I hoped my voice wasn’t shaking. I couldn’t play with him. If he moved, I’d have to shoot. If I gave him one chance, I was as good as dead.

His eyes looked toward me.

John Andera looked toward me, and then back at Katje Crawford, and let his gun drop away from him with a small toss. Too dead inside now to even try to run and end it all his own way if that meant more struggle. My stomach relaxed. I went limp. I hadn’t been so sure I was any match for him even with my gun and the advantage.

“Shoot him,” Katje Crawford said. “He’s a murderer ten times over. Shoot him now.”

“I’ll take him in,” I said.

“He’ll fool you,” she said. “He shot Tony in cold blood.”

Andera said, “Sasser admitted it, Fortune. He was scared, he talked. He told Zaremba that Francesca had really seen my face when I killed Leland, that she was working with the police, that she knew Leland had been killed to protect the Black Mountain Lake project. He made Zaremba send me to kill Fran.”

His dead eyes turned toward Katje Crawford. She still stood against the wall in that red slack suit, fear and a kind of hate on her face.

“I didn’t know it was Francesca,” Andera said to her. “I didn’t recognize her. I killed those who made me do it.”