Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind

“Fran didn’t scare. Look what it got her. I scare.”

She went on working steadily as if she had to meet some specific time schedule.

“Did she have many visitors?”

“Carl Gans twice for dates. Mr. Dunstan came around a few times after her. That’s all. It was weird, alone so much.”

“Who are Gans and Dunstan? Can you describe them?”

“Carl Gans works at the Emerald Room. Your height, but heavier. A real rough face, and maybe forty-five. Mr. Dunstan, is a smaller man, same age, nice. He looks rich, but I don’t know what he does. His name’s Harmon, lives in Hempstead.”

“Was she involved with either of them? Or both?”

She stared at me. “If you mean was she making out with them, I wouldn’t know. She never let them bring her home up here. I think she was tough to get into bed. The tiger type, battle all men.”

“How about a big, blond man about thirty?”

She closed her last suitcase. “No, I don’t know.”

“A John Andera?” I described Andera.

“No one like that I saw.”

“Why did she keep her dressy clothes so separate?” I said.

She straightened up. “You noticed that? I don’t know why. I think someone gave her the dressy stuff. All she brought was those junk clothes. I never could figure Fran out. She could have had anything, the best clothes by the ton, but she never had much even at home. The bare necessities.”

“The rich don’t need to buy to feel secure.”

“Maybe not,” she said.

She went into the bedroom, and realized that all her clothes were packed. She came back out, took off her robe, and in her bra and pants began to pick a dress from a suitcase. The new indifference of youth to modesty is a healthy thing, I guess, so I didn’t look away. It wasn’t easy, I’m not a youth.

“This place costs money,” I said. “Where did she get it?”

“She had it in the bank. I guess her bankbook was in that handbag the… that was taken.” She was dressed, and said, “Can you help with the bags? With that arm?”

“I can take two if they’re not bulky.”

I took two slim bags in my one hand, and struggled down the stairs behind her. The trunk would be picked up. On the sidewalk we lined up the bags. She looked at me.

“I don’t know what happened to Francesca, Mr. Fortune,” she said. “She never told me anything. I’m sorry.”

I had the sudden feeling that she was waiting for me to walk away before she flagged down a taxi.

I said, “I can reach you in Dresden?”

“Sure, anytime. My folks are in the book.”

“Well,” I said, smiled, “thanks for talking to me.”

She smiled too, and I walked away toward Third Avenue. When I was out of sight, I looked fast for a taxi. It was mid-morning, a good hour, and I got one quickly. In luck.

“Park here,” I said to the driver. “Soon I’ll say follow that taxi. You want to get the jokes over first?”

“It’s your money,” the driver said.

We were parked where I could see Celia Bazer. She got her taxi soon. It came across Third Avenue, went on to Second, and turned downtown with me behind it.

Celia Bazer led me to the Cooper Hotel on East Eleventh Street. A cheap hotel with no doorman. Instead, a tall, blond man came out to meet the Bazer girl. Tall and husky, he was handsome in a heavy way. About thirty or so, he seemed to pose as Celia Bazer paid the taxi, conscious of his face and build. His clothes were sleek and studied-a soft gray jacket, darker gray slacks, a pale blue shirt open at the neck to show fine blond chest hair, and pale blue suede shoes. They each took two bags into the hotel.

I paid off my cab, and walked toward the hotel. A green Cadillac came slowly along the street behind me, passed me, and double-parked just beyond the hotel. No one got out. A lone man in the Cadillac was interested in his rear-view mirror. I stopped and watched him for a time in a store window next to the hotel. He started up, drove off, and I went into the hotel.

Celia Bazer and the blond man weren’t in the lobby. I knew the desk clerk: Willy Hassler.

“Hey, Dan, after me?”

“The blond man just came in, Willy. Who is he?”

Willy Hassler and I had run in the same paths of juvenile theft when we were boys in Chelsea. I only lost my arm from it, Willy lost ten years. Now he was a desk clerk in a cheap hotel. It didn’t depress him. He’d lived a lot lower.

“Four-oh-nine, Frank Keefer,” Willy said. “Registered from Albany, but it could be phony-he thought about it when he wrote. Been here four days. The woman’s new to me.”

“Can I listen without bugging their room, Willy?”

Willy closed his eyes. “Four-oh-nine? Yeh, there was a door into four-eleven. And it’s empty, four-eleven. Go up.”

“I’ll send you a bottle of the best, Willy.”

“If you got a client, make it cash.”

“I’ll send something,” I said.

I felt cheap as I rode up in the shaky elevator. But a thousand dollars, even two, is something a man has to learn to hang on to if he’s middle-aged and never hung on to anything. Self-interest is the game, especially by the mid-forties.

Inside room 411, I put my ear to the plywood panel that now covered where the door to 409 had been. They must have been just on the other side. Celia Bazer was talking. There was anger in her voice, and something more-fear? Or love?

“What do you want from me, Frank?”

Frank Keefer’s voice was deep and smooth. “Maybe I just want you after all, Cele.”

“Sure. Four years of us, then Francesca and her daddy came into your big eyes, and good-bye for me!”

“Leave Fran out, Cele. We busted up, I told you.”

“Maybe you busted up just Tuesday night! The hard way. You want to keep me quiet. You and Joel hate trouble, right?”

“Leave Joel out, too,” Keefer said, his voice a little ragged this time. “Fran told me to get lost before she ever left Dresden. You remember that. I never saw her again.”

Celia Bazer’s voice laughed. “Sure, you came down here just to find me. Surprise, Francesca was living with me! Did you come to try for her again, the jackpot? Maybe it looked like you had a chance. Maybe you got afraid of what I could tell her. Maybe you made a big mistake!”

I could almost feel the threat hanging in the silence inside room 409 on the other side of the thin panel. Frank Keefer’s deep voice broke it:

“You have a short memory, you know, Cele? Your face was bad the time I busted it. It could look a lot worse.”

Her voice was thin. “You don’t scare me. You’re scared!”

But Celia Bazer was scared. It was there in her voice. Keefer scared her-and excited her. That was in her voice, a thickness of desire. She was afraid of him, and she wanted him, too. He heard what I did in her voice.

“Come here,” his voice said.

The sounds on the other side of the panel were meaningless except in my mind. I imagined them, a man and woman close together. I saw Keefer holding her roughly, because that would be his pose. Her head was against his shoulder. The need in her voice was now stronger than the fear.

“You were really through with Fran, Frank? All over?”

“Three months ago, Cele. I had plans, sure. You can’t blame a man for trying for the bonanza. But she tossed me over, and what does Frank Keefer do against the Crawfords? I told Joel the hell with it, I wanted you. I mean it.”

His voice didn’t convince me, not all the way, and I imagined his eyes not quite looking at her as she looked up at his face. But that was a projection of how I would act. Keefer was probably looking straight at her and smiling.

“Frank?” her voice said. “What happened to Francesca?”

“Don’t know, baby. I got down here Tuesday. I went to your place, no one was there. I called Bel-Mod, they said you were out of town. Wednesday night I went to see if you were home yet. The cops were there, I heard Fran’s name. I got out. Yesterday, I saw the story in the paper.”