Michael Collins - The brass rainbow

Maybe it’s an inevitable story in a country that makes the many want what only the few can have. For most the big dream can never happen, but the trying for it is supposed to make the world move. Maybe it does, I don’t know. If I knew I’d be writing important books no one would read. What I do know is that every now and then there are some who, like a cheap gambler, want it now and easy and without work, and that ends in violence.

“So Baron had to go,” I said. “He was no match for you, and he trusted you. He sent Leo away because he was only meeting you, his partner, that night. He met Strega and his. 45 instead. Carla Devine almost queered it, but Strega spotted her. You should have killed her then, not warned her. Maybe you liked her.”

She had closed her eyes again. I suppose I was right, Carla had reminded her of herself, and she wanted to forget that part.

“When did you marry Paul Baron?” I said.

She opened her eyes and turned, but she said nothing.

“You had a husband,” I said. “You couldn’t buy him off, or divorce him, because you couldn’t even tell him about the deal. He would have owned you for life. He could tell Walter you’d been his partner. He knew Walter had killed Jonathan. And he’d have bigamy on you. He’d never have let you alone. No one seemed to know you were married to him, or that he was married at all. Who would look for an old marriage? So, kill him. Strega was there to do it for you, and Weiss would take that fall, too.”

She spoke up to the ceiling, “I was fifteen when I met Paul. What I told you earlier was mostly true. The well-bred girl with no present and no future. Paul showed me how to live high and easy. I liked it. We were a good team. I never had an arrest. Then I married him. It was wrong; we were too different once the bloom was off. So we went our private ways, but we still worked together sometimes. A divorce didn’t seem important. Not until Monday, and then it was too late. Mrs. Radford handed me the big chance. I had to have it. No one knew about Paul.”

“Leo Zar knew. Maybe Paul told him, or maybe he had found out.”

“We all make mistakes.”

“You didn’t make many. Did you plan to kill Strega, too?”

She raised herself on her elbow, and both blue eyes were straight toward me. “I killed no one. Remember that. There’s nothing you can do to me.”

She didn’t blink, or look grim, or do anything but let her words sink in. Then she lay back again. “Strega was in love with me. He had wanted me ever since Walter first took me to Costa’s place. I don’t think it would have lasted long, though. Once I was married, he wouldn’t be hard to ease away from, and after all, he had killed Paul, hadn’t he?”

“Strega was a rough man.”

“Rough men can be handled,” she said, “only…”

“Only?” I said.

She sat up, and I had a flash of long, pale leg. She looked toward the record player. “We don’t make the same mistake twice, we make it a hundred times. Rough men, strong men, that’s my weakness. I can handle them, but I can’t stay away from them. Walter was a boy. Tonight I went to tell Strega we’d have to stay apart for a time, to start the brushoff. But he wanted me. So, first him, and then the brushoff. Once more, you see?”

She drew on her cigarette, but it had gone out. She dropped it into an ashtray. “Walter was at the window. He shot Strega. Then he stood out there in the snow crying. He stood, and Strega shot him. I brought him home. I had it, the big rainbow, but it all turned to brass.”

She stood up and went to put a record on the player. It was Brahms, his Fourth Symphony. I could hear Morgana Radford crying in the bedroom. There was no sound from Mrs. Radford. She was probably planning the funeral.

“What happened to the man who posed as Jonathan for you?”

“He ran with his money. Does it matter?”

“Who was the sandy-haired man looking for Carla?”

“No one. A gun Strega hired.”

“Where’s Walter’s gun?”

“In the Jaguar.” She began to nod her beautiful head in time to the powerful music. “There’s nothing you can do, you know. Not a thing.”

I walked out. I went through the snow back to the Jaguar and got Walter Radford’s gun. It was a simple hunter’s side-arm. Then I got into my car and started back for New York. I would tell Gazzo the story. He could handle the local police.

It was morning out in the city. In Captain Gazzo’s shade-drawn office it was still night. The dim light etched sharp shadows across Gazzo’s gray hair and tired eyes. I had told my story some two hours earlier, and Gazzo had set the full machinery of his department in motion, and now he sat behind his old desk and brooded in his perpetual midnight.

“We can’t touch her,” Gazzo said at last.

“No. They’re all dead.”

Deirdre Fallon would not even be charged. There was nothing to charge her with. Everyone who could have testified to what she had done was dead. Mrs. Radford could tell nothing without admitting that she had concealed murder, and she was not going to do that. Mrs. Radford would not help the police. She had no first-hand proof anyway, George Ames had no proof, and all my evidence was against the dead.

I had given Gazzo the Malay kris, with Walter Radford’s fingerprints still on it, for Jonathan’s murder, and Walter’s pistol for Strega’s killing. Ballistics would do the rest. They had Strega’s. 45 automatic to prove who had killed Paul Baron, and Strega’s. 38 pistol for Leo Zar and Walter Radford. Costa had been contacted and had confirmed where I had found the weapons. Gazzo had taken my word that Strega, or his sandy-haired hired hand, had killed Carla Devine. We would never know which one had actually done it, or exactly how. Police work is rarely neat.

“I’ll send Walter Radford’s gun, and Strega’s. 38, up to North Chester. They’ll handle those killings,” Gazzo said. The Captain sighed a long, weary sigh that had thirty hard years of frustrating police work behind it. “They’ll talk politely to the Fallon woman, and to Mrs. Radford, and then they’ll turn them loose with an apology and their sympathies. A tragic love triangle. They can’t prove anything else. We can work out the whole affair in detail, but there’s nothing a ten-cent judge would let the D.A. get to a jury. She walks out like a bird.”

“The mother, too,” I said. “Women live longer.”

Gazzo didn’t laugh. “I’ll put the word in for you with the North Chester police. You might want to work up there again. You stayed away from them to keep down the publicity on the Radfords. They might even thank you.”

“What about the other favor? Freedman.”

His gray eyes moved to consider me without friendliness, but without rancor either. The stubble on his tender face stood out like dirt on the face of a gravedigger. He toyed with Strega’s. 38 on the desk before him.

“It’s been done. I guess Weiss has that much coming. Let’s get down there.”

We went down to the room where they processed prisoners who were being released. Sammy Weiss was already there. He was gathering up a small pile of debris they had taken from his pockets when he had been jailed, and counting the few dollars of his own he had had. The $25,000 was stolen property. Weiss didn’t even ask about that money.

“Hey, Danny,” he said to me. He grinned all over his moon face. His eyes were not grinning, not yet. A life sentence was still too close behind him like a dark, perched vulture.

“Good deal, Sammy,” I said.

Gazzo said, “Take a lesson, Weiss.”

“I learned, Captain, yeh.”

He put his possessions and few dollars into his pockets. He stood there. All the police in the room watched him. I smiled. The police didn’t smile. They had seen it all before, and they had seen too many like Weiss go out one day and come back the next.