Michael Collins - The brass rainbow

She wore boots, a loose one-piece wool dress, and nothing else against the ten-degree cold but an enormous red-and-white-striped scarf. She strode out like one of those old fanatics leading a crusade.

Inside, the main room of the cottage was bright and well-furnished. She led me through into a smaller room without even a glance at the expensive furniture. In the small room there were a narrow bed, straight chairs, two worn bureaus, an old desk piled with papers, and a shabby dining table. A monk’s cell.

“Sit down,” she said.

I sat. She sat at the desk. I saw her clearly, and she was a girl: a tall, lanky girl of about twenty-five, with a long solemn face.

“I’m Morgana. You’re investigating Uncle Jonathan’s death?”

“I suppose I am.”

“You think someone here really killed him?”

“I don’t think anything yet. Do you?”

“I think that a total stranger is a bit too convenient. My uncle was a strong and clever man. It strikes me that he was not a man to be killed so easily by someone who had come to squeeze money. He should have been alert in that situation.”

That thought had crossed my mind. “Do you have an idea?”

She crossed her legs. It was an efficient, mannish gesture. She swung her booted leg as if she were about to give instructions to her soldiers. “No, not really. Any Radford or Ames is capable of murder, but I don’t know of any motives. Logically there is my brother, Walter, but it couldn’t have been Walter.”

“Why not, and why logically?”

“He is basically too gentle to hurt anyone, although he hated Jonathan. Jonathan tried to make him a businessman, and Mother tried to make him a cold aristocrat. Because they both failed, they think he is weak, but it isn’t that.” Her leg swung faster to some inner conflict. “When we were both small, we took an oath to right the wrongs our family had done. To do only good. Mother and Jonathan destroyed that in Walter, but they could not make him what they wanted, so he became what he is.”

“What is he?”

“Bitter, corrupt and self-indulgent.” She looked at me. “But the gentle boy is still there; I know that. He couldn’t kill.”

“He has an alibi anyway. If he was really here on Monday.”

“He was. I talked to him.” Her leg swung. “But she wasn’t.”

“She?”

“The cool Deirdre. She gets it all now, you see?”

“Did Jonathan dislike her? Did he oppose her?”

“No, not at all. Jonathan admired her just as Mother does. They admired her strength. Good for Walter, they considered.”

“Then why would she kill Jonathan?”

“There may be things I don’t know. They don’t tell me much.”

“It’s not logical for her to kill a man who liked her.”

“Unless something had changed,” Morgana Radford said. Her leg swung in spasms and her hands twitched. “There’s something dark and animal in her. She looks at Walter like a spider.”

“But she has an alibi. Everyone has an alibi.”

She sighed. “I suppose so. I suppose it was this Weiss. In a way it is a kind of justice. Simple, stupid violence.”

I watched her. “You didn’t like your uncle, did you?”

Abruptly, she stood. She began to pace the Spartan room. “My uncle was an evil man. One of the evil Radfords! Do you know how the Radfords became powerful, rich? On blood! They called it coffee, but it was blood they sold. The blood of Indians, peasants, slaves! They robbed, killed and maimed the darker people of the world so that they could live in ease at home. It still goes on, day after day. Power, greed and self-interest, and Jonathan was the leader of today. A most efficient, strong man. I’m glad he’s dead, and I won’t let them make Walter like him!”

In her shapeless brown dress she looked like some fundamentalist preacher promising fire and brimstone. That’s just what she was. A fanatic. What else she was, I couldn’t say. Maybe she was on the edge of a private darkness, or maybe she was only a sensitive girl in a rapacious family. Fanatics do a lot of harm, but they do a lot of good, too. Maybe most of the good.

“Where were you on Monday, Miss Radford?”

“At work. I’m an officer in the Society of Economic Missions. Our work is to correct the wrongs of exploitation in colonial countries.” She gave me an appraising look. She knew what I was asking. “It’s in the East Fifties. I was there all morning. I came home on the train after Walter.”

“Do you know about any problems your uncle had?”

She shook her head. “No, not really. I did hear Mother say once that Jonathan was becoming a night owl in his old age, but I don’t know what it means. He did seem to take longer business trips recently.”

“Night action and longer business trips? But you don’t know if he was involved in something unusual for him?”

“No, but I wouldn’t be surprised by anything Jonathan was involved in,” Morgana Radford said bitterly. “Anything.”

“Do you know where I can find Walter?”

“Probably at that Costa’s gambling house. Jonathan closed it, but it opened up in the next town. Walter has to gamble, you see? He has to wallow. They did that to him.”

She was no longer talking to me. I left her staring at what had to be some invisible image of Walter Radford. I went back to the house where my taxi waited in the snow. Mrs. Radford was there. “You were speaking to Morgana?”

“Yes.”

She was silent a moment. In the forest some large night bird attacked a small animal. Mrs. Radford said, “She is a strange girl, withdrawn from us. It comes from having no father. She worshiped her only brother. She can’t let him grow up, mature. She sees mature strength as evil.”

There are always two sides, sometimes more, and all sides can be true. Strength can be mature. It can also be evil.

“Walter must assume charge now,” Mrs. Radford said.

“I guess so, Mrs. Radford,” I said. I was thinking that there were pressures in the Radford family. Whether they were a cause of Jonathan’s death, or only a result, I had no way of knowing.

I got into the taxi. Mrs. Radford stood in the snow in front of the house and watched me leave.

Carmine Costa’s casino was a big house on a back road with many small rooms inside. Some of the rooms were for relaxation and booze; six were for action. There were two roulette rooms, a dice room, a blackjack room, a baccarat layout, and a poker room. It was all open. No one cares much about other people gambling. In most police forces the vice squad is separate so that the other squads don’t have to arrest the gamblers and girls they depend on for so much information that solves bigger crimes.

There was little of the frantic madness of Las Vegas. The people here had plenty of money to lose if that would help them to pass the time. Still, there were tense jaw muscles and sweaty palms hidden in dinner jacket pockets. No gambler wants to lose. Not once, not ever.

Deirdre Fallon stood at the dice table as slim as a crystal doll. A white evening dress that fitted her curves from ankle to high neck left no question this time about her hips and breasts. Her hand rested on the arm of a slender man beside her.

He was like his dead uncle, but younger and smaller. He held his body in an arrogant attitude, but the pallor of his face was almost anemic. His dinner jacket was flawless, and there was a superior tilt to his chin, but his eyes were dark circles with brown chips small in the center. His attention was totally on the dice game, and his mouth had a loose, petulant cast.

“Miss Fallon,” I said.

She turned. “Are you following me, Mr. Fortune?”

“No, but it’s a nice thought.”

She wrinkled her nose at me, smiled. It gave me that twinge in my back. She touched the small man beside her.