Walk a Black Wind Read online

  Both Gazzo and I knew they were right. If nothing stood out in their minds, until we had some ideas it would be like shooting fish in a very large barrel.

  Martin Crawford said, “She’s dead, and what can we do? What’s the use of power and money if we can’t stop chance, can’t control life? What do we do?”

  “We go on trying to control life,” Gazzo said.

  Crawford nodded, and they stood up. The wife went out first—to claim her daughter. We hadn’t learned much. Maybe there wasn’t much to learn. Just another small-time murder?

  3.

  Night was falling fast—the way it does in late autumn—over the East Eighty-fourth Street block where Francesca Crawford had lived briefly as Fran Martin. The wind seemed to have dropped, as if the tree-lined street was walled in from the turmoil of the rest of the city. The East Side can be like that, while the West Side throbs and boils.

  The dead girl’s building was a small brownstone, neater than West Side brownstones. There were flower boxes in the windows instead of milk cartons and shirtless men. I got no answer to my ring, and the vestibule door was locked. Sure that I was alone, I used my thin square of stiff plastic to open the spring lock. On the top floor I used my ring of keys to enter the silent apartment.

  A thin, dusty light filtered over shiny, tasteless furniture of the kind that comes with good furnished apartments and tells you nothing about the occupants. The living room was large, there was a full kitchen, a dining room, two bedrooms, and two bathrooms—$400 a month, at least.

  One bedroom was cluttered, with two closets full of clothes for a young woman who went many places but had little taste beyond showing off what had to be a sensual figure. Make-up was thick as a forest on a dressing table, the bed was covered by a spread, and a small desk looked barely used. Paycheck stubs showed that this was the bedroom of the roommate, Celia Bazer. She worked for Bel-Mod Fashions, Inc., and was paid too much to be anything less than a model.

  The second bedroom was bare and spartan. There was no make-up anywhere, not even in the bathroom, and fewer than ten dresses in the two closets. The closets were oddly segregated. One held three sleek cocktail dresses, some high heels, and an evening wrap. The other had only bright, loose, casual dresses, slacks, sandals, mannish shirts, a pair of red-stained jeans. All airy and informal, with a sense of youth and independence. The bed was covered with another spread, and there was the same small desk—but used.

  The desk was littered with guides to New York, theater programs, nightclub napkins, and paycheck stubs from the Emerald Room. The checks were small, Francesca Crawford had made little money. Nothing went back farther than three weeks. The bureau drawers told me no more. No slips, no girdles, no brassieres, and only four pairs of bikini underpants—a modern girl. The only jewelry was some silver and turquoise pieces—earrings, a necklace, two bracelets. Good, handmade Indian jewelry, but new and shiny, and with nothing to show where it had come from.

  As if Francesca Crawford had been on another planet since leaving home three months ago. Unless there had been some clue in her missing handbag. Had the bag been taken to hide where she had been, what she had been doing? Or was it simple robbery? Or, maybe, to suggest a simple robbery?

  I turned to the bed. A killer can often become careless at the instant of killing, leave some clue. I pulled back the spread, and got a surprise. There was no blood on the bed.

  I went back to the roommate’s bedroom, stripped off the cover from that bed. The blood was on this mattress—and a deep tear where the long knife had passed through the dead girl. Francesca Crawford had been killed in the wrong bed.

  The super of the building was a small man who looked me up and down, stared at my duffel coat and missing arm. He had a belligerent air, as if he would belch in your face to prove that he took no guff from anyone. I asked him if Francesca Crawford had had many callers.

  “You a cop? With that arm?”

  “Private,” I said. “Her family wants to know how it happened, what she was doing, who her men were.”

  His narrow face almost sparkled. The kind of animal thrilled by secondhand pleasures, other people’s pain. He rubbed at his jaw. “Said her name was Martin here. Not bad-looking except for that scar, but a funny one. Alone most of the time, never talked much. I had ideas about her and the roommate, only the Bazer kid had plenty of men.”

  “Francesca Crawford didn’t have men?”

  “I only seen two in three weeks, then just a couple times. No parties, no gang, no steady like most girl kids.”

  “Who were the two you saw?”

  “One guy forty or so, Dago-looking, but real dressed up, Gray hair, small. Never saw him with her, but he went up a couple times, asked once if she was home.”

  “The other one?”

  “Big, blond guy, maybe thirty,” he said, and his eyes were excited. “Saw him the night she got killed, around five P.M. He asked for Bazer first, then the Crawford girl. Wanted to know if I knew where they were. I didn’t. I told the cops.”

  “How about a man about forty-three, short but broad?” and I described John Andera in full.

  “Never saw one like that.”

  “Any women?”

  “Nah.” No fun in peeping on women with women.

  “You heard nothing the night she died?”

  “I told the cops. Not a thing.”

  “And you hear everything, don’t you?” I said.

  He slammed the door in my face, but I felt better as I went out into the now dark evening, and headed for the subway. I’d let him know what I thought of him. I was imagining him back in his room cursing me when I turned north on Lexington Avenue and saw the man behind me.

  It was dark, and there were a lot of people on the sidewalk. I couldn’t get a good look at him, but I was sure he was tailing me. I didn’t recognize his clothes: dark, almost black, with a cheap-looking topcoat, and a hat pulled low. To be sure, I turned off the avenue and walked toward the Park. He came behind me, dropping back on the side street where there were fewer people. I did a few sharp turns. He was still on my trail when I turned back toward Lexington. I reached the avenue, and ducked into a doorway around the corner.

  He didn’t appear. I watched the corner, but no one like: him came around after me. I waited five minutes, then took the subway downtown.

  Maybe I’d been wrong.

  The Emerald Room had just opened when I walked in. Behind its anonymous façade it was a beautiful place of small rooms with deep leather booths, stiff white tables, decent light to see your food by, a real fire against the October chill, and a small, quiet bar. The maître took one look at my old duffel coat, and came fast.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I’d like to talk to the manager.”

  “About what?” He was half-curt, and half-relieved. I was a nobody, but at least I wasn’t asking for a table.

  “A former employee.”

  “I handle the personnel. What former employee?”

  “Francesca Crawford,” I said. “Or Fran Martin, I guess.”

  He froze solid. “The police have asked all, and been told all we know.”

  “Was there any trouble with her? How about men?”

  “She was a quiet, efficient girl. We liked her. Now do I have to call the bouncer?”

  His eyes flickered to my left where I saw a muscular middleweight in a loose suit watching us both. I left.

  I stopped in a diner on Eighth Avenue near my office for my dinner. If you know an area of New York, you can learn the specialty of each diner, and can eat pretty well for little money by picking the right diner on the right day. Here, on Wednesdays, it was kidney stew, and I thought about Francesca Crawford while I ate. Gazzo was right, there wasn’t much to go on. Three weeks is a short time, and that’s all she’d had in New York as far as I knew. The roommate, Celia Bazer, might know more, but meanwhile I wanted to look a little farther back.

  I saw no sign of anyone following me to the branch library. The library
is a detective tool most people forget. It would tell me more about Mayor Martin J. Crawford. I got Who’s Who in America. The entry wasn’t long, Dresden was only a small industrial city:

  Crawford, Martin James: Mayor, Dresden, N.Y. Born Dresden, N.Y., April 14, 1920. Ed. private schools, Cornell Univ., Cornell Law. M. Katje Van Hoek; four children. New York State Bar, 1945. Lawyer, Dresden City Council, 1948-50. Elec. New York State Assembly, 1950-56. New York State Atty Gen’s Office, 1957-62. Estab. law firm Vance, Crawford and Cashin, 1962. Elec. mayor of Dresden, N.Y., 1964. Dresden Plan (strict Welfare control), 1966. Dresden Crime Comm. estab. 1968, under dir. of Carter Vance and Anthony Sasser, with mayor as chmn. Re-elected 1968. Dresden Plan for welfare control opposed in various court actions, abandoned, 1969.

  I closed the book, and thought about Mayor Martin Crawford. A local Dresden boy, and the schools indicated from a “good” family, probably some money. There was influence, and more than a little ability, in a plum job like City Council lawyer at twenty-five. Until 1962 he had gone the statewide political route. After 1962 it had been private practice and local politics—the bigger fish in the smaller pond. From the sound of the Dresden Crime Commission, and the “Dresden Plan” to crack down on welfare rolls, Crawford was an anti-crime crusader and a conservative reformer. Men who crusade and reform make enemies.

  I looked up the number of the Eighty-fourth Street apartment, and called from the library. I got no answer. Either the police still had Celia Bazer, or she was off somewhere, and there wasn’t much I could do until I talked to her. I had a thousand dollars in my hands, and I thought about my girl, Marty—Martine Adair, who gives me a lot and gets little in return. I hadn’t seen her for a week. She was busy with a new show, a featured role at last, but maybe she was free tonight. I called the theater. Marty wasn’t free.

  So I went to the bar where my friend Joe Harris was on duty, and had a few Irish whiskies. I even paid. I talked with Joe for a couple of slow hours, then went home. In bed I lay awake quite a while. I thought about the murder of the daughter of an anti-crime, conservative mayor. A girl wasn’t killed without a reason—or maybe she was. We live in a violent time, and I guessed that, statistically, more people were killed by unknown strangers than were killed for politics.

  4.

  I woke to a gray day and a throb in my missing arm. I don’t often think about the arm, but it’s on solitary gray mornings when I do. I ask myself how a man goes on without a part of himself. I never get an answer.

  So I got a cigarette, lighted my gas radiators, plugged in my ready coffee, and called Marty. She didn’t answer. I wasn’t surprised, she’d be too busy until her show opened. There was nothing to do but go to work, and over my coffee I tried to work up the necessary enthusiasm, or sense of duty.

  I don’t like murder, I know it can’t go free, but there’s still no pleasure in an eye-for-an-eye, in adding more pain. In a world that lives with legal murder—call it defense, or protection, or a crusade for peace and justice, or what you will—it’s hard to work up real hate for some desperate, at least half-crazy fool. I can hate many people, but most simple murderers aren’t among them. When you hound them into the light, they’re too often pitiful creatures who acted more from fear than from hate or greed. I know that doesn’t help if you were close to their victim, and it wouldn’t help me if my child had been killed, but it’s still true.

  The brownstone at 280 East Eighty-fourth was bleak in the gray morning, the wind blowing the last leaves from the trees that stood ringed by their little private fences. I had an odd vision—once man had skulked vulnerable among great forests of towering trees, and now the few trees stood vulnerable among forests of indifferent people.

  My ring was answered this time, and I went up. A tall, full young woman waited for me. She was dark-haired, pretty, and more female than the dead Francesca Crawford. I guessed her age as twenty-five-plus, and her prettiness was mostly youth, so she didn’t have much time. She wore a blue robe.

  “Miss Celia Bazer?” I asked.

  “Yes. You’re more police?”

  “Dan Fortune, a private detective.”

  “But I don’t know anything! I told the police!”

  “I just want to talk,” I said. “Can I come in?”

  “In?” she said, stepped back. “Yes, come in then.”

  Suitcases littered the living room, and a trunk stood open. I could see empty closets inside her bedroom.

  “Home to Dresden,” she said. “I don’t stay here now. One year in the big city for fame and fortune. I didn’t make much fortune, and I don’t like this kind of fame.”

  “You and Francesca were old friends in Dresden?”

  “Not so old. A couple of years before she went away to college, a few months when she came back. Her father is the Mayor, mine runs a shoe store.”

  She resumed her packing. The robe did little to hide her body. She didn’t seem to care. I sat down.

  “Why was Francesca using a false name?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. She never said. She just called me one day, asked if I had room, and when I had she moved in.”

  “You don’t know where she’d been before here?”

  “I know she was in the city, some other place.”

  “Was she scared? Hiding?”

  “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.”