I was really helping Jo-Jo. So far I had helped tie him potentially to a murder close to home and definitely tied him to a murder victim a long way from home. I was doing fine.
‘I’ve changed the pickup on Olsen to suspected of murder,’ the captain said.
Chapter 11
You go on the probable in this world, I’ve said that before. Captain Gazzo was going on the probable of what he had. From where the captain sat, it was logically Jo-Jo. But I had another seat and another factor. I had the character of Jo-Jo Olsen as it had been emerging as I went along, and in my book Jo-Jo Olsen was not probable.
It can be misleading to talk only to a man’s friends or a man’s enemies, but no matter how I sliced the pie it still came out that Jo-Jo Olsen was not a violent type. Nothing made it probable that Jo-Jo Olsen would lose his temper over a woman. Possible of course — anything is possible — but not probable. The way it came out in my mind was that Jo-Jo might lose his temper over a racing car, but not much else. Even if he did, his reaction would not be violent.
And violence was the key.
I stood in the afternoon heat and sun of the city outside police headquarters and looked at the whole picture, and it was all violence. The quick and efficient violence against Patrolman Stettin. The unplanned violence of the burglar that had killed Tani Jones. The calculated violence for a purpose that had put Pete Vitanza into the hospital. The peripheral violence of Swede Olsen. The menace of violence that were my two shadows. The infinite potential of violence that was Andy Pappas. The animal violence of a Jake Roth or Max Bagnio under Pappas’ orders. Naked violence from end to end. I could not place Jo-Jo Olsen into that picture.
But the only one connected to Nancy Driscoll was Jo-Jo.
If my logic was to be more than wishful thinking, I needed a connection between the Driscoll girl and some other factor in the affair; or I had to rule her out of the case by labelling an outsider as her killer, someone who had no other connection to Jo-Jo Olsen or anyone else in this affair. Someone like Walsh. If someone outside all the other problems had killed Nancy Driscoll, then there would still be no concrete connection of Jo-Jo to any specific crime. I would be no worse off. If I could bring someone I already knew into a connection with Driscoll, I could be better off.
There was only one place to go for an answer — the people who had known Nancy Driscoll. Maybe the police had missed something. They do miss something sometimes, although not really very often. But this time they had been asking without knowledge of Jo-Jo. I went back into headquarters and up to Gazzo’s office. I got the addresses of the Brandt woman from the captain’s pretty sergeant, on Gazzo’s okay. I went back into the heat and hailed a cab. I had two addresses for the Brandt girl. I gave the office address, since it was only afternoon, and sat back with the window open and let the wind blow against my face and tried to think of nothing.
It did not work. It never does. My mind whispered around and around the same point — I was missing the key. I tried to think of Marty. That wasn’t hard. She was easy to think about. But my mind saw her as if in a silent movie, her body and her face moving, but the offstage voice whispering that there was a key to all this, and that I should have seen the key by now. One small, out-of-normal incident gnawed like a worm in my brain. I could not place it. And there were a host of larger hints. They talked to me, but they did not say anything. My mind was not receiving. I forced myself to think of anything.
The wind, I thought of the wind on my face in the oven of tall buildings and crowded people that was midtown New York. It was a strong, hot wind as the taxi moved as fast as it could. Like the sirocco that had blown through a room I had tried to sleep in once near Palermo. Or the wind from the desert on a stopover I had made in Libya. There is a sobering sense of mortality in thinking about places you have been, strangers you have lived among. All things pass, and you will pass with them. There is a sadness in it, and without sadness there is no sense of life. Life is limited, and there is all the good and most of the bad. Life is arrival, departure and change, and those who never move do not live.
The taxi driver had to turn around and tell me that we were at my address. I paid him and got out. Miss Peggy Brandt worked in the Union Carbide Building. It towered tall and glass and steel, high above Park Avenue. I went into the lower lobby and rode the escalator up to the real lobby and the elevators. I read the directory and took an express elevator to the thirty-second floor. Miss Brandt worked inside expanses of glass, chrome, leather, carpets four-inches deep, and the brittle smile of a blonde receptionist. The gorgeous guardian of the gate made me cool my heels. Miss Brandt appeared, and her face took on a shell the instant she saw me. Her eyes flickered to my empty coat sleeve. She was tall, pretty, and calm. I explained my business. She led me down a soundless hall, deep in carpet, to an empty conference room.
‘What do you do here, Miss Brandt?’ I asked. I was interested. It was a trick to keep her friendly, but I was interested, too. I have always been interested in women who are in the struggle between the womb and the brain. In some ways it is the war of our time, for women at least, and a lot of the time for the men too. If a woman wants only one or the other, there is no trouble — for man or woman. But if she tries for both, then the war is on, and there is a price to pay for her and for the man.
I’m an editor,’ she said. ‘I’ve already told the police all I know, Mr Fortune.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I just wanted a better picture of Nancy. I’m looking for a murderer, and I have to know who was murdered.’
Peggy Brandt crossed her very nice legs. She arched her back. Her breasts thrust out. I took it all in. She was not interested in me, I was much too old for the male she had in mind, but she automatically put herself on display, showed the wares, as women who still want to be the female chosen by the male always do. They were good wares.
‘I’ve tried to think,’ Peggy Brandt said, ‘but it’s hard. Nancy was a strange girl. No, she wasn’t strange, she was too damned usual. Have you seen her apartment?’
I nodded. Peggy Brandt saw that apartment in her mind.
‘She had to have it alclass="underline" the furniture, the prints, the proper place,’ the girl said. ‘Time was passing, you understand? She had seen too many movies about bright young married people. She read the women’s magazines and dreamed about living that fine, suburban life.’ There was an edge of scathing contempt in Peggy Brandt’s voice, mixed with a faint regret. She was in the war all right. Inside she must have looked like a battleground of maimed desires. ‘She was a poor girl, from a poor family out in Queens. Corona, I think. Semiskilled workers: beer and bowling, eat at the kitchen table, wear undershirts and make love in the back seat of the car. She had no skills, no career or desire for a career. She couldn’t afford the things she considered she had to have, so bought cheap imitations. The men she knew were all wrong; men like her father and brothers. When she found a man she thought would be right he never seemed to want to marry right away. The only men she met and wanted were men who had come from the same background but were fighting to get out and had ambitions and did not want to marry yet.’
‘Like Jo-Jo Olsen?’ I said.
‘Jo-Jo?’ the girl shook her pretty head. ‘I don’t know any Jo-Jo. I guess you mean this Joseph. I never knew his last name. Nancy did not talk much. I knew she had a man named Joe, younger than she. She liked him a lot, I think. You never could really tell with Nancy. I mean, the man himself wasn’t as important as the picture she had of the man and herself in a cosy marriage nest. But I think she liked him, at least she thought he was the man who could give her the life she wanted. I got the impression that he was in no hurry. She was. I never saw a girl in so much hurry.’