He sat in the gloom of the cold basement room, unmoving in the half shadows. The sweat shone on his face like polished ebony. The face of a rat with his back to the wall, cornered. Protesting.
“I never see that chippie. Not me. How I know she was working my turf? You tell the cops that, okay? You tell the cops Duke Wiltkowski never nowhere near that chippie.”
He sweated in the cold cellar room. A depth in his wide eyes almost of pleading. Go away, leave him alone. Go away before he told what he couldn’t tell. Wanted to tell but couldn’t. Not yet.
“Where were you that night?”
“Right here. An’ with one o’ my pigs. All night. Milly-O. Me ’n’ Milly-O we was makin’ it most all night. You asks her.”
One of his prostitutes who would say anything he told her to say, to the police or to God himself. That desperate. An alibi he knew was no alibi. Sweated. Licked his lips.
“That Injun husband she got, maybe he done it. Hey, they all crazy, them Injuns! That there professor hangs in Irish Johnny’s. Hey, he got to of been playin’ pussy with her. I mean, a big-shot white guy down there. Hey, that there professor he got a wife. Maybe she don’t like that chippie, right?”
“How about Walter Ellis? He was out in the snow that night.”
The fear on his face became sheer terror. “I don’ know nothin’ ’bout Mr. Ellis! You hears. Fortune! Nothin’!”
Now he walked into Irish Johnny’s with the exaggerated swing and lightness of a dancer. Out in public, the big man. His face in the light a mass of crisscross scars. The new bandage dark with dried blood. He smiled a mouthful of broken yellow teeth.
“Saw it was you, professor. That your lady?” He clicked his heels, bowed to Dorothy Margon. A Prussian officer. “Duke Wiltkowski. My old man was Polack.” He nodded to me, cool and casual, expansive. An image to keep up and no immediate fear in sight. “Hey, Fortune. How’s the snoopin’?”
“Slow,” I said, smiled. “But getting there.”
“Yeh.” The quick lick of the lips, and sat down at the table, legs out in his Prussian boots. The silver cross at his throat reflected the bright tavern light. He surveyed the room with a cool, imperious eye. Looked at Dorothy Margon. “You been holdin’ out on the Duke, professor. You could do real business with that one.”
The Duke admired Dorothy’s long blonde hair, the low-cut black velvet dress that looked too expensive for an assistant professor’s wife, her breasts rising out of the velvet.
“It’s not what I do,” Fred Margon said.
Dorothy Margon tore a cardboard coaster into small pieces, dropped the pieces onto the table. She began to build the debris into a pyramid. She worked on her pyramid, watched the Duke.
The people were filling the tavern now. I watched them come out of the silence and cold of the winter night into the light and noise of the tavern. They shed old coats and worn jackets, wool hats and muddy galoshes, to emerge in suits and dresses the colors of the rainbow. Saturday night.
The Duke sneered. “Works their asses a whole motherin’ year for the rags they got on their backs.” He waved imperiously to a waiter. “Set ’em up for my man the professor ’n’ his frau. Fortune there too. Rye for me.”
Dorothy Margon built her pyramid of torn pieces of coaster. “What happened to your face?”
“Injuns.” The Duke touched the bandage on his face, his eyes fierce. “The fuckers ganged me. I get ’em.”
“Alma Jean’s husband?” I said. “The Cherry Valley bar?”
The Cherry Valley Tavern was a low-ceilinged room with posts and tables and a long bar with high stools. As full of dark Iroquois faces as the massacre that had given it its name. All turned to look at me as I entered. I ordered a beer.
The bartender brought me the beer. “Maybe you’d like it better downtown, mister. Nothing personal.”
“I’m looking for Joey Brant.”
He mopped the bar. “You’re not a cop.”
“Private. Hired by his mother-in-law.”
He went on mopping the bar.
“She wants to know who killed her daughter.”
“Brant was in here all night.”
“They told me. What time do you close?”
“Two.”
“When the snow stopped,” I said.
“We went to the sweat lodge. Brant too.”
“Good way to sober up on a cold night. Maybe Brant has some ideas about who did kill her.”
“Down the end of the bar.”
He was a small man alone on the last bar stool. He sat hunched, a glass in both hands. An empty glass. Brooding into the glass or staring up at himself in the bar mirror. I stood behind him. He didn’t notice, waved at the bartender, violent and arrogant.
“You had enough, Joey.”
“I says when I got enough.” He scowled at the bartender. The bartender did nothing. Brant looked down at his empty glass. “I got no woman. Crow. She’s dead, Crow. My woman. How I’m gonna live my woman’s dead?”
“You get another woman,” the bartender, Crow, said.
Brant stared at his empty glass, remembered what he wanted. “C’mon, Crow.”
“You ain’t got two paychecks now.”
Brant swung his head from side to side as if caught in the mesh of a net, thrashing in the net. “Lemme see the stuff.”
The bartender opened a drawer behind the bar, took out a napkin, opened it on the bar. Various pieces of silver and turquoise Indian jewelry lay on the towel. There were small red circles of paper attached to most pieces. Rings, bracelets, pendants, pins, a silver cross. Joey Brant picked up a narrow turquoise ring. It was one of the last pieces without a red tag.
“Two bottles,” Crow said.
“It’s real stuff, Crow. Four?”
“Two.”
I thought Brant was going to cry, but he only nodded. Crow took an unopened bottle of cheap rye blend from under the bar, wrote on it. Close, Brant’s shoulders were thickly muscled, his arms powerful, his neck like a bull. A flyweight bodybuilder. Aware of his body, his image. I sat on the stool beside him. He stared at my empty sleeve. Crow put a shot glass and a small beer on the bar, opened the marked bottle of rye.
“On me,” I said. “Both of us.”
Crow stared at me, then closed the marked bottle, poured from a bar bottle. He brought my beer and a chaser beer, walked away. The small, muscular Indian looked at the whisky, at me.
“Why was Alma Jean on the street, Joey?” I said.
He looked down at the whisky. His hand seemed to wait an inch from the shot glass. Then he touched it, moved it next to the beer chaser.
“How the hell I know? The bitch.”
“Her mother says she had to have a big reason.”
“Fuck her mother.” He glared at my missing arm. “You no cop. Cops don’t hire no cripples.”
“Dan Fortune. Private detective. Sada Patterson hired me to find out who murdered Alma Jean. Any ideas?”
He stared into the shot glass of cheap rye as if it held all the beauty of the universe. “She think I don’ know? Stupid bitch an’ her black whoremaster! I knows he give her stuff. I get him, you watch. Make him talk. Black bastard, he done it sure. I get him.” He drank, went on staring into the bottom of the glass as if it were a crystal ball. “Fuckin’ around with that white damn professor. Think she fool Joey Brant? Him an’ that hot-bitch wife he got. Business, she says; old friends, she says. Joey knows, yessir. Joey knows.”
“You knew,” I said, “so you killed her.”
There was a low rumble through the room. The bartender, Crow, stopped pouring to watch me. They didn’t love Brant, but he was one of them, and they would defend him against the white man. Any white man, black or white.