Jonas went back to the telephone. Oster closed his eyes.
“George Tabor isn’t anxious to get turned loose, either,” Oster said. “He seems happy in jail. Safe.”
“Zaremba wasn’t nobody,” I said. “If I even might have killed Zaremba, I’d be scared. Mark Leland was his partner, and Leland was trying to wreck a big deal of Zaremba’s.”
“That project is all legal,” Oster said. “In three months we’ve found no tie between Leland and Commissioner Zaremba.”
“Zaremba fixed that,” I said. “But you know.”
“I work here, Fortune,” Oster said. “The Mayor pays my salary. I investigate crimes, not public business.”
“You like your job?”
“I have for fifteen years.”
“What’s your verdict on Mark Leland?”
“A man looking for a political edge. Digging for dirt. There’s two sides to any business, Leland may have had his side, but I don’t know why he was killed. A man like that makes a lot of enemies. We’re investigating his private life.”
“Muggers too? Investigating transients?”
“That’s right, standard procedure. Leland was stabbed on a public street in his car, his wallet was missing. We may never solve it, or maybe some hobo shows up with the wallet.”
“There was a witness.”
Oster shook his head. “Francesca Crawford’s description could fit ten thousand men. She picked no one from any mug book. She had no information on Leland except rumor. We followed every lead she gave us. Tabor knew nothing, Zaremba had an alibi, and the project is all okay.”
“So Francesca was no danger to anyone?”
“Not that we can see. She knew nothing important, and it’s been over three months. Who would be afraid of her?”
It was what had been said before-and it was solid. If Francesca had been a danger, the killer wouldn’t have waited three months to silence her. Whatever she might have known, she would have told everyone by then. Unless she had kept something back, and the killer had just learned that. It was a slim possibility. Why would she keep anything back?
“Zaremba was eager to know who hired me,” I said. “It’s possible he just knew who killed Francesca. No connection to Leland and the project.”
Jonas returned from the telephone. “You mean maybe he was protecting someone? Or blackmailing? What about that Anthony Sasser? He spends a lot of time around the Crawfords, he knew the girl, and he works with Zaremba. Not on the Black Mountain Lake project, but Sasser worked with Zaremba on other business.”
“Sasser killed Francesca?” Oster said. “Christ, Jonas, Tony Sasser is like an uncle to those girls. What reason?”
I said, “Francesca’s grandfather talked to her before she left town. How did the grandfather happen to die, Oster?”
“In bed, natural causes,” Oster snapped. “Emil Van Hoek was eighty-two, had a bad heart and emphysema. He was about to die for years. Don’t come here and beat bushes for straws!”
“We’ve got three stabbings, and a natural death,” I said. “They have to be connected. If not by business, then somewhere in their private lives. That includes the grandfather.”
Sergeant Jonas said, “Trouble in Zaremba’s organization?”
“A business organization, not a gang,” Oster said.
“Business that was always legal?” I said.
“As far as I know. Legal here,” Oster said. “Okay, a man like Zaremba is killed, you have to think of a power play, a business battle, but this hasn’t got the feel. Simple murder with Fortune left alive. It’s crude, messy, too open. No plan to it, and if it had been business there would have been a neat, careful plan.”
He was a better cop than he had seemed. As good as his job allowed in a small city where pressure and influence were the way men lived. And he was right.
“Hate,” I said, “not greed. A witness didn’t matter.”
“It looks private,” Sergeant Jonas agreed.
“Everyone has a private life,” I said.
We were all thinking about that when Oster’s telephone rang. It was New York for Sergeant Jonas. He didn’t talk for long. When he returned this time, he sat down.
“The Dunstan woman is out of New York,” Jonas told us. “Her husband says she’s visiting relatives in New Haven. He just got home himself maybe half an hour ago. We haven’t found your client, Dan, he’s not at his home. His office says he’s in Philadelphia on business. We had to roust the office manager out of bed to talk, and he says Andera isn’t due to call and report until tomorrow morning. His place is staked out.”
There was nothing more I could do now, and I was close to passing out again. I left Lieutenant Oster and Jonas sitting in silence, and went down to my car. I drove to my motel, and fell onto the bed.
13
In drugged sleep I dreamed of running down a long tunnel after my missing arm that floated always ahead of me, mocking me to be a whole man again.
I woke to a gray morning heavy with a feel of rain coming, and the scent of pine needles outside. I reached for a cigarette. Abram Zaremba had given me the dream. I had let him slap me without hitting back because his men might have been around. I had meekly drunk the brandy trusting to my brain that told me it wasn’t poisoned, instead of throwing it into his face because no man should ever crawl like that. If it had been poison, I’d have drunk my death for fear of possible death that just might be there in his hidden men.
Now I lay with the drug boiled out of me like the venom of a snake bite. Abram Zaremba had bitten me, and for a time I would feel that more was missing than my arm, but it would pass, a man goes on living with himself somehow. Zaremba, at least, would bite no one else with his moral poison, make no one else crawl to his power. In the end I had won-I was alive. But who had bitten the snake? It could have been anyone he had ever dealt with, but, like Oster, I had the feeling that this had not been any power murder, any “business” play. Zaremba had come alone to me in his arrogance. He had died alone without his “help” near him, his death as much a surprise to him as to everyone else. He had not expected danger, or he would not have come alone. If he had been in a power fight, that he would have known and come protected.
Unless he had not come alone, and one of his own men had killed him. That was not uncommon in his world. But, again, that would have been carefully planned, and there was something unplanned about last night’s murder.
Then, of course, it could have been George Tabor.
I heaved myself out of bed and went into the shower. I stayed under the hot water a long time. Partly to ease the pains from my bruises, and partly because I didn’t really want to start looking again. George Tabor said he had seen a woman, maybe young, and Felicia Crawford was somewhere. I didn’t want to track down Felicia if she had killed the man who had murdered her sister. But until I did find her I wouldn’t know if she had done anything or not. You have to risk the wrong answer to find the right answer. Unless you are ready to exist with no answer, just drift in a blind embryo of dead, passionless safety.
I dressed, slipped my old pistol into my pocket again, and went out for some breakfast. I had eggs, over light, and looked up the name of the “friend” Francesca Crawford had sent letters to with notes in them for Felicia. Muriel Roark was the name, and her address was listed. When I went out to my car, a cold October drizzle had started.
The address was in the University section of Dresden, an old area torn down and rebuilt into low apartments and residence halls. Muriel Roark lived on the second floor of a garden apartment where the shrubbery was already sodden with rain.
A dazzling brunette opened the apartment door. Small and round, with a bright face that made me want to sing for youth, and feel old at the same time.
“Yes?”
“Miss Roark?”
She nodded, smiled. “Have we met? I like your face.”
“Dan Fortune,” I said, smiled back. “I want to talk about Francesca and Felicia Crawford.”