Her face became serious. “Come in.”
She ushered me to a long couch in a small living room. The couch was covered by a throw rug in the European style. All the furniture was old, covered with throws, and marked as her own. She flopped on a great, shapeless sack in the center of the room, showing smooth, hard thighs that had muscles. She saw my eyes looking at her legs.
“I’m a dancer,” she said, raising her leg out stiff so I could see the muscles cord. “I teach modern dance at the University, a graduate fellow. What about Francesca?”
“You were good friends?”
“We understood each other. She was a private person, so am I. With her it was her scar, her identity. With me it’s my dancing-no one touches that, not ever.”
“You can’t be touched?” I said. I liked this girl-woman.
She laughed. A warm laugh. “All I’m careful about is my muscles. You’re looking for who killed Fran?”
“And for where Felicia is,” I said. “You had some letters from Francesca? You showed them to Felicia?”
“No, I didn’t show her my letters. I gave her two notes enclosed for her. I didn’t read her notes, either.”
“Damn,” I said. “You can’t tell me anything about what was in those notes to Felicia?”
She pulled her knees up to her chin. There was something pure and innocent about her body and its free actions.
“No,” she said, “except that the first one was from somewhere out west. The letter I got was mailed from Chicago, but Felicia said the note had been written in Arizona, or Colorado, or somewhere like that.”
I remembered the Indian jewelry. “You can’t say which?”
“No, I’m sorry. The second letter was from New York just after Fran moved in with Celia Bazer.”
“She wrote she was with Celia Bazer?” I said, sat up. “Did anyone else know that up here?”
“Only Frank Keefer. He’d come around a few times after Fran left to ask if I’d heard from her. I guess he was pretty unhappy about losing her. Anyway, about two weeks ago was the first time I could tell him anything, so I did.”
“That Francesca was living with Celia Bazer?”
“Yes.”
“Where does Keefer live?”
She told me. I stood up. She watched me, and seemed to stretch. Not a dancer showing her muscles this time. She stretched her whole slim, curved body.
“You have to leave?”
“Yes.”
“How did you lose your arm?”
“I usually say in the war,” I said. “But I really lost it in a fall into the hold of a freighter I was robbing when I was sixteen. I got away, but I lost the arm.”
“Will you come back again?” she said. “Come back. Call me first. In the evening.”
I could still see her lying there on that shapeless sack as I went down the stairs.
Frank Keefer’s house was in a middle-class tract on the eastern edge of Dresden. There were flower beds around the small house as if someone spent a lot of time in the garden. I didn’t think it was Keefer, but you never can tell-axe murderers have grown prize roses. The garage was empty, but I saw movement in the house.
Celia Bazer answered my ring. She had a discolored left eye, and her face was puffy. In the last few days she had changed from big city career girl to a small city woman, not even as pretty suddenly. She wore an old house dress, and her eyes were vacant as if she had been thinking of something important when I surprised her.
“You?” she said, groped for my name. “Mr. Fortune?”
“Yes. Can I come in?”
“Here?” she said. Her voice was vague, distracted, almost drugged. “I mean, have you found who killed Fran?”
“I’m still looking,” I said.
An alarm must have sounded in her head. “How did you find me here?”
“I didn’t. I want Frank Keefer. Is he home, Celia?”
“Frank?” Now her eyes were wary. “No. Why do you want Frank?”
“I’ll tell you inside,” I said, and gently walked her backward into a small living room. She didn’t resist.
There were chairs and sofas in the living room, but everything was hidden under piles of paper, and a mimeograph machine stood on a table. The room was shabby, but not from poverty as much as from neglect. I saw a littered kitchen through an open archway, stacked with the same mimeographed pages.
I said, “I know about you, and Frank, and Francesca. Where is Frank?”
“I don’t know. He never came back last night. After he did this,” she touched her battered eye, “he went out with Joel.”
Her voice was a monotone, as vacant as her eyes. “A year I was away, and he whistled, and here I am. He’s a bastard, and a fake, but he turns me on. It’s that simple, I guess, even with blackeyes. Some women have no brains. I don’t know, I feel… safe with Frank, you know? Without Joel maybe…”
She trailed off, her voice almost wistful, like some beaten-down wife who dreamed of her man being better some day, sure that underneath he was a good man or why would she want him?
“You know where they were all night?”
“No. Part of their new scheme, I guess.” She nodded toward all the piles of literature. “Joel talked a couple of local shopping centers into a throwaway newsletter, said he could get it into the northwest suburbs, the rich people. He told them he could get a special deal because he’s with the city, everything cut-rate. All the merchants in the centers take ads, and Frank runs the things off on the mimeo. I hope they make the price of the ink.”
“You don’t distribute leaflets at night,” I said.
“Maybe they got into a poker game, or another deal.”
“Do either of them know Abram Zaremba?”
“Commissioner Zaremba? You mean personally? Maybe if they shined his shoes once.”
“They know anything about the Black Mountain Lake project?”
She nodded. “Joel got the Mayor to appoint him an inspector of the drainage district out there, and he got Frank in to sell lots. Only it was hard to sell them so early, Frank didn’t like the job.” She stopped, surprised. “What’s that got to do with Francesca?”
“Maybe a lot, Celia,” I said. “Frank lied about not knowing Francesca was with you in New York.”
“Lied?” Some life came into her voice as she realized the only way I could have known Frank Keefer had denied knowing that Francesca was in New York with her. “You were at that hotel. You followed me there. What makes you say Frank lied?”
I told her what Muriel Roark had told me. “Frank admits he was in New York when Francesca was killed.”
“But he never saw her.”
“Didn’t he? He was asking about her since she left. He’s not a man who gives up, is he? He went there to see her, Celia. After she was dead he turned to you, maybe to cover up.”
“No, he loves me. All right, he lives big dreams, so if he could marry Francesca, swell, but she dropped him.” Her monotone was flat again. “Anyway, he wouldn’t kill her.”
“Unless maybe he made a mistake, Celia?” I said. “You said that in the hotel. A bad mistake, you said.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“Yes you do,” I said. “Francesca died in your bed. She had slept in your bed that night. A mistake, maybe, made by someone who wanted to kill you not her?”
She had thought about it. “My bed was better, that’s all.”
“Frank Keefer wouldn’t have known that. What could you have told Francesca that would have finished Frank with her for good if it wasn’t over already?”
She shook her head.
“I’ll find out somehow, Celia. I have the police on my side, they’ll check out his life with a microscope. If he tried to kill you, got the wrong girl, you’ve got to know one way or the other, don’t you?”
She shook her head again. Wildly, like a rag doll, but it had no meaning now. Her monotone cracked.
“He was in prison once for wife-beating,” she said, her voice so low I could barely hear it. “In Pennsylvania. He’s still got a wife there. A boy, too. He sends money sometimes. I don’t care. I didn’t like New York, I didn’t like the men there. I just want Frank.”
“He’s married, but he’d have married Francesca?”