Crawford said, “Blackwind had no dental work beyond his childhood, and his reservation had no records. The body was too decomposed to show scars. His brother said he had broken his left arm once, and there was a break in the left arm of the body. Only it was a recent break, and the M.E. couldn’t say if it was a new break or the old one rebroken. The reservation had no X-ray records.”
“But the left arm did have the break?”
Katje Crawford said, “He’s dead, Mr. Fortune. How could he have eluded such a manhunt so completely, and how could there have been a body his size in that lake just at the right time? If he was alive, he would have tried to see the girls sometime during the last fifteen years. He had a tremendous love of children, I hadn’t known that about him. In fact, I knew so little about him.”
“Would Francesca search for a dead man?” I said.
“Perhaps, yes. For her identity, for the truth about her history. She’d want to know about Ralph.”
Crawford said, “And she wouldn’t ask us, no.”
“Was Abram Zaremba connected to Blackwind at all?”
“Not at all, as far as I know,” Crawford said.
“How about a Carl Gans? John Andera? Harmon Dunstan? Or maybe Joel Pender, or Frank Keefer, or Anthony Sasser?”
“No, none of them,” Katje Crawford said. “Tony Sasser wasn’t even in Dresden before Ralph was dead.”
Crawford said, “Wait. There was a Captain Dunstan at Ralph’s trial, Katje. His commanding officer in Korea, captured with Ralph, remember? He testified for Ralph.”
“I don’t remember, Martin,” Katje Crawford said. “It’s been fifteen years now.”
“Are you sure, Crawford?” I said.
“Pretty sure, yes. Captain Dunstan.”
“All right, maybe Francesca went searching out her past and a dead father. Maybe it has something to do with why she was killed, and maybe not. It could be a coincidence, or she could have stumbled over something dangerous, or someone could even have made a mistake about what she was after,” I said to them. “But maybe we better remember one thing-if Ralph Blackwind does happen to be still alive, he’s got the murder of a prison guard hanging over him still. He might do a lot to not be found.”
None, of them had an answer for that. Katje Crawford sat looking at the floor when I left. Maybe she was wondering if none of this would have happened if she had told the girls about their father a long time ago.
In my car, I drove back to my motel and checked out. As I drove south and east through the rain, it all came into focus. Francesca had been looking for her father. Now Felicia was. Dead or alive, I didn’t know. Maybe that was what the grandfather, Emil Van Hoek, had had to tell Francesca-one way or the other.
17
I stopped for lunch on the road, and it was late afternoon when I crossed the Throggs Neck Bridge and drove across the Island to Hempstead. The rain had stopped, the day clear and bright with a touch of early winter in its snap.
There were two cars in Harmon Dunstan’s garage. No one seemed to be watching this time, but when I rang at the door, not much else had changed. Mrs. Grace Dunstan opened the door in almost the same shirt and slacks, and with the same Bloody Mary in her hand. I had the sensation of time standing still. She looked at me as if time did stand still for her-one day exactly like another, the same things in the same way with no surprises and no need to think about tomorrow because it would be today and yesterday over again. A weariness in her.
“Mr. Fortune,” she said like fate. “Come in then.”
Harmon Dunstan sat at the home bar in the immaculate living room, a drink in his slender hand this time. It was late enough now, maybe in more ways than one. Dunstan was less friendly this time, his thin, dark face slack and watchful.
“You sent the police last night?” the small man said.
“The Dresden police sent them. Your wife was in New Haven-just about unseen. Where were you?”
“Calling on a client in Westchester,” Dunstan said. “My bad luck, he wasn’t at home-called away suddenly.”
“Did you know Abram Zaremba?”
“No. I don’t like people coming here with threats.”
“I haven’t made any threats.”
“You-” He ended it there. The threat was in his mind, and he was smart enough to realize he had revealed that.
I said, “What did Francesca Crawford really want from you, Dunstan?”
“I’ve told you all I’m going to, Fortune.”
Grace Dunstan said, “Talk to him, Harmon. Your women are no real secret. Everyone knows we have an understanding.”
“Be quiet, Grace,” Dunstan said. It was firm, but gentle. Telling her that she didn’t know what she was saying.
I said, “What did she want, Dunstan? She made a play for you, yet she lost interest fast. Did she think you could help her to find out about her father?”
“Her father?” Dunstan said.
It wasn’t a question, no, not even rhetorical. It was footwork, something to say while he thought. He finished his drink, keeping busy to keep from talking. Grace Dunstan took his glass, and began to refill it. She worked with one hand, drinking her own Bloody Mary while she made his drink.
“Ralph Blackwind,” I said. “You remember him? You were his captain in Korea. You testified for him at his trial.”
“Yes,” Dunstan said, “I remember him.”
“Did Francesca ask about him?”
“Yes, she asked about him,” Dunstan said. His wife gave him his new drink. He drank. “I told her that Ralph had died fifteen years ago. That he got a raw deal, went to prison, and died. I told her that he was a good man who had deserved better, but that’s the way the ball bounces. She had her mother and a good life, let Ralph Blackwind rest in peace.”
“That’s all?”
“That was all.”
“But it means you knew who she was before she was killed. You knew she was Francesca Crawford not Martin.”
“Yes, all right, I knew. After she asked about Ralph, I knew. What does it mean? That was all a long time ago. She was a woman here and now, I liked her, wanted her. Ralph was old history. It was the present I was after.”
“So am I,” I said.
Dunstan said nothing.
“Poor Harmon,” Grace Dunstan said. “You didn’t get what you wanted this time, did you? This one got away.”
Dunstan turned on her. “I liked her, Grace. This was real. You sensed that, didn’t you? You’ve never cared about the women I chased before. You’re not interested in me, so the other women didn’t matter, and for that I thanked you. I need a woman, you don’t need a man, at least not me. So you didn’t care about my substitutes. They weren’t good, but they were better than nothing if I couldn’t have you. But this time you knew it was different.”
“Did I?” she said. “Maybe you’re right, but she’s dead, and that ends it, doesn’t it? You’ll have to settle for what we have until next time. I’m sorry, really I am.”
“Sorry enough to come to my bedroom sometimes?”
She turned away, sharply.
I said, “You have separate bedrooms? Then your alibis for Francesca’s murder are zero. It’s a big house, with separate bedrooms. Either of you could come or go without being seen or heard. You can’t prove where you were when Francesca was killed. No more than you can prove where you were last night.”
Dunstan was silent. “Can most people prove where they were when you ask them about any given night?”
“It depends.”
“On what, Fortune?”
“Mostly on luck. The chance they were with someone.”
“Then we weren’t lucky,” Dunstan said.
Grace Dunstan said, “We never have been, have we, Harmon?”
I had the feeling of a man standing high on a cliff looking down at two people walking a solitary beach. No one else was anywhere, yet they walked apart. Each alone in the sea and sky, unable to move together no matter how much they wanted to, or even had to because there was no one else. They walked along side-by-side, but each alone. Each staring at the horizon for someone else to come along, any new face to talk to, to smile with. Yet no one would come, because, for them, there really was no one else. Neither anyone else, nor each other, so doomed to a kind of slow dance together that would end only when one or both were dead. Two people wanting each other, without mercy on each other, and needing each other maybe more than they even knew.