Her eye was still bruised, and I wanted to ask her why she stayed, but she wouldn’t really have an answer. Because we all need something or someone, and at least Frank Keefer was a good man when the lights were out, and that was better than a man who was good nowhere. She read my mind. It’s not hard.
She touched her eye. “He’s nice most of the time. He’s always disappointed, and then I’m here, and he lets me help him. He’ll support me, and he’ll stick, even if he strays sometimes. When his schemes blow up, he runs to me. We’ve got each other.”
They had each other, and the Dunstans had everything but. Take your choice, find the miracle of both at, once, settle for a little of each, or live alone. It usually works out.
Frank Keefer and his uncle, Joel Pender, were in the living room. Pender watched the TV morosely, and Keefer sat alone with a beer. All the mimeographed throwaways were still piled everywhere, and the mimeograph machine was covered and dusty.
“What happened to the throwaway scheme?” I asked.
“We printed them wrong, no one would pay,” Keefer said, shrugged. “Joel had the wrong sale date, we were a day late getting them out. Who could use them? We spent the advances, no one’ll pay us for another try. What the hell.”
There was no fight in Frank Keefer for the moment. Joel Pender was put together with different glue. His thin shoulders were squared where he watched TV, as if prepared to go on undaunted-something good would still come along.
I said, “You came from out west, Pender?”
“Wyoming. The other side of nowhere.”
“You came here less than fifteen years ago?”
“I forget,” he said.
I let it go for the moment, turned to Frank Keefer.
“You lied again about New York and Francesca, Keefer,” I said. “You met her, talked to her. You were seen.”
He drank some beer. “Okay, I saw her. I tried once more for her, she threw me out. That’s all.”
“No,” I said. “You’re not a fool, you knew you had no chance when she dropped you up here. You went down there because you and Pender were scared of what Pender had told her when he was drunk. You’d been trying to find out where she was to be sure she wouldn’t tell where she’d found out about her real father. You were scared of what the Mayor would do.”
I turned on Joel Pender. “You have a hold on Mayor Crawford, right? It’s what got you the city jobs. But you blurted it out to Francesca that night. What did you really tell her, Pender? Just that she wasn’t Crawford’s daughter, and who her real father was, isn’t enough to give you a hold on the Mayor.”
Celia Bazer and Keefer watched me and Pender. Keefer looked like he was enjoying watching Joel Pender squirm now.
I said, “I can tell Crawford you told the girl.”
Joel Pender was a man who never gave up. In a way I had to admire the tenacity of the little man.
“A deal? If I tell you, you keep quiet all the way?”
“All right,” I said. I didn’t think it mattered much.
Pender swore. “I was here long before fifteen years, more like twenty. In those days I gardened for old Emil Van Hoek. I knew Katje. She come home in 1950 with her tail down and her belly up. The Van Hoeks wanted her to stick with the Indian, make a go for the kids. Katje wasn’t having none of that, no sir. She wanted her share of the goodies. She took up with Crawford. He’d known her as a kid, but there was a big difference between a seventeen-year-old Van Hoek, and an eighteen-year-old married woman with twins. Crawford made his pitch, Katje said whoopee, but there was a problem, right?”
“She was married, had twins,” I said. “You can get an annulment with children if you try early enough, but it wasn’t easy even then.”
“Right, so they had to fake it and fix it all the way,” Pender said. “The Van Hoeks wouldn’t help, said they’d even fight it. That would have stopped it for sure. So Crawford moved it away to Utica, faked residence and witnesses, and fixed the judge, too. I was a witness for them. We all swore the Indian ran out on Katje before he was sent to Korea, swore he reneged on wanting kids, hinted she’d been alone long enough so the twins weren’t his. It worked, and that was my hold on Crawford. I mean, the fraud could be blown like tissue any time, all the sworn dates and facts were wrong.”
“The Van Hoeks kept quiet after opposing it?”
“Katje didn’t tell them until after she married Crawford. That left the Van Hoeks in a bind. If they talk, they hit Katje with fraud and bigamy. So what could they do?”
“Why did Crawford and Katje do it? Why not wait?”
“I figure Katje told Crawford no fun until the ring. I guess he couldn’t wait, right? I figure she was afraid he’d slip away to some eager broad in Albany. I think she was scared of the Indian, too, and didn’t want to wait and tell him she was through when he came back. I figure she thought if it was all done, she was remarried, he wouldn’t kick up a bad fuss for the reason the Van Hoeks didn’t-it would get Katje in real trouble.”
It was a good point. A man might fight if he came home and was asked for a divorce at once. But how many young men, in reality married only a few months and separated for years, would cause trouble against a fait accompli for children they’d never known, and a woman who was already with another man? And passion makes people do many things, take risks.
“That’s what you knew?” I said. “All of it?”
“That’s enough,” Pender said, “especially after they used the Indian’s caper against Katje and the girls to make him keep quiet, too. The Indian could have crucified them all the way, in and out of court, if he hadn’t shot old Emil Van Hoek. I mean, he was Katje’s real husband still, right, with the annulment a fraud? Only he shot Emil Van Hoek, and that made it a felony-kidnapping, and gave Crawford the weapon to send the cops after them. When the Indian was caught, Crawford could make a deal-he’d defend the Indian, get the kidnapping charge dropped, if the Indian kept quiet about the annulment.”
Pender reached for Frank Keefer’s beer, took a drink, wiped his thin mouth. “What would you of done? I guess the Indian didn’t care by then, and kidnapping got the chair, at least life. With him shooting old Van Hoek, the annulment fraud wasn’t going to help him if Katje swore he’d taken her and the kids by force, with a gun. So he went along, and they got all the charges dropped except the lesser one for shooting old Van Hoek. That they couldn’t drop all the way, and it sent the Indian up.”
“You told Francesca all of that?”
“I told her, damn me, and Frank went down to try to make sure she kept quiet about where she heard it. Crawford never wanted it to come out, even if the Indian is dead.”
“No,” I said. “The Indian isn’t dead, Pender.”
The dark, scrawny man blinked like an owl. “Not dead? You’re crazy. He got killed in that prison break.”
“No,” I said. “That’s what old Emil Van Hoek told Francesca-Ralph Blackwind hadn’t been killed fifteen years ago. Blackwind had written him once, maybe feeling bad about the shooting, who knows? The old man never told until Francesca came to him with your story. It was like bowling pins, Pender. Once the first one fell, they all came down. You blew it open.”
Pender didn’t speak. His thin face looked as if he couldn’t speak. He was thinking about Mayor Crawford, and his future, and that his drunken anger had started a chain that had led to Francesca Crawford’s death. If it had. Maybe he was thinking more about a live Indian, a real father, and a dead daughter.
“Alive?” Frank Keefer said. “Fran was looking for him, and she knew about the fake annulment? I mean-”
“Blackwind knew about the annulment eighteen years ago,” I said. “You’re both sure that was all Francesca knew? What did she say about her father when you saw her the day she died, Keefer?”
“That I could get lost for good, that she’d found her real dad’s trail. She didn’t say he was alive, but she said that someone was watching her. That was why she moved in with Celia. She didn’t know who was watching her, but that businessman pal of Mayor Crawford’s, Tony Sasser, had come to talk to her.”