“Anthony Sasser talked to Francesca in New York!?”
Keefer nodded. “She said he came to bring her home, but she told him she was looking for her real father-that was her home.”
“When was Sasser there? Damn it, why didn’t you tell that sooner! When was he there?”
“Maybe a week before she got killed,” Keefer said. “And I don’t get mixed with Tony Sasser, no sir. I live here.”
I went out of there fast.
But before I left, I saw the look on Joel Pender’s face that told me that the uncle didn’t think that any of them were going to do much living in Dresden anymore. On my way, I passed all those piles of useless mimeographed sheets. All a day late. It would always be a day late for Frank Keefer and Joel Pender, and they lived in perpetual fear-the fear of failure.
Celia Bazer had a fear too-the opposite fear. It was there in her eyes-the fear that Frank Keefer might lose his fear, that he might succeed some day. He was hers only in his failure, the failure her only insurance that he would always need her.
My fear was Anthony Sasser.
23
The Crawford mansion was alight through the trees in the steady rain. I parked in front. A maid opened the door, took me into the living room. The Crawfords were there, both of them-Katje Crawford in a dark red slack suit that suited her lean body, and Crawford drinking.
“Felicia was here,” Crawford said. “She told us.”
“Is she still here?”
“No. She went to a motel with that young Indian,” he said, and shook his head. “It’s almost impossible to believe.”
I said, “That Ralph Blackwind’s alive after you both tried to bury him eighteen years ago?”
Katje Crawford sat up straight. “He attacked us. He almost got the girls killed. He shot my father. I had a right to my own life. We had made a mistake, he should have seen that. Instead, he went crazy, and afterwards Martin defended him, got him less punishment than he deserved.”
“You cut him out of your big life like a wart,” I said. “The annulment was a cheat and a fix. Crawford had the money and power to do it. You fixed everyone, but Blackwind came home, and you had to fix him somehow. Your hands were dirty, and he could sink you, but you were lucky-he did a stupid trick, and he shot your father. So Crawford made a deal. Some deal! You got silence and your fine, rich life, and Blackwind got ten-to-twenty years in prison! A kid who’d just spent two years in a prison camp, was half out of his mind, couldn’t take more prison so flipped and made a break, killed a guard, and finished himself. Only he fooled you, he didn’t die.”
Crawford was up, pacing, and I saw that ineffectuality in him again. There was a kind of anguish in his fleshy face, as if he was seeing himself eighteen years ago, younger and running fast with ambition.
“He didn’t care, Fortune,” he said. “I made the deal, yes, and it wasn’t fair, but he didn’t care, and what else could I do? I remember he said, ‘Katje wants you, not me. That’s it. Take her.’ Could I let it all ruin everything we had, all we would be? The children too? I swear to you that I got him the lightest sentence anyone could have under the circumstances. He’d shot Emil Van Hoek, almost killed him.”
Katje Crawford smoothed her slim red slacks. Her face was like stone, and yet there was conflict in her eyes, as if she was remembering not only the trouble eighteen years ago, but also those good months in New York over twenty years ago.
“He talked about the communal ranch we would build out in Arizona by getting water from the white ranchers,” she said. “He wanted to take me to that wilderness of snakes. Sometimes a person doesn’t know what he or she wants until suddenly the choice is there. I realized I wanted Dresden, with all the comfort and privileges that meant. When I found I was pregnant, I was doubly sure. My children raised in a hogan among lizards? No!”
I said, “The girls you were so close to? Never too busy with your privileges to mother them?”
She took a cigarette from another of her jade boxes, lit it. “We don’t always know how things will turn out, Mr. Fortune, and don’t judge me! I corrected a mistake, and I needed the annulment to make sure of Martin. I wanted to marry at once, settle it, and that annulment bound us together even more-we were both guilty of fraud and bribery. What happened later wasn’t our fault.”
“No, he played into your hands,” I said. “He was a violent man, and he probably still is. Maybe more violent now. You must have been really scared when you found out he was alive, and maybe not so far away.”
“Afraid? Why?” Katje Crawford said. “If he is alive, he hasn’t come near us for fifteen years. Why would he now?”
Crawford said, “We didn’t know he was alive until Felicia told us tonight. How could we have known?”
“Because Anthony Sasser found Francesca in New York a few weeks ago, and she told him.”
“Sasser?” Martin Crawford said. “Found Francesca?”
“He talked to her. She told him she was looking for her real father, so you had to know then that Blackwind was alive.”
“No,” Crawford said. “Sasser never told us. No.”
The big Mayor looked at his wife. Katje Crawford stared back at him with a kind of shock, immobile for a moment.
“He didn’t tell me,” she said.
I said, “You didn’t send him to find her?”
“No,” Crawford said, “why would we? She was an adult.”
The implication didn’t have to be said, but I said it:
“Then he had his own reasons.”
I let the words sink into them, and then I said, “Felicia might know all that Francesca knew. Some of it, anyway. What motel is she in right now? How far?”
“The Delaware Motel,” Martin Crawford said. “Not far.”
Katje Crawford stood up. “I’ll find Tony, talk to him. I’ll find out.”
She started from the room before I could move. She walked fast with her athletic stride, and was gone before I realized what she was doing. I began to go after her.
“Let her go,” Martin Crawford said.
The pistol in his hand wasn’t small. It was a Colt Agent, a pocket. 38 with a two-inch barrel and a lot of power.
“Let her go to Sasser,” Crawford said. “She’ll find out, or stop him, or whatever has to be done. Only her, Fortune.”
He sat down slowly in a big antique chair, the pistol still steady on my chest. I remembered the first time I had met Anthony Sasser in Dresden-when he had been alone in this big house with Katje Crawford while Crawford was at a meeting.
“They’re lovers?” I said. “Your wife and Sasser?”
“Yes,” Crawford said. “I’ve known for some time. He’s younger, stronger, and he’ll go farther than I will. In a way he almost runs the city now, I really work for him. She’s been bored with public life for some time. Tony is much more exciting-in business and in private.”
“She gets what she wants?” I said.
“Usually,” Crawford said, his voice toneless as if he didn’t much care. “There are two basic kinds of women, Fortune. One kind wants ‘male’ attention, needs to have a man want her. She wants his ‘maleness,’ and she’s likely to end up with a hard life. Those women marry the dreamers, the searchers, the wanderers who follow their own destiny all the way. Men who might be gamblers or tycoons; daredevils or hobos; heroes or criminals. It’s potluck, win or lose.
“The other kind of woman wants everything a man can give her except his ‘maleness.’ Status, money, place, appearance, social graces. She judges a man by the position he can give her in the world, his potential to make her life a success. She doesn’t care about him as a male, that’s peripheral, and she’ll do better in life because she chooses the man who will best give her what she wants-the externals. A cool woman concerned with form not substance, and a weak male who will work for form not substance. Katje chose me, and she got what she wanted. I’m a success; important, rich, with position and power. Only sometimes, when such a woman nears forty, she suddenly wants a ‘male,’ and finds she doesn’t have one. She’s killed what maleness her man had, and now she has no man. So she finds one. The late passion, the excitement she never wanted.”