The Emerald Room had just opened when I walked in. Behind its anonymous facade it was a beautiful place of small rooms with deep leather booths, stiff white tables, decent light to see your food by, a real fire against the October chill, and a small, quiet bar. The maitre took one look at my old duffel coat, and came fast.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’d like to talk to the manager.”
“About what?” He was half-curt, and half-relieved. I was a nobody, but at least I wasn’t asking for a table.
“A former employee.”
“I handle the personnel. What former employee?”
“Francesca Crawford,” I said. “Or Fran Martin, I guess.”
He froze solid. “The police have asked all, and been told all we know.”
“Was there any trouble with her? How about men?”
“She was a quiet, efficient girl. We liked her. Now do I have to call the bouncer?”
His eyes flickered to my left where I saw a muscular middleweight in a loose suit watching us both. I left.
I stopped in a diner on Eighth Avenue near my office for my dinner. If you know an area of New York, you can learn the specialty of each diner, and can eat pretty well for little money by picking the right diner on the right day. Here, on Wednesdays, it was kidney stew, and I thought about Francesca Crawford while I ate. Gazzo was right, there wasn’t much to go on. Three weeks is a short time, and that’s all she’d had in New York as far as I knew. The roommate, Celia Bazer, might know more, but meanwhile I wanted to look a little farther back.
I saw no sign of anyone following me to the branch library. The library is a detective tool most people forget. It would tell me more about Mayor Martin J. Crawford. I got Who’s Who in America. The entry wasn’t long, Dresden was only a small industrial city:
Crawford, Martin James: Mayor, Dresden, N.Y. Born Dresden, N.Y., April 14, 1920. Ed. private schools, Cornell Univ., Cornell Law. M. Katje Van Hoek; four children. New York State Bar, 1945. Lawyer, Dresden City Council, 1948-50. Elec. New York State Assembly, 1950-56. New York State Atty Gen’s Office, 1957-62. Estab. law firm Vance, Crawford and Cashin, 1962. Elec. mayor of Dresden, N.Y., 1964. Dresden Plan (strict Welfare control), 1966. Dresden Crime Comm. estab. 1968, under dir. of Carter Vance and Anthony Sasser, with mayor as chmn. Re-elected 1968. Dresden Plan for welfare control opposed in various court actions, abandoned, 1969.
I closed the book, and thought about Mayor Martin Crawford. A local Dresden boy, and the schools indicated from a “good” family, probably some money. There was influence, and more than a little ability, in a plum job like City Council lawyer at twenty-five. Until 1962 he had gone the statewide political route. After 1962 it had been private practice and local politics-the bigger fish in the smaller pond. From the sound of the Dresden Crime Commission, and the “Dresden Plan” to crack down on welfare rolls, Crawford was an anti-crime crusader and a conservative reformer. Men who crusade and reform make enemies.
I looked up the number of the Eighty-fourth Street apartment, and called from the library. I got no answer. Either the police still had Celia Bazer, or she was off somewhere, and there wasn’t much I could do until I talked to her. I had a thousand dollars in my hands, and I thought about my girl, Marty-Martine Adair, who gives me a lot and gets little in return. I hadn’t seen her for a week. She was busy with a new show, a featured role at last, but maybe she was free tonight. I called the theater. Marty wasn’t free.
So I went to the bar where my friend Joe Harris was on duty, and had a few Irish whiskies. I even paid. I talked with Joe for a couple of slow hours, then went home. In bed I lay awake quite a while. I thought about the murder of the daughter of an anti-crime, conservative mayor. A girl wasn’t killed without a reason-or maybe she was. We live in a violent time, and I guessed that, statistically, more people were killed by unknown strangers than were killed for politics.
4
I woke to a gray day and a throb in my missing arm. I don’t often think about the arm, but it’s on solitary gray mornings when I do. I ask myself how a man goes on without a part of himself. I never get an answer.
So I got a cigarette, lighted my gas radiators, plugged in my ready coffee, and called Marty. She didn’t answer. I wasn’t surprised, she’d be too busy until her show opened. There was nothing to do but go to work, and over my coffee I tried to work up the necessary enthusiasm, or sense of duty.
I don’t like murder, I know it can’t go free, but there’s still no pleasure in an eye-for-an-eye, in adding more pain. In a world that lives with legal murder-call it defense, or protection, or a crusade for peace and justice, or what you will-it’s hard to work up real hate for some desperate, at least half-crazy fool. I can hate many people, but most simple murderers aren’t among them. When you hound them into the light, they’re too often pitiful creatures who acted more from fear than from hate or greed. I know that doesn’t help if you were close to their victim, and it wouldn’t help me if my child had been killed, but it’s still true.
The brownstone at 280 East Eighty-fourth was bleak in the gray morning, the wind blowing the last leaves from the trees that stood ringed by their little private fences. I had an odd vision-once man had skulked vulnerable among great forests of towering trees, and now the few trees stood vulnerable among forests of indifferent people.
My ring was answered this time, and I went up. A tall, full young woman waited for me. She was dark-haired, pretty, and more female than the dead Francesca Crawford. I guessed her age as twenty-five-plus, and her prettiness was mostly youth, so she didn’t have much time. She wore a blue robe.
“Miss Celia Bazer?” I asked.
“Yes. You’re more police?”
“Dan Fortune, a private detective.”
“But I don’t know anything! I told the police!”
“I just want to talk,” I said. “Can I come in?”
“In?” she said, stepped back. “Yes, come in then.”
Suitcases littered the living room, and a trunk stood open. I could see empty closets inside her bedroom.
“Home to Dresden,” she said. “I don’t stay here now. One year in the big city for fame and fortune. I didn’t make much fortune, and I don’t like this kind of fame.”
“You and Francesca were old friends in Dresden?”
“Not so old. A couple of years before she went away to college, a few months when she came back. Her father is the Mayor, mine runs a shoe store.”
She resumed her packing. The robe did little to hide her body. She didn’t seem to care. I sat down.
“Why was Francesca using a false name?” I asked.
“I don’t know. She never said. She just called me one day, asked if I had room, and when I had she moved in.”
“You don’t know where she’d been before here?”
“I know she was in the city, some other place.”
“Was she scared? Hiding?”
“Fran didn’t scare. Look what it got her. I scare.”
She went on working steadily as if she had to meet some specific time schedule.
“Did she have many visitors?”
“Carl Gans twice for dates. Mr. Dunstan came around a few times after her. That’s all. It was weird, alone so much.”
“Who are Gans and Dunstan? Can you describe them?”
“Carl Gans works at the Emerald Room. Your height, but heavier. A real rough face, and maybe forty-five. Mr. Dunstan, is a smaller man, same age, nice. He looks rich, but I don’t know what he does. His name’s Harmon, lives in Hempstead.”
“Was she involved with either of them? Or both?”
She stared at me. “If you mean was she making out with them, I wouldn’t know. She never let them bring her home up here. I think she was tough to get into bed. The tiger type, battle all men.”
“How about a big, blond man about thirty?”
She closed her last suitcase. “No, I don’t know.”
“A John Andera?” I described Andera.