was the leader of today. A most efficient, strong man. I’m glad he’s dead, and I won’t let them make Walter like him!”
In her shapeless brown dress she looked like some fundamentalist preacher promising fire and brimstone. That’s just what she was. A fanatic. What else she was, I couldn’t say. Maybe she was on the edge of a private darkness, or maybe she was only a sensitive girl in a rapacious family. Fanatics do a lot of harm, but they do a lot of good, too. Maybe most of the good.
“Where were you on Monday, Miss Radford?”
“At work. I’m an officer in the Society of Economic Missions. Our work is to correct the wrongs of exploitation in colonial countries.” She gave me an appraising look. She knew what I was asking. “It’s in the East Fifties. I was there all morning. I came home on the train after Walter.”
“Do you know about any problems your uncle had?”
She shook her head. “No, not really. I did hear Mother say once that Jonathan was becoming a night owl in his old age, but I don’t know what it means. He did seem to take longer business trips recently.”
“Night action and longer business trips? But you don’t know if he was involved in something unusual for him?”
“No, but I wouldn’t be surprised by anything Jonathan was involved in,” Morgana Radford said bitterly. “Anything.”
“Do you know where I can find Walter?”
“Probably at that Costa’s gambling house. Jonathan closed it, but it opened up in the next town. Walter has to gamble, you see? He has to wallow. They did that to him.”
She was no longer talking to me. I left her staring at what had to be some invisible image of Walter Radford. I went back to the house where my taxi waited in the snow. Mrs. Radford was there. “You were speaking to Morgana?”
“Yes.”
She was silent a moment. In the forest some large night bird attacked a small animal. Mrs. Radford said, “She is a strange girl, withdrawn from us. It comes from having no father. She worshiped her only brother. She can’t let him grow up, mature. She sees mature strength as evil.”
There are always two sides, sometimes more, and all sides can be true. Strength can be mature. It can also be evil.
“Walter must assume charge now,” Mrs. Radford said.
“I guess so, Mrs. Radford,” I said. I was thinking that there were pressures in the Radford family. Whether they were a cause of Jonathan’s death, or only a result, I had no way of knowing.
I got into the taxi. Mrs. Radford stood in the snow in front of the house and watched me leave.
Carmine Costa’s casino was a big house on a back road with many small rooms inside. Some of the rooms were for relaxation and booze; six were for action. There were two roulette rooms, a dice room, a blackjack room, a baccarat layout, and a poker room. It was all open. No one cares much about other people gambling. In most police forces the vice squad is separate so that the other squads don’t have to arrest the gamblers and girls they depend on for so much information that solves bigger crimes.
There was little of the frantic madness of Las Vegas. The people here had plenty of money to lose if that would help them to pass the time. Still, there were tense jaw muscles and sweaty palms hidden in dinner jacket pockets. No gambler wants to lose. Not once, not ever.
Deirdre Fallon stood at the dice table as slim as a crystal doll. A white evening dress that fitted her curves from ankle to high neck left no question this time about her hips and breasts. Her hand rested on the arm of a slender man beside her.
He was like his dead uncle, but younger and smaller. He held his body in an arrogant attitude, but the pallor of his face was almost anemic. His dinner jacket was flawless, and there was a superior tilt to his chin, but his eyes were dark circles with brown chips small in the center. His attention was totally on the dice game, and his mouth had a loose, petulant cast.
“Miss Fallon,” I said.
She turned. “Are you following me, Mr. Fortune?”
“No, but it’s a nice thought.”
She wrinkled her nose at me, smiled. It gave me that twinge in my back. She touched the small man beside her.
“Walter. I think Mr. Fortune wants to talk to you.”
He turned fast as if afraid he might respond too slowly and make Deirdre Fallon angry. His shadowed eyes scanned me. He did not like what he saw, and he was not a good enough actor to hide it. Or maybe he didn’t give a damn.
“Fortune? You’re working for that killer? Damn you, he killed my uncle for his blood money!”
“I thought it was Paul Baron’s money?”
“Sure, Baron’s money, but Weiss came crawling to get it! Why don’t you find the money! Find it and you’ve got Weiss!”
His voice was loud, and people were looking at us. Deirdre Fallon put her arm around his thin waist.
“Walter is upset,” she said. “He feels his uncle was killed because of him, and…”
He squirmed. “Deirdre, don’t…!”
“It’s the truth, Walter,” she snapped.
“I know, damn it, but not to him!”
I was the alien, the outsider, in front of whom no Radford should ever drop the wall. Deirdre Fallon did not seem as worried about me. Maybe because she wasn’t yet a Radford. She wasn’t quite in the castle.
“Maybe you could tell me more about this money you owed to Paul Baron?” I said.
He seemed about to answer when the stickman tapped him. It was his turn to roll. He forgot me as if I had gone up in smoke. The dice were in his hands. His dull chip eyes shined. His mouth tightened, became firm, almost cruel. He was taller, as if he had gathered his muscles. He laid a hundred-dollar bill down.
“Shoot a hundred,” he said in a smooth, cool voice that had taken on a faint British accent. He rolled a four.
“Four the point,” the stickman droned. Hard point or easy, winner or loser, they were all suckers to the stickman.
“Another hundred rides on Little Joe,” Walter said. Except he barked it like an officer ordering a bayonet charge.
He was a man at war. A soldier for glory and victory. A man like his ancestors battling heavy seas and steaming jungles. He thrilled to the battle, and it was the game that mattered, not the result. Maybe Deirdre Fallon could bring him out. Maybe no one had ever helped him to find anything worth fighting for.
Deirdre Fallon was watching me. “You look disapproving.”
“A man has to get his kicks,” I said. “I guess Walters One, Two and Three were gamblers, too.”
“You don’t like the suggestion of aristocracy in the numbers?”
“I’m not much impressed by family. My grandfather would have been. He was arrogant about being a Fortunowski of Poland.”
She smiled a nice, open smile. “I would have liked your grandfather. Family is important in a chaotic world.”
“If the family has values.”
“The Radfords have many values. Mostly good ones. Walter simply hasn’t found the right values for himself yet.”
“And you mean to help him find them?”
She smiled again. “Perhaps reshaping men is a disease of women, but Walter loves me, and I’m going to like being a Radford.”
Before I could answer that one, Walter crapped out. I saw him deflate as the pot was raked away and the dice passed. His eyes were deep pools of loss. It wasn’t the pot he stared at, it was the dice in another man’s hands.
Deirdre Fallon took his arm. “We can have a drink and talk.”
His sorrowful eyes looked at her. It was as naked a look as I had ever seen. His whole face said that the dice
