dark, and still pretty. She was younger than Devine, but not that much younger. One of the Spanish Irish who never seem old until they suddenly become crones. There was no doubt that she was Carla’s mother.
“Sit down, Mr…?” Devine said.
“Fortune,” I said. “Dan Fortune.”
He brightened. “Irish?”
“It was Fortunowski. My dad edited it for modern readers.”
The woman’s voice was a whisper. “Is… is Carla in bad trouble? Has she… done something?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just trying to find her to ask some questions. It’s a case I’m on.”
“Case?” Devine said. “You’re a policeman?”
“Private.” I showed him my credentials.
The woman said, “She lives with some girls. On University Place. It’s a fine apartment.”
“Mr. Fortune knows that, dear,” Devine said gently. He leaned toward me from where he sat on a stuffed settee. “The others didn’t have any credentials. You said a case?”
“Your daughter might be a kind of witness, Mr. Devine. Do you know a man named Paul Baron?”
“No. We don’t know anything Carla does in the city. What kind of case?”
“Murder,” I said. “Maybe two murders. Blackmail, too.”
The woman made a sound. Just a sound without a name. Devine clasped his hands between his knees. He looked up and at me, and past me out a window. He had a view of the greasy water, and maybe a scow or a mud flat.
“They have to grow up, you know?” Devine said. “A child, ah, that’s a marvelous thing. Small, pretty, vulnerable and happy. No matter how they cry and you have to smack them, they’re happy little things. They run and jump and swing and throw themselves into the snow. It’s all so marvelous for them. I used to watch her and almost cry. They don’t know, children. About life, death, all that. But they grow up and they find out how short it is, life, and they want their share. It has to be that way. I always understood. Carla wanted a lot of things I didn’t want, her mother didn’t want, so she had to go and find them. You can’t give your child what you have, what you wanted. It’s natural. I never expected her to stay here.”
I said nothing. He wasn’t finished. The woman watched him with those dark eyes as if this were something they had talked about a lot. They had understood, decided that Carla was right, that the risks where worth it for her to live. They were right, of course, but it’s no easier to be right than wrong.
“I didn’t want her to stay up here,” Devine said. “When I bought the land back in ’thirty-three it was almost wild up here. All boats, open fields, and fishing. I like fishing. It’s an optimistic hobby. It was good for her as a child; she had a good childhood. She liked the house; we all did. It was what I worked thirty years to have, and I got it. Paid it off two years ago; it’s all ours now. That was what I wanted: a piece of land, a paid-up house, my own place. We’re boxed in now, and the water’s no good, and the fish are gone, and maybe I should have been told a paid-up house really isn’t much for a man to want, but you believe what they tell you when you’re young. It was a goal, as good as any, I suppose, and I got it.”
He looked at me. “I didn’t expect her to want to stay, though. They find out about life and they have to run off and grab for it fast because they’ve found out. It was right. It was my house, my land, I worked for it. It wasn’t what she worked for. She had to go and do her own work. You just hope she won’t get in too bad trouble. She could drown in the front yard. I wanted her to go. If I had another life, maybe I’d try for something else myself. Something I could take with me; like climbing a mountain or building a bridge in the jungle. Risk more, maybe. Only I hope she’s all right.”
The woman made the sound again. Then she closed her dark eyes. She seemed to sleep. Devine took a breath, unclasped his hands. They were squeezed white.
“As far as I know, she’s all right,” I said. “She may have lied to the police. If she did, she might be in danger. Not from the police. Tell me about the other two men.”
“One was a small man, thin. Kind of sandy hair. He came early before we were up. I didn’t like him; he kept looking all around. I told him Carla wasn’t here and hadn’t been. He was a bit arrogant, but nervous. He didn’t seem to know what to do after I told him she wasn’t here. He finally asked if I knew where she was. I told him no, and shut the door on him.”
“Did he have a car?”
“A green sedan, old. He seemed uneasy when he left.”
I described Walter Radford. “Was he like that?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I would have said older, but I’m not certain.”
“The second man?” I said.
Devine shook his head slowly. “Very different. That was when we began to worry. Two of them, and then what this second man was like. He looked like some animal, a bear. He hardly spoke at all. Just said her name: Carla.”
“Short, broad, with big hands and shoulders like a bull?”
“That’s him. I told him Carla wasn’t here. He pushed me away like a feather and went through the whole house. After he looked, he left. I thought of the police, but what had he done?”
“Did you tell either of them where they could find her?”
“No. I don’t know anywhere except her apartment with the girls.”
“Do you know a boy with a gray coupe? Thin, pale, long hair?”
“No.”
Mrs. Devine opened her eyes. “There was a boy like that. He came here with her once. He called a few times after.”
She got up and went out of the room. Devine and I sat. There were noises out of sight: drawers being opened and closed; the sound of rummaging. Then she came back. She carried a torn scrap of paper. She gave it to me.
“It was in a drawer with her things,” she said.
She sat down again in the same chair and closed her eyes. Devine watched her. I looked at the scrap of paper. It had a name and address: Ben Marno, 2 Grove Mews, 5-B.
I stood up, and Devine watched me.
“She’ll be all right,” I said. “If she comes home, or calls, send her to the police. Make her go.”
“Yeh,” Devine said. “I will.”
I went out to my car. As I drove away, the house was as clean and neat as when I had arrived. But it seemed smaller.
18
I raced the black clouds down from City Island and lost. When I pulled onto the Triborough Bridge, the interlude of sun was over, and the river was gray below. Downstream the lights were on in all the tall buildings. The wind came up, and a driving snow had started when I stopped around the corner from the East Sixty-third Street building.
I was crossing the lobby when Walter Radford and Deirdre Fallon came out of the elevator. She had changed to a black sheath, but her sable was the same. I wondered if Carla Devine had a sable. What was better, a quiet Cape Cod cottage or a sable? If I knew the answer to that, I’d be rich-or in an insane asylum. Walter wore a dinner jacket and a cashmere overcoat and looked like an adolescent going to a formal.
“Is there any way to keep you away from us?” Walter said.
“No.”
Walter reddened and clenched those anemic fists again. It seemed to be his reflex to any insult of any degree. Someday it would get him hurt. Deirdre Fallon touched his arm. He jerked back like a puppet. Maybe that’s what he was.
“Did you go looking for Carla Devine?” I asked.
“Go to hell,” Walter said.
“I wasn’t first at her parent’s house. I wasn’t even second. One of those ahead of me sounded like you.”
