“Sit down,” she said. “Will you have a drink?”
“Irish if you have it,” I said.
She had it, and made the drink herself at a small bar in a corner. There had to be servants, but a patrician didn’t ring for the maid to make one drink for a single guest. Even the porch furnishings were rich antiques in fine taste. It was a taste that comes only from growing up with fine pieces, living with them, appreciating them. I don’t often feel like a peasant, but here I did. We’re not used to that feeling in this country because we have so little real aristocracy, and even they are becoming more “common man” these days.
She brought my whisky. “Now. You’ll say who hired you?”
“No one did,” I said. “Is Felicia home yet?”
“Felicia?”
“She came to New York to see me. She had a gun. She ran. I think she’s out to find the killer herself.”
Her face almost collapsed. She stood and rang a bell. A maid appeared.
“Is Miss Felicia home?”
“No, ma’am. She left this afternoon, with a suitcase.”
“Thank you, Paula.”
The maid left. Katje Crawford’s clenched hands told me that she wanted to ask a hundred more questions of the maid, but one didn’t ask private questions of a maid. When she sat again, the lines of her face had deepened into dark slashes. She sat very still for a minute or more, spoke to herself:
“How many daughters must I lose?”
There was no answer to that. She didn’t expect one. She listened to her own answers for a time. I drank my Irish.
“I think Felicia knows something we don’t,” I said.
She shook her head as if to clear a spell, and smiled at me apologetically, her silence rudeness to a guest. “I’m sorry, I’ll be all right. Knows something? What could Felicia know? You mean about Francesca? She would have told us.”
“Francesca wrote to her twice, Mrs. Crawford, asked her not to tell anyone.”
“Francesca wrote? I see. You think something in a letter?” she said. “But Felicia would have told us- now.”
“Maybe not. Felicia said that Francesca felt neglected, different, not loved. Felicia could be keeping faith.”
Katje Crawford winced. She was a dynamic woman, and her thoughts were mirrored in her face, her active body. An energetic, sinuous body younger than her age, and I felt her as a woman. An attraction. That doesn’t happen often to me on a case. But I was aware of Katje Crawford, of her strength. Maybe there had been more of her in her daughter than Francesca had realized. Too much, maybe.
“Yes, it’s true,” she said. “My fault, but not all mine. Francesca was combative, what Tony Sasser calls a ‘hardhead.’ But I wasn’t the mother to the twins I’ve tried to be to the younger ones. A young matron with her own interests and a rising husband makes a bad mother sometimes. Then, we just weren’t close, not alike. A streak of isolation in the girls, even Felicia. Still, you can’t blame the child. My guilt. What do I do now, Mr. Fortune? For Francesca, nothing. To catch who killed her won’t give me any sense of achievement. But what do I do for Felicia? Where is she?”
“Help me find Francesca’s murderer fast.” I said.
She nodded. “Yes. What can I tell you?”
“What you know about Abram Zaremba and the Black Mountain Lake project.”
“The project is a needed housing development. We’re growing too fast. What else should I know?”
“Francesca worked against it?”
“She had strong ideas on ecology. Is it important?”
“What about Abram Zaremba?”
“I don’t know him personally. My husband does, I think. Has all this some connection to Francesca?”
“Mark Leland had,” I said. “You know about him?”
“Of course I do,” she said, moved her lean hand in a sharp gesture. “We thought of that at once, Mr. Fortune, but Mark Leland was killed over three months ago. Francesca couldn’t describe the man she saw running from Leland’s car. Lieutenant Oster tried everything with her, she simply didn’t see enough. Some hired killer, anonymous, the Lieutenant thinks. Far away by now. What danger was Francesca to him?”
“Maybe none, but Mark Leland was investigating the Black Mountain Lake project when he was killed.”
She sat silent. Then, she got up and went to an inlaid side table, a beautiful piece of work by some eighteenth-century English craftsman. She took a cigarette from a jade box, and lighted it without waiting for me to fumble for my lighter.
“You think Francesca was killed because of that development? A few thousand acres of swamp land!”
“She was involved with Mark Leland in more than just seeing a man run from killing him. They’d met, talked.”
“Talked? Then tell Martin! Tell my husband, he knows about that project. Find out, Mr. Fortune!”
She came back to her chair, and her legs seemed to give way as she sat. “We have all we want or need, we hurt no one by it, but she had to be militant. Look for battles she was no part of. Man is a scheming animal, that’s what marks us, Mr. Fortune-we strive for ourselves. Perhaps it’s wrong, and perhaps it will kill us all, but it can’t be changed.”
The life in her face was animated even in despair and anger. I could feel her presence all the way down my back.
“There’s another possibility in Dresden,” I said.
“More?” She half-smiled. “You know your work, don’t you? Strange, one wouldn’t guess it to look at you.”
“A one-armed roustabout?” I said.
She shook her head. “The one arm is incidental. It gives you a piratical look, nothing more. No, it’s your dress and manner. You seem inconsequential, uneducated, but you’re not at all, are you? You know that my side table is eighteenth-century English, and good. I saw it in your eyes. People underestimate you, don’t they? They confuse a missing arm with a missing intelligence, and I think you foster that image.”
“It’s just me, Mrs. Crawford.”
“Perhaps,” she smiled. “What is the other possibility?”
“Frank Keefer.”
She nodded. “I know, but it was never serious. Francesca toyed with him, found him physically interesting. I expect he had other thoughts, but he’s a fool with grandiose ideas.”
“She dumped him just before she left.”
“Did she? I didn’t know, but would that make him kill her? She was the golden girl he wanted. Why kill his dream?”
“Maybe because he couldn’t have her?”
“Frank Keefer?” At another time she would have laughed. Now she only smiled. “He’s the stupid, dull type who never gives up. To admit that a woman was beyond his grasp, would never have him, would lower his self- esteem so much I doubt if he could consider that possible.”
“Would he kill to keep her?”
She hesitated. “I would say no, he hasn’t the necessary moral strength, but I suppose you never can be sure. Anyway, it’s Francesca who’s dead, Mr. Fortune. How would that mean-”
“Maybe Keefer made a mistake,” I said.
She was silent again. I stood up.
“If Felicia comes home, sit on her and call me, okay?”
The “if” seemed to weigh down the porch, but she nodded.
“Where can I find your husband now?” I asked.
“At a meeting of civic leaders at City Hall. He has to go to these meetings, but it’s a terrible bore for me.”
There was an annoyance on her face as I left, as if thinking of a lot of things that bored her.
