9
City Hall was in an old, downtown section of Dresden. An ugly graystone building in late Victorian style. Floodlights bathed it in a glare, and the lawn was manicured in an attempt at some dignity.
The chill night, the big building in its square, and the dark, narrow streets leading off into a silent, deserted black made me think of London. I could almost feel the fog, hear the mellow musical sound of a London police whistle.
A night guard at a desk inside called up to the Mayor’s office for me. Two silent black women mopped the lobby floors. It was dim and cold in the lobby, bare, as if designed to prove that the city fathers did not spend taxpayers’ money on frivolous decoration. (We seem to insist that city employees work with none of the shine and comfort of private companies, but happily swallow the plush homes and privilege city leaders have in private life.)
I found the Mayor’s office on the second floor where he waited for me alone now. It was a big, austere office, and Martin Crawford seemed smaller behind his desk. He also seemed tired. Maybe it was too much civic-minded meeting.
“You have some news, Mr. Fortune?” he asked.
He was the first one in Dresden who’d asked that, who hadn’t been more concerned with who my client was.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We don’t have much to work with.”
He nodded. “The New York police sent a man here. But where do you look for what killed a girl out in a jungle?”
“She’d left home before. Four years in college, even the summers away. She knew how to be alone on her own.”
“College, even a big California farm, is a lot different from New York, Fortune.”
“It is,” I agreed. “Have you heard from Felicia?”
“Felicia?” he said, exactly as his wife had. They say people grow like each other in a long marriage. “What should I have heard from her? She’s not mixed in this!”
I told him what I’d told Mrs. Crawford. “Whatever it is she knows, or thinks she does, she’s scared enough to carry a gun and trust no one.”
“But what? Something about Francesca?”
“I’d say so,” I said. “Something Francesca told Felicia she wouldn’t tell you or your wife. Your wife admits she was apart from the twins. Were you apart from them too?”
His blue eyes seemed to lose light, and his polished public face wentloose like a man who is unsure. There was something about the way it happened that said it had happened before, often. A private face now that hinted at confusion, weakness, ineffectuality. As if his public manner was a facade, a front of confidence, and under it he was hollow and accustomed to having someone else make the real decisions that he carried out with his public smile and lawyer’s eyes.
“I was busy, up in Albany so much,” he said. “I left them to Katje. Then, later, it seemed too late. At least for Francesca. I leaned over backwards to get to know her. She never helped. Yet I think I loved the older girls best, in a way.”
“Felicia could be in danger,” I said bluntly. “Francesca was killed for a reason, and the killer won’t take a chance on Felicia whether she knows anything or not as long as she’s running around acting as if she does.”
“What can I tell you?” Crawford said. “What do I know?”
“About Abram Zaremba and the Black Mountain Lake development,” I said.
His manner changed as if a steel rod had gone up his spine. The impression of softness, indecision, vanished. Whatever gave him that aura of ineffectuality wasn’t in his official work. The lawyer faced me now.
“What concern is that to you?” he snapped.
“It concerned Francesca, right? She fought it?”
“Conservationists! A bunch of juveniles and old women who don’t have any idea of reality. A mayor has many things to consider, Fortune. It was my opinion that the benefits to the city, the desperate need for housing, out- weighed the ecological factors. That was my decision, and it stands unless the people throw me out, which is their right.”
Before he finished his speech, a door to the left opened, and Anthony Sasser stepped quietly into the room. The businessman got around. I wondered if he’d been listening all along in an adjacent office? He moved with ease, a man in his own backyard. He sat down to my left, silent and alert. I ignored him, faced Crawford.
“Who else objected to the project besides conservationists?” I said. “Maybe the taxpayers? Or maybe they would object if they knew how the deal was arranged? You built a dike at public expense, maybe paid Zaremba even for the land you built the dike on? You put a nice road into Zaremba’s lodge. You created a drainage district so the taxpayers can buy bonds, the taxpayer foot the whole drainage bill? Drainage that will make useless land a goldmine?”
“It’s a proper arrangement under our conditions,” Crawford said. “Land is limited here. Zaremba’s land, when reclaimed, will benefit the whole community.”
“But first it benefits Abram Zaremba-a lot,” I said.
Anthony Sasser spoke from my left. “Abram Zaremba is a businessman, he made a smart investment. It’s all legal.”
“You in on the project?” I asked Sasser.
“I wish I was,” Sasser said. “It’s a good deal for everyone. Marty there is right.”
“Mark Leland didn’t think it was a good deal for everyone, did he?” I said.
Sasser tilted his chair back and rocked in the quiet office. I had a feeling that I had just started walking on eggshells. Mayor Crawford’s voice was low and smooth. The lawyer addressing a jury he wanted to impress with his gravity, but firmly set straight at the same time.
“How do you know that, Fortune?” the big Mayor said. “The police here don’t know what Leland was doing in Dresden. We found no documents, and his lone partner doesn’t even know what Leland was really doing. If you have information about Leland, you should tell our police and Crime Commission.”
“You don’t know he was investigating the Black Mountain Lake project?” I said.
“No,” Crawford said, “we don’t. Why would he, there’s nothing to investigate. How do you think you know?”
“Leland talked to Francesca about it. Didn’t she tell you?”
“No, she didn’t,” Crawford said, “not a word.”
“She told Felicia.”
Sasser said, “Hearsay. Maybe Felicia got it wrong. My Crime Commission found no evidence of what Leland was doing, and nothing wrong with the project. I’m not in the project, but I’ve worked a lot with Commissioner Zaremba, and I’d be careful about accusing him or the city government.”
His voice was matter-of-fact, but I heard the warning in it. So did Martin Crawford. His lawyer manner slipped into a smile, man-to-man, smoothing the ruffled waters.
“There are always nuts who think every public deal has to be crooked, Fortune,” he said, friendly. “They smell a shady deal when there isn’t one. It’s a way to get a reputation with the public. You get used to that in government.”
“This nut was dangerous enough to someone to be killed,” I said. “Someone thought there was trouble around.”
Anthony Sasser said, “No one knows why Leland got killed. Maybe he got in trouble someplace else.”
“A coincidence he was killed here, and that Francesca saw the killer, and now she’s dead?”
Crawford said, “The police, and Tony there, questioned her carefully, showed her every mug book. All she saw was a man running, her identification was useless.”
“Maybe she saw more than she said, or someone thought she had,” I said. “You seem pretty anxious to think Francesca wasn’t mixed up in the project.”
Crawford let a silence stretch for a time as if he were thinking about Francesca and the project-a daughter
