I swayed against a table. His white shirt was dark with blood in the dim light. He didn’t hear me, no. He didn’t hear anything. Zaremba was dead. In that chair, bloody and dead with a rigid death smile.
I held onto the table. I breathed to clear the drug from my head, and stepped closer. I touched him. He was still limp. Less than half an hour. The blood had dripped from his chest onto the floor under the chair, and had dripped nowhere else. Someone he had known then? Killed in that chair facing his killer, unaware of the danger?
With me lying drugged on the floor not ten feet way? The killer unconcerned about me? Or maybe very concerned, hoping I’d be accused of Zaremba’s murder?
I began to search around the room, the floor, the furniture. My legs were steady now, the adrenalin pumping inside me. I found nothing that meant anything to me. No trace of blood, not a book out of place. There was nothing to do now but call the police. My hand was on the receiver when I heard the footsteps outside, and a key turned in the door. I had my gun out when George Tabor walked in. He stopped, blinked.
“Fortune? You’re still-”
“You expected me to be somewhere else by now?” I said.
Tabor stood in his coat. “Zaremba said he’d take you with him somewhere, talk to you.”
“Did you ask how he planned to ‘talk’ to me?”
“No,” he said.
He didn’t seem to care about my pistol. Still in his coat, he walked to the television set, turned it on, like a lemming obsessed only by the sea somewhere ahead. As if his whole consciousness was bound by the TV set and the simple world on the small, gray screen. No disappointments, no traumas, nothing to have to depend on for joy or happiness but the TV-a friend and lover that wouldn’t let him down.
I said, “You must have been awfully afraid of Zaremba.”
“Very afraid,” he said, his eyes on his safe images on the screen. “I’m a sane man. I-”
My words must have suddenly struck him, the tense-“You must have been awfully afraid…” He turned, stared around the room, aware that I wasn’t supposed to be here, and that if I was… He saw Abram Zaremba dead in the chair.
“You killed him?” he said. “You killed-”
“No,” I said. “I had no reason. I want answers, and dead men don’t help me. I might have defended myself, but Zaremba had no weapon, he must have been alone. But you were scared of him, and you just used your key to get in. You must have locked the door again when you went out, so who else could have come in and killed him except you, Tabor?”
“Me?” He still stared at the dead and bloody Zaremba as if afraid the dead man would rise up and hurt him. “Locked? The door? I don’t know. Did I lock it? I-”
He stopped, blinked again as if my words were taking minutes to reach his brain. “Me? I didn’t kill him! I just came back! I wasn’t here!”
“Back from where?”
“Where? Walking. A drink. I stopped for a drink. Some tavern. I don’t remember which one. A few blocks.”
I said, “You had to know more about Mark Leland and what he was doing than you say you do. Zaremba believed you knew more or he wouldn’t have paid you off. But men like Zaremba know that a more permanent solution is better than a payoff in the end, and maybe you guessed that, too.”
Tabor stared at the dead businessman, and then at his TV screen where some smiling man was giving violent news. There was a longing in his eyes for the haven of the TV. The haven of a man whom life has burned, whose woman is asleep alone in the bedroom indifferent to him and without passion for him, whose friends have been buried. The TV is better than brooding in some dark corner and going insane with fear, or love, or despair. A peaceful illusion of reality.
“You better talk to me,” I said. “Unless you want to wait for Zaremba’s ‘friends’ who might think what I think.”
Tabor collapsed inside, and came to life at the same time. He sat down, his back to the TV. Zaremba had had a lot of bad friends, and Tabor shivered. He had been afraid of Zaremba, and he was more afraid of Zaremba’s friends. Sometimes fear brings a man to life better than joy or love.
“I didn’t kill him, Fortune. I swear it. He gave me his work, I was no danger to him. I knew that Mark was investigating Black Mountain Lake, but he hadn’t gotten anywhere as far as I knew. It was all legal. Mark said that it favored Zaremba, and smelled, and if he could stir up enough trouble, maybe Albany would have to suspend it, start a real investigation. But that was all he had. Maybe he could rock the boat enough to get the project suspended.”
“Why did he go to Francesca Crawford?”
“She was Mayor Crawford’s daughter, Mark smelled good publicity in her. She already opposed the project. He was going to try to show her that her father was at least unethical in the deal. And he knew something from Crawford’s past, some legal shadiness, he hoped to use to make the girl help him by working against her father from inside.”
“What did he know from Crawford’s past?”
“I don’t know. Neither did he, not for sure. Just a hint that Crawford had hidden something in the past.”
I said, “Let me see your hands.”
There was no blood on them, and they were grimy, unwashed. There was no blood on his clothes. Still, it didn’t prove much.
“You just walked around, stopped for a drink?”
Tabor nodded. “Then I came back and waited down outside for a while. You or Zaremba didn’t come out. No one came out, except… A woman,” he looked up at me from his chair. “A woman came out about ten minutes before I came up. I didn’t see much-just a woman, a tweed coat, maybe young. She walked off fast, with a swing, you know? A young walk… maybe.”
A woman, maybe young. Athletic. Or who seemed young. Felicia? Celia Bazer? They were young. Katje Crawford? Mrs. Grace Dunstan? They could look young in the dark.
I went to the telephone now and called the police. With Tabor here, I couldn’t just walk away this time, no. I gave the police my name, the address, and told them Abram Zaremba had been murdered. They would come fast. I hung up.
George Tabor was back at his TV set. He still had his coat on, but he wasn’t in the room now. He was on the screen with some tall cowboy riding into a western town just after the Civil War. I joined him in that safe, distant town.
12
I sat alone, fighting sleep from Zaremba’s drug, in the office of Lieutenant Oster, Dresden Police Homicide Division. I had been there since they’d brought me and Tabor in from the apartment. It was past 1:00 A.M. before Lieutenant Oster, and Sergeant Jonas from the New York police, got back to me. Oster sat behind his desk, Jonas leaned on a wall.
“Let’s hear your story again,” Lieutenant Oster said.
I told him. “Whoever killed Zaremba thought I was dead, or didn’t care about me.”
“Or maybe your story is all phony,” Oster said.
Jonas said, “No knife in the apartment, Lieutenant.”
“Knives can be dumped,” Oster said.
“Zaremba was stabbed?” I said, my brain fuzzy.
Oster nodded. “Once in the heart. M.E. says he died instantly, a good hit. Never got out of that chair.”
“The same M.O. as Francesca Crawford,” I said.
Oster said, “You were alone with Zaremba.”
“What’s my motive?”
“Fear could be enough,” Oster said. “We don’t know you up here. Maybe you’re working for the killer. Who’s
