instead of throwing it into his face because no man should ever crawl like that. If it had been poison, I’d have drunk my death for fear of possible death that just might be there in his hidden men.
Now I lay with the drug boiled out of me like the venom of a snake bite. Abram Zaremba had bitten me, and for a time I would feel that more was missing than my arm, but it would pass, a man goes on living with himself somehow. Zaremba, at least, would bite no one else with his moral poison, make no one else crawl to his power. In the end I had won-I was alive. But who had bitten the snake? It could have been anyone he had ever dealt with, but, like Oster, I had the feeling that this had not been any power murder, any “business” play. Zaremba had come alone to me in his arrogance. He had died alone without his “help” near him, his death as much a surprise to him as to everyone else. He had not expected danger, or he would not have come alone. If he had been in a power fight, that he would have known and come protected.
Unless he had not come alone, and one of his own men had killed him. That was not uncommon in his world. But, again, that would have been carefully planned, and there was something unplanned about last night’s murder.
Then, of course, it could have been George Tabor.
I heaved myself out of bed and went into the shower. I stayed under the hot water a long time. Partly to ease the pains from my bruises, and partly because I didn’t really want to start looking again. George Tabor said he had seen a woman, maybe young, and Felicia Crawford was somewhere. I didn’t want to track down Felicia if she had killed the man who had murdered her sister. But until I did find her I wouldn’t know if she had done anything or not. You have to risk the wrong answer to find the right answer. Unless you are ready to exist with no answer, just drift in a blind embryo of dead, passionless safety.
I dressed, slipped my old pistol into my pocket again, and went out for some breakfast. I had eggs, over light, and looked up the name of the “friend” Francesca Crawford had sent letters to with notes in them for Felicia. Muriel Roark was the name, and her address was listed. When I went out to my car, a cold October drizzle had started.
The address was in the University section of Dresden, an old area torn down and rebuilt into low apartments and residence halls. Muriel Roark lived on the second floor of a garden apartment where the shrubbery was already sodden with rain.
A dazzling brunette opened the apartment door. Small and round, with a bright face that made me want to sing for youth, and feel old at the same time.
“Yes?”
“Miss Roark?”
She nodded, smiled. “Have we met? I like your face.”
“Dan Fortune,” I said, smiled back. “I want to talk about Francesca and Felicia Crawford.”
Her face became serious. “Come in.”
She ushered me to a long couch in a small living room. The couch was covered by a throw rug in the European style. All the furniture was old, covered with throws, and marked as her own. She flopped on a great, shapeless sack in the center of the room, showing smooth, hard thighs that had muscles. She saw my eyes looking at her legs.
“I’m a dancer,” she said, raising her leg out stiff so I could see the muscles cord. “I teach modern dance at the University, a graduate fellow. What about Francesca?”
“You were good friends?”
“We understood each other. She was a private person, so am I. With her it was her scar, her identity. With me it’s my dancing-no one touches that, not ever.”
“You can’t be touched?” I said. I liked this girl-woman.
She laughed. A warm laugh. “All I’m careful about is my muscles. You’re looking for who killed Fran?”
“And for where Felicia is,” I said. “You had some letters from Francesca? You showed them to Felicia?”
“No, I didn’t show her my letters. I gave her two notes enclosed for her. I didn’t read her notes, either.”
“Damn,” I said. “You can’t tell me anything about what was in those notes to Felicia?”
She pulled her knees up to her chin. There was something pure and innocent about her body and its free actions.
“No,” she said, “except that the first one was from somewhere out west. The letter I got was mailed from Chicago, but Felicia said the note had been written in Arizona, or Colorado, or somewhere like that.”
I remembered the Indian jewelry. “You can’t say which?”
“No, I’m sorry. The second letter was from New York just after Fran moved in with Celia Bazer.”
“She wrote she was with Celia Bazer?” I said, sat up. “Did anyone else know that up here?”
“Only Frank Keefer. He’d come around a few times after Fran left to ask if I’d heard from her. I guess he was pretty unhappy about losing her. Anyway, about two weeks ago was the first time I could tell him anything, so I did.”
“That Francesca was living with Celia Bazer?”
“Yes.”
“Where does Keefer live?”
She told me. I stood up. She watched me, and seemed to stretch. Not a dancer showing her muscles this time. She stretched her whole slim, curved body.
“You have to leave?”
“Yes.”
“How did you lose your arm?”
“I usually say in the war,” I said. “But I really lost it in a fall into the hold of a freighter I was robbing when I was sixteen. I got away, but I lost the arm.”
“Will you come back again?” she said. “Come back. Call me first. In the evening.”
I could still see her lying there on that shapeless sack as I went down the stairs.
Frank Keefer’s house was in a middle-class tract on the eastern edge of Dresden. There were flower beds around the small house as if someone spent a lot of time in the garden. I didn’t think it was Keefer, but you never can tell-axe murderers have grown prize roses. The garage was empty, but I saw movement in the house.
Celia Bazer answered my ring. She had a discolored left eye, and her face was puffy. In the last few days she had changed from big city career girl to a small city woman, not even as pretty suddenly. She wore an old house dress, and her eyes were vacant as if she had been thinking of something important when I surprised her.
“You?” she said, groped for my name. “Mr. Fortune?”
“Yes. Can I come in?”
“Here?” she said. Her voice was vague, distracted, almost drugged. “I mean, have you found who killed Fran?”
“I’m still looking,” I said.
An alarm must have sounded in her head. “How did you find me here?”
“I didn’t. I want Frank Keefer. Is he home, Celia?”
“Frank?” Now her eyes were wary. “No. Why do you want Frank?”
“I’ll tell you inside,” I said, and gently walked her backward into a small living room. She didn’t resist.
There were chairs and sofas in the living room, but everything was hidden under piles of paper, and a mimeograph machine stood on a table. The room was shabby, but not from poverty as much as from neglect. I saw a littered kitchen through an open archway, stacked with the same mimeographed pages.
I said, “I know about you, and Frank, and Francesca. Where is Frank?”
“I don’t know. He never came back last night. After he did this,” she touched her battered eye, “he went out with Joel.”
Her voice was a monotone, as vacant as her eyes. “A year I was away, and he whistled, and here I am. He’s a bastard, and a fake, but he turns me on. It’s that simple, I guess, even with blackeyes. Some women have no brains. I don’t know, I feel… safe with Frank, you know? Without Joel maybe…”
She trailed off, her voice almost wistful, like some beaten-down wife who dreamed of her man being better some day, sure that underneath he was a good man or why would she want him?
“You know where they were all night?”
“No. Part of their new scheme, I guess.” She nodded toward all the piles of literature. “Joel talked a couple of local shopping centers into a throwaway newsletter, said he could get it into the northwest suburbs, the rich
