“Then whistle and damn you!” Frank Keefer said through his broken mouth. “Look at my face!”
“It’ll heal and give you character,” I said. “Why start fights when you can’t fight? Maybe you just thought it would be easy to beat a one-armed man? Fight cripples?”
“You were pumping Celia, cripple,” Joel Pender said. He was a sweet man. “Why don’t you talk to us straight?”
“Fine,” I said. “Keefer, what did you talk about down in New York with Francesca Crawford? When you visited her?”
“I never went down to Fran-”
Celia Bazer spoke from her corner. “He was in that hotel, Frank. He heard us talking.”
“Heard?” Frank Keefer said, licked blood.
“Heard,” I said. “All of it, including lies. Muriel Roark told you Francesca was with Celia, and you got down to New York on Tuesday-the day she was killed.”
“I never went near her!”
“You didn’t know she was alone in the apartment?”
“No! I didn’t know Cele wasn’t back until after-”
Joel Pender said. “Shut up, Frank. This guy’s got something in mind.”
I said, “You thought Celia might be back, would be in her own bed that Tuesday night?”
“I didn’t go near the place until Wednesday,” Keefer said.
“No,” I said. “You were seen Tuesday evening. Maybe you came back that night, climbed in the window looking for Celia who would tell Francesca you still had a wife, had served time for wife-beating. You had made a new play for Francesca, maybe she gave you some hope. But if Celia knew, and talked…? So you came to kill Celia. It was dark, you were scared, Celia’s bed was occupied. Who else would be in that bed? So you stabbed her-only Celia wasn’t back, and you killed Francesca.”
Frank Keefer forgot his bleeding mouth. Only abject fear would make him do that. A fear that saw himself facing a judge, convicted, waiting to be sentenced to some narrow cell for the rest of his natural life-no more schemes, no more women, no more dreams of a golden future.
“You’re a liar!” he said.
Joel Pender faced danger a different way-with a sharp, cool calculation. His teeth ready, careful.
“He’s fishing, Frank,” Pender said. “If it happened like he says, no one could prove it, and he wouldn’t be talking.”
“Unless Frank was seen that night,” I said.
“I couldn’t have been,” Keefer said. “I wasn’t there. Anyway, I couldn’t have-”
“Shut up, Frank,” Pender said, and to me, “Who saw Frank?”
“Maybe Abram Zaremba, or one of his men checking up on Francesca,” I said. “He was killed last night, and where were you two last night?”
“Commissioner Zaremba?” Frank Keefer said, shaky.
Joel Pender had nothing to say.
I said, “It looks like Zaremba could have known who murdered Francesca. She saw the killer of Mark Leland, who was investigating the Black Mountain Lake project. Maybe Zaremba was having her tailed, at least, just to be sure she knew nothing vital. She was down in New York for a reason, I’m sure-hiding, using a false name, meeting older men. For all I know she could have been mixed with you two in some scheme to stop Zaremba, a little blackmail, or-”
Frank Keefer said, turned to Joel Pender, “Tell him, Joel! Tell him what Fran was doing. I don’t want to be tied in with any murder of Commissioner Zaremba, no way!”
“I told you shut up,” Pender said.
His voice was quiet, but his eyes were busy. He was balancing the risk against the gain-the calculation and infinite patience of a small weasel who would crawl ten years on his belly if he had a reasonable assurance that at the end he would make others crawl.
“I’ll tell you what we figure the kid was doing in New York,” he said, “if you keep quiet about who told you first. Okay, Fortune? I’ll deny it anyway.”
“Tell me,” I said.
Frank Keefer mopped his bloody mouth like a woman seeing the first gray hair. Celia Bazer still stood in her corner as if she felt safer with two walls close. Pender leaned toward me, sincere. I guessed it was an act he’d practiced.
“I was drunk or it’d never happened,” Pender said. “She come here that night all shook up. Said she’d found out her dad was a fraud cheating the public to help men like Commissioner Zaremba and get rich himself. She said she knew I knew about the Mayor, and she wanted me to tell her. Some legal trick in the Mayor’s past Leland had told her about. She didn’t know what it was because Leland hadn’t known. I said I didn’t know anything, and Frank tried to calm her down. So then she turned on Frank and said she was through with him!
“She said we were all liars and cheats, too, and Frank was a lousy gigolo. We were worse than her dad or Zaremba because we worked for them like parasites, did their dirty work. She was in one hell of a state, and when she told Frank they was finished, I got so mad I lost my head. Our big chance, see? Marry into the Mayor’s family, be someone in this town. Gone for a lousy girl kid thought she was too good for us, too good even for the Mayor! So damned holy about the Mayor being a cheat and all. I just saw red, damn her!”
He shook his head, and his small eyes were mystified, as if he would never understand how a smart man like himself had been so stupid, had been goaded into saying what he had not wanted to say. He shrugged up at me.
“So I told her,” he said. “I told her she lived on the Mayor, went to college on the Mayor, learned all her big, pure ideas on the Mayor. So he got something for himself out of his job, why not? If he was a fraud and a cheat, she lived on him, and there were men a lot worse than the Mayor. I told her she should get down on her knees to the Mayor for giving her all she had because he didn’t have to give her spit!”
Pender stopped again. He was having a hard time telling it even now. I didn’t push him. He sighed.
“I was drunk, see, so I told her what no one ever told her before. I said if she thought the Mayor was a crook, maybe she ought to know there was a lot worse crooks like murderers, kidnappers, and psychos-and she was the kid of one of those! She was the kid of a guy who shot her grandfather, got her shot, and damned near got her mother killed, too!”
He looked at me. “I told her Crawford wasn’t her real father. Not hers, and not Felicia’s. Her old lady was married before, a long time ago, and her real father almost got them all killed, and went to prison for twenty years for it!”
In the silence of that room piled with the mimeographed dream of a quick profit for two losers, I suppose we all had our own thoughts. Pender chewed his lip, probably still wondering why he’d blurted it all out to Francesca in drunken anger over three months ago. A secret that explained why Pender got jobs from Mayor Crawford. Keefer was probably thinking only of himself, of the loss of his hopes for marrying big. Celia Bazer seemed to be wondering how she’d feel at such news.
I was seeing pieces of a puzzle fall into place like greased parts of a complex machine. Francesca’s excitement. Her oblique talk about identity-it had been real, not just metaphorical: her real identity at stake. Her sudden trip-a girl who’d always felt different, neglected, a rebel, the ugly duckling. Looking for a real father. What all the men in New York she’d met had in common was clear-they were all over forty. Except Abram Zaremba, who was older, but she hadn’t really met him, only gone to work at his restaurant in a job she didn’t need. So the Emerald Room was, somehow, connected to her father. It explained everything, except why she had been using a false name, and maybe Mark Leland’s murder still explained that. Maybe she wanted to find a lost father for more than her identity-for help in trouble, too.
“Tell me the whole story, Pender,” I said. “What else did you tell Francesca?”
“That’s all,” Pender said. “Her old lady was married young, busted up, married Crawford, and then the first guy came around and started a shooting match and went to jail for it. Happened before I was around here, I only got it secondhand. Only I was here three years later when the first husband busted prison and got killed in the escape.”
“Francesca’s real father is dead?” I said.
“Like a dinosaur,” Joel Pender said, and laughed. “Those girl twins was lucky, Crawford brought ’em up like
