The old woman said, “I don’t want to talk to him.”
“You heard her,” Carter Vance said.
“Vance?” I said. “Mayor Crawford’s law partner, right? Head of the Crime Commission with Anthony Sasser. I’ll bet you turned up a lot about Abram Zaremba’s dealings.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Fortune,” Vance said.
“Sasser worked with Zaremba, right?”
“If you’re implying that Mr. Zaremba did anything illegal, be careful. We found no such situation. We did manage to clean up the streets of Dresden, though.”
“I’ll bet you really cracked down on pickpockets and welfare cheats. Two-bit hoodlums stay clear of Dresden, right? Honest citizens can make an honest dollar in peace and safety so they can pay their taxes for Abram Zaremba’s benefit.”
“Not all two-bit hoodlums stay clear of Dresden, it seems,” Vance said. “Mrs. Van-Hoek doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“I want to talk to her,” I said, and turned back to her. “If you could just tell me what your husband told Fran-”
“Fortune,” Vance said.
He had a gun. A blue Mauser automatic. He waved it toward the door.
“You better ask Martin Crawford anything you want to know.”
“You always carry a gun, Vance?” I said.
“I head a crime commission. I have the need. Now walk.”
I walked.
We walked, dripping rain, through the entry hall of the Crawford mansion. Martin Crawford sat in the living room reading the newspaper. He lumbered up when he saw us.
“Carter? What the devil-?” he said, looked at us both.
Vance said, “He was in the cottage, annoying the old lady with questions. He didn’t want to leave.”
Katje Crawford appeared from somewhere. “Put down that gun, Carter. Mr. Fortune is a detective.”
“A cheap snooper from New York,” Vance said. “I think we can charge him with trespassing. He refused to leave.”
“He just wants to help us, Carter,” Martin Crawford said.
“Help?” Vance said. He pocketed his gun, walked out to the glassed-in porch, began to pour himself a drink.
Katje Crawford came all the way into the living room. She wore a tweed skirt, a cashmere sweater, low shoes, and a golf glove on her right hand as if still hoping the rain would stop.
“Why did you want to talk to my mother?” she asked.
“To find out what your father told Francesca just before she left home,” I said.
“My father?”
“Told Francesca what, Fortune?” Martin Crawford asked.
Katje Crawford sat down. “I wasn’t aware that my father had seen Francesca before she left. He was very sick.”
“What do you think he told her, Fortune?” Crawford said.
“Something about her real father,” I said.
It didn’t exactly hit them like a bombshell, no. They had lived with it for a long time. But saying it out like that startled them. They had kept it so far hidden that it must have sounded almost strange to them said out loud. Carter Vance turned at the bar, looked at me and at them.
“So you know,” Martin Crawford said. “I suppose I knew you would. One tries hard to shelter a child. For Francesca it’s too late, but I had hoped to keep it from Felicia a bit longer. It’s not easy to be a stepfather, it changes a child’s relation to you. To me they’re my children, but I’ve always known they would see me differently if they knew the truth.”
I said, “Has Felicia come home?”
“No,” Crawford said.
There was a world of pain in the single word. Crawford had lost one daughter, or stepdaughter, and his voice said that he didn’t want to lose another.
Katje Crawford said, “You think my father told Francesca something about her real father, and that’s connected to her death somehow?”
“I don’t know what he told her, or what it means.”
She shook her head. “I can’t think what he could have said that would have any bearing, Mr. Fortune.”
“Can you tell me about it all?” I said.
Katje Crawford sat and thought for a time. Then she nodded slowly. “Very well, sit down, Mr. Fortune. I don’t see what good it can do, but I expect you’ll go on searching until you know the story.”
I sat. Martin Crawford leaned back in his chair, his hands over his eyes, as if he didn’t want to hear. Carter Vance sipped his drink out on the porch.
16
“His name was Ralph Blackwind,” Katje Crawford said, and smiled thinly. “I think the name fascinated me. It was so strong, ethnic. I was seventeen in 1950, in New York alone trying to be a dancer. I had no talent. Too tall, awkward. So many young people desperately want to be what they can never be. As if they purposely choose the dream that must defeat them because they are equipped for it least of all they could do. Perhaps it’s necessary to learn the pain of failure before you can turn back to what you really knew you had to be all along. The real tragedy is the few who go on pursuing a hopeless dream, just good enough for a few small triumphs, hope always just ahead.”
She stopped to find a cigarette. I waited. She would tell it all in her own way. Out on the porch, Carter Vance was mixing another drink. His own was still half-full, so it wasn’t for him. Crawford sat like a man watching an old movie he’d seen fifty times before and knew by heart.
“Ralph Blackwind,” Katje Crawford said, smoked. “I met him at a YMCA dance for soldiers. He was handsome, dark-eyed, small and stocky, intense and all male. I was seventeen, in a hurry to be a woman. We were both outdoor people, we used to ride in New Jersey. He wanted a ranch among his people, work with them. Dedicated, coiled like a whip. I’m not a fool, I was failing as a dancer, and I knew it. I needed a new dream, Ralph was it. After a month we were married. But Korea had broken out, and two months later Ralph was sent over there, and I came home. Of course, I was pregnant by then.”
She looked up at me. “I was pregnant, Ralph was in Korea, and I knew it was wrong, a mistake, an error. The moment I came home, I knew it. Ralph and I-here? With what I knew all at once I really wanted? My life here? It had been a childish dream worse than the dancing. I knew, but Ralph was fighting in Korea. Could I write and tell him? I couldn’t. So the girls were born, twins. Francesca and Felicia Blackwind.”
The names were exotic in the big, elegant room. They had a wild sound, open and windy in a dry land of desert hills.
“God,” Martin Crawford said, “how Francesca would have liked that name. We should have told her, Katje, the moment we saw what kind of tough girl she was.”
“Perhaps we should have,” Katje Crawford said, and said to me, “I met Martin again soon after the twins were born. He’d known me when I was a girl. We fell in love. We were right for each other-the same lives, the same backgrounds, the same plans for the future. What were we to do? I couldn’t divorce Ralph, by then he’d been reported missing in action! Martin was in politics, it would have been suicide to try a divorce. We waited and waited, but Ralph wasn’t found, and the girls were growing. So we had the marriage quietly annulled, and were married ourselves. A year later, Ralph came home.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. It was almost a vicious gesture. Carter Vance brought her the drink he had made. She took it and drank without looking at Vance.
“Ralph had been a prisoner of the North Koreans for almost two years. He’d escaped-alone across hundreds
