“We don’t know why she left home,” the big man said. “We don’t know what she was doing. They have their own minds, the children today. We teach them to think, and they think in ways we can’t even know, much less understand.”
Gazzo said, “You can’t tell us anything?”
“Nothing we can think of,” Katje Crawford said. “Francesca was always our difficult child. I never seemed to reach her after she was ten.”
“Pigheaded!” Martin Crawford said, the anger as much for himself as for the dead girl. “Sometimes she just sat and stared at us. The best one, I suppose. The best child is often the worst for the parents. A child’s standards and her parent’s standards are often very different, and if the child is tough, they battle.”
“You battled a lot with her?” I asked.
They both looked at me for the first time. Martin Crawford nodded.
“All the time. On everything. She even opposed me on public issues. Housing, conservation, crime fighting.”
“When did you hear from her last?” Gazzo said.
“After she left we didn’t hear at all.”
I said, “Three months? Did you look for her?”
“No,” Crawford said. “She left a note saying she had gone on a trip. No reason, nothing about where or why.”
“She had a scar,” I said. “Like a bullet wound.”
“A childhood accident,” Mrs. Crawford said.
Gazzo said, “Mr. Fortune just wonders if it could have any bearing. So do we. Did someone shoot at her?”
“Martin shot by accident. She was two-and-a-half,” Mrs. Crawford said, and she looked at me with a question in her blue eyes. “You called this man ‘Mister’ Fortune. Isn’t he one of your policemen, Captain?”
“A private detective,” Gazzo said. “Working with us.”
“Private?” she said. “I don’t understand. You mean someone hired him? Why? Who?”
“I knew Francesca, Mrs. Crawford,” I said. “I met her here in New York. I want to help.”
“Help?” she said. “Yes, I see. Thank you.”
Gazzo said, “Can either of you think of anything in your daughter’s life before she vanished that could help us?”
“No,” Martin Crawford said. “I mean, where do we start?”
“In twenty years,” Mrs. Crawford said, “how do we pick out what could help you? Francesca was unusual in many ways-busy, too silent, good in school, intense on her own projects. But she was normal, too, with a lot of friends. Some we knew, some we didn’t. Nothing stands out, Captain. Perhaps if you had specific questions, but until you do
…”
Both Gazzo and I knew they were right. If nothing stood out in their minds, until we had some ideas it would be like shooting fish in a very large barrel.
Martin Crawford said, “She’s dead, and what can we do? What’s the use of power and money if we can’t stop chance, can’t control life? What do we do?”
“We go on trying to control life,” Gazzo said.
Crawford nodded, and they stood up. The wife went out first-to claim her daughter. We hadn’t learned much. Maybe there wasn’t much to learn. Just another small-time murder?
3
Night was falling fast-the way it does in late autumn-over the East Eighty-fourth Street block where Francesca Crawford had lived briefly as Fran Martin. The wind seemed to have dropped, as if the tree-lined street was walled in from the turmoil of the rest of the city. The East Side can be like that, while the West Side throbs and boils.
The dead girl’s building was a small brownstone, neater than West Side brownstones. There were flower boxes in the windows instead of milk cartons and shirtless men. I got no answer to my ring, and the vestibule door was locked. Sure that I was alone, I used my thin square of stiff plastic to open the spring lock. On the top floor I used my ring of keys to enter the silent apartment.
A thin, dusty light filtered over shiny, tasteless furniture of the kind that comes with good furnished apartments and tells you nothing about the occupants. The living room was large, there was a full kitchen, a dining room, two bedrooms, and two bathrooms-$400 a month, at least.
One bedroom was cluttered, with two closets full of clothes for a young woman who went many places but had little taste beyond showing off what had to be a sensual figure. Make-up was thick as a forest on a dressing table, the bed was covered by a spread, and a small desk looked barely used. Paycheck stubs showed that this was the bedroom of the roommate, Celia Bazer. She worked for Bel-Mod Fashions, Inc., and was paid too much to be anything less than a model.
The second bedroom was bare and spartan. There was no make-up anywhere, not even in the bathroom, and fewer than ten dresses in the two closets. The closets were oddly segregated. One held three sleek cocktail dresses, some high heels, and an evening wrap. The other had only bright, loose, casual dresses, slacks, sandals, mannish shirts, a pair of red-stained jeans. All airy and informal, with a sense of youth and independence. The bed was covered with another spread, and there was the same small desk-but used.
The desk was littered with guides to New York, theater programs, nightclub napkins, and paycheck stubs from the Emerald Room. The checks were small, Francesca Crawford had made little money. Nothing went back farther than three weeks. The bureau drawers told me no more. No slips, no girdles, no brassieres, and only four pairs of bikini underpants-a modern girl. The only jewelry was some silver and turquoise pieces-earrings, a necklace, two bracelets. Good, handmade Indian jewelry, but new and shiny, and with nothing to show where it had come from.
As if Francesca Crawford had been on another planet since leaving home three months ago. Unless there had been some clue in her missing handbag. Had the bag been taken to hide where she had been, what she had been doing? Or was it simple robbery? Or, maybe, to suggest a simple robbery?
I turned to the bed. A killer can often become careless at the instant of killing, leave some clue. I pulled back the spread, and got a surprise. There was no blood on the bed.
I went back to the roommate’s bedroom, stripped off the cover from that bed. The blood was on this mattress-and a deep tear where the long knife had passed through the dead girl. Francesca Crawford had been killed in the wrong bed.
The super of the building was a small man who looked me up and down, stared at my duffel coat and missing arm. He had a belligerent air, as if he would belch in your face to prove that he took no guff from anyone. I asked him if Francesca Crawford had had many callers.
“You a cop? With that arm?”
“Private,” I said. “Her family wants to know how it happened, what she was doing, who her men were.”
His narrow face almost sparkled. The kind of animal thrilled by secondhand pleasures, other people’s pain. He rubbed at his jaw. “Said her name was Martin here. Not bad-looking except for that scar, but a funny one. Alone most of the time, never talked much. I had ideas about her and the roommate, only the Bazer kid had plenty of men.”
“Francesca Crawford didn’t have men?”
“I only seen two in three weeks, then just a couple times. No parties, no gang, no steady like most girl kids.”
“Who were the two you saw?”
“One guy forty or so, Dago-looking, but real dressed up, Gray hair, small. Never saw him with her, but he went up a couple times, asked once if she was home.”
“The other one?”
