were alone, Dan? You didn’t see who shot?”
I hadn’t seen who shot. The Cadillac, yes, but there were other green Cadillacs, and I hadn’t seen where the shots had come from. Had I been alone? No, but yes. For now.
“I didn’t see,” I said. “I was alone.”
“You’re bruised up from something else, too.”
“I was hit,” I said. “Earlier. Small man, didn’t know him. He hit good. I’m tired, Captain.”
It was dark outside when I sat up. They told me it was still Saturday. Still? Then I’d lost Friday already. I managed to eat. John Andera came to see me after dinner. He was nervous and different. His face was neutral. The shock was gone, the stunned look, as if my shooting had steadied him. Or maybe it was only the way he reacted to action and real danger he could come to grips with.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Not bad. You weren’t hit?”
“No. I didn’t see who shot, I was down on the sidewalk.”
“What about the green Cadillac?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t notice a Cadillac. There wasn’t one when I got up, when the police came.”
I said, “Someone is scared of me. It means that Francesca wasn’t killed by chance, or in some robbery. She was killed for a reason someone wants to stay hidden.”
“But you don’t know who,” Andera said, “or what he wants to hide, so it’s no use to me. What else did you find?”
I told him about Mayor Crawford and his political fights, what Celia Bazer had said about Francesca and men, and about the blond, Frank Keefer. “Keefer threw Celia Bazer over for Francesca in Dresden, then she threw him over. I don’t think he’d have liked that. Did Francesca ever mention him?”
“No,” Andera said. “She mentioned no one.”
“She seems to have been pretty isolated down here,” I said. “What did she talk about on your dates?”
“Us.”
“Where did you meet her for your dates?”
“At restaurants. She didn’t want me to come to her place, I never knew where she lived.”
“No mention of a Harmon Dunstan or Carl Gans?”
“Do your women talk about other men on early dates?” Andera said. “Will you need more money, Fortune?”
“I’m covered for the hospital, mostly. I’ll give you a bill. I’ll probably go to Dresden. That means expenses.”
“When you need them, tell me. I’ll come back.”
He left. I lay in the hospital bed feeling all my bruises, and the deep groove in my head hidden under a mound of gauze. Francesca Crawford hadn’t died in a random killing, no.
I rested and slept all day Sunday. My concussion was gone, and my appetite was fine, and they would let me out on Monday. I was in no hurry. In the hospital I was safe. But I wouldn’t fight to stay in after Monday. I was getting mad, and three days is a long time for a trail to grow cold.
Captain Gazzo came again after lunch on Monday. I was up in a chair, ready to dress when they told me. Gazzo took another chair, straddled it. I told him about what Celia Bazer had said, but not about Frank Keefer. I didn’t want Keefer chased or picked up yet.
“We talked to Dunstan, Gans and the Emerald Room,” Gazzo said. “No help I can see. What about who shot you?”
“Nothing I can tell. I’d just tried to ambush a tail on me, got clobbered. I went down to the street, and wham,” I said. “All I saw of the man tailing me was a camel coat, brown hat, green Cadillac, and fast fists. He may have been an ex-pro fighter the way he handled himself.”
Gazzo shook his head. “Not enough to help. We’ve combed her neighborhood for anyone who might have seen anything, or for signs of anyone hanging around her place. Nothing we don’t already know, no one saw the killer enter or leave.”
“Celia Bazer says Francesca was in New York before she moved into the Eighty-fourth Street place.”
“Sure,” Gazzo said. “She came to town two months ago, took an apartment on Carmine Street. None of the tenants there seem connected to her. She went to that Harmon Dunstan for a job, but got Dunstan himself for a while instead. For two weeks she didn’t work, just dated Dunstan. Then she took the job at the Emerald Room, began to see Carl Gans, and moved to the Bazer girl’s place.”
The Captain rubbed his tender jaw. “Her job was below what she could have gotten, I can’t see why she took it. She wasn’t running in any kid crowd, she wasn’t after a career, she was solitary but busy, and she told no one anything.”
“No young men, no female friends except Bazer,” I said. “Unusual. Not the standard young girl in the city for fame, fortune, or husband.”
“Two men in two months, both old for her, and what do they have in common?” Gazzo said. “Dunstan is a businessman, Carl Gans is the bouncer at the Emerald Room. You tell me?”
“They’re men,” I said.
“And both have alibis, more or less.”
So did my client, and he was a third man-also over forty. That was some pattern. Only I was sure that my client’s alibi would hold up. That didn’t make it a true alibi, but it did mean that Andera was sure no one could break it. And it looked like Gazzo hadn’t turned up Andera yet.
“Without witnesses, or some solid evidence,” Gazzo said, “nothing down here points to anyone, Dan. I’ve got Sergeant Jonas up in Dresden, but if he doesn’t find anything we can use, we’re stumped. The killer’s a ghost.”
“Maybe it was only bad luck in the big city.”
“And the man who shot you is protecting the city,” Gazzo said, leaned over his chair. “There’s a missing month, you know? Between leaving Dresden, and coming here. I can’t send a man without a lead, Dan, but you can tackle that. Do that for me, Dan. Find me that missing month.”
I nodded. It wouldn’t be easy to trace a hidden month in the life of a dead girl. The way she had stayed to herself, used a false name, we might never find where she’d been at all. While I thought about it, I realized that Gazzo was thinking, too. He was rubbing his face again, thoughtfully.
He said, “You know who owns the Emerald Room, Dan?”
“No.”
“Abram Zaremba,” Gazzo said. “Commissioner Zaremba to you and me. He had some state job once-Fish and Game Commission, I think. He likes to be called Commissioner.”
I knew the man. Upstate, Abram Zaremba was a man to know. Whatever business you did, Zaremba could help. Power, money, and a lot of influence. No one said he was illegal, exactly, but he had a lot of “friends” who would do anything he wanted done. And Martin Crawford was a reformer, a crusader.
“I didn’t know he operated in the city here.”
“He has businesses here. He lives near Dresden, Dan.”
“You’ve talked to Zaremba?”
“About a bar waitress with a phony name? I’d just warn him away, and a judge would talk to the Chief. I know three judges who drink his booze every week. I’d need a reason.”
“He wouldn’t go to a judge about me,” I said. “I can try a talk with Carl Gans, and look around.”
Gazzo was silent for a time. He knew what chasing Abram Zaremba could mean, and it was no TV game. He sighed.
“You’ve got to be some use to me,” he said.
A joke, but it really wasn’t funny. I might smoke something out when a cop never could-because me Zaremba would be sure to try to stop fast if there was anything to smoke out. A cop might scare him to cover, but I wouldn’t scare him. He’d know what to do with me. I’d been shot once already.
A detective captain has a hard job. Maybe I could help him, and it was his job to use me even if I ended up dead. It was my job, if I was going to do my work, to take the chance.
