“A teaser? She made a play, but no action later?”
“She liked to talk a lot,” he said dryly. “You working for the family? That mayor and all?”
“In a way.”
“Funny, her being a mayor’s daughter. I figured she was no waitress, but she did her job. Knew all about how to wait table in a bar. Like she knew how inside, you know?”
“Some girls know that in their bones,” I said.
“Yeh, like that,” he said. “She knew how to handle herself, and no play, so I dropped her.”
“She talked too much,” I said. “About what?”
“Nothin’ much. Shows, books, about how I used to fight for the Commissioner only I didn’t have it to go higher than six-rounders so he put me here when we opened. I mean, I talked about that.”
“You were a fighter? For Zaremba?”
“Commissioner,” Gans said. “When I got my growth, had to move up to middleweight, I didn’t have the punch. Good enough for a bouncer, but not for a real fighter.”
He said it simply. I had the feeling that he was a simple man who had muscles to earn his living, and not much else, and that he knew if, and was grateful he had work at all.
“What else did she talk about?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Gans said. “Just talk, you know? She-”
A small, balding man in a very expensive dinner jacket stood there. He was over sixty, he face round and owlish, and his eyes were small. A silent man stood behind him and watched only me.
“What does he want here, Carl?” the older man said.
“Asking about the Martin kid, Commissioner,” Gans said. “I mean, Crawford. You know, the kid worked here a while and got killed last week?”
“Why would I remember a waitress?” Abram Zaremba said. “Why does this man come here about her?”
His voice was firm, but he’d just made a mistake. No one had mentioned that Francesca had been a waitress. Zaremba remembered her, knew about her.
“I took her out a couple of times,” Carl Gans explained.
“So? You have an alibi, Carl?”
“I was here till two A.M.,” Gans said. “I played cards with some of the guys past four A.M.”
Abram Zaremba made it sound as if he’d never asked Gans about the alibi before, but that could have been an act for my benefit. The alibi could have been arranged by Zaremba, too.
“Then you’re clear,” Zaremba said, and turned to me. “What’s your name?”
“Dan Fortune.”
He looked me over. “Get out of here.”
He walked away. I was left with Carl Gans.
“The Commissioner said get out,” Gans said.
I got out.
7
I had done worse than get nowhere. Abram Zaremba knew who I was now, and I knew no more than when I had gone in the club.
The cold wind that had been scouring the city for weeks blew me to the Lexington Avenue subway. I rode downtown thinking that in upstate cities Abram Zaremba was a very big fish with a lot of interests. Carl Gans worked for him, and he owned the Emerald Room. Was there some connection to Zaremba in the pasts of Harmon Dunstan and John Andera?
It was early, but I was still weak, so I stopped in a diner on Seventh Avenue where the Monday special was pot roast. While I ate, and rested, I thought that nothing yet really connected Francesca to Abram Zaremba except that she had taken a job at the Emerald Room she had no real reason to take.
The good pot roast eased my aches, and I walked on to my office to call Captain Gazzo. I wanted to hear that he’d found a lead, any lead, that would keep me from having to go up to Dresden, but I didn’t have much hope-the dead girl had done so little in New York. A runaway girl usually tries to do too much with her freedom. Francesca Crawford had been so isolated, so cryptic, that I couldn’t help feeling that some unknown shape lurked unseen and murderous in the shadows.
It was an impression, no more, but it was there, and that was why I jumped two feet on the sidewalk in front of my office building when a real shadow moved close in a doorway. Someone came toward me from the doorway. A woman.
I had no gun, as usual, and I was tensed to run when I saw the ghost. She came into the light of a street lamp-long dark hair pulled back, a hawk nose, faintly slanted eyes, broad cheekbones, and dark brown eyes. Francesca Crawford!
“Mr. Fortune?”
While my nerves jumped, my brain told me that there were no ghosts, and if this was Francesca Crawford she was alive. Yet I knew she was dead. By now, buried in Dresden, New York.
“Miss Crawford?” I said.
“Yes. Can I… talk to you? Please?”
Francesca Crawford-except, of course, it wasn’t. No, not quite. There were no ghosts, and Francesca was dead. There was a different “feel” to this girl. The same face, but with make-up, and proper, conservative clothes.
“Turn your head left,” I said.
She had no scar under her right ear.
“Her sister,” I said. “Twins.”
“Felicia Crawford,” she said. “I want to know-”
“Not on the street,” I said. “My office in there.”
She shivered, and it wasn’t the wind. She didn’t like the look of my dark, shabby building. Neither did I. It was too well known to people who followed me and had guns.
“Come along,” I said, and took her arm.
She flinched like a deer at my touch, but she let me lead her. She was an identical twin, but the years had accentuated the differences not the identity. She dressed differently, seemed younger, but I sensed that the real difference was inside. Francesca, from what everyone said, had been tough, difficult, the rebel. This girl seemed soft, quiet, the “good” girl who did what she was expected to do. A little weak.
“How did you know about me, Miss Crawford?” I asked.
“Mother and Dad talked about you. They told Mr. Sasser you were investigating the… murder. I want to help. I want to know what you know.”
I remembered the name of Anthony Sasser from Mayor Crawford’s biography in Who’s Who-the businessman who headed the Dresden Crime Commission with the Mayor’s partner, Carter Vance.
“Your parents sent you?” I said.
“No, I came on my own. I just left. Today.”
We reached my apartment, and I steered her up the stairs before she saw that my home wasn’t much better than my office. In my five cold rooms she stared as if she didn’t believe anyone could live there. She didn’t know how even the poor of urban America lived, so how could she, or anyone like her, have any conception of how the poor of the earth lived? The millions to whom my five rooms would be a palace, my income a fortune, and my hash-house meals food beyond their dreams?
“How about coffee?” I said. “Or something stronger?”
“Coffee, please,” she said. “You live here?”
“It has advantages if you don’t want money, comfort, or status,” I said as I plugged in my coffee pot in the kitchen, and then went around lighting my gas radiators.
“Yes, I see,” she said. “There are a lot of things on the other side of the iron curtain around the Crawford house.”
