Walk a Black Wind (12 page)

“Yes?” she said, and added, “You're that detective.”

“Dan Fortune, Mrs. Van Hoek. Can we talk?”

“About what?”

The question wasn't challenging, only neutral, implying that she had nothing to talk about. I saw that her severe manner was more disassociated than stern. The manner of someone who lived alone with her own slow thoughts.

“About Francesca and your husband,” I said.

“I never knew anything about Francesca. Mr. Van Hoek is dead,” she said, and turned away as if that settled it all.

I followed her into a small Victorian room that had an aura of timeless insulation. She sat down, as timeless as the room, and neither looked at me nor away from me. She didn't seem surprised that I had not closed the door behind me and gone away, but her eyes seemed uninterested by me. I had an impression that we were both in the same room, but in different times, therefore invisible to each other.

“Your husband died suddenly,” I said.

She looked toward a window and the rain. “Mr. Van Hoek took many years to die.”

“He talked with Francesca just before he died,” I said.

The rain on the windows seemed to fascinate her. “I liked the rain as a girl. It was so warm in the attic of the big house where we played. That was before I met Mr. Van Hoek. Katje and the Mayor have the big house now. It's not the same house, that was torn down years ago. I live here. As long as I live I have a home here. Katje is a good daughter.”

“Did Mr. Van Hoek tell Francesca about Katje's first husband, Mrs. Van Hoek?”

“I don't know. Leave me alone, please.”

She sat in her chair as if she didn't want to move, not ever, for fear of breaking time into small pieces, of losing her own image in the shattered mirror of time.

“Katje's first husband was an Indian?”

“A nice boy. She brought him home twice. She was defiant, you see? He was a soldier, away from home. She had it annulled. The best way. The Mayor was better for the children.”

“You opposed the marriage? The Indian boy?”

“There were the children. He was a nice boy, but we couldn't make her try. She knew what she wanted to do.”

“You wanted her to make the marriage work?”

“She knew better. You can see that. We have a fine home.”

“But he came back, the Indian. Made trouble?”

She moved her head in a sharp jerk. “Leave me alone, please. I don't want to talk to you.”

I heard steps coming toward the cottage. At the window, I looked out and saw a small man with silver-gray hair coming toward the cottage under an umbrella. He walked stiffly, like a judge—or a senior lawyer. How did I know? I don't know, but it was an impression, and his face was too young for his silver-gray hair and his manner. Prematurely gray.

I went back to Mrs. Van Hoek as the gray-haired man came into the cottage. He shook his umbrella outside, laid it just inside the door, turned, and came into the living room smiling and rubbing his hands against the October cold. He saw me.

“Who are you?”

“Dan Fortune, Mr.—?”

“Carter Vance. You're the private detective? What the hell are you doing with Mrs. Van Hoek?”

His diction didn't quite match his silver hair or his formal clothes. Neither did his age—about forty or so. As if he'd built a careful public image to hide himself.

“I'm talking with Mrs. Van Hoek,” I said.

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 of miles of enemy territory. He'd killed many of the enemy, some with his hands. Something had changed in him. He was cold, bitter, a man who could kill easily. Perhaps that had always been part of him, in his history, in his anger at being an Indian.

“He learned of the birth of the girls, and of our annulment. I suppose something snapped when they told him. A combination of what he'd been through, of the shock of the news. Perhaps it was only a last straw. He talked about death, the horror of war, the horror of the whole world, the insanity of the white man's world. He wanted his haven—me and his children.”

She recrossed her legs. “I don't pretend to think that I acted well to Ralph. I never wrote to him about the girls, I had the marriage annulled without telling him. Yes, I thought he was dead over there, perhaps I even hoped he was, but that was no excuse. I did what I had to do for my own life. We had made a mistake, Ralph and I, and Ralph would have known that, too, if we had tried to go on. I had to correct it. Firm and final. There was no other way.”

She drank the drink Carter Vance had given to her, and seemed to realize she had it for the first time. She stared into the drink. “I was living with my parents while Martin was in Albany. That weekend, Martin was on his way home, but he hadn't arrived yet. I've always given thanks for that. I think Ralph would have killed Martin.

“He walked into the house with a submachine gun and a pistol. All I did was move, and he started shooting. He shattered the living room, and hit my father! He almost killed my father. He made me get the children, and drove away with us. We drove all evening toward Canada. The girls had to eat and sleep, so he stopped in a motel in Utica. That was when I learned all about Korea, his escape, his anger at the world. He talked to me all night while the children slept as much as they could they were so afraid.

“He talked and talked that night, about all his horrors, and about his plans for a ranch in Canada. Nonstop, as if he really were insane.

“I've seen that night in my dreams a thousand times since, and I'm still sorry for Ralph, terribly sorry for what he had become in that war, for what I had had to do. But I have never regretted it. The girls had nightmares for years afterwards. He would have been hounded down eventually, and who knows what would have happened to the girls? I did what was right.”

She stopped, and sat back in her chair. She lighted another cigarette. She smoked as if that was all, the story over as far as she was concerned—she had done right.

“How did you get away from him?” I asked.

“The police came in the morning,” she said, her voice normal now. “Martin had arrived home soon after Ralph took us. He saved my father, and alerted the police. When they found us, Ralph tried to resist, and Francesca was shot in the melee. That was her scar, Mr. Fortune. Under it all, Ralph wasn't a bad man. When Francesca was hit, he gave up, carried her out to an ambulance himself.”

I said, “Then?”

Martin Crawford said, “I defended Blackwind. I had Katje say she had gone with him voluntarily, to talk to him, and I had the kidnapping charge dropped. I got it all dropped—except the assault-with-intent-to-murder on Katje's father. Mr. Van Hoek had been badly shot, and we couldn't evade that charge even though he pulled through. Blackwind got ten-to-twenty in Auburn. Three years later he escaped with four other men. One was killed in the escape—so was a prison guard. Ralph and the other two evaded for three days. Two of them were cornered in Hancock, one was killed. The survivor said that Ralph had drowned in a Catskill lake where they'd hidden.”