Night of the Toads (7 page)

Detective Shamski walked me out to the squad car. He was silent, embarrassed. I didn’t try to make him feel better. He had to get used to working with the Denni-kens. We drove to the station, and he marched me inside. He huddled with the desk sergeant. Neither of them seemed happy. The sergeant nodded me to the desk. Shamski left looking relieved.

‘I need your personal junk, Fortune,’ the sergeant half apologized. ‘Lieutenant says hold you. Material witness, your own protection. I guess he can justify it, and the Captain keeps his hands off the squad room if he can.’

‘Don’t make waves, I understand. Can I make one call?’

Now he looked embarrassed. ‘Denniken said no lawyer yet. I got to work here.’

‘My girl,’ I said. ‘She expects me. You can listen.’

‘I guess that’s okay.’

He pushed a telephone at me. I was lucky, Marty was home. I told her I was stuck with Lieutenant Denniken, I didn’t like it, and she better call The Preacher. When I hung up, the desk sergeant looked grateful. It’s a mean world most of the time. ‘The Preacher’ was a nickname for Captain Gazzo at Centre Street. My call was a message to Gazzo. So much for the sergeant’s trust.

They put me in a cell. Gazzo would work man-to-man, nothing official. It took about three hours. Denniken himself came to the cell for me. He walked me to the street.

‘Anything I can tell my client?’ I asked.

‘She’s been told.’

‘You find the husband yet?’

‘Stay out of my area, Fortune,’ Denniken said. ‘You had to get word over my head. Very clever. You know, you wouldn’t like that yourself if you were me.’

He walked back inside. He wasn’t going to tell me anything. Maybe I’d made a mistake. On the dark Queens street I was too tired to worry about it.

I rode a slow subway into Manhattan, and called Marty. I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t want to go to her place. I wanted a public place, with voices and lights. Marty said she’d meet me at The Jumble Shop bar. She was waiting when I got there. In her old clothes, her hair in a kerchief. She looked as if she’d been asleep, but I knew better.

‘Studying,’ she said. ‘What happened, Dan?’

I told her.

‘Oh, damn!’ she said. ‘Those children were with her?’ ‘Since Saturday. Aged maybe seven and five. Their mother wouldn’t wake up. The father gone. The older one took care of the younger. Nice kids, happy.’ When the drinks came, I drank. ‘That’s what she did on her weekends; went to be with two little kids she had hidden in a house in Queens. Kids and a husband. Took fifty dollars out there every Friday.’

‘At least she went to them, was with them,’ Marty said.

‘She lived one hell of a busy life. Mother, actress, and hustler. No wonder she was tired-looking. But she had them near her. They were a family. Now what do they do?’

‘How did she die, Dan?’

‘Don’t know. There were some pills near her.’

‘Suicide? No, Dan. She was trying to be a mother even in her life, with her ambitions. She worked too hard.’

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘Maybe I never will know now. Let’s just drink.’

We drank. We talked about other things. After all, she had been a girl we hardly knew, Anne Terry, and we had our own lives like everyone else. When even I knew I’d had enough to drink, and had begun to talk again about Anne Terry and her hidden life. I took Marty home. Somehow, we both needed each other, needed something to hold to.

Marty had an early appointment, so I went home. I went to bed. All at once I wanted to curl into a ball and sleep without thinking. How many show-biz hustlers, or even dedicated actresses of twenty-two, struggling to advance an inch, take fifty dollars every week and go to be a mother to two little girls? Most of us are half dead all the time. Anne Terry had been very alive.

So I slept, but not well. The two little girls seemed to mix in my dreams with a lost arm. An arm is part of a man, and so is a child. Even lost, they can’t be escaped. Faces in my dreams. All the faces, but always the faces of the little girls turned up to Anne Terry. They smiled as she told them that a great prince would help them all live in a castle where they would be busy and happy working every day. Ricardo Vega’s face appeared with a laugh that echoed and echoed.

Then the unshaven face of Captain Gazzo, the sleepy grey eyes. Gazzo sat astride a chair with his arms folded on the high back, his chin on his arms, and watched me like an owl as he asked, over and over, how had Anne Terry died?

Chapter Nine

Captain Gazzo talking over and over:

‘In my office it’s nine a.m. You’re not in my office, Dan. Why aren’t you in my office? Telling me about it?’

In the morning light the deep furrows of Gazzo’s face are like the steel lines of a Durer engraving. No dream. Astride the chair, the owl watching me wake up, he looked like his own myth—the myth that says he never sleeps, year in and year out.

I reached for a cigarette. ‘How’d you get here?’

‘You’re not the only snooper with master keys. Let’s talk about Anne Terry. Coffee? I plugged it in.’

I nodded, he got two mugs of coffee, straddled the chair. ‘Where are the kids, we’re after the husband. Word says he’s floating around Manhattan. The sister says she knews nothing, never did. She doesn’t cry, Dan She’s your client?’

‘Only legally,’ I said, and told him about Marty and my vendetta on Ricardo Vega. I don’t hold out on Gazzo unless he’s in an official stance with even me. When he has to be he lets me know, and we understand each other. ‘Who gave the word on the husband?’

‘Local bar flies out there. The Pyramid tavern. Boone Terrell was in one Friday. Got drunker than usual. Yelled about all women being whores. He ran out of cash and credit, said he had Bowery friends to stake him. We’re looking.’

‘Jealous?’

‘Or guilty.’

I heard it in his voice. Anne Terry had not died of natural causes, and not of suicide. I sat on the edge of the bed.

‘How?’ I asked. ‘No marks on her, no blood I saw.’

‘Abortion,’ Gazzo said.

He has seen every way of death there is, every violence the half-sane imagination of man can think up. He says we’re all crazy, and that he’s the craziest for trying to stop us from feeding on each other’s blood. Hate, greed and insanity he knows, but he’s never learned to live with waste.

‘A pretty good job, the M.E. says,’ he said. ‘Not perfect, some internal bleeding and heavy pain after she got home, but she was packed right, no infection. A real Doc could have done it. She should have made it from the cutting.’

‘She didn’t make it.’

‘No,’ Gazzo said. ‘He used sodium pentothal for anesthetic. A heavy dose, not fatal, but she would have been woozy. She had pain at home, so she drank some whisky, and took some of those pills on her bed table. Prescription pills, but in one of those sample bottles the drug companies send to doctors. The M.E. thinks she was so woozy she took a double dose of the pills by mistake—took the dose twice because she forgot. The combination of pentothal, booze and pills could have killed her, but probably wouldn’t have, except she had a respiratory condition, too. She felt bad, took the pills, lay down, and just stopped breathing. Bad luck all around.’

The sun was breaking through the morning grey now. I put out my cigarette. Bad luck? That was all?

‘Why you, then?’ I said. ‘A Homicide Captain?’

‘Yeh,’ Gazzo said. ‘We don’t much like those pills, Dan, you know? Maybe just bad luck, but those pills worry us. The bottle says take two for pain. The M.E. says she probably took six—added one for good measure, then took the dose twice by accident. There were maybe ten left in the bottle, so no suicide. The kids say no one was there, but they played outside, and that house is wide open. No, we just don’t like those pills.’

‘Someone might have known what they’d do to her?’

‘Maybe. Now tell me about Ricardo Vega, and everything.’

I told him; especially about the rainy night, and what Anne Terry had said to Vega and to me, and what she had done. I told him about Sarah Wiggen and Ted Marshall, and about Sean McBride at Anne’s apartment.

‘You think what she wanted to talk to Vega about in private could have been being pregnant?’ Gazzo said.

‘It’s got the sound.’

‘That Marshall could be covering for her, and the Wiggen girl reported her missing fast—maybe she knew Anne was going to have an abortion, and got worried,’ Gazzo said.

‘It plays,’ I said. ‘Ricardo Vega’s child?’

Gazzo nodded. He got up and went to the telephone. I didn’t hear all he said, but I heard Ricardo Vega’s name. Gazzo came back.

‘Get dressed, Dan.’

I got dressed.

Ricardo Vega was waiting in Gazzo’s office. He looked alert and muscular, and he wasn’t alone. The business manager, George Lehman, stood wrinkled and sleepy. A small, sharp man carried a briefcase and fidgeting—a lawyer. When he saw me, he smiled.

‘Well, Captain, I feel better now,’ Vega said, his dark eyes on me. ‘I begin to understand all this.’

Gazzo sat behind his desk, lighted a slow cigarette. ‘What do you undersand, Mr Vega?’

‘That Fortune there, he’s got it in for me.’

‘Rey!’ George Lehman said quickly.

The lawyer moved. ‘Mr Vega has nothing to say until we know what this is all about, Captain. I protest this high—’

‘Shut up,’ Vega snapped. ‘When I need you, I’ll tell you. Both of you.’

‘Rey, as your lawyer I insist—’

‘Don’t insist,’ Vega said, the princely warning in his smooth voice again. ‘What am I, Mafia? I’ve got to be careful? The Captain’s going to trap me? Hell,’ and he leaned toward Gazzo. ‘Fortune there hates my guts, Captain. He’s out to get me. Any way he can. He thinks I’m after his girl, and he’s worried. Maybe he should be. What’s he got to offer?’

Gazzo looked at me. ‘What about it, Dan?’

‘I hate his guts,’ I said mildly, ‘and he’s chasing my girl. But he chases a lot of girls, and I didn’t bring his name in first, the sister did.’

‘Sister?’ Vega said. ‘What sister?’

‘Sarah Wiggen,’ Gazzo said. ‘She reported Anne Terry missing, and she brought your name in, so we talked to you.’

‘You talked to me, and I told you,’ Vega said. ‘The girl’s in my class, we had some drinks, no more. Who knows where she is?’

‘You had more than some drinks, Mr Vega,’ Gazzo said. ‘We found a cuff link and a tie in Anne Terry’s apartment, both yours. Fortune here has given me what he heard in your apartment between you and Anne Terry. Sarah Wiggen knows, too.’

Vega shrugged. ‘Okay, there was more, we had some good times. I still don’t know where the hell she is.’

‘We do,’ Gazzo said. ‘She was found dead last night in a house in Queens.’

The lawyer came alert like a bird dog on a scent. George Lehman licked his lips, made a sound. Ricardo Vega only stared at Gazzo at first. Then his handsome face seemed to age, grow less handsome and more human in a space of seconds. He took a deep breath, put his hands to his eyes, rubbed at his eyes and his whole face, as if he had just learned that there were a lot of things wrong with this world after all.

‘The poor, stupid kid,’ he said.

‘She had an abortion,’ Gazzo said.

Ricardo Vega nodded very slowly, up and down, like a man saying: Yes, I know how it is, what else is new? His hands rubbed at his thighs, his male loins.

‘You’re not surprised?’ I said.

‘Did you arrange it for her, Vega?’ Gazzo said.

George Lehman stood scared, glanced at Vega. The lawyer could stand it no longer. A police Captain was openly, brazenly, asking his client if he had committed a crime! It was enough to send any lawyer into shock.

‘You listen, Captain! My client—’

‘Shut up, damn it,’ Vega said. ‘I told you.’

‘No, Rey,’ the lawyer stood his ground. ‘I can’t keep quiet when the Captain goes so far. I won’t.’

‘I liked the girl,’ Vega said. ‘My child, maybe.’

Vega got up, paced a few steps but wasn’t aware of his movement. He was thinking. I had a glimpse of the brain that had to be under his gaudy surface to have made him the artist he was. He made his decision.

‘All right. I want to help. She was a hard kid, but I liked her. She had talent. I liked her a lot. Too bad.’

It rang in my head, an echo:
too bad
. As if both of them had wished the rules of the game were different. Wished that they could have acted to other rules, or played another game.

Vega sat down, laced his fingers. ‘We had something more real than most of my things. Too real. I found myself too deep. Not marriage, she never asked, but we were becoming a pair, a twosome. You understand? Not just love, or sex if you want, but in our work. A team—with a girl kid! I found I was listening to her ideas, and advising her on her New Player’s Theatre plans. No! My work is mine, no partners.’

‘You dumped her? Like that. No regrets?’ I said.

‘A lot of regrets, Fortune, but I don’t share my talent. I won’t collaborate. I can’t. I had to end it clean.’

Anne Terry wasn’t the only one who lived a double life. His voice, his tone, his speech pattern were all different now. Two men: the glib, virile swinger; and the serious artist. It was the artist we were hearing now. Or maybe seeing at work?

‘She was pregnant?’ Gazzo said.

‘Not that I knew,’ Vega said. ‘She hung on, hounded me like the night Fortune was at my place. He told you what I said, but she had other ideas. She told my business manager she was pregnant, and sent him up to tell me she’d call in a few minutes to arrange to talk about it. She called and I went to that cafeteria. She had her deal all arranged to offer me.’

The lawyer was on the edge of apoplexy. ‘For God’s sake, Rey! You’re incriminating yourself like some—’

Vega hardly moved. ‘Charley, I told you. Okay?’

The lawyer could push professional integrity only so far. Vega was a big client. The lawyer backed off. If Vega was spinning a fantasy, he was doing an impressive job. He was building the image of a strong man who did his own thinking. Maybe too strong? He sat studying his clenched hands as if seeing that meeting in the cafeteria all over again.

‘She said the baby was mine,’ he went on, choosing his words. ‘She’d have it, start a paternity suit. She told me she’d been married all along. Ted Marshall would testify that I’d known she was married; that I’d used lies, threats, my position in the theatre, to blackmail
her
into adultery. She’d say she’d been afraid of what I could do to her, and had believed in all my offers to help her, so had given in when she really didn’t want to. Then, afterwards, I’d refused to stand by her.’