Night of the Toads

by Michael Collins

  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 f
ew 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.’

  Vega seemed to think about it. ‘She made it sound pretty bad. Luck made the date airtight, she said—two weeks we spent at my Vermont farm just after New Year. She could prove she’d had no relations the week before, and not for a couple of weeks after. Since it really was my kid, the blood tests would show positive to every test. To top it all off, Ted Marshall had faked up a tape that sounded like me refusing to help her after she had told me she was pregnant, and I’d admitted it was mine. I sounded pretty nasty on that tape, arrogant.’

  He smiled a little ruefully. ‘She arranged that tape on me beautifully. Around the time we were beginning to bust up, about a month or so ago, we taped a couple of scenes from plays about lovers in trouble. When Marshall edited them some, and spliced them together right, she had what sounded like me refusing to help. It was a good job, even the voice levels were perfectly matched. It would be damned hard to prove it was a fake, and Anne was a good actress. I could picture her using that tape in court, tearfully telling how she’d had to trap me with a tape recorder after I refused to help her.’

  Vega looked grim, shook his head where he sat. ‘She didn’t expect me to believe that she could really prove it all, she didn’t think she had to. A jury might not believe her, but odds were that they would. Juries love the underdog, the weak against the big, important man. No, she didn’t think I’d want a long court fight—adultery, lies, headlines, dirt, my whole past raked over. I’m no angel, so she didn’t think I’d want to risk a battle in the open I could easily lose.’

  I said, ‘But could she really hurt you that way? In these days?’

  ‘Blackmail doesn’t always depend on real damage,’ Vega said, ‘but on possible damage. The victim afraid to risk damage.’

  ‘You thought there was a chance of damage?’ Gazzo asked.

  ‘She did, Captain,’ Vega said. ‘Anne wasn’t bright. Tough, not bright. We live in a transition time. The young have free morals, but strong ethics. Free, but honest, and she was going to make me look dishonest, smelly, dirty. The older middle-class people show a lot of backlash for rigid morality. My own money goes into my movies. I could be hurt at the good middle-class box office. My name is a draw. I could lose financial backing. The young admire me, I could become an ethical leper. Could, Captain. For a price, I’m safe. That’s what she tried.’

  Gazzo said, ‘What price?’

  ‘Twenty-five thousand, my name on a contract to direct one play, co-produce with her for one season, at New Player’s. A little cash, and my name. She gets an abortion, I’m safe.’

  ‘You agreed?’ Gazzo scowled.

  Vega’s face was like dark granite. ‘I grew up in a Havana slum, Captain. I don’t scare, I don’t pay blackmail. It was tried before. I didn’t think she’d do it, but that didn’t matter. I don’t sell my name or my work, not ever.’

  ‘You turned her down?’ I said.

  ‘Flat,’ Vega said. ‘I also took some positive action. You might as well hear it from me. Some friends of mine went to see Ted Marshall. When they left, he didn’t want any part of blackmailing me, no. He was on my side. I never saw Anne again, and that was over two weeks ago.’

  ‘Then why send Sean McBride to Anne’s place yesterday?’ I asked. ‘To get what you’d left there, maybe?’

  ‘McBride? I didn’t send him. Why would I want to hide I knew her, the police had already questioned me?’ He gave me his superior smile—the prince chiding a dull mortal. His story was over. It was like coming out of a quiet movie theatre into the noise and chaos of the real city. His dark eyes glinted, ‘McBride said I sent him to Anne’s apartment?’

  ‘He didn’t mention your name,’ Gazzo admitted. ‘You never knew she was married, had kids, lived in Queens, too?’

  ‘She had children? Damn, no! I didn’t know any of that.’ Vega leaned toward Gazzo. ‘Look, Captain. I knew a young girl; tough, determined, not bright. We talked plans, theatre. I liked her. I’m sorry she’s dead. Now do I go home, or do I let the lawyer start earning his pay?’

  Gazzo nodded them out. Ricardo Vega was all smiles, like the champ leaving the ring. There was no formal statement; the story wasn’t part of Anne Terry’s death—if it was true.

  ‘A good story, it sounds true, ‘Gazzo said.

  ‘Probably most of it is,’ I said.

  ‘Yeh, most of it.’ The Captain swivelled. ‘She did a lot of living for twenty-two. If we have to dig in all of it, we’re in trouble. Maybe Ted Marshall can help. I guess you’ll want to go along, too?’

  I wanted to go along.

  Chapter Ten

  Mrs Marshall answered our ring. Something had happened to her. The motherly face had grown longer, taken on rocky cliffs. Her dyed hair was tied back like a combat nurse prepared for hard action, all trivia put behind her. There was a bottomless stare to her eyes, as if she had seen what could lie on the other side of her hope. Anne Terry had happened.

  ‘More police?’ she said. ‘And you, Mr Fortune?’

  ‘Other police were here, Mrs Marshall?’ Gazzo asked.

  ‘Late last night, yes. Ted went with them. He’s still not back.’

  ‘Denniken,’ Gazzo said to me. ‘He’s got the right, a known boy friend. If he’d learned anything, I’d know by now.’

  ‘What can Ted tell you?’ Mrs Marshall said, her voice level and quiet. ‘He knows no
thing about poor Anne.’

  ‘He might not realize what he knows,’ Gazzo said. ‘You haven’t heard from him since the other police took him?’

  ‘He called from the police station. He said he was all right because he knew nothing. That was hours ago.’

  Gazzo turned for the door. ‘I’ll stake a man here from the local squad.’

  I followed Gazzo. Mrs Marshall spoke behind me.

  ‘Do you think he was the father?’

  I turned. ‘Probably not, no.’

  ‘If he was, he’d have married her. He wanted to anyway.’

  ‘She was already married, Mrs Marshall.’

  ‘He didn’t know. She could have divorced.’

  ‘I guess she could have,’ I agreed.’

  ‘She wasn’t living with her husband, was she?’

  ‘In her own way she was,’ I said. ‘Weekends. Maybe not really with the husband. More with her children.’

  ‘The police told Ted there were children.’ She had that expression women with grown children got remembering when their children were little. ‘Every weekend? With all her work?’

  ‘She didn’t miss often, I don’t think.’

  ‘She must have been a good mother—in her own way.’

  Her eyes went vacant, considering the qualities of being a mother. I went out after Gazzo. As I walked out of the elevator into the bar lobby, I got a quick glimpse of a small man in army fatigues ducking behind the basement door. I found Gazzo on the street beside his car. He’d already called for a local man. A Captain of Detectives has more than one case.

  ‘You want a lift?’ he asked me.

  ‘I’ll hang around for a while.’

  Gazzo got into the back seat of his car. He’s not one of those high-rankers who like to prove they’re just-plain-cops by poses like riding up front with their drivers, scorning the soft privileges. Gazzo says he likes soft seats and thoughtful privacy as befits his rank and age.

  I waited for the squad detective. This was one of my areas, and I knew him when he walked up: Detective (Second Grade) Leo Puskis. A nice cop, Puskis—too nice to make First Grade unless he gets lucky or gets shot in the line.