Night of the Toads

by Michael Collins

  In the street Marshall was half a block ahead and running. He was younger and faster. He reached the subway at Seventy-second Street a full block ahead. I plunged down the stairs, fumbled for a token, as the train came in. I made the door with a lunge. I chased through the cars. Once I had a glimpse of him far ahead, moving on through the cars. People sat in lethargy and stared at me as I ran past. Their eyes were curious, but not even their hands moved. The train pulled into Columbus Circle.

  I had to decide—stay on, or get off? I got off. It was the wrong choice. The train was long gone before I gave up hope of finding him on the platform.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Where does a man run from his own guilt and panic? Unless he has planned an escape, he is inexorably pulled home, and I didn’t think Ted Marshall had planned much for days. I could be wrong, but I had nowhere else to look anyway.

  I went up and grabbed a taxi on Broadway. I watched the night city pass on the way downtown, and thought about Ted Marshall. The gaudy, sparkling blaze of Times Square with its masses of people mocked Ted Marshall in my mind. This was where he dreamed of finding his name emblazoned, but he had arranged an abortion, a girl had died, and now he was running. A man caught in a drama with no future for his name.

  He had arranged the abortion, alone or not I didn’t know. He had not known of Boone Terrell, or the house in Queens, so if he was alone in guilt, then her death had not been murder. Before I could know, I had to find him, talk to him.

  A blind man running through the night city. No one lives in a smaller world than a city man. For a rural man his home is a whole town, an entire countryside. For a city man home is a neighbourhood, a narrow world of a few blocks, a few friends. The rest of the giant city is as alien as a foreign country. All doors are closed, any stranger can be an enemy. There is nowhere to go, and a man in panic runs to what he knows. It was a theory, anyway. Terror seeks the familiar.

  The taxi dropped me at Marshall’s apartment house. I went to the rear. There was no light in Marshall’s windows. I went down into the basement. Frank Madero’s rooms were silent, no light under the door. I used my keys. Madero’s apartment was empty, votive lights guttering eerily. I rode up to the Marshall apartment. I heard nothing inside, and opened the door.

  The four rooms were dark; as still as a lunar landscape. Light from other buildings cast pools of faint light near the windows. I bumped into the overcrowded furniture, and found no sign of Ted Marshall in his own room. I went back out into the hall to see if there was a place to stake out. There wasn’t. I was considering that a stake-out in the street would be better, when I heard an elevator coming up.

  I ducked back into the dark apartment, and closed the door. I heard the movement behind me. I had time to see a large, dim shape, nothing more. I had come in from the light, and my eyes had not adjusted to the dark. His had. I took a slashing blow of something hard and metal. Only time to see the motion, try to evade, fail … on my knees, down but not out. My head split pain. I tried to get up. My brain told me I had to fall and roll away. Caught between the two commands, I did nothing. I kneeled like a prisoner about to put his head on the block.

  A thick arm came around my throat. I tried to reach back with my lone hand. The arm tightened … squeezed … black …

  I had two arms, a fine figure of a whole man. Two fine arms, and still couldn’t evade her blows. She hit hard for a woman, Anne Terry: ‘I’m a good mother, Gunner. I love my kids, Gunner. I just want a chance.’ Why didn’t she love me with my two fine arms? Sarah Wiggen’s eyes smoked at the touch of hands on her breasts: ‘I saw him first. I love him. Hate her.’

  I opened my eyes. I saw nothing. God, I was blind! Doc, you never told me I’d be blind, blind.…

  Shapes emerged from a black pit. A ghostly furnace. Some … washtubs? Thick, square pipes over my head. The sound of traffic somewhere. People walking. The night sounds of the city. Where I sat nothing moved. Silence, dust.

  My head ached, not badly. A small wound burned hot on my temple. My throat was bruised. My feet were tied, I saw them in the dim light where I sat against a wall. My hand was tied behind me: to my belt, and then to some kind of pipe. The furnace said I was in some cellar. If I had been unconscious for very long I would have felt much worse. So—I had not been carried far. The basement of Ted Marshall’s building.

  I tried my bonds. They wouldn’t give. I couldn’t move to find a way to cut them. I had no miracle escape tools.

  I yelled.

  I got an echo, and a pounding head. No one came.

  I considered time: hit about 7:15, out for maybe ten minutes, so nearly 7:30 p.m. now. All at dinner, early TV.

  I yelled anyway.

  I began to know how a prisoner in solitary confinement feels. Time motionless.

  Later, I decided to identify my attacker. Strong, quick, muscular—big? Run down the list, Fortune. Nuts. What did I remember? Maybe he was weak, slow and skinny. Surprise did it.

  I yelled.

  I dozed in the dim dust. Hours now, or a few minutes? What had he wanted? Not to be found in Ted Marshall’s apartment? Urgent business with Ted Marshall, no outsiders wanted? Someone who had known about Queens, and knew what the right pills would do to Anne Terry?

  I yelled.

  A door opened above. ‘Hello? Someone down there?’

  ‘Behind the furnace,’ I called.

  He found me, stared. A round little man with vest and a watch chain. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Practical joke. Get my hand loose.’

  He was nervous, shocked by the unusual, and his hands fumbled, but he made it. After he helped me untie my feet, he looked around for monsters in the shadows.

  ‘Just a joke,’ I said, ‘but thanks.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. He retreated quickly up the stairs.

  I looked at my watch 9:32. Two hours at least. I walked through the cellar toward the stairs, and saw a broad shaft of light from the direction of the superintendent’s apartments. Frank Madero stood in his open doorway, peering in my direction. I walked to him.

  ‘I hear someone yell,’ he said. ‘Just now. You?’

  ‘Someone hit me, tied me down here. You didn’t hear my yelling before?’

  ‘I just come home.’

  ‘Ted Marshall here, Frank?’

  ‘I don’t see him since I talk to you.’

  I edged in past him. The votive lights still flickered, but the apartment was empty.

  ‘I see a man maybe six-thirty, when I go out,’ Madero said. ‘Big man, blond. I think one of the men who beat up Ted.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Out front. Like he watch building, you know?’

  I took the elevator to the fifth floor, and got out warily. I listened at Marshall’s door. No sound, no light. I used my keys, and this time went in ready. When I was sure that the place was really empty. I turned on the light. I checked the closets of Ted Marshall’s room. All his clothes seemed to be there, and three suitcases. No one had even sat on his bed.

  In the living room I searched the floor where I had been hit. I found nothing. Then I saw the two glasses, and two cans of beer, on a coffee table. Both glasses were empty, ringed with dried foam. I had a sense memory of the coffee table being empty. I also remembered the pools of light from other buildings. The worn drapes were drawn now. All but one set open to a closed rear window. A chair near the undraped window was not on the marks it had made in the rug. I opened the window and looked down.

  Down in the courtyard something black lay in stray light from other apartments. A bundle of old clothes. I left the light on as I went down in the elevator. The courtyard was slashed with beams of light from many windows. A concrete yard fenced with a cyclone fence, the gate locked. A chorus of TV words and music came from the apartments all around me in the night—the Greek chorus of mid-century America.

  Ted Marshall lay on his back in the clothes I had last seen in Sarah Wiggen’s apartment. One arm was broken under him. His nec
k was broken. What else was broken I couldn’t tell, and the back of his head was crushed in a pool of blood. I saw no marks that couldn’t have come from the fall. His pockets contained money, keys and a wallet. In the wallet there were a few credit cards, old newspaper clippings that told how good Ted Marshall had been in some stock company show, a lot of small portrait pictures of himself, and two nude pictures of Anne Terry. It was hard to remember she was dead. It was almost harder to remember that Ted Marshall had been alive.

  I went up and called Gazzo.

  Gazzo watched the Medical Examiner work. Detectives were all over the courtyard, and up in the apartment.

  ‘Two hours in the cellar?’ Gazzo said.

  ‘While someone had a beer with Marshall.’

  ‘Nothing says they were the same: the visitor, the man who tapped you, and the killer. Marshall fixed up the abortion?’

  ‘That’s how it looks. But maybe not alone, with this.’

  ‘No suicide, Dan? You’re so sure?’

  ‘The window was closed. He didn’t close it himself. So he wasn’t alone.’

  ‘Men jump in front of friends,’ Gazzo mused. ‘The friend closed the window. Reflex. He could have hit the way he did from a jump.’

  ‘Why was I put on ice?’

  ‘Him or the friend. He had to know you were after him after the Wiggen girl’s place. Later, scared witless, he jumped. Where’s the mother?’

  ‘She works. Okay, if there was a friend here, why didn’t he yell for help when Marshall jumped?’

  ‘Maybe not a real friend. An associate. Someone who wanted no connection to Marshall, but not a killer.’

  ‘You want it to be suicide, Captain?’

  ‘Sure I want it a suicide. Neat and simple,’ Gazzo said. ‘Abortion and suicide. What about it, Doc? Suicide?’

  The M.E. stood up wiping his hands. ‘My guess is no. The autopsy may help. Dead about an hour, no more. He might have been hit first. A jump should have landed him farther out.’

  Gazzo nodded, thought for a time. ‘I guess I go back out to Queens and check Boone Terrell’s story some more. That McBride was seen around, Dan?’

  ‘The super said so.’

  A detective called down from above that Mrs Marshall had been located at work, was on her way home. Gazzo went up. I left to put a band-aid on my cut temple.

  Ricardo Vega’s name was up above the show title on the marquee of The Music Box Theatre on Forty-fifth Street. I went in through the front. The auditorium was dark, some thirty people scattered across the rows of orchestra seats watching the rehearsal on the stage. I slipped into a seat in the last row. Marty wasn’t on the stage, Ricardo Vega was. In his sweat suit and boots, doing a scene. Most of the other players were in costume. It didn’t matter to Ricardo Vega.

  I didn’t know what the scene was, but it was Vega’s. He seemed taller, more powerful, and even in the sweat suit he gave a sense of dignity that made me feel suddenly calm. Calm and no longer in the theatre. Almost without being aware of it I was no longer in a dark seat: somewhere else, sunk into the moment on the stage. His voice carried with no effort to all parts of the theatre, encompassing the whole theatre within his quiet voice. He moved with authority and a sense of joy. Totally alive. Transformed into something that was always Ricardo Vega, and more than Ricardo Vega. Something with a life of its own that was all of Ricardo Vega and much more. Not a different person, rearranged. Taken apart and put together in a different pattern—the pattern of the person he was creating up there in a world he made more real than the world where I sat. Oblivious to all but his art. Nothing held back, nothing. Given to the audience, but not for them, no. For his art, work, the hands of his art.

  Then it was gone. The orchestra started to play, and Vega began a dance, the chorus behind him. Began to caper like a wooden puppet, a smile on his face as false as his acting was true. I had forgotten in the suspended instant of his art that the show was a musical. I watched him, capering and vulgar, lost behind the plaster smile. Art turned to charade, the entertainment of burlesque—look, Ma, I’m popular! He began to sing, no music able to hide the sense of desperation in his voice.

  When the scene was over, Vega stood with his head bent like a penitent as he listened to the music director.

  I went backstage.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Last rehearsals are worlds of private tension. Only the stage manager notices a stranger. I was lucky, the stage manager was setting a new scene. Marty’s scene. I saw her alone in the wings, her lips moving as she paced, prepared. It was not a time to go to her. Art is one of the few things that can only be done alone, and yet can only reach its goal as the effort of a selfless group. Each artist must do his work alone for its own sake, for the truth of the work itself, and all artists must work together for the common whole, the final product for the world. Both together. The paradox of art, and maybe the paradox of life, too.

  Ricardo Vega’s dressing room was closest to the stage. Vega wasn’t there. The business manager, George Lehman, was. He saw me in the narrow corridor. Heavy, solid, he came out with the short, quick steps of a small but thick man. A quick glide, as if on wheels, only the solid legs moving. His bald head glistened with sweat, and his suit was as wrinkled as ever over fat.

  ‘You want something, Fortune?’

  ‘Some talk with your boss,’ I said.

  ‘He’s busy. He’s got no time to waste, okay?’

  Without Ricardo Vega near he was a different man. The jumpy manner of a slave existing on the whim of the prince was gone. A kind of solid presence. He was his own man, too, and the fleshy face no longer seemed so flabby. He could not stop the sweat, mopped at his face and hands with a handkerchief, but there was that muscle I had seen before under the flesh, a solid jaw, a firmness to his eyes that watched me.

  ‘Why don’t you just mind your own business, Fortune? Leave Rey alone, you know?’

  ‘He made himself my business, Lehman.’

  ‘The girl? A tramp actress? Come on, that kind flops for anyone, twice on Sunday. Why blame Rey for trying? You think he’s the only one? Take a tip, watch that director, Kurt Reston.’

  ‘You know all about tramps?’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t always on top, mister. I did my time with tramps. I wouldn’t spit on any of them. If it ain’t Rey today, it’s someone else tomorrow. Believe me. I know them all.’

  ‘You’re on top now, Lehman?’

  ‘That’s right. Money, a home, a decent woman. Get a decent woman, Fortune, the kind you know what they’re thinking when you’re in bed with them. I’ve got two boys in college, a girl marrying a rabbi. My old man was a pushcart peddler in Brownsville. Rey did it for me. Leave him alone.’

  ‘All you have to do is eat his dirt,’ I said.

  His thin-shell eyes were neither angry nor surprised. He had heard that charge before. He lived with it. All he did was mop the sweat from his hands.

  ‘Brownsville is a bad place,’ he said. ‘Most guys never get out. They die in the gutter. I had my gutter, ran with a Jew gang worse than you could know. I took five-to-ten for armed robbery. I learned. You got to have money and respect. For ten years my kids wore patches and ate potatoes. Who wants an ex-con? Rey hired me. I’d learned accounting in prison, and for Rey I worked hard. My house is in Manhasset now, North Shore, right? You think I’ll let tramps or their studs kick Rey? Stay out of this, Fortune. Find something else to play detective on.’

  ‘Stay out of it? Out of what, Lehman? You don’t mean Marty. What’s Vega mixed in I should stay out of?’

  His face and eyes gave away nothing, but he was worried. He was tight inside. He mopped at his face. He seemed to be trying to decide just how much to say.

  ‘If Rey lays off your woman, will that get you to stay out? Just walk away, forget it?’

  ‘Forget what?’

  ‘Just lay off! We can play rough, too. Be nice.’

  ‘What’s so important now, Lehman? Maybe Ted Marshall?’

>   ‘A cheap punk who got what he deserved.’

  ‘Didn’t the beating do the job? What more was there, Lehman? Did Marshall know more, do more, and Vega had to—’

  A burst of loud music drowned me out. Lehman stopped listening, mopped at his face as the scene on stage ended, and the performers trooped off. Everyone grim, as only performers at late rehearsals can be grim, the girls half naked in their exercise tights, but somehow sexless. Marty came off, saw me, and came to take my arm, hold tight. Ricardo Vega was behind her.

  ‘Well now, the gumshoe lover again,’ he said in his bantering tone, but his heart wasn’t in it. His voice was strained, his eyes abstracted, the witty prince lying flat.

  ‘I saw your scene,’ I said. ‘The song-and-dance, too.’

  Everything about him seemed to be far off, at a distance. Sean McBride appeared from somewhere, found a chair in the dressing room, straddled it. His limp eyes watched only Vega. He whistled between his teeth, made a paper bird with his big hands—a folded paper bird with wings and head that moved.

  Vega said, ‘Everyone has to be George M. Cohan today. The voice of the people. You’re a dance critic now, Fortune?’

  ‘Ted Marshall was killed tonight,’ I said.

  He paused, shrugged. ‘You play with blackmail, you get hurt. You expect me to care?’

  ‘Is that a statement, Vega? Blackmailers get hurt?’

  ‘Call it a proverb. Was there evidence I killed him, too?’

  ‘You expected there would be?’

  George Lehman said, ‘Rey was working here all night. I was with him. So were fifty other people.’

  ‘I only kill people between shows,’ Vega said. There was a strange bitterness in his voice. Odd, out of place.

  ‘Lehman wants me to forget the case. I wonder why?’

  ‘Look, Fortune, I’m tired. Take your girl and go, okay?’

  ‘Where was McBride all night, Vega?’

  Sean McBride worked his paper bird, watched only, the bird and his hands. ‘Ask the lady, mister. Little Marty there.’