Night of the Toads

by Michael Collins

  I looked down at Marty. ‘He was with you, Mart?’

  She dropped my arm. ‘When was Marshall killed?’

  ‘Somewhere from 9—9:45 p.m.,’ I said.

  ‘McBride left my place before nine. That’s only a few blocks from where Marshall lives,’ Marty said.

  Sean McBride shrugged. ‘I got me some drinks.’

  ‘Maybe he did,’ Marty said, a lightness in her voice that maybe only I recognized. A warning of trouble. ‘You’ve been sending him around to keep the pressure on me, right, Rey? Hints that you really like me, could send me places. Today I was busy—pictures, costumes, all that—but when I got home around seven tonight, Sean boy was waiting. Not for you, Rey, for himself. He wanted my precious body, the one I should hand around to show what fire I’ve got inside. He didn’t offer me anything, no sir. He’s a real man, not a tired old creep like you, Rey. He was doing me a favour. He doesn’t have to buy a woman. He was sorry for me, stuck with a cripple and an old man. He doesn’t think you can cut the mustard, Rey. He can, yes sir! An ox, and about as smart. I got him out short of being raped. That was a surprise. Maybe he went for drinks. Maybe he stops short of murder, but I wouldn’t count on it.’

  She had drawn a crowd by now. The performers. Silent and uneasy, they didn’t know where to look. I watched Marty. Lehman watched McBride. McBride watched only Vega. Vega stared at the floor, and I sensed something—he no longer cared about Marty. Something had pushed her from his mind. He raised his head.

  ‘Pay McBride off, George.’

  McBride stood up. ‘Rey, I’m sorry, you know? She pushed—’

  ‘Get him out of here!’ Vega said. ‘I want him gone.’

  ‘I didn’t say none of that, Rey! She’s lying. A break, huh? Anything you want me to do.’

  Vega exploded in the dim backstage. ‘How much do I have to take? Hounded! It’s got to stop! Christ, do I have to handle everything myself?’

  He was in his dressing room, the door slammed shut, before anyone knew what he was doing. George Lehman blocked the way to the door. Sean McBride looked at Lehman, his face blank. Then he walked away out the stage door. Everyone drifted away, and Marty went for her mink.

  McBride wasn’t in sight when Marty and I left. We took a taxi to her apartment. McBride wasn’t there either, and I breathed easier. Marty tossed her mink on a chair.

  ‘Make me a drink,’ she said. ‘Triple martini.’

  She kicked off her shoes and vanished into the bedroom. I made the drinks. I stood with my whisky at the window. A cold night wind had come up, and the shadowy citizens hurried home. I thought of Paris five centuries ago, of François Villon scurrying through the night looking for a safe lodging in a city as wild as any savage land. Every man clawing for his needs.

  Marty came out in her long, green robe. She curled with her drink at one end of her long couch. I took the other end.

  She drank, shivered. ‘That animal McBride told me about the abortion, between grabs at me. He was sure Marshall had fixed the abortion. Now Marshall’s dead. Suicide. Dan?’

  ‘No. Ted Marshall maybe didn’t do it all alone.’

  ‘Rey Vega?’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking, it doesn’t seem right for Vega to do such a stupid thing, take such a risk.’

  ‘Important men, rich men, kill people. Not often in our world, they can get what they want easier ways. But it happens. Some intolerable pressure, some half-rational motive.’

  She drank. ‘McBride said someone was trying to involve Vega in it. Someone who wants to cause Vega trouble.’

  ‘Involve Vega? How, baby?’

  ‘Just mix him in it publicly, I think. McBride said he might have to beat someone else. He was proud, thought it would make me swoon. Could it have been Marshall? McBride killed him?’

  ‘Some new blackmail? Did he mention any name?’

  ‘I had my mind on his hands. The pig!’

  Her eyes were wide with a kind of pain. I moved to her, touched her arm. She shrank away.

  ‘Don’t, Dan! Not tonight. No man. I don’t want the smell of a man. You understand, Dan.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I just don’t want any man near me tonight.’

  ‘I’m not just any man, Mart. I’m me, Dan, and I don’t understand, no. I shouldn’t be “any man” to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dan. Not tonight.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ I said.

  I got my raincoat and left. She didn’t look up. She curled tighter, her martini in her hands.

  I walked for a long time in the sharp night wind. To the river. When you love a woman, want her, and she says no, a giant steel hand tears you up inside. You want to smash walls, and you understand why men kill for passion. I wasn’t ‘any man’ to her, I couldn’t be or what was there, and I walked by the river for a long time before I turned into the first river saloon I found. I didn’t even want to talk to Joe Harris, no. I had a double Irish. I began to calm. Sometimes I wonder what men who don’t drink do when they are chopped up inside?

  The Buddhists, Zen style, tell you that peace is found by leaving the world. They don’t mean death, even if that is a kind of peace; they mean withdrawal. They mean not needing the world, learning how little a man needs to face himself with a smile. They mean hopping off the merry-go-round. I’ve tried it. I jumped off many times, and I never really got back on the last time. A middle-aged roustabout who dropped out and goes where his shoes take him. But it’s not really part of our Western world, and no man escapes the world that made him. A Western man can’t stare at a wall and find peace. We can get off the carousel, but the music goes on inside.

  If you can’t leave the world, and you don’t have some simple belief to tell you what is right and wrong, there is only work. I had a case. For society it was a case worth nothing: two dead zeroes who had given the world little, and been worth less to the world. Knowing why they had died wasn’t worth the time of one detective who should be out protecting decent people. Not to society, no. Yet Captain Gazzo would work on it, and so would I.

  For two kids without even a weekend mother, yes, and just to do the job right. True, but more than that. For Anne Terry, who had wanted to give much to an indifferent world, and who had been worth a lot more than many. A girl, woman, who had kept the faith in her fashion, in the ways allowed to her with the pressures she had inside she could not help. A girl with the courage to carry her conflicting demands, and to dare for her dreams. She had made a mistake, but for a large dream, not for a small greed, and her presence filled the case like a hollow inside me. As if, somehow, my work could bring her back.

  So I drank, and I worked. Ted Marshall had arranged the abortion. Maybe not alone, or maybe someone had come into the action for his own reasons. Someone who had killed Ted Marshall? Why? McBride for Vega? Maybe McBride on his own?

  I drank, and I thought. At least, it took my mind off Marty and my need to be loved.

  Chapter Seventeen

  My five cold rooms and ready pot of coffee greeted me on a chill new morning. I had stayed sober, not called Marty, and lay looking at the thin sunlight without a hangover. I felt good.

  I jumped out of bed, the chill sharp on my bare skin, and for an instant had the illusion of being far away. A hotel in Paris. A bed-sitter in Manchester. A flat in Stockholm. Out of some new bed to cross to a window and look out at the light over an alien city. A bright, new morning. Dazzling and new, and, because the city was strange, aware that someday there would be no new mornings for me, so each morning a complete life. For those who climb slowly from the bed they have always known, morning is only another day.

  I had my coffee, and enjoyed the morning at the window, until New York became familiar again, and I called Marty. She never got up before noon if she could help it, so was asleep. She cursed me out, said she was all right, told me to call later, and hung up. I called Captain Gazzo. His female sergeant told me he was out. Sarah Wiggen didn’t answer; she went to
work earlier than a sometime detective.

  I wore my old pea jacket when I went down to the diner for some breakfast, because I was still feeling the illusion of being somewhere else. Amsterdam, maybe, ready for a robust Dutch breakfast before a walk along the canals. The illusion held through pancakes, eggs and bacon. It finally faded as I walked downtown toward Ted Marshall’s apartment house.

  The lobby was spotless this time, almost shining. Scrubbed in deference to death, maybe, or maybe Frank Madero had needed to keep busy through his long night with a friend dead. Or was it the order of the owner; remove the marks of police boots, the evidence of murder in a proper building where murder didn’t happen but had? There was a hush to the building, even the TV sounds muted. Real blood was more interesting. I could imagine the good wives working with ears cocked for new violence.

  Mrs Marshall answered the door. She wore a hat, and all black, and her face was round and motherly again as if her moment of battle was over. She looked now like those calm, silent old women I had seen in the war picking through the ruins after the battle had passed. No more worries, the curtain rung down on both fear and hope.

  ‘Come in, Mr Fortune.’

  ‘You’re going out?’ I said.

  ‘To get him. The police have been kind. They don’t … need him any longer.’

  Which meant that Ted Marshall had died from the fall and nothing else. Her voice had a soft texture, comforting. She sat down, so I sat. She got up.

  ‘Tea? I’m having some,’ she said.

  ‘Fine, thank you.’

  She sat down. ‘It won’t be ready yet. I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I, Mrs Marshall, but I have to ask—’

  It wasn’t my voice she heard. ‘You were here last night? That Captain, Gazzo is it, he told me. I had to identify poor Theodore. My company let me go. A few days with pay.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, feeling lame.

  ‘You were here? You never saw Theodore?’

  ‘No. Someone was in the apartment, I was hit. You have any idea who that could have been, Mrs Marshall?’

  ‘No,’ she said, heard her private dialogue. ‘I tried, you know? Poor Ted, he had such fantasies. Like his father. Most people assumed I doted on Theodore so because his father had been dull, ordinary. No, Theodore was exactly like his father. A handsome dreamer, weak, full of ambitions they hadn’t the capacity for. I knew Anne would hurt him. She was a good girl in her way, but much too much for him.’

  ‘He arranged her abortion, Mrs Marshall?’

  She nodded. ‘I didn’t ask him, but I knew. He was nervous that Friday. Saturday he was gone most of the day, and when he came home he was an awful wreck. Theodore never could face trouble. He was a boy who wanted the world to make a wide, sunny path for him with no grey days. After the police came the first time to ask him if he knew where she was, why she was missing, he was too frightened to move. He just lay there in his room. Only a boy, I so hated to see him frightened like that.’

  ‘Was anyone else mixed up with him, helping him with Anne? Did he talk about anyone special?’

  ‘He never said anything to me, Mr Fortune.’

  ‘Did you see him with anyone? Someone special, maybe? Some stranger to you?’

  ‘I don’t remember anyone, no.’

  ‘Can I look at his room?’

  ‘Of course. The tea should be ready.’

  I searched Ted Marshall’s room. The police had been ahead of me, and Gazzo does a complete job. I found no lead to anyone else, no clues. Only the closet full of clothes, all the best, and shelves of books, mostly plays. In the books one role in each play had been marked all through in the margins. The roles Ted Marshall had seen himself playing. All the plays were big plays, and all the marked roles were big roles—the male star. Nothing small for Ted Marshall.

  In the living room Mrs Marshall had the tea poured. I took a cup, sat down. She perched, drank her tea.

  ‘You’re continuing to investigate, Mr Fortune?’

  ‘So are the police. We’ll find who killed him.’

  ‘It seems a sad kind of work. He’s dead, who or why doesn’t matter very much. I expect the reason won’t make much sense. We live in a senseless, frightened world. Men who kill are always afraid. I’m not sure I want to know why Theodore made someone so afraid of him. I remember a play he did once. There was an old woman in the play whose son had been killed, and the son of a neighbour woman, fighting against each other. All the old woman could think was that the two women stood on each side of scales of sorrow, balanced by the bodies of the dead boys.’

  What did I say? In the silence of that musty apartment where she had worked for her son’s weak dreams she seemed to be seeing the scales of sorrow, and all the dead boys. The doorbell rang without reaching her. I answered it for her. Frank Madero came in. He was pale and stiff in a Cuban-style suit with a rakish nipped-in waist. The suit was too small for him, old and faded, with marks on the padded shoulders where it had hung for too long unused in a closet.

  ‘It time we go, Mrs Marshall. I got to work special,’ Madero said. There was a greyness to his dark face, a puffiness around his eyes as if he had been crying. ‘You find yet who kill Ted, Mr Fortune?’

  ‘Not yet. What about you? You heard, saw, nothing?’

  ‘Only what I tell you last night. I come home just a little before I see you.’

  ‘Ted didn’t come to you at all?’

  ‘Maybe, but I’m not home, yes? He don’t feel so good, I see that. I think maybe he knows about the girl, Anne, but I don’t ask. He’s my friend. If I am here last night, maybe he alive.’

  ‘You suspected he fixed the abortion for Anne?’

  ‘That makes him a bad man? Because he help her? She makes the baby, she wants to stop baby. He do his best, yes?’

  Mrs Marshall had her coat on. ‘I’m ready, Frank. Will the funeral parlour people be there?’

  ‘I just call them to go,’ Madero said.

  Together they walked to the door. She seemed to have forgotten that it was her apartment. She was leaving me in the room as if I lived there, not her. She looked back at me.

  ‘In that play Theodore did there were a lot of old women with dead sons; a civil war of some kind. At the end the old heroine goes for her son’s body. She’d seen the first of him, she said, she’d see the last of him. What was the pain she suffered bringing him into the world, to the pain she was suffering carrying him out of the world? She didn’t care what had killed him. Once he was dead, the reason didn’t matter.’

  She went out leaning on Frank Madero—as Juno Boyle had at the end of the play she remembered. Juno and the Paycock, O’Casey. A little war and a cheap murder. Is there a difference? You tell me, I don’t know.

  I gave them a few minutes. Then I went down. I wasn’t feeling good anymore in the clear, cool day. When I found why Ted Marshall had died, it probably wouldn’t make much sense. About as much sense as Juno Boyle’s civil war. Or as much sense as the isolation inside us all that made Marty shrink in her anger even from me.

  The new morning had come down to just another day. I stopped in O. Henry’s for an Irish. It was too early, but my sense of clean well-being had gone with the morning. To ease my guilt before I had a second, I called Gazzo again. The lady sergeant had a message this time. If I called I could go to an address on Hudson Street. Gazzo had left the message only an hour ago, the place wasn’t seven blocks from O. Henry’s.

  Police cars were out front when I got there. One of a row of tall old-law tenements with the fire escapes in front, and terra-cotta decoration all over the grimy brick façade. Small shops on the street level ranged from grubby bodegas to elegant antique emporiums. Three levels of patrolmen passed me up to the second-floor rear apartment. A railroad flat, the dark rooms smelling of sweat, cooking, rot and urine. All the rooms were bare and empty except the kitchen.

  In the kitchen was a white enamel table, two stained straight chairs, a water heater, a sink, and the usual hig
h bathtub with an enamel cover to make a work area. The walls and fixtures had that thick, leprous look that comes in New York flats from endless years of paint—layer on layer. Detectives worked and crawled all over the room. Gazzo stood watching. Lieutenant Denniken from Queens was with him.

  ‘You know Denniken, Dan,’ Gazzo said.

  ‘Fortune,’ Denniken acknowledged, and nothing more. He walked away.

  ‘What is this, Gazzo?’ I said.

  ‘Where the abortion was done, Dan. Cleaned, but not good enough. Blood under the tub, broken syringe needle, traces of hair and maybe foetal matter. Lab has it all now.’

  I looked around the barren rooms and felt sick.

  ‘How’d you find it?’

  ‘Remember Boone Terrell saying Anne had something written down in case Vega couldn’t meet her? Last night, after we found Ted Marshall, I told Denniken to go over that Queens house with a sieve. We had luck. Denniken had a brainstorm—the little kids had cleaned, all right, but they couldn’t carry out the big garbage cans. Denniken found the note deep in the garbage. This address, and Vega’s name.’

  ‘But I heard Ted Marshall admit it all.’

  ‘All, Dan? Or just part? I figure the beating he took did more than shut him up. I think he changed sides. A Judas goat for Vega. That’s why he got killed; he knew too much.’

  Gazzo moodily watched one of his men taking apart the sink drain, another taking fingerprints. ‘I see it that she had a bigger club over Vega than he let on. That’s what was missing. He paid her off. Then he fixed the abortion. Maybe he told her he wanted it safe, or maybe that he wanted to make sure she kept her bargain. What he really wanted was his payoff back, and to make sure she stayed silent—permanent.’

  ‘Murder?’ I said.

  ‘I read murder, but to prove it we’d need the quack who did the job. The only other weak link is dead—Marshall. Maybe we can pin Marshall on him somehow. If not, and he doesn’t break, I guess it’s the abortion charge. He was here.’

  ‘I want to like it,’ I said, and I did, ‘but a man like Vega needs a life-and-death motive for murder.’