Night of the Toads

by Michael Collins

  His long lashes flicked at each point I made as if they were blows. He had stopped looking at my pistol.

  He said, ‘In Cuba I want to be medical student. A doctor where I live, the slum, he like me. He say I am a bright boy, he teach me many things. With Batista I have no chance to be student. The doctor, my friends, helps me to be medical soldier, I learn very much. When revolution came I am Batista soldier, so I must run. I come here, work in hospital. Only orderly, but I watch, listen, read books. There is Cuban doctor who lets me watch operations. I take instruments. I get laid off. I start to help people have little money, need medical help.’

  ‘Abortions, Frank? Before Anne?’

  ‘All kinds of medicine help,’ he said. ‘Some girls want help, so I do. I think if I can make enough money maybe I can go to medical school even now, but—’

  ‘Tell me about Anne?’

  The pain in his dark eyes was almost physical. ‘Ted ask I help. No money. I do to help Ted, and the girl! A friend! I have seen doctors use those pills. I don’t know that they are bad with so much pentothal! She is sick, I don’t know.’

  ‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘An accident. Was killing Ted Marshall an accident, too?’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  He was up. ‘No!’

  I waved my big cannon. ‘Sit down, Frank.’

  He sat, his eyes sunk into his parchment face. ‘You say McBride kill Ted! Yes! You say police know!’

  ‘I said they had it worked out as McBride,’ I said. ‘I didn’t say they were right. You killed Marshall, Frank.’

  He shook his head, back and forth, no and no and no! His eyes looked at his votive lights, a slender moth devoted to the flickering light that was going to somehow help him.

  ‘You’ve already told me,’ I said. ‘You admit seeing Sean McBride that night. You admit being in the lobby telling him to get out. But that night, Frank, before I found Marshall’s body, you’d told me only that you’d seen McBride maybe three hours earlier! You didn’t mention that you’d seen McBride in the lobby at eight-thirty. You implied that you’d just come home around nine-forty. You hadn’t; you’d been in the building all along.’

  ‘So I was there. It don’t mean nothing.’

  ‘You wanted to hide it,’ I said. ‘And if you were there, then you had to have heard me yelling in the cellar! You heard me, and you didn’t come to free me. You didn’t come to roe, because you wanted me out of the way, too. Emory Foxx saw you there that night, and you saw him. You probably saw Foxx and Marshall talk in Marshall’s apartment. You heard Marshall spill his guts to Foxx, tell him everything, even where the abortion was done.’

  I stopped to let it sink in, but Madero didn’t speak. He just sat there now with his sunken eyes lost, his dark face so taut I thought it would split open.

  I said, ‘Ted Marshall was stupid enough to try to help Foxx frame Ricardo Vega, but you’re not so stupid. You knew Marshall had become dangerous. He’d told Foxx enough to hang himself, and he was ready to tell the whole world. He was about to break, you couldn’t trust him any longer. No one could have in his state. So you went in after Foxx left, and you killed him then.’

  In day-to-day life you can’t see people change, not usually. Change is too slow, too imperceptible. But now, as I watched, Frank Madero changed before my eyes like those flowers you see opening in stop-time photography. He had been taut, sunken, lost, shrinking into oblivion in that enormous medieval chair. By some trick of my mind, and the flickering votive lights, he seemed to grow again, swell, blossom like a chrysalis emerging from a dried shell. His face relaxed, his eyes came out of their shadow, a look of sudden peace over him.

  ‘I go in,’ he said. ‘Ted he shake. I tell him I hear what he say to Foxx. He fall to pieces, sit down, hide his face, say he can’t take no more. I have hammer with me. I hit him. I drag him to window. It is hard, but I get him up on window. I am more strong than you know. I push him out. I close window, come back down to here.’

  ‘Your friend,’ I said, ‘but he would have ruined you.’

  I stood, the pistol ready. ‘We better go, Frank.’

  He smiled that soft, girlish smile. His hand went into a pocket. Some sixth sense told me—that sudden relaxation, that peace on his face. The change a moment before because he had made his decision. His hand came out of his pocket.

  I dove, swung the pistol at his arm.

  He screamed as the pistol hit, the small capsule flying out of his hand to the floor. He didn’t try to attack me. He slid to the floor, scrambled toward the capsule. I stumbed against the chair, swore, recovered. His groping hand reached the capsule on the floor. I hit him with the pistol. He fell flat on his face, groaned where he lay on the floor. I got the capsule, dropped it into the kitchen sink, ran the water, and leaned on the sink breathing hard.

  He lay prone on the floor, his arms spread out, unmoving. He began to cry.

  Captain Gazzo was still in his office, finishing the paper work this night had handed him. He listened to me, and to Frank Madero. His nostrils flared—he liked a complete case; he so rarely got one. He had his abortionist.

  As Frank Madero finished his story, Ricardo Vega strode into the office. Vega was rumpled and unshaven, just released and angry. He had some words for Gazzo.

  ‘I’m talking to my lawyers, Gazzo. An official statement to the newspapers about your stupidity might make me—’

  ‘We had a case. You were framed,’ Gazzo said. ‘We worked and cleared you. We might make something of coercion of McBride; don’t push it. Foxx goes to jail, that’s all. Go on, Madero.’

  Vega’s face darkened. He didn’t go on, but he didn’t leave. He stood waiting.

  Frank Madero said, ‘That’s all. I kill my friend. I just want to be a doctor. No chance. I don’t mean the girl to die. I do a good job, have one mistake. I would be good doctor. When I come here, you know how I come? I hide in wheels of airplane. I almost freeze. My brother, too, but he don’t make it. He fall out of wheels of plane over ocean. No one know except me. My mother in Cuba have twelve kids. What is one?’

  Vega looked at Madero at the mention of Cuba. Curiosity, an idea to use in a play. Madero saw Vega watching him.

  ‘I know him,’ Madero said. ‘You know something? We come from same slum in Havana. We both want to be much, to do much. He get help at start, I get nothing. That is the difference.’

  ‘You are nothing, amigo,’ Vega said; ‘that’s the difference. I got out of that slum because I was more than the others, and because I had guts. Don’t cry to me.’

  ‘Gazzo said, ‘Get the hell out of here, Vega.’

  Ricardo Vega hesitated, ready to battle. Then he flashed that bantering grin, bowed to Gazzo, and walked out.

  I signed my formal statement, and so did Frank Madero. They took Madero out. Gazzo leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Thanks, Dan. I’ll sleep better.’

  ‘You’d have found him. Sean McBride didn’t quite fit when you thought about it. Not for Ted Marshall. Too soon. He only went crazy after Vega fired him, his chance gone.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Gazzo agreed. ‘And maybe not. McBride fitted good enough for Marshall’s killing. We’ve got too many cases to dig into the reasonably solved ones.’

  I had no good answer to that. Gazzo knows the limitations of his work better than I do. So I left once more.

  Outside on the misty streets only a few late citizens hurried along to their unknown destinations. A big Cadillac stood at the curb. Ricardo Vega rolled down a back window, called to me. The driver was someone new.

  ‘You’re a good detective, Fortune. They told me about it,’ Vega said. ‘No more trouble between us, all right? We were both wrong. I’d like to pay you something.’

  ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ I asked.

  He smiled his winning smile: the hidalgo. ‘Just don’t make me sound so bad at Foxx’s trial. Tell only what you have to. After all, what did I do we all don’t do?’

  ‘But you’ll
tell everything yourself,’ I said. ‘If Lehman goes to trial, it’ll go better for him if you tell the jury everything that made him do what he did. How you used him, and for what.’

  ‘Lehman acted on his own, just like that crazy McBride. He gets no help from me, Fortune. Why should he?’

  ‘Funny. That’s what he said you’d do.’

  ‘Did he?’ Vega said, less friendly.

  I said, ‘Don’t pay me anything, Vega. I’m going to get it all into the record at Foxx’s trial. All I can about Anne Terry, Lehman, McBride, Foxx, myself and even Marty. Marty’s how I started on the case, so I’ll get her in. I’m going to crucify you as far as I can.’

  His dark eyes glittered. ‘I can still hurt Marty.’

  ‘No, we know too much now. We know your weaknesses. You’ll stay far away from us.’

  I turned to walk away. I was tired of him. He spoke behind me.

  ‘You know, I really liked her, Fortune. Anne Terry, I mean. She had beauty, talent, strength. I got closer to her than to any girl in a long time. I already told you that. We were good together. Maybe I should even have married her.’

  I turned back. ‘You’re telling me something?’

  ‘I’m telling you that I didn’t try to do all of it, that I didn’t want to do it. She was just too much. I am what I am. I won’t be pushed, and I can’t share what I am. I can’t share Ricardo Vega. With no one.’

  I heard what Anne Terry had said on that rainy night, and what Emory Foxx had said tonight—Vega would never be sure. The difference between a born prince and a success-prince. A born prince knew he would always be a prince. Rey Vega would never be sure what tomorrow would make him. So he worked for himself alone, his talent directed inward, his work unrelated to anything but his own victory. He could only use people, and nothing connected him inside to Frank Madero from the same Havana slum. But work must go outward, not inward, and Rey Vega would stand isolated, afraid of the next ‘Vega’ behind him.

  ‘They say you’re a genius,’ I said to him. ‘I always believed them. Maybe you could be a genius: you’ve got skill and talent. But you’re not a genius. You need to many flies to feed you. You haven’t had a moment of daring since you put your own money into your work. You’re dancing for the public now, and you’re going to fade before more original artists. You don’t have the vision or the courage to be great. You can’t want women; you can only chase skirts. A life of one-night stands. Sideshow genius.’

  His handsome face had been framed in the open car window as I talked. Now his head turned as if to give orders to the new man behind the wheel of his car. I braced, thought: here we go again? But he didn’t speak. Not to the driver, and not to me. He gave a faint shrug, a half-smile, and vanished back inside his Cadillac. The big car slipped silently away. I watched until it turned a corner, and then I began to walk.

  When I reached an avenue, I looked through the mist for a taxi. I wanted Marty now: my place, my haven. One more fly with desperate hopes and no hope. Other times, other places, Francisco Madero might have been a hero, needed. He might have saved lives and been honoured, instead of losing a life and being forever damned. A moment of error, and then the fear that had killed Ted Marshall. I wasn’t going to be the one who had to look at Mrs Marshall’s eyes when she heard the reason for her son’s death.

  I was going home to Marty where it would be warm and we could smile close in the dark. I had a woman, not just a skirt to hang in my closet overnight. Ricardo Vega could have had a woman, but he was afraid to lose himself. A rich man who was, of course, a better man, so could live only for himself, afraid to touch.

  A solitary taxi came far down the deserted avenue. I watched its top light distant in the mist. Ricardo Vega could have had a real woman. If he had been a little more man, and a little less prince of success, Anne Terry could have had her chance and none of it would have happened. I felt sad, even bitter, but she would never stand still for that. Not Anne Terry. She would cheer me up: ‘Forget it Gunner; we all die. You got to take risks. At least the kids’ll be okay.’ A girl no better and no worse than most.

  No! That was a lie, an insult. I heard her scorn: ‘Get away from me with that cheap crap, Gunner!’

  No. She had been much worse than most, and a lot better than most. She hadn’t made the conditions of her life, so she had refused to accept the conditions. For her own needs she should have left her kids in Arkansas, but she hadn’t. For the small pleasures she should have made the best of what she had, but she wouldn’t. Her life had given her little to battle with, so she faced the weapons she had to use, and used them. A woman who shaped her own life if it killed her.

  The taxi reached me still empty. I sat back, and I didn’t feel good. She was slipping away forever, Anne Terry. In a few days, weeks, I would forget her like a puddle that dried and vanished after a rainy night. A vague memory, and I realized as I looked at the dark night city outside the taxi that I had been working all along for a miracle. Not to solve a case, or catch a killer. Not for justice or truth. I had been working to make her live again, to bring her back, to let her win this time. I had been working to give her another chance. This isn’t a world of miracles, yet I felt that I had failed her, too.

  After a time the cab passed a big Cadillac in the mist. It could have been Ricardo Vega’s Cadillac. I stared at it. I felt a sudden surge of wolfish joy. I was going to ‘get’ Vega at the trail. I felt better. At least revenge. I’m human, too.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1970 by Gayle H. Lynds 2007 Revokable Trust

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