Night of the Toads df-3

by Michael Collins

  Close, she was less pretty but more opulent. Her face was long and bony, with the tired look that doesn’t come from worry or conflict, but from plain too much work and not enough sleep. Her eyes were too bright, feverish, as if she lived on energy alone. But her full body was really beautiful. I found I envied Richardo Vega. For this girl in bed, even I might-?

  I said, ‘Vega doesn’t like you, either.’

  ‘You better fade out, Gunner.’

  Her voice still had the quality I had heard up in Ricardo Vega’s living room-direct, a little hard, and older than her years. A voice of bone, not sugar.

  ‘We could help each other out,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t guess so. Mind your own henhouse.’

  I heard a regional sound in her voice, far from New York.

  ‘I need a weapon,’ I said. ‘Two hit harder than one.’

  She smiled at that. A nice smile. Not innocent or eager, but friendly. She reached out and touched my bruised face. When a woman has known few men, she will usually flinch from physical touch, will make a big thing of it. This girl had been with many men, her touch firm and matter-of-fact. Her fingers came away bloody. She looked at the blood.

  ‘I don’t need losers, Gunner. Bring me the winner.’

  ‘He’s a bastard, Miss Terry.’

  ‘And a genius. You know it. If you want the theatre, he’s where the action is. The power, Gunner.’

  ‘What is he as a man?’

  ‘Power there, too, Gunner. You believe it.’

  ‘I believe a brush-off when I hear one.’

  She seemed to think about that, about the brush-off, and after a time she sighed. ‘I really dig the guy, too, except he’ll never be sure enough to relax. Too bad.’

  She blinked in the rain. For an instant I was aware of a real sense of loss about her. Then she began to walk away without looking at me again. ‘Go sniff around your own bird, Gunner.’

  Her walk was a stride like Marty’s. After a few seconds, I sloshed behind her toward my subway. She turned at Lexington, and when I reached the corner, I saw her go into a cafeteria up the block. Under the conditions, that seemed strange to me. She wasn’t the type of girl who ate in cafeterias. Maybe it was only the bloodhound habit, but I followed. Through the cafeteria window I saw her carry two cups of coffee to a table, and look at her watch. I waited in the rain.

  A tall, pale, skinny man appeared and walked toward her table. He had a stoop, and a kind of shuffle as if his feet hurt. His enormous hands stuck out of short topcoat sleeves. The coat was too small, and shabby, and his pants were work pants. He wore work boots. He had a gaunt face and sunken eyes, but I guessed that he was only in his early forties. The early forties of a man who’d lived a long and hard life.

  He sat down at the girl’s table, his coat still on. She pushed a cup to him. They sat without speaking. When he had finished his coffee, he just stared at her. She took one of his big hands. Her face was gentle, her eyes soft. His reaction surprised me-he hung his head, looked at the floor. I could see the pressure as she squeezed his big hand. She talked for some minutes, smiling almost sadly, as if the two of them were alone in the cheap cafeteria. Then she patted his hand.

  His gaunt head jerked up. For the first time he spoke, and I saw a sharp exchange between them. It was over in seconds. He stood up slowly, reluctant. She nodded to the door. At that he turned and walked away. I watched him come out and go north. He didn’t look back. Inside, she went to the telephone. She returned to the table with another cup of coffee. I had a quick hunch, and moved into a doorway next to the cafeteria from where I could look out at intervals.

  When I saw them they were already around the corner and near me in the rain. Ricardo Vega, and another man. I shrank back, and hoped the other man wasn’t Rick McBride, or Sean, and, if it was, I hoped even more that he wouldn’t spot me.

  It wasn’t McBride, it was the heavy man, George, and he didn’t spot me. But he took up my old post outside the cafeteria window. Vega went inside. I didn’t have to see Vega to know where he went inside the cafeteria, and with George outside I wasn’t going to see anything more. All I would do was risk more lumps, and no matter who the gaunt man had been, I didn’t see anything in it all to help my problem.

  I slipped carefully from the doorway, but George had no interest in me or anything else outside that cafeteria. I took the subway downtown, and stopped in on Doc Silverman. He patched my cuts, felt my face bones, clucked over my bruises, and sent me home. My five cold rooms were a bleak welcome. After Vega’s place they looked like a rural railroad waiting room. In Europe people are used to coming home to cold rooms, to moving around in coats until the heat takes hold. Americans expect cozy heat, and a frigid apartment is depressing.

  I was depressed enough anyway. Bruises aside, I hadn’t done much for Marty. I felt no better when she arrived about 2:00 a.m., even though my rooms were warm, and a good movie was on TV. She saw my band-aids and bruises.

  ‘Dan, who? Vega? No!’

  ‘Did he bother you again tonight, Mart?’

  ‘I didn’t see him; they didn’t rehearse my scene. The understudies worked separate. What happened?’

  I told her blow for blow verbal and physical. ‘I don’t think I did much good, baby.’

  ‘He knows I’m not alone now, Dan.’

  ‘You think that’ll help?’

  ‘He likes the easy chase, the sitting pigeon, no fuss,’ she said, kissed me. ‘You know, I love you a whole lot.’

  Reason number one for going to Ricardo Vega had worked fine. She was nice to me the rest of that night. I liked it, but it made me uneasy. Gratitude is a bad base for passion. No woman loves a man because she’s grateful.

  So, after she was asleep, I lay in the dark and tried to think that Vega would lay off Marty because of me.

  Chapter Three

  I should have known better. For a week it did seem possible, but men like Ricardo Vega don’t change in a week. Marty was ready to cry; except that Marty doesn’t cry; she swears.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn! He’s got the ‘business manager’ of his, George Lehman, hinting that the boss is worried, maybe I lack spark, fire! There ought to be more ‘like’ in my scene!’

  The first week, Vega was just busy. The man aside, he was a great actor, had written the show, his own money was in it, and when there was an artistic purpose to serve, he served it first. The second week he was the king again.

  ‘King of toads!’ Marty said. Her work meant too much to her. ‘He squats on his pad, croaks his power, and licks out that sticky tongue to snare all the flies.’

  I was helpless, and that’s a hell of a feeling. I had no power to pressure Ricardo Vega, and I couldn’t fight him physically. A gun was no threat. He would be sure by now that I wasn’t going to use a gun. Yet I had to do something, and I thought a lot about Ricardo Vega the second week. That was why I spotted the girl’s name in the newspaper. In The Daily News. The story wasn’t in The Times, of course. I think it was only the picture that even got it into The News. The News likes pictures of pretty girls.

  I don’t often read The News, but in my one-window office that Monday morning I had nothing to do but think about Ricardo Vega. It was a sunny spring day at last. I wanted to relax and enjoy the day over some beers, or maybe I needed a friend to talk to-a real friend. Only Joe Harris fitted that need-one friend, not counting Marty; the fate of a man who belongs nowhere. But Joe wouldn’t be on duty at Black’s Tavern until noon. I had an hour, so I read The News.

  The picture of the big girl in the small bikini stopped me on page four:

  NUDE ACTRESS VANISHES

  Anne Terry, 22, actress and model, who made headlines when she appeared nude for a whole act in a banned production at The New Player’s Theatre, was reported missing late last night. The disappearance of the curvy actress was reported by her sister, Sarah Wiggen, of 29 West Seventy-sixth Street, who told police her sex-pot sister vanished last Thursday from her West Tenth Street ap
artment.

  Her partner in New Player’s Theatre, Theodore Marshall, 26, questioned by the police, denied any knowledge of her whereabouts. Marshall said he could think of no reason for the beauty to have vanished. Police are investigating.

  There was no mention of Ricardo Vega, but it was the girl in the rain all right. Her name brought the night back to me, ‘Go sniff around your own bird, Gunner.’ A girl who had wanted to talk to Vega alone. Who had been thrown out, had talked to the bald man, George, who had then called, and Vega had come to her. A brush-off, a summons, and now a disappearance. It was worth a look. I had liked Anne Terry, she had helped me.

  The noble detective. All ready to connect Ricardo Vega to one missing girl in the hundreds he had dropped. With his power and money, and her obvious background? A ‘free’ girl, who had to know fifty men more desperate than Vega; and a rich man who could pay off a dozen girls, one way or the other. After over two weeks, I was suspicious of foul play by Ricardo Vega? When his name wasn’t in the story, and The News a paper that would jump with joy at even a hint of the great man?

  Not to help the girl no. A straw. A chance to cause Vega trouble. There was a connection, if slim, and maybe I could at least bruise Vega. Then, anything was possible. Famous men do make mistakes.

  I took a taxi to the West Seventy-sixth Street address of the sister, Sarah Wiggen. The day was crisp, the trees in the park budding with new, bright green that didn’t last long in New York. Somehow, that made me think of the missing girl, Anne Terry, who must have been green and bright once, but who had long lost it when I had talked to her in the rain. Lost it at the age of twenty-two.

  Sarah Wiggen had never had it. The sister opened her door to my ring, and maybe she had been green once, but she had never been bright-alive bright, I mean, not intelligent bright.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, stared at my empty sleeve.

  Maybe she was intelligent, I couldn’t say, but I could guess that she had always been drab, earthbound. She looked enough like her sister to prove the relation, but where Anne Terry had worn grey and looked gaudy, Sarah Wiggen wore red and looked grey. Not that she wasn’t pretty, and almost as well filled out, but the classic bones of her sister were missing, and something more-the spark, the verve, the intangible that makes men turn.

  ‘Miss Wiggen? Can I talk to you about your sister?’

  ‘Anne?’ Her tone could have been eagerness-or surprise. Her voice lacked the bone, but it had the same regional accent. ‘You know where she is? Come in.’

  Moving she looked more like her sister. It gave her animation. The apartment couldn’t move, and it lay there, cheap and dull. The colours seemed to cancel each other out, and there was no eye for style. It wasn’t electric, it was simply polyglot, mismatched, and there wasn’t much of it. A bare apartment, but not empty. A man stood up.

  ‘Did I hear that Anne has been found?’ he said.

  A florid-faced man of medium height, but topping my 160 pounds by a good fifty. He didn’t look fat, just thick, like a broad tree trunk. Part of that effect was his clothes: brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, soft, checked shirt; green wool tie; pin-stripe flannel pants that belonged to a suit; good brown shoes badly run over at the heel.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I want to help you find her. My name’s Dan Fortune, I’m a detective.

  ‘A police detective?’ the florid man asked.

  ‘Private. I met Anne a few weeks ago at Ricardo Vega’s apartment. I’d like to help if you’ll let me.’

  ‘Vega?’ the man said, glanced at Sarah Wiggen. ‘Perhaps he could help you, Sarah.’

  ‘I can’t pay a detective,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want pay. On my own.’

  ‘You have some personal angle?’ the man said.

  ‘Anne helped me once, and I don’t like Ricardo Vega. He could be involved. I want to find out. That’s straight.’

  ‘It is,’ the man said.

  He went to Sarah Wiggen, put his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Why not let him try, Sarah? He could help.’

  He could have been her father, but he didn’t act fatherly. Maybe fifty years old, less. Probably the same age, nearly, as Ricardo Vega-but this man looked almost fifty and Vega looked barely thirty. (It’s partly a matter of will, of desire. Some men look forty at twenty-five: mature, responsible, proper. They want to look mature; they are in the main stream-firm fathers, solid husbands, mature in business. Other men look boyish, immature at forty. Men out of the main stream who value personal youth and their individual ego. A matter of a man’s self-image.)

  ‘If he wants to, all right,’ Sarah Wiggen agreed.

  ‘Give me a dollar to make it legal,’ I said. ‘You’re my client.’

  She found a dollar in her handbag, and gave it to me.

  ‘Good,’ I said, and turned to the man. ‘Now why did Ricardo Vega’s name mean something to you? Mr-?’

  ‘Emory Foster,’ the florid man said.

  ‘You know Anne Terry?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, I never met her,’ he said, ‘and Vega means nothing to me. It’s Sarah he has meaning for.’

  ‘What meaning?’ I said to the sister. ‘His name wasn’t in the story in the newspaper.’

  ‘It will be,’ Emory Foster said. ‘She just told the police.’

  ‘Why did you wait?’ I asked the girl.

  ‘I didn’t list all the names of the men Anne knew,’ she said. ‘Only Ted Marshall, because he was her current boy friend. I don’t even know all her men.’

  Emory Foster said, ‘I told her to tell the police all she knew. Especially about Ricardo Vega.’

  ‘What does she know about Vega?’

  ‘That Anne was in his acting class,’ Sarah Wiggen said, ‘and that they… they played around.’

  ‘Vega plays around with a lot of girls.’

  ‘I guess he does.’

  I waited. ‘That’s all? No trouble with Vega?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’re not close, Mr Fortune. I don’t see her much. We live different, and we don’t talk to each other often.’

  ‘Then how do you know she’s missing?’

  ‘I talked to her Thursday,’ she said. ‘She called to ask me to go down home with her. We haven’t been home in four years, at least I haven’t, but I didn’t want to go with her. I called her Friday morning to tell her. She didn’t answer. She’s always home on Friday mornings. Ted Marshall gets Fridays off, and they work. She’s never home on weekends, so I didn’t think too much about Friday until Sunday. She was supposed to call me definitely on Sunday evening to get my answer about going down home. When she didn’t call, I went down to her place.’

  ‘It worried you that much? Just not calling once?

  ‘Anne always does what she says she’ll do. Always,’ Sarah Wiggen said. ‘The super had to let me into her place. I saw that she hadn’t been home since at least early Friday. The place was all neat, untouched. Anne always straightens on Thursdays for Ted coming on Friday. She’d never clean on a weekend. To me that meant that she hadn’t been home since maybe Thursday evening. I called Ted Marshall. He said when he went on Friday morning, she hadn’t been home. She hadn’t told him she’d be away. So when she still wasn’t home late Sunday night, I went to the police.’

  ‘That was pretty quick, wasn’t it?’ I said.

  Emory Foster said, ‘Her being missing Friday makes this weekend different. She didn’t tell Marshall she’d miss their regular meeting on Friday morning, and she expected to be at home on Sunday evening. Sarah tells me Anne is very orderly. And she still isn’t at home, is she?’

  I thought about it. ‘Where is ‘down home,’ Sarah?’

  ‘North Carolina, a dirt farm. She’s not there, I called the general store, talked to my Ma.’

  ‘Which one of you changed the name?’

  ‘Anne. She married at fourteen,’ she said, almost bitterly. ‘Annie May Terrell. She shortened it for acting.’

  ‘What’s her numbe
r on Tenth Street? You have no key?’

  ‘She never gave me a key. Number 110, apartment four.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can find,’ I said.

  Neither of them said any more, and both of them stood as if they were waiting for me to leave before they moved. That made me wonder, but not as much as the timing of Sarah Wiggen’s report to the police. It had been fast, no matter what they said.

  Chapter Four

  The building at 110 West Tenth Street was in the part of Greenwich Village taken over years ago by well-paid fringe artists-editors, copywriters, commercial artists, theatre producers, designers, professors. People who had once wanted to be real artists, free livers, and who came to live where others where still trying. But they had jobs and children, needed to be clean and safe. The aspiring or stubborn real artists were careless, dirty, and not always safe, so were driven out by those who had come to love them. Only the few artists who had been highly successful could stay. The rest had to find lower rents on less careful streets, evicted by those who wanted the name of artist, but who, in the end, feared the game.

  The street was clean, tree-lined and expensive, and Anne Terry’s brownstone building silent in the early afternoon. A ring got no response. I used my rectangle of stiff plastic to open the vestibule door, and the ninth key on my ring of master keys opened the apartment door. It was the top floor; flooded with sun, and empty.

  There were two rooms and a kitchenette, laid out much like Sarah Wiggen’s apartment, and with not much more furniture, but there the resemblance ended. The difference, as with the sisters themselves, summed up in a few words-spark, verve, style, the intangible. Everything blended, yet there was nothing ‘arranged’ about the place. All casual, even careless, and, yes, warm. I had not expected a warm apartment-‘I don’t need losers, Gunner. Bring me the winner.’

  I began work with the closets. Those in the bedroom held only female clothes, and not as many as I expected. Few outfits for a woman, especially a theatre woman-one or two good ensembles for each occasion, no waste, like a general planning a battle. In the living room closet there was a man’s green tartan jacket, a pair of grey slacks. The jacket had a name strip sewn to the collar: Theodore Marshall.