Night of the Toads df-3

by Michael Collins

  ‘Who says what’s life and death to any man? Any man can kill under the right pressures, conditions. How many times have you said those things yourself, Dan?’

  How many times had I said them? All true. I had at least implied them to Marty only last night.

  ‘Besides, there’s still the abortion,’ Gazzo said.

  ‘What places him here personally, beside the note? Who rents the flat?’

  ‘Vacant. The super swears he knows nothing. We’re working on him, but it doesn’t matter. We found this, Dan. In a pile of rags and junk near a lone chair in the next room-sort of a waiting room, I guess.’

  He handed it to me. A silver money clip, initialled: R.V. On the back was an inscription, worn down: To Rey, a coming star: Applause! — 1-20-50. A well-used money clip.

  Gazzo said, ‘It’s Tiffany, easy to check. You know, in thirty years you learn that people are funny, they have small quirks almost as unique as fingerprints. It looks like Vega leaves bits of jewellery around.’

  I said, ‘Marty says he thinks he’s being involved in it all by someone who wants to give him public trouble.’

  ‘This is more than some trouble,’ Gazzo said. ‘He’s tied to the girl. He’s got motive already. He’s placed here now. He’s got no alibi for Saturday-we checked after Boone Terrell’s story. Terrell’s story is the final nail, and there are small hints from everyone. The D.A. does a dance with what we have.

  ‘Can I see that note Anne had?’

  It was typed, not written. Gazzo saw my startled face.

  ‘Look at the back,’ he said.

  The paper was a page from one of Anne Terry’s production plans for her theatre. There were handwritten additions to prove it was Anne’s. A discarded page? It was garbage-stained, but it looked like a correct page, and I couldn’t remember seeing any discarded scrap pages in her desk.

  Gazzo said, ‘Sometimes the plain and simple is just that.’

  A neat woman, Anne Terry, orderly. This page rang a bell. Did I remember seeing it? Was Anne a woman to take a page from her files and use it as scrap? On Friday, or Thursday it would have been. Some pages had been missing on Tuesday. But on Monday? The first time I’d looked? No. I was sure. Or was I? If I was, how did I prove it? Vega said someone was involving him. I saw a shadow, a man at Anne’s desk and files on Tuesday. Emory Foster, a ‘friend’ of Sarah Wiggen.

  Chapter Eighteen

  This is the age of magical technology. Detectives use all the modern tools of science, yes they do. I used a basic tool in a drugstore on Bank Street-the telephone book. It’s simple when you know what to look for. No Emory Foster was listed, not in five boroughs. No one has ever invented a free-lance writer without a telephone, or a poor free-lance writer with an unlisted number.

  I called Sarah Wiggen. She didn’t answer. She worked somewhere. Who had said it? Ted Marshall, yes-Sarah worked in some kind of residence hall for females. That could take all day. I flagged down a taxi on Hudson Street. The day was hotter now near noon, and they were still playing soccer in the park. Silent men scoring imaginary goals in make-believe important contests because they had nothing better to do in the richest country in the world.

  The superintendent of Sarah Wiggen’s brownstone had the steady eyes of a Corsican bandit.

  ‘Yeh?’

  ‘Sarah Wiggen isn’t at home. You know where she works?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m working on her sister’s murder. I need her.’

  He thought about it. ‘Columbia University. The Mary Higgens House. It’s in the book.’

  I found another drugstore. At The Mary Higgens House they passed me along the line until I reached a crisp female voice of uncertain age who had to be the boss. I explained who I was, and what I wanted. She thought about it, too.

  ‘I see,’ she said at last. ‘Sarah said that if we needed her she would be at home, or at her sister’s apartment.’

  I thanked her, and went out for another taxi. This time the cab went through the park. The soccer players had ended their match, and sat on the grass looking as if no one had won. They looked as if they thought that no one could win. Men have to have more than themselves to live for, something they can believe will go on after them. It doesn’t matter if it’s true, only that they believe it. Children and money aren’t enough, especially money. That is what the solid core of our nation doesn’t understand, and that is why we are in trouble.

  At Anne Terry’s apartment the buzzer answered my ring. Upstairs, Sarah Wiggen had the door open, was working over a floor full of cardboard boxes. Her hair hung in her eyes, and she wore slacks and an old sweater that made her look more alive. She hadn’t touched the files as far as I could see.

  ‘Where do they go?’ I asked, nodding at the boxes.

  She brushed the hair from her eyes. A soft gesture that raises a woman’s breasts gently. ‘I went over to see them, Sally Anne and Aggy. Do all children talk so much, I wonder? They were all over me: Aunt Sarah. Sally Anne talked about her mother. She said she’d have to take care of her father. Little Aggy moves her arms and legs just to watch them move. They’re so alive, aren’t they? It makes you happy.’

  ‘Sad, too,’ I said. ‘You’re taking these things out?’

  ‘What they want. I bought toys, too.’

  ‘Are you taking her files?’

  ‘No.’

  I went to the files. The page with the typed note on the back was missing. It had not been replaced with a revised page. Maybe the police had taken a revised page, but I thought not.

  ‘Why not take the files, her papers?’

  ‘Who would I give them to?’ It was her first reference to Ted Marshall. She looked out of a window. ‘You heard last night? Of course you did. Am I that hungry, frustrated? I suppose I am. I wanted his hands on me. Anne, alive or dead, just didn’t matter. What he had done didn’t matter, or what he was: weak. I hated Anne, didn’t I? Because men wanted to take her, and who wanted to take me? If he came back to me, I’d have won.’

  ‘Maybe it’s good,’ I said. ‘We go on that way.’

  ‘I can feel his hands in my mind, but his hands can’t feel anything,’ she said. ‘Who killed him, Mr Fortune?’

  ‘I’m working on it,’ I said. ‘Who’s Emory Foster, Sarah?’

  ‘What?’ She packed an ash tray. ‘A friend, I told you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It came to me, you call him Mr Foster. Yesterday you sent him here, no, he offered to come here for you, and when I saw you around 6 p.m., he should have been back with you, but he wasn’t. Who is he, Sarah?’

  ‘I call his Mister because he’s old.’

  She went on packing, but there was a change-the pleasure was gone. She had been mobile, talking, and now I saw the stiff reluctance in her where she knelt packing. She had been open, and she had closed.

  I said, ‘When you first reported Anne missing, you didn’t mention Ricardo Vega. You’ve told me you went to the police to make trouble for Ted Marshall, you were sure Marshall was the man involved. You didn’t care about Vega-your own words, Sarah. Next day, you suddenly did tell the police about Vega. After Emory Foster had come to you?’

  It was a question. She didn’t answer, so I went on. ‘I don’t think you knew Ricardo Vega existed, Sarah. Not as Anne’s lover. You weren’t close to Anne; she kept her life very secret. That was her way. You only knew about Ted Marshall because she took him from you. You never met Emory Foster before Monday. He came to you the way I did-he read the news story.’

  She stopped her packing now, but she didn’t look up. ‘All right, yes, he read the paper, he wanted to help find Anne. He came to ask if I knew about Ricardo Vega. I didn’t know, so he told me, and I told the police. That’s all.’

  ‘Help find Anne? He never heard of Anne. Why come to a total stranger, you, to help find another stranger?’

  ‘You came!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I came. Why did I come? I owed Anne something, I’m a trained detective, but w
as that my real reason? No, I came to try to get Vega! I think Emory Foster did the same-with a big difference. I called you Monday night, remember? Someone was with you. I told you I was going to Anne’s apartment-coming here. I found Anne later that night! Was Foster with you? You just happened to mention where I was going?’

  Her head was down, hair dangling like a curtain over her face, as if too much weight rested on her neck. She didn’t seem worried, or evasive, only reluctant, being made to do something she didn’t want to do. Her voice was unfriendly.

  ‘He was there, yes. I might have mentioned you.’

  ‘And he left right away?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Do you know his real name?’

  ‘Foster is the name he told me.’

  ‘How do I find him, Sarah?’

  ‘I don’t know. You proved I hardly know him.’

  ‘He would have given you a way to contact him. I’ll find him. Sarah, but I’m in a hurry. You want more killing, maybe?’

  She was sullen. ‘I’ve got an address at home, somewhere.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  She got her coat to cover her old clothes, and we went down for a taxi. We rode in silence. The driver took the West Side highway to avoid the lunch-time traffic. The river was high with the spring flow, cleaner, and some rusty big ships blew steam and water and looked happy now that winter was over. Sarah Wiggen watched the river, and the big ships straining for the open sea, and maybe that changed her mood.

  ‘Have you ever felt purged?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe.’

  ‘Cleaned out?’ she said. ‘Brain and body purged clean. When they told me Ted was dead, it seemed to clean me out inside. Last night I was like a starving female mouth: all flesh, thick. Today I feel all space. Clean, and far apart in a wide sky as if Anne and Ted had never been part of me. I feel… free.’

  ‘You were in love with Marshall?’

  She considered it. ‘I wanted him to love me and not Anne. That’s all I can say. When he dropped me, I quit everything.’

  ‘For him?’

  ‘My excuse, yes. The truth is I didn’t have what it takes,’ she said. She looked away from the river toward midtown and the theatre district we were passing. ‘I was setting nowhere in the theatre. No one hired me, said I was good. Anne used to say that if you haven’t given up, you haven’t failed. I don’t know what it takes to never quit, never accept any judgment except your own. Courage, or arrogance, or stupidity, maybe, but I don’t have it. It’s not in me.’

  ‘Anne had it, yes,’ I said. I could see her standing in the rain, alone, only herself.

  ‘She had the abortion because she wouldn’t give up, settle for less than she had to have. The arrogance, or courage, or stupidity to risk all the way,’ Sarah said, still watching the indifferent city spread out in the spring sun. ‘I’ll live all my life knowing I settled for less. You don’t marry a house in New Rochelle without always knowing that all you have is less than you wanted. I’m a smaller person than my sister. Possibly even a better person, but smaller. I don’t think I can fool myself that anything I do now will matter very much.’

  ‘But you’ll try hard to fool yourself,’ I said. ‘Like the rest of us, you’ll want what you do to matter a lot.’

  ‘I’ll probably even succeed,’ she said, ‘but not all the time.’

  She was still a colourless girl, without any snap, but I liked her better. Unless she was fooling herself, and me, all the way. She had something on her mind as the taxi dropped us at her brownstone. She climbed up to her bleak apartment as if pushing through some thick liquid.

  Inside, she rummaged in her desk without taking her coat off. She handed me a slip of paper with an address on it: 422 East Eighty-third Street. There was a telephone number. I had no need for it, but I took it. I didn’t want her warning Foster. She might know the number but I didn’t think so.

  ‘Emory Foster couldn’t have done anything to Anne, could he?’ she said. ‘What good will it do to find him?

  ‘There’s Ted Marshall,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what Foster’s done. I know the police think Ricardo Vega got them both killed, and I’m not so sure anymore.’

  ‘The police think Vega did it all?’

  ‘At the moment.’

  She held her coat tight around her, and her face was abstracted, thinking. I couldn’t tell if her thoughts were worried or happy. A new thought came to me.

  ‘Sarah, how did Boone Terrell know where you lived? Had he been here before?’

  ‘What?’ she said, blinked. ‘I don’t know. I suppose Anne told him. I’d never even met him. I told you that.’

  ‘So you did,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t you leave Boone and the children alone?’

  I left her standing there angry. She didn’t hate her sister or Ted Marshall anymore. Hate was still a strong emotion in this world, and it was easy to stop hating the dead.

  Chapter Nineteen

  East Eighty-third Street, as far east as 422 is Yorkville-the big German section. Famous for sauerbraten and beer halls where you can dance cheap, the Bund was popular here just before the war, and a lot of the local citizenry still think we fought the wrong enemy in that war. (Not that right-wing Germans are the only ones who think that in this country.) There are sub-minorities, too, mostly Czech and Hungarian.

  Number 422 was another old-law tenement with the fire escape in front, but built of grimy grey-stone without even the terra-cotta decoration. Instead of a bodega, the grocery store on the street level had a sign in Magyar. I paid off my cabbie and climbed the steps to the vestibule. There was no Emory Foster listed on the corroded mailboxes, but there was an Emory Foxx. The name was on an engraved business card, yellow with age, in the box for 4-B. A telephone number had been crossed out-a Los Angeles number, Hollywood.

  The ‘B’ apartments on each floor were just at the top of the stairs to the left. I rang at 4-B. I waited. I was looking forward to the look on Emory Foster’s, or Emory Foxx’s face when he saw me. I was disappointed. At my second ring there was a shuffling inside, and the door opened on a thin, grey-haired woman in an old black dress. She wore jewellery everywhere-costume jewellery in gold and silver and stones of every colour. Her eyes were glazed, and her feet were in ragged slippers. She just stood.

  ‘Mrs Foxx?’ I asked. ‘Is Emory home?’

  She looked at me.

  ‘Is Emory a heavy man, maybe fifty, has a tweed jacket with elbow patches? He’s a writer?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m looking for him. About Ricardo Vega.’

  She nodded. ‘Emory should be back soon.’

  She shuffled back into the apartment. I went in. It was a railroad flat, with those same thick-painted walls from the generations of painting by tenants who didn’t have the energy to strip the old paint before they put on the new. Paint, instead of scrubbing, to cover dirt. The furniture was like Emory Foster, or Foxx himself-good, but old, and out of place where it was. It was in Spanish style, heavy and velvet and had probably once graced more spacious rooms. The living room itself was a hothouse, with two electric heaters going. Plants hung and stood everywhere. There were bowls of goldfish by the dozens.

  ‘Emory knew Vega in Hollywood?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer. She had sat down in a plum velvet armchair, picked up a tumbler of thick, brown liquid that had to be sherry, and gone back to what she had been doing-reading a thick historical novel with voluptuous cover of a raunchy cavalier in padded tights, and a costumed lady with bursting breasts.

  ‘How long has he known Vega?’ I asked.

  ‘Too long.’

  She didn’t look up. I didn’t really exist. Nothing did. Just her tumbler of sherry, and the broad-shouldered cavaliers, and perfumed breasts, of centuries ago.

  ‘Why does he want to pin murder on Vega?’

  She looked up but not at me. ‘I hope Rey Vega dies in jail. Just dies. That much, at least. Dead
and buried.’

  She thought about that for a moment, then went back to her book. It was all unreal, like seeing a mental patient sitting alone in some sanitarium room, reading an imaginary book.

  ‘Dead and buried,’ I said, prompted.

  Her eyes up again, still looking at something only in mind. ‘He buried us, but he forgot to kill us first. We’re dead, but we can’t lie down.’

  ‘How long, Mrs Foxx? Why?’

  Back to her book. I wondered if she even knew when Foxx would be home? The hothouse room was making me sweat, or maybe it wasn’t the heat. I had to get out. Emory Fox, if he was framing Ricardo Vega, wasn’t doing it all alone. Boone Terrell had to be part of it, maybe Sarah Wiggen. Mrs Foxx didn’t even notice me leave, lost in the reality of Louis the Fourteenth.

  In the hall it was like returning from the past, and going down the steps in the sun was like coming back to life. The apartment upstairs made me think of that tiny room in The Bronx where Leon Trotsky had sat alone and dreamed of murdering the Czar and living in the halls of the Kremlin. Trotsky had done it.

  Once out, I crossed the street and headed for the avenue and the nearest subway to Queens. I saw the messenger out of the corner of my eye. In a messenger’s uniform, but there was something familiar despite the number 422. Another man went into the building behind the messenger. Together? I couldn’t tell. Two women went up the steps at almost the same time, all mixed together.

  I waited across the street in front of a corset shop, its small signs in both German and Czech. I didn’t have to wait long, and I had my answer when my wait ended. Maybe five minutes. The second man, not the messenger, came out of number 422, and stood for a moment on the steps: George Lehman, the business manager of Ricardo Vega. The messenger had been Sean McBride. Lehman stood on the steps in a topcoat with a velvet collar, and looked up and down the street. Then he came down and started across the street to my side. I turned to study the display of corsets in the window. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lehman take up a position in front of a German bookstore. He continued to look alertly in both directions. I saw his instant shock when he saw me. He stook rigid as if trying to decide whether I had seen him or not. I concentrated on the corsets. When I looked again, Lehman had crossed the street again, and was already half a block away.