Night of the Toads (14 page)

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 high 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.’

‘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.