Night of the Toads (13 page)

Then it was gone. The orchestra started to play, and Vega began a dance, the chorus behind him. Began to caper like a wooden puppet, a smile on his face as false as his acting was true. I had forgotten in the suspended instant of his art that the show was a musical. I watched him, capering and vulgar, lost behind the plaster smile. Art turned to charade, the entertainment of burlesque—look, Ma, I’m popular! He began to sing, no music able to hide the sense of desperation in his voice.

When the scene was over, Vega stood with his head bent like a penitent as he listened to the music director.

I went backstage.

Chapter Sixteen

Last rehearsals are worlds of private tension. Only the stage manager notices a stranger. I was lucky, the stage manager was setting a new scene. Marty’s scene. I saw her alone in the wings, her lips moving as she paced, prepared. It was not a time to go to her. Art is one of the few things that can only be done alone, and yet can only reach its goal as the effort of a selfless group. Each artist must do his work alone for its own sake, for the truth of the work itself, and all artists must work together for the common whole, the final product for the world. Both together. The paradox of art, and maybe the paradox of life, too.

Ricardo Vega’s dressing room was closest to the stage. Vega wasn’t there. The business manager, George Lehman, was. He saw me in the narrow corridor. Heavy, solid, he came out with the short, quick steps of a small but thick man. A quick glide, as if on wheels, only the solid legs moving. His bald head glistened with sweat, and his suit was as wrinkled as ever over fat.

‘You want something, Fortune?’

‘Some talk with your boss,’ I said.

‘He’s busy. He’s got no time to waste, okay?’

Without Ricardo Vega near he was a different man. The jumpy manner of a slave existing on the whim of the prince was gone. A kind of solid presence. He was his own man, too, and the fleshy face no longer seemed so flabby. He could not stop the sweat, mopped at his face and hands with a handkerchief, but there was that muscle I had seen before under the flesh, a solid jaw, a firmness to his eyes that watched me.

‘Why don’t you just mind your own business, Fortune? Leave Rey alone, you know?’

‘He made himself my business, Lehman.’

‘The girl? A tramp actress? Come on, that kind flops for anyone, twice on Sunday. Why blame Rey for trying? You think he’s the only one? Take a tip, watch that director, Kurt Reston.’

‘You know all about tramps?’ I said.

‘I wasn’t always on top, mister. I did my time with tramps. I wouldn’t spit on any of them. If it ain’t Rey today, it’s someone else tomorrow. Believe me. I know them all.’

‘You’re on top now, Lehman?’

‘That’s right. Money, a home, a decent woman. Get a decent woman, Fortune, the kind you know what they’re thinking when you’re in bed with them. I’ve got two boys in college, a girl marrying a rabbi. My old man was a pushcart peddler in Brownsville. Rey did it for me. Leave him alone.’

‘All you have to do is eat his dirt,’ I said.

His thin-shell eyes were neither angry nor surprised. He had heard that charge before. He lived with it. All he did was mop the sweat from his hands.

‘Brownsville is a bad place,’ he said. ‘Most guys never get out. They die in the gutter. I had my gutter, ran with a Jew gang worse than you could know. I took five-to-ten for armed robbery. I learned. You got to have money and respect. For ten years my kids wore patches and ate potatoes. Who wants an ex-con? Rey hired me. I’d learned accounting in prison, and for Rey I worked hard. My house is in Manhasset now, North Shore, right? You think I’ll let tramps or their studs kick Rey? Stay out of this, Fortune. Find something else to play detective on.’

‘Stay out of it? Out of what, Lehman? You don’t mean Marty. What’s Vega mixed in I should stay out of?’

His face and eyes gave away nothing, but he was worried. He was tight inside. He mopped at his face. He seemed to be trying to decide just how much to say.

‘If Rey lays off your woman, will that get you to stay out? Just walk away, forget it?’

‘Forget what?’

‘Just lay off! We can play rough, too. Be nice.’

‘What’s so important now, Lehman? Maybe Ted Marshall?’

‘A cheap punk who got what he deserved.’

‘Didn’t the beating do the job? What more was there, Lehman? Did Marshall know more, do more, and Vega had to—’

A burst of loud music drowned me out. Lehman stopped listening, mopped at his face as the scene on stage ended, and the performers trooped off. Everyone grim, as only performers at late rehearsals can be grim, the girls half naked in their exercise tights, but somehow sexless. Marty came off, saw me, and came to take my arm, hold tight. Ricardo Vega was behind her.

‘Well now, the gumshoe lover again,’ he said in his bantering tone, but his heart wasn’t in it. His voice was strained, his eyes abstracted, the witty prince lying flat.

‘I saw your scene,’ I said. ‘The song-and-dance, too.’

Everything about him seemed to be far off, at a distance. Sean McBride appeared from somewhere, found a chair in the dressing room, straddled it. His limp eyes watched only Vega. He whistled between his teeth, made a paper bird with his big hands—a folded paper bird with wings and head that moved.

Vega said, ‘Everyone has to be George M. Cohan today. The voice of the people. You’re a dance critic now, Fortune?’

‘Ted Marshall was killed tonight,’ I said.

He paused, shrugged. ‘You play with blackmail, you get hurt. You expect me to care?’

‘Is that a statement, Vega? Blackmailers get hurt?’

‘Call it a proverb. Was there evidence I killed him, too?’

‘You expected there would be?’

George Lehman said, ‘Rey was working here all night. I was with him. So were fifty other people.’

‘I only kill people between shows,’ Vega said. There was a strange bitterness in his voice. Odd, out of place.

‘Lehman wants me to forget the case. I wonder why?’

‘Look, Fortune, I’m tired. Take your girl and go, okay?’

‘Where was McBride all night, Vega?’

Sean McBride worked his paper bird, watched only, the bird and his hands. ‘Ask the lady, mister. Little Marty there.’

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.