Night of the Toads Read online

  Night of the Toads

  Dennis Lynds writing as Michael Collins

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  To Marty Booher,

  a big man and a good friend

  Chapter One

  I’d never have remembered the girl if Ricardo Vega had been another man. He wasn’t. He was ‘Rey’ Vega to anyone who claimed to know him well—El Rey, the King.

  We don’t admit it, but we consider a successful man a better man. A prince of success, an inevitable winner. Maybe it’s only that we never lost our need for princes, and if we don’t have an aristocracy, we make one. An aristocracy is comforting. It takes us off the hook—we never really had a chance to make it big. At the same time of course, since an aristocracy of success isn’t really closed to us, we can all dream. A contradiction, sure, but logic has never bothered people’s attitudes much.

  The trouble is that the successful man himself has a way of coming to believe he is better. From there it’s an almost automatic step to believing he was always better—born better, a different breed of man. A man who should have rights and privileges ordinary men don’t have. A special man, superior, a king. That was Vega. I didn’t know him well enough to call him Rey, and he made me remember the girl.

  Or maybe it was the weather.

  One of those wet springs in New York when the streets are under water, and no collar can keep the wind-driven rain out. All through March, when Marty came home with her show from Philadelphia, and through most of April, Marty was in a bad mood. (Martine Adair, my girl, who is almost twenty-eight and hasn’t been a girl since long before I met her. She wasn’t born with the name, or with anything else that she cares about now, except, maybe, the ability to work hard and long for what she wants. She wants to be an actress. No, to act, and she’s good. Being good isn’t always easy, not when you want to be good more than you want to be known.

  Her bad mood that April wasn’t all the weather. She had trouble in her show. It came to be my trouble on another rainy Thursday in my small and grey bedroom.

  ‘Go and kill him, Dan! Right now!’

  ‘Knife, gun or my bare hand?’

  She sat up in the bed. A small woman with long red hair, and big eyes, and the face of a young boy. It’s the combination of the boy-face on the woman’s body that kills the men, including me. That and her eagerness. She vibrates when she’s sitting motionless. Her walk is a stride, and her anger is fury.

  ‘He should be dead! He’s got to die!’

  ‘He will, honey. We all do.’

  ‘Spare me the damned philosophy, and do something.’

  ‘You want me to kill him for you? Just like that?’

  ‘Passionately!’ She lighted a cigarette, and looked down at me by the light of the flame. ‘I mean it.’

  She did mean it. I saw that in her eyes: a cold, gripping fury. She wanted Ricardo Vega dead, destroyed. And no, she didn’t mean it; not the normal, civilized Marty. Both, and at the same time. The complex drives of our needs.

  ‘It’s my role, I worked for it,’ she said. ‘Kurt says I’m good. He’s the director. He says don’t worry, but at the bank Vega’s the whole show, and I know it. I fought him off in Philly, I don’t want to fight anymore. I want him to stop. I don’t want him in my bed.’

  ‘Can he get you fired?’

  ‘Of course, if he made an issue. I don’t think he will.’

  ‘But you’re not sure, baby?’

  ‘I’m sure, and I’m not sure.’

  ‘So maybe you’ll say “yes” in the end?’

  ‘Does that make you sick?’ Her eyes flashed down at me, because her anger had to go somewhere. Then she touched me, and turned her face away again. ‘The key word Dan—“maybe.” That’s how they work, the important lechers, the big-scorers who have to have what they’re supposed to want—every girl they meet. He’s attractive, they always are: handsome, strong, a public figure. He’s exciting, and he’s nice, you know? He won’t get a girl fired, of course not, but.…? Why should a girl risk even that small maybe when it really might be pleasant? Bingo! It’s easy when you know how, have the weapons.’

  Her voice was bitter in the grey evening light. She has fine breasts. I watched her breasts, and the long hair thick on her shoulders. That’s me. She is someone else. She has her own needs.

  ‘What do you want, Marty?’

  ‘Go and tell him. He doesn’t get me fired, and he doesn’t get me! Hit him. Knock him down.’

  ‘With a club? One arm never won fair lady brawling.’

  ‘Scare him! You’re a detective. Make him stop, Dan, before I say “why not” because I’m scared of losing it all.’

  ‘All right, Marty,’ I said.

  She dropped her cigarette into the ashtray, lay close against me. She was warm. ‘Hurt him, Dan. Scare him. I worked so damned hard for the chance.’

  I knew how hard she’d worked for it, her first real role in a play, and after she had dressed and gone to her chorus rehearsal, I watched the rain for a while. When your woman asks you to act for her, you better act. At least, you had better if you wanted her friendly for the next month. I didn’t want to meet Ricardo Vega on those terms. I didn’t want to go to Vega so she would be nice to me later. It’s not a noble reason—if it is honest, and the reason most men do favours for women, if the women want to face the way it is or not.

  Yet I did want to meet Vega. I don’t like men who trade on fear or hope; who scare or intice with their power to make or break dreams. So after a while I got up, dressed, and made myself think about that better reason for what I was doing. By the time I had my raincoat on I’d worked up a good anger. No one should ever have to live scared.

  On my way out to get a taxi, I picked up a book I’d been reading. Vega was a producer, director, investor of his own money as well as an actor, and a book in my hand might help me get past the door easier.

  The taxi dropped me at Lexington and Eighty-first Street. As I walked towards Vega’s building the rain seemed to come down harder. An elegant marquee sheltered the glass-and-chrome doors of Vega’s building, and a uniformed doorman stood inside the doors. I walked on. My book wouldn’t help me get inside if I let the doorman announce me.

  The basement service entrance bristled with signs that warned undesirables, but the door was unlocked. Those doors usually are, I’ve found. Detective experience has some uses. I stepped lightly in the basement in case a super was around, and went up into the lobby. I was lucky, the door opened into a wing of the lobby out of the doorman’s sight. The elevators were self-service. Service wages are too high, so we live in an era of automation.

  There were loud voices behind Vega’s door when I rang. I had to ring again before the door was opened by a rawboned blond man with a lean, rough face and hungry eyes. His clothes—grey jacket, blue shirt and tie above the waist; chino levis and black Wellington boots below—and boyish but battered face gave the impression of a travelled twenty-year-old, but he was older: maybe twenty-eight. He looked uncertainly at my wet raincoat, black beret, book, and empty left sleeve as if he didn’t know what he was supposed to do next.

  I helped him out. ‘I want to see Vega.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘I’m waitin’ myself.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and pushed in. ‘That makes two of us.’

  I was wrong. In the antechamber a skinny girl sat in a chrome chair as if waiting for execution, a thick play script held on her lap in both hands. In the living room, through an archway, there were three more people. The living room was mammoth, crammed with eclectic furniture that had cost twenty years’ rent of my five cold-water rooms, and with the walls hidden by masses of magnificent paintings—all
abstract, and all originals. The room of a prince of the world of art who breathed every minute in the rarefied air of the business of talent and genius, who knew everyone who was ‘doing’ anything worth talking about.

  Only one of the three in the living room was visible: a short, heavy, middle-aged man inside the archway. He was bald, gone to a pot, and his suit looked like it wrinkled over his flab one minute after he put it on. He was trying to look attentive and inconspicuous at the same time. That’s a hard trick, and his flabby face glistened with sweat. The other two in the living room were only voices—a male and a female. I heard the female first.

  ‘Hold the charm, Rey, okay? Just the score.’

  ‘No bugging me, Annie, please,’ the male voice said. It was a smooth, pleasant, very urbane voice. A tone of light banter didn’t hide the confidence of power in the voice that told me, somehow, that the man behind the voice was handsome and much admired by women. There was a kind of creamy gallantry in the voice, but a weariness, too, and under it all a hint of cruder menace.

  ‘Bug you?’ the woman said, and I could hear the curl of her lip. ‘No woman bugs you, Rey?’

  ‘Come on. Anne, you’re a big girl. It was fun, okay’

  ‘That’s where we stand, Rey?’

  There was a silence while the heavy man I could see went on sweating. I imagined the unseen pair staring at each other, their lips smiling, their eyes not.

  ‘Don’t try, Anne,’ the weary male said. ‘No trouble.’

  ‘Sure, you’re a sweet guy. We had fun.’

  Now the iron surfaced in the man’s urbane voice. Still smooth, still pleasant, but the gallantry was gone.

  ‘Let me spell it out, Anne. I made no promises, no offers. You did what you wanted to do. What you wanted, no favours right? It was nice, and maybe we do it again sometime.’

  There was that suspended silence again, the sense of the unseen man and woman watching each other, and then the woman spoke in a kind of tired voice. A sad voice.

  ‘Okay, Rey. We better talk alone.’

  The man’s voice, ‘Take Miss Terry to a taxi, George.’

  The sweating man stepped out of my sight, talking as he went, polite and deferential—a clerk. ‘Sure, Rey. Where you want to go, Miss Terry?’

  The woman said, ‘We better talk in private, Rey.’

  ‘Get her out of here, George!’

  George cajoled, ‘Please, Miss Terry, you know?’

  ‘You want me to handle it, George?’ the unseen man said.

  It was the prince speaking: Where will you be tomorrow, George, if I have to do it myself? Why do I need you if you can’t do the job for me?

  ‘Okay, Miss Terry,’ George said, sharper. The changed voice of a man who fears to love what he has.

  George came into sight pushing the woman by one arm. She resisted, but under the heavy man’s flab there was old muscle. When the woman saw the three of us waiting, she stopped her struggles. Her face turned neutral, and I saw that she was tall and much younger than her voice had sounded. I had a fast view of a pretty face, dark hair, full breasts and hips, and fine long thighs below a grey mini-mini skirt.

  Then the door closed behind the young woman and George, and the urbane unseen man’s voice spoke almost in my ear:

  ‘Who the hell are you? What do they think I’m doing, casting a circus with one-armed freaks?’

  His smooth voice was all stone now. I wasn’t a woman.

  Chapter Two

  He wasn’t a big man, Ricardo Vega. About five-foot-ten, my height, but he looked taller. Slender and trim, good shoulders and no hips, he had to be my age, forty-five, but he didn’t look that, either. He was very handsome, and he looked a lot younger. An aristocratic Latin face like some patrician young hidalgo: fine-boned yet masculine, with strong dark eyes. Dapper, yet there was a virile carelessness to his tailored blue jacket, grey slacks, low cordovan boots, and open blue shirt.

  ‘What the devil are you supposed to be?’ he said, that light, amused banter in his voice. ‘On your head, what is it? A black beret? One of Che Guevera’s men? But you have to have a beard! Where’s the beard?’

  His hands, his whole body, moved with his voice in the flamboyance that was his strength. He was a great actor, a genius of the theatre, few doubted that. From the moment he had walked out on a stage, only a few years rescued from a Cuban slum by a visiting American producer with an eye for talent, he had done what experts said couldn’t be done. After Vega had done it, the same experts suddenly saw that Vega’s way was the only way to do it. The true artist never finds the audience ready for him. He has to force his vision on the world, build his own audience. By now the whole country was his audience through his movies, but he was still at his best on stage in his own scripts, under his own direction. In the last few years he’d done his own productions. An institution—the Vega style.

  ‘I’m not an actor, Vega,’ I said, aware that he had me psyched, on the defensive. ‘I’m a friend of Marty Adair.’

  ‘Marty?’ he said. ‘A great girl, beautiful.’

  A change came over him the instant I mentioned Marty. I sensed that crude menace that seemed to be part of him, maybe from his old Cuban days, and that emerged, I guessed, when he was opposed. He reached out suddenly, and took the book from my hand.

  ‘You wrote this? Of course, you’re a writer!’

  ‘No,’ I said. It was Portnoy’s Complaint. A joke on me.

  ‘You’re not Philip Roth? That’s too bad.’

  His apologetic grin was full of mock sadness at my failure to be ‘somebody,’ to have talent. His whole body seemed to drop in sympathy for me. He winked at his audience. The skinny girl smiled uneasily, and clutched her script. The blond man laughed. Never debate an actor, they have the weapons.

  ‘My name’s Fortune, Vega,’ I said. My only defence was a blunt attack. ‘Marty’s my woman. She worked for her job, she’s going to keep it.’

  ‘Why not, man?’ he said lightly, his eyes not light, deciding how he could slap me down the hardest. ‘Fortune? Wait, now, Marty talked some. Dan Fortune, sure, the gumshoe! A detective, now that’s impressive.’

  I said, ‘You want me to make it plain, Vega?’

  ‘Plain? Sure, go ahead, make it plain.’

  ‘Stop bothering Marty, and don’t try—’

  He hit me good. A faint drop of his right shoulder, and a sucker right hand lead, and I was on the floor with an ache in my chin. I’m no fighter, and while I was getting up I had time to remember that in his long-ago Cuban days he had been. It looked like he kept in shape and practice. I got up, but I needed a chair to hold onto for a time. I saw pretty colours.

  That mocking weariness was in his voice. ‘Don’t come here and warn me, Fortune. You want to keep Marty, you work to keep her, okay? That’s the game. If I’m too much for you to handle, that’s too bad. You over there,’ he looked at the blond man, ‘what’s your name?’

  The blond man jumped a foot. ‘Me, Mr Vega? Rick McBride.’

  ‘My friends call me Rey,’ Vega said, eyeing the blond McBride. ‘We’ll have to get rid of that ‘Rick’ name; those dream-boy tags are out these days. ‘Something ethnic, maybe, like Sean. Now throw this idiot out, and we’ll talk.’

  ‘Me?’ McBride said, his mouth open.

  My head was clear. I didn’t need the chair now, but I was less match for McBride than for Vega. McBride’s face had those marks of a rough youth, and his eyes were hungry on me.

  ‘You,’ Vega said. ‘I want to see how you move. He’s trespassing; you can hit him.’

  McBride looked everywhere except at me. He was working up an anger. I put my hand into my raincoat pocket, mimed a pistol. A useless trick against the experienced, but McBride and Vega weren’t used to guns. They knew I was a detective, they didn’t know I don’t carry a gun, and they would expect a weapon from a one-armed man. In our suddenly violent world guns have come to be common. Few normal men will take the chance. They didn’t.

  ‘R
emember you’re no king to me, Vega,’ I said.

  I backed out, gunman style. Hitting a one-armed man wasn’t going to enhance Vega’s image. I’d won the face-off on points. It was there in the way the skinny girl watched me, not Vega. I didn’t think she was going to have much luck with whatever she wanted from Vega. Face means a lot to men like him.

  I should have kept that in mind, but when I walked out of the lobby, the wrinkled man, George, and the girl Vega had thrown out of his apartment were standing out in the wet night beyond the service alley. The rain was coming hard, and George had no coat, but the girl was talking and he was listening. I slipped into the alley to see what I could hear.

  The rain drummed on garbage cans, and I couldn’t hear what the girl was saying. I tried too hard. The arm was around my neck, squeezing my throat, before I heard a step. He dragged me back down the alley. I got a foot against a wall and heaved backward. We went down in a river of water with me on top. His arm came loose. I got my chin under the arm, and bit hard. He howled. I broke free, and scrambled up.

  All my fight did me no good; he was the stronger man. I started to run, but my feet slipped, and a violent blow on my back made me gasp. I half-turned and took a punch that numbed my lone arm. The next two punches were more accurate. I went down flat in the alley, my nose and mouth bleeding.

  ‘Mr Vega says don’t bother him.’

  It was the blond, McBride. He leaned and slapped my face twice, hard. It hurt. My mind thought about his name. Would he decide on Sean? My foot kicked him in the belly. He kicked me in the ribs, bent and hit me in the face with a fist, kicked me again, and again. The girl Vega had thrown out before me saved me from the hospital or worse.

  ‘Hey! You dirty—! Police!’

  McBride ran for the building. After all, he was just a roustabout aspiring to be an actor. That’s what I figured he was. I sat up and tested for damage. Blood and bruises, no more. The girl stood at the open end of the alley. I limped out to her.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll ache, but I’ll heal.’