Night of the Toads Page 3

  He was her partner, he came here often, it told me nothing. Her bedroom chest-of-drawers did. There were four shirts still in laundry wrappers; three pairs of socks, size thirteen; brief undershorts; two ties; an electric razor, male; all but the ties and razor with the same sewn name strip: Theodore Marshall. So Ted Marshall was more than her partner: surprise!

  The chest-of-drawers yielded another less than surprising find. A single cuff link initialed R. V., and a green tie figured in gold with crowns and tiny initials: R. V. At least it was solid evidence that Ricardo Vega had known her well.

  I found nothing under cushions, under furniture, under the big bed, under the rugs, in the corners, or in the table drawers. Nothing on shelves, on the mantelpiece, or in the various vases and decorative boxes. The apartment had been cleaned, and some time ago by the layer of grit undisturbed inside the one open window. The window confirmed that Anne Terry had not expected to be away long—in New York no one leaves a window open if they plan to be away long.

  I finished with the one odd feature of the apartment: an old desk, and a cardboard filing cabinet, in a corner behind a screen. The file held a folder of the lease and rent receipts; another of time-payment contracts for the TV, clothes, some furniture; and a thick folder labelled: New Player’s Theatre. No bankbooks and no tax records, which surprised me—she was a neat, efficient girl.

  I went through The New Player’s Theatre folder. It showed the theatre to be in the red—usual for an Off-Broadway venture. But it wasn’t too far into the red; it had been well-managed. Programmes proved that it was a serious theatre, producing the difficult work of avant-garde play-wrights, as well as the work of pseudo-avantists who dealt in shock-and-snicker. The shockers had run longer, naturally, but none of the plays had run long.

  The bulk of the file was Projected Plans, and they were ambitious. The New Player’s had been planning for better quarters. Profit-and-loss, rentals, and the needed capital had been worked out for all theatres. Plans for new productions were detailed: ambitious productions, daring. Hard work had gone into the planning, not just dazzling verbal dreams over booze, and it added to busy work for a future, a real future. Bold, needing money, but not the work of a girl who wanted to vanish.

  The desk, too, was neat, the top pigeonholes empty except for the usual paid bills, and a day-calendar book. The datebook explained that over worked, underslept face I had seen in the rain. Days began early, ended late: The New Player’s; auditions for paying shows; a modelling job, regular, and a host of irregular jobs like artist’s model, photographer’s model, product demonstator, even typist. At night there were classes, and nameless appointments. There were sparse weeks, almost blank pages, but no page totally blank—always The New Player’s.

  The top drawer explained her nights. A litter of matchbooks, stirring rods, coasters, all from night clubs, cafés, hotels; male business cards, many with lip prints. Par for the course again; a girl with looks and ambitions surviving in New York. I didn’t envy the police if she were really missing, and if her closer friends knew nothing. A life of casual encounters, one-night stands. A busy fly in a world of toads? Caught at last? Except, I saw Anne Terry as more of a hornet, with sting.

  The bankbooks were in a bottom drawer. A savings account with nothing: $197. A checking account, the stubs showing no pattern of deposit except the weekly modelling cheque, and showing near zero too often—saved by a sudden deposit, sometimes good, sometimes not. The weekly pay cheque from the regular job interested me. Most companies like to pay monthly or biweekly at most. It had to be an arrangement she had wanted.

  The cancelled checks themselves seemed uninteresting at first: mostly bills from the payees, and regular ones to The New Player’s—she was a real owner, not a decoration for Ted Marshall. But after I had stacked them, I had a small pile of cheques made out to cash. Normal, except that there was a pattern. Almost all the cash-cheques were for the same amount, fifty dollars, and almost all were dated on Fridays. I checked the calendar.

  I sat back and stared at the cash-cheques. She was neat, but was anyone that regular in her kind of life? It could be nothing, but—? There were missing Fridays, yes, a few drawn on Thursdays, but in general the uniformity of day and amount was too much coincidence. In a hectic life, did a girl always run out of cash on Friday? And could she always need exactly fifty dollars? All right, a special need; regular, routine. What? Blackmail? Fifty dollars? A regular contribution? But in cash, so she wasn’t sending it home, or anywhere by mail.

  I was still mulling it, turning it over and considering all angles, when the doorbell rang. I jumped a foot in the chair, then had a surge of something like joy. Anne Terry, coming home? I was coming to like the girl, and not in the way Ricardo Vega liked girls. I was also losing my grip. Would a girl ring her own doorbell?

  I was out of the chair. The police? They would have been here to check that she was really gone, but, from the look of the place, they hadn’t searched much. She had not been gone long enough to make them take it seriously at first—off on a binge, ninety-nine percent. But they would have another, closer, look if she didn’t turn up. So I had my leg over the window sill to the fire escape when the door was tried and given a violent kick.

  I came back inside, and trotted lightly to the door. The police don’t kick in doors of empty apartments; they get the super to open up. I slid behind where the door would open as a second good kick cracked the lock. The third kick would do it. It did. The door flew open and all the way back to me. I took a bash on the knuckles, but held the door from swinging back out.

  The man stumbled into the room, off balance. I got one quick look at him as he went by the crack between door and frame. The blond again—Rick, or Sean, McBride. Vega’s new volunteer helper—for friendship. I stayed where I was, out of sight, my lone hand ready in a fist if he closed the door. He didn’t, he was that much an amateur, and that nervous. He hurried for the bedroom. When I heard a drawer open, I went after him, picking up a handy, large, but not too heavy vase on the way.

  He bent over a drawer in the bedroom, his back to me. I wanted to ask him what he was up to, but it’s not often that easy. I had no gun, and I didn’t expect he was going to tell much without heavy pressure. I did the next best thing. I whacked him good with the vase. Not too good, just enough. It was a pleasure. He collapsed in a heap. I got out of there fast.

  I was out the door, and one flight down, when I heard them coming up. Two men who had not rung the girl’s doorbell, and a pair of lighter feet coming behind them. I beat it back up. McBride was moving inside clearly, with groans. I made the stairs up to the roof, hidden from Anne Terry’s doorway. The two men had eyes only for the open door. I heard them go in. There was a scuffle, and voices.

  ‘Who are you? What’s the story?’

  ‘Someone hit me!’ McBride’s outraged voice. The two newcomers had to be the police, and McBride wasn’t worried about them yet, only about me. He had a. lot to learn.

  ‘Breaking-and-entering, mister.’

  ‘Who are you? We got the super for a witness.’

  ‘You broke that vase? Looking for what? Jewels?’

  ‘Where’s the girl?’

  McBride, ‘I don’t know, I come to see her. A friend, like.’

  ‘Your name, mister!’

  ‘Sean McBride.’

  A rebirth for Rick McBride! Maybe a star was being born.

  ‘You busted that door? Why?’

  ‘It was open, you know? Like, I told you I’m a friend. The door was open, so I come in. Someone hit me. Maybe it was you two, yeh!’

  I revised my estimate of Rick, no, Sean McBride. He wasn’t dumb, and he thought fast under pressure. It was a good story if he stuck to it. They couldn’t prove it was false, he wasn’t a criminal, he did know Anne Terry more or less, he had kept Ricardo Vega out of it, and he hinted at a possible charge of police brutality. Reasonable doubt all the way.

  I left by way of the roof. They would hammer him more, take
him to precinct, let him sweat, but they would get no more from him now that he had his story. He had been around, and he had more brains than I had guessed.

  I went down to the street through another building. I wondered just how well McBride had known Anne Terry.

  Chapter Five

  I walked down Fifth Avenue, and across Washington Square, among the spring hordes of a sunny Village afternoon. The well-dressed men and their women, the outsiders from ‘real’ life, wandered giggling and pointing, having one hell of a time gawking at the bizarre flora and fauna of this year’s Village population. The bright-coloured local birds-of-passage themselves—all shapes, sexes and skins, each in the plumage of his choice—stared at no one and nothing, all going somewhere, intent on their purpose. That makes you wonder.

  On Third Street The New Theatre was tucked between an open pizza stand and a psychedelic poetry-reading club. A tiny marquee, with pictures of the players in action outside. There was a padlock on the inner doors. A sign indicated that tickets for the next production wouldn’t go on sale for three weeks. The photos outside were from an earlier production.

  Anne Terry was in most of the photos, and I had another view of her: the actress. Good or bad I couldn’t know from the pictures, but they told me one thing—Anne Terry wasn’t just a pretty face with her good side to the camera, or her breasts stuck into your eye. She had been caught in action; neck cords stretched like ropes, mouth twisted, body in powerful motion. An intensity that came over even in still shots. Intense: the one word I could fit to all I had seen of her so far, and I didn’t see her abandoning all she was doing. But if she had chucked it all, that intensity would make it hard to find her.

  There was a portrait of Theodore Marshall, and he was easy to spot in the action shots. Intense wasn’t a word for Marshall. Tall, slender, handsome in a juvenile way, with a brooding face and thick, black hair. No actor—posed, stiff, mugging emotion; all surface, all conscious attitude, the eyes uninvolved and even a little scared. Maybe a lover of theatre, but no actor. Yet the man I had to find next. The first drugstore gave me his address from the telephone book.

  It was only a few blocks away across Sixth Avenue. A red brick apartment house. The best, semi-new building on a block of tenement brownstones. It had gone to seed, the bare lobby shabby with streaks on the stone floor where a wet mop had been swished around in a feeble show of cleaning. A solid, middle-class New York apartment house, neither good nor slum: respectable. Theodore Marshall lived on the fifth floor. I rode up.

  An older woman answered my ring. ‘Yes?’

  She was small and motherly, thickened by years of routine daily round in a simple, accepted world. She was dressed now in a suit, on her way out, and her hair was dyed dark. She looked at my missing arm.

  ‘Mr Theodore Marshall?’ I asked.

  ‘Theodore?’ She paused. ‘Is it about his theatre?’

  ‘About Anne Terry.’

  ‘Anne? Well, come in then.’

  Brisk, she led me into a square living room that looked as if it had been there a long time. Clean and pleasant, but with the dusty feeling that comes from age, wear and little change. She sat down, perched on a couch with her handbag on her lap.

  ‘Well, tell me’ she said. ‘You’ve found her? Where was the silly girl? You’re police?’

  She made me think of Ricardo Vega again, of his age. Five, maybe ten years older, the woman looked like Vega’s mother. The will inside a person again. This woman content, even insistent, to be old and comfortable like the heavy, styleless furniture of the room. Only the dyed hair struck a false note. From the hair, and the outdoor suit, I judged she worked.

  ‘A private detective,’ I said. ‘We haven’t found Anne as far as I know.’

  ‘Private detective? Then you’ve come to ask Theodore more questions? I assure you my son told all he knew.’

  ‘People remember later,’ I said. ‘New questions.’

  I had the feeling of being interrogated, screened before I could see some dignitary. My business was being analysed, and found not sufficiently urgent.

  ‘He’s tried to remember anything. We’re both worried, of course. Perhaps if you came back later?’

  ‘Time could be important, Mrs Marshall.’

  She accepted the name. So Theodore Marshall lived with his mother. It didn’t fit my image of him, but, then, what image could I have yet? All his clothes at Anne Terry’s apartment—a home away from Mother? The rent right in both places?

  ‘But he’s asleep, you see?’ Mrs Marshall said. ‘He’s hardly slept since he heard about Anne. He had an accident last week, quite serious. Now I must go to work.’

  I didn’t want to push too hard, but, ‘If I could—’

  An inner door opened in the kitchen beyond the living room where the windows overlooked a rear courtyard and the walls of tenements across the yards. Theodore Marshall came out, his fingers automatically straightening his thick hair. In person he was taller and thinner. He wore narrow black slacks custom-made to his slim hips, a silky blue-and-white cotton shirt Ricardo Vega would admire, a sky-blue silk tie, and cuff links of sky-blue stones. A man who liked good clothes—so much that he napped in them. Mrs Marshall’s eyes showed that Theodore Marshall admiration began at home. Maybe only love.

  ‘I heard, Ma,’ he said. He had a soft, pleasant voice, eager now. ‘You’re a private eye? Can you find Anne? I mean, like, you were hired? Mr—’

  ‘Dan Fortune. Sarah Wiggen hired me.’

  Suprise arched his pale face. He had an unhealthy pallor, and his eyes up close were very pale hazel—the impression of dark eyes coming from sunken eye sockets with dark circles. I had seen faces like his on gamblers who worked tensely in smoky rooms far from the sunlight, and who lay awake nights full of schemes. Like Anne Terry, Marshall had the look of a man who burned his candle at all ends. At least from what I could see of his normal face. I couldn’t see too much. One eye was badly bruised and puffed almost shut. His lips were split, swollen. His nose looked thick and scabbed, and a bandage covered his left ear and part of his cheek. There was a thickness under the silky shirt that had to be bandaged ribs. He saw me staring.

  ‘Stupid trick,’ he said wryly. ‘Doing the pipe lights at the theatre. Ladder went over, I landed off the stage in the pit. Damn near a hospital job.’

  ‘You’re surprised Sarah Wiggen hired me?’

  ‘Sure as hell I am. Not that it isn’t damned sweet of Sarah, but, Christ, I didn’t figure she’d care that much.’

  ‘Please, Theodore,’ Mrs Marshall said.

  He grinned, punched her lightly on the arm. ‘Come on, Ma, I’m a big boy.’

  She smiled like a girl. She liked it, her boy’s buddy charm. I realized that it was his swearing she was clucking over, and that it was a standard game with them. They seemed to have a nice relationship. I wondered what Mr Marshall had been like—dull and solid, probably, a quiet man.

  ‘Sarah and Anne didn’t get along?’ I asked. Sarah Wiggen had hinted at the same thing, but had at least implied that the aloofness was all on Anne’s side.

  ‘Well,’ Marshall grinned, even blushed. ‘Sarah and me, I, we had a thing for a while. Before I met Anne, you know? We were in the same class a while, me and Sarah. Scene class.’

  ‘Sarah’s an actress, too?’

  ‘Was, not now. Quit it. Got some mother-hen job in some kind of residence hall for females.’

  ‘You and Sarah?’ I said. ‘Then Anne came along?’

  ‘Bingo, that’s it. We had the same ideas, you know?’

  His voice, still soft and pleasant, jerked and jumped like a spastic. Nervous: voice and body. His strange, light eyes were hard to really see, elusive. I saw in them, vaguely, that same self-awareness I had seen in the action pictures of him at the theatre, a small fear that seemed part of him. Not for now, always; as if he lived every day a little afraid. I remembered a very young second mate on a Liberty ship during the war whose eyes had been like that when we entered
the war zone. Not afraid of the submarines in themselves, but afraid every day that something would happen to the skipper and first mate, leaving him. A man in over his head on nerve he didn’t really have.

  ‘You’re nervous,’ I said. ‘Worried about Anne?’

  ‘That,’ he said, nodded. ‘Maybe more worried without her, you know? She’s cut out, ditched the theatre and all?’

  ‘You know any reasons she would ditch it?’

  ‘Not a one.’

  ‘Nothing? Friends, plans, troubles?’

  ‘Who knows, you know? I went over on Friday like usual. She wasn’t home. No word before or since. I never see her on weekends, of course. That’s her time with the big sports, money work. Sarah says she talked about going down home, but not to me she didn’t.’

  ‘You had big plans for your theatre,’ I said. ‘Plans that cost money. Could that be part of her disappearance?’

  ‘Plans? Hell, we’re not even sure of the next show.’

  Mrs Marshall objected, ‘Perhaps you didn’t have big plans, Theodore, but I know Anne did. Why, I’ve heard her talking about them here. It worried me for you. She’s too ambitious.’

  ‘Knock it off, Ma,’ Marshall said. His voice was curt. ‘Pipe dreams; pie-in-the-sky. Anne and her big dreams. All fog, you know?’

  ‘Dreams can be trouble,’ I said. ‘Money and influence, is that what she was after?’

  Marshall nodded. Mrs Marshall wan’t even listening to me. Her eyes were for her boy.

  ‘She’s too old for you, Theodore,’ she said.

  His pale eyes looked to the ceiling for help. ‘For Christ sake, Ma, I’m four years older than Anne.’

  ‘She’s a mature woman. You’re still a boy,’ she said.

  ‘That’s swell, thanks. A boy who lives off his mother, right? Go to work for me, Ma. Work your ass off!’

  She flinced, but her voice was calm. ‘That’s hardly called for in front of a stranger.’ She looked at me. ‘Theodore doesn’t like me to work, especially not at night. I’m not fond of it, but the theatre is demanding. He works much too hard, really. He has his odd-hour job, though I’m against that. He shouldn’t waste time on money work without future. Still, the job pays for his clothes, and appearance is vital in the theatre. Of course, I wish Theodore wanted a more solid career, but a career is useless if it isn’t what a man wants. Theodore must have his chance, and you get nowhere with half measures. Now is the time he has to think only of his goal. I’m really quite selfish, you see. Investing for my old age when he’s rich.’