Night of the Toads df-3 Page 5

  The police had done a routine search now, but the place hadn’t changed. It was still warm, comfortable, and just beginning to have that feel of emptiness deserted apartments get after a time. Or that could have been me-looking all day for a girl who wasn’t anywhere. Only she had to be somewhere.

  I started, again, with the closets-every pocket, the linings, the floors, the shelves. One concrete hint of a second home was all I needed. I didn’t get it. The chests-of-drawers were no better. Books are often good for addresses, other names. Hers weren’t: no inscriptions, no pieces of paper, no bookmark envelopes. I had hopes for the bathroom-drugstores use name-labels, and with luck she would have bought some medicine at her other place. She hadn’t.

  The desk was next. It took an hour, the silence of the apartment growing heavy on me with distant voices all around from other buildings. Over an hour, but when I found it I got all at once. A sales slip from Macy’s. Among all her paid bills; a grain of sand if I hadn’t been looking for it. I didn’t fault the police, I had seen it once myself. But now I knew what I wanted. A sales slip for a bathrobe, with her name and the Tenth Street address-and an address for the robe to be sent to: Terrell, 1977-A Steiner Street, Long Island City, Queens.

  I took the subway. There was no pot of gold in this. Northbound from Eighth Street it wasn’t crowded until we got to Forty-second Street, and I had a seat. By Rockefeller Centre I sat dark in a valley of humanity hanging from hand-holds. They rocked with the train, adapted to it after long years. Some read. Some stared. Some muttered to themselves. Some hung with their eyes closed, asleep standing. The late ones who worked long hours, whipped.

  In Queens I found the right bus. It let me out in one of those neighbourhood business sections that fill the boroughs of New York. A thousand ‘downtowns’ like Chinese boxes, the smaller inside the larger from the centre of Manhattan out to Little Neck. The ‘New York’ the world knows is only the heart of Manhattan, the rest a series of main streets a lot like Peoria.

  The main street was crowded, the stores open late where profit hung by a fingernail. Twenty yards right or left any solitary figure on the dark side streets moved like a silent shadow in a forest. Semi-detached brick houses lined the streets, driveways beside them, the yards behind. At the corners, tall apartment houses made the semi-detacheds seem isolated, individual. In each house a family lived unique in its own eyes, individual. To a giant’s microscope each family in each house was the same. That is the power and the weakness of people in mass civilization. Weakness that they believe themselves more individual than they are while the giant manipulates them. Power that they can be, in the last fire, individual beyond the giant.

  Steiner Street was on a border: the border between middle-class needs and the spread of slum and industry. The same semi-detached houses, but fewer of them, surrounded by small factories, warehouses, garages. Not shabby themselves yet, the houses, but ringed by shabbiness. A street where the not-quite-poor held to the last pride of middle-class values. On its way down. Where the residents fought a rearguard action with brooms, hoses and geraniums.

  The unit that had to be 1977 was the last pair on the block next to a tall warehouse. One driveway had been lost to the warehouse, and the whole semi-detached seemed squashed by the shadow of the warehouse. It would be the cheapest unit on the block. The side near the warehouse was lighted, the other side was dark. I didn’t feel optimistic. In New York, even in a semi-detached where two families live so close, neighbour too often knows nothing of each other. But there are exceptions, and I decided to ask some questions at the lighted side first.

  How much of our life is automatic assumption? We see what isn’t there, because we see what our minds expect: our minds a storehouse of prejudices, automatic notions, assumptions unaffected by observation. If I had not approached the house up the narrow walk I would have taken an oath, later, that the side I wanted was the dark side. I would have believed it completely, sure I had seen it, because my mind assumed that, since I was often a mystery, the side I wanted was the dark side. I would have been wrong. The lighted side was 1977A. There was loud music inside. Very loud music, bright and bouncy.

  When I rang the bell the music did not stop, but quick, light footsteps scrambled and literally ran to the door. There was a frantic fumbling at the lock, and the door swung wide open. I had to look far down at the tiny girl who stood there.

  ‘I’m Aggy. What’s your name?’

  By her size she looked maybe three years old, but I guessed she was nearer to five. A tiny child with a round, freckled face, and big, eager brown eyes.

  ‘Dan,’ I said. ‘Can you tell your Daddy I’m here?’

  ‘Did you bring me something?’

  She had seen my missing arm, and began to circle around me looking for it. She giggled, sure that the missing arm was a game-I had it hidden somewhere with something for her in it.

  Another voice called, ‘Don’t stand with the door open!’

  It was a firm, authoritative voice, but not adult. Aggy vanished at a run. I closed the door as a second child appeared. She was drying her hands on an adult apron. The apron touched the floor. She was about seven, thinner than Aggy.

  ‘Hello. Do you know how to bake biscuits?’

  ‘No, sorry,’ I said. ‘Is you Dad at home?’

  ‘I want to make some biscuits,’ she said, and gave an exaggerated sigh of annoyance-mimicking adults sighing.

  The house was grim. A barren living room was meagerly furnished with secondhand relics: serviceable, nothing more. Some crude pieces had been built half-heartedly from packing boxes and orange crates. They had been left unpainted. Yet everything was draped and covered with random pieces of coloured cloth that seemed to have no pattern, that added to nothing. Or did they add to beauty for a child, the random pieces of cloth? The efforts of a child playing house.

  ‘Mommy loves biscuits,’ the little girl said.

  The second room was even more barren. There was an old television set, a single armchair, and a battered record player on the floor. Toys were littered all across the floor: old toys, mostly broken. The record player was the source of the loud music, and the smaller child, Aggy, sat in the one chair with her thumb in her mouth, listening.

  ‘I’d like to talk to your Dad,’ I said to the older child.

  ‘He’s not home yet. I’m making dinner.’

  In the kitchen a chipped, enamel-top table was set for three, but awkwardly, as if by someone with all thumbs. A package of crackers and a carton of milk were on the table. Soup bubbled on the stove. There was a box in front of the stove. The older child stood on the box to stir the soup.

  ‘It’s Lipton’s chicken,’ she explained. ‘In little paper packages, you add water. I can’t open cans. Aggy likes lettuce. I don’t, ugh, so I have raw carrots. I hope Mommy wakes up soon; we’re out of cookies for dessert.’

  ‘Your mother’s here? Asleep?’

  ‘We’re too young to stay alone, silly. Only Mommy won’t wake up. She’s been sleeping awful long. She came home early, but Daddy had to go away. We played, but she got tired. She said maybe she’d sleep a long time, we had to play nice and not make a mess. I hope she wakes up soon. I’m too short.’

  ‘Where is she, honey?’

  ‘In bed, of course. You know people sleep in bed.’

  The loud music stopped, and the smaller child yelled for a new record. The seven-year-old hurried away, fussy and exasperated-like Mommy. I found the bedroom.

  Anne Terry lay on top of the bedspread covered awkwardly with a blanket. Her face was quiet and slack, her eyes closed, her hands on her stomach. A glass of water on the bed table had bubbles of stale air in it. A bowl of cereal and a plate of doughnuts were untouched on the bed table. From her slack face, the odour, the stiffness of her cold legs, I guess that she had been dead for maybe two days.

  I took off the blanket. She wore a black slack suit and a white blouse. There was no blood, no marks, no wounds. A small bottle of pills on the
bed table was half full. No violence, no pain on her face, only death. I went back out.

  The smaller child was singing with her record. The older was back stirring her soup. There was a brightness to the seedy rooms as if the little girls, despite the older one’s mothering, knew they were only children and needed light and noise.

  I touched the older child. ‘What’s your name, honey?’

  ‘Sally Anne Terrell. Is Mommy awake now?’

  ‘Not yet. Can you tell me how long she’s been asleep?’

  ‘A long time.’

  ‘Today is Monday. Do you know that, Sally Anne?’

  ‘I know that!’ She was insulted.

  ‘Good. Do you know what day your mother went to sleep?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘Oh, no. Before that.’

  ‘She came home early. When was that?’

  ‘On Friday, silly. It’s always Friday when she comes.’

  ‘She went to sleep Friday night?’

  ‘Oh, no! She read to us on Friday. Daddy was gone. Next morning she went away. Saturday, I guess. Cartoons were on.’

  ‘She went out Saturday, and came back?’

  ‘Daddy was away. Mommy came back and played. Only she got tired. She broke two glasses at dinner! She walked funny. She went to sleep. She won’t wake up. We always watch Lassie. That’s on Sunday, I know that. I gave Aggy her milk money today. She’s only kindergarten, but it’s important to get good habits. I stayed home with Mommy.’

  ‘That was good. When your mother said she might sleep for a long time, did she do anything? Tell you anything?’

  ‘No. Oh, she took some aspirin, of course.’

  ‘Your Dad hasn’t been home since Friday?’

  ‘He was mad, I think. He went to drink. He gets pains.’

  ‘You didn’t call him? At his work? Today?’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t work except sometimes. We don’t have any telephone.’

  ‘All right, Sally Anne. I’m going to find a telephone. Your mother is sick. I’m going to get some help.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll feed Aggy.’

  I had to go to the main street to find a booth. I called the police. When I got back to the house, the little girls were playing a game with a kind of plastic bucket that shot coloured balls all over the room. The object was to chase the balls and get them back to receptacles on the bucket first, each player having a different colour. I got green. The three of us were still chasing balls and shouting when the police arrived.

  Chapter Eight

  A Lieutenant Denniken was in charge. I didn’t know him, Queens isn’t my beat, but I saw the kind he was. A ‘cop’ who lay awake nights hating the Supreme Court for coddling ‘evil’. Law and order; but order before law. Injustice better than disorder.

  ‘You talk when we ask, Fortune. Go sit down.’

  Yet he was human. He found a neighbour woman, not next door where it was still dark, but three houses down. He sent Sally Anne and Aggy with the neighbour before the assistant Medical Examiner arrived. She agreed to keep them until something was decided, if it wasn’t too long, she had her own affairs. She knew nothing about the husband except that he was a bum.

  ‘There’s a sister,’ I said. ‘Sarah Wiggen. She doesn’t seem to know about kids. Mrs Terrell lived a double life.’ I could have added that Anne Terry had really lived a triple life, but Denniken wasn’t going to care about my abstractions.

  ‘Shamski, get the sister’s address from Fortune here, and give him the spiel,’ Denniken ordered.

  The ‘spiel’ was the recitation of my constitutional rights. Denniken couldn’t even bring himself to say them.

  ‘Okay, Mister Fortune, now tell your yarn,’ he said.

  I told him the whole story except that I left Ricardo Vega out. He scowled when I had finished.

  ‘Missing Persons and her Village Precinct are looking for her? You’re sure?’ He didn’t like anyone in on his cases, especially not the Centre Street brass.

  ‘I’m sure, Lieutenant.’

  ‘How come you followed up on your own? You didn’t report the lead brought you out here?’

  ‘A hunch, not a lead. I’ll report now.’

  ‘No, mister. I’ll report. You’ll answer questions.’

  The assistant Medical Examiner came out of the bedroom wiping his hands with distaste. It suddenly brought home the fact to me: Anne Terry was dead. The beautiful body, the hard work, the dedication and the ambition, the strong self-reliance, were all gone. The good actress, the struggling girl, and the mother. I could hear her bony voice, ‘So long, Gunner.’ I had liked her. To the M.E. she was only decay, unpleasant.

  ‘We’ll have to autopsy before I can tell you, Denni-ken,’ the M.E. said. ‘A tough one. She had-’

  ‘Hold it, Doc,’ Denniken snapped. ‘Fortune here doesn’t need to know.’

  ‘I’ve got a client, Lieutenant.’

  ‘To find the girl. You found her. Take him in, Shamski.’

  ‘For what?’ I said.

  ‘Material witness. We need your statement-tomorrow.’

  ‘Like that?’

  ‘You want to argue?’ Denniken didn’t smile.

  I walked to the door without answering. I waited there for Detective Shamski. Denniken didn’t seem to like my attitude, but that didn’t bother me. Anne Terry could have died of natural causes. Most people do, even at twenty-two. There were no signs of violence, and the whole thing could be over for me. What bothered me was the little girls, the toys on the floor. Children make me feel sad, vulnerable, as I get older.

  Detective Shamski walked me out to the squad car. He was silent, embarrassed. I didn’t try to make him feel better. He had to get used to working with the Denni-kens. We drove to the station, and he marched me inside. He huddled with the desk sergeant. Neither of them seemed happy. The sergeant nodded me to the desk. Shamski left looking relieved.

  ‘I need your personal junk, Fortune,’ the sergeant half apologized. ‘Lieutenant says hold you. Material witness, your own protection. I guess he can justify it, and the Captain keeps his hands off the squad room if he can.’

  ‘Don’t make waves, I understand. Can I make one call?’

  Now he looked embarrassed. ‘Denniken said no lawyer yet. I got to work here.’

  ‘My girl,’ I said. ‘She expects me. You can listen.’

  ‘I guess that’s okay.’

  He pushed a telephone at me. I was lucky, Marty was home. I told her I was stuck with Lieutenant Denniken, I didn’t like it, and she better call The Preacher. When I hung up, the desk sergeant looked grateful. It’s a mean world most of the time. ‘The Preacher’ was a nickname for Captain Gazzo at Centre Street. My call was a message to Gazzo. So much for the sergeant’s trust.

  They put me in a cell. Gazzo would work man-to-man, nothing official. It took about three hours. Denniken himself came to the cell for me. He walked me to the street.

  ‘Anything I can tell my client?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s been told.’

  ‘You find the husband yet?’

  ‘Stay out of my area, Fortune,’ Denniken said. ‘You had to get word over my head. Very clever. You know, you wouldn’t like that yourself if you were me.’

  He walked back inside. He wasn’t going to tell me anything. Maybe I’d made a mistake. On the dark Queens street I was too tired to worry about it.

  I rode a slow subway into Manhattan, and called Marty. I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t want to go to her place. I wanted a public place, with voices and lights. Marty said she’d meet me at The Jumble Shop bar. She was waiting when I got there. In her old clothes, her hair in a kerchief. She looked as if she’d been asleep, but I knew better.

  ‘Studying,’ she said. ‘What happened, Dan?’

  I told her.

  ‘Oh, damn!’ she said. ‘Those children were with her?’ ‘Since Saturday. Aged maybe seven and five. Their mother wouldn’t wake up. The father gone. Th
e older one took care of the younger. Nice kids, happy.’ When the drinks came, I drank. ‘That’s what she did on her weekends; went to be with two little kids she had hidden in a house in Queens. Kids and a husband. Took fifty dollars out there every Friday.’

  ‘At least she went to them, was with them,’ Marty said.

  ‘She lived one hell of a busy life. Mother, actress, and hustler. No wonder she was tired-looking. But she had them near her. They were a family. Now what do they do?’

  ‘How did she die, Dan?’

  ‘Don’t know. There were some pills near her.’

  ‘Suicide? No, Dan. She was trying to be a mother even in her life, with her ambitions. She worked too hard.’

  ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘Maybe I never will know now. Let’s just drink.’

  We drank. We talked about other things. After all, she had been a girl we hardly knew, Anne Terry, and we had our own lives like everyone else. When even I knew I’d had enough to drink, and had begun to talk again about Anne Terry and her hidden life. I took Marty home. Somehow, we both needed each other, needed something to hold to.

  Marty had an early appointment, so I went home. I went to bed. All at once I wanted to curl into a ball and sleep without thinking. How many show-biz hustlers, or even dedicated actresses of twenty-two, struggling to advance an inch, take fifty dollars every week and go to be a mother to two little girls? Most of us are half dead all the time. Anne Terry had been very alive.

  So I slept, but not well. The two little girls seemed to mix in my dreams with a lost arm. An arm is part of a man, and so is a child. Even lost, they can’t be escaped. Faces in my dreams. All the faces, but always the faces of the little girls turned up to Anne Terry. They smiled as she told them that a great prince would help them all live in a castle where they would be busy and happy working every day. Ricardo Vega’s face appeared with a laugh that echoed and echoed.