Night of the Toads (3 page)

Sarah Wiggen had never had it. The sister opened her door to my ring, and maybe she had been green once, but she had never been bright—alive bright, I mean, not intelligent bright.

‘Yes?’ she said, stared at my empty sleeve.

Maybe she was intelligent, I couldn’t say, but I could guess that she had always been drab, earthbound. She looked enough like her sister to prove the relation, but where Anne Terry had worn grey and looked gaudy, Sarah Wiggen wore red and looked grey. Not that she wasn’t pretty, and almost as well filled out, but the classic bones of her sister were missing, and something more—the spark, the verve, the intangible that makes men turn.

‘Miss Wiggen? Can I talk to you about your sister?’

‘Anne?’ Her tone could have been eagerness—or surprise. Her voice lacked the bone, but it had the same regional accent. ‘You know where she is? Come in.’

Moving she looked more like her sister. It gave her animation. The apartment couldn’t move, and it lay there, cheap and dull. The colours seemed to cancel each other out, and there was no eye for style. It wasn’t electric, it was simply polyglot, mismatched, and there wasn’t much of it. A bare apartment, but not empty. A man stood up.

‘Did I hear that Anne has been found?’ he said.

A florid-faced man of medium height, but topping my 160 pounds by a good fifty. He didn’t look fat, just thick, like a broad tree trunk. Part of that effect was his clothes: brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, soft, checked shirt; green wool tie; pin-stripe flannel pants that belonged to a suit; good brown shoes badly run over at the heel.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I want to help you find her. My name’s Dan Fortune, I’m a detective.

‘A police detective?’ the florid man asked.

‘Private. I met Anne a few weeks ago at Ricardo Vega’s apartment. I’d like to help if you’ll let me.’

‘Vega?’ the man said, glanced at Sarah Wiggen. ‘Perhaps he could help you, Sarah.’

‘I can’t pay a detective,’ she said.

‘I don’t want pay. On my own.’

‘You have some personal angle?’ the man said.

‘Anne helped me once, and I don’t like Ricardo Vega. He could be involved. I want to find out. That’s straight.’

‘It is,’ the man said.

He went to Sarah Wiggen, put his arm around her shoulders.

‘Why not let him try, Sarah? He could help.’

He could have been her father, but he didn’t act fatherly. Maybe fifty years old, less. Probably the same age, nearly, as Ricardo Vega—but this man looked almost fifty and Vega looked barely thirty. (It’s partly a matter of will, of desire. Some men look forty at twenty-five: mature, responsible, proper. They want to look mature; they are in the main stream—firm fathers, solid husbands, mature in business. Other men look boyish, immature at forty. Men out of the main stream who value personal youth and their individual ego. A matter of a man’s self-image.)

‘If he wants to, all right,’ Sarah Wiggen agreed.

‘Give me a dollar to make it legal,’ I said. ‘You’re my client.’

She found a dollar in her handbag, and gave it to me.

‘Good,’ I said, and turned to the man. ‘Now why did Ricardo Vega’s name mean something to you? Mr—?’

‘Emory Foster,’ the florid man said.

‘You know Anne Terry?’ I asked him.

‘No, I never met her,’ he said, ‘and Vega means nothing to me. It’s Sarah he has meaning for.’

‘What meaning?’ I said to the sister. ‘His name wasn’t in the story in the newspaper.’

‘It will be,’ Emory Foster said. ‘She just told the police.’

‘Why did you wait?’ I asked the girl.

‘I didn’t list all the names of the men Anne knew,’ she said. ‘Only Ted Marshall, because he was her current boy friend. I don’t even know all her men.’

Emory Foster said, ‘I told her to tell the police all she knew. Especially about Ricardo Vega.’

‘What does she know about Vega?’

‘That Anne was in his acting class,’ Sarah Wiggen said, ‘and that they … they played around.’

‘Vega plays around with a lot of girls.’

‘I guess he does.’

I waited. ‘That’s all? No trouble with Vega?’

‘I don’t know. We’re not close, Mr Fortune. I don’t see her much. We live different, and we don’t talk to each other often.’

‘Then how do you know she’s missing?’

‘I talked to her Thursday,’ she said. ‘She called to ask me to go down home with her. We haven’t been home in four years, at least I haven’t, but I didn’t want to go with her. I called her Friday morning to tell her. She didn’t answer. She’s always home on Friday mornings. Ted Marshall gets Fridays off, and they work. She’s never home on weekends, so I didn’t think too much about Friday until Sunday. She was supposed to call me definitely on Sunday evening to get my answer about going down home. When she didn’t call, I went down to her place.’

‘It worried you that much? Just not calling once?

‘Anne always does what she says she’ll do. Always,’ Sarah Wiggen said. ‘The super had to let me into her place. I saw that she hadn’t been home since at least early Friday. The place was all neat, untouched. Anne always straightens on Thursdays for Ted coming on Friday. She’d never clean on a weekend. To me that meant that she hadn’t been home since maybe Thursday evening. I called Ted Marshall. He said when he went on Friday morning, she hadn’t been home. She hadn’t told him she’d be away. So when she still wasn’t home late Sunday night, I went to the police.’

‘That was pretty quick, wasn’t it?’ I said.

Emory Foster said, ‘Her being missing Friday makes this weekend different. She didn’t tell Marshall she’d miss their regular meeting on Friday morning, and she expected to be at home on Sunday evening. Sarah tells me Anne is very orderly. And she still isn’t at home, is she?’

I thought about it. ‘Where is ‘down home,’ Sarah?’

‘North Carolina, a dirt farm. She’s not there, I called the general store, talked to my Ma.’

‘Which one of you changed the name?’

‘Anne. She married at fourteen,’ she said, almost bitterly. ‘Annie May Terrell. She shortened it for acting.’

‘What’s her number on Tenth Street? You have no key?’

‘She never gave me a key. Number 110, apartment four.’

‘I’ll see what I can find,’ I said.

Neither of them said any more, and both of them stood as if they were waiting for me to leave before they moved. That made me wonder, but not as much as the timing of Sarah Wiggen’s report to the police. It had been fast, no matter what they said.

Chapter Four

The building at 110 West Tenth Street was in the part of Greenwich Village taken over years ago by well-paid fringe artists—editors, copywriters, commercial artists, theatre producers, designers, professors. People who had once wanted to be real artists, free livers, and who came to live where others where still trying. But they had jobs and children, needed to be clean and safe. The aspiring or stubborn real artists were careless, dirty, and not always safe, so were driven out by those who had come to love them. Only the few artists who had been highly successful could stay. The rest had to find lower rents on less careful streets, evicted by those who wanted the name of artist, but who, in the end, feared the game.

The street was clean, tree-lined and expensive, and Anne Terry’s brownstone building silent in the early afternoon. A ring got no response. I used my rectangle of stiff plastic to open the vestibule door, and the ninth key on my ring of master keys opened the apartment door. It was the top floor; flooded with sun, and empty.

There were two rooms and a kitchenette, laid out much like Sarah Wiggen’s apartment, and with not much more furniture, but there the resemblance ended. The difference, as with the sisters themselves, summed up in a few words—spark, verve, style, the intangible. Everything blended, yet there was nothing ‘arranged’ about the place. All casual, even careless, and, yes, warm. I had not expected a warm apartment—‘I don’t need losers, Gunner. Bring me the winner.’

I began work with the closets. Those in the bedroom held only female clothes, and not as many as I expected. Few outfits for a woman, especially a theatre woman—one or two good ensembles for each occasion, no waste, like a general planning a battle. In the living room closet there was a man’s green tartan jacket, a pair of grey slacks. The jacket had a name strip sewn to the collar: Theodore Marshall.

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.