Night of the Toads

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.

‘Remember 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.’

Close, she was less pretty but more opulent. Her face was long and bony, with the tired look that doesn’t come from worry or conflict, but from plain too much work and not enough sleep. Her eyes were too bright, feverish, as if she lived on energy alone. But her full body was really beautiful. I found I envied Richardo Vega. For this girl in bed, even I might-?

I said, ‘Vega doesn’t like you, either.’

‘You better fade out, Gunner.’

Her voice still had the quality I had heard up in Ricardo Vega’s living room-direct, a little hard, and older than her years. A voice of bone, not sugar.

‘We could help each other out,’ I said.

‘I don’t guess so. Mind your own henhouse.’

I heard a regional sound in her voice, far from New York.

‘I need a weapon,’ I said. ‘Two hit harder than one.’

She smiled at that. A nice smile. Not innocent or eager, but friendly. She reached out and touched my bruised face. When a woman has known few men, she will usually flinch from physical touch, will make a big thing of it. This girl had been with many men, her touch firm and matter-of-fact. Her fingers came away bloody. She looked at the blood.

‘I don’t need losers, Gunner. Bring me the winner.’

‘He’s a bastard, Miss Terry.’

‘And a genius. You know it. If you want the theatre, he’s where the action is. The power, Gunner.’

‘What is he as a man?’

‘Power there, too, Gunner. You believe it.’

‘I believe a brush-off when I hear one.’

She seemed to think about that, about the brush-off, and after a time she sighed. ‘I really dig the guy, too, except he’ll never be sure enough to relax. Too bad.’

She blinked in the rain. For an instant I was aware of a real sense of loss about her. Then she began to walk away without looking at me again. ‘Go sniff around your own bird, Gunner.’

Her walk was a stride like Marty’s. After a few seconds, I sloshed behind her toward my subway. She turned at Lexington, and when I reached the corner, I saw her go into a cafeteria up the block. Under the conditions, that seemed strange to me. She wasn’t the type of girl who ate in cafeterias. Maybe it was only the bloodhound habit, but I followed. Through the cafeteria window I saw her carry two cups of coffee to a table, and look at her watch. I waited in the rain.

A tall, pale, skinny man appeared and walked toward her table. He had a stoop, and a kind of shuffle as if his feet hurt. His enormous hands stuck out of short topcoat sleeves. The coat was too small, and shabby, and his pants were work pants. He wore work boots. He had a gaunt face and sunken eyes, but I guessed that he was only in his early forties. The early forties of a man who’d lived a long and hard life.

He sat down at the girl’s table, his coat still on. She pushed a cup to him. They sat without speaking. When he had finished his coffee, he just stared at her. She took one of his big hands. Her face was gentle, her eyes soft. His reaction surprised me-he hung his head, looked at the floor. I could see the pressure as she squeezed his big hand. She talked for some minutes, smiling almost sadly, as if the two of them were alone in the cheap cafeteria. Then she patted his hand.

His gaunt head jerked up. For the first time he spoke, and I saw a sharp exchange between them. It was over in seconds. He stood up slowly, reluctant. She nodded to the door. At that he turned and walked away. I watched him come out and go north. He didn’t look back. Inside, she went to the telephone. She returned to the table with another cup of coffee. I had a quick hunch, and moved into a doorway next to the cafeteria from where I could look out at intervals.

When I saw them they were already around the corner and near me in the rain. Ricardo Vega, and another man. I shrank back, and hoped the other man wasn’t Rick McBride, or Sean, and, if it was, I hoped even more that he wouldn’t spot me.

It wasn’t McBride, it was the heavy man, George, and he didn’t spot me. But he took up my old post outside the cafeteria window. Vega went inside. I didn’t have to see Vega to know where he went inside the cafeteria, and with George outside I wasn’t going to see anything more. All I would do was risk more lumps, and no matter who the gaunt man had been, I didn’t see anything in it all to help my problem.

I slipped carefully from the doorway, but George had no interest in me or anything else outside that cafeteria. I took the subway downtown, and stopped in on Doc Silverman. He patched my cuts, felt my face bones, clucked over my bruises, and sent me home. My five cold rooms were a bleak welcome. After Vega’s place they looked like a rural railroad waiting room. In Europe people are used to coming home to cold rooms, to moving around in coats until the heat takes hold. Americans expect cozy heat, and a frigid apartment is depressing.

I was depressed enough anyway. Bruises aside, I hadn’t done much for Marty. I felt no better when she arrived about 2:00 a.m., even though my rooms were warm, and a good movie was on TV. She saw my band-aids and bruises.

‘Dan, who? Vega? No!’

‘Did he bother you again tonight, Mart?’

‘I didn’t see him; they didn’t rehearse my scene. The understudies worked separate. What happened?’

I told her blow for blow verbal and physical. ‘I don’t think I did much good, baby.’

‘He knows I’m not alone now, Dan.’

‘You think that’ll help?’

‘He likes the easy chase, the sitting pigeon, no fuss,’ she said, kissed me. ‘You know, I love you a whole lot.’

Reason number one for going to Ricardo Vega had worked fine. She was nice to me the rest of that night. I liked it, but it made me uneasy. Gratitude is a bad base for passion. No woman loves a man because she’s grateful.

So, after she was asleep, I lay in the dark and tried to think that Vega would lay off Marty because of me.