‘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. The 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.
Then the unshaven face of Captain Gazzo, the sleepy grey eyes. Gazzo sat astride a chair with his arms folded on the high back, his chin on his arms, and watched me like an owl as he asked, over and over, how had Anne Terry died?
Chapter Nine
Captain Gazzo talking over and over:
‘In my office it’s nine a.m. You’re not in my office, Dan. Why aren’t you in my office? Telling me about it?’
In the morning light the deep furrows of Gazzo’s face are like the steel lines of a Durer engraving. No dream. Astride the chair, the owl watching me wake up, he looked like his own myth-the myth that says he never sleeps, year in and year out.
I reached for a cigarette. ‘How’d you get here?’
‘You’re not the only snooper with master keys. Let’s talk about Anne Terry. Coffee? I plugged it in.’
I nodded, he got two mugs of coffee, straddled the chair. ‘Where are the kids, we’re after the husband. Word says he’s floating around Manhattan. The sister says she knews nothing, never did. She doesn’t cry, Dan She’s your client?’
‘Only legally,’ I said, and told him about Marty and my vendetta on Ricardo Vega. I don’t hold out on Gazzo unless he’s in an official stance with even me. When he has to be he lets me know, and we understand each other. ‘Who gave the word on the husband?’
‘Local bar flies out there. The Pyramid tavern. Boone Terrell was in one Friday. Got drunker than usual. Yelled about all women being whores. He ran out of cash and credit, said he had Bowery friends to stake him. We’re looking.’
‘Jealous?’
‘Or guilty.’
I heard it in his voice. Anne Terry had not died of natural causes, and not of suicide. I sat on the edge of the bed.
‘How?’ I asked. ‘No marks on her, no blood I saw.’
‘Abortion,’ Gazzo said.
He has seen every way of death there is, every violence the half-sane imagination of man can think up. He says we’re all crazy, and that he’s the craziest for trying to stop us from feeding on each other’s blood. Hate, greed and insanity he knows, but he’s never learned to live with waste.
‘A pretty good job, the M.E. says,’ he said. ‘Not perfect, some internal bleeding and heavy pain after she got home, but she was packed right, no infection. A real Doc could have done it. She should have made it from the cutting.’
‘She didn’t make it.’
‘No,’ Gazzo said. ‘He used sodium pentothal for anesthetic. A heavy dose, not fatal, but she would have been woozy. She had pain at home, so she drank some whisky, and took some of those pills on her bed table. Prescription pills, but in one of those sample bottles the drug companies send to doctors. The M.E. thinks she was so woozy she took a double dose of the pills by mistake-took the dose twice because she forgot. The combination of pentothal, booze and pills could have killed her, but probably wouldn’t have, except she had a respiratory condition, too. She felt bad, took the pills, lay down, and just stopped breathing. Bad luck all around.’
The sun was breaking through the morning grey now. I put out my cigarette. Bad luck? That was all?
‘Why you, then?’ I said. ‘A Homicide Captain?’
‘Yeh,’ Gazzo said. ‘We don’t much like those pills, Dan, you know? Maybe just bad luck, but those pills worry us. The bottle says take two for pain. The M.E. says she probably took six-added one for good measure, then took the dose twice by accident. There were maybe ten left in the bottle, so no suicide. The kids say no one was there, but they played outside, and that house is wide open. No, we just don’t like those pills.’
‘Someone might have known what they’d do to her?’
‘Maybe. Now tell me about Ricardo Vega, and everything.’
I told him; especially about the rainy night, and what Anne Terry had said to Vega and to me, and what she
