had done. I told him about Sarah Wiggen and Ted Marshall, and about Sean McBride at Anne’s apartment.
‘You think what she wanted to talk to Vega about in private could have been being pregnant?’ Gazzo said.
‘It’s got the sound.’
‘That Marshall could be covering for her, and the Wiggen girl reported her missing fast-maybe she knew Anne was going to have an abortion, and got worried,’ Gazzo said.
‘It plays,’ I said. ‘Ricardo Vega’s child?’
Gazzo nodded. He got up and went to the telephone. I didn’t hear all he said, but I heard Ricardo Vega’s name. Gazzo came back.
‘Get dressed, Dan.’
I got dressed.
Ricardo Vega was waiting in Gazzo’s office. He looked alert and muscular, and he wasn’t alone. The business manager, George Lehman, stood wrinkled and sleepy. A small, sharp man carried a briefcase and fidgeting-a lawyer. When he saw me, he smiled.
‘Well, Captain, I feel better now,’ Vega said, his dark eyes on me. ‘I begin to understand all this.’
Gazzo sat behind his desk, lighted a slow cigarette. ‘What do you undersand, Mr Vega?’
‘That Fortune there, he’s got it in for me.’
‘Rey!’ George Lehman said quickly.
The lawyer moved. ‘Mr Vega has nothing to say until we know what this is all about, Captain. I protest this high-’
‘Shut up,’ Vega snapped. ‘When I need you, I’ll tell you. Both of you.’
‘Rey, as your lawyer I insist-’
‘Don’t insist,’ Vega said, the princely warning in his smooth voice again. ‘What am I, Mafia? I’ve got to be careful? The Captain’s going to trap me? Hell,’ and he leaned toward Gazzo. ‘Fortune there hates my guts, Captain. He’s out to get me. Any way he can. He thinks I’m after his girl, and he’s worried. Maybe he should be. What’s he got to offer?’
Gazzo looked at me. ‘What about it, Dan?’
‘I hate his guts,’ I said mildly, ‘and he’s chasing my girl. But he chases a lot of girls, and I didn’t bring his name in first, the sister did.’
‘Sister?’ Vega said. ‘What sister?’
‘Sarah Wiggen,’ Gazzo said. ‘She reported Anne Terry missing, and she brought your name in, so we talked to you.’
‘You talked to me, and I told you,’ Vega said. ‘The girl’s in my class, we had some drinks, no more. Who knows where she is?’
‘You had more than some drinks, Mr Vega,’ Gazzo said. ‘We found a cuff link and a tie in Anne Terry’s apartment, both yours. Fortune here has given me what he heard in your apartment between you and Anne Terry. Sarah Wiggen knows, too.’
Vega shrugged. ‘Okay, there was more, we had some good times. I still don’t know where the hell she is.’
‘We do,’ Gazzo said. ‘She was found dead last night in a house in Queens.’
The lawyer came alert like a bird dog on a scent. George Lehman licked his lips, made a sound. Ricardo Vega only stared at Gazzo at first. Then his handsome face seemed to age, grow less handsome and more human in a space of seconds. He took a deep breath, put his hands to his eyes, rubbed at his eyes and his whole face, as if he had just learned that there were a lot of things wrong with this world after all.
‘The poor, stupid kid,’ he said.
‘She had an abortion,’ Gazzo said.
Ricardo Vega nodded very slowly, up and down, like a man saying: Yes, I know how it is, what else is new? His hands rubbed at his thighs, his male loins.
‘You’re not surprised?’ I said.
‘Did you arrange it for her, Vega?’ Gazzo said.
George Lehman stood scared, glanced at Vega. The lawyer could stand it no longer. A police Captain was openly, brazenly, asking his client if he had committed a crime! It was enough to send any lawyer into shock.
‘You listen, Captain! My client-’
‘Shut up, damn it,’ Vega said. ‘I told you.’
‘No, Rey,’ the lawyer stood his ground. ‘I can’t keep quiet when the Captain goes so far. I won’t.’
‘I liked the girl,’ Vega said. ‘My child, maybe.’
Vega got up, paced a few steps but wasn’t aware of his movement. He was thinking. I had a glimpse of the brain that had to be under his gaudy surface to have made him the artist he was. He made his decision.
‘All right. I want to help. She was a hard kid, but I liked her. She had talent. I liked her a lot. Too bad.’
It rang in my head, an echo: too bad. As if both of them had wished the rules of the game were different. Wished that they could have acted to other rules, or played another game.
Vega sat down, laced his fingers. ‘We had something more real than most of my things. Too real. I found myself too deep. Not marriage, she never asked, but we were becoming a pair, a twosome. You understand? Not just love, or sex if you want, but in our work. A team-with a girl kid! I found I was listening to her ideas, and advising her on her New Player’s Theatre plans. No! My work is mine, no partners.’
‘You dumped her? Like that. No regrets?’ I said.
‘A lot of regrets, Fortune, but I don’t share my talent. I won’t collaborate. I can’t. I had to end it clean.’
Anne Terry wasn’t the only one who lived a double life. His voice, his tone, his speech pattern were all different now. Two men: the glib, virile swinger; and the serious artist. It was the artist we were hearing now. Or maybe seeing at work?
‘She was pregnant?’ Gazzo said.
‘Not that I knew,’ Vega said. ‘She hung on, hounded me like the night Fortune was at my place. He told you what I said, but she had other ideas. She told my business manager she was pregnant, and sent him up to tell me she’d call in a few minutes to arrange to talk about it. She called and I went to that cafeteria. She had her deal all arranged to offer me.’
The lawyer was on the edge of apoplexy. ‘For God’s sake, Rey! You’re incriminating yourself like some-’
Vega hardly moved. ‘Charley, I told you. Okay?’
The lawyer could push professional integrity only so far. Vega was a big client. The lawyer backed off. If Vega was spinning a fantasy, he was doing an impressive job. He was building the image of a strong man who did his own thinking. Maybe too strong? He sat studying his clenched hands as if seeing that meeting in the cafeteria all over again.
‘She said the baby was mine,’ he went on, choosing his words. ‘She’d have it, start a paternity suit. She told me she’d been married all along. Ted Marshall would testify that I’d known she was married; that I’d used lies, threats, my position in the theatre, to blackmail her into adultery. She’d say she’d been afraid of what I could do to her, and had believed in all my offers to help her, so had given in when she really didn’t want to. Then, afterwards, I’d refused to stand by her.’
Vega seemed to think about it. ‘She made it sound pretty bad. Luck made the date airtight, she said-two weeks we spent at my Vermont farm just after New Year. She could prove she’d had no relations the week before, and not for a couple of weeks after. Since it really was my kid, the blood tests would show positive to every test. To top it all off, Ted Marshall had faked up a tape that sounded like me refusing to help her after she had told me she was pregnant, and I’d admitted it was mine. I sounded pretty nasty on that tape, arrogant.’
He smiled a little ruefully. ‘She arranged that tape on me beautifully. Around the time we were beginning to bust up, about a month or so ago, we taped a couple of scenes from plays about lovers in trouble. When Marshall edited them some, and spliced them together right, she had what sounded like me refusing to help. It was a good job, even the voice levels were perfectly matched. It would be damned hard to prove it was a fake, and Anne was a good actress. I could picture her using that tape in court, tearfully telling how she’d had to trap me with a tape recorder after I refused to help her.’
Vega looked grim, shook his head where he sat. ‘She didn’t expect me to believe that she could really prove it all, she didn’t think she had to. A jury might not believe her, but odds were that they would. Juries love the
