I looked at Frank Madero. ‘Nothing to hide?’
Madero’s eyes were flat. ‘We are not lovers, if you mean that. We are friends. It is possible, you see?’
‘Then get your ‘friend’ up to his apartment. Don’t make the police find him. You don’t have to mention me.’
Madero nodded; he understood. Gazzo wouldn’t be happy about going off on my own to Marshall. I guess I just wanted to nail Ricardo Vega myself, if I could. Ted Marshall said no more. He seemed almost paralyzed on the bed.
I went up to the street, and called Marty from a Sixth Avenue booth, but there was no answer. At her theatre they said she wasn’t on call until later. I wanted to talk to her over lunch, so decided to give her an hour.
Anne Terry’s apartment was near. Maybe I could find some evidence to show that she had gone on with her blackmail.
Chapter Eleven
A fat woman in a housedress with a cigarette hanging from her mouth was sweeping out the vestibule of Anne Terry’s building. She gave me a smile, hummed at her work. The smile faded when I showed an old badge and said I wanted Anne Terry’s apartment. It wasn’t me who faded the smile, it was the dead girl.
‘Awful. She was a fine girl. Straight and on the line. Maybe she liked men too much. Women are all born lonely and too eager. That’s nature’s way, I guess.’
‘I guess,’ I said. ‘Did you know her men?’
‘Some, not many: She didn’t broadcast.’
‘A Ricardo Vega? You saw him Friday or Saturday?’
‘Nope. The cops asked me that. He’s that big shot, right? What was she doing with a man like him?’
‘A little blackmail, maybe,’ I said, watched her.
‘Anne? I’d have to know more to know about that. Ain’t no one you know for sure what they are, but I got to hear reasons, and know who says what. All I know, she was nice.’
‘She was nice,’ I said. ‘Can I have the key?’
‘Don’t need it. A friend’s up there now.’
I went up carefully. The ‘friend’ could be Sean McBride again, or Ricardo Vega, or anyone. The door was open. I found him bending over the old desk, and recognized the hunting-lodge clothes: Emory Foster, the florid friend of Sarah Wiggen. An open suitcase was on the floor, filled mostly with photo albums and books. The heavy man heard me and turned.’
‘Mr Fortune. You’re still at work?’
‘I’d like to know more about what happened,’ I said.
‘So should I,’ Emory Foster said. ‘Poor Sarah is taking it quite hard. She asked me to get some things of hers Anne had.’
‘I didn’t think she cared much about Anne.’
‘They were sisters, Fortune.’
‘Not close,’ I said. ‘You said you never knew Anne?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘You’re an old friend of Sarah’s, though?’
‘A friend, not so old. She doesn’t have many friends.’
‘How’d you meet her?’
‘She’s interested in writing. I teach a class.’
‘You’re a writer, Mr Foster?’
He gave a small shrug. For a thick, florid man he was subdued, tentative. He looked like a man who should roar and slap backs, hold forth at some artistic party full of celebrities, be photographed kneeling beside a lion he had shot. That kind of man, but who had been cut open and hollowed out. A shell, isolated inside a floating bubble.
‘I write,’ he said. ‘Free-lance, teach a few classes. I do advertising copy, some stories. Small beer.’
‘For the theatre?’
‘No, not for the theatre.’
‘Is it much of a living?’
‘I survive, Mr Fortune. A serious writer who doesn’t find a clique of elite, or command an obvious market, hasn’t much chance. So I write my books which no one will publish, and make a living doing copy, teaching, and writing trash under pseudonyms.’ He shrugged, stepped away from the old desk. ‘That seems to be all that Sarah asked me to get. Can I help you with anything? You’re looking for who helped her?’
‘If anyone did.’
‘I suppose she could have handled it alone. A tough girl, they tell me. You’d think she would have found a real doctor.’
‘Maybe she did. Maybe the curette slipped.’ I was really wondering if someone could have known what the combination of drugs would do to her?
‘A real doctor would have cost a lot of money,’ he said. ‘Not to mention influence to force the risk. I wonder who she knew with both money and influence?’
‘I wonder,’ I said
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ll leave that in your hands. I better get back to Sarah. I have my own work to do.’
He went, and I searched again. The desk was a mess by now. I found no whisper of blackmail. The file was no better. It, too, had been manhandled, everything out of order. The place had been oversearched, like a field with too many footprints. I called Marty before I left. She still didn’t answer.
I took the subway to Seventy-second Street, walked up beside the spring park. Even on a weekday it was crowded. There were the old with nothing to do, their years of service rewarded with idleness and the slow starvation we proudly call social security. (We’re a narrow Puritan nation at the core. We grudgingly keep our old alive, but make sure they have no joy in it.) The odd and unemployable fed pigeons, and stared wondering into space. In a field, young men played soccer while their women encouraged in some foreign tongue. Without work, they played the sport of their homeland to know they still existed. We’re a rich nation, we can afford to waste lives.
We can also afford to let a women take time off when her sister dies. Sarah Wiggen was at home. She stood with her arms hugging herself as if cold. She wore black. It didn’t help her to look like her sister. Yet I could see, again, that she was really a pretty woman-her drabness was inside, behind the lustreless eyes.
‘What do you want, Mr Fortune? It’s over.’
‘You’re sure, Sarah?’
She was shivering. Her eyes saw far away or long ago. Maybe both-North Carolina and a young sister she had hated for marrying first and leaving her to hold the bag on a dirt farm. She saw something much closer in time and space, too. Herself, maybe, and her hate.
‘How much did you really know, Sarah?’ I asked.
‘Know?’
‘I wondered about how fast you ran to the police. You knew about Queens, her kids, the abortion.’
‘No!’ She hugged herself. I waited. She sat down on one of her sterile chairs. ‘I knew she was pregnant. I guessed what she planned to do when she talked about going down home.’
‘So you knew where she was? You knew she was dead?’
‘Dead?’ Some small life flashed in her slack eyes. ‘You don’t think I’d have left those children alone with her? No, I didn’t know about Queens, or any children. I didn’t know where she was.’ Her hands moved to her belly. ‘Are they… nice children?’
‘You haven’t seen them?’
‘I didn’t want to, yet. Are they pretty, like Anne?’
‘I think so. She never told you she had children?’
‘I guess she didn’t think the family deserved to know. Up here I suppose she wanted to keep them apart from
