knew everyone who was ‘doing’ anything worth talking about.
Only one of the three in the living room was visible: a short, heavy, middle-aged man inside the archway. He was bald, gone to a pot, and his suit looked like it wrinkled over his flab one minute after he put it on. He was trying to look attentive and inconspicuous at the same time. That’s a hard trick, and his flabby face glistened with sweat. The other two in the living room were only voices-a male and a female. I heard the female first.
‘Hold the charm, Rey, okay? Just the score.’
‘No bugging me, Annie, please,’ the male voice said. It was a smooth, pleasant, very urbane voice. A tone of light banter didn’t hide the confidence of power in the voice that told me, somehow, that the man behind the voice was handsome and much admired by women. There was a kind of creamy gallantry in the voice, but a weariness, too, and under it all a hint of cruder menace.
‘Bug you?’ the woman said, and I could hear the curl of her lip. ‘No woman bugs you, Rey?’
‘Come on. Anne, you’re a big girl. It was fun, okay’
‘That’s where we stand, Rey?’
There was a silence while the heavy man I could see went on sweating. I imagined the unseen pair staring at each other, their lips smiling, their eyes not.
‘Don’t try, Anne,’ the weary male said. ‘No trouble.’
‘Sure, you’re a sweet guy. We had fun.’
Now the iron surfaced in the man’s urbane voice. Still smooth, still pleasant, but the gallantry was gone.
‘Let me spell it out, Anne. I made no promises, no offers. You did what you wanted to do. What you wanted, no favours right? It was nice, and maybe we do it again sometime.’
There was that suspended silence again, the sense of the unseen man and woman watching each other, and then the woman spoke in a kind of tired voice. A sad voice.
‘Okay, Rey. We better talk alone.’
The man’s voice, ‘Take Miss Terry to a taxi, George.’
The sweating man stepped out of my sight, talking as he went, polite and deferential-a clerk. ‘Sure, Rey. Where you want to go, Miss Terry?’
The woman said, ‘We better talk in private, Rey.’
‘Get her out of here, George!’
George cajoled, ‘Please, Miss Terry, you know?’
‘You want me to handle it, George?’ the unseen man said.
It was the prince speaking: Where will you be tomorrow, George, if I have to do it myself? Why do I need you if you can’t do the job for me?
‘Okay, Miss Terry,’ George said, sharper. The changed voice of a man who fears to love what he has.
George came into sight pushing the woman by one arm. She resisted, but under the heavy man’s flab there was old muscle. When the woman saw the three of us waiting, she stopped her struggles. Her face turned neutral, and I saw that she was tall and much younger than her voice had sounded. I had a fast view of a pretty face, dark hair, full breasts and hips, and fine long thighs below a grey mini-mini skirt.
Then the door closed behind the young woman and George, and the urbane unseen man’s voice spoke almost in my ear:
‘Who the hell are you? What do they think I’m doing, casting a circus with one-armed freaks?’
His smooth voice was all stone now. I wasn’t a woman.
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
