‘Maybe, but I’m not home, yes? He don’t feel so good, I see that. I think maybe he knows about the girl, Anne, but I don’t ask. He’s my friend. If I am here last night, maybe he alive.’
‘You suspected he fixed the abortion for Anne?’
‘That makes him a bad man? Because he help her? She makes the baby, she wants to stop baby. He do his best, yes?’
Mrs Marshall had her coat on. ‘I’m ready, Frank. Will the funeral parlour people be there?’
‘I just call them to go,’ Madero said.
Together they walked to the door. She seemed to have forgotten that it was her apartment. She was leaving me in the room as if I lived there, not her. She looked back at me.
‘In that play Theodore did there were a lot of old women with dead sons; a civil war of some kind. At the end the old heroine goes for her son’s body. She’d seen the first of him, she said, she’d see the last of him. What was the pain she suffered bringing him into the world, to the pain she was suffering carrying him out of the world? She didn’t care what had killed him. Once he was dead, the reason didn’t matter.’
She went out leaning on Frank Madero-as Juno Boyle had at the end of the play she remembered. Juno and the Paycock, O’Casey. A little war and a cheap murder. Is there a difference? You tell me, I don’t know.
I gave them a few minutes. Then I went down. I wasn’t feeling good anymore in the clear, cool day. When I found why Ted Marshall had died, it probably wouldn’t make much sense. About as much sense as Juno Boyle’s civil war. Or as much sense as the isolation inside us all that made Marty shrink in her anger even from me.
The new morning had come down to just another day. I stopped in O. Henry’s for an Irish. It was too early, but my sense of clean well-being had gone with the morning. To ease my guilt before I had a second, I called Gazzo again. The lady sergeant had a message this time. If I called I could go to an address on Hudson Street. Gazzo had left the message only an hour ago, the place wasn’t seven blocks from O. Henry’s.
Police cars were out front when I got there. One of a row of tall old-law tenements with the fire escapes in front, and terra-cotta decoration all over the grimy brick facade. Small shops on the street level ranged from grubby bodegas to elegant antique emporiums. Three levels of patrolmen passed me up to the second-floor rear apartment. A railroad flat, the dark rooms smelling of sweat, cooking, rot and urine. All the rooms were bare and empty except the kitchen.
In the kitchen was a white enamel table, two stained straight chairs, a water heater, a sink, and the usual high bathtub with an enamel cover to make a work area. The walls and fixtures had that thick, leprous look that comes in New York flats from endless years of paint-layer on layer. Detectives worked and crawled all over the room. Gazzo stood watching. Lieutenant Denniken from Queens was with him.
‘You know Denniken, Dan,’ Gazzo said.
‘Fortune,’ Denniken acknowledged, and nothing more. He walked away.
‘What is this, Gazzo?’ I said.
‘Where the abortion was done, Dan. Cleaned, but not good enough. Blood under the tub, broken syringe needle, traces of hair and maybe foetal matter. Lab has it all now.’
I looked around the barren rooms and felt sick.
‘How’d you find it?’
‘Remember Boone Terrell saying Anne had something written down in case Vega couldn’t meet her? Last night, after we found Ted Marshall, I told Denniken to go over that Queens house with a sieve. We had luck. Denniken had a brainstorm-the little kids had cleaned, all right, but they couldn’t carry out the big garbage cans. Denniken found the note deep in the garbage. This address, and Vega’s name.’
‘But I heard Ted Marshall admit it all.’
‘All, Dan? Or just part? I figure the beating he took did more than shut him up. I think he changed sides. A Judas goat for Vega. That’s why he got killed; he knew too much.’
Gazzo moodily watched one of his men taking apart the sink drain, another taking fingerprints. ‘I see it that she had a bigger club over Vega than he let on. That’s what was missing. He paid her off. Then he fixed the abortion. Maybe he told her he wanted it safe, or maybe that he wanted to make sure she kept her bargain. What he really wanted was his payoff back, and to make sure she stayed silent-permanent.’
‘Murder?’ I said.
‘I read murder, but to prove it we’d need the quack who did the job. The only other weak link is dead- Marshall. Maybe we can pin Marshall on him somehow. If not, and he doesn’t break, I guess it’s the abortion charge. He was here.’
‘I want to like it,’ I said, and I did, ‘but a man like Vega needs a life-and-death motive for murder.’
‘Who says what’s life and death to any man? Any man can kill under the right pressures, conditions. How many times have you said those things yourself, Dan?’
How many times had I said them? All true. I had at least implied them to Marty only last night.
‘Besides, there’s still the abortion,’ Gazzo said.
‘What places him here personally, beside the note? Who rents the flat?’
‘Vacant. The super swears he knows nothing. We’re working on him, but it doesn’t matter. We found this, Dan. In a pile of rags and junk near a lone chair in the next room-sort of a waiting room, I guess.’
He handed it to me. A silver money clip, initialled: R.V. On the back was an inscription, worn down: To Rey, a coming star: Applause! — 1-20-50. A well-used money clip.
Gazzo said, ‘It’s Tiffany, easy to check. You know, in thirty years you learn that people are funny, they have small quirks almost as unique as fingerprints. It looks like Vega leaves bits of jewellery around.’
I said, ‘Marty says he thinks he’s being involved in it all by someone who wants to give him public trouble.’
‘This is more than some trouble,’ Gazzo said. ‘He’s tied to the girl. He’s got motive already. He’s placed here now. He’s got no alibi for Saturday-we checked after Boone Terrell’s story. Terrell’s story is the final nail, and there are small hints from everyone. The D.A. does a dance with what we have.
‘Can I see that note Anne had?’
It was typed, not written. Gazzo saw my startled face.
‘Look at the back,’ he said.
The paper was a page from one of Anne Terry’s production plans for her theatre. There were handwritten additions to prove it was Anne’s. A discarded page? It was garbage-stained, but it looked like a correct page, and I couldn’t remember seeing any discarded scrap pages in her desk.
Gazzo said, ‘Sometimes the plain and simple is just that.’
A neat woman, Anne Terry, orderly. This page rang a bell. Did I remember seeing it? Was Anne a woman to take a page from her files and use it as scrap? On Friday, or Thursday it would have been. Some pages had been missing on Tuesday. But on Monday? The first time I’d looked? No. I was sure. Or was I? If I was, how did I prove it? Vega said someone was involving him. I saw a shadow, a man at Anne’s desk and files on Tuesday. Emory Foster, a ‘friend’ of Sarah Wiggen.
Chapter Eighteen
This is the age of magical technology. Detectives use all the modern tools of science, yes they do. I used a basic tool in a drugstore on Bank Street-the telephone book. It’s simple when you know what to look for. No Emory Foster was listed, not in five boroughs. No one has ever invented a free-lance writer without a telephone, or a poor free-lance writer with an unlisted number.
I called Sarah Wiggen. She didn’t answer. She worked somewhere. Who had said it? Ted Marshall, yes-Sarah worked in some kind of residence hall for females. That could take all day. I flagged down a taxi on Hudson Street. The day was hotter now near noon, and they were still playing soccer in the park. Silent men scoring imaginary goals in make-believe important contests because they had nothing better to do in the richest country in the world.
The superintendent of Sarah Wiggen’s brownstone had the steady eyes of a Corsican bandit.
‘Yeh?’
‘Sarah Wiggen isn’t at home. You know where she works?’
