Chapter Three
I should have known better. For a week it did seem possible, but men like Ricardo Vega don’t change in a week. Marty was ready to cry; except that Marty doesn’t cry; she swears.
‘Damn, damn, damn! He’s got the ‘business manager’ of his, George Lehman, hinting that the boss is worried, maybe I lack spark, fire! There ought to be more ‘like’ in my scene!’
The first week, Vega was just busy. The man aside, he was a great actor, had written the show, his own money was in it, and when there was an artistic purpose to serve, he served it first. The second week he was the king again.
‘King of toads!’ Marty said. Her work meant too much to her. ‘He squats on his pad, croaks his power, and licks out that sticky tongue to snare all the flies.’
I was helpless, and that’s a hell of a feeling. I had no power to pressure Ricardo Vega, and I couldn’t fight him physically. A gun was no threat. He would be sure by now that I wasn’t going to use a gun. Yet I had to do something, and I thought a lot about Ricardo Vega the second week. That was why I spotted the girl’s name in the newspaper. In The Daily News. The story wasn’t in The Times, of course. I think it was only the picture that even got it into The News. The News likes pictures of pretty girls.
I don’t often read The News, but in my one-window office that Monday morning I had nothing to do but think about Ricardo Vega. It was a sunny spring day at last. I wanted to relax and enjoy the day over some beers, or maybe I needed a friend to talk to-a real friend. Only Joe Harris fitted that need-one friend, not counting Marty; the fate of a man who belongs nowhere. But Joe wouldn’t be on duty at Black’s Tavern until noon. I had an hour, so I read The News.
The picture of the big girl in the small bikini stopped me on page four:
NUDE ACTRESS VANISHES
Anne Terry, 22, actress and model, who made headlines when she appeared nude for a whole act in a banned production at The New Player’s Theatre, was reported missing late last night. The disappearance of the curvy actress was reported by her sister, Sarah Wiggen, of 29 West Seventy-sixth Street, who told police her sex- pot sister vanished last Thursday from her West Tenth Street apartment.
Her partner in New Player’s Theatre, Theodore Marshall, 26, questioned by the police, denied any knowledge of her whereabouts. Marshall said he could think of no reason for the beauty to have vanished. Police are investigating.
There was no mention of Ricardo Vega, but it was the girl in the rain all right. Her name brought the night back to me, ‘Go sniff around your own bird, Gunner.’ A girl who had wanted to talk to Vega alone. Who had been thrown out, had talked to the bald man, George, who had then called, and Vega had come to her. A brush-off, a summons, and now a disappearance. It was worth a look. I had liked Anne Terry, she had helped me.
The noble detective. All ready to connect Ricardo Vega to one missing girl in the hundreds he had dropped. With his power and money, and her obvious background? A ‘free’ girl, who had to know fifty men more desperate than Vega; and a rich man who could pay off a dozen girls, one way or the other. After over two weeks, I was suspicious of foul play by Ricardo Vega? When his name wasn’t in the story, and The News a paper that would jump with joy at even a hint of the great man?
Not to help the girl no. A straw. A chance to cause Vega trouble. There was a connection, if slim, and maybe I could at least bruise Vega. Then, anything was possible. Famous men do make mistakes.
I took a taxi to the West Seventy-sixth Street address of the sister, Sarah Wiggen. The day was crisp, the trees in the park budding with new, bright green that didn’t last long in New York. Somehow, that made me think of the missing girl, Anne Terry, who must have been green and bright once, but who had long lost it when I had talked to her in the rain. Lost it at the age of twenty-two.
Sarah Wiggen had never had it. The sister opened her door to my ring, and maybe she had been green once, but she had never been bright-alive bright, I mean, not intelligent bright.
‘Yes?’ she said, stared at my empty sleeve.
Maybe she was intelligent, I couldn’t say, but I could guess that she had always been drab, earthbound. She looked enough like her sister to prove the relation, but where Anne Terry had worn grey and looked gaudy, Sarah Wiggen wore red and looked grey. Not that she wasn’t pretty, and almost as well filled out, but the classic bones of her sister were missing, and something more-the spark, the verve, the intangible that makes men turn.
‘Miss Wiggen? Can I talk to you about your sister?’
‘Anne?’ Her tone could have been eagerness-or surprise. Her voice lacked the bone, but it had the same regional accent. ‘You know where she is? Come in.’
Moving she looked more like her sister. It gave her animation. The apartment couldn’t move, and it lay there, cheap and dull. The colours seemed to cancel each other out, and there was no eye for style. It wasn’t electric, it was simply polyglot, mismatched, and there wasn’t much of it. A bare apartment, but not empty. A man stood up.
‘Did I hear that Anne has been found?’ he said.
A florid-faced man of medium height, but topping my 160 pounds by a good fifty. He didn’t look fat, just thick, like a broad tree trunk. Part of that effect was his clothes: brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, soft, checked shirt; green wool tie; pin-stripe flannel pants that belonged to a suit; good brown shoes badly run over at the heel.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I want to help you find her. My name’s Dan Fortune, I’m a detective.
‘A police detective?’ the florid man asked.
‘Private. I met Anne a few weeks ago at Ricardo Vega’s apartment. I’d like to help if you’ll let me.’
‘Vega?’ the man said, glanced at Sarah Wiggen. ‘Perhaps he could help you, Sarah.’
‘I can’t pay a detective,’ she said.
‘I don’t want pay. On my own.’
‘You have some personal angle?’ the man said.
‘Anne helped me once, and I don’t like Ricardo Vega. He could be involved. I want to find out. That’s straight.’
‘It is,’ the man said.
He went to Sarah Wiggen, put his arm around her shoulders.
‘Why not let him try, Sarah? He could help.’
He could have been her father, but he didn’t act fatherly. Maybe fifty years old, less. Probably the same age, nearly, as Ricardo Vega-but this man looked almost fifty and Vega looked barely thirty. (It’s partly a matter of will, of desire. Some men look forty at twenty-five: mature, responsible, proper. They want to look mature; they are in the main stream-firm fathers, solid husbands, mature in business. Other men look boyish, immature at forty. Men out of the main stream who value personal youth and their individual ego. A matter of a man’s self-image.)
‘If he wants to, all right,’ Sarah Wiggen agreed.
‘Give me a dollar to make it legal,’ I said. ‘You’re my client.’
She found a dollar in her handbag, and gave it to me.
‘Good,’ I said, and turned to the man. ‘Now why did Ricardo Vega’s name mean something to you? Mr-?’
‘Emory Foster,’ the florid man said.
‘You know Anne Terry?’ I asked him.
‘No, I never met her,’ he said, ‘and Vega means nothing to me. It’s Sarah he has meaning for.’
‘What meaning?’ I said to the sister. ‘His name wasn’t in the story in the newspaper.’
‘It will be,’ Emory Foster said. ‘She just told the police.’
‘Why did you wait?’ I asked the girl.
‘I didn’t list all the names of the men Anne knew,’ she said. ‘Only Ted Marshall, because he was her current boy friend. I don’t even know all her men.’
Emory Foster said, ‘I told her to tell the police all she knew. Especially about Ricardo Vega.’
‘What does she know about Vega?’
‘That Anne was in his acting class,’ Sarah Wiggen said, ‘and that they… they played around.’
