Michael Collins - Night of the Toads

The top drawer explained her nights. A litter of matchbooks, stirring rods, coasters, all from night clubs, cafes, hotels; male business cards, many with lip prints. Par for the course again; a girl with looks and ambitions surviving in New York. I didn’t envy the police if she were really missing, and if her closer friends knew nothing. A life of casual encounters, one-night stands. A busy fly in a world of toads? Caught at last? Except, I saw Anne Terry as more of a hornet, with sting.

The bankbooks were in a bottom drawer. A savings account with nothing: $197. A checking account, the stubs showing no pattern of deposit except the weekly modelling cheque, and showing near zero too often-saved by a sudden deposit, sometimes good, sometimes not. The weekly pay cheque from the regular job interested me. Most companies like to pay monthly or biweekly at most. It had to be an arrangement she had wanted.

The cancelled checks themselves seemed uninteresting at first: mostly bills from the payees, and regular ones to The New Player’s-she was a real owner, not a decoration for Ted Marshall. But after I had stacked them, I had a small pile of cheques made out to cash. Normal, except that there was a pattern. Almost all the cash-cheques were for the same amount, fifty dollars, and almost all were dated on Fridays. I checked the calendar.

I sat back and stared at the cash-cheques. She was neat, but was anyone that regular in her kind of life? It could be nothing, but-? There were missing Fridays, yes, a few drawn on Thursdays, but in general the uniformity of day and amount was too much coincidence. In a hectic life, did a girl always run out of cash on Friday? And could she always need exactly fifty dollars? All right, a special need; regular, routine. What? Blackmail? Fifty dollars? A regular contribution? But in cash, so she wasn’t sending it home, or anywhere by mail.

I was still mulling it, turning it over and considering all angles, when the doorbell rang. I jumped a foot in the chair, then had a surge of something like joy. Anne Terry, coming home? I was coming to like the girl, and not in the way Ricardo Vega liked girls. I was also losing my grip. Would a girl ring her own doorbell?

I was out of the chair. The police? They would have been here to check that she was really gone, but, from the look of the place, they hadn’t searched much. She had not been gone long enough to make them take it seriously at first-off on a binge, ninety-nine percent. But they would have another, closer, look if she didn’t turn up. So I had my leg over the window sill to the fire escape when the door was tried and given a violent kick.

I came back inside, and trotted lightly to the door. The police don’t kick in doors of empty apartments; they get the super to open up. I slid behind where the door would open as a second good kick cracked the lock. The third kick would do it. It did. The door flew open and all the way back to me. I took a bash on the knuckles, but held the door from swinging back out.

The man stumbled into the room, off balance. I got one quick look at him as he went by the crack between door and frame. The blond again-Rick, or Sean, McBride. Vega’s new volunteer helper-for friendship. I stayed where I was, out of sight, my lone hand ready in a fist if he closed the door. He didn’t, he was that much an amateur, and that nervous. He hurried for the bedroom. When I heard a drawer open, I went after him, picking up a handy, large, but not too heavy vase on the way.

He bent over a drawer in the bedroom, his back to me. I wanted to ask him what he was up to, but it’s not often that easy. I had no gun, and I didn’t expect he was going to tell much without heavy pressure. I did the next best thing. I whacked him good with the vase. Not too good, just enough. It was a pleasure. He collapsed in a heap. I got out of there fast.

I was out the door, and one flight down, when I heard them coming up. Two men who had not rung the girl’s doorbell, and a pair of lighter feet coming behind them. I beat it back up. McBride was moving inside clearly, with groans. I made the stairs up to the roof, hidden from Anne Terry’s doorway. The two men had eyes only for the open door. I heard them go in. There was a scuffle, and voices.

‘Who are you? What’s the story?’

‘Someone hit me!’ McBride’s outraged voice. The two newcomers had to be the police, and McBride wasn’t worried about them yet, only about me. He had a. lot to learn.

‘Breaking-and-entering, mister.’

‘Who are you? We got the super for a witness.’

‘You broke that vase? Looking for what? Jewels?’

‘Where’s the girl?’

McBride, ‘I don’t know, I come to see her. A friend, like.’

‘Your name, mister!’

‘Sean McBride.’

A rebirth for Rick McBride! Maybe a star was being born.

‘You busted that door? Why?’

‘It was open, you know? Like, I told you I’m a friend. The door was open, so I come in. Someone hit me. Maybe it was you two, yeh!’

I revised my estimate of Rick, no, Sean McBride. He wasn’t dumb, and he thought fast under pressure. It was a good story if he stuck to it. They couldn’t prove it was false, he wasn’t a criminal, he did know Anne Terry more or less, he had kept Ricardo Vega out of it, and he hinted at a possible charge of police brutality. Reasonable doubt all the way.

I left by way of the roof. They would hammer him more, take him to precinct, let him sweat, but they would get no more from him now that he had his story. He had been around, and he had more brains than I had guessed.

I went down to the street through another building. I wondered just how well McBride had known Anne Terry.

I walked down Fifth Avenue, and across Washington Square, among the spring hordes of a sunny Village afternoon. The well-dressed men and their women, the outsiders from ‘real’ life, wandered giggling and pointing, having one hell of a time gawking at the bizarre flora and fauna of this year’s Village population. The bright-coloured local birds-of-passage themselves-all shapes, sexes and skins, each in the plumage of his choice-stared at no one and nothing, all going somewhere, intent on their purpose. That makes you wonder.

On Third Street The New Theatre was tucked between an open pizza stand and a psychedelic poetry-reading club. A tiny marquee, with pictures of the players in action outside. There was a padlock on the inner doors. A sign indicated that tickets for the next production wouldn’t go on sale for three weeks. The photos outside were from an earlier production.

Anne Terry was in most of the photos, and I had another view of her: the actress. Good or bad I couldn’t know from the pictures, but they told me one thing-Anne Terry wasn’t just a pretty face with her good side to the camera, or her breasts stuck into your eye. She had been caught in action; neck cords stretched like ropes, mouth twisted, body in powerful motion. An intensity that came over even in still shots. Intense: the one word I could fit to all I had seen of her so far, and I didn’t see her abandoning all she was doing. But if she had chucked it all, that intensity would make it hard to find her.

There was a portrait of Theodore Marshall, and he was easy to spot in the action shots. Intense wasn’t a word for Marshall. Tall, slender, handsome in a juvenile way, with a brooding face and thick, black hair. No actor-posed, stiff, mugging emotion; all surface, all conscious attitude, the eyes uninvolved and even a little scared. Maybe a lover of theatre, but no actor. Yet the man I had to find next. The first drugstore gave me his address from the telephone book.

It was only a few blocks away across Sixth Avenue. A red brick apartment house. The best, semi-new building on a block of tenement brownstones. It had gone to seed, the bare lobby shabby with streaks on the stone floor where a wet mop had been swished around in a feeble show of cleaning. A solid, middle-class New York apartment house, neither good nor slum: respectable. Theodore Marshall lived on the fifth floor. I rode up.