Or was there an unknown motive for Ricardo Vega, big enough? There were too many small hints. They kept coming up. Boone Terrell couldn’t have arranged them all. Hints that the payoff might have been made after alclass="underline" from Sarah Wiggen, Ted Marshall, Terrell himself again. Emory Foster wondering who had the money and influence for a good abortion. Terrell with his story, and Marshall indicating maybe Vega arranged it all. Sean McBride skulking around. All coincidence? I didn’t think so, and where there was smoke, something had to be burning.
Gazzo said it-something was missing.
Then, too, did we limit it to men? Sarah Wiggen had known Anne was pregnant, and had more than a few reasons to hate her. Some sisterly pills? Or Mrs Marshall with her boy to mother? That’s the trouble with murder, the motive doesn’t have to be rational, concrete, An urge will do, a momentary need rational only to the killer. And murder itself was only a thin possibility; simple chance bad luck more probable.
Like a scientist, you make an assumption and go on from there. An assumption from the facts you have. I had made an assumption at the start-Ricardo Vega, and something was missing. I decided on another assumption, the most simple after Anne Terry herself-Ted Marshall. The most logical man in the case. Maybe it would lead me somewhere new.
I walked down Fourth Street in the crisp spring dusk. I got no answer to my ring at Marshall’s apartment, and there was no light in the windows above. I tried Frank Madero. He was home. I went down through the basement. He stood aside to let me walk into his ascetic living room. He had been sitting in the dark, votive lights burning under all his crucifixes. He turned on the light for me. He was alone.
‘Where’s Ted Marshall, Frank?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe he go to the sister.’
‘Sarah Wiggen?’
‘I think maybe. He say maybe he go.’
He perched on the edge of one of his hard chairs like a woman in a tight skirt, alert and birdlike, but that was all. His act was way down. No, not an act. No more than a woman arching out her breasts with a man is an act, or a man being strong and gallant with a woman is an act. The overt mannerisms need the proper stimulus, and so did his. I wasn’t any stimulus. Maybe the votive lights of his religion held him down, or my continued presence-the normal public. Most homosexuals feel a litte ashamed, and learn to hide. Our world has made them feel ashamed, taught them to hide.
‘He needs a girl now,’ I said.
‘They were friends, Mr Fortune. They have bad time.’
‘Tragedy bringing them together?’ I said.
‘I see it many times,’ Frank Madero said.
‘How close are you to Marshall, Frank?’
‘Not that way, I said. Good friends.’
‘If he told you anything we don’t know about Anne’s death, you’d do him a favour by telling me. He’d do better going in on his own, Frank. He’ll break sooner or later.’
‘He tell me nothing.’
‘Did you see him around here Saturday? Maybe with Anne?’
‘Only Friday I see them.’
‘Friday? You’re sure, Frank?’ I sensed that I was rigid, like a vulture on a dead tree, alert. Was it going to be this simple? Such a small mistake? My brand-new assumption finding paydirt under the first rock? Why not? Most crimes are solved on trivial mistakes because no one knew, before it happened, that there would be a crime. Neither Marshall nor Anne Terry aware that she was going to die, that for Marshall’s sake they shouldn’t be seen together on Friday.
Madero’s eyelashes fluttered. ‘I think Friday.’
‘Be sure! What time on Friday?’
He was thinking. ‘The afternoon, I was not working. They were here, sure. But-maybe Thursday?’
‘There’s a hell of a difference, Frank.’
He shrugged, helpless. ‘I think maybe Thursday.’
He had said, first, Friday, and immediate thoughts are often right. After that I had scared him, made it too important. On the other hand people really don’t remember small incidents well enough to say Thursday or Friday without going back and relating it to other incidents to fix the day.
‘Was Mrs Marshall with Anne this weekend?’
‘I never see her with Anne no time.’
‘Okay, Frank, listen. If Ted arranged the abortion, you tell him it’s better if he goes in on his own.’
‘Ted don’t do that, but I tell him what you say.’
Maybe I’m not a bad detective. If Ted Marshall was the man, then Ricardo Vega was clear, but I went up to the street eagerly. A good job was more important than my revenge. I went straight up to Anne Terry’s apartment on Tenth Street. The happy fat woman super had changed her housedress for a robe, but the cigarette still hung from her mouth. The TV boomed behind her.
‘No rest for the law, huh?’ she said.
‘I love my work,’ I said. ‘You said you knew some of Anne Terry’s men friends. How about Ted Marshall?’
‘Him, yeh. A boy. Nice, but weak, you know? She had to mother him. The kind that crawls inside a woman to be safe.’
‘Did you happen to see him last Friday?’
‘Nope, not a hair.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I said so, mister.’
‘So you wouldn’t know if he’d been here or not?’
‘Sure I’d know. He wasn’t here. Least, not like usual.’
‘You’d know he wasn’t here?’
She nodded. ‘Not like every Friday. I ain’t missed him in almost a year, except last Friday.’
‘How? I mean, how did you always see him?’
‘Because he always comes the same time: ten o’clock. I’m always out picking up the garbage cans after they been dumped. I watch TV until ten every morning, then I get the cans, and I been sayin’ hello to that Marshall every Friday.’
‘But not this Friday?’
‘Nope, and I’m out there a half hour at least.’
A real lie? Marshall had told everyone that he had gone to Anne’s apartment on Friday, as usual, and she hadn’t been home. It was his whole proof that he knew nothing-he had expected Anne to be at home as usual, so, clearly, she had told him nothing. If he hadn’t gone, then he had known that she wasn’t home, and what more had he known or done?
I took a taxi uptown this time. Sarah Wiggen’s downstairs door was open. I went up. There were voices behind her door. I recognized Ted Marshall’s voice. My finger was on the doorbell when the tone of his voice stopped me. I listened. Muffled voices, Marshall and Sarah Wiggen, rising and fading.
‘… she wouldn’t listen, Sarah. She had to do it. I was scared, but
…’ Ted Marshall’s voice. Tragic, breaking as it rose higher; yet reluctant, jerky. ‘… she was so…’
‘… determined… always that way,’ Sarah’s voice. ‘… challenge anyone, anything, when she made up her mind.’
‘… didn’t want to…’ Marshall’s voice with that odd jerkiness again, as if he was rocking where he sat. ‘Vega had me beat up, I couldn’t fight… weak, that’s me… I’d have married her… married all the time… those kids, God… I didn’t know…’
‘She destroyed things,’ Sarah’s voice loud, a throb in it. Somehow, I knew she was holding his hand. ‘She didn’t mean to, she just had to plunge ahead her own way.’
I heard movement, a shuffling of bodies, and silence. Sarah’s low voice seemed to mumble softly. Ted Marshall’s voice had a kind of thin hope.
‘We… we knew each other first, didn’t we?’ Marshall said.
Her voice was bitter, but thick, too. ‘She was more beautiful. You wanted her more. My body isn’t the same, is it? Or is it? Tell me my body’s as good.’
Silence, and, ‘Christ, Sarah, you…’
‘A live sister better than a dead one,’ she said. That combination, muffled through the door, of bitter edge and a drugged thickness. ‘Is my body good, Ted? Am I good-now?’