‘Ted Marshall here, Frank?’
‘I don’t see him since I talk to you.’
I edged in past him. The votive lights still flickered, but the apartment was empty.
‘I see a man maybe six-thirty, when I go out,’ Madero said. ‘Big man, blond. I think one of the men who beat up Ted.’
‘Where?’
‘Out front. Like he watch building, you know?’
I took the elevator to the fifth floor, and got out warily. I listened at Marshall’s door. No sound, no light. I used my keys, and this time went in ready. When I was sure that the place was really empty. I turned on the light. I checked the closets of Ted Marshall’s room. All his clothes seemed to be there, and three suitcases. No one had even sat on his bed.
In the living room I searched the floor where I had been hit. I found nothing. Then I saw the two glasses, and two cans of beer, on a coffee table. Both glasses were empty, ringed with dried foam. I had a sense memory of the coffee table being empty. I also remembered the pools of light from other buildings. The worn drapes were drawn now. All but one set open to a closed rear window. A chair near the undraped window was not on the marks it had made in the rug. I opened the window and looked down.
Down in the courtyard something black lay in stray light from other apartments. A bundle of old clothes. I left the light on as I went down in the elevator. The courtyard was slashed with beams of light from many windows. A concrete yard fenced with a cyclone fence, the gate locked. A chorus of TV words and music came from the apartments all around me in the night-the Greek chorus of mid-century America.
Ted Marshall lay on his back in the clothes I had last seen in Sarah Wiggen’s apartment. One arm was broken under him. His neck was broken. What else was broken I couldn’t tell, and the back of his head was crushed in a pool of blood. I saw no marks that couldn’t have come from the fall. His pockets contained money, keys and a wallet. In the wallet there were a few credit cards, old newspaper clippings that told how good Ted Marshall had been in some stock company show, a lot of small portrait pictures of himself, and two nude pictures of Anne Terry. It was hard to remember she was dead. It was almost harder to remember that Ted Marshall had been alive.
I went up and called Gazzo.
Gazzo watched the Medical Examiner work. Detectives were all over the courtyard, and up in the apartment.
‘Two hours in the cellar?’ Gazzo said.
‘While someone had a beer with Marshall.’
‘Nothing says they were the same: the visitor, the man who tapped you, and the killer. Marshall fixed up the abortion?’
‘That’s how it looks. But maybe not alone, with this.’
‘No suicide, Dan? You’re so sure?’
‘The window was closed. He didn’t close it himself. So he wasn’t alone.’
‘Men jump in front of friends,’ Gazzo mused. ‘The friend closed the window. Reflex. He could have hit the way he did from a jump.’
‘Why was I put on ice?’
‘Him or the friend. He had to know you were after him after the Wiggen girl’s place. Later, scared witless, he jumped. Where’s the mother?’
‘She works. Okay, if there was a friend here, why didn’t he yell for help when Marshall jumped?’
‘Maybe not a real friend. An associate. Someone who wanted no connection to Marshall, but not a killer.’
‘You want it to be suicide, Captain?’
‘Sure I want it a suicide. Neat and simple,’ Gazzo said. ‘Abortion and suicide. What about it, Doc? Suicide?’
The M.E. stood up wiping his hands. ‘My guess is no. The autopsy may help. Dead about an hour, no more. He might have been hit first. A jump should have landed him farther out.’
Gazzo nodded, thought for a time. ‘I guess I go back out to Queens and check Boone Terrell’s story some more. That McBride was seen around, Dan?’
‘The super said so.’
A detective called down from above that Mrs Marshall had been located at work, was on her way home. Gazzo went up. I left to put a band-aid on my cut temple.
Ricardo Vega’s name was up above the show title on the marquee of The Music Box Theatre on Forty-fifth Street. I went in through the front. The auditorium was dark, some thirty people scattered across the rows of orchestra seats watching the rehearsal on the stage. I slipped into a seat in the last row. Marty wasn’t on the stage, Ricardo Vega was. In his sweat suit and boots, doing a scene. Most of the other players were in costume. It didn’t matter to Ricardo Vega.
I didn’t know what the scene was, but it was Vega’s. He seemed taller, more powerful, and even in the sweat suit he gave a sense of dignity that made me feel suddenly calm. Calm and no longer in the theatre. Almost without being aware of it I was no longer in a dark seat: somewhere else, sunk into the moment on the stage. His voice carried with no effort to all parts of the theatre, encompassing the whole theatre within his quiet voice. He moved with authority and a sense of joy. Totally alive. Transformed into something that was always Ricardo Vega, and more than Ricardo Vega. Something with a life of its own that was all of Ricardo Vega and much more. Not a different person, rearranged. Taken apart and put together in a different pattern-the pattern of the person he was creating up there in a world he made more real than the world where I sat. Oblivious to all but his art. Nothing held back, nothing. Given to the audience, but not for them, no. For his art, work, the hands of his art.
Then it was gone. The orchestra started to play, and Vega began a dance, the chorus behind him. Began to caper like a wooden puppet, a smile on his face as false as his acting was true. I had forgotten in the suspended instant of his art that the show was a musical. I watched him, capering and vulgar, lost behind the plaster smile. Art turned to charade, the entertainment of burlesque-look, Ma, I’m popular! He began to sing, no music able to hide the sense of desperation in his voice.
When the scene was over, Vega stood with his head bent like a penitent as he listened to the music director.
I went backstage.
Chapter Sixteen
Last rehearsals are worlds of private tension. Only the stage manager notices a stranger. I was lucky, the stage manager was setting a new scene. Marty’s scene. I saw her alone in the wings, her lips moving as she paced, prepared. It was not a time to go to her. Art is one of the few things that can only be done alone, and yet can only reach its goal as the effort of a selfless group. Each artist must do his work alone for its own sake, for the truth of the work itself, and all artists must work together for the common whole, the final product for the world. Both together. The paradox of art, and maybe the paradox of life, too.
Ricardo Vega’s dressing room was closest to the stage. Vega wasn’t there. The business manager, George Lehman, was. He saw me in the narrow corridor. Heavy, solid, he came out with the short, quick steps of a small but thick man. A quick glide, as if on wheels, only the solid legs moving. His bald head glistened with sweat, and his suit was as wrinkled as ever over fat.
‘You want something, Fortune?’
‘Some talk with your boss,’ I said.
‘He’s busy. He’s got no time to waste, okay?’
Without Ricardo Vega near he was a different man. The jumpy manner of a slave existing on the whim of the prince was gone. A kind of solid presence. He was his own man, too, and the fleshy face no longer seemed so flabby. He could not stop the sweat, mopped at his face and hands with a handkerchief, but there was that muscle I had seen before under the flesh, a solid jaw, a firmness to his eyes that watched me.
‘Why don’t you just mind your own business, Fortune? Leave Rey alone, you know?’
‘He made himself my business, Lehman.’
‘The girl? A tramp actress? Come on, that kind flops for anyone, twice on Sunday. Why blame Rey for trying? You think he’s the only one? Take a tip, watch that director, Kurt Reston.’
‘You know all about tramps?’ I said.