‘I’m sorry, Dan. Not tonight.’
‘I’m sorry, too,’ I said.
I got my raincoat and left. She didn’t look up. She curled tighter, her martini in her hands.
I walked for a long time in the sharp night wind. To the river. When you love a woman, want her, and she says no, a giant steel hand tears you up inside. You want to smash walls, and you understand why men kill for passion. I wasn’t ‘any man’ to her, I couldn’t be or what was there, and I walked by the river for a long time before I turned into the first river saloon I found. I didn’t even want to talk to Joe Harris, no. I had a double Irish. I began to calm. Sometimes I wonder what men who don’t drink do when they are chopped up inside?
The Buddhists, Zen style, tell you that peace is found by leaving the world. They don’t mean death, even if that is a kind of peace; they mean withdrawal. They mean not needing the world, learning how little a man needs to face himself with a smile. They mean hopping off the merry-go-round. I’ve tried it. I jumped off many times, and I never really got back on the last time. A middle-aged roustabout who dropped out and goes where his shoes take him. But it’s not really part of our Western world, and no man escapes the world that made him. A Western man can’t stare at a wall and find peace. We can get off the carousel, but the music goes on inside.
If you can’t leave the world, and you don’t have some simple belief to tell you what is right and wrong, there is only work. I had a case. For society it was a case worth nothing: two dead zeroes who had given the world little, and been worth less to the world. Knowing why they had died wasn’t worth the time of one detective who should be out protecting decent people. Not to society, no. Yet Captain Gazzo would work on it, and so would I.
For two kids without even a weekend mother, yes, and just to do the job right. True, but more than that. For Anne Terry, who had wanted to give much to an indifferent world, and who had been worth a lot more than many. A girl, woman, who had kept the faith in her fashion, in the ways allowed to her with the pressures she had inside she could not help. A girl with the courage to carry her conflicting demands, and to dare for her dreams. She had made a mistake, but for a large dream, not for a small greed, and her presence filled the case like a hollow inside me. As if, somehow, my work could bring her back.
So I drank, and I worked. Ted Marshall had arranged the abortion. Maybe not alone, or maybe someone had come into the action for his own reasons. Someone who had killed Ted Marshall? Why? McBride for Vega? Maybe McBride on his own?
I drank, and I thought. At least, it took my mind off Marty and my need to be loved.
Chapter Seventeen
My five cold rooms and ready pot of coffee greeted me on a chill new morning. I had stayed sober, not called Marty, and lay looking at the thin sunlight without a hangover. I felt good.
I jumped out of bed, the chill sharp on my bare skin, and for an instant had the illusion of being far away. A hotel in Paris. A bed-sitter in Manchester. A flat in Stockholm. Out of some new bed to cross to a window and look out at the light over an alien city. A bright, new morning. Dazzling and new, and, because the city was strange, aware that someday there would be no new mornings for me, so each morning a complete life. For those who climb slowly from the bed they have always known, morning is only another day.
I had my coffee, and enjoyed the morning at the window, until New York became familiar again, and I called Marty. She never got up before noon if she could help it, so was asleep. She cursed me out, said she was all right, told me to call later, and hung up. I called Captain Gazzo. His female sergeant told me he was out. Sarah Wiggen didn’t answer; she went to work earlier than a sometime detective.
I wore my old pea jacket when I went down to the diner for some breakfast, because I was still feeling the illusion of being somewhere else. Amsterdam, maybe, ready for a robust Dutch breakfast before a walk along the canals. The illusion held through pancakes, eggs and bacon. It finally faded as I walked downtown toward Ted Marshall’s apartment house.
The lobby was spotless this time, almost shining. Scrubbed in deference to death, maybe, or maybe Frank Madero had needed to keep busy through his long night with a friend dead. Or was it the order of the owner; remove the marks of police boots, the evidence of murder in a proper building where murder didn’t happen but had? There was a hush to the building, even the TV sounds muted. Real blood was more interesting. I could imagine the good wives working with ears cocked for new violence.
Mrs Marshall answered the door. She wore a hat, and all black, and her face was round and motherly again as if her moment of battle was over. She looked now like those calm, silent old women I had seen in the war picking through the ruins after the battle had passed. No more worries, the curtain rung down on both fear and hope.
‘Come in, Mr Fortune.’
‘You’re going out?’ I said.
‘To get him. The police have been kind. They don’t… need him any longer.’
Which meant that Ted Marshall had died from the fall and nothing else. Her voice had a soft texture, comforting. She sat down, so I sat. She got up.
‘Tea? I’m having some,’ she said.
‘Fine, thank you.’
She sat down. ‘It won’t be ready yet. I’m sorry.’
‘So am I, Mrs Marshall, but I have to ask-’
It wasn’t my voice she heard. ‘You were here last night? That Captain, Gazzo is it, he told me. I had to identify poor Theodore. My company let me go. A few days with pay.’
‘That’s good,’ I said, feeling lame.
‘You were here? You never saw Theodore?’
‘No. Someone was in the apartment, I was hit. You have any idea who that could have been, Mrs Marshall?’
‘No,’ she said, heard her private dialogue. ‘I tried, you know? Poor Ted, he had such fantasies. Like his father. Most people assumed I doted on Theodore so because his father had been dull, ordinary. No, Theodore was exactly like his father. A handsome dreamer, weak, full of ambitions they hadn’t the capacity for. I knew Anne would hurt him. She was a good girl in her way, but much too much for him.’
‘He arranged her abortion, Mrs Marshall?’
She nodded. ‘I didn’t ask him, but I knew. He was nervous that Friday. Saturday he was gone most of the day, and when he came home he was an awful wreck. Theodore never could face trouble. He was a boy who wanted the world to make a wide, sunny path for him with no grey days. After the police came the first time to ask him if he knew where she was, why she was missing, he was too frightened to move. He just lay there in his room. Only a boy, I so hated to see him frightened like that.’
‘Was anyone else mixed up with him, helping him with Anne? Did he talk about anyone special?’
‘He never said anything to me, Mr Fortune.’
‘Did you see him with anyone? Someone special, maybe? Some stranger to you?’
‘I don’t remember anyone, no.’
‘Can I look at his room?’
‘Of course. The tea should be ready.’
I searched Ted Marshall’s room. The police had been ahead of me, and Gazzo does a complete job. I found no lead to anyone else, no clues. Only the closet full of clothes, all the best, and shelves of books, mostly plays. In the books one role in each play had been marked all through in the margins. The roles Ted Marshall had seen himself playing. All the plays were big plays, and all the marked roles were big roles-the male star. Nothing small for Ted Marshall.
In the living room Mrs Marshall had the tea poured. I took a cup, sat down. She perched, drank her tea.
‘You’re continuing to investigate, Mr Fortune?’
‘So are the police. We’ll find who killed him.’
‘It seems a sad kind of work. He’s dead, who or why doesn’t matter very much. I expect the reason won’t make much sense. We live in a senseless, frightened world. Men who kill are always afraid. I’m not sure I want to know why Theodore made someone so afraid of him. I remember a play he did once. There was an old woman in the play whose son had been killed, and the son of a neighbour woman, fighting against each other. All the old woman could think was that the two women stood on each side of scales of sorrow, balanced by the bodies of the dead boys.’