Night of the Toads

by Michael Collins

‘I took my vacation to stay with Boone and the children for a time,’ Sarah said. ‘Boone has to find work now.’

  ‘I didn’t know he could,’ I said.

  ‘I expect it won’t be easy,’ Terrell said.

  ‘It takes money to raise children,’ I said.

  ‘I expect how it does,’ he said.

  Sarah said, ‘I intend to help out for a time.’

  ‘That should be fine, then,’ I said, ‘with what Emory Foxx paid Boone for that story.’

  Almost anyone can tell a lie, talk a whole concocted story, and lie to a series of questions if ready. It takes more skill, practice, to lie with silence, with your face, to a direct statement. It’s even harder for most of us if we have been waiting for the accusation, knowing it would come, but not sure just when. Sarah Wiggen couldn’t do it. She looked down at her hands, her fingers twisting like worms. Boone Terrell was better.

  ‘I guess I don’t rightly understand you, Mr Fortune,’ he said. ‘Who would that Emory Foxx be now?’

  Nothing changed in his gaunt face. The same small smile and flat eyes. All he needed was a stick to whittle. ‘Emory Foxx is Emory Foster,’ I said, ‘and the man who “helped” Sarah, and paid you to tell what Anne said about Vega.’

  ‘You got the advantage of me,’ Terrell said.

  I had been standing. Now I sat on one of his halfhearted homemade chairs. ‘Boone, right now you’ve only signed a false statement. That’s bad enough. If you tell it in court, that’s perjury. You want your kids to lose you, too?’

  ‘I told what Annie said. Maybe it’s true, maybe not.’

  ‘She didn’t tell you Vega arranged it,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t any note. Foxx planted it. Foxx did more to frame Vega. You want Vega to be charged for what he didn’t do, and when it comes out, go to prison with Emory Foxx?’

  ‘He got Annie pregnant,’ Terrell said. ‘She died.’

  ‘Did he kill her, Boone?’

  ‘That depends how you see it, don’t it?’

  The small smile was gone from his rocky face now. His jaw muscles stood out like crags. He looked only at me.

  ‘Maybe it does,’ I said. ‘Maybe Vega is guilty in a way, but what about Emory Foxx? A man out to murder Vega by using you, me, the law. That’s what he’s doing, Boone. Three more people are dead because of his actions. Nobodies like you, and me and Sarah, caught between Vega and Emory Foxx. Vega started it by being what he is, but Emory Foxx carried it on, and you helped by lying for money.’

  Terrell said nothing. Rural people are less complex than the abstract city men, and more complex. They respect principle and truth, will fight for it, but they live in a world that respects values even more. They are rarely abstract. Tradition before universal principle and justice; family before truth; county before right; honour before fact. Truth is good, the clan comes first. Morality, yes, but defend the family.

  I said, leaned, my coat still on and the big cannon heavy in the pocket where I hoped it would stay, ‘Boone, you don’t have a choice. I know enough now to make your story smell even to Lieutenant Denniken. Sarah told Foxx how to find me Monday night, and he followed me out here. He found Anne dead. Somehow he found The Pyramid, and your friend Matt Boyle, and then he found you. Maybe he made you believe Ricardo Vega had gotten Anne killed, I don’t know, but he paid you to tell that story of what she said about Vega. He was only muddying then, sniping at Vega, but then he found where the abortion had been done, and it got serious. He planted the note out here, planted evidence against Vega in that abortion room, and now it was bad. Foxx was lucky, the timing worked right, and Vega helped him a lot by sending Sean McBride around to snoop and watch—Vega looked like a worried man. The police have swallowed it, they have to the way it stands, but it won’t hold. You’re in trouble now, Boone, but if you go in on your own, expose Foxx, I think it’ll go a lot easier for you.’

  Terrell hadn’t moved a hair while I talked. Sarah Wiggen was watching him. His small smile didn’t return to his gaunt face. He sat there like a rebel in the dock braced for torture, monolithic in his stubbornness. His eyes looked toward the inner room where the little girls lay wrapped in ragged blankets and listened to their music, coloured cartoon books.

  ‘Boone?’ Sarah Wiggen said.

  Terrell was impassive. ‘Easy on me, but I ain’t got much chance workin’. The kids is young, they forget me. I don’t say you got any part right, but say it’s so and I tell it, I got to give up any money, right? Now, if’n I hold to what I told, maybe they say I’m lyin’ and I go to jail, but I says there wasn’t no money. Foxx he got no proof there was.’

  ‘They’ll find the money, Boone,’ I said.

  ‘Money looks kind of the same. I figure I could work out something for the kids.’

  Sarah said, ‘Boone, no. Not both of you. Children need what they know, someone they love, a parent.’

  ‘How much could it be, Terrell?’ I said. ‘Foxx isn’t rich. How long would it last for them? And later?’

  He considered us both. Without expression. He could have been deciding what meat to have for dinner. A farmer thinking about whether or not to take his wife to town on Saturday night. He folded his hands in his lap.

  ‘Since you got most already,’ he said. ‘What you say I should do?’

  Sarah Wiggen held his arm in both hands. He didn’t look at her, he looked steadily at me.

  ‘First tell me what did happen with Foxx,’ I said.

  ‘Foster, he called himself,’ Terrell said. ‘Like you had it, he follered you, found Annie. He watched you and the cops. When you all left here, he called Sarah.’

  Sarah said, ‘The police called me, and told me what had happened, that it had been an abortion. They couldn’t find Boone; they wanted family identification. Foster, or Foxx I suppose, called before I left for Queens. I told him.’

  ‘So he found out it was an abortion,’ I said.

  Terrell said, ‘He went an’ asked neighbours, got told about The Pyramid. My buddies only told the cops what they got to. Foster, Foxx you say, talked money, so Matt Boyle told him better. He found me ‘bout morning. Made his proposition.’

  ‘You took it,’ I said, ‘for the kids.’

  He moved for the first time. He leaned forward, clasped his big hands. ‘Maybe I done it for me. How was we livin’? Annie gone and all. Her money was what we lived on mostly. What was gonna happen to me? The kids, sure, and I was scared, too, and maybe I was hatin’ that Vega, I knew the kid was his. I took it, cash money he got. He told me go to Sarah and make the story hold up. You was there, that’s all.’

  ‘What really happened Friday, Boone?’

  He squeezed his big hands. ‘Mostly like I told the first time. She come early, the whole thing with Vega’d gone bad. We was all going down to Carolina, for a while anyways. She was sick of everything, all them men. Not before Monday, though, ’cause she had to take care of the way she was. I guess I’d kind of figured the kid maybe was mine, so I got mad. She got mad back. The kid was Vega’s, she wasn’t having it no matter. Vega wouldn’t do nothin’ for her, not even help her fix it. Her partner in that theatre of hers was fixin’ her up with some kind of special Doc he knew about for Saturday. So I walked out and got drunk. Maybe if I’d stayed.…’

  He left it hanging, and so did I.

  ‘Ted Marshall arranged it, paid for it?’ I said. ‘You did know about Marshall?’

  ‘I knew. I guess he paid; she didn’t have money.’

  ‘You didn’t know where she had it done?’

  ‘She never said.’

  ‘Then how did Emory Foxx find out?’

  They both shook their heads, sat silent. I stood up.

  All right, go in to Captain Gazzo, Boone. On your own, and to Gazzo at Centre Street. Take the money.’

  Boone Terrell nodded. ‘He gets off, that Vega. He didn’t even help her. Maybe if he pays for it, she don’t die. He got the money for a real doctor. He could of helped.’

  ‘Maybe he won’
t get off, Boone,’ I said.

  His head went all the way down, and he was crying. His clenched hands against his forehead. Sarah Wiggen was up, came at me with her hands out to push me from the room.

  ‘You got what you wanted,’ she said, her face white. ‘We were wrong, now go away! He can’t stand any more. The money for the children, that’s what kept him going, a purpose. He’s not nothing to think about now but Anne.’

  I went.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Manhasset is on the North Shore of Long Island just outside the city limits. I took a cab from Steiner Street to Flushing Main Street, and caught the Long Island Railroad. From there it was twenty minutes on a slow train. Most of the trains are slow, and I had time to look out of the window at the neat suburban houses on their manicured plots of small land. I had time to think of Boone Terrell who had been sustained by the need to act for his children, but who had now lost that need to act, and so had only Anne Terry to think about—his loss and his emptiness. Any life was better than no life, and a weekend wife better than no wife at all.

  I had time on the slow train to think of Anne Terry, too. Somehow, she was fading in the inexorable twists of events. Her death usurped by the stronger hates of Emory Foxx and Ricardo Vega, as her life had been ruled by their power. She was fading among the neat houses outside the train window—the homes of people she had not known, and who did not want to know her.

  Manhasset was exclusive once, a place of the rich. It’s middle-class now, but still a nice place to live. Part of the exodus from the cities, the middle-class migration to a narrow safety that is not particularly Protestant, and not necessarily Anglo-Saxon, but that is very much white. A sterile landscape behind an invisible stockade of fear and power and advantage, built to keep out the poor and crude, the dirty and disadvantaged, the communal and bleeding. In these homes of the comfortable, the people want no intrusion, no competition. They want to keep the advantages they have, and Anne Terry could count for nothing here—alive or dead.

  Anne Terry had had no dream of privilege, but only of work, of finding somewhere a reason to live. In this dark landscape they could only hate her for the wind she brought to shake their comfort, and she was fading from me among the Vegas and Foxxes and manicured lawns. I didn’t want to lose her. I needed her with me among these houses that sat like impervious toads. I needed her honesty and her laugh: ‘I wanted something big, Gunner, you believe it. I made a bad play, a mistake, but I wanted it alive, Gunner man, not small and wrinkled and flat.’

  She was my reason, Anne Terry, and at Manhasset station I took a mini-bus taxi that dropped me at a red brick house with a lawn and lighted windows. The lawn wasn’t especially large, and the backyard was fenced. A middleclass house on a well-behaved street in the quiet suburbs. If there were private quirks, they were firmly inside. Not even a careless gardening tool marred the proper order.

  George Lehman opened the door himself. His suit coat was off, but he still wore his tie. A napkin in his belt, a black yamalke skullcap on his bald head that gave his fleshy face a kind of ancient dignity. He nodded to me before I could speak.

  ‘Fortune, sure,’ he said. ‘Come in.’

  A small entrance hall was crowded, spotless, and smelled of rich food. The living room had that mixture of German and Russian heaviness of the New York Yiddish culture—dark, thick furniture; ornate silver menorahs, faintly oriental tapestries like ikons. In the dining room six people sat silent around a long oak table that gleamed white and silver, and an ornate samovar steamed on a side table. The six people were three male, three female. The males wore the same black yamalkes.

  ‘My family,’ George Lehman said.

  His fleshy hand moved a few inches. As if that was a command, all six people at the table stood and formed a kind of line in front of the table. The three males stood stiffly, the women with more diffidence. Lehman looked at me with what I could only call a soft pride.

  ‘Mr Fortune came to see me on business,’ Lehman said. It was a statement and an explanation, as if in this house George Lehman made the decisions, but everyone was entitled to know the basis of those decisions.

  He indicated the family ranged in front of me one at a time with his thick hand. His voice different here, that gentle pride, firm but kind.

  ‘My son Saul, he goes to Brandeis University.’

  A tall, thin youth with a dark beard, who bowed his neck.

  ‘My son David. David is at Colombia University.’

  Fatter and shorter, like his father, David grinned.

  ‘My daughter Sylvia. Soon she marries her rabbi.’

  The girl was petulant, but she hid it carefully. Her father not all she wanted, but she didn’t say that in this house.

  ‘My brother Maurice.’

  An older man, short, who smiled from a friendly face.

  ‘My sister-in-law Sophie, who lives with us.’

  The poor relation, grateful, and admiring Lehman.

  ‘And my wife Florrie. My best luck.’

  The wife blushed. ‘George, you embarrass your friend.’

  Lehman smiled, and I nodded to them all, managed a mumble. Only the oldest boy stared at my arm. Lehman dropped his napkin onto the table.

  ‘You all finish dinner,’ he said. ‘Save some tea.’

  ‘I’ll bring down two glasses,’ the wife said.

  ‘That’s fine, Florrie,’ Lehman said.

  He nodded me from the dining room. Not even the wife had asked who or what I was, or why I was there. In this house George Lehman was the patriarch, benign and respected, never questioned. He led me down into the basement. It was a finished basement—playroom with pool table, refrigerator, television, record player, posters, the trimmings of young people; and an office with desk and leather chairs.

  ‘Okay, Fortune, sit down,’ Lehman said.

  He sat behind the desk, I took a chair. I still wore my duffle coat. He hadn’t asked me to take it off. He had closed the office door. Upstairs, the patriarch with his family in his home. Down here, alone with me, the visitor from another world, he was Ricardo Vega’s business manager.

  He took off the yamalke. ‘We say prayers at meals.’

  ‘A nice family,’ I said. ‘Does Vega come here much?’

  ‘Rey never comes here.’

  I heard a tone is his voice—Rey Vega didn’t come here; Rey would pollute this house, this family. The split identity so many of us live with today. Anne Terry had not been alone in living two lives, but where she had been one person in two, even three, sub-worlds, Lehman was two people in one big world. Anne was unique, to herself. Lehman was all too common these days. The work identity, and the private identity: separate, lost from each other. The private standards left at home, the public man with different values. The kind patriarch tall at home, moral, and the narrow servant of Rey Vega at work, flexible.

  ‘You were hurt,’ he said, looking at my head.

  ‘I was hurt,’ I said. ‘Sean McBride was hurt more, and Vega’s in jail.’

  ‘A mistake. Rey didn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘Emory Foxx framed him good.’

  I watched his heavy face. His wary eyes, like thin shell, showed nothing, but his heavy eyebrows went up.

  ‘You know that?’ he said.

  ‘I can prove it now, Lehman. I’ve got the proof.’

  ‘You? What proof? Foxx hasn’t talked, I know him.’

  ‘First tell me about Emory Foxx. Why does he hate Vega? Fifteen years of hating, Captain Gazzo says.’

  ‘Nothing much to tell,’ Lehman said. ‘Just an old feud. Started before I was business manager. I was Rey’s accountant then.’

  ‘The D.A. thinks a jury’ll lap it up,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to tell me?’

  He mopped at his face with a handkerchief, shrugged. ‘They worked together out in Hollywood then. Emory Foxx was a pretty big writer at the studio. Rey was called out to do his first picture after dazzling them with those two big h
its on Broadway. They worked together on the picture. They couldn’t get along; it was Rey’s picture, from one of the plays on Broadway. Foxx was running dry, played out, I guess, and Rey was the new King. Foxx got fired, or shifted to another picture, actually. Pretty soon after that everyone got called up by one of those Congressional investigations.’

  I could see the sweat circles spreading under his arms in his shirt sleeves. He mopped at his hands. ‘It was happening all over in those days. Everyone hauled to Washington, or before a junketing committee on a witchhunt. They called Rey. He told them straight: he’d been a kid Communist in Cuba, joined left-wing fronts later in New York—everyone had at the time. He’d busted years before, and he proved it. Emory Foxx clammed up, refused to talk. He got cited, went to jail for over a year, and got blacklisted from movies and Broadway. He said Rey ‘got’ him to ruin him, climb over him. That was crazy, everyone knew it. Rey was already in solid, on his way up, and Foxx had been dropped from the picture six months before. Rey didn’t have any reason to hurt Foxx, none.’

  ‘How did he say Vega ‘got’ him?’ I said.

  ‘He never did say straight out, because he had nothing to say,’ Lehman said, angry. ‘The guy was a Communist, that’s all. He was one then, and they knew he was lying, and he’s still a Communist! Maybe that’s why he’s after Rey, because Rey’s been against the Communists for years. Or maybe he just cracked crazy. I don’t know, but he’s been hounding Rey ever since he got out of jail—thirteen years, more! Hounding him!’

  ‘No one seems to know much about it?’

  ‘Because Foxx never come out in the open with it. All behind-the-scenes, private sniping, lying to people! He’s too scared to try it in the open. Years ago Rey had to send lawyers to threaten slander suits, or libel. Foxx was on parole a while, and Rey warned him he’d charge him and send him back. No newspaper or magazine’ll touch Foxx, they know Rey would ruin them. Maybe he’s had it hard. I guess he finally cracked open.’

  When he finished, he sat for a moment as if seeing those old days. His face didn’t look like the memory was beautiful. He moved, lighted a cigarette, waited for me to speak.