Night of the Toads Read Online Free PDF

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.

Chapter Five
    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.
    An older woman answered my ring. ‘Yes?’
    She was small and motherly, thickened by years of routine daily round in a simple, accepted world. She was dressed now in a suit, on her way out, and her hair was dyed dark. She looked at