Epitaph For A Dead Beat

by David Markson

  “I’ll take a dozen.”

  “That’s what they’re counting on. Not that it isn’t a reputable publisher—which could be another reason why Ephraim isn’t too happy with me these days. The only place he sees his name in print is on his phone bill.”

  “I gathered he was a little anxious about some girl named Josie?”

  “Ephraim would be anxious about what color the grass will come up next April.” We had turned at Grove and were headed toward Seventh Avenue. “Although it’s a funny story, actually. It couldn’t have happened with anybody except Josie—Josie Welch, the girl I live with. She’s as pretty as a picture, but she’s probably the most scatterbrained kid in town. It’s Zen—that started it all.”

  “Sin?”

  “Zen. Zen Buddhism, you must know about it—?”

  “I hear there’s a lot of it going around.”

  She threw back her gleaming head. “That’s as good a comment as any. Damn, but I hate these fads—you can’t turn around without hearing words like safari and atman and Lord knows what else, all of it mixed up with undergraduate profundity and stale beer—”

  “It sounds pretty subtle for a girl like this one—”

  “Oh, it is. But somebody gave her a lecture on it one night. Some intense young man, no doubt. Josie’s always getting lectured, it’s a way she has of being seduced.”

  “Zen Bedism—”

  “Oww—” She winced. “But you don’t know how right you are. It was all she talked about for a week or two, and then last Sunday I came in about midnight and there were she and Ephraim, sitting on opposite ends of the couch with their legs crossed and their arms folded, both of them stark naked and staring into space. You learn not to be surprised by much of anything Josie does, but this was a little extreme. I thought they were probably high at first, but then Josie admitted just that—they were supposed to be practicing Zen, trying to lose all awareness of their physical natures and achieve a state of absolute spirituality. I asked her when the practice session ended and the game began, but she wouldn’t say another word. The pair of them were still contemplating eternity when I went to bed.”

  “Zen Nudism—”

  “Clown—”

  “And Josie achieved Nirvana while Ephraim didn’t—which explains all his anxieties—”

  “Not quite. The next morning Ephraim was coming out of her bedroom when I was leaving for the library. I do freelance reading for film people, incidentally, screening books that might make movie properties—not so much, now that I’ve gotten my advance on the novel. If I have any luck I’ll be quitting altogether. Anyhow, I let it pass, as I do with most of Josie’s sundry indiscretions. But that evening Ephraim showed up again. You’d have to know Josie to appreciate this, but the minute he made the first hint of a pass at her she hauled off and socked him. She told him flatly that she wouldn’t go to bed with him if he were the last man on earth—”

  “Huh?”

  “That was Ephraim’s reaction, likewise. He asked her where she thought she’d gone the night before, but Josie said she’d had nothing to do with what happened. Even if she’d consented in so many words, it hadn’t been her real self. She’d been withdrawn from the external world, and her mind hadn’t had anything to do with her body. All this in dead seriousness, mind you. It broke me up so much I had to get out of there. And Ephraim’s been chasing her ever since.”

  “Waiting for her to come back to earth.”

  “Literally. But that’s what I mean about him. All right, she wants to pretend it never happened—so anyone else would leave her to her little self-deception and forget about it. But not Eph. You’d think she’d suddenly spurned him after ten years of wedded bliss.”

  “He seemed to want to blame you for something or other.”

  “Sure he would. He followed me around like a puppy for months. It wouldn’t occur to him that a girl just might not be interested—if he thinks she’s intimate with anyone else he has to convince himself she’s a tramp he never really wanted to start with. And now after last weekend Josie’s obviously a tramp also, only in this case it’s my influence. Sometimes it does make me a little sore—”

  We had stopped walking and were standing below the steps to a three-story brownstone, just off Seventh. It was lighted over there, and cars were passing, but you could have held hearing examinations where we were. I took a smoke, offering her one, and she said no.

  “I haven’t shut up since we left Vinnie’s, have I?”

  “Most of it about some girl named Josie—”

  “Chattering like an imbecile, just so I can hide how I really—” Her voice caught. She was standing two steps up, against the stone balustrade, and she turned away. “Oh, damn him, anyhow. Just because you live in the Village they think they can treat you like—”

  The delayed let-down startled me. “Hey,” I said.

  She nodded, compressing her lips. I went up. “Listen—that joker isn’t worth three wasted thoughts in thirteen years—”

  “Oh, I know it, I just—”

  “Anyhow he’s gone. He’s off writing sonnets to a dirty sock. Ain’t nobody here but Shane, ma’am—”

  She smiled. She didn’t make anything of it when I kissed her. I had a hand on the rail at each side of her, and only our lips met. It was just light testing, like the first warm drop from an infant’s bottle you touch to your wrist.

  “That wasn’t me,” I told her. “I’ve attained other-worldliness, complete withdrawal—”

  “You’re a Tibetan monk—” She came up with two keys on a tiny chain. “Do they let you drink coffee—I mean in those monasteries?”

  “You show them your Diners’ Club card—”

  She grimaced, going to the door. It was an old paneled wood aflair, under an arch, and I pushed it in after she’d worked the key. She skipped lightly up one carpeted flight and led me along a corridor to the front. “Josie must be off somewhere if Ephraim said he rang,” she said quietly. “She goes uptown a lot. If she’d been home she would have let him in to torment him some more.”

  I waited while she used the second key on a door marked 3, then followed her into a large living room. A low couch on tubular legs faced us from the far wall, and there were leather sling chairs in corners. There was an expensive hi-fi arrangement, and wrought-iron racks were jammed with records and books. Tan drapes covered the windows overlooking the street. There was no rug but the floor was inlaid of hard dark wood squares and highly polished.

  Fern grinned at me. “I’ll bet you wanted something devastatingly bohemian—”

  “Orange crates, driftwood, sprawling Beatniks—”

  “The furniture’s mine. I was married once, it’s what I got to keep as a souvenir. In the bedrooms also—” She gestured toward two doors in the wall at my left. “Left one’s me, right one’s Josie. You go to the John through the kitchen, but don’t ask me to explain whose concept that was. Do you take it black, Harry?”

  “Swell.”

  She waved me toward a chair, then slipped through a doorway near the couch. I heard water run. After a minute an inner door closed, which would be that jerry-built latrine.

  I was just standing there. The door to Ferris bedroom was open about half a foot. The door to her roommate’s was closed. So I picked the roommate’s.

  I don’t know why I do those things. Maybe I do those things because I’m a cop. Maybe I’m a cop because I do those things.

  Mother was right. I should have been a poet. There was no iuture in the business I was in, no future at all.

  There was a small lamp burning on a table in there. It hadn’t shown with the door closed. I took a single deep breath and then I backed out. I drew the door after me as carefully as if there had been unstrung pearls balanced on its top.

  “Nosy,” Fern Hoerner said.

  She was at the kitchen door, holding a bag of sugar. Common household granulated sugar. She was going to drop it in a minute.

  “That Josie. There’s one do
or in here to the pantry and one to the bathroom. So I just found this on a shelf in the medicine cabinet. Sometimes I think that girl doesn’t know her own name.”

  “Josie Welch,” I said.

  “Actually it’s Josephine.”

  “Josephine, yes—”

  She frowned. “Aren’t you being strange, Harry? What’s so important about her name?”

  I wanted to think of a way to tell her. There wasn’t any way. The girl looked as delicate as old dreams, and I despised what it would do to her face. I felt like a man about to slash a Leonardo with a dull blade.

  “Someone will have to identify the body,” I said.

  CHAPTER 4

  I had been right about the sugar. The package twisted in her hands and began to empty itself in a thin, fluid stream, like time spilling. It whispered as it built itself into a mound at her feet.

  She never saw it, gaping at me. I hadn’t moved. Heifetz could have strung a bow on the tendons at the back of my calves.

  It was not the first time I had found a corpse. But I generally have some vague professional notion when there might be one around. Like the vague notion a steel worker has that one of those high girders might be slippery. It’s the same fall. You just don t expect to take it off a trolley on the way home from work.

  The bag was crushed and empty when I finally got across. She had not made a sound.

  “She’s been shot, Fern—”

  “But—” She shivered once, looking past me toward the bedroom. “But I— Oh, dear God, are you sure? How could—?”

  “The police will ask you to go in. If you’d rather do it before they come—”

  She turned a little wildly, pressing a hand across her mouth.

  Very probably the police would be more comfort than a total stranger, which was a status I had just reverted to. She finally nodded, however.

  I took her arm. The shade on the one lamp in there was orange, and it threw an unnatural cast over everything, like wildfire beyond thin curtains. The girl lay across the bed with one arm flung upward and her cheek turned against it. Her long thin legs were bent over the side, and her feet touched the floor. She had slippers on. The strap on the left shoulder of her red brassiere was severed, and the brassiere had slipped toward her throat, exposing that one small breast.

  Her face was to the light. She could not have been more than twenty, but somehow there was no innocence about her. The face was small-boned, and she had been pretty. She was fragile, but the way Bardot is fragile. The small blackened stain at her heart was hardly visible.

  Fern had come only one step into the room. Her fingers were digging into my forearm.

  “Get yourself a drink, Fern—”

  She broke away, running jerkily toward the kitchen. I did not follow her.

  The girl had been killed instantly. The wound was from a .25 at best, more likely a .22, and a single shot from that kind of bore would have to be perfect to kill at all. There was a faint smear of blood on the girl’s palm, where it had touched the hole in what must have been sheer reflex.

  I pressed my hand against the inside of her thigh. There was no stiffness, although the skin seemed cold. That could have been an illusion. I guessed it was an hour. It might have been three.

  I let out my breath. There was nothing which did not belong in a bedroom. A freshly laundered brassiere, white this time, lay on the floor between a dresser and the bed. She had been changing, so the other one had evidently ripped of itself, not in any struggle. A window near the bed was lifted two inches. There was a fire escape in the blackness beyond it.

  A lot of clothes in the closet, just as many cocktail and semi-formal things as casual items. A girl who had not made a career out of Greenwich Village. A girl who had had a friend intimate enough to change a brassiere in front of. Or had she answered the door and then come back in here alone? None of this was any of my business.

  I had touched both doorknobs before, so I touched them again, going back out.

  Fern was watching me grimly from the couch. She was clutching a tumbler of whisky in both hands. She was not crying, but her face was the color of cooled ashes. I looked into her room also.

  It was the same size as the other, set up almost the same way. The window was not open. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed.

  “Would she have had anything in there worth taking, Fern?”

  She frowned, not understanding.

  “It could have been a prowler, although I doubt it.”

  “Could have been—Oh God, who? Why? I—n

  I had been waiting for it. She broke apart like a bridge collapsing, in slow motion, letting herself fell to the side with her face in her hands. I could hear the coffee perking and I went in and turned it off. I used up another minute or two brushing the sugar against the base of a cabinet. I found a glass on a draining rack and brought it out. She had a bottle of Four Roses on a table at the end of the couch.

  I hadn’t been right about her face. Even torn up that way she was lovely.

  “You’re being so calm, Harry. And I don’t know anything about you at all, do I?”

  “I’m a detective, Fern. Private.”

  “You’re—” She looked up in alarm. “I don’t understand. I mean, you being here and—”

  “The police won’t particularly like the idea either. It was just chance that I was in Vinnie’s.”

  “Oh, God, it’s so—” She bit hard on a knuckle, fighting it. The phone was on a small stand near the windows. It wasn’t going to go away.

  “I better call them now, Fern.”

  She said nothing. I dialed. My name, the address, the apartment number. It would have taken longer to order a rib roast.

  It was 12:53.1 let myself slide into one of the sling chairs. “They’ll be a while,” I said. “If you want to talk instead of just sitting—”

  She stared at me absently.

  “Did you know her long, Fern?”

  “About a year.” Her voice was ragged. “She’s lived here for five months.”

  “That when that marriage you mentioned broke up?”

  “That was before. Do you—may I have a cigarette?”

  I went across and gave her a Camel. It trembled between her lips.

  “You don’t have any ideas?”

  “There just isn’t anybody, any reason—”

  “Ephraim?”

  “But you heard him yourself. He said he was looking for her and she didn’t answer the bell—”

  “So did fifteen other people hear him. He could have kept all that private over there. He might have wanted the edge on an alibi.”

  “But Ephraim—he’s such an ineffectual sort of boy. He’s frustrated, I guess, and maybe deep down he knows he’s not much of a writer, but I just can’t—”

  “There was another girl he mentioned. When he was asking where Josie might be—”

  She picked up her glass, sighing, then replaced it. “Dana O’Dea—’’

  “A good friend of Josie’s?”

  “She was. Until—” She let it trail off.

  “You’ll have to tell the cops, Fern.”

  She nodded. “They had a fight. At a party, just a few nights ago. Both she and Josie had a crush on Pete Peters, the novelist. He’s—well, just part of the gang down here. I told you before how I met Ephraim coming out of Josie’s room that morning. I’ve met Pete coming out a dozen mornings. But the thing is, if I were Dana’s roommate I would have seen Pete over there also—” She paused, and her arms dropped between her thighs. “I guess Josie and Dana were both kidding themselves, thinking Pete was playing it straight. But then something came up at the party, somebody made a crack, and Dana blew her top. She was drunk, I guess, but she called Josie every name in the book, and then she told Pete to take her home. Pete said no, but it was curious, somehow. He didn’t say he wouldn’t go with Dana—I’m almost certain he said he had to stay. In fact I was tempted to ask Josie later if—”

  “She might have been pregn
ant?”

  “I don’t know, Harry, I—”

  I was scowling. “Ephraim’s interest doesn’t make much sense if everyone knew Josie was going with this Peters—”

  “You saw Ephraim—he’s a little crazy. He told Josie the other night he wanted to marry her. I think he felt—well, I got the idea he wanted to do it deliberately, knowing she might have another man’s child. As if it might add some simulated sort of tragic stature to his life, like Byron’s limp or something—”

  “You said she went uptown a lot. Anybody special she saw?”

  “Connie, yes.”

  “Connie?”

  “I don’t know his last name. She’s never said anything about him, nothing at all. He just calls, two or three nights a week, and if Josie isn’t busy she goes up. Oh, God, I mean went up. It was always odd, I guess probably he’s a married man—”