Epitaph For A Dead Beat

by David Markson

  After a minute the door opened an inch. A pouchy-faced woman with red eyes and hair like an abandoned floor mop gave me the best she would ever have to offer: “Yeah?”

  “Oh, I’m just fine, thank you, Mrs. Henshaw. Nice of you to ask. Is Hiram at home, by chance?”

  “Job?”

  “Not work, no. I’m just that old sleuth, remember?”

  “Agh—”

  She jerked the door inward as graciously as an animal hater letting the cat in, then clomped off on a pair of wooden shower mules, trailing gin fumes and the hem of a ratty housecoat. “Hiram!” she bellowed. She slammed another door against loud television noise and disappeared.

  The man I wanted came out after a minute, pulling on a jacket the color of cranberry sauce. I supposed it went well enough with his maroon and gray checked pants. He smiled at me from behind a pair of glasses as thick as hockey pucks.

  “Well, man,” he said, “good to see, good to see. Fearless Fannin, the ideal of all us red-blooded American youth. Welcome to the humble pad, like.”

  He was a jazz musician in his forties, roughly the size of a sparrow with stunted growth and about as nearsighted as a bat at noon. He’d gone through Dixieland and Bop and, when he could get work, into a sort of reactionary’s Progressive, and he’d spent more man-hours in Greenwich Village saloons than any relic since Maxwell Bodenheim. He was too old to be a Beatnik, and even the language he spoke was dead at least a dozen years, but he resurrected it with a flavor I liked, mostly unconscious. If Audrey Grant lived in the vicinity he would not only know her address, but also her mascara shade, her garter-belt size, and where she bought her Stopette.

  “I thought you’d be out soothing the savage breast,” I told him.

  “Oh, man, don’t bring up the subject, huh? That sax of mine is practically atrophied from lack of use. Last I looked there was rust on the reed. I haven’t seen a taxable dollar since Morgenthau stopped signing them.”

  He gripped my hand, then went across to a piano bench against a smeared wall. There wasn’t any piano, but that would not mean anything in there. Everything else in the room had come in on the tide after the Lusitania went down.

  I’ve got a small fin not going anywhere, Hiram. A girl named—”

  “Man, man!” He gestured excitedly, putting a finger to his lips. He cocked an ear toward the back of the apartment. “Like, shhh—”

  I grinned, waiting. Finally he nodded. “Pianissimo on the do-re-me, huh? That witch could hear a dime drop in a deep well. A fin for a chick named—?”

  “Audrey Grant. You know where she sleeps?”

  He chuckled. “You phrase that question ambiguously. If you mean whereabouts does the damsel have a pad she can call her own, sure. If you want to know where she is prone to rest her bones of an evening, I trust you’ve got an hour or two.”

  “Easy mark?”

  “Every doll to her own debauch. Leave us just say she is wont to wander.”

  “What’s the mailing address?”

  “East Tenth.” He gave me a number. “This an event sinister, Harry? I would sleep poorly if I thought I was fingering a frail.”

  “Nothing important, Hiram. Just family business.”

  “Tame, tame. You anxious to make contact pronto?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Well, there’s this brawl. A cat named Don McGruder just sold a slim volume of verse and is howling. Audrey Grant swings with that crowd, so McGruder’s is where you’d latch on.”

  “A guy need an invitation?”

  “To a pad in Crazytown? Man, you just sort of go, you know? But if you’re shy, I could clutch your clammy little hand. For, say, another thin fin?”

  “The wife won’t care if you scram?”

  He made a face, standing. “So who inquires? Like it’s peaceful coexistence, comprenez?”

  I dug out a ten. His eyes went to the rear again, and then the bill jumped out of my hand and into his breast pocket like something unbaited from a mouse trap. “Man, I appreciate that, I truly do. Hell of a thing, but I must be blowing flat lately. I wouldn’t touch your gelt if I could get work, Harry.”

  “Sure.”

  He had one hand on the doorknob. “Hey, now tromp my tenor, I plumb forgot. I hear tell you were the lucky winner who helped Fern Hoerner strip the cellophane off Josie Welch that dreadful day—”

  “Just chance. I ran into her in a bar.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Vinnie’s. That creepy Turk. Boy, them poets. Deep, man, deep. I wouldn’t have thought Ephraim could swat flies. Curious. Indeed, curious.”

  “Something on your mind, Hiram?”

  He nodded absently, pacing back to the bench. “Like sit a second,” he said. I watched him pop a filter cigarette into his mouth and chew on it as if it were a cigar. “Probably it’s idle scratch,” he decided. “Just dust on the needle, you dig me? But a small thought’s been bugging me. I know beans about pistolas, but a bird would have to have a keen eye to commit the big deed with a twenty-two, nest pas?”

  “Or else a lot of luck.”

  “Yeah, curious. Curious.” He sucked on the cigarette. “So the minute I became cognizant of the gory details, Lucien Vaulting hove into mind. He was my age, but one of them screwball athlete types, you know? Always rupturing himself with a football over in the Square, making bets with the young cats like how many push-ups they could do, all that boff. But the thing that bugs me, he was flipped over guns. He even got hauled in by the fuzz one time for practicing on a roof. But good, man, good—”

  He laughed abruptly. “Except here’s the hitch. Loosh bought the box about a year ago. Had a ticker attack, trying to chin himself at a party. Poor old Loosh.” He studied his cigarette, then looked across again. “But like I say, it’s still weird. I mean Josie Welch, and now you put me on about the Grant chick. Loosh was the local thigh man, had a hand under every skirt. But the chicks who were current when he copped out were these very two. I mean simultaneous-current, you dig me? Neither of the wenches bunked with him steady, but the pair of them would be pattering about his pad together on many a cozy night. On many a frosty morn. According to community folk tale, it was a real squooshy ménage-a-trois.”

  I took a cigarette of my own. “I don’t get what’s on your mind, Hiram.”

  “Man, like I don’t either. Just chatter, you know? But Ephraim bugs in here also. This Lucien was a writer. He scribbled two novels, both pretty hip—anyhow none of this sloppy Beat boff that’s all mushy chorus and no melody. The word was out that he was probably compounding something real far out when he died, because it had been nigh on to half a decade since he’d last spoke for publication, but there weren’t any pages. Like the manuscript had blown away. Probably he’d just dried up—what I mean, down here most of the cats dry up before they get wet, comprenez? Anyhow, Ephraim had a case on him, hero worship. Like if Loosh came into a bar, say, Ephraim had to scoot over and dust off a stool for him. And then when Loosh played the last note Eph started chasing both the chicks. Like he was trying to make it with the pair of them because Lucien did. Identification with the master, like—”

  “Trying to beat him, even—”

  “Indeed, indeed. Except what’s the moral? Just that Eph finally flipped enough to lay out poor Josie. Writers, man. Too much brain work. It gets real hot inside the skull, you know?”

  I didn’t see what point he had. I decided he didn’t have any at all. “A guy named Pete Peters,” I asked him. “I hear he saw a lot of Josie Welch also.”

  Henshaw shrugged. “Like saying a cat goes to a house of ill fame two, three times a week. Those beds are swinging when the cat is not there, too.”

  “Who’s a painter named Ivan Klobb?”

  “A cool specimen. He’s got a showing in some far-out uptown gallery next week. I mean you take a look, you know whether it’s a sunset or a commode. Mucho nudes. Josie Welch used to hold still for him sometimes. So does your Audrey Grant, although mostly he works with a real built body na
med Dana O’Dea. Sure, I forgot—this O’Dea rooms with the chick you’re looking for. If Audrey Grant isn’t swinging at this ball tonight, Dana probably will be. You can’t count on the Grant chick—she comes, she goes. A traveler. Like I’ve spied her making for home at maybe eleven bells in the morning.’’

  “Out all night, you mean?”

  “Indeed, but not down here among the peasants. Up where the tall money flows, the nightclub circuit.”

  “She goes up—” I cut it off I took a slow breath, staring at him.

  “Have I like served up something with a bone in it, dads?”

  I didn’t answer. I was looking for Audrey Grant because her father wanted to chat about the family estates. It was supposed to be an innocent matter, and maybe it still was. Maybe the girl had friends uptown. Maybe not one of them was somebody named Connie.

  “Let’s check that party, Hiram,” I told him.

  CHAPTER 12

  It was just after ten when we got to the McGruder place. Henshaw had taken me five blocks west along Christopher Street, then through an iron gate and down a hand-truck ramp into a cluttered alley. Light came from a turning in the rear, where it gleamed on a dozen battered trash cans. There were sounds of a cool horn that could have been Miles Davis as we went back, and there was talk. The air was rank.

  The light was from an unshaded bulb over a doorway in the right-hand building. Four plank steps led down into a low room which at a glance looked wide enough to store obsolete bombers in. There was only one light inside, another naked bulb hanging from a cord socket looped over a water pipe in a far corner, and it could not have been more than forty watts. The walls of the room were whitewashed concrete, and there were no windows. There were at least fifty people standing around in clusters. A long table thrown together from sawhorses and boards stood off to the left, crowded with drink-making paraphernalia, and there was a phonograph on another table in the corner which got the light. The only other furniture seemed to be half a dozen auditorium chairs, lost in all that floor space.

  “Tut’s other tomb, like,” Henshaw said. “McGruder claims he digs his doom better in the depths. He communes with the dark night of his soul.”

  “He’ll commune with pneumonia if he lives here in the winter.”

  Henshaw gestured toward the rear. “There’s a lone radiator out yonder. He hibernates in one room when it frosts up.”

  There were doorways in the far wall, leading into what looked like a maze of corridors. The corridors were illuminated by kerosene lamps with red chimneys instead of electricity. Except for a section where heating equipment would have to be, McGruder evidently had the full basement to himself. I could think of about ten housing-authority violations his landlord could have been cited for, but I wasn’t particularly trying.

  “We just help ourselves to that booze?”

  “Like the butler is indisposed, you know?”

  We had started over that way when a tall, narrow-shouldered man in a pink-and-white-striped polo shirt waved a limp hand in Henshaw’s direction, peered at me, then detatched himself from a group and pranced toward us. He was in his late twenties, and so thin that a June breeze would have bent him double. That lifted hand flopped around near his shoulder like a drooping epaulet all the way across. “Hiram, dear,” he twittered. He stroked about fourteen excess inches of beer-colored hair out of his gay blue eyes, not looking at Henshaw at all. “I’m so glad. I was certain you would have a previous engagement.”

  “If you mean work, man, I’m applying to the sanitation department Tuesday. Meet a cat. Don McGruder, Harry Fannin.”

  He didn’t curtsey, which was a small boon. The hand fluttered hither and yon some more, then finally got down to where mine was.

  “Delighted, Harry. You’re new blood. I simply adore new blood.”

  “Like you could save it, Don,” Henshaw grunted. “Harry goes for dames. It’s kind of a fad.”

  McGruder pouted. “A shame,” he said wistfully. I got my hand back, not without a caress. “You’re more than welcome anyway, dear,” he decided. “We try our best to get along with the minority groups. Have a ball, won’t you?” He tweaked Henshaw’s ear, gave me an exaggerated wink and flitted off, as harmless as a falling leaf.

  “Poets,” Henshaw said. “I forgot to clue you about that.”

  I shrugged. An extremely young girl with wild black hair and a shape like an ironing board was pouring herself a Canadian Club at the makeshift bar. Most of the rest of the stuff appeared to be unadvertised house brands, so I waited for the bottle. On the floor to my right a hulking Negro in a fluorescent white shirt was slumped against the wall with a set of bongo drums between his sprawled knees and a dreamy expression on his face. A girl in a dress that might have been cut from old gunny sacks was hunkering next to him.

  Just beyond them a man in a leather jacket and knee-length laced boots was fishing around in an army knapsack. The knapsack seemed to be filled with equal quantities of canned goods and paperback books.

  “—You have to read the Lankavatara Sutra” someone said loudly behind me. “It’s the only way to get in—”

  “—James Jones?” someone else said. “James Jones! You can’t mean it?”

  Ironing Board finished with the bottle and passed it to me. You could have buried bones in the dirt under her fingernails. “Is it true?” she said. “Are they really coming tonight?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Corso and Ginsberg.”

  “Who are Corso and Ginsberg?”

  “Who are Corso and—” She gaped at me as if I’d just heaved a rock through a cathedral window. “Why, only the two greatest poets since, since—”

  “The greatest ever?”

  She went off shaking her head. “—Herman Wouk?” a voice said. “Herman Woukl You don’t really—” I poured a healthy belt of the Canadian. I expected I might need it.

  Henshaw was filling a tumbler with red wine from a gallon jug. “You see the Grant girl?” I asked him.

  He squinted, looking around. “Her roommate.” He gestured toward the far corner. “That chick I mentioned—Dana O’Dea.”

  There was only one girl over that way. She had short, coal-black hair, and she was wearing a tight shoulderless sheath dress. In better light the dress might have been the color of a burning barn, but its color didn’t matter anymore than color matters on a Rolls Royce. At sixty miles an hour its loudest noise would have been from seams stretching in the appropriate places. I could understand why a painter would make use of her. She was as voluptuous as overripe fruit.

  She looked drunk. She was doing a solo shuffle to the music, rocking a pair of hips like two cruisers in a heavy sea. A man coming out of one of the corridors snatched at the back of her dress as he passed. She let out a high-pitched squeal, scampering away.

  “She’s worth looking at, isn’t she?” a husky voice said next to me then. It was a voice I knew, one that sounded like fog whispering. It didn’t really sound that way. That was just a metaphor my blurry little brain had come up with in a hectic moment between all those clients in the last three days.

  “Hi,” she said. She was wearing tan slacks and a powder-blue blouse which was slashed deeply between her breasts. The blouse had a high collar up under that yellow hair, and the only make-up she had on was lipstick. There was a feint touch of the same shade on a pillow slip I hadn’t gotten around to changing.

  “You’re that girl whose phone must be out of order.”

  “Oh, Harry, you must think I’m dreadful, but that morning, I—” She glanced past me, but Henshaw was talking to someone. No one else was at the bar. “I was going to leave you a note, Harry, but there just didn’t seem to be anything to say that wouldn’t sound banal. I’m sorry—”

  “No harm done.”

  “I’ve been uptown almost every minute since. About the book. It’s been a good thing, actually. It’s kept my mind off Josie.”

  “Sure.”

  “Although I guess I have
to admit it’s also kind of exciting. It looks as if there’s going to be a movie sale, a big one.”

  I was glad she was going to have a movie sale. That would make her rich and famous. She would be able to afford an answering service to take her incoming messages, like when Sam Goldwyn called. There was still a square of adhesive on her wrist.

  “We’re being awfully uncommunicative,” she said.

  “I haven’t meant to be, Fern.”

  “You did call, didn’t you?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “I’ll be less busy next week, Harry.”

  “Sure.”

  “Please? I haven’t meant to make it seem so casual. It wasn’t— well, they weren’t the most romantic circumstances—”

  “That’s true.”

  “What’s true?” somebody asked. A man Henshaw’s age with a beard like a devastated wheat field had come up in back of us. He was wearing a paint-stained sweatshirt and he had strong features behind the stubble, sharper than they had appeared in Grant’s clipping. An expensive unlit briar hung inverted in one corner of his small mouth, and he took it out to kiss Fern on the cheek.