Epitaph For A Dead Beat

by David Markson

  “Ravishing,” he said.

  “Hello, Ivan. Ivan Klobb, Harry Fannin.”

  Klobb gave me a firm right hand. “Fannin? The chap who was with Fern on that unfortunate evening?”

  “I’d hate to have it make me a celebrity.”

  “You’re a private detective, the newspapers said.”

  I nodded. He did also. I didn’t like him. There was something bland about his expression, almost vicious. After a moment he took Fern’s arm. “Indeed, yes. Well, look, you two, I hope you’ll pardon the intrusion, but if you’re not discussing something earth-shaking, I’d like to speak with you, Fern. A personal matter—five minutes, no more.” She glanced at me uncertainly. “I’ll bring you back, old girl, if it’s worrying you. You don’t mind, my good man, do you?”

  I minded the phony English accent more than anything else, although I had decided what it was about him that grated. Without the beard he would have had a face just like those I remembered from old newsreels of Bund meetings in the days of Fritz Kuhn, when he himself would have been a susceptible twenty.

  “You won’t be leaving, Harry?” Fern asked me.

  “I’ll see you later.”

  “Do, please.” Her hand touched my wrist. I watched them walk off toward one of the rear doors.

  Henshaw had disappeared, I hoped in search of Audrey Grant. I took a drink of the whisky I had been carting around and made a face. Evidently McGruder had had some empty bottles stored away. What he had poured into the one with the Canadian Club label had not been Canadian. I turned back to the bar and added water to the glass.

  “—James Gould Cozzens?” someone moaned. “James Gould Cozzens! You’re mad—”

  A record ended with a screech and someone started to monkey with the machine. Near me the Negro tapped a brief staccato on the bongos in the break. Before I looked he was lolling back against the wall, as if it had all been reflex.

  “Go ahead, Rosie, take off on it!” someone yelled.

  The man made an indifferent gesture. “I thought maybe Donnie wanted to read us some bright new words now,” he muttered.

  People turned toward Don McGruder, but he dismissed them with a flutter of that pale palm. “Later, dears, later. Play some of those old Bird Parkers like a sweet lad, why don’t you, Nicky?”

  The boy at the phonograph began to dig through a stack of records. Behind me two others were raving.”—Hitch-hiked all the way? Well, man, I hope you read On the Road—”

  “—Now how could I read when I’m on the road? I mean, I’ve got my duffle in one hand and I’m using the other to thumb with, so how could I hold a book?”

  A new record started. I saw Dana O’Dea’s red sheath disappear into a cluster of five or six men, several of whom had run out of razor blades as long ago as Klobb had. One of them might have been Pete Peters. I had been trying to spot him out of curiosity, but I was a bust as a beard watcher.

  Even water hadn’t helped McGruder’s whisky. I checked the stock more carefully and came up with a fifth of Old Crow on which the seal had not been broken. I was looking around for something to cut it with when I heard a sharp metallic twang, like that of a small spring being released, just off to my right.

  A gleaming switchblade flipped past my arm and gouged itself into the bar. It shivered to a stop no more than two inches from my hand.

  “Try that on your bottle, hot shot,” a voice said. “And consider yourself lucky you didn’t get it in the ribs about three nights ago.”

  I let out my breath. Ephraim Turk was not quite grinning at me.

  CHAPTER 13

  I pulled out the knife, staring at him. I didn’t say a word.

  He showed me several large teeth. “Scared you, huh?”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that either. I was still holding the bottle, so I let him watch me run the blade around its neck. Then I flipped the knife over in my palm, hefting it. Its lethal end could have pinned my hand to the table with about five inches of steel to spare.

  He smelled unsubtly of sweat. He had a clean white basque shirt on, but the jacket over it was the same seersucker he’d worn the other night. The jacket looked as if he’d been sleeping in it ever since. A few more jolly little tricks with the knife and someone would bury him in it.

  “That was neat,” I told him finally. “You develop the skill with practice, or did it just come to you during one of those naked Zen sessions on the living-room couch?”

  “Hell,” he said. He flushed. “But I suppose that slut would shoot off her mouth at that, wouldn’t she?”

  I pressed the point of the blade back into the wood, snapping it shut. “If you mean Fern Hoerner, maybe you ought to call her by name.”

  “Sure. Okay, so you got friendly—I didn’t know. So I’m even sorry. Hell, you don’t think I was especially happy about that mess over at Vinnie’s? I don’t usually go around slapping females.”

  “Or shooting them, evidently.”

  He gave me a wry grimace. “You’re funny. They let me out this afternoon. How about the knife, huh?”

  He lifted a hand, but I shook my head.

  “Okay, so keep the thing. I just found it back there in the hall five minutes ago anyhow. It might be McGruder’s.”

  “He shaves with it.”

  The little man shrugged, then stepped past me. I poked a Camel into my mouth and watched him pour himself a glass of white wine. I realized I wasn’t really surprised to see him. A record stopped with another screech, this time sounding like chalk going the wrong way on a blackboard. Ephraim winced.

  “You were with her when she found Josie?” he said then.

  I nodded. He was being pleasant enough, but there was something almost spinsterish about his manner. In spite of his baby face he made me think of things that get shriveled up, like prunes. “How come they let you scram?” I asked him.

  “I had an alibi. They finally got around to believing it.”

  “What about that gun?”

  “Aw, hell—” He screwed up his enormous forehead in disgust. “People know about my record. Every damned time something gets stolen around here I get put down for it. Just because I got arrested for shoplifting in California once. You know what I hooked? Six cans of smoked oysters and a slab of Bel Paese cheese. I was trying to write a blank verse epic on Sacco and Vanzetti and I was practically starving. Boy, I began to feel like Sacco and Vanzetti myself over there this week. You know who they were?”

  “Vaguely. Somebody planted the gun after the killing— picking you because it would look convincing?”

  “I’ll plant something on him quick enough, when they find out who. Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italians up in New England in the—”

  “A lot of people know about the smoked fish?”

  “Oysters are animals, not fish. Sure, that’s the trouble. I gave the fuzz at least twenty names.”

  “Just names wouldn’t convince them.”

  “I told you. I had an alibi. A guy was with me—he even walked me to Vinnie’s, just before I ran into you.”

  Somebody named Peters—”

  He started to answer, then stopped. “—Somerset Maugham?” a voice wailed. “Somerset Maugham!”

  “Evidently it took your pal a while to show up,” I said.

  He was considering me. “He got drunk that night,” he said after a minute. “He didn’t hear about anything until today.”

  “I thought the upstairs neighbor said you were alone over there?”

  “Pete was down on the landing. The human eye isn’t constructed to see around corners.” He grinned suddenly. “You’re asking as many questions as they did.”

  I didn’t smile back. “I just realized I know more than they do,” I told him.

  He had been drinking. He lowered the glass, then reached to the table and set it down. “Just what is that supposed to mean, huh?”

  “Nobody walked you as far as Vinnie’s,” I said without emphasis. “Maybe I didn’t make it clear to the p
olice, but you came in there on the dead run. It doesn’t prove anything about the killing—just that for one reason or another both you and Peters are lying.”

  “Why, you son of a—”

  His face got livid. June Allyson could have made herself look more ferocious with a minimum of effort, and I was a little sorry I had badgered him. I had simply been thinking out loud, and there wasn’t any real reason for it.

  “So run the hell back and tell them,” he snarled then. “Don’t you think they checked the story? What’s it your business anyhow, you—”

  I didn’t answer him. I was chewing on a knuckle awkwardly when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I started to turn, thinking that it was probably Henshaw.

  It was Mount Everest.

  It fell on me.

  CHAPTER 14

  I caught it flush on the jaw. I staggered back three or four drunken steps, flailing my arms, but that was only for effect. I crashed down like something miscalculated at Cape Canaveral.

  A thousand lights came on. They kept bursting like expanding stars. I was the only one seeing them.

  All by myself on the floor of a seedy Greenwich Village basement, and I was forging ahead of whole nations in the race for outer space.

  I had a remote idea that the party had come to an abrupt halt. “Well, for crying out loud!” someone screamed. “I saw that, Pete Peters! Why, that man wasn’t even looking at you, you brute!”

  Good old Donnie McGruder, just the ally I needed. I couldn’t make him out in the mists. All I could see was a bearded monster nine feet tall, with forearms like hams and shoulders like a yoke.

  Nobody had told me Peters was nine feet tall. That worried me. I closed my eyes tightly and shook my head before I let myself look at him again.

  So it was only six feet. So I’d still never get up there without help.

  I didn’t want to get up anyhow. Let somebody else go climb mountains just because they’re there. I didn’t have any spirit of adventure. I didn’t have any pride either. I just sat, sucking in air.

  “You’ve got some damned nerve,” McGruder was sputtering. “Now just what was that all about?”

  “Aw, he was bugging Ephraim,” Peters said. “Giving the poor kid a hard time. After Ephraim spends two days in jail, for gosh sakes.”

  “That’s still no reason to sneak up behind a man and hit him,” McGruder said. “Especially you, you big ape. Why, you might have killed him.”

  It was me they were talking about. That was nice. Even Ephraim was interested. “He had it coming,” he contributed brightly. He was dancing around as gaily as a doll on a string. “He’s that private detective who found Josie the other night. What’s he butting in down here for anyhow? Maybe that will teach him to stay where he belongs, the carpetbagger.”

  “That’s not the point,” Peters said. He had a remarkably soft voice for a big man, a voice like marshmallows toasting. Soft and gooey, like my head. But that was nice too. I found comfort in his marshmallowy tones.

  I got myself lifted to one knee, with all the cosmic temerity of a creature emerging from a Darwinian swamp.

  “Nobody should bother Ephraim,” Peters went on. “Two days in jail is enough. Ephraim suffered. Do you people have any concept of how he suffered? It makes him—why, it makes him holy.”

  “So get him a tin cup, like,” somebody put in. Good old Henshaw also. “He can go beg alms.”

  “It isn’t something to joke about,” Peters told him. “You people don’t comprehend the alchemy of it. Being in jail does something to a man’s soul. Something ultimate.”

  “It makes him a saint,” I said then. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was intruding upon a religious awakening. Fact is, I must have come to the wrong party altogether. I was looking for the protest meeting about Sacco and Vanzetti. Whatever became of Sacco and—oh, sure, poor old Sacco and Vanzetti—”

  People were looking at me strangely. It didn’t mean a thing. They were just disturbed by the sound of my scrambled brains. They kept sloshing around in the pan when I got to my feet. I hadn’t known I was going to say a word.

  “What were we talking about?” I said. “Oh, yeah, oysters. I always thought they were fish myself. Actually I like toasted marshmallows better. No I don’t either. Ha! Come to think about it—you know what, about toasted marshmallows?”

  “Say, listen, fellow—are you all right?”

  That was Peters. He was watching me with genuine concern. I laughed in his face, swaying like a lunatic. I hadn’t known I was going to laugh either.

  “Listen, there are beds out back, maybe you better—”

  “No, no, first ask me—what about toasted marshmallows—”

  “Sure,” Peters said. “Sure. You take it easy now, fellow.” He glanced past me, nodding anxiously to someone. “You want me to ask you about toasted marshmallows. Sure. What about toasted marshmallows, fellow?”

  I grinned at him. “They make me nauseated,” I said. Then I hit him dead in the middle of that beard with as hard a left hand as I had ever thrown in my life.

  Somebody gasped, but it wasn’t Peters. His head jerked, but for a second his body hardly moved at all. Then he went over like a felled oak.

  A girl decided to shriek. Peters took two or three ringsiders with him, going back. One of them was Ephraim. I didn’t break up about it. The girl I’d spoken to before with the unmowed black hair and the figure like an ironing board was another one. She wound up sitting spraddle-legged with her mouth open and Peter’s head in the lap of her black skirt. She had on black stockings that ended just below her bony knees.

  A man snickered. “The ultimate, man,” a woman added profoundly.

  I was still pulling in air a little desperately. I waited another moment, watching until Peters came up groggily on one elbow. A fellow astronaut. His head dropped onto his chest and someone accommodatingly dumped the contents of a beer glass onto it. Ephraim was still sitting there also, staring at me in sullen outrage, as if I’d just maligned James Dean.

  The mob had begun to chatter again and I pushed through them toward the bar. I didn’t see Henshaw or Fern, but McGruder took me by the arm. He gave me a precious, shy smile, the fairy princess I’d just won in the lists.

  “I’m sorry about that, Harry. Dreadfully sorry. You must think we’re all beasts.”

  “Forget it. I hope it didn’t bust up the party.”

  “Say now, say, you forget it. You’re most welcome. If anyone should leave it’s Pete. That—that—”

  He was leading me toward a corner. I didn’t have the strength to fight it.

  “You are a private investigator, Harry?”

  “I think somebody hung a sign on my back.”

  He didn’t smile. In fact when I glanced at him I realized he had discarded almost all of his mannerisms. He was picking at a corner of his thin lower lip, and the serious expression made him look unexpectedly older.

  “This is all very puzzling,” he said after a minute. “If not to mention tragic. I knew poor Josie Welch quite well. She was so young that I was something of a—well, a big brother to the girl. She used to come to me with her problems.”

  I was working my jaw. “Any problems the cops would be interested in?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that at all. Just her bad childhood, general depression—psychological problems more than any other kind. She was raised on a farm in Kansas. The poor kid was attacked criminally by an uncle when she was no more than fourteen. It soured her on men pretty badly.”

  I grunted. “I hear she slept with enough of them. You should pardon the expression.”

  He still didn’t grin. “She did chase around a lot,” he said. “Too much. But she never found any satisfaction in it. I think it was a fairly obvious syndrome—a way she had of getting even.”

  “You’re going to lose me,” I told him.

  “Oh, you know what I mean. Giving her body contemptuously, almost as if she wanted to watch men make fools of themselves.”

/>   That was worth another grunt. “You didn’t know she was a call girl?”

  McGruder’s head jerked, it startled him that much. “You’re joshing?”

  “I might be. But the possibility existed when the cops started digging Tuesday night. I’d guess it’s pretty high on their agenda now that Ephraim’s out.”

  He was scowling. “She could be a bitter girl sometimes. I even used to think she was capable of—well, violence. But I never suspected she’d found that sort of outlet. All of this is why you’re down here, I suppose?”