Epitaph For A Dead Beat

by David Markson

  I bent myself under the chain. My shoes squeaked.

  Five steps, and then a flat concrete landing. A wooden door swung inward at the barest touch.

  The mouth of an alley, very much like the one which had led to McGruder’s. Darkness here also, but not absolute darkness. Back at the right an oblong shaft of light, spilling out of a window at ground level. A high brick facade unbroken along the left. Silence.

  Marley? Bob Cratchit? Tiny Tim?

  Humbug.

  I went down on a wet knee at the window, bracing one arm against my ribs. Miss Fannin’s gowns by Davy Jones, special effects by Oliver Constantine. The miseries of the hero in no way reflect the interests of the sponsor. The window was the type that hinges inward. It was propped open by a paperback book.

  Dr. Zhivago? Dr. Spock? Wrong as always. Not even The Metaphysical Speculations of Tuesday Weld. Something called Walk the Sacred Mountains, by one Peter J. Peters. There was an L.P.. record on the ledge beneath it, a session by Thelonious Monk.

  I looked in. A small room, a bulb inverted from a cord in the ceiling. A black ceiling. Black, Ebenezer? Certainly black, saves on cleaning costs. Black walls also.

  There was a cot opposite me, draped in a bleached sheet which hung to the floor. The only other inanimate object in there was a fluffy, snow-white rug, with two men and a woman sitting on it.

  They were sitting cross-legged, like Burmese idols. The woman was a spindling, horsey blonde I might have noticed at the party. One of the men I didn’t know. The other was Don McGruder.

  Dashing Don McGruder, mournful footnote from a psychiatrist’s case book. Whatever the diagnosis was, it was catching. This time the other two didn’t have any clothes on either.

  God bless us, every one. For this I’d struggled out of a sickbed. But maybe I’d write a book now myself. By H. Fannin-Ebing.

  There was an oriental water pipe in the middle of the rug, and they were passing its stem from mouth to mouth. I watched the blonde suck in smoke, then hold her breath. She had a bosom like a mine disaster. Even through the window the sweet stench of the marijuana was overpowering.

  “They don’t comprehend,” the girl said. She slurred the words. “‘Get married, Phyllis’—that’s all I hear. What a drag. I love them, I really do, but they don’t dig me, you know? They just weren’t with it at all when I asked for the money for the abortion—”

  “This isn’t swinging me tonight,” McGruder said. “It simply isn’t. I’m not high in the least.”

  “Recite us some Kerouac then, Donnie. You do him so passionately. The part where he talks about how they make love in the temples of the East—”

  “If you really want me to—”

  She wanted him to. By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy to the sea, there’s a Beatnik girl a-settin’, and she’s gettin’ high on tea. I was sorry I couldn’t stay, but I had a previous appointment.

  I had an appointment with Fagin. We were going to teach a few middle-class youngsters some of the nicer subtleties of felonious assault.

  I wondered if they would have a jazz band at that monastery when I got there. If I stole the instruments, would that make me a felonious monk?

  There was a turn farther back as I’d anticipated, but at the rear of the building I was in total darkness again. I found a door frame by touch. The door was open.

  A hallway. Fifteen or twenty feet inside I saw a tiny wedge of light which would be the room I’d been watching. There could have been other doors in there.

  I hesitated a minute, feeling dizzy. I couldn’t hear them from across in that room. I pulled back the hammer on the revolver, making noise with it, then uncocked it again soundlessly.

  “Ephraim?” I said softly. “That’s that Magnum, Ephraim.”

  The place was as quiet as an unlit cigarette.

  “I’m the ghost of Christmas yet to be, Ephraim. Speak to me, lad, unless you don’t want to find anything in your stocking except worms and the bones of your feet.”

  “Damn your black heart, Fannin,” he said.

  There was a swishing sound after the words. Something flexible and hollow struck me behind the ear, not hard, and I danced away from it. That was fine, except that the abrupt movement sent a new pain through my chest, like tape ripping. I doubled up gasping and the thing hit me again.

  It was nothing, maybe a length of rubber hose. On a normal working day I could have caught it between my teeth and chewed it into pieces. I hadn’t had a normal day since they’d fired on Barbara Frietchie. Waves of murky nausea washed over me and I stumbled against a wall.

  “Shoot,” he said then. “Go ahead, shoot me—”

  His voice was choked and theatrical. For a minute I had the batty notion that he was going to start reciting also, like McGruder. Then I thought I heard him, I could have sworn.

  “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag,” he said

  Dementia, absolute dementia. He was sprinting, going away.

  I let him run. I’d had it. I wasn’t even ashamed.

  I dragged myself out of there like a feeble old man whose favorite walking cane was sprouting leaves under the backyard porch, just out of reach. Come back, cane.

  Sick, sick. I didn’t stop to see how the literary tea was progressing, but I was perverse enough to slip the Peters novel off the ledge. Phyllis would find a husband one day, she’d be a steady fourth for bridge at the country club, a pillar. Me, I had gum on my sole.

  It was almost an ultimate satirical indignity. The groaning gumshoe. There was a scrap of paper stuck there also.

  It was a photo of a matronly, heavily made-up woman, torn from what looked like an inquiring photographer’s column. The woman had practically fractured her jaw for the camera, getting it lifted to erase the lines in her neck. Next to the picture it said:

  Mrs. Burner van Leason Fyfe, Cotillion chairman: “Of course there’s still society in America. There just has to be. Why, what meaning would anything have without it?”

  CHAPTER 27

  There was a loose page in the Peters book. I stared at it without interest, leaning against a fender:

  ... digging it with Bennie and Jojo and those wild chicks (one of them an Arab, she had eyes like smothered stars) in the backseat of that broken down Chrysler Bennie had driven to Tampico and back and sold for forty dollars in San Diego and spent the money on a two-week fix and then swiped it back again, and all night long Jojo talking about the Mahayana transcendence of our friend Wimpy, the poet who did not wash except on the coming of the new moon and who was the new culture hero of our time and who once said: 7 dig Brahman and I dig The Bird but I do not dig housewives,” which became a creed: and all the while (younger then and my jeans too tight; I’d borrowed them from a tranquil Taoist midget Td met reading Lincoln Steffens in a public urinal in Times Square—ah, holy times, holy square!) pressing my hand against the knee of that swinging angel Arab lass and not minding the blood where I tore my skin against a broken spring in the seat, oh how I suffered, telling myself as soon as I make it with this chick I will hop a freight and very religiously ride the rails to Albuquerque to tell Herman (but first some detail here about Herman, a raw maniac hipster kid who...

  That was all I needed. I wadded up the page and tossed it in the general direction of a passing cat, then let myself ooze wetly behind the wheel of the Chevy. I’d leaked water on the floorboards, coming over. I supposed it wasn’t any worse a crime than leaking prose.

  I wasn’t sure I could make it uptown. Or maybe I just wanted recognition for all my successful missions. I drove back to Fern’s.

  It was almost six, and it got light in the few minutes I was in the car. I leaned against the bell, feeling rotten about waking her. After a minute I heard a window being lifted. I went down a few steps, letting her get a look at me.

  “It’s Harry, Fern—”

  “Harry, what—?”

  She disappeared inside, and a second later the catch released. I haul
ed myself up the one carpeted flight.

  She was in the apartment doorway, wearing that short blue jacket again. Her hair was tousled, and light from the stairwell gleamed on her naked lovely legs. Her face slackened when she saw my own. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Harry—”

  “Don’t take me out, coach.”

  She extended a hand, but it didn’t look strong enough to support me. I gave her what I could spare of a smile, then went across to one of the leather sling chairs where my damp seat wouldn’t do any harm.

  I sat for a minute with both arms crossed against my stomach, hearing the door close. When I raised my head she was kneeling in front of me.

  Her fingers traced across my forehead, near the patch of gauze. “It couldn’t have been just Ivan—?”

  “He led the cheering section.”

  “You look worse than Dana did. Does it hurt badly?”

  “Only when I laugh.”

  “Oh, stop joking, it isn’t something to—”

  “I’m okay, Fern. I shouldn’t have come. You’ve had enough for one night.”

  “You can quit that also.” She had gotten up, considering me somberly.

  “Have I ever told you how beautiful you are?” I asked her.

  “Have I ever told you you’re a little crazy? Yes, I think I did, the other night. There’s coffee, Harry. I made some for Dana before, all I have to do is heat it—”

  “Coffee would be swell.”

  She shook her head, then went into the kitchen. I worked myself out of the soggy jacket. Bloomingdale’s better grade, eighty-seven bucks for the suit and I still owed them forty. Maybe the old Armenian tailor on my corner could salvage it. He was half blind from reading William Saroyan in the glare of his window all day, and he couldn’t sew a straight seam, but his Negro presser was fair. The Negro read Karen Horney and Erich Fromm.

  “It won’t be a minute,” Fern said from the doorway. “Listen, Harry, why don’t—” She glanced toward the closed door to the second bedroom. “Good heavens, I’m not going to be coy. Dana will be asleep for hours with those pills. Get yourself inside and get undressed. There’s a big quilted robe in the closet if you want a hot shower—” She smiled. “Or is that what you tried to take already? Maybe you ought to just jump right into bed, you big oaf. I’ll bring the coffee.”

  I grinned at her. “If you touch me, I’ll scream.”

  “Go on, now.”

  I left my jacket across one of the wings of the chair. A lamp on her bed table was burning, and the covers were flung aside. I gave my tie a yank, then growled at myself in a mirror over a dressing table. The wet knot was as tight as a wet knot.

  There was a day-old Times in a magazine rack, and I spread it across the small bench before I sat. Maybe the raw-honed private cop would have more luck with his shoelaces. Not tonight, Napoleon. I bent forward about halfway, which was enough to make me dizzy again. Concussion, sure as shooting.

  My elbow had nudged a book on the table. It was lying reverse side up. Fern’s picture was on the glossy jacket.

  “Advance copy,” she said. She had come in carrying an enormous steaming white mug. “First one off the presses.”

  “I never met a famous author before.”

  She wrinkled her forehead, peering across her shoulder. “Who dat? Where he at?”

  She looked wind-blown in the photo. The novel was called Go Home, Little Children. A sticker on the cover said that it was a book club selection.

  She put the coffee near me. “Drink it before it gets cold. I thought I told you to get out of those wet things—”

  “I would of, ma’am. ‘Cepting I need a scissors for my tie.”

  “Oh, here, let me—”

  She leaned down, working at it, and then stepped back and gave me an exaggerated scowl. “Maybe we’ll need a scissors at that. Or a—” She drew in her breath. “Oh, damn me anyhow, I was almost going to make a joke about a knife, when poor Audrey—”

  She pressed a hand across her mouth, looking away. I reached out and pulled her toward me. She came yieldingly, going to her knees again, and my hands slipped beneath that jacket. Her head fell against my chest.

  She was not wearing anything under there. The soft flesh of her shoulders was still bed warm. I held her.

  “It’s as if it won’t end,” she said. “Three people dead. Dana’s right, things get so terrible sometimes—”

  Her face lifted. For a moment I didn’t move. I didn’t even breathe. The muscles in my jaw had gone tight, and something began to twist inside of me—into a hot sickening node, like fear or like horror.

  It wasn’t fear. The book thudded to the floor as I got to my feet.

  “Three,” I said. “Three people dead—”

  “Well, yes, aren’t—?”

  “You couldn’t have known about the third, Fern, unless—”

  “What—?”

  She was still on her knees. Highlights glinted in her silken hair. Her face was as delicately etched as a dream that only time itself was ever going to exorcise.

  “Why?” I said. “Dear God, Fern—why did you kill them?”

  CHAPTER 28

  She got to her feet. Her face had no more color than dispersing smoke. “Are you mad—?”

  “Am I? Maybe I am, because I can’t conceive of any reason. Why, Fern—?”

  I had taken a step forward. My shoe touched something and I glanced down. Go Home, Little Children. A Novel by Fern Hoerner. I stared at it like a man looking down from the rim of an abyss. By Fern Hoerner.

  I saw it then, as clearly as fanatics see hell. I had to brace myself against the dressing table. “By Lucien Vaulking,’’ my mouth said.

  “What—?”

  “Your husband, the writer who supposedly didn’t write— that was his name, wasn’t it? It has to be. There’s no other answer, none—”

  She didn’t speak. Her eyes were wide.

  “The author who died without leaving the novel everyone expected him to leave. You didn’t write the book, did you, Fern? Lucien Vaulking did, and somehow you got hold of the manuscript. A manuscript you knew at a glance would sell to Hollywood for big money, since you were in the business. You—”

  I had the rest of it. But I had to push the words up out of my throat like uncomprehending draftees out of a slit trench. “Josie and Audrey,” I said. “The same two girls Vaulking had been seeing before he died. They must have found out—recognized the book—and threatened to expose you. Which has to mean that Audrey Grant’s father was killed for no other reason than—”

  “You are mad,” she hissed. She let herself drop to the bed. “You have to be—utterly.”

  I groped for the cigarettes I didn’t have. “Someone is, Fern. Someone who could kill those two girls to cover a theft, and then take a third life for no other reason than to throw suspicion in a different direction. Someone absolutely wanton, ruthless—”

  “I—” Her hand moved, and light flashed on the patch of adhesive on her wrist. I sank to the bench.

  “Christ. Someone who could even pretend to such terrible anguish that she would deliberately mutilate herself with a burning cigarette. All the acting you’ve done, every minute, so that I thought you were the only normal human being in this whole crew of psychopaths. My God, how sick you must be—”

  Something changed in her face. Her lips parted, and then, incredibly, every trace of shock was gone from her expression. She dropped back onto one elbow, as casually indulgent as if Td started to tell a joke she’d heard a dozen times before. “All this because I said three people were dead, which I shouldn’t have known. You will go on?”

  The unreality of the pose struck me like a blow. I stared at her. I didn’t know whether I was physically ill or whether the whole thing had hit me too hard in a place I’d set myself up to be hurt, but I felt dazed. Three of them, over a manuscript, a novel. I had to force myself to realize how much money was involved. I was sweating from every pore.

  “You would have been famili
ar with the background,” I managed. “Josie would not have told many people about her illegitimacy, but her roommate would have known. You would have heard about Grant’s wealth also, and you obviously knew about Ephraim’s marriage—”

  “I can admit all of that. And I was married to Lucien—it was never any secret. None of this means a thing.”

  I shook my head, thinking it out. “Blackmail,” I said. “Josie and Audrey. Everything I’ve heard about the pair of them indicates they were capable of it. Not ordinary Village kids, but call girls, both of them bitter, opportunistic. Sure. They must have had proof that the book was Vaulking’s. They told Oliver Constantine they were coming into money, and the logical assumption was that they meant Grant’s—except that finally it didn’t make any sense, not with the girls dead themselves. But they meant your money—from the movie sale, the book club. They couldn’t very well admit to Constantine that they were leaving one dirty racket because they’d found an easier one, going from one rotten way of life to another, so they made up an excuse about an inheritance—probably the first idea that came to mind. So a story they contrived in all innocence helped you lead the police in the wrong direction—”