Epitaph For A Dead Beat

by David Markson

  This was ridiculous. She did it.

  The image kept on leering. It was a dark, amorphous blur, like an inkblot. What do you think you see in the blot, Mr. Fannin?

  Fern killed them.

  Of course she did. There, now, that’s a good lad. Tell me, when did you first start to get this sensation that people were taunting you? Do you often feel inadequate, left out? Do you find total strangers smirking behind their hands when you walk into a room?

  She did it, damn it.

  It was 4:19 when I parked in front of a hydrant four doors down from her building. There was a faint mist from the river. The angle was bad, but I could see the glow of a lamp behind her blinds. She probably had a wax statuette of somebody named Harry up there and was huddled over it in a trance, jabbing it with long sharp pins.

  Who do it, voodoo it? Something moved in the shadow of an alley across the street and I went over.

  “Rotten detail?”

  Toomey grunted. “Got to watch her, I suppose. Not that it’ll lead to anything.”

  “The publisher with her?”

  “Blalock? Yeah.”

  “Blalock?”

  “Ernest B. Blalock—Junior. I thought you and him got to be pals.”

  “I keep telling him to call me by my first name.”

  “Those things take time. You look bushed.”

  “I’m past knowing.”

  “Just feel restless, huh?”

  “Unfulfilled. Or does that make me sound like a Beatnik?”

  “I know what you mean. They sure can’t dump it on a jury with just your word against hers, in spite of your honest face.” He chuckled. “I supposed you’ll get sued for that, too.”

  “Sued for what, too?”

  “You missed the cheery news, huh? They’re going to slap papers on you for libel, slander, defamation of character— whatever his lawyers can think of. It’ll make the tabloids for six weeks straight, with pictures of the Hoerner babe looking sexier every day. Hell, I might even buy that book myself.”

  I reached for a cigarette. “What’s my face got to do with it?”

  “When those newspaper guys asked you what door you walked into—I just meant that Constantine might sue you also. If nothing comes of his end he might feel kind of sore that you called him a dirty name for publication. Although on the other hand I suppose you could prove a few things about him—”

  “And his Vice Squad contacts who claimed they didn’t have any file on him last liiesday.” I was fumbling in a pocket. “You got a match?”

  “They covered for the guy, huh? Yeah, here—”

  He flicked a lighter, and my hand went toward his wrist. I never touched him.

  “Jesus!” he said. “Oh, Jesus—”

  We both broke into the gutter at the same time. I did not have a gun, but Toomey’s service revolver was in his hand before we had gone three strides. The roar of the gunshots was still reverberating.

  They had been incredibly close together, muffled so that they had sounded almost like a single explosion. My brain told me it had counted four but I couldn’t be sure. We bolted around opposite ends of a parked Buick, getting across.

  I was ahead of him on the stone steps. I yanked at the door handle once. Toomey pushed me aside, grabbing my arm for balance and slamming a foot against the lock. It gave with a splintering sound and I went through and then doubled over, clamping my jaws against the searing pain in my chest. I stumbled up the one flight after him and around to the front.

  The door to the apartment held against his shoulder. He braced himself against the banister opposite it, then vaulted forward and took it with both heels. It rocketed inward.

  I stopped dead, and my insides turned to stone.

  Ernest Blalock was standing at the far side of the room. He was in his shirtsleeves. The shirt was white, but no whiter than his face. His stare was fixed on the low couch next to him.

  She was sprawled hideously. Her head was twisted downward, and her golden hair was trailing along the floor. A trickle of blood had seeped out of her mouth, still gleaming, but I did not have to get over there to know that it would coagulate in a minute. Her eyes were gaping in their sockets.

  She was still wearing the tweed skirt, but she’d taken off her blouse and put on that short bluejacket. The jacket was open. The flesh below her black brassiere was so severely charred that the gun had to have been held flush against her. There had been five shots, not four. I could have covered the entire tight grouping with a poker chip.

  There were voices in the hall, and I got the door closed somehow. I was vaguely aware of Toomey racing in and out of Fern’s bedroom, and then into the one with the fire escape which had belonged to Josie Welch. He cursed once, reappearing, and I watched him take Blalock by the arm. “Tell it,” he snapped.

  Blalock shuddered. His look was glazed. He buckled against the wall when Toomey swung him around.

  “Damn it—”

  “That—that—Ephraim Turk. We were in the kitchen. He—”

  Toomey motioned toward the second bedroom. “He go that way?”

  Blalock forced a nod. “Oh, dear God. He literally dragged her around by the hair, he—”

  Toomey was already on his way to the phone, jamming the revolver back onto his hip. He dialed rapidly. “Toomey, Lou—get me the lieutenant, fast. Or Captain Brannigan if he’s still on it—”

  Blalock had taken a faltering step toward him. He spun suddenly, plunging into the kitchen. “Sure, dead,” I heard Toomey say. “Looks like a forty-five. What the hell, he had half an hour to swipe one someplace, he’s had the habit. Right here, yes sir—”

  He hung it up. I was looking at her again, smelling the burned powder and the burned flesh. I could hear Blalock being sick. Toomey frowned at me.

  “Hey, fellow, not you too?”

  “Too much,” I said. “I better get some air—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I can see how you’d feel. It would be your word alone he’d killed her on, wouldn’t it?”

  I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. I went back outside on legs that did not want to do anything but fold in half.

  CHAPTER 32

  There were people on the stairway to the next floor, all of them in bathrobes. “Say, did we hear—?”

  “Police matter,” I managed, and then I heard Toomey telling them something behind me. I went down and through the smashed lower door, wincing at every step. I took hold of the concrete rail with both hands and hung there, swaying.

  My word he’d killed her on. Sensitive, saintly little Ephraim. She won’t go to any cocktail parties. I should have known, dear Christ I should have known.

  Audrey Grant and Josie Welch. Call girls, tramps who’d had nothing for him but scorn. One of them had married him as the most brutal kind of joke, the other had given herself to him once and then pretended it never happened. But Pete Peters had been right. In his warped life they had been the only two women who mattered, and I’d told him that Fern had murdered them both.

  I’d told him. I’d been so sure, so damned sure. And so convincing that thirty minutes after he’d talked to me he’d not only gotten the gun but had already used five of the six bullets it probably held, and now he’d be ... now... I heard the first distant wail of a siren in the darkness as I started to run.

  Commerce Street, I’d seen the address in the paper. It took me three minutes to get over there, no more, sprinting through the wet mist with both hands clasped against my side. The building was ancient, brick, and its glass vestibule door was open. E. Turk, 3-EI lurched up the two flights. I stopped, gasping, just steps shy of the landing, fighting vertigo and pain and a dozen other things I could not have named.

  “—Listen, listen, we ought to wait for the police—”

  “—But time is passing, suppose he needs—”

  “—Who’s this coming now? They couldn’t have gotten here so quick—”

  Faces turned from a closed door as I dragged myself up the rest of the way. Th
ey might have been faces reflected in muddied water, for all I saw them. I staggered through the cluster to the knob. The apartment wasn’t locked.

  “Hey, whore you? You ain’t supposed to—”

  I turned my head. I must have looked like Raskolnikov on his way to get rid of the ax. I must have looked like Yorick when they dug him up. No one made anymore protest. I pulled the door after me.

  There was only one room. It was close, disordered, filthy. He was on a narrow disheveled bed, on his back. One of his shoes was off, and there was a rip in the heel of his blue sock. The gun was still in his hand, although it had jerked out of his mouth at the recoil. A Ruger Blackhawk.

  People don’t kill other people. People are good, people have beautiful souls. There had been about forty books on two metal shelves above an unpainted wood table. It didn’t seem that he would have had time, but he’d gotten his hands on each of them, rending bindings and shredding pages as if he’d decided that literature had been the cause of all his troubles. In a way, maybe it had been. The debris was scattered around the bare floor, except for a single page which lay near his shoulder. It could have been there by chance, but it was corny enough for the fanciful son of a gun to have meant it. It shook me, because of the foolishness I’d been quoting to myself before he’d hit me in that alley last night:

  ...It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

  Two cops were pressing up the stairs when I came out. One of them was Sergeant DiMaggio.

  “I guess you better go back over, Fannin.”

  I nodded. An elderly man touched my sleeve as I started down, lifting a leathery, concerned face. “He was an author, that boy. I don’t know if he was any good or not. He’s dead, eh?”

  “As dead as Dickens,” I said, but the voice wasn’t my own. Mine was trying to burst through the top of my skull, screaming in horror.

  CHAPTER 33

  Hiram Henshaw was perched cross-legged on a deformed hassock in his living room, squinting at me like a myopic canary from behind his thick lenses. He was wearing a stained sleeveless undershirt and a pair of pegged pants the color of rotted apricots. Except to whistle once or twice he had not made a sound in the ten minutes I’d taken to tell him the story.

  I wasn’t sure why I was up there. My viscera were still rattling around like loose bolts, and I felt about as sociable as a hangman. It was well after nine o’clock.

  He picked at a splotch of dried shaving lather in his left ear. “So you’ve been pacing the paranoic pavements ever since you left the law, like?”

  “A couple hours. I had coffee just down the block—” “Indeed, indeed, glad to be of sympathy. I can see how the circumstances would make a cat start gnawing on his nearest leg. Like rough. But man, you couldn’t have been cognizant that crazy Turk would perforate the chick’s pajama tops. Or that he’d do unto himself like he did.”

  “Okay, I guess I couldn’t have been. But still, I—” “Still you’re dogged by dismal doubt. She came on with this parting bit about how she’d extemporized the whole solo, and you’re sure she had to be just giving you the big razzoo—but you’re not that sure—”

  “You’ve got it, friend.”

  “Yet you voiced the conclusion yourself—the chick was the only one with motive for the mayhem, nest pas? This is not reassuring enough for your caviling conscience?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got to come up with something concrete. If I could just prove she’d stolen the book—”

  “Oh, yes. But she would have held flame to that script of old Loosh Vaulking’s first thing—tell-tale page after tell-tale page, gone, gone. Alas, I dig your dilemma, I truly do.”

  “Yeah.” I took a smoke. “How do writers work, Henny? Damn it, I suppose once a guy copied over a new draft of something he wouldn’t have any reason at all to save the earlier version—”

  Henshaw shrugged. “Like as not, not, like. But on the other hand since when does a cat need a reason to save things? Like I cherish three hundred and thirty-seven unpaid traffic tickets in a scented drawer, you know? And—”

  He stopped abruptly, tilting his head to one side. His brow was wrinkled. After a minute he began to talk to himself. “In Vinnie’s Place? Surely, in Vinnie’s. Just making idle talk, and Loosh declared—hmmm, now what did Loosh declare? Like his pad had gone to pot since the domestic tranquility had terminated. Like Fern had left his bed and board, his bed and broom, and that cat was such a slob he couldn’t live in the same room with himself. So like he’d been—like—well, pull my daisy—”

  He faced me again. He pursed his lips. Very slowly he got to his feet. “Now leave us not let hope spring too eternal, lad, but Loosh Vaulking had this brother. Upstate a ways—where, where? Dobbs Ferry, oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed. And in his brother’s pad are many mansions, you dig me? And like Loosh had taken to stashing stuff for storage—”

  Henshaw giggled. And then he bowed from the waist. “Like I reiterate, there could be nothing up there but bags of old bread. But if you’ll remember to make restitution for the long-distance chatter before you debouch, man, there’s like a telephone on the floor under yon sagging chair—”

  And it was that simple. That simple. The draft was sketchy, and far from finished, but it was indisputably the same novel. Roger Vaulking, his wife and a housemaid were able to swear it had been in a closet in their home, along with other possessions of Lucien’s, for over two years. An immediate injunction was granted against sale of the Blalock edition, and Roger Vaulking told reporters he would eventually release the work through another firm, but not until its notoriety had substantially lessened. Review copies with Fern’s name on them were around, of course, and Dana O’Dea got hold of one and sent it to me from San Francisco about a month later.

  She’d hung around for a day or two, but my ribs got worse before they got better, and that baseball nostalgia goes only so far. I was sorry, but even Medwick had to leave potential scores on base once in a while. I rewrapped the book and mailed it to Sergeant DiMaggio that November, when Constantine and Ivan Klobb were indicted on assorted counts of prostitution.

  Not that there was much point in the gesture. The sergeant probably never read it either.

  David Markson is the author of ten other books, including Vanishing Point, This is Not a Novel, and Wittgenstein’s Mistress, heralded by David Foster Wallace as “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.” Markson’s work has also been praised by Kurt Vonnegut, Ann Beattie, William Kennedy, Gilbert Sorrentino, and many others. He lives in Greenwich Village.