Epitaph For A Tramp

by David Markson

  “Damn it, Fannin.”

  “I was in a hurry, Nate. But let me—”

  “No, let me. Okay, so the guy stabs her out front and then grabs the money and guns off. And after that the girl gets back on her feet bleeding like a stuck pig and rings your bell and dances up the stairs, huh?”

  “I know how it sounds. But either he thought she was dead or he lost his nerve. You can—”

  “the girl didn’t say anything?”

  “Not about who killed her, no.”

  “But you talked?”

  “A couple words, yeah.”

  “Fannin, you amaze me. How long have I known you—five, six years?”

  “Come off it, will you, Nate? What gripe have you got except that I should have called sooner? What the hell would you have done in my position, got up a bridge game maybe? Let’s play it without the weary cop sarcasm, huh? I’m not much in the mood.”

  “Fannin, I’ll finish what I started to tell you. And like I say, if I didn’t know you and you hadn’t played it straight for five years I’d have had every badge in nine precincts out of bed and hunting for you two minutes after I got here—”

  “Now listen—”

  “You listen. All right, the girl comes up and dies on your doorstep. You used to be married to her, maybe that’s good enough reason why she’s there. But don’t tell me you had a cozy little chat before she died and she didn’t say word number one about who—”

  “Damn it—”

  “And don’t hand me any fairy tale about somebody she went to see who followed her and took the money, don’t give me that either. Don’t give me anything. Just get yourself over here and make it fast. You get me? I don’t know what you’re trying to cover, or who—the girl’s reputation probably—but I don’t like to be suckered. I’ll trust you on it for the fifteen minutes it’ll take you to get across town and not four seconds longer. What the hell do you take me for anyhow?”

  “Why, you old rummy. You old dim-witted country Irish jerk. Five years, huh? And just how many things have I handed you in that time? Every damned one of them crated up and slapped on your desk without a loose string anywhere. Which is a damned good thing because if there was a loose string you’d trip over it and fall on your fat face. And here I get one that I’m not even doing for money, see, no fee at all because sometimes I can get to be sentimental as hell, you know? And in three hours I’ve done half your legwork and found your motive and—”

  “What motive, Fannin? What motive is that? You mean the forty-two thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven dollars and thirty-four cents?”

  “You bet your tin badge I mean the—”

  “Yeah? What’s the matter, Fannin, you get hoarse all of a sudden? You lose the voice from trying so hard to make yourself sound good?”

  “All right, all right, let’s have it. I thought the Troy heist wasn’t your department?”

  “Never said it was.”

  “Damn it, Brannigan, where’d you get the exact figure? Do I have to come over there and shake it out of you?”

  “Why, hell, Harry, not at all. Like I say, its all among friends. You just trot on over and I’ll be more than happy to show you the cash. After all, we found it in your laundry bag, didn’t we?”

  CHAPTER 9

  Brannigan didn’t ask me how the money had gotten there. It was just as well. For the moment all I could think of was that I’d eaten my oatmeal every day that week without making a single naughty face, so maybe the Good Fairy had left it as a reward. I grunted something unsociable and said I’d be over fast. Brannigan said he’d bet on it.

  Actually he would have lost. I had a stop to make first.

  Estelle was still inside. I called so long through the door, took the eerie silent elevator down to the lobby and walked toward the MG. From across the street it looked as if some industrious member of the city’s overworked traffic force had ticketed it.

  It was only a handbill. Men and women everywhere, it said, make sure today of the salvation of your souls. Are you living a spiritual life or a carnal life? Be saved now! I tossed it into the glove compartment. Let Adam Moss worry about such things, if and when he got the car back. For myself I was more interested in my dirty drawers.

  Obviously the killer had been inside after I’d left. Framing me to cover himself would be his only possible out if he thought Cathy had talked before she died.

  He. Four hours on it and I came up with a personal pronoun. I wasn’t even sure I had the right gender. Her, maybe. It.

  I wondered if Moss was going to have any notions. I was going to find out just about then.

  I went up Riverside Drive, cruising more slowly than Bran-nigan would have liked. My broken head would have liked it a lot slower than that. A morning haze was trying to overextend its visa along the Jersey shore across the Hudson, but the sun was cutting it quickly. It was going to be another scorcher.

  Moss’s address would fall somewhere between the Drive and upper Broadway. A new Caddy was pulling away just short of his corner and I nosed the MG in. There would have been room for a fleet of us.

  Across the street a junior-grade Eddie Bogardus of perhaps fourteen was hacking away at the seat of a park bench with a knife of the sort they outlawed about five years back. He saw me watching him.

  “Don’t you know a mean cop you could practice on with that thing?”

  “Drop dead twice,” he told me indifferently.

  The place I wanted was a rundown apartment building of six or seven stories, several doors up from the Drive. Moss’s registration listed him for 3-G but there were no names on any of the bells and no letters either, merely numbers. The vestibule door was open and hooked back. Behind it a couple of unshaded 25-watt bulbs were trying unsuccessfully to make the long narrow lobby look like something other than the esophagus of a submerged whale.

  Moss would not have a full apartment of his own. It was one of those buildings in which the original railroad flats had been broken up into separate singles, where they sold you one room for yourself and you got to use the John and the kitchen if the other half-dozen people along the corridor happened to oversleep that morning. The landlords got away with the deal because of all the tight-budgeted Columbia University kids from around the corner.

  The hall marked 3 was around to the right in the rear on the main floor. It was exactly seven o’clock when I rang the bell near the outside door. I had to wait a fall minute and then I drew a beautiful young Chinese girl with an armfal of potted plant who wasn’t interested in me at all except to let me hold the door.

  “Moss?” I said after her.

  “Last room on the right,” she called over her shoulder. I stood there a moment, watching to see if she had on one of those slit skirts that Chinese girls always wear. I wondered why they always do that. Not that I had any complaints. This one had good legs and I watched them until she turned into the lobby.

  The doors along the corridor were marked with peeling gilt letters. I found G and rapped twice. The door behind me opened while I was standing there and a face poked itself out. It was a woman’s face, about forty years older and not too much longer than Seabiscuit s. The face stared at me, probably wondering if I’d brought the hay. I stared back. Finally the woman grunted and went away.

  I rapped on Moss’s door again, harder this time.

  I heard bedsprings, then footsteps and what I judged to be unpleasant muttering. The bolt snapped from inside. “For crying out loud, what time is—?”

  I looked at Adam Moss. He was a kid, eighteen or nineteen at most. He was husky and good-looking, with a mop of curly brown hair. He was wearing white boxer shorts and a pair of shoulders that the young Max Baer might have envied. He was patently annoyed.

  “Moss?”

  “Yeah. Who’re you? I don’t know you—”

  I had my wallet in my hand and I flashed it. “You want to step back inside?”

  He glanced at the card and then back at me, puzzled. “Police?”
/>   And then his face brightened. Adam Moss grinned at me as if I’d just told him he’d earned his first varsity letter.

  “Hey, that’s great. That’s sure what I call fast action!” He glanced at his watch. “Gee, not even five hours since I reported it. Where is it? You bring it back, officer? It wasn’t wrecked, was it? Come in, come in!”

  He was beaming. My one lead. My only lead. I sat down on the kid’s rumpled bed and took a cigarette. I would have been · happier with a cyanide inhaler but I’d left it in my other suit.

  “You leave the keys in it, Moss?”

  “Yeah. Like I told them when I called. I parked it around midnight, up on Broadway near 111th, and then I had a couple of beers with some of the guys from school in the West End bar. I guess it was around 2:15 or so when I realized I’d forgotten them. We ran down, but you could see it was gone even before we got to the place. Boy, I was pretty worried for a while. What a dumb stunt. My old man would have booted me one. He just bought it for me last month. Can I get dressed and get it now? Is it here or do I have to pick it up someplace?”

  “You never ran into a girl named Catherine Hawes?”

  “What? Who?”

  “Hawes?”

  “No, why? She the one who had the car? You didn’t tell me—it isn’t smashed up or anything, is it?”

  “Runs like a top. I use your phone?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He gestured but I had already seen it. “Say, what do you mean, runs like a... you been driving it or something? What’s all this about a girl?”

  “You call the local precinct?”

  “Of course,” he said. He was eyeing me uncertainly.

  I dialed Central and asked for 103rd Street. When I got the desk I said, “Hello, my name is Adam Moss, 113th Street. I called last night about 2:30 to report a stolen car. I wonder if you’ve gotten anything on it yet?”

  He asked me the make and license number. I told him and he said to hang on.

  Adam Moss was scowling at me. “Hey, what is all this?”

  “Just checking.”

  “Checking what? Now you look here, friend—”

  The desk sergeant came back on. “Nothing yet, Mr. Moss. If s pretty early, but the listing has gone out on it. We’ll let you know if we find it.”

  “Thanks.”

  Adam Moss had his hands on his hips. “Relax,” I told him. “The car’s okay. I’m a EL, not a regular officer.” I showed him the card again and this time he stopped to read it. “There’s no trouble, Moss, but you might have had some if you hadn’t called in as soon as you did. A girl took it. She was in a hurry and she must have spotted the keys when she came out of one of the hotels up here. An hour and a half later she was killed.”

  “Say, now—”

  “The police will be checking you sooner or later. You go back to that bar after you found out it was gone?”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s where I called from. The guys were with me. The bartender knows me too.”

  “You’re all right then. The car’s around the corner but I’ll have to turn it over. They’ll probably hold it for a day or two until they get you squared away.”

  “Well for crying out loud, my heap in a murder case. Isn’t that something?”

  I had opened the door. I took two singles out of my wallet and tossed them on his dresser. “Gas,” I told him.

  “Say, you don’t have to do that. Thanks. Who’s the girl, anyhow? She good looking?”

  “Aren’t they always?”

  Seabiscuit opened the stall across the way again as soon as I started out. I turned and winked at her. She slammed the door and something fell inside the room.

  Young Moss was grinning at me. “Mishugganah,”he said. He had a good smile and he was a nice healthy kid who had most likely never seen the inside of a squad room in his life. It would have been no trouble to hate him for it.

  “See you, Mr. Fannin. Thanks again. Boy, wait’ll I tell my old man.”

  I went along the corridor and out into the lobby. The Chinese girl was coming back. She had dumped her plant and was carrying a man’s suit about Moss’s size on a cleaner’s hanger. I waited until she went past.

  “Say, uh, just out of curiosity, you think maybe you could tell me why all Chinese girls wear dresses with—”

  She had stopped and turned toward me. “Yes?”

  “Never mind. I was being silly.”

  I was grinning at her and she looked at me vaguely. Then she smiled. “It’s out of deference to old custom, obviously. Why, don’t you approve?”

  She had a voice like a small bell tinkling under water. I told her I approved in spades and she laughed. I went out of there wondering if Moss’s old man knew about that personal valet service. In my day at school I’d had to room with a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound reserve fullback named Irving.

  I took my time walking back to the Drive. I supposed I’d expected exactly what I’d gotten from Moss. I knew I’d expected it. I didn’t have a gun. I’d walked in on two of them already that morning, and I wouldn’t have rapped on the door to the vestry at St. John’s Cathedral without the Luger if I’d seriously thought I might run into a third.

  I cut through Central Park and made it across town in the MG without getting squashed by any of the large economy-size models. It was just 7:42 when I swung off Lexington toward my apartment building. I didn’t go all the way down the block. I didn’t go down the block at all. I jerked the car over to the side just after I made the turn and pulled in at a fire plug. I sat there for a minute, watching him.

  Anybody could stare at the house. At least a dozen other people were doing it, either at the building itself or at the three squad cars parked out front. Most of them were clustered on the other side of the street but there were also two or three near the door, talking to the plain-clothes cop on duty who wouldn’t be telling them anything but to move along. But the one I cared about was a good hundred yards up from the others, standing alone almost directly across from me.

  He was wearing a brown tweed sports jacket that Brooks Brothers had never been ashamed of, and the lizard briefcase under his left arm would have gone for close to a hundred dollars in any shop on the same avenue. In the light of day the crewcut took ten years off his age, even with the gray at the temples. His tie was Countess Mara or Bronzini and every bit as sleek as the stained one he’d probably tossed under the bed a few minutes after I’d seen him that morning.

  I was over there next to him before he noticed me, and then his head did an almost imperceptible nervous shudder before he turned fully. But if it should have been an ace of a hangover there wasn’t any other sign of it.

  “You selling many of those policies?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It is insurance?”

  “Why, yes, only I don’t seem to recall—”

  “Must have been at the lodge. I’ll tell you though, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. Maybe you’re right. Fellow shouldn’t go round with such inadequate coverage, certainly not a family man like myself. I’m afraid I’ve misplaced your card, but if you could spare another I’d—”

  “Why certainly/’ I stood there while he slipped a calfskin wallet out of his jacket and fumbled in it. “Spragway,” he was saying. “Ethan J.” I’d already looked at him so I let him look at me while I read the card. It listed a Lexington Avenue agency address in one corner and a Park Avenue home address in the other. The home number would be only two or three blocks from where we were.

  “I’m frightfully sorry, but I don’t seem to recall your name at all.” He had decided to frown slightly.

  “Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes.”

  “How curious. Just like the philosopher.”

  “Doesn’t bother me if he doesn’t mind. Something going on down the block there?”

  “Evidently. Well, yes, good to have seen you again, Hobbes. Afraid I’ve got to be running.”

  “You didn’t notice anything when you passed here last night?”


  “Last night?” Spragway frowned fully now. “Here? What makes you suggest that I—?”

  “Come off it, mister. You were here all right, drunk as an owl. A little before four. I asked you if you noticed anything.”

  He got indignant. “My good man, if I happened to come down this street last night, or for that matter any night, it would be because I live only two blocks away—as you saw on my card and which, it strikes me now, is no business of yours. I am not accustomed to being called an alcoholic. Good day, Mr. Hobbes.”

  He turned on his heel and I let him go, the only insurance man in captivity who ever let a prospect slip by without taking an address and phone number. I supposed a respectable drunk would have a lot of practice deliberately not remembering people he’d met when he was boozed up. Even one whose eyes were perfectly clear four hours later and whose breath smelled of nothing stronger than Ipana.

  I stood there sucking air through my teeth and thinking about nothing while he disappeared around the corner.