Epitaph For A Tramp

by David Markson

  CHAPTER 10

  The plainclothes dick in front of my building started toward me with an expression of bored annoyance when I eased the MG between two of the squad cars, all three of which were double parked. He reached the curb being so weary of the stupidity of the unenlightened masses that it was killing him.

  “This look like a parking field, Mac?”

  “I could have sworn.”

  “Move it! Move it!”

  “How you going to watch it if I do that? Its evidence. I was even thinking maybe we ought to wrap it in tissue paper or something.”

  He grimaced sourly. “Funny man. They been biting their nails upstairs there, waiting for all the jokes. Lets see it, huh?”

  I showed him the wallet. He glanced at it and then nodded.

  They had cleaned up the blood, or probably they’d let the superintendent do it after they’d gotten their pictures. A well-clipped poodle was sniffing at the sawdust. He went off, limping a little in the left forepaw.

  The door was wedged open with a folded tabloid. BERRA HITS TWO, YANKS ... something or other, it said. When I turned at the top of the stairs I could see that the apartment door was open also. There was another detective in the hall, a gaunt, underfed younger specimen of the breed with a neck as long as a beer can.

  “Fannin,” I told him.

  He turned to relay the name inside but he didn’t get to say anything. Young cops rarely do. Brannigan came into the doorway, a beefy, red-faced, Sequoia-size man I’d once seen get jumped by a trio of longshoremen during a rackets case. He hadn’t had time to get his gun unsheathed and so he’d used his fists. He’d left the three of them propped unconscious against a wall like so much garbage. His tie was pulled down now and he was looking at me in a way that was supposed to make me stand on one foot with my head hanging. He got over that in a minute, not saying anything. He jerked his thumb disgustedly and went in.

  A hawk-nosed medical examiner I had met once or twice was just leaving. “I’ll send the wagon,” he told Brannigan. He had to step across the body to get out.

  Someone had covered her with my raincoat, probably Dan. He was sitting near a window in his shirtsleeves, dark-eyed and unshaven and looking sleepy. He nodded, smoking.

  There were dead flash bulbs in a couple of ashtrays and one or two drawers were open. Print powder was dusted around. The laundry bag was on the floor and the money was stacked up in piles of different denominations on the desk. Home. The place looked as inviting as the rumpus room at Buchenwald.

  There was one other detective with Brannigan, a lieutenant named Coffey who was totally bald. The skin under his eyes was pouchy and discolored. Possibly too much night duty had done that, I didn’t know. But it hadn’t put the glaze of menacing resentment in his eyes that you saw the minute you looked at him. That would be part of the personality and it was probably why he was a cop. A grand cop, and I was glad he was there. If we had to use a rubber hose on anybody he’d have two in each pocket.

  I said a single filthy word which no one paid any attention to. Finally I went in and walked around to the kitchen and stuck my fingers into five glasses and picked up the bottle of Jack Daniels I’d left out earlier. I carried the bottle and the glasses back into the living room. I poured myself about an inch of the sour mash and drank it straight. I poured myself one more, not drinking it, and left the bottle open. “Fannin’s back,” I said. “Party time.”

  Coffey took one. No one else did. I went across the room and pulled out a straight chair and sat down where I would not have to face her. Part of her was sticking out, like spillage from a dropped pocketbook.

  Brannigan still had not said anything. He was giving me a minute. He had been on the force for twenty years but he could still drink his morning coffee without somebody’s blood in it. I supposed I might as well get to it anyhow.

  “Can somebody take it down? I don’t much want to have to repeat it later.”

  “The kid can,” he said. “Pete?”

  The young flagpole came in from the hall. He already had his notebook out. Brannigan walked across and closed the door and came back. He sat down in the good chair, slumping forward and tilting his hat across his eyes. Dan was still by the window and the kid sat next to him.

  “No questions until I’m done, huh? I know how to tell it.”

  “Tell it,” Brannigan said.

  I did. I gave it to them in detail. I skipped the things Cathy had said, knowing that Brannigan would ask me about that afterward anyhow, and I left out some of the things Estelle had told me, which were purely personal. I didn’t mention Ethan J. Spragway, but I wasn’t sure why, except that the whole business was probably irrelevant. I didn’t make any bones about the kind of life Cathy had been leading, or about why we’d split up. I suggested that it would be a good move to stake out the Perry Street apartment on the chance that Duke might nose around there during the day. I had been talking nineteen minutes when I finished.

  “What did the girl say when she came through the door, Harry?”

  “She was dying, Nate. She knew she was. She told me she was sorry about things.”

  “That all?”

  “That’s all.”

  Brannigan sat up and pushed his hat back. “Somebody followed her here from wherever she’d gone after two o’clock. He knifed her for forty-two thousand dollars. And then he came upstairs and made you a present of it.”

  I didn’t answer him. “The rest will be pure speculation, Pete,” he said. “You can cut it there.” He jerked his tie lower across his shirt. “I hate to begin hot days with guesswork, Harry. But you might as well.”

  “No premeditation,” I said.

  “Meaning?”

  “He was looking for the money, not trouble. Maybe he thought he could talk her out of going to anybody else about it, I don’t know. Anyhow all he wanted was more conversation on the subject. And probably she had the stuff in her hand when she walked back to the guy’s car. I don’t know in what, but the guy’d seen it when she first went to him.”

  “Canvas sack.” Brannigan motioned and I saw it on the floor at the side of the desk.

  “All right, she’s carrying that. He wants it, and bad, but this time she tells him to make his pile some other way. Maybe this sets it off, maybe something else, but either way it’s quick, so probably they’d had the start of an argument about it before. And then they’re not arguing anymore. The guy grabs the sack but at the same time he sees that she’s not dead. He panics, but he hasn’t got the guts to stab her again. So what does he do?”

  “You’re telling it.”

  “Okay, I am. So he sees her get up and make the bell, and a minute later he hears the buzzer. He gets out of there like a shot.”

  “With the money?”

  “Sure with the money. But he’s probably not even shifted into third before it hits him. A fat lot of good it’s going to do him to scram if she’s lived long enough to talk. For all he knows she could have come up to borrow a Band-Aid. Hell, she may live to be ninety, and either way he’s damned sure got to find out. He comes back and watches the place. I come out twice, and the second time I take off in the MG.”

  “And he comes over and walks in. Through the door you’ve conveniently forgotten to lock.”

  “Hell, Nate, I left the keys under the rubber for Dan.”

  Brannigan didn’t say anything.

  “So what else?” I said. “The minute he gets inside he knows he’s done murder. He also knows that if she’s talked you’ll have him on it so fast it will make him nauseated. But if he plants the money here it’s my word against his—and I’m the one with the dead horse in the bathtub.”

  “Fine,” Brannigan said. He had taken out a cigar. “But if she hasn’t talked he’s throwing the money away.”

  “Wouldn’t you? You going to take the odds that she didn’t spill? Standing here with the body on the floor and me possibly on my way to the police at that very moment? You leave the coin, Nate. You leave it and y
ou pray like hell at the same time that she didn’t talk so you’ll be out of it completely. You can’t get a much better bargain for the price.”

  Coffey had gone to the bottle. “You’ve got the killer’s impulses figured out pretty clearly for pure speculation, Fannin,’’ he said sarcastically. “Any of this based on anything you know and haven’t told us, maybe?”

  I let the sarcasm ride. “It’s based on what didn’t happen.”

  “Namely?”

  “Namely that the guy didn’t come up and try to take me out myself while I was still here. A pro wouldn’t take the chance that I could tag him for it. It’s got to be somebody who didn’t intend to do it to start with, and who chickened out fast after it happened.”

  “How do we know he saw her get up?” Coffey said. “Suppose she lay there a minute. Suppose the guy drove off and left her for dead?”

  “Say what you mean. You mean there wasn’t anybody out there at all.”

  “I didn’t say that, Fannin.”

  I turned to Brannigan. “Look, Nate, if there’s anybody else in it but me it’s got to be my way. He sees her come in because he comes in himself. If the guy drives off like Coffey says then there’s no point in putting him out there to start with, because it means I’ve got the dough all along. It kills the motive for anybody else. It means I knife her on my own doorstep and then come back up and wait while she crawls up after me. She’d do that. And I’d leave the loot stashed away with my sweat socks. I’m clever like that. Just like I’d have Dan call you. Hell, I’d call the papers, too. I’d print invitations. Come see Fannin electrocute himself. One wire in his ear and the other up his back. Free smoked mussels for everybody.”

  “Fannin, I didn’t accuse you,” Coffey said.

  “Who the hell did you have in mind, W. C. Fields?”

  “Look, Fannin—bug off. The body’s in your apartment. The money’s here. The victim’s your ex-wife. So you come back three or four hours after you should have, tossing off some story on pure spec, and you get touchy if I question any part of it. Well, you can shove your touchiness, friend. You greasy private Johns give me a swift pain anyhow. If I made a list of every time one of you meddlers make us take three weeks to do what we could have done in three hours the department wouldn’t have enough paper to type it on. For my money you still got a lot of scrubbing to do before you stop smelling bad.”

  If Brannigan hadn’t been there Coffey probably would have spit on the carpet. He sat there eyeing me like something in the gutter he’d stepped in on the way to work.

  “Funny,” I told him, “I’ve got a list, too. Not as significant as yours, Coffey, just something I think about when I run out of comic books. People who’ve given me kicks, added an extra dimension to my prosaic life. Guys like, say, Einstein, Gandhi, Adlai Stevenson, Toscanini, Willie Mays—people like that, you know? And you know something else? There ain’t a cop on the list. Not one.”

  “You’re funny as sick people, Fannin. Be funny, what I said still goes. Who the hell are you that I got to wear kid gloves? You somebody’s favorite nephew all of a sudden? Chew nails, huh?”

  It wouldn’t get any pleasanter so I let it drop. His wife had to live with it, not me. Probably some of it was my own fault anyhow. They weren’t setting any departmental records to get her off the floor over there. The room was still for a minute.

  “You girls about finished?” Brannigan said.

  Coffey grunted.

  “Take a drink,” I told him. Mine was on the floor near me and I picked it up and stared at it.

  Brannigan made a clicking noise with his teeth. “All right, it’s as handy as we can establish for now.” He turned to the stenographer. “Pete, get out that description on Sabatini first of all. And run a check on that Adam Moss, too; see if there’s any file on him just in case. You might as well get started now. Call in on the way and put through the stake-out for that Perry Street address, my authority.”

  “Right, Captain.”

  “And take the money in. Report the recovery of it, but tell the insurance mob it’s impounded indefinitely. They’ll probably be on your neck in four minutes. And put through the pick-up on that cousin of Sabatini’s in Troy.”

  “Yes, sir.” I watched him load the satchel. He threw a half salute like a scarecrow flapping in a breeze and when Brannigan returned it he went out. Brannigan got up and walked into the kitchen. Water ran into a glass.

  “So it all hinges on who she’d go to,” he said when he came out. “Whose doorbell she’d push when she found herself in a jam. No family besides the mother and sister?”

  “None.”

  “Then I suppose we check with the Kline girl first, get a list of everybody she can tie in with the deceased.” He stared at Cathy for a minute, then at me. “It’d seem like there’d be a fair-sized list of names.”

  “And no-names.”

  “One-night stands?”

  “Something like that.”

  He cursed once, chewing on the cigar. It wasn’t burning. “You want to call the Kline girl?”

  “I’m working with the department?”

  “You don’t think maybe it’s about time?”

  “Nuts,” Coffey said.

  “You got a problem, Art?”

  “Damn it, yeah. There’s nothing in the book says we got to play potsie with some hot-shot peeper just because he used to be married to the dame.”

  “Report me,” Brannigan said. “I haven’t had a reprimand in fourteen years. The commissioner probably stays up nights worrying that I’m getting complacent. You going to make that call, Harry?”

  “Right now,” I said. I dug out the slip of paper with the Gramercy Park address and number. My hand was no more than six inches from the phone when it started to ring.

  “Let me,” Brannigan said. “If somebody’s checking on what happened to his investment it might just relax him into a slip or two later on if he figures you’re not running loose.”

  He lifted it as it started its third ring. He said, “Brannigan, Homicide,” and then nothing else. All of us were close enough to hear the click and then the dead buzzing.

  He stood there for a minute, holding the receiver and looking at the chewed end of his cigar. “Don’t you just love a son of a bitch who’d tease like that?” he said then.

  CHAPTER 11

  Sally Kline said on the phone that there were only two or three people Cathy had seen with any regularity. One was a writer on Bank Street in the Village named Ned Sommers. Another was a photographer named Clyde Neva who had a live-in studio loft on East 10th Street. She said Neva was a pretty blatant homosexual.

  “But gosh, Harry, I hope I don’t sound as if I’m suggesting that either one of them might have—”

  “It’s just routine,” I told her. “One of them might remember something, or know things you don’t. Anymore?”

  The only other one she could tag was an Arthur Leeds. She thought he was a musician and she gave me another Village address, on Jones Street this time. I told her to get some sleep.

  Coffey had been checking the addresses in my directory when I repeated the names. “No women, huh?” Brannigan said.

  “There wouldn’t be.”

  “This Kline girl. She came home at eleven, was there all night until she called you?”

  “For crying out loud, Nate—”

  “Just asking. She’ll have to make a statement anyhow, this afternoon will be good enough. I’ll see her then.” He took the phone and dialed headquarters about something. I went into the bedroom and dug out a .38 Police Special and a shoulder holster to replace the empty Luger sheath. Dan followed me in.

  “I got all the time in the world if you want anything,” he said quietly.

  I’ll call you.”

  “Be at the office. Don’t strain it, huh, fella?”

  I stood there a minute after he went out. I took out Ethan J. Spragway’s card and looked at it. Spragway spelled backward was Yawgarps. I stuck the card in a drawer
. The sour-faced plainclothesman from outside was just coming up when I went back out front.

  “The wagon will be here any minute, Waterman,” Brannigan told him. “Stick around after it leaves. You’ll be called about relief. And take that MG when you go in. Give him the keys, will you, Harry?”

  I tossed them over. Waterman dropped them. He bent to pick them up with the same sick-of-it-all expression that he probably had when he made love to his wife. Brannigan had turned to Coffey.

  “All right,” he said, “Fannin and I will check out those three intimates, but first we’ll take a look around that Perry Street place, give it a run-through for address books, mail, all the rest. I want that Moss kid seen again, and I want his alibi authenticated. Pete’ll know pretty quick if there’s any local sheet on him. I also want to know if Bogardus is still telling the same story he told this morning. After that you can start checking the hotels up near where that MG was parked on Broadway. I want all of them for three blocks in every direction. A clerk just might remember Sabatini going out for smokes and the girl ducking out five minutes later. Maybe she said something, asked a question, looked scared. You can pick up a partner first, anybody who’s unassigned. If it looks like you’re going to have to waste a day waking up off-duty clerks call in for an extra team. Keep Pete posted on the desk every hour or so.” Coffey grunted in acknowledgment. Maybe in disgust, it was an ambiguous sort of sound. He was leaning against the wall near the door, sucking a flat toothpick.