Epitaph For A Tramp

by David Markson

  “What’d it do, make you stain your bloomers, Mac?” Turner snarled behind me. “Go the hell home and change, huh?”

  I walked up. Brannigan was talking to a sergeant behind the Olds. There was a hospital one short block up the street and I could see two ambulances camped outside. Angels of mercy in a bureaucracy. They could have had one of those things parked on the slope at Golgotha and they wouldn’t have used it without official authorization. Brannigan gestured and after a second the sergeant ran over. There was another dick directing traffic around the tie-up.

  There wasn’t much damage. The right rear fender of the Olds was crushed back like the lecherous grin of a toothless old man, and the wheel was badly out of line. Duke’s front fender was crumpled also, but then he’d wanted to smash it against my head anyhow. There were three neat punctures in the metal just below his back window from Turner’s shooting. I didn’t see the woman who’d been driving the Olds.

  Flowers Say It Better had backed off into Perry. A lanky young Negro unfolded himself from the curb near it, tossed away a smoke and came over to me.

  “Can you take my name and tag and let me cruise out of here?” he wanted to know. I’ve got a mess of orchids in there for a party who’s going to be right upset if he gets buried without them.”

  I nodded toward Brannigan. “Better see the boss.”

  “Don’t you gotta always?” he said wearily. He sauntered over that way.

  I went over and leaned against Brannigan’s car, waiting. It was getting hot. The ambulances finally started up, swinging through a stoplight and letting their sirens growl halfheartedly as they came. My suit was filthy where I’d rolled in it keeping out of the way of the Chevy.

  I dragged on a Camel, watching a Village fag come by. Not just another amateur, this one was a classic, a prototype. He was wearing purple pants about four sizes too small, desert boots with tiny bells on the ends of the laces, a tailored blouse. He had a single gold earring in his left ear, none in the right. He was leading an expensive Siamese cat on a pink ribbon that matched his blouse. The cat had the same tiny bells on its collar. I supposed the cat was that way, too.

  Brannigan came over after another two or three minutes. “You got a cigarette?” he asked me.

  I gave him one. He was looking across at the antique shop and his face was flushed slightly. Two young boys in dungarees were staring at him.

  “There’s blood on your shirt, mister.”

  Brannigan grunted. He had a stain along his tie. He closed his jacket but there was another one along his lapel, shaped like a Dali watch.

  “You all cleared?”

  “That son of a bitch,” he said. “That crummy punk. I should have put one into the middle of his spinal column, trying to cut us down that way. And instead I feel my guts flop over when I see him go through that window. Twenty-three years on this job and I still... Damn it, Fannin, did that slut of an ex-wife of yours have running hot water up the street here or is it another one of those half-assed Greenwich Village bohemian joints where I’ll have to wash off this mess in the toilet? You got a match for this thing?”

  I gave him a folder, ignoring all that. “Listen,” I told him, “I haven’t eaten since about Mother’s Day. You want to sit with a cup of coffee while I grab a bite before we run through the apartment?”

  “Hell, what time is it?”

  “Twenty to ten.”

  “And it was three-thirty when she got knifed.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Six hours and ten minutes. And what have we got?” He handed me back the matches. I’ll tell you what we’ve got. We haven’t got a pot.”

  “Let’s eat, huh?”

  “What the hell,” Brannigan said. “What the hell.”

  We walked down Seventh. After about two blocks we found a place that looked all right. It was grand. They had imitation Aztec carvings on the orange-and-green-striped walls and they gave us underdone eggs and yesterday’s coffee. We might have stayed all day, but a sign over the register said that occupancy by more than thirty-eight people was dangerous and unlawful and we would have hated for them to get into trouble on our account. Thirty-seven other customers might have dropped in at any moment.

  CHAPTER 13

  We went back to Perry Street. Bogardus was long gone, but otherwise the place was the same. The dishes and silver were all Woolworth’s pride, the upholstery smelled vaguely of insecticide and old sin, and there were seven different water-color views of the same flower pot on the wall, all executed by that color-blind old lady who turns them out for every furnished apartment in the world. Anything Brannigan and I wanted would be tucked away in drawers or stashed in closets. We washed up before we got to it, and then we gave it almost an hour.

  We would have been better off using the time to do pushups. The only item we discovered even remotely connected with crime was a hardcover copy of a Raymond Chandler novel and that had my name in it, dated from eighteen months before. Nothing was hidden under the rug, inside the toilet tank, behind the Shredded Wheat. Nothing slipped out of the pages of the books we flipped except a newspaper recipe for braised squab, and the only notation on any of the recent sheets of the desk calendar was a week-old scribble reminding Cathy to replace something called “Love that Pink.” There were snapshots in one of Sally’s drawers, mostly beach stuff, and we found an expensive set of blown-up portraits of Cathy stamped on the reverse with the signature of Clyde Neva, the photographer on Tenth Street Sally had mentioned. A book called Under the Volcano was the property of Ned Sommers, and two or three re-issue Bix Beiderbecke records had A Leeds scrawled on their jackets, completing Sally’s list. There were no unusual deposits or withdrawals in either girl’s bank accounts. There were bills, receipts, ticket stubs, circulars, theater programs, canceled checks, folksy letters from Sally’s family in Maine, soap coupons, match folders from a dozen Village bars. The only address book had Sally’s initials on the cover and nothing in it which interested us. A small scrap of ruled paper in a cracked vase had a phone number penciled on it and when we had run out of other ideas I dialed the number. A syrupy, old-maidish voice said:

  “Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thank you for calling and please give our number to a friend. This is a recorded response. Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is—”

  I passed Brannigan the receiver. He listened a minute, hung it up and then stood there picking his teeth with a discolored thumbnail. If the glad tidings had made his day any brighter he was doing his best to hide it. “The Black Knight of Germany,” he said after a little.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. I was just remembering a game we used to play on the barn roof, being air aces after the first war. Me and two other kids. The names we always used were von Richthofen, Eddie Rickenbacker and Georges Guynemer. They always stick together in my mind, always in the same order.”

  “Too early for me. Tom Mix, Buck Jones and Ken Maynard, maybe. Which one do you want to see first?”

  “That Ned Sommers I suppose. Bank Street’s only two blocks up.”

  I called Sally before we went out, telling her that Duke had been roped and that she could come home. She had been asleep. It occurred to me that I could probably use some sack time myself, but it had not caught up with me yet. We left the key under the rubber again.

  It was pushing eleven o’clock and the asphalt was already the texture of secondhand chewing gum. They had cleared out the intersection up at Seventh. Brannigan drove the half-block to Fourth Street and turned north.

  “You expect to get anything out of these guys?” I asked him.

  “Who knows? Some background, anyhow. We’ll take it all back to the office later and sort it out with everything else that comes in. Hell, it’s all routine, you know how it goes.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  The address we had for Ned Sommers was a beat-up old brown
stone with an entrance below street level. Four chipped slate steps went down past a battered regiment of empty trash cans into a tile alcove. It said Sommers – 1-R, on one of the bells, but the front door was unlatched and we went in without ringing. Uncarpeted steps went up again along the left-hand wall but 1-R would probably be back under them. The hallway smelled like a sanatorium for cats with kidney disorders. We found the door where we expected it to be and Brannigan knocked.

  It took a minute, and then the door did not open.

  “Who is it?”

  “Ned Sommers?”

  “Who wit?”

  “Sommers?”

  It could go on that way until one of them got laryngitis before Brannigan would say “Police.” More than one accommodating flatfoot has gotten his wife’s name on the department’s relief list for needy widows by doing that. He just stood there waiting calmly. Finally we got a crack big enough to pass mail through.

  “Ned Sommers?”

  He peered out at us, furrowing his forehead. He was a sallow-faced man of about twenty-eight, lean almost to the point of being undernourished. I judged him to be close to six-feet-even but he would not have gone in as more than a welterweight. He had wavy black hair which he had gotten cut for his grade school graduation and not since, pale brown eyes and a nose which had been flattened once. It was a nose which might have made another man look belligerent. It only made Sommers look like someone who ought to have known better. He was wearing cord slacks and nothing else, and if he had been dressed there would have been a library card in his shirt pocket.

  “I’m Sommers,” he said finally.

  One of his hands was on the inside knob and his other was on the door jamb. Brannigan identified himself then, flashing his shield. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”

  Sommers continued to frown at us. “Questions about what? I’m pretty busy.”

  We were standing there. Sommers had glanced behind himself, pursing his lips. He turned back. “Let me get a shirt on. I’ll come out.”

  “Step away from the door,” Brannigan told him.

  “Oh, now look, a man has a right to privacy in his own—”

  He moved aside. He had to, since Brannigan was already on his way in. The expression on his face suggested that he would have liked nothing better than to bop one of us with a choice volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature. I could see the fall set on the wall behind him, along with what looked like every other juicy bit of bedtime reading from The Nicomachean Ethics to The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones. I couldn’t see the woman, but she would be behind the door someplace.

  She wasn’t quite, but only because the bed wasn’t there. It was along the far wall to our left. She was sitting up in it with the sheets drawn around her shoulders. I supposed she might have ducked into another room if that hadn’t been the only room there was.

  One room. It seemed hardly adequate for Sommers’s creative pursuits. The books went from floor to ceiling along two walls. There were enormous piles of what must have been every issue of the New York Times since Harper’s Ferry and Sommers appeared to be reading all of them simultaneously. There were copies of Time with pictures of Neville Chamberlain and John Nance Garner on the covers. There were a hundred different photographs tacked on the two empty walls, and every one of them was of Ernest Hemingway.

  The girl’s clothes were scattered among the debris as if she’d been caught in a cyclone without enough safety pins.

  She was staring at us, still as cut stone. An adder being held by the back of the jaws would have had the same expression in its eyes. She was a Negro and as beautiful a girl as I had ever seen.

  Brannigan turned to Sommers, red-necked. “Out front,” he said. “And make it quick.” He turned around and went out without looking at me.

  We waited at the foot of the steps below the sidewalk. Across the way a sign in an unwashed store window said: Sonny Tom Laundry Will Moving at Monday for Corner Fourth Street Down-flight. Brannigan had taken out a cigar and stripped it but did not light up.

  Sommers got there in a minute. He had pulled on a yellow sports shirt and thonged leather sandals and he was smoking.

  He glanced at me, dismissed me as a mere adjutant, then waited expressionlessly for Brannigan.

  Brannigan was above him on the steps. “I suppose you were here all night?”

  “Most if it, yes.”

  “What time did you get in?”

  “Three-thirty, perhaps four. Why?”

  “Any other people with you before that?”

  “Yes. Two or three young writers who come to me for advice and—”

  “Where?”

  “The White Horse Tavern, then a coffee shop down on Mac-dougal. Exactly what is all this, anyhow?”

  “There any gap between the time you left the others and came here?”

  “No, none at all. They walked me up, in fact. These other fellows haven’t been published yet, so it’s sort of an obligation to let them hang around as much as they—”

  “Okay, okay, you’re a famous writer and the disciples cluster around like flies. We get the general drift, Sommers. The girl with you all evening long?”

  Sommers’s face had darkened. He didn’t answer.

  “I asked you if the girl was around all night.”

  “Yes. Now look, I don’t think I have to answer any of this. If I don’t get an explanation I—”

  “ Wherfs the last time you saw Catherine Hawes?”

  He frowned slightly. “Cathy? A week or so ago. No, more than that. It was a Sunday, so it’s almost two weeks.”

  “Tell us about her.”

  “Now just what is that supposed to mean?” He glanced at me then back to Brannigan. “She isn’t in some kind of trouble—?”

  “What kind of trouble would she be in, Sommers?”

  “Well, how would I know? Look, what’s the point in giving me a hard time? Ask me a sensible question and I’ll give you a decent answer, huh?”

  Brannigan bit off the end of his cigar, turning to spit. “Tell us about her, Sommers. What she does, what she thinks.”

  “Oh, come on, will you? If you’d let me know what ifs about maybe I could—”

  “You’re the writer. So write. Give us a paragraph about Catherine Hawes.”

  Sommers shrugged wearily. He studied his cigarette, dragged on it, flipped it out toward the gutter. He would have liked more of an audience but he gave it to us anyhow. “Catherine Hawes,” he said. “About twenty-five, exceptionally pretty. Bright too, but without much intellect. Neurotic, divorced, essentially uninhibited. Just enough sensitivity and awareness so that she can’t be satisfied with the ordinary middle-class existence—husband, family, that sort of thing—but not enough creativity or drive to find anything to take its place. She drifts, goes off the deep end sometimes, generally out of sheer boredom—drinks too much, looks for new kicks. There are a lot of girls like her. They shouldn’t go to college to start with. They get just enough ideas about art and rebellion to get restless. But most of them settle down eventually, wind up at cocktail parties in the country club and forget they ever knew the difference. They play golf. Cathy probably will too, sooner or later.”

  “You said she was married.”

  “She cheated. It broke up.”

  “She a nympho?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way. She was knocking around a lot before the marriage. People get used to that. It’s not the sexual satisfaction so much as the excitement of somebody new. Hell, even I was the same way. I was married a couple of times myself, out of this same Village milieu. It was good enough while it lasted—I didn’t need other women, no—but the idea is always there. You get the urge, you follow through. Anyhow it’s an important experience for a writer. You’ve got to—”

  “Edifying,” Brannigan cut in. “Who would she go to if she got into a jam? Who is she closest to?”

  Sommers shrugged again. “Look, I don’t really know. The girl she lives
with, perhaps. Sally Kline. Maybe she’d come to me. How about it now—what kind of trouble?”

  “You sure you haven’t seen her in a week and a half?”

  “Positive.”

  “She come around here often?”

  “Once a week, perhaps. A writer has to discipline his use of time. In any event there’s nothing steady about it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I gathered that inside,” Brannigan said.

  “Now look, if that’s a crack—”

  “Probably it was. Skip it. I don’t read books myself so I wouldn’t know what it takes to write them.”

  Sommers chewed his lip, not knowing whether he could afford to get angry or not. We stood there. Two young girls passed us on the street, chattering. “That illiterate,” one of them said. “All he did was say hello and then keep shoving me into corners—”

  I was taking a Camel. “I bum one of those?” Sommers asked. “I left mine in back.”

  I gave him one and lit it. He nodded, hardly looking at me. He hadn’t really seen me since we’d gotten there, which I supposed explained why he liked Hemingway so much. Hemingway never sees anybody either.