Epitaph For A Tramp

by David Markson

  “I don’t know what else to say without knowing what it’s all about,” he told Brannigan.

  “That’s good enough for now,” Brannigan decided. “You’ll hear from the department again.” He had started up the stairs.

  When he did get the urge to read, it patently wasn’t going to be something of Sommers’s.

  “Well, for crying out loud,” Sommers said after us, “this is some deal. You come around asking all kinds of personal questions and then you—”

  “You can go back in,” Brannigan said, stopping. “Your sweetheart’s probably getting edgy in there.”

  “That’s none of your damned business!” Sommers had made up his mind to get sore after all. “Police. Try to be decent and what does it get you? Thanks a lot, mister.”

  “You’re welcome. You’ve been a cooperative, helpful citizen. And now you can blow.”

  “The hell with you,” Sommers said abruptly. “Sure, I’ve been cooperative. And I didn’t have to answer a damned one of your questions. You guys give me a royal pain. A bunch of tough, cynical, uncreative clods, what the hell do you know? What I do in my apartment is my own concern and I don’t need any comments from your end. I’m a writer and a good one, and if you want to know I spent four years in jail. Sure, lift an eyebrow when I tell you. Go back and look it up, it’s all there. I stole eleven thousand dollars when I was eighteen. Eighteen! You guys wouldn’t have had the imagination to swipe apples! Well, I did my time and I don’t owe you anything, see?”

  I wondered precisely what had brought all that on. Brannigan was at the top of the steps, looking at his cigar. “Nobody said you owed us anything, Sommers,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have to make any explanations about my private life either. What I do to make myself a better writer is my business. You slobs wouldn’t know an experience if it hit you in the face.”

  He made a point of deliberately flinging away the cigarette I’d just given him. That was quite an approach he had toward his profession at that. I could almost visualize him at work, writing stirring exhortations in his notebook: Very important! Every Tuesday and Thursday, nine to eleven, be sure to have an experience! The vestibule door slammed after him when he whirled and went inside.

  Brannigan was already walking. “Writer,” he said. “If that self-centered phony is a writer then I’m—I’m—”

  “Marcel Proust,” I said. “Ducky Medwick. What the hell, you didn’t have to needle him that way.”

  “Greenwich Village,” he grunted. He did not say anything else until we had gotten into the car. Then he said, “And the next one is a queer. That Neva, the photographer. And I suppose the one after that—what’s his name? That Arthur Leeds—will be a hermaphrodite. Why don’t you go the hell home and catch up on some sleep? They’ll have the body out of there by now.”

  “You’re a comfort,” I said.

  “I get that way.”

  He cut down Seventh before turning east on Tenth Street and we passed the antique shop. The smashed window was already being boarded up. “I suppose there’ll be a suit against the city for that,” he said then. “And probably one on the accident. Causing Sabatini to flee at excess speed, some such malar-key. Maybe it isn’t Greenwich Village after all. Maybe it’s just people who make me sick.”

  He was still laboring the unlit cigar. We passed the rear of the Women’s House of Detention and that gave him a few more ideas. “And right in there is where she would have wound up if she hadn’t gotten knifed. In with the whores and the junkies and the lovely little seventeen-year-old mothers who get drunk and bash their kids’ heads against the wall for crying too much. Sweating out an arraignment for driving the car on the Troy heist. Because she was bored. Because she was too sensitive to be satisfied with the middle-class way of life—is that what the bastard said it was?”

  “Why don’t you shut it off, Nate? I’m the one who ought to be disgusted.”

  “Are you? You don’t much seem to be. Buster Keaton I got to ride with. Just how do you feel about all this anyhow?”

  “Go to hell,” I told him. “As a favor, huh? Just for me?”

  CHAPTER 14

  Clyde Neva’s address turned out to be a six-story warehouse structure on a block taken up almost completely by the sides of large apartment buildings which fronted on other streets. The place had two entrances. One of them was a gigantic sliding-gate affair for trucks. That one was boarded up. The other one was small and newly painted, the color of a stale whisky sour. A neatly polished metal plaque in the center of it said:

  Neva Portraits - Loft

  The smaller door opened into a narrow stairwell with concrete fire steps and a metal handrail leading upward. There was another plaque just inside which said simply Neva, and still another on the first landing, this time with an arrow pointing upward. Underneath the third plaque someone had scrawled in lipstick: Oh, Clyde, ifl come up all thatway I’ll just never, never come down. The fire doors from the unused warehouse were barred on each landing.

  The stairwell was sweltering. There was one final Neva at the top, in case someone hadn’t been paying attention, and a bell that you worked by a chain. Brannigan worked it and we heard it tinkle somewhere inside. I crushed out a cigarette, sweating.

  Clyde Neva called out to us as he started to open the door, saying, “But darling, you’re so-ooo early,” and then he got a look at us and said, “But it isn’t you either, is it? I don’t know you, do I? But then that’s always so-ooo exciting! Do come in, do!”

  “Can it,” Brannigan said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Can the swish talk, we’re not buying. You Clyde Neva?”

  He looked at us, pouting. He had the sort of face that was meant to pout, the kind that would have looked charming in the mirror over a lady’s dressing table while its owner plucked her eyebrows, if its owner had been a her. So it had probably looked sickening when its owner had plucked his. He was wearing rouge, and you could have hitchhiked to Rochester and back in the time he’d spent on his hair. Each tiny blond curl had been twisted into place separately, in a way which made his head look as if someone had doused it with mucilage and then dumped the contents of a bait can over it. He was wearing an orange turtleneck sweater, and the buttermilk-colored things he thought were pants were so tight that he had probably had to put them on with Vaseline.

  “I said are you Neva?”

  “But naa-tur-a-lly. Surely you didn’t miss the darling signs?”

  Brannigan had wanted to know what I felt. I could have told him now. Just tag along, Harry, come meet all the jolly sorts she’d shared her Ju-Jubes with in the past dozen months. I felt an incipient nausea just looking at this one.

  We’d gone in. Neva had the fall floor, and most of it was one stadium-size room with windows along the rear and a skylight in the roof. The place might have been the ballroom in a sorority house for unmatriculated screwballs on party night.

  Instead of chairs there were pillows scattered everywhere, all of them violet and all about the size of recumbent hippopotami. Most of the wall space was taken up with weird, leering African masks, and there were Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling like Yuletide at the Mao Tse Tung’s. A broad platform raised the level of the floor about ten inches in a far corner, and in the middle of the platform, draped in pink, was the largest bed I had ever seen. It would have accommodated the starting five from the Harlem Globetrotters and probably two or three substitutes. They could have practiced in it if they didn’t feel like sleeping. A white picket fence ran around the outside edge of the platform, and in the center of the fence was a little red gate. A lantern hung on the gatepost. A sign said: Neva.

  The photographic equipment stood by itself in another corner, near a door marked: Dark Room—For Pictures, Silly. There was another door near that one with a large half moon carved into the paneling.

  Neva was reading Brannigan’s shield and being remotely concerned. “But, dears” he was saying,
“what can you want with little old me?”

  I took a cigarette. I was running out of them.

  “Neva, I’ve got some questions and I want some answers,” Brannigan told him. “Straight answers without the phony affectations. Save that for the misfits you think you have to impress. You got some clean young boy who’ll give you an alibi for last night?”

  “Have I got—oh, come there, must you be so crude, Mr. Brannigan? And you haven’t even been polite. The least you might do is introduce me to your hand-some friend.”

  He looked at me with a sly, simpering sort of grin that was supposed to be clever and quaint and superior all at once. It made his face about as appealing as the back end of a dachshund. I went over to a window and stood there, which was the only thing I could think to do to keep from drop-kicking him through the skylight.

  “Neva, I asked you about last night.”

  “Well, of course I was with someone, darling. Isn’t everyone?”

  Brannigan had meant it about not being on the market for the gay talk. Neva finally got the clue when he found himself being hoisted by the front of the sweater and dumped onto one of the huge purple pillows. He let out a gigglish little squeal, like a goosed hyena.

  “You needn’t be so aggressive! Please, my analyst says my psyche is very delicate. I just mustn’t get upset!”

  “I bet. And your analyst can lick my old man any day of the week.” Brannigan was towering over him. “I won’t say it a second time, Neva. Anymore of that ‘darling* routine and you’ll do your answering down at headquarters under lights that’ll make that mascara of yours run down into your socks.”

  Neva was pouting again. He got to his feet with a gesture like petals opening, then stood there posing with his hands limp in front of him. He nodded grudgingly.

  “Who were you with last night?”

  “A chap named Anton Quayles. We were developing—”

  “Here?”

  “—pictures. Here, yes.”

  “What time did he leave?”

  “About nine o’clock this morning. We were working quite late.”

  “He going to admit that?”

  “If you’re as offensive with him as you’ve been with me, I’m certain he’ll have no choice.”

  “Never mind the editorial comment either. You have any other visitors?”

  “Would you?”

  “Damn it, Neva—”

  “No, no other visitors. We were quite alone.”

  “ When’s the last time you saw Catherine Hawes?”

  “Catherine—” Neva pursed his lips. His hands were still raised limply, as if he’d just finished an exhausting concerto at an invisible Steinway, but he seemed suddenly conscious of the gesture. He opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it.

  “When, Neva?”

  “I—well, it’s been weeks, we—”

  Brannigan had him by the sweater again, jerking him forward. Neva squirmed, trying to draw away. He kept running his tongue over his lips, and now his eyes were darting from Brannigan’s to mine and then back. I went over there.

  “What about her, Neva?”

  “I—they weren’t pornography,” he gasped then. “They were art. Anyhow I didn’t send any of them through the mail so there’s no charge that can be—*

  “Son of a—” Brannigan flung him aside like something unclean. Neva went to his knees. He snatched at one of the pillows, hugging it to himself and cowering behind it. He had begun to whimper like a setter pup with its first dose of worms.

  “There was only one set. Only one, honestly. That’s all I ever printed. And I never took any others. You can ask anyone. I’m a very serious portrait photographer. Some of my young men’s faces have won awards in—”

  “Get’em, Neva.”

  “But I—”

  “Get them!”

  Neva swallowed once, getting to his feet, then scampered across the room toward a filing cabinet with a series of mincing, tight-cheeked little steps. A high-jumper with hemorrhoids would have moved just about the same way. Brannigan had glanced at me. I ground my cigarette into the floor with my heel.

  Neva was rummaging through a top drawer. He was mumbling.

  “Talk up, damn it,” Brannigan said.

  “I merely tried to say that it wasn’t my idea, not at all. We were—well, it was after a party and she was tipsy, and the boys she was with were tipsy too, and I—”

  “Boys she was with—”

  Brannigan took three strides toward the cabinet. “Get the grease off your fingers and hand them over here, Neva!”

  “Yes, yes, I—” Neva scurried back toward us, white-faced. He held out a manila folder awkwardly.

  I was staring at the palm of my right hand when Brannigan opened it. He did not say anything. He looked at the picture on the top of the pile long enough to flush and then he dropped his hand without looking at any of the others.

  “Let’s see them, Nate.”

  He handed them over. They were about what I expected. Neva was not even much of a photographer. I had seen better at stag parties in college.

  I looked through all of them. Cathy’s eyes were squinting against the light as if she’d been hopped up on marijuana when they were taken, but I did not bother to mention it. I handed them back without saying anything at all.

  They would have made splendid illustrations for a book I had just begun thinking about writing. I was calling it Fannin Grows Up.

  “Get the negatives, Neva.”

  Neva brought out a smaller folder. Brannigan lifted out one negative, held it to the light, put it back. There was a sink on a wall behind us and he went over there. He tore the prints into pieces, then crumpled the negatives on top of them.

  “There anymore of these? Anyplace?”

  “No, honestly, none at all. Just the single set.”

  Brannigan dropped a match into the sink, standing there while the pile flared up. There was a quick stench from the negatives.

  He turned back after a minute, talking quietly now. “Neva, if I didn’t want to keep the girl’s name out of a mess like this on top of everything else I’d take you in so fast your jeans would unravel. I’ll forget I ever saw those things, or for that matter you. Especially you. But I’ll give you fair warning. If I ever hear your name once in connection with anything that comes through the department, I’ll have a vice squad cop on your neck twenty-five hours a day and thirty on Sundays. I’ll have you hauled in and booked if you so much as shake hands with a business acquaintance on the street. You got that straight?”

  Neva nodded. He was not the same frivolous lad who’d greeted us at the door a few minutes before. But then I had to wonder just who was.

  “You pig,” Brannigan said. “You slimy, ugly, perverted son of a bitch. You—ah, the hell with it. You’ve been told. Get even a parking citation from here on out and you’ll see whether or not I’m just making conversation.”

  He turned and looked at me, then went out. He went down the concrete stairs quickly and I didn’t rush to keep up with him. I was only a short way down when Neva called after me. I stopped and looked back.

  “About Catherine,” he said hesitantly. “You didn’t say. Is anything the matter? I—”

  “You know Ned Sommers?”

  “Slightly, yes. The writer.”

  “You could call him,” I said. “He’ll probably be interested, too. She’s dead.”

  I couldn’t have told anybody why I’d bothered. I didn’t wait for his reaction. Brannigan was already in the car when I got down. The street was like a stokehold and my shirt was clinging to me.

  “That was some dame, Fannin,” he said when I got in. “I never did congratulate you on getting divorced, did I?”

  He didn’t expect an answer so I didn’t make one. He jerked away from the curb and then swung down into the lower east side of the Village before heading across toward Jones Street. I did not say anything all the way over. I kept seeing the photos of Cathy in my mi
nd, and when I tried to get rid of them the only thing that came instead was an image of her on the floor in my doorway. It made the ride fun. I had such a swell choice of things to think about.

  The Arthur Leeds address was another brownstone. Brannigan parked across from it and then sat there for a minute without opening the door. “Forget it, huh?” he said. “Rubbing you, I mean. Hell, you didn’t know how far she’d gone.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He made a sucking sound between his lips, leaning forward on the wheel. “I still don’t get it, you know. You. God knows, you’ve been around. And yet you stayed married to her for damned near a year.”

  I didn’t answer him. He went on talking without looking at me.

  “Promiscuous as a mink. And judging from the evidence, about as discriminating as a hungry hound in the town dump. You’ve gotten or a dozen buddies doing time who’d like to have fooled you that long.”