And then Henry Hiram Henshaw abruptly stopped paying any attention to me at all. I took him by the shirt front and he dropped the cigar, but he did not seem to notice. I shook him but all he did was turn his head. He shuddered, and then two wet tears trickled out from under the hubcaps he wore for glasses.
“Ah,” he said softly then, “alas, poor Leedsie. Last night the Hawes sheets, this morning the cold, cold shaft.”
CHAPTER 16
I was at a window which faced the street. Everything was bright and sharply etched in the sun, and I watched a woman come out of one of the brownstones across the way, smartly dressed in a conservative aqua summer suit and leading a small boy by the hand. The boy was blond as snow, six or seven at most, and they made a lovely picture together. At the bottom of the steps the boy stopped and said something and the woman gave him a belt across the ear which would have felled a first-growth spruce. I turned back to Henshaw.
Brannigan was standing over him. It left me cold. Leeds, the thing on the fence, anonymous as a side of cheap beef. I’d wanted a live one. I’d wanted one with a face I could put a fist into. I wanted a cigarette also, but I didn’t have any. I chewed on a match.
“All of it,” Brannigan was saying. “In plain, simple, ordinary American English, Henshaw. When did you see the Hawes girl here?”
“Okay, dads, okay. But give a cat room, stand back, you’re fogging my spectacles. I’ll reconstruct, I’ll come on strong in all details. But like allow me room to stroll my thoughts, huh, man?”
Brannigan took a deep breath. “From the beginning, Henshaw. The name of the joint on Second Street. Everything from the time you left there.”
“I’m recalling, man. The handle on the house is indisputable. I mean unless they sold out shop this morning, like. Handleman’s Happy Hour. They even got my picture out front—under glass, you know? The Bird blew there once, man. Charley Parker in the flesh. You cats dig jazz, incidentally? Or am I cast awash on an alien shore, like?”
“You’ll be awash someplace if you don’t get to it,” Brannigan said. “You finished a performance at one o’clock. Leeds was nervous about the heroin so you canceled the next show. Then what? Where’d you go? Who was with you?”
“Awash, I am awash at that. So I will feed it to you straight, like, sans rhythm, sans melody, sans life! Ah, lackaday!” Henshaw sighed dejectedly. Brannigan took a quick step toward him and the small man made a protective gesture with his free hand. “No, man, like no! All, I’ll tell all. One, yes, one o’clock. Here, man, we lit out for here. To this very pad.”
“Just you and Leeds?”
“You dig me, your highness.”
“Damn it, and then what?”
“Bliss, man, bliss. An exclusive cutting of a new Charley Mills disc. Private, unreleased, for our own hip ears alone. Man, if that Mills ain’t the coolest with the longhair stuff, if that cat ain’t the sole last living genius in Greenwich Village, I’m—”
“Henshaw, you want me to hook that bracelet higher up on that pipe? You want to tell this hanging by your wrist from the ceiling?”
“Well, man, man, ain’t I coming on? Am I obfuscating, like? Like you requested, in detail. In detail, I, H. H. Henshaw, and the late lamented A. Leeds, repaired from the pad known as Handleman’s Happy Hour to this here pad known as where we are now in session, solo and by ourselves, to soothe our savage breasts by paying profound heed to a rendition of something très cool, très far out, by that yet unrecognized master, C. Mills. We listened and then I kid you not, we listened anew. And then the chick made an entrance/*
“Catherine Hawes?”
“Well now, dads, get with it, huh? Who else? Edna St. Vincent Millay? Bess Truman? The siblings Bronte, maybe? The Hawes chick, man. But, yes, oh, yes.”
“What time?”
“Give or take a chorus, the little hand was at the two and the big hand was breathing down the neck of the four. Like two-eighteen, maybe.”
Brannigan was sitting across from him. He stared at his right fist, then covered it with his other hand. “And?” he said patiently.
“And Henshaw departed. I mean, sugar, man, like I could share a cat’s coin, or borrow his pad, or even, when my straits are dire, might I sip the last ounce of Grade A in the big white box. But a cat’s mouse, never! Anyhow he told me to fly. The chick was coming on real queer, like maybe she put butane in her syringe by mistake, and I am not one to mix unnecessarily in troubles. I debouched.”
Brannigan glanced at me. “No needle marks,” he said. “She wasn’t on anything.” He turned back to Henshaw. “Could she have been just scared?”
Henshaw shrugged, gesturing. The cuffs rattled when he did. “I write them like I see them, dads. He was an old man, like, and he got hung up looking for big fish down there in the Gulf Stream, you know? But like he wasn’t hooking them, and so he dreamed of Joe DiMaggio. You read that book? Man, she could have been scared. She could have had hepatitis like, too. If I’d been cognizant of the fact that I’d be contending for a Nobel Prize like this, I’d have done a biopsy and penned a report in pure iambic, you dig me?”
“All right, all right. What did she say when she got here? What next?”
“Like who listened? Like she whispered to him a minute, and then she gave him a gander at something she had in this reticule. That’s a sack, Jack. And then Leedsie gives me the nod. I’m all bugged up for home-fried potatoes anyhow, had the things on my mind all day. Like you know how you get bugged that way sometimes, man? So I amble up the square to Kirker’s and get me a double order. Which is when I espy the chick again. When I’m satiated with home-fries, that is. I’m strolling home, back past this pad here again, when I see the chick make for her heap like Leedsie blew the wrong riff, you know? Those forty-one rouge MG’s you cats are all shook up over, she had one of those. That heap came on like Louis himself, I josh you not. You get all forty-one of those fiddles jamming together on one block sans mufflers that way, you couldn’t dig that sound with a shovel.”
“Damn it, Henshaw, what in hell are you talking about? You had two orders of French-fries and then you saw the Hawes girl beat it out of here in the MG?”
“Home-fries, man, like h-o-m-e-fries!”
“She still have the sack with her?”
“Pressed to her bosom like it wouldn’t grow tooth number-one for lo, these many months yet.”
“What about Leeds? You see Leeds again?”
“Man, how can I blow this tune if you keep standing on the score? Like sure, I saw Leeds again. But, man, I ain’t come to that part yet. Chapter three, book sixty-four, verse nineteen, brought to you by Welch’s Grape Juice. You know? Like I say, first she blasts off in this MG bomb. I’m maybe five pads up the block, and I’m debating. If Leedsie flubbed the dub with the chick, maybe we can dig that Mills record one more time. I’m still giving the matter considerable ratiocination when he bounces out the front door like some cat set fire to the joint and who’s got the gauze, you know? He’s got his Dodge across the road and zoom, he’s oiflFIike a tall bird. And I am alone in the still night!”
“He go in the same direction she did?”
“There were stars above, man. I paused to dig the stars. I saw no more.”
Brannigan was looking across at me with his tongue pressed into his cheek. He stood up, put his hands into his pockets, paced two strides, took them out again. “Arthur Leeds,” he said then.
“Two-twenty,” I said. “Make it two-thirty after Henshaw here had his meal. Even two-forty. It wouldn’t take her that long to get to my place, Nate.”
Brannigan grunted, turning toward Henshaw. “What time is it now?” he asked him.
“I dig the big hand approaching nine and the small hand touching one.”
“You ain’t got a watch?”
“Don’t need one, man. Infallible sense of rhythm. It ticks off in my head, like.”
I looked at my wrist. “Thirty minutes off,” I told Brannigan. “It’s a quarter after.”
<
br /> “Sure. Hell, this loony probably loses a week every time he misses a fix. What the devil, say she got here about three. You’re not positive it was three-thirty when she got to your place. Call it three-twenty. She comes here, asks him for help, gets turned down. He changes his mind, follows her... well, why bother? We’ve been through all that.”
“Wouldn’t convict him in court,” I said meaninglessly. “Not without a later witness.”
“If I had him alive to take to court, I’d have a confession.”
“I suppose,” I said. I didn’t know why I was questioning it. Henshaw wouldn’t have known the right time if they’d roped him to one of the hands of the clock on the city hall tower. I was simply feeling let down, maybe cheated a little. It was a trifle tough to feel vengeful toward what was left of Arthur Leeds.
The apartment didn’t tell me anything about him either. He had a lot of records, good hi-fi equipment off in a corner. He subscribed to half a dozen music magazines. He was reading a paperback called Sidewalk Caesar by someone named Donald Honig. That morning’s Tribune was folded back to Red Smith.
I turned to Henshaw. “What about today?” I asked him. “Leeds say anything about last night?”
“Never asked, dad. Man’s chicks are his castle.”
“He act like he had something on his mind?”
“Dad, you cats just don’t pay heed. Like I pronounced previously, he was all dismembered over that H. If that cat acted anymore shook up, you could have traded him in for a new Waring blender and got coin thrown in on the deal.”
“How did you know Catherine Hawes?”
“Her?” He shrugged. “She pops up, man. Like she’s here, like she’s there, comprenez? How do I know my old lady? Who remembers? How do I know God? Like I mean, that cat is around, too. I believed in him the other day, for true. Last Tuesday. Great, man, great!”
Brannigan cracked his knuckles disgustedly. “You satisfied?”
I nodded.
“Police routine,” he said. “Meet every nitwit in town. You want an answer to anything, you go to the nuts. I got a couple calls to make, Harry. You going to knock off now?”
“Might as well get some sleep,” I said. I knew I had to see Estelle first. I also wanted to see Sally Kline, to get some background on Leeds. I wanted to make the son of a bitch come to life a little.
Brannigan was at the phone. “You going to want anything else from me?” I asked him.
“This morning’s statement will probably do. Take it slow, fellow. And next time call a cop who doesn’t spend all his time at a desk, huh? I’m a menace when I get out on the street, for crying out loud.”
“See you, Nate. Thanks.”
“Right, Harry.”
I went out, still feeling anti-climactic. Probably part of it was the temperature. I was just beyond the door when Henshaw started to giggle obscenely behind me. “Hey, man,” he said, “how about that? When the chicks ask me where Leedsie is I got to inform them, that cat is hung up. You dig that? Hung up? Hung up?”
He was laughing like a jackass but I stopped hearing him before I got to the second landing. I picked up Vesti la Giubba down there instead. Someone was bellowing it in an off-register Haig and Haig tenor behind a door that had been left open against the heat. The man had a swell audience out back in the yard, but apparently he didn’t know it yet.
Caruso’s girlfriend didn’t know it either. Or probably it was only his wife. “Can I get dressed now, Herb,” I heard her call out, “or do you want to use me first?”
Life was going on. You couldn’t be sure exactly why.
CHAPTER 17
I felt groggy in the hack on the way uptown. I’d been fighting sleep more than I suspected. With all of it finished now I had abruptly sagged to half mast.
Estelle asked who it was through the speaker and a second later I got the buzz and went in. She was waiting in the doorway as I came down the corridor.
She tried a smile but she didn’t have the tools for it, not today. There were lines around her mouth like cracks in pale china, and her eyes were dull. “I’m so glad you could come,” she said.
“Just got clear,” I told her.
“You look dreadful, Harry. I guess you haven’t been to bed at all, have you?”
“Going now. We just wrapped it up, Estelle.”
She looked at me vaguely, not quite understanding. She was wearing a white linen blouse with ruffles at the collar like Benjamin Franklin, and the plain gray jacket which matched her skirt was across the back of one of the sterile, antiseptic living-room chairs. I supposed the furniture would get sat in by relatives in a day or two and then not again until the next funeral in the family.
The air-conditioning was on and I walked over to the machine. Estelle had closed the door and was standing near it, watching me with a curious frown.
“Someone named Arthur Leeds,” I said. “A musician in Greenwich Village. Cathy went to him when she ran off with the money. He followed her up to my place.”
“You mean—” She swallowed, then clasped her hand over her mouth and whirled toward the wall. She started to sob, biting her fist.
“It’s over now, Estelle. Completely over. Leeds is dead. He had an accident running from us. And you don’t have to worry about our friend Duke anymore either. He was picked up also.”
She stood there with her back turned. I walked over to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Estelle. Listen, what about your mother? Did you see her?”
She nodded, not looking at me. “Yes,” she said distantly. “But I didn’t... I didn’t say anything.”
“Is she all right otherwise?”
“Yes. But, oh, Harry, it’s all so...” She shuddered again, then held her breath for a long moment. Finally she turned back toward me, wiping her eyes and trying the same unsuccessful smile. “I’m sorry. Can I... I’m afraid we haven’t got anything but Scotch. Will that be all right?”
“Fine. But then I better scram.”
She poured the drink at a cabinet. She put in the Scotch first and then had to go into the kitchen for ice. Estelle was the sort who would do it that way.
I dropped myself onto the couch. After a minute she came out and sat down a little away from me. She had not made a drink for herself. She kept her hands in her lap, like something someone had asked her to keep an eye on for a while.
The drink would have been just right for a teetotaling Lilliputian. I sipped it without saying anything. It survived for three or four seconds.
“You never heard Cathy mention this Leeds, Estelle?”
She shook her head, looking as if she were thinking of something else altogether. Probably she was. I put the glass down on a coffee table. When I looked back she had begun to cry again.
“Harry, I’m so... must you go, Harry?”
“God, I’ve got to. I feel like an unplugged lamp. On top of that my head’s been throbbing like six other guys’.”
She was facing me. She reached up hesitantly, touching my temple with her fingertips, and I could feel it when she did. “He hit you so hard, I...” She winced, drawing her hand away. “It’s gotten all black and blue.”
“Another Scotch might help,” I said. “I could stick around that long.”
“Oh, I—of course.” She got up, started to reach for the glass, changed her mind and brought over the bottle instead. “Forgive me. I never do know how much. There hasn’t really been any whisky in the house since you and Cathy stopped visiting. We—”
She broke up again. I poured a second drink.
“Harry... would you sleep here? I’m so alone. If I could just be able to know you’re here, in the next room. I know I haven’t any right to ask, you’ve done so much already. But it would be such a comfort. You could use my bedroom. I can make it dark enough. And I can turn on the air-conditioner in there also, it would be—”
“Oh, look, I even took a roll in the gutter since I was here last, Estelle. I’ve got to get a shower and—”
“The bathroom is right next to my room, Harry. I can shut the corridor door until you’re finished.” She touched my arm. “Harry, I’m so shaky and upset. Just for now—for the afternoon. I’ll wake you whenever you like. Just so I can know I’m not here by myself...”
Her voice tripped over a sob and she lowered her head. “Sure,” I told her then. “What’s a private cop for if he’s not around when you need him?”
She jumped up, having a little more luck with the smile this time. I supposed it did not make a hell of a lot of difference. A bed was a bed, and the way I was feeling the tailgate of a rolling truck would have done the trick.
I’ll fix it,” she was saying. ‘I’ll get clean sheets.”
“Hell, you don’t have to—”
Epitaph For A Tramp Page 15
