David Markson - Epitaph For A Dead Beat

“Don’t be silly—”

She made a half-hearted attempt to knot the towel back into place. “Aphrodite’s fig leaf. Did Aphrodite have a fig leaf? I don’t even know who Aphrodite was.” She got to her feet, holding it where it had slipped around her hips again. “Cheap theatrics and a thirty-cent striptease to boot, to keep your mind off the bum acting. I better get to bed before I wind up howling Thomas Wolfe from the window ledge. Or aren’t we supposed to like Wolfe anymore? That’s one other damned thing — I keep forgetting who’s hip and who isn’t.” She laughed a hollow, strained laugh. “Oh, good heavens, thanks, Fern, really — I’m sorry I’m such a pathological mess.”

She headed toward the room which had belonged to Josie, moving stiffly. Fern glanced at me and then followed her. They spoke quietly, then Fern closed the door after her, turning back. She looked like a delicate mechanical doll that nobody’d remembered to wind.

“I meant to ask her where Klobb’s studio is,” I said.

“It’s on Downing Street, but — Harry, you’re not going over there with all this—”

“Just to look around, talk to him maybe—”

She had come toward me. “I’m sorry if I seemed cold before.’’ Her voice was husky. “It was just so rotten Tuesday — not us together, you know that, but the way I sort of used you—”

“I’ll call you, Fern.”

“Do, Harry, please. I—” She trembled suddenly, then fell against me. I held her until the shivering stopped. Then I kissed her tightly once and went out.

It was still easy, like walking off a building. But I hadn’t had too many dates in any prearranged sense myself lately. Maybe when this was over I’d have a few with a girl who’d be vulnerable until it was, and whose cheeks had been wet against my neck after I’d let her tell me she wasn’t vulnerable three nights before.

The Chevy was on Seventh. I went down the few blocks with no other moving cars in sight. The number she’d given me was a warehouse, with a small private entrance at one side. A hand-lettered sign said, Klobb-Penthouse, which would mean a shed on the roof, nothing more. The door was not locked.

I went in, not being particularly quiet, not quite knowing what I had in mind. The stairwell was as empty as a tilted tomb, but if the police had only Klobb’s home address and not this one he could still be around. There were six flights of reinforced concrete and then one last section of slatted metal, rising into a gable-like structure which would lead onto the roof. The door up there was open.

The studio sat thirty feet away, beyond a dozen or more random-shaped chimneys and flue pipes. It was built like a greenhouse. There were lights on, either a lot of them or just the brights a painter would use, but the glass panes were smeared and barely translucent. The roof of the warehouse itself was extremely still.

“Klobb?” I said.

A rag on a line flapped once. Maybe he was busy being creative over there, oiling that leather strap. There was a high sill to be stepped over in the doorway where I was, and I stepped over it.

That was when it came to me that I was never going to learn, not ever. This time it wasn’t any slumbering Beatnik with a malfunctioning weapon some old uncle had brought home as a souvenir of the Meuse-Argonne. I was at least a foil second too late reaching for the Magnum I’d concluded I would not need for Klobb alone. Something that could have been a fist lifted out of the shadows and slammed into the back of my neck. Something else that could have been a foot extended itself from nowhere and cracked across my shin. I went down like a defunct sputnik. I chewed tar.

“I used to think about it sometimes,” a familiar voice said then. “No kidding, I really used to wonder — whatever became of that great soph halfback, Harry Fannin? I asked you to leave my name out of it with the cops, fellow. I asked you politely as hell.”

“Do you intend to chat all night, darling,” said another voice I knew, “or are you going to get busy and dump him over the side?”

I got up onto my elbows and knees, then hung there as limply as a sweaty leotard. Someone in rubber-soled desert boots stepped near me noiselessly. It was a task, but I lifted my head high enough to see the grain-colored beard that identified him as Ivan Klobb. I also saw the boxy black Colt.45 automatic in his right hand.

His other hand lifted the Magnum off my hip. “On your feet, fellow,” I was told.

I managed it, a little shakily, watching Klobb pass the Colt to Constantine. That made a total of three pieces I was facing, since lovely Margaret was getting her kicks from the Beretta again. It made me feel dangerous, like Dan McGrew.

Constantine had shed his dressing gown for a dark blue serge suit. He had on a figured gray silk tie, and his collar looked too tight. It probably always did, around that tree stump he had for a neck.

“Damned glad you dropped in, fellow,” he told me. “We would have looked you up one of these days, of course, but this saves trouble all around.”

“I’m glad too,” I said, but I was just making sounds. I’d wanted to find out if I could. Td hate to put anybody out on my account.”

“Sure. That’s why you forgot to mention my name with the bulls, isn’t it? My old buddy.”

“You were in it before I saw them,” I said.

“You won’t write to the alumni magazine if I call you a liar, will you, fellow? The name Connie came up last Tuesday, yeah — I know because my Vice Squad connection tipped me. They played it dumb, and so far as they knew there was no Connie on the books. What did you think this was, Fannin? You think I’m playing sandlot ball?”

“Get to the point, Connie. You don’t much care what I think.”

“Sure, sure — I’ll get to it. The point is that Vice Squad got another call a couple of hours ago — not about Connie this time, but Constantine. That much they couldn’t fake. I might have spent my time in courses like outdoor cookery at Ann Arbor, fellow, but there’s a little something besides oleomargarine between my ears. My old pal Fannin fixed things for me, didn’t you, pal?”

“Let him send you a letter about it,” Margaret said. “From the hospital.” She was off to my right, leaning almost jauntily against a chimney. The glow from the studio left her half in shadow, and there was enough breeze to have flung some of that rampant hair into her face. Except for the Beretta she could have been soliciting over there.

Except for the Beretta. Constantine was still waiting for some sort of answer, and Klobb had moved behind me. I didn’t like not seeing the third gun. I was fairly sure there was not going to be any shooting, not since they knew they were already tied into the case, but I still did not like it.

“There was another killing,” I said finally. “Audrey Grant’s father. Somebody sent him a telegram about the girl’s where abouts. Your name was in it.”

Constantine frowned, watching me carefully. “Somebody who? ”

“A Friend*—no other signature.”

He grimaced. “You find the telegram or did the bulls?”

“I got there first, if that’s what you mean.”

“If there was a telegram,” Margaret said.

“That’s not the point.” Constantine did not look at her. “You could have ditched the thing if you saw it before the bulls, Fannin.”

I shook my head. “Not after I unwrapped another dead one. I’ve got the matter of my own license to protect in these things.”

“Your goddam license—” He spat across his shoulder. His thick lips were drawn back against his gums when he stepped toward me.

“Twenty-three girls. You get an expense-account convention in this town, it takes one phone call. Six years I’ve spent building up the reputation, until every big public relations man in the East knows I’m his man, and now some dollar-an-hour peeper spills the details in the wrong office. You know what this can do to my set-up? You got any idea what this can cost me?”