David Markson - Epitaph For A Dead Beat

She wasn’t conscious of me at all now. I could feel the Magnum on my hip when I shifted my weight. Her hands were in her lap, empty. That made things even weirder.

“You weren’t quite sure why Audrey didn’t suspect me when Josie died. She did, of course, although she couldn’t be sure until she learned if I’d located the three pages. So she ‘dropped in’ yesterday. She brought Pete with her, although he had no idea what was going on. I knew damned well she wanted a look at that closet, so I let her have one. I made a pretense about needing something from the drugstore, and even asked Pete to walk me down so she could be alone in the place. Except by then I’d substituted three pages on matching paper in my own handwriting — close to Lucien’s but unquestionably mine. I didn’t know exactly when or where to kill her yet, you understand. She stole the pages — meaning she didn’t notice the substitution. They’ll most likely turn up in her apartment — absolutely meaningless. That was enough to convince her that I wasn’t involved. I did have some luck with the timing on some things, but then everything was in my favor to start with — the degenerate way these people live, all the sordid relationships, Ephraim and his mockery of a marriage — God, how weary I’d gotten of all that. But I’m out of it now, you see. I’ll be somebody — a rich somebody.”

“With a number over your breast pocket,” I said. “You’ll be able to buy cigarettes and soap for everybody else in death row.”

“Well, the man is recovering.” She came back from wherever she’d been. “He’s his ironic old self again. How droll.”

I used all my hands on the bed, getting to my knees. She watched me indifferently. After a minute she smiled.

“You’re not really one of the stupid ones, Fannin — you’re just stubborn. Why do you think I’ve told you all of this? You’ll go to the police, of course—”

I didn’t answer, busy breathing.

“You will, all right. It’s really quite amusing — except for one thing.”

“I know,” I said. “But you tell me anyhow.”

“You’re dopey. You staggered up here looking like somebody Noah left off the passenger list, and you collapsed on my floor. Tell them I did it. You won’t even be able to explain what gave you the idea to start with, it’s based on such a false premise.” She laughed, rising gracefully in a little half-pirouette. Then she cocked an eyebrow toward the bed. “There truly isn’t any point in rushing about it, you know. I’ve got a hunch your immediate future would be considerably less frustrating if you spent it sleeping. Shucks, I might even fondle you where it hurts.”

I made it the rest of the way up, staring at her. I was gritting my teeth so hard I could hear them. “Three,” I said. “One a man nearly blind you didn’t even know.”

“Two cheap whores and a filthy, odorous wretch who tried to put his hands on me when I walked in claiming to be a friend of Audrey’s. An overwhelming loss to the world.”

“You found the three sheets and killed the girls anyhow, because even without the proof they could still talk and cause doubt. You killed Grant only to cover your trail. Why did you bother? Why, if you were going to tell me all of this?”

“Oh, but I hadn’t intended to tell you anything, you see. This was just impulse—”

“Just—” I swallowed. “My God, I thought people like Ephraim and Peters were in bad shape. Harmless phonies who simply haven’t outgrown their adolescence. But you—”

“What about me, Harry? You were getting stuck on me, to tell the truth, weren’t you? Say that you weren’t, especially after Tuesday night. When I wept on your manly chest, Harry— remember when I cried?”

“I’ll get over it, Fern. “I’ll spend a night in a cesspool.”

“Heck, that’s a pretty flimsy parting line. Too bad you’re not one of those Mickey Spillane detectives — you could shoot me in the belly and be done with it. But that would be murder, wouldn’t it? I mean, since after all, you can’t prove a thing.”

She laughed again, slipping the robe off her shoulders. She glided to the bed, naked as a reptile. “You will excuse me then, but I do have to get my rest — a girl ought to look her best for the reporters. Yes, my little confession — just an impulse, but what a brilliant one. I wonder how many copies it will sell — a million, do you think? Surely, at least a million.”

The light snapped off, and I heard sheets rustling, with sounds like nuts being shelled. “Drop in again, why don’t you — sometime when you’re feeling a little more friendly. I might even autograph a copy for you—’To helpless Harry, who had no proof.’”

I did shoot her— through her twisted, malevolent brain, with every bullet in the Magnum, savoring each separate recoil as it jarred my arm to the shoulder — but only in my imagination, only in my imagination.

“Good night, lover,” she said.

There was a Benzedrine inhaler in the bathroom. I crushed the gummy substance out of the tube with my heel, then chewed on the stuff as long as I could stand the taste. Dana was torpid from the barbiturates, and I had all the capacity for exertion of an anemic amoeba, but I wasn’t going to leave her in that apartment.

It took a glass of water in her face to get her into a sitting position, and she kept mumbling something incoherent about San Francisco while I yanked the red sheath over her head. We went down into the street like walking wounded, but nobody asked us how the rest of our boys were doing at the front. She was out cold again the minute she hit the car.

I double-parked and left her for the five minutes it took to get some response from Joey Pringle, a hophead musician who lived on the third floor of my building. Between the pair of us we carted her up the one flight. Pringle didn’t ask what was going on either, but only because at 7 A.M. he’d be operating on two hours’ sleep at best, all of it induced intravenously.

I showered, worked myself into fresh clothes, then reheated yesterday’s coffee and forced down two cups. After that I got Dana stripped again and between the sheets. I did it with all the jaded worldliness of an aging gynecologist. I made the precinct house just as Lieutenant Vasella was finishing his night’s tour.

If I sounded as inane to him as I did to myself, he didn’t show it. It took the two patrolmen still posted at Audrey Grant’s apartment exactly sixteen minutes to locate the three manuscript pages under the base of a lamp. Their existence proved nothing about Fern’s guilt, but at least suggested that my story wasn’t sheer fantasy. The downtown lab had no sizable samples of either Fern’s or Lucien Vaulking’s handwriting with which to compare them, but within thirty minutes more Vasella was informed that the writing had been done long after Vaulking’s death, in fact most likely within the last seventy-two hours.

A car was dispatched to my office with instructions for finding my Grant file under S, like in General Sherman, which I actually should have been asked to turn over earlier. Central Identification had Fern’s prints on record, because of secretarial work she had once done for an insurance firm which registered all employees, but we learned quickly that they matched none of those on the newspaper clippings or the envelope in which Grant had received them. What prints there were belonged to Grant himself, his lawyer Fosburgh, two mail clerks, a letter carrier and me.

The original message form for Grant’s telegram had been picked up at a midtown Western Union office, but this also bore no prints of any interest. It had been filled out laboriously in left-handed block printing by a right-handed person, and the line requiring identification of the sender listed the name R. E. Lee. The civil service intellect. No clerk had been alert enough to take a second glance at someone who had appended that signature to a communication addressed to one U. S. Grant.