David Markson - Epitaph For A Tramp

“Shut up, scum. What’s his cousin’s name?”

“Sabatini. Just like him. Freddie Sabatini.”

“What’s Duke’s first name?”

“Angelo. Hey, look, this thing hurts bad, Jack. Ain’t I gonna get a doctor?”

I told him what he could do with the wrist. I supposed Angelo Sabatini would be a hundred miles off already. With a murder rap on his neck a punk like this one would be sprinting fast enough to make Roger Bannister look like a hitchhiker. It was Duke all right. All that cash in the balance, a girl like Cathy who probably started feeling guilty or scared when it was over — anything could have set it off. I’d find out the details after the cops picked him up. The cops. Sure, they’d get him sooner or later, but I wasn’t going to be in on it. Hell no, Fannin would be home reading witty lines out of his Bartlett’s Quotations and waiting for some potted dame to climb the stairs and fall into his lap for the big romp in the hay. You could set fire to the end of the bed and Fannin wouldn’t smell smoke until morning.

Sally had come across to where I was pacing. Her hand was on my arm.

“Harry — now let me be the one to tell you to take it easy.”

I didn’t say anything because anything I would have said would not have had more than four letters in it. I picked up the phone and dialed my home number. Dan got it on the first ring.

“You called Brannigan yet?”

“Just about to. You said an hour. You onto anything?”

“Looks open and shut. Don’t ask me how, but she rode along on a payroll heist up in Troy yesterday with two punks. Guy named Bogardus I got wrapped up, another one named Sabatini. Sabatini’s the one who killed her. They—”

“Killed her!” Bogardus was staring up at me from the floor, slack-jawed. I ignored him.

“Evidently she got scared,” I said. “She’d probably told the guy what I did for a living, and then she was probably just innocent enough to think she could go to me and promise him she wouldn’t mention any names.”

Dan did not say anything. Bogardus was still gaping like a six-year-old watching three of them sneak up on James Arness at once.

“I’m going to ice this joker I’ve got down here,” I said. “When the badges get there just tell them I’ll have it when I come. I’ve got a couple of stops to make first.”

“Right. You got any line on where this Sabatini might have ducked to?”

“He’s got forty thousand in his glove compartment.”

“Makes it tough.”

“Yeah. I’ll see you in an hour or so. But listen—” I gave him Sally’s address. “Tell them to pick up Bogardus here. Brannigan can put through a call on it. I’ll leave a key, same as up there.”

I put back the phone and turned to Eddie Bogardus. He screwed up his face. “Damn, Jack, you sure you got it figured straight? Duke wouldn’t of killed the broad, not her. He was nuts about her. He even wanted to marry her an’ all.”

“He’d have a sweet honeymoon doing twenty for armed robbery.”

“He still wouldn’t of killed her, even if she was gonna rat on us. Hell, for all he knew I might of got caught and ratted before that. He could of just run and hid out. He had the loot, dint he?”

“Did he?”

He thought about that, sitting there against the bed like Newton under the tree. After a while you could see it fall on him. Cathy had somehow managed to wind up holding all the coin. Duke hadn’t knifed her to keep her from talking. Repossessing the forty thousand had been a better reason.

I had turned to Sally. “You know an Adam Moss, 113th Street?”

She’d been sitting with her hands in her lap like the little lost girl at the station house. It took a minute, then she frowned. “Not at all. Is he involved in it somehow?”

“Cathy was driving his car. He must be somebody she went to before she came to me.”

“Funny, it’s not a name she’s ever mentioned.”

I’ll check it. You have someplace you can stay a day or two?”

“Golly, you don t think there’s going to be anymore—”

“Just until the other one’s picked up. There might be loose ends.”

“I guess I could call one of the girls from the office—”

“Do that,” I said. It was 5:34. “Meanwhile I’ll take care of the southpaw here. On your feet, Gomez.”

“What re you gonna do? I thought you tole that guy to send the cops down?”

He was still hanging onto that leg of lamb at the end of his sleeve. It was beginning to look overcooked. I took him by the elbow and nudged him into the chair.

“Hey now, bananas, you said you’d get me a doctor. I got to get a splint on this or somethin’. Damn, Jack, it’s—”

“You’ll get a splint,” I told him. “You’re sitting on it. There tape in the bathroom, Sally?”

She went for it. Bogardus was squirming.

“Put your wrist on that armrest.”

“What? Hey, you ain’t gonna—”

I frowned at him, so he put the arm down. He did it the way you’d set down nitroglycerin during an earth tremor. He clamped his jaws tight against the yell when I took hold of it, changed his mind and opened it again. The yell didn’t come because I snapped the bone into place just then. That Bach cantata came back instead. He could hum it for the cops when he woke up. I took the tape from Sally and told her to make her call.

“Tell her you’ll explain later,” I said. “And scribble down the name and number for me, will you? And your office number if you think you might go to work.”

“I won’t go in.”

I taped Sleeping Beauty into the chair, then picked up the stocking he had used to gag Sally and bound it around his mouth. I didn’t want him rousing up any neighbors and convincing them he was the victim of foul play before the wagon got there. The stocking had a run in it anyhow. Sally got her friend out of bed after a wait. She wrote the name Judy Paulson and the address and number on a sheet of yellow tablet paper. I chewed a cigarette while she threw some stuff into a blue leather bag which might have been manufactured to carry manhole covers.

I looked around the bedroom. Furnished apartments. Toss your gear into the closet, come in to use the sack after the last bar closes and there’s no place else to go. Live in one sometime. See if the place ever shows anymore outward trace of your personality than an iron lung.

Sally put her hand on my wrist. “I guess I didn’t say it before. I’m sorry, Harry.”

“Let’s go,” I said. Bogardus was wheezing with his head on his chest. I double checked the tape and the gag and then we locked the door. We went down the quiet stairway and I left the key under the rubber in the lower hall. The street was as hushed as a sickroom. We walked the block and a half to Seventh and then up to the MG. We were not talking.

Her girlfriend lived off Gramercy Park and I drove her over there. The car didn’t make anymore noise than four flatulent drunks in a YMCA shower. If Adam Moss turned out to be a nice guy maybe I’d buy him a muffler.

She did not get out when I parked. You could see a few streaks of gray in the sky and a bird was acting moronic about it in the park. We were just sitting there when the couple turned the corner. The man looked as if he would have been willing to quit hours before. He kept telling Evelyn it was time to go home.

“My neck, home,” Evelyn said. “I’m going up to the church and scream bloody murder—”

Maybe she went. We were under a street lamp. “There’s something else I didn’t say,” Sally Kline told me. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“Just for coming. Are you going up to see the police now?”

“Somebody’s got to tell Cathy’s mother and sister. I thought I’d get it over with.”