David Markson - Epitaph For A Tramp

“Oh, Lord, I’d forgotten all about them—” My hands were together on the wheel and she put one of hers over them. “Would you like me to come along, Harry? If it might make it easier I’d—”

“You get some sleep. I’ll call you later.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

She was turned toward me. She leaned across and kissed me on the cheek like a sister. I never had a sister so I turned around and looked at her, and then we weren’t related anymore. Why do people do those things? People do all sorts of things. I once had a client worth seven and one-half million dollars and she used to do her laundry in the toilet bowl. So we sat there stuck together like two halves of a boiled potato with the water burned out of the pot. After a while she got out. I watched her until the door buzzed and I saw her open it and go inside, and then I pulled out and headed up toward 72nd Street West.

I had thought about calling, but I hadn’t spoken to Estelle in almost a year. She would know something was wrong the minute she recognized my voice. The decent thing was to go there.

I took Lexington all the way and then cut across. There were the beginnings of traffic now, and the sanitation trucks were out. I found a slot about a block from the building and walked over.

I pushed Howes, which was 12-C. Cathy’s mother was too deaf to hear the ring. There was another one of those broadcast systems in the center of the block of bells and I knew it would be Estelle who would call down.

It was a good minute and then her voice came clearly. The Russians weren’t jamming this one yet.

“It’s Harry Fannin, Estelle.”

“Who?”

“Harry Fannin.”

There was a silence. Finally the buzzer rang. I went in, crossed the long lobby with mirrors and potted stuff that I remembered and pressed for the elevator. It was a self-service job, silent as an anaconda slithering down a cypress, and it got there a lot more quickly than I wanted it to. Because I was wondering what Emily Post might have to say about just how you go barging in on someone at six o’clock in the morning to let her know that her kid sister had gotten caught up in an armed robbery and then had been murdered by a cheap hood named Duke Sabatini.

I was still wondering when I walked along the corridor on the twelfth floor to the door marked C and pressed the bell. And then Estelle opened up and I didn’t wonder anymore, at least not about part of it.

Because part of what I had been going to say was wrong. Duke Sabatini hadn’t done it.

Duke hadn’t done it because he was here, and there could only be one reason why he’d come. He had to be looking for Cathy. So he didn’t even know she was dead.

“In,” he told me. He didn’t say it precisely the way Eddie Bogardus had said it. Bogardus I’d tagged as an Edward G. Robinson fan, and this one was a trifle more suave — say the early Cagney sort. The gun was Cagney’s kind also, a foot-long Army Colt which might have looked less likely to drag him to the floor if it had been mounted on a caisson. He was standing several feet back from the door, calmly pressing the thing into Estelle’s ribs.

It was Duke all right. New York wouldn’t be that lousy with random armed punks waiting behind entrances. Actually he was prettier than Cagney. Taller too, although the Vitalis alone gave him a three-inch edge. He had eyes the color of broomstraw.

We were standing there. “Remember that scene when he squashes the grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face?” I said. “Always got a boot out of old Jimmy. Or was it Jean Harlow’s face?”

“Let’s save the chatter, huh?”

“Well now, sure, if you didn’t see the picture I guess we can’t discuss it. Truth is I can’t stay anyhow. I just dropped by to deliver some bananas.”

He caught the reference and he scowled at me, so I scowled back. I was being rather silly. He knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

“You want to step out of the way,” I asked him finally, “or am I supposed to crawl through your legs?”

“Hard,” he said. “First he’s comic and now he’s hard. Just ease in the door. There’s room for six of your kind, Oliver.”

Oliver, Jack. Different cast, same writers. Same old story-line too. Boys lose girl, so one of them checks out the roommate and the other one checks out the mother and sister. Two wrong endings on the same double feature. A girl like Cathy would go to a man when she got into trouble.

Sure. So what man?

I went in. I’d seen too many females messed up already that morning to want to make him really impatient. Estelle was trembling, next to him. She couldn’t have looked much worse if vandals had trampled the chrysanthemums.

“That wall will do swell,” he told me. “Let’s turn around and get your hands up on it.”

I did that too, standing next to a highboy. I could see a little of the other furniture and it was what I remembered, all very antiseptic and uncomfortable looking. Estelle’s taste. There was a TV set in the corner. Just a little while and the three of us could catch Sunrise Semester.

Duke had closed the door. “On the couch,” he told Estelle. “And get glued there.”

I heard her going, then felt the.45 hook into the small of my back. I’d already made up my mind not to horse around with this one. Years ago I’d made up my mind. It’s a cinch to be psychological, Fannin’s one mental block, but any muzzle you can lose a fountain pen in is just too big.

But he really didn’t make me that nervous. He’d be looking for information, not a murder rap.

He was frisking me, running me down with his left hand. “The gun’s on my right hip,” I told him. “If you’re looking for the forty grand, I already blew that on chewing gum and soda.”

“We’ll get to that news later, Oliver.” He jerked out the Luger and then my wallet. Then he found the barrel and trigger-assembly of Eddie’s zip-gun.

That seemed to amuse him a little. He wheezed contemptuously through his nose and I heard the pieces fall against the seat of an upholstered chair. The.45 crowded my spine some more, so he was probably busy with my wallet. After a while that dropped to the floor.

“Big of you,” I told him. I could see that he’d left the money in it. He wasn’t interested in my paltry fifty or sixty bucks.

“Fannin,” he said. “Cop, huh? Okay, cop, it’s too early for you to be on it for any bonding company. So Bogardus spilled about the heist. What else do you know that’s interesting? Let’s have it.”

He didn’t know me from Little Black Sambo, which meant that Cathy had kept us private after all. I didn’t feel so high-spirited anymore, knowing that. Under the circumstances I suddenly felt considerably like a slob.

“Spill, cop.”

“Shove that rod against me one more time and you’ll get one goddam lot of answers,” I told him. “Back off and let me stop climbing this wall. What the hell do you need besides that howitzer to keep me in line? You want a tin whistle maybe?”

“A wit,” he said. “A real genuine wit.”

“Yeah, I know, the man who wrote Snowbound was wittier.”

A little time passed. He grunted. He could turn colors before I’d explain it to him.

He decided to be accommodating. “Drop ‘em,” he said.

“Keep your feet right where they are when you come around. Anything fishy and this thing goes off.”

I turned. He had backed out into the middle of the room. His gray sharkskin suit had shoulders as outsize as the cannon in his hand and the knot in his purple tie was big enough to moor something of Cunard’s. Cathy’s latest beau. So he hadn’t killed her. So I still wasn’t rushing off to ask permission to bunk with him next semester.