David Markson - Epitaph For A Tramp

It wouldn’t get any pleasanter so I let it drop. His wife had to live with it, not me. Probably some of it was my own fault anyhow. They weren’t setting any departmental records to get her off the floor over there. The room was still for a minute.

“You girls about finished?” Brannigan said.

Coffey grunted.

“Take a drink,” I told him. Mine was on the floor near me and I picked it up and stared at it.

Brannigan made a clicking noise with his teeth. “All right, it’s as handy as we can establish for now.” He turned to the stenographer. “Pete, get out that description on Sabatini first of all. And run a check on that Adam Moss, too; see if there’s any file on him just in case. You might as well get started now. Call in on the way and put through the stake-out for that Perry Street address, my authority.”

“Right, Captain.”

“And take the money in. Report the recovery of it, but tell the insurance mob it’s impounded indefinitely. They’ll probably be on your neck in four minutes. And put through the pick-up on that cousin of Sabatini’s in Troy.”

“Yes, sir.” I watched him load the satchel. He threw a half salute like a scarecrow flapping in a breeze and when Brannigan returned it he went out. Brannigan got up and walked into the kitchen. Water ran into a glass.

“So it all hinges on who she’d go to,” he said when he came out. “Whose doorbell she’d push when she found herself in a jam. No family besides the mother and sister?”

“None.”

“Then I suppose we check with the Kline girl first, get a list of everybody she can tie in with the deceased.” He stared at Cathy for a minute, then at me. “It’d seem like there’d be a fair-sized list of names.”

“And no-names.”

“One-night stands?”

“Something like that.”

He cursed once, chewing on the cigar. It wasn’t burning. “You want to call the Kline girl?”

“I’m working with the department?”

“You don’t think maybe it’s about time?”

“Nuts,” Coffey said.

“You got a problem, Art?”

“Damn it, yeah. There’s nothing in the book says we got to play potsie with some hot-shot peeper just because he used to be married to the dame.”

“Report me,” Brannigan said. “I haven’t had a reprimand in fourteen years. The commissioner probably stays up nights worrying that I’m getting complacent. You going to make that call, Harry?”

“Right now,” I said. I dug out the slip of paper with the Gramercy Park address and number. My hand was no more than six inches from the phone when it started to ring.

“Let me,” Brannigan said. “If somebody’s checking on what happened to his investment it might just relax him into a slip or two later on if he figures you’re not running loose.”

He lifted it as it started its third ring. He said, “Brannigan, Homicide,” and then nothing else. All of us were close enough to hear the click and then the dead buzzing.

He stood there for a minute, holding the receiver and looking at the chewed end of his cigar. “Don’t you just love a son of a bitch who’d tease like that?” he said then.

Sally Kline said on the phone that there were only two or three people Cathy had seen with any regularity. One was a writer on Bank Street in the Village named Ned Sommers. Another was a photographer named Clyde Neva who had a live-in studio loft on East 10th Street. She said Neva was a pretty blatant homosexual.

“But gosh, Harry, I hope I don’t sound as if I’m suggesting that either one of them might have—”

“It’s just routine,” I told her. “One of them might remember something, or know things you don’t. Anymore?”

The only other one she could tag was an Arthur Leeds. She thought he was a musician and she gave me another Village address, on Jones Street this time. I told her to get some sleep.

Coffey had been checking the addresses in my directory when I repeated the names. “No women, huh?” Brannigan said.

“There wouldn’t be.”

“This Kline girl. She came home at eleven, was there all night until she called you?”

“For crying out loud, Nate—”

“Just asking. She’ll have to make a statement anyhow, this afternoon will be good enough. I’ll see her then.” He took the phone and dialed headquarters about something. I went into the bedroom and dug out a.38 Police Special and a shoulder holster to replace the empty Luger sheath. Dan followed me in.

“I got all the time in the world if you want anything,” he said quietly.

I’ll call you.”

“Be at the office. Don’t strain it, huh, fella?”

I stood there a minute after he went out. I took out Ethan J. Spragway’s card and looked at it. Spragway spelled backward was Yawgarps. I stuck the card in a drawer. The sour-faced plainclothesman from outside was just coming up when I went back out front.

“The wagon will be here any minute, Waterman,” Brannigan told him. “Stick around after it leaves. You’ll be called about relief. And take that MG when you go in. Give him the keys, will you, Harry?”

I tossed them over. Waterman dropped them. He bent to pick them up with the same sick-of-it-all expression that he probably had when he made love to his wife. Brannigan had turned to Coffey.

“All right,” he said, “Fannin and I will check out those three intimates, but first we’ll take a look around that Perry Street place, give it a run-through for address books, mail, all the rest. I want that Moss kid seen again, and I want his alibi authenticated. Pete’ll know pretty quick if there’s any local sheet on him. I also want to know if Bogardus is still telling the same story he told this morning. After that you can start checking the hotels up near where that MG was parked on Broadway. I want all of them for three blocks in every direction. A clerk just might remember Sabatini going out for smokes and the girl ducking out five minutes later. Maybe she said something, asked a question, looked scared. You can pick up a partner first, anybody who’s unassigned. If it looks like you’re going to have to waste a day waking up off-duty clerks call in for an extra team. Keep Pete posted on the desk every hour or so.” Coffey grunted in acknowledgment. Maybe in disgust, it was an ambiguous sort of sound. He was leaning against the wall near the door, sucking a flat toothpick.

“You got any questions or are you just learning to like it here?”

“Nuts,” Coffey said. He started for the door, threw Brannigan a salute which could just as easily have been translated into an obscene gesture as anything it was supposed to mean, and went out. The toothpick lay on the carpet where he’d been standing.

I looked at Brannigan. He was still working the unlighted cigar and he did not say anything.

“What the hell is all that?” I asked him. “You guys give him white mice to play with when he wants them, too?”

“Tell you later,” he muttered. “Let’s go, huh?”

I stood there a minute after he was gone, then I knelt next to the door and lifted the raincoat away. Woodsmoke would have had more color than her face. Waterman was watching me. I went downstairs.

The stenographer had taken one of the cars. Coffey was just pulling out in the second one and Brannigan was waiting at the third, one without insignia. “Counting Waterman it looks like three vehicles for four men,” I said when I got in. “Evidently the whole departments gone soft.”

Brannigan looked at me, made a face, then finally got rid of the decimated cigar. “Guys who came with Coffey and Pete have been checking out every apartment on this block for an hour and a half,” he said almost indifferently, “trying to rouse up somebody who might have had insomnia and been staring out a window when the deed was done. I’ve once in a while been known to give a legitimate P.I. his head, Harry, but I don’t particularly sit on my butt and read Ralph Waldo Emerson while I’m letting him run. Four other officers are out pulling hack drivers out of bed to see if any of them noticed that red MG on the streets last night, or any red MG, and where, and every patrolman who was on duty is being asked the same thing. We’ve already talked to everybody in your building, and it may also interest you to know that your office has been pulled apart and put back together again, just in case you might be working on something that could have tied in with this, or for that matter to see if you’d had any communication from the deceased lately which you might not want to mention. Also I used your phone to call and check the figures on that Troy heist. You can bill us on it, I suppose. You got anymore questions or are you beginning to like it here, too?”