David Markson - Epitaph For A Tramp

Flowers Say It Better had backed off into Perry. A lanky young Negro unfolded himself from the curb near it, tossed away a smoke and came over to me.

“Can you take my name and tag and let me cruise out of here?” he wanted to know. I’ve got a mess of orchids in there for a party who’s going to be right upset if he gets buried without them.”

I nodded toward Brannigan. “Better see the boss.”

“Don’t you gotta always?” he said wearily. He sauntered over that way.

I went over and leaned against Brannigan’s car, waiting. It was getting hot. The ambulances finally started up, swinging through a stoplight and letting their sirens growl halfheartedly as they came. My suit was filthy where I’d rolled in it keeping out of the way of the Chevy.

I dragged on a Camel, watching a Village fag come by. Not just another amateur, this one was a classic, a prototype. He was wearing purple pants about four sizes too small, desert boots with tiny bells on the ends of the laces, a tailored blouse. He had a single gold earring in his left ear, none in the right. He was leading an expensive Siamese cat on a pink ribbon that matched his blouse. The cat had the same tiny bells on its collar. I supposed the cat was that way, too.

Brannigan came over after another two or three minutes. “You got a cigarette?” he asked me.

I gave him one. He was looking across at the antique shop and his face was flushed slightly. Two young boys in dungarees were staring at him.

“There’s blood on your shirt, mister.”

Brannigan grunted. He had a stain along his tie. He closed his jacket but there was another one along his lapel, shaped like a Dali watch.

“You all cleared?”

“That son of a bitch,” he said. “That crummy punk. I should have put one into the middle of his spinal column, trying to cut us down that way. And instead I feel my guts flop over when I see him go through that window. Twenty-three years on this job and I still… Damn it, Fannin, did that slut of an ex-wife of yours have running hot water up the street here or is it another one of those half-assed Greenwich Village bohemian joints where I’ll have to wash off this mess in the toilet? You got a match for this thing?”

I gave him a folder, ignoring all that. “Listen,” I told him, “I haven’t eaten since about Mother’s Day. You want to sit with a cup of coffee while I grab a bite before we run through the apartment?”

“Hell, what time is it?”

“Twenty to ten.”

“And it was three-thirty when she got knifed.”

“Close enough.”

“Six hours and ten minutes. And what have we got?” He handed me back the matches. I’ll tell you what we’ve got. We haven’t got a pot.”

“Let’s eat, huh?”

“What the hell,” Brannigan said. “What the hell.”

We walked down Seventh. After about two blocks we found a place that looked all right. It was grand. They had imitation Aztec carvings on the orange-and-green-striped walls and they gave us underdone eggs and yesterday’s coffee. We might have stayed all day, but a sign over the register said that occupancy by more than thirty-eight people was dangerous and unlawful and we would have hated for them to get into trouble on our account. Thirty-seven other customers might have dropped in at any moment.

We went back to Perry Street. Bogardus was long gone, but otherwise the place was the same. The dishes and silver were all Woolworth’s pride, the upholstery smelled vaguely of insecticide and old sin, and there were seven different water-color views of the same flower pot on the wall, all executed by that color-blind old lady who turns them out for every furnished apartment in the world. Anything Brannigan and I wanted would be tucked away in drawers or stashed in closets. We washed up before we got to it, and then we gave it almost an hour.

We would have been better off using the time to do pushups. The only item we discovered even remotely connected with crime was a hardcover copy of a Raymond Chandler novel and that had my name in it, dated from eighteen months before. Nothing was hidden under the rug, inside the toilet tank, behind the Shredded Wheat. Nothing slipped out of the pages of the books we flipped except a newspaper recipe for braised squab, and the only notation on any of the recent sheets of the desk calendar was a week-old scribble reminding Cathy to replace something called “Love that Pink.” There were snapshots in one of Sally’s drawers, mostly beach stuff, and we found an expensive set of blown-up portraits of Cathy stamped on the reverse with the signature of Clyde Neva, the photographer on Tenth Street Sally had mentioned. A book called Under the Volcano was the property of Ned Sommers, and two or three re-issue Bix Beiderbecke records had A Leeds scrawled on their jackets, completing Sally’s list. There were no unusual deposits or withdrawals in either girl’s bank accounts. There were bills, receipts, ticket stubs, circulars, theater programs, canceled checks, folksy letters from Sally’s family in Maine, soap coupons, match folders from a dozen Village bars. The only address book had Sally’s initials on the cover and nothing in it which interested us. A small scrap of ruled paper in a cracked vase had a phone number penciled on it and when we had run out of other ideas I dialed the number. A syrupy, old-maidish voice said:

“Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thank you for calling and please give our number to a friend. This is a recorded response. Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is—”

I passed Brannigan the receiver. He listened a minute, hung it up and then stood there picking his teeth with a discolored thumbnail. If the glad tidings had made his day any brighter he was doing his best to hide it. “The Black Knight of Germany,” he said after a little.

“I’m listening.”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I was just remembering a game we used to play on the barn roof, being air aces after the first war. Me and two other kids. The names we always used were von Richthofen, Eddie Rickenbacker and Georges Guynemer. They always stick together in my mind, always in the same order.”

“Too early for me. Tom Mix, Buck Jones and Ken Maynard, maybe. Which one do you want to see first?”

“That Ned Sommers I suppose. Bank Street’s only two blocks up.”

I called Sally before we went out, telling her that Duke had been roped and that she could come home. She had been asleep. It occurred to me that I could probably use some sack time myself, but it had not caught up with me yet. We left the key under the rubber again.

It was pushing eleven o’clock and the asphalt was already the texture of secondhand chewing gum. They had cleared out the intersection up at Seventh. Brannigan drove the half-block to Fourth Street and turned north.

“You expect to get anything out of these guys?” I asked him.

“Who knows? Some background, anyhow. We’ll take it all back to the office later and sort it out with everything else that comes in. Hell, it’s all routine, you know how it goes.”

“I suppose,” I said.

The address we had for Ned Sommers was a beat-up old brownstone with an entrance below street level. Four chipped slate steps went down past a battered regiment of empty trash cans into a tile alcove. It said Sommers — 1-R, on one of the bells, but the front door was unlatched and we went in without ringing. Uncarpeted steps went up again along the left-hand wall but 1-R would probably be back under them. The hallway smelled like a sanatorium for cats with kidney disorders. We found the door where we expected it to be and Brannigan knocked.