David Markson - Epitaph For A Tramp

He turned back to me while he was waiting for his transfer. “They’ve been sweating him out for months,” he said, “trying to get a make on his contacts. Some bonehead rookie picked him up by mistake two weeks ago and they figured the whole thing was shot. If Henshaw here isn’t their boy it’s dead now completely. Leeds was a heavy traffic point.”

“Me!” Henshaw screamed. He clattered his cuffs. “Hey, now, man, like I declared, I was just here to spin a—”

Brannigan got his other call. “Brannigan, Central,” he said. He gave the Jones Street address. “Corpse impaled on a fence, accident while fleeing interrogation. Central operation. A wagon, one car. No, nothing else, it’s a Narcotics mix. They’re on the way. Right, I’ll be here. Yes.”

He hung up and glanced my way again. “Twice,” he said. “Twice in one morning. That punk through the shop window and now this. Damn it.”

I didn’t say anything. He stood there a minute, staring at nothing, and then he dialed once more. He was looking rotten. “Brannigan,” he said. “Get me Pete Weller in my office.”

I sat down across from Henshaw and took a cigarette. It was my last one.

“Me, Pete,” Brannigan said. “What’s with the Hawes sheet? Coffey make that hotel check? Yeah, I expected as much. You match up the Bogardus story with what came out of Troy? Right. What about the run-down on Fannin’s block? That too, huh? Hospital report on Sabatini? Well, that’s something, at least. What’s on red MG’s? Oh, sweet damn. No, give it to me now, just read them down so I can see if any of the locations sound interesting—”

He listened expressionlessly to something for several minutes. “Hell,” he said finally. “All right, yeah, tell him to keep checking in. No, all looks like a big bust. Yeah. Stick on it. So long.”

He put the phone back and looked at me. “Last Monday I had three different tips on the same horse,” he said somberly. “Three. Thirty bucks I put down, money the wife doesn’t even know I’ve got. You know where the horse comes in? I should have known what kind of week it was going to be.”

“All of it?”

“All of it. Coffey couldn’t get a tumble at any of the hotels. About sixty different overnights and any names in the bunch could have been Sabatini and the girl. The plainclothesmen I had checking your street for possible witnesses got nothing at all, a couple of people might have heard tires screech around three-thirty but nobody bothered to look out of any windows. Sabatini’s all right, but his version of the story pairs up with the other punk’s — no variations, no loose ends to make anything of. All we’ve got are red MG’s. You know how many of them? Forty-one, for hell’s sake. Twenty-eight cops and thirteen hack drivers saw vehicles of that description on the streets last night, but not one of them had any reason to pay attention to plate numbers. Forty-one, all the way from the Cloisters down to the Battery and back, all between roughly two and three-thirty in the morning. Every shoe clerk and his brother drives a red MG, for crying out loud. And not one of the locations fits with anything we know so far — none here or at Neva’s or at Sommers’s. Nobody even saw it parked out in front of your place. Damn it to hell. We’re nowhere, Harry. Except at a nice rosy dead end.”

He walked across the room and parked himself heavily on a studio couch, then took out a cigar and looked at it. When he did, Henshaw began to giggle.

Brannigan heaved the cigar at him. The small man ducked, but he reached out deftly with his free hand at the same time and snatched the cigar out of the air. He righted himself and flipped it into his mouth, wrapper and all, and sat there grinning smugly.

Dead end — except that we’d forgotten to wind up one small aspect of the interrogation. Henshaw had the cigar tilted up at a rakish angle, watching me merrily as I walked across.

“Okay,” I told him, “so like it’s a canary. So swallow it or spit it out. What did Leeds do after one o’clock?”

He wiggled the cigar. He tittered. He slapped his knee. “The Hawes sheet, ” he chortled. “Oh, I dig that, oh, yes, oh, yes! That’s what the man said, is it not? The Hawes sheet? What a far-out place to get high! Who needs a measly fix when the Hawes sheets lie awaiting!”

And then Henry Hiram Henshaw abruptly stopped paying any attention to me at all. I took him by the shirt front and he dropped the cigar, but he did not seem to notice. I shook him but all he did was turn his head. He shuddered, and then two wet tears trickled out from under the hubcaps he wore for glasses.

“Ah,” he said softly then, “alas, poor Leedsie. Last night the Hawes sheets, this morning the cold, cold shaft.”

I was at a window which faced the street. Everything was bright and sharply etched in the sun, and I watched a woman come out of one of the brownstones across the way, smartly dressed in a conservative aqua summer suit and leading a small boy by the hand. The boy was blond as snow, six or seven at most, and they made a lovely picture together. At the bottom of the steps the boy stopped and said something and the woman gave him a belt across the ear which would have felled a first-growth spruce. I turned back to Henshaw.

Brannigan was standing over him. It left me cold. Leeds, the thing on the fence, anonymous as a side of cheap beef. I’d wanted a live one. I’d wanted one with a face I could put a fist into. I wanted a cigarette also, but I didn’t have any. I chewed on a match.

“All of it,” Brannigan was saying. “In plain, simple, ordinary American English, Henshaw. When did you see the Hawes girl here?”

“Okay, dads, okay. But give a cat room, stand back, you’re fogging my spectacles. I’ll reconstruct, I’ll come on strong in all details. But like allow me room to stroll my thoughts, huh, man?”

Brannigan took a deep breath. “From the beginning, Henshaw. The name of the joint on Second Street. Everything from the time you left there.”

“I’m recalling, man. The handle on the house is indisputable. I mean unless they sold out shop this morning, like. Handleman’s Happy Hour. They even got my picture out front — under glass, you know? The Bird blew there once, man. Charley Parker in the flesh. You cats dig jazz, incidentally? Or am I cast awash on an alien shore, like?”

“You’ll be awash someplace if you don’t get to it,” Brannigan said. “You finished a performance at one o’clock. Leeds was nervous about the heroin so you canceled the next show. Then what? Where’d you go? Who was with you?”

“Awash, I am awash at that. So I will feed it to you straight, like, sans rhythm, sans melody, sans life! Ah, lackaday!” Henshaw sighed dejectedly. Brannigan took a quick step toward him and the small man made a protective gesture with his free hand. “No, man, like no! All, I’ll tell all. One, yes, one o’clock. Here, man, we lit out for here. To this very pad.”

“Just you and Leeds?”

“You dig me, your highness.”

“Damn it, and then what?”

“Bliss, man, bliss. An exclusive cutting of a new Charley Mills disc. Private, unreleased, for our own hip ears alone. Man, if that Mills ain’t the coolest with the longhair stuff, if that cat ain’t the sole last living genius in Greenwich Village, I’m—”

“Henshaw, you want me to hook that bracelet higher up on that pipe? You want to tell this hanging by your wrist from the ceiling?”

“Well, man, man, ain’t I coming on? Am I obfuscating, like? Like you requested, in detail. In detail, I, H. H. Henshaw, and the late lamented A. Leeds, repaired from the pad known as Handleman’s Happy Hour to this here pad known as where we are now in session, solo and by ourselves, to soothe our savage breasts by paying profound heed to a rendition of something très cool, très far out, by that yet unrecognized master, C. Mills. We listened and then I kid you not, we listened anew. And then the chick made an entrance/*