Epitaph For A Dead Beat

by David Markson

  So I sat there scowling another minute and then I stood up.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I can’t help you. It’s after hours, but most other agencies have answering services.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t—”

  “I’m busy.”

  “But you gave the impression—”

  He let it trail off uncertainly when I went around the desk and took my jacket down again.

  “The coat I could get used to, Mr. Grant,” I said then. “Maybe it’s almost got a certain style. It would look cavalier as hell over a Brooks Brothers suit. But not on top of—”

  I bit down on it. I knew it wasn’t the man or the man’s shirt. Maybe it wasn’t even a girl with a Band-Aid on her wrist who wasn’t answering her telephone that week. I didn’t know what it was. I just wanted to be away from there, and now.

  I was at the door. He hadn’t gotten sore. Obviously he wasn’t the type. He was just leaning forward with his head bent and his arms triangulated backward against the arms of the chair, like Ichabod Crane on a slow horse.

  Td like to lock up, Grant.”

  “Mr. Fannin, I can hardly see—”

  “Can’t see what? Okay, it’s none of my business, but damn it, if you’d look in a mirror once you’d—”

  “I mean I can hardly see you, sir.”

  “Huh?”

  He was standing, not facing me. “My sight is approximately eighty percent deficient,” he said distantly. “I have glasses for what reading I do, glasses plus a four-inch magnifying lens. But I believe I appear freakish enough without making my eyes look like a pair of enormous bugs, so I rarely wear the glasses in public. Very few people are aware of the condition, I’ve even hidden it from Fosburgh. But it has hardly seemed important for me to notice whether my clothes are particularly fashionable, or for that matter clean. When a man has not been able to recognize a beautiful woman as such since his late twenties, he can lose interest in certain of the more trivial amenities. I’m sorry if I’ve offended your sense of good taste, Mr. Fannin.”

  The door swung into place behind me. The man’s eyes were closed. He was tilted forward with one bony hand lifted, and I could not decide whether he looked more like John Carradine in the role of a tattered preacher, or a parody of Don Quixote, or a dead tree.

  I went back and sat down, of course.

  CHAPTER 9

  His marriage had lasted seven years. He did not tell me in so many words why it had broken up, although he implied that his wife had been something of a tramp.

  At the time of the divorce their daughter was six. The girl, named Audrey, went with the mother. Elizabeth Muller Grant asked for no alimony, and Grant assumed she had met another man. She did not marry again, however.

  Grant did not question this, asking only to be allowed to visit the child regularly. He also did not question the fact that, two years later, Elizabeth Muller gave birth to a second daughter, not his, who was quickly sent out for adoption. The woman herself was living well, and his own child appeared to lack nothing.

  He did not see the girl as frequently as he had intended. Explaining this, Grant said that his vision had taken a severe turn for the worse in that period, and, fearing total blindness, he had begun to keep to himself. Too, the girl had been enrolled in an out-of-state boarding school and was rarely home. The visits had become entirely unrewarding when they died of their own inertia in 1950, when Audrey was fourteen.

  Ten years later, and two months before he appeared in my office, Grant happened upon the newspaper obituary of an Elizabeth Muller of Manhattan. It listed as her only survivor a daughter, Miss Audrey Grant, also of New York. Funeral services at a midtown chapel were announced for the following day.

  Ulysses Grant evidently lived in considerable disorder. He read the death notice only because, having misplaced his magnifying glass, he found it resting on that page of an opened Times. It did not occur to him to check the date on the paper. When he arrived at the mortuary at the specified hour he learned that the funeral of Elizabeth Muller had been held nine days before.

  The mortician was able to furnish Grant with two addresses. The first, Elizabeth Muller’s, led him to an expensive furnished apartment in the East Fifties. There he was told that the personal effects of the deceased had been removed by her daughter almost a week before. The second address was that of a residence hotel in Greenwich Village, where Audrey Grant had rented a single room for several years. She had left no forwarding address when she moved out three days before Grant asked for her.

  Grant took about fifteen minutes to tell me all this, gesturing now and then with a hand like a hungry skeleton’s. When he finished he reached into an inside pocket for a billfold fat enough to have his lunch in it. He searched around and came up with a folded white envelope, then did not pass it across. A muscle in his throat might have been working slightly beneath that parched beard.

  “This was early in the summer?” I asked him.

  “In early July, yes.”

  “And you haven’t done anything about it since?”

  The hand lifted. “I went to both of those addresses on the first day,” he said. “That night I had second thoughts. The girl knows she has a father. I’ve lived in the same apartment all her life. She could have—”

  He turned away. There were traffic noises below the window, remote but savage. It was moving up on six o’clock.

  “But now something’s come up to change your mind again?”

  “I hadn’t quite changed my mind to start with, Mr. Fannin. Not about wanting to see the girl, or to help her if she needs it. Let us merely say—well, that I held the matter in abeyance. About a month ago I asked Fosburgh to look into the question of my ex-wife’s finances. It was something to be discreet about, since it was no business of mine, but evidently there was no will. I assumed Elizabeth had—”

  He studied the linoleum. I waited for him.

  “Men would have supported her,” he went on. “She was handsome enough to have lived well in concubinage. She might have left some small amount of cash—it would have been like her to keep money lying about her apartment. And she would have told Audrey about it, I’m sure. The superintendent at the building said that two young women had been there frequently during her illness. It was cancer, I believe—”

  “One of the two girls was definitely Audrey?”

  “The superintendent knew her by name.”

  “Any assumptions about the second one?”

  “If you mean it might have been Elizabeth’s other child, yes, I’ve thought of the possibility. In any event the second girl would be of no concern to me.” He realized he was still holding that envelope. “This arrived today, special delivery as you can see.”

  The envelope was plain bond, addressed to Grant in a southpaw scrawl, with no return address. It had been postmarked at nine that morning in a Village sub-station. It contained two newspaper clippings.

  One of them was a two-column photograph of three men and a girl seated at a table. I recognized one of the men before I read the caption:

  BEATNIK TO READ: As part of the new trendin nightclub entertainment, the Blue Soldier in Greenwich Village has announced a series of poetry recitations by noted writers of the Beat Generation. Featured this weekend and next will be Peter J. Peters, novelist and poet, left. Also shown are poet Ephraim Turk, painter Ivan Klobb, and Beatchick Audrey Grant.

  The shot had been clipped from the top of a page in the Post and the date had been left above it. It had appeared exactly a week ago. Audrey Grant was a brunette and could have been reasonably attractive. Peter J. Peters had a neatly trimmed beard. Ivan Klobb, who looked old enough to know better, had a sloppy one.

  The news story I had not seen, but only because I don’t read the Journal. It was one day old:

  BEATNIK WRITER

  HELD IN MURDER

  It said nothing that DiMaggio had not told me on the phone, except that Turk had been officially booked on suspicion. The
y were still calling me Henry. I frowned at the two pieces, not really thinking about anything.

  “No idea who they came from?”

  Grant shrugged.

  “Fosburgh told you he knew me when he saw them?”

  “He phoned the police first, since your name was incorrectly reported. Then it seemed only logical to come here.”

  I nodded. “I know a little about the murder, Mr. Grant. Until now it hasn’t been any of my business. It probably still isn’t.”

  “I don’t quite follow you.”

  “There doesn’t have to be any connection between your daughter and the killing—except insofar as it’s already been made. Someone could simply be using it as an incidental, to point out to a man worth thirteen million dollars that his little girl is pretty chummy with the riffraff.”

  “A crank, you mean?”

  “You run into any before?”

  “Nothing of any consequence. The usual absurd requests.”

  “You want me to try and find out who sent the stuff?”

  Grant had wet his lips. He stood up. “I don’t care about the clippings, Mr. Fannin. If it seems necessary to investigate their origin in finding my daughter you may do so.” He shook his head. “I have told you a lot about myself, sir. It has not been pleasant for me, nor, I’m sure, especially interesting for you. I would like to speak to Audrey. Merely once. If she desires no further communication I will not trespass in her life again. You may tell her so.”

  “I will,” I said. “Before the end of the weekend.”

  “It will be that simple?”

  I’ve met some of these people. I might be able to find her at that bar tonight—the Blue Soldier—or there’s a chance I can do it on the phone. After all, she’s not missing in the usual sense.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. I had come around the desk, but we did not shake hands. ‘“I’ll call you as soon as I get something,” I told him.

  “Yes. Thank you.” He turned to the door, stopped a minute, then went out without adding anything.

  He’d run out of geese. Talking about his troubles had even given him a shabby sort of dignity. I supposed loneliness could do that, even if money couldn’t.

  Philosophical Fannin. I went back to the desk, got out a manila folder, slipped the clippings and the envelope into it. I scribbled William Tecumseh Sherman on the folder and stuck it away. I locked the office and left.

  A block away I passed a haberdashery which wasn’t yet closed. I caught Grant out of the corner of my eye, towering over a neat little clerk like a sequoia over a sightseer. The clerk was busily showing him something that might have been a shirt.

  CHAPTER 10

  Behind the long dark bar in the Blue Soldier a bald Neanderthal type with a six-ply neck put down a wetly chewed cigar to take my order. It was a few minutes after nine. The man was about fifty-five. His shirt was white-on-white with a monogrammed Z over the pocket, his cufflinks were two more outsized Z’s, and his figured silk tie was as wide as the business end of a shovel where it disappeared into his white smock. There would be another initial on the belt buckle down under there. The man himself would have driven a booze truck during prohibition, would have taken some small independent chances in the petty rackets in the thirties, would have made his pile from black-market peddling during the war. Now he owned a chromed, gaudy tourist trap on lower Sixth Avenue, and within five minutes of the start of any conversation he would say something about being legitimate.

  I could have been wrong. He was chewing the cigar again before he poured my bourbon. “No poetry reading tonight?” I asked him.

  The man stopped pouring. He stared at me. I could not read his expression, but it was considerably like the one I might have gotten from certain good folk if I’d said something nasty about General MacArthur.

  “Poets,” he said. “Beatniks. God almighty.”

  He turned, started to walk away, stopped, snorted, came back. He put his elbows on the bar and leaned forward until his face was no more than three inches from my own. When he spoke again I had to strain my ears to hear him.

  “In answer to your question, friend—no, there ain’t no goddam poetry reading.”

  “You’re going to drop ashes in my drink,” I said just as quietly. “Forgive me. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  He backed away with a grimace. “I get something in your drink, you’ll get another drink. Drinks I got.”

  “But no poetry readings.”

  The man braced himself with both hands gripping the inner rim of the bar. “You really want to know? You’re not just making what you think would be friendly conversation?”

  Td like to know.”

  “You’ll stop me if I get violent? Sort of put your hand on my arm? I’ve got a touch of blood pressure.”

  “Sure.”

  He nodded gravely. He gestured toward my right with a stubby thumb. There were about twenty tables over that way, half of them occupied, and there was an empty bandstand.

  “Nice little spot I got here, ain’t it? Brings in a good living, sends the kids to college—all strictly on the up and up, you know?”

  I smiled pleasantly.

  “No headaches at all. No high-priced entertainment—just a little dance music—steady clientele. So what happens? I get one of these uptown agents dropping in, hocking me, I should have these readings. Me, I donno from nothing—poetry’s out of my line—but be tells me out on the Coast they’re buying it like maybe it’s Equanil. Culture, he tells me.’ Three hundred bucks and I can own a poet for the weekend. A beard the guys got. Big son of a bitch, too, looks like he could wrestle Antonio Rocca better than writing poems. You follow me?”

  “Peter J. Peters,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He grunted. “So last Friday it goes on. I even bring my wife in, she goes for that sort of thing. First show at eleven, and by nine you can’t get a seat in the joint. Three, maybe four times as many customers as I ever had at one time before.”

  “This is bad?”

  He set the cigar down carefully on the edge of a glass tray. “Beer,” he said. “They wanted beer.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “One,” he said. “One to a customer. Sometimes one to a table.” His nostrils quivered slightly. “This is the part where I tend to get upset. You’ll watch me, huh?”

  I put my hand on his arm reassuringly.

  “Six, maybe seven at a table usually holds four, see? So a waiter goes over. Maybe one guy orders. The other six don’t want nothing. Or maybe they say not yet. The waiter goes back, the six still don’t want. And the first guy doesn’t reorder, he’s still nursing the first one. You ever see a guy nurse one beer for three hours? Regular customers I got can’t get in, and six fully grown people are watching one guy nurse one beer for three hours. Characters talking all kinds of big words when what it adds up to, they can’t hold a job. Intellectuals. There’s even a table I got to replace, they carved things in. ‘Middle class morality is primeval.’ You want to tell me what the hell that means? A hundred and fifty people, and you know what I take in? I got more in the register since six o’clock tonight. Beatniks. The same slobs been hanging around the Village twenty years, this year they got a name. One more goddam poet or Beatnik son of a bitch sticks his nose in that door, I’m gonna—”

  I squeezed his wrist. He stopped. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks.”

  “You tell it with admirable restraint.”

  “It’s a week, it gets easier. What’s your interest anyhow? You look like a man works for a living.”

  “One of them owes me money.”

  “The Russians should owe it to you, better. God almighty.”

  I put some cash on the bar. He pushed it back toward me.

  “You’ll remember it, you could come back,” he said. “A customer wears a tie, a customer’s got socks under his shoes—I’m just starting to see he’s worth being nice to.”

  He was lost in thought when I went out of there. There was a cast of stolid,
painful determination over his face. Like the look of a man learning to live with disgrace in the family.

  CHAPTER 11

  I tried Fern Hoerner from a booth in a drugstore. I might as well have tried Eisenhower when he was caught up in crisis on the back nine at Burning Tree.

  The Chevy was in a lot around the corner. I left it there, walked a block east to Washington Square, then cut through the park toward Thompson Street. It’s still a nice park, one of the last in New York you can pass after dark without having a homicidal sixteen-year-old step on your spine. I didn’t even mind the prim queens in tight jeans mincing along the pathways, although I was happier with the Italians on the tenement stairs on Thompson. Old women in black with seamed faces, and old men who had hopefully named their sons after Garibaldi or Marco Polo or Boccaccio and were content with a cop or two in the family. I went up a flight of chipped slate steps into a building that only a successful bombing could have improved, climbed two more sagging flights inside, then knocked on a door I had knocked on once or twice before.