Epitaph For A Dead Beat

by David Markson

We discussed philosophy and religion on the way to Sutton Place. When we passed 23rd Street I said, “What shall we talk about—Existentialism?” Ten blocks later I said, “How about the Dead Sea Scrolls? Surely you have an opinion about the Dead Sea Scrolls?” Mrs. Constantine found it all so stimulating she ran three stoplights getting home.

  When she finally swerved over to the curb it was in front of a tree-sheltered riverside apartment building where the rents would be as high as any you could pay in New York, or in the world. She left the motor running for a dignified, elderly doorman who wished her good evening by name. I followed her under a canopy and through a richly mirrored lobby, then waited while she pressed for an elevator. The elevator made as much noise coming down as a wounded moth. Its operator was as old and courtly as the doorman. They were both retired bank presidents, supplementing their pensions. He took us up three flights, and then we stepped into a private foyer instead of a corridor.

  That meant the Constantines had at least half a floor. Mrs. Constantine discarded her coat across the carved mahogany arm of a towering antique chair, then led me stiff-lipped through an ornate archway into a living room.

  King Farouk would have a bigger one. It ran about seventy feet back to where you would see the water, and that whole wall was glass, partly obscured by ungathered drapes. There were tall ferns, and there was a lot of whatever kind of furniture it was. Only one small lamp was burning, and everything was luxurious and dark and furry, like vespers at a mink farm. She stopped in the middle of it all.

  Her eyes were still giving off sparks, but I didn’t grin. Maybe it was the sight of all that indulgence, but she wasn’t funny anymore.

  “My husband has a slight cold. If you’ll wait, it will be a minute.”

  I nodded, watching that orange mane disappear through another arch. I supposed hubby would have a study in there. Sure. He’d be camped in a contour chair in front of a twenty-inch screen, with a nasal spray in one hand and a notebook fall of Johns in the other. I went across to the windows. Dutiful Margaret would stroke his hot little forehead before she told him about the nasty mans out front. Poor darling, has it been a trying evening with the runny nose? Would baby like a hot toddy before he works out the girls’ schedules for tomorrow night? I looked down at the black sweeping river, but it only made me choleric to think of the sort of people who could afford to run it through their back yards.

  So all of a sudden I was getting righteous. I was a Puritan. So the lady was wrong, I didn’t do divorce cases. So what? What business was it of mine where the Constantines got the dough to pay the ice man?

  Anyhow, I already knew how Mrs. Constantine paid the ice man. There was a bar in a corner to my left, with a single bottle of Chivas Regal on its mosaic top, and I started over that way.

  I hadn’t gotten across when he came striding into the room behind me. He was bellowing.

  “Harry Fannin! Harry! Why, you old son of a gun, no wonder I never made the connection. The goddam papers said Henry—”

  I must have stared at him witlessly for the first second or two. He was my height, but he would have weighed in at close to sixty pounds more than I did. That meant he had put on at least thirty in the dozen years since I had seen him. Oliver Constantine, left tackle.

  “Harry, you old renegade! Why, if fid known you were in New York I would have looked you up years ago!” He was pumping my right hand with his own, which was the size of a catcher’s mitt, and his left was crushing my shoulder. “The best damned halfback in that whole crop of sophomores. Why, by George, I remember one time in scrimmage you ran right over me. Took me out so hard I almost didn’t start the Illinois game. Well, I’ll be damned—”

  I got rid of the hands, shaking my head. We weren’t quite long lost brothers, since I’d never really said more than two hundred words to the man. “I never thought of it either,” I told him. “You made second-string All-Conference that year.”

  “Ah!” He waved it aside. “Should have made first. I mopped up the field with that big Swede from Minnesota they picked.” He lumbered around the bar. He had a face like a chunk of scarred sandstone under a quarter-inch blond crew cut, and he was wearing a dark blue dressing gown with an ascot. “Boy, those were the days, weren’t they, fellow? What’s your poison, Harry?”

  I gestured toward the Scotch, watching him dully. He came up with an ice bucket and two old-fashioned glasses, and he poured two drinks. “Yes, sir, best sophomore on the club. Drink up, Harry. To old Michigan—” He tossed off the whisky, grinning at me. “Old Fannin himself, the boy who was going to make them forget Tom Harmon until that knee went sour. Well, hey, hey, you’re not drinking—”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek, nodding. He had been a harmless buffoon at college, but I had had to respect him as an athlete. I remembered a game in which he had played almost sixty full minutes when he was injured badly enough to have been in the infirmary. I was also remembering that Josie Welch had been nineteen years old.

  Cotton Mather Fannin. “Ill drink to Michigan,” I said.

  “Well, for crying out loud—” He had been looking at me in amazement. “Why, you old son of a gun, you don’t like my business. You really don’t! A private cop. A divorce-case peeper and he’s got a moral streak—”

  I shrugged. “I never had to pay for a woman.”

  “Ha! Now you’re talking. Listen, fellow, listen—there’s half a million paunchy old men in this town, fat slobs who never got a cheek pinched in their lives except by their fat wives. They dial the right number, all of a sudden they’re free-wheeling downhill on a bright red scooter. Well, they’re going to buy the scooter whether I supply it or somebody else does. I like it better when the scratch turns up in my pocket.” He poured himself another drink, motioning me to the bottle. “Ha! Or am I talking too much, being too defensive? What the hell, Harry, what the hell—to Tom Harmon, eh, boy? Drink up. To old Ninety-Eight!”

  I drank to Harmon, then shook loose a cigarette. “I’d like to bat the breeze, Connie—”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. Brother, this mess. That Josie was a nice kid. But listen, listen, Margaret says you came sprinting into Audrey’s place like you were trying to get back into shape—”

  “The Grant girl’s dead also.”

  “Huh?”

  I told him about it briefly. It was obviously news, and I decided it was a fair exchange for anything he could give me in turn. When I finished he blew his nose in a yellow silk handkerchief, turning away. I had not expected that, but I couldn’t think of any valid reason why I shouldn’t have. “You haven’t got any idea what gives?” he asked me.

  “There be any chance one of your customers got mixed up with the pair of them?”

  “Nah, never happen. Hell, the girls know better than to give out their home addresses.”

  He threw down what was left of his second Scotch, then wiped his mouth with the back of one of those meaty hands. “Boy, this can fix me, but good. Even without a tie-in, all I need is one wrong cop getting wind of it being two of my stable.” The hand reached to my sleeve abruptly. “Hey, fellow, you’re not going to have to mention my name—”

  I used up the rest of my whisky, not saying anything.

  “Hey, now, Harry, we played on the same squad, remember? All right, you can’t promise—hell, I know how you can get hung up with bulls—but you’ll do your best, eh, fellow?”

  “Let’s leave it there, Connie. I’ll see what comes up.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, sure—”

  “Where do you get the girls?” I asked him. “Not the ones who hang around the clubs—kids like these two from downtown.”

  He was staring at the bottle, preoccupied. “Got a contact, painter named Klobb. I give him half a grand whenever one of them works out.”

  I made a face. “Your wife down there for some special reason tonight?”

  “Just looking for Audrey. We couldn’t get hold of her all week—the girl she lives with kept saying she was out.”

  �
�Mrs. Constantine always use a gun when she’s herding up absentees?”

  “Ah!” The grin came back. “Margaret gets her little kicks. How about that, by the way? A glue-footed old linebacker like me, coming up with that kind of class—pretty neat, eh?”

  “Sure,” I said. I put the Beretta’s magazine on the bar. “Look, I guess I better scram. The cops are going to rack me up as it is. Also I ought to get in touch with the girl’s father.”

  “Well, here, here—call him.” He pointed out a white phone behind me. “No extra motion, that’s my motto. Always was. Hell, you compare college linemen to the boys in the pro game someday. The pros don’t make a move until they see where the play’s going.” He dropped a shoulder and lunged toward me. “Am I right or am I right?”

  “I still remember,” I told him. I did. He’d been able to hit like an irritated rhino. And I was thirty-two years old and still enough of a kid to daydream once in a while about the All-America halfbacks I’d worshiped when I was twelve or fourteen. I supposed I could quit all that now. I dug out Grant’s number.

  I let the phone ring eight or ten times before I put it back. It was 12:40, but 0. J. Fosburgh had said the man was a drinker. Most likely he would have a corner in a neighborhood bar somewhere.

  Constantine was working the bottle again. “Funny,” he said. “Those two girls. I figured it was something personal with Josie, you know? I mean whatever it was between her and this Beatnik writer they booked. But here’s Audrey too. Whatever the connection is, neither one of them will get their money now, poor kids.”

  I frowned at him. “Get what money?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. They quit on me, both of them. They’d never mentioned it before, but they told me they were distantly related and that they were coming into a lot of scratch. Like I say, I thought it was just one of those things with Josie, so we were still trying to talk Audrey into sticking. That’s why Margaret was down there tonight, actually.”

  “This wasn’t two months ago, in July?”

  “When they mentioned the money? No—hell, it was only a week, ten days back.”

  I stood there. For a minute it did not make any sense at all. Then it started to. If Audrey Grant and her half-sister had talked about inheriting money, there was only one person I knew that it could be coming from.

  I felt as cold as a Christian on the way to the Colosseum.

  It must have showed on my face. “Well, listen, fellow, what is it?”

  I was already headed toward the foyer. “Just an idea, Connie, but I’ve got to beat it. Thanks for the booze.” I pressed for the elevator, hard.

  He followed me. “Well, say, get in touch, will you? I don’t mean just about this—hell, I know you won’t throw my name around with the bulls. Some evening, why not? Strictly social—” He was mauling my hand again. “Old Fannin himself—”

  The doors opened, and he stood there grinning at me until they closed again. We were bosom buddies and he knew I wouldn’t mention his name to the cops. Either he was still the campus clown or he was a lot more shrewd than I understood.

  It didn’t matter at the moment, either way. Neither did my haste.

  Whatever time I got there, Ulysses S. Grant was going to be just as dead.

  CHAPTER 19

  I stood in front of a door marked 5-D at the end of a corridor which had last been mopped during the candidacy of Alf Landon. There were other doors behind me, all closed, but judging from the odors they would have opened onto three stables and a sty. The Nineties, just east of Broadway. The neighborhood had been more than decent when Grant had first moved in.

  Ask a landlord about the rot and he would blame it on the influx of Puerto Ricans. He would be well informed about Puerto Ricans. You would probably have to go to a beach in the Caribbean to find him.

  Fannin, the social critic. Try the door, Fannin.

  It had taken a cab fifteen minutes to get me across town. I’d pressed a bell at random to get a buzz, since Grant’s had not answered. I could still have been wrong, and there was still that local pub for him to be in. But if Audrey Grant and her half-sister had talked about expecting money this was the only place I knew that it could be coming from.

  Try it, Fannin.

  A notice for an undelivered telegram was sticking out under the door. I took out a handkerchief before I worked the knob.

  I could have been wrong. I’m never wrong. Somewhere down the hall a baby began to cry and I closed the door behind us, against the sound.

  A window was open, and in the brief draft a single feather stirred near my foot, then fell again. He’d bought that white shirt.

  Another body. Describe it, Fannin. The bullet which took him on the cheek, shattering too much bone to be a .22 this time. The mess where it had emerged at the base of his skull, making it a .38 at least. The whole thing, like how many others? It didn’t make me light-headed this time. I slumped against the wall and stared at my hands, not upset either, just tired.

  There were more feathers. They were from an ordinary bedroom pillow which had been used to muffle the report. I wondered remotely if the feathers were goose down.

  What else, Fannin? A smashed alarm clock on its back, its hands stopped at 5:47. That was a mistake, although a minor one. Grant had been in my office at 5:47. But he had still been dead three or four hours longer than his daughter, which seemed to be the point the killer had hoped to suggest. He was cold as oceans.

  There was a phone. I used the handkerchief again, dialing Western Union. A woman with seaweed in her mouth repeated Grant’s name and address and then said: “‘For information about your daughter try a man named Constantine. Can be located through Morals Squad.’ The message is signed, A Friend.’” I thanked her.

  I wasn’t with it. I wasn’t anywhere. Every seemingly logical thought in my head went just so far and then reversed itself like a buttonhook. If Josie and Audrey had anticipated an inheritance they had to have been involved in Grant’s murder themselves. But then they would not have talked about it. Also they should not have been dead.

  Button, button, who’s got the button? Not Fannin, not now. I lifted the directory and fumbled pages until I found McGruder, D., Christopher St.

  It rang twice. Grant was on the floor in back of me. His daughter was on the floor three feet from where it was ringing. My hand shook.

  “Detective Toomey.” A voice said.

  “This is Fannin.”

  “Oh, brother—where are you?”

  I gave him the street number. “I’ve got another one.”

  He whistled. “A couple more, you can start charging the department a commission.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But don’t tell anybody I’m making with the jokes. You’re lucky the sergeant’s in the next room or you’d hear the steam through the wire. You better get yourself down here fast, chum.”

  “I just leave this for whoever wanders in?”

  “Since when would that be a new trick for you? Hell, stay there, I guess. We might even do you the honor ourselves— we’ve accomplished about all we can in this madhouse anyhow.”

  He hung up. I felt like a crankcase full of sludge. I needed draining.

  The place was cluttered. Everything was scarred, dilapidated. There were thousands of books. A console phonograph was fairly new, and there were at least two hundred records stacked near it. There was a complex radio mechanism, and there was a tape recorder.

  The playthings of a man almost blind, who would have given special devotion to sound. There was no television set.

  More books in cartons in the bedroom. The bed unmade, and a week’s filthy laundry flung around the floor, looking like soggy flotsam on an unswept strand. An autographed photo of Eugene V. Debs framed on a wall.

  A cockroach scuttled along the drain when I flipped the light in the kitchen. Thoreau’s Walden was propped against a sugar bowl on the table, and something called The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha was held open by a half loaf of black
bread. A broken Chablis bottle lay on the window ledge.

  Thirteen million dollars. The papers had played Josie’s death as a Beatnik killing, and they would do the same with Audrey’s. If the concept meant anything at all, Grant had been a Beatnik long before they invented the word. Ulysses, son of Thaddeus, by way of Harold Lloyd and Lemuel Gulliver. That classic raincoat was draped over a chair, trailing along the pitted linoleum, and I fingered it. There were even books in the bathroom.

  Too many books. A lifetime full, and nothing else, nothing else at all. I found a cold can of Ballantine ale in the refrigerator and I nursed it, waiting for the badges.

  CHAPTER 20

  I got a pair of them, patrolmen, in about ten minutes. They were both younger than I was, and they took in the situation with all the sentiment of retired storm troopers. “You’re Fanning?” one of them asked me.

  I nodded. “They want you to wait here,” he said. He noticed the beer. “Don’tcha know you’re not supposed to touch anything?”