Epitaph For A Dead Beat

by David Markson

  “I doubt it, not if the skin isn’t broken.” I went across to one of the sling chairs. “He didn’t do that gaudy a job with his fists alone?”

  “He decided I’d be more impressed by a leather strap. Come to think of it, I was impressed at that.”

  “You want to tell me about it, Dana?”

  She nodded, reaching for her smoke again with one of those milky arms. Damaged as she was, the girl made you suspect that half the women in the world were grossly deficient in protein. Fern had taken a seat next to her, tucking her bare legs beneath her. She wasn’t one of the afflicted.

  “I don’t come out lily white in the tale myself,” Dana said. “But then I’m just about beyond salvaging as it is.” She considered me thoughtfully. “That really was a honey of an exhibition I put on for you over there, wasn’t it?”

  “It was harmless enough.”

  “I’ll bet. But thanks anyhow.”

  “You leave McGruder’s with Klobb?”

  “No, I didn’t. I felt rotten when they let us go, and I walked around for a while. I ran into Ivan when I stopped for coffee, and we went down to his studio. It wasn’t anything except company, someone to talk to. Although Ivan was pretty upset himself, for reasons most people don’t know about.” She glanced at Fern. “Did Josie ever tell you about a man named Constantine?”

  Fern turned to me.”—Connie?”

  “I found out tonight. The police hit it pretty close on Tuesday, Fern. Josie’d been taking calls.”

  “Taking—” She pressed her lips together. “I did begin to wonder about it, I suppose. It’s just so darn hard to accept—”

  “You’re telling me,” Dana said. “Audrey let me in on it a few weeks ago. She was tight one night, feeling sorry for herself. Boy, it knocked me for a loop. We weren’t that intimate—you know how you just share a place to save money. The fact is—well, I guess I didn’t like her too much. I suppose everybody down here is always putting down everybody else, taking advantage of other people’s weaknesses, but Audrey was worse, somehow. Bitchy. Oh, damn, what a thing to be saying. Anyhow, I’d always supposed she was seeing someone else’s husband and had the sense to be discreet about it.” She looked back across. “You know about Ivan introducing her and Josie to this Constantine— for a fee?”

  I nodded, watching Fern lift a hand in puzzlement. “But he’s such a successful painter. Sometimes I think he’s the only real artist down here. Why would he—?”

  “You go figure it.” Dana butted her cigarette. “He didn’t mention it tonight, of course—it obviously wasn’t supposed to be known—but I was pretty certain that was what he was worried about. We had a couple drinks, and then he—” She made a face. “This is going to sound funny, considering the circumstances, but he decided to paint me. Ivan’s odd. He’s come looking for me more than once after midnight. So it wasn’t anything extraordinary, and God knows I would rather have held still all night than go home by myself. I had some pot, one stick that—”

  She frowned. “I tried to pass that off to you, didn’t I?”

  “We both could have used it.”

  “Be nice. Damn it all, sometimes I just—oh, what’s the use? Anyhow, I smoked it—by myself, since Ivan was working. It did calm me down, even though all I could think about was Audrey under that cot. And I kept remembering the party tonight, too. Or maybe not just tonight, maybe it was all the damned parties all the nights—all the pompous philosophical excuses we make for acting like adolescents when none of us have anymore purpose than goldfish, how sleazy it all finally is—and anyhow all of a sudden I was taking a good look at myself and I guess it made me disgusted. And then I remembered what Audrey’d told me about the blood money Ivan had gotten, and—”

  She confronted me squarely. “I told him I knew about it. I also told him he wasn’t paying me enough to pose, and that I wanted fifty dollars an hour—retroactive for the last ten hours. Just like that I said if he didn’t pay me I was going to the police—” She kept on feeing me. “Which is what I mean about not being worth salvaging. Oh, damn, I—” She sobbed, turning aside. “Listen, Fern, have you got some sleeping pills, anything—?”

  Fern’s mouth was drawn. She got up forlornly. Dana closed her eyes and let her head fall against the wall. She sat that way without moving until Fern came back.

  “It would be so darned easy if I could blame it on the marijuana,” she said then. “At least I’m not going to say I didn’t deserve what he gave me. He threw my clothes down the stairs and just about threw me after them. I don’t know what it means, although when it started I was one mighty scared young extortionist. All I could think of was that Josie and Audrey might have threatened to expose him in the same way, and he’d—”

  Fern’s breath caught audibly. “You don’t think—?”

  “I don’t know, I just don’t know. What kind of people are capable of blackmail? If I was capable of the impulse myself, I think Audrey certainly would have been—and Josie too, for all that supposed innocence of hers. But my God, if they were blackmailing him and he killed them he would have had to kill me too. I couldn’t prove anything the way they could have, but it still could have ruined his reputation—”

  She shuddered once. Fern had set two capsules and a glass of water on the end table, and she brushed the pills into her hand. She swallowed them without water.

  “What happens to us, Fern?” she said then. “What? All right, never mind all this, this is extreme, but just the way we live in general—how do we get so sick and miserable and self-destructive? I used to be a nice girl once, I swear it. I used to have clean, wholesome dates with well-meaning clods who actually brought me flowers once in a while. Dates. I haven’t had one in any prearranged sense in so long that I’ve begun to feel like—like a public conveyance. A streetcar named Dana, flag her down in front of any saloon below Fourteenth Street and climb aboard. Do you know what I was going to do if Ivan was fool enough to come through with the money? I was going to pack up and get out of here, go to San Francisco maybe, anyplace—just to see if it’s possible to start fresh. That isn’t such a shameful motive for a blackmailer, is it? But do you know what I’m going to do now? I’m going up to see this man Constantine myself. Oh, yes. Except I’ll have to wait until these bruises heal, won’t I? They like their merchandise pure when they pay cash, don’t they? Do you think it will take long? I’m really anxious, and—”

  She had gotten a little hysterical, and Fern grabbed her by the shoulders. The towel fell away and for a second Dana’s eyes darted nervously, but she caught hold of herself. She gulped in air, holding it.

  “Come on, there,” Fern said. “Everyone goes through this kind of thing one way or another, you know that—”

  Dana let her chin collapse on her chest. “It’s my night to play the fool. Forgive me, Fern, will you, I’m just—”

  “Don’t be silly—”

  She made a half-hearted attempt to knot the towel back into place. “Aphrodite’s fig leaf. Did Aphrodite have a fig leaf? I don’t even know who Aphrodite was.” She got to her feet, holding it where it had slipped around her hips again. “Cheap theatrics and a thirty-cent striptease to boot, to keep your mind off the bum acting. I better get to bed before I wind up howling Thomas Wolfe from the window ledge. Or aren’t we supposed to like Wolfe anymore? That’s one other damned thing—I keep forgetting who’s hip and who isn’t.” She laughed a hollow, strained laugh. “Oh, good heavens, thanks, Fern, really—I’m sorry I’m such a pathological mess.”

  She headed toward the room which had belonged to Josie, moving stiffly. Fern glanced at me and then followed her. They spoke quietly, then Fern closed the door after her, turning back. She looked like a delicate mechanical doll that nobody’d remembered to wind.

  “I meant to ask her where Klobb’s studio is,” I said.

  “It’s on Downing Street, but—Harry, you’re not going over there with all this—”

  “Just to look around, talk to him maybe—”
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  She had come toward me. “I’m sorry if I seemed cold before.’’ Her voice was husky. “It was just so rotten Tuesday—not us together, you know that, but the way I sort of used you—”

  “I’ll call you, Fern.”

  “Do, Harry, please. I—” She trembled suddenly, then fell against me. I held her until the shivering stopped. Then I kissed her tightly once and went out.

  It was still easy, like walking off a building. But I hadn’t had too many dates in any prearranged sense myself lately. Maybe when this was over I’d have a few with a girl who’d be vulnerable until it was, and whose cheeks had been wet against my neck after I’d let her tell me she wasn’t vulnerable three nights before.

  The Chevy was on Seventh. I went down the few blocks with no other moving cars in sight. The number she’d given me was a warehouse, with a small private entrance at one side. A hand-lettered sign said, Klobb-Penthouse, which would mean a shed on the roof, nothing more. The door was not locked.

  I went in, not being particularly quiet, not quite knowing what I had in mind. The stairwell was as empty as a tilted tomb, but if the police had only Klobb’s home address and not this one he could still be around. There were six flights of reinforced concrete and then one last section of slatted metal, rising into a gable-like structure which would lead onto the roof. The door up there was open.

  The studio sat thirty feet away, beyond a dozen or more random-shaped chimneys and flue pipes. It was built like a greenhouse. There were lights on, either a lot of them or just the brights a painter would use, but the glass panes were smeared and barely translucent. The roof of the warehouse itself was extremely still.

  “Klobb?” I said.

  A rag on a line flapped once. Maybe he was busy being creative over there, oiling that leather strap. There was a high sill to be stepped over in the doorway where I was, and I stepped over it.

  That was when it came to me that I was never going to learn, not ever. This time it wasn’t any slumbering Beatnik with a malfunctioning weapon some old uncle had brought home as a souvenir of the Meuse-Argonne. I was at least a foil second too late reaching for the Magnum I’d concluded I would not need for Klobb alone. Something that could have been a fist lifted out of the shadows and slammed into the back of my neck. Something else that could have been a foot extended itself from nowhere and cracked across my shin. I went down like a defunct sputnik. I chewed tar.

  “I used to think about it sometimes,” a familiar voice said then. “No kidding, I really used to wonder—whatever became of that great soph halfback, Harry Fannin? I asked you to leave my name out of it with the cops, fellow. I asked you politely as hell.”

  “Do you intend to chat all night, darling,” said another voice I knew, “or are you going to get busy and dump him over the side?”

  CHAPTER 24

  I got up onto my elbows and knees, then hung there as limply as a sweaty leotard. Someone in rubber-soled desert boots stepped near me noiselessly. It was a task, but I lifted my head high enough to see the grain-colored beard that identified him as Ivan Klobb. I also saw the boxy black Colt .45 automatic in his right hand.

  His other hand lifted the Magnum off my hip. “On your feet, fellow,” I was told.

  I managed it, a little shakily, watching Klobb pass the Colt to Constantine. That made a total of three pieces I was facing, since lovely Margaret was getting her kicks from the Beretta again. It made me feel dangerous, like Dan McGrew.

  Constantine had shed his dressing gown for a dark blue serge suit. He had on a figured gray silk tie, and his collar looked too tight. It probably always did, around that tree stump he had for a neck.

  “Damned glad you dropped in, fellow,” he told me. “We would have looked you up one of these days, of course, but this saves trouble all around.”

  “I’m glad too,” I said, but I was just making sounds. I’d wanted to find out if I could. Td hate to put anybody out on my account.”

  “Sure. That’s why you forgot to mention my name with the bulls, isn’t it? My old buddy.”

  “You were in it before I saw them,” I said.

  “You won’t write to the alumni magazine if I call you a liar, will you, fellow? The name Connie came up last Tuesday, yeah—I know because my Vice Squad connection tipped me. They played it dumb, and so far as they knew there was no Connie on the books. What did you think this was, Fannin? You think I’m playing sandlot ball?”

  “Get to the point, Connie. You don’t much care what I think.”

  “Sure, sure—I’ll get to it. The point is that Vice Squad got another call a couple of hours ago—not about Connie this time, but Constantine. That much they couldn’t fake. I might have spent my time in courses like outdoor cookery at Ann Arbor, fellow, but there’s a little something besides oleomargarine between my ears. My old pal Fannin fixed things for me, didn’t you, pal?”

  “Let him send you a letter about it,” Margaret said. “From the hospital.” She was off to my right, leaning almost jauntily against a chimney. The glow from the studio left her half in shadow, and there was enough breeze to have flung some of that rampant hair into her face. Except for the Beretta she could have been soliciting over there.

  Except for the Beretta. Constantine was still waiting for some sort of answer, and Klobb had moved behind me. I didn’t like not seeing the third gun. I was fairly sure there was not going to be any shooting, not since they knew they were already tied into the case, but I still did not like it.

  “There was another killing,” I said finally. “Audrey Grant’s father. Somebody sent him a telegram about the girl’s where abouts. Your name was in it.”

  Constantine frowned, watching me carefully. “Somebody who?”

  “A Friend*—no other signature.”

  He grimaced. “You find the telegram or did the bulls?”

  “I got there first, if that’s what you mean.”

  “If there was a telegram,” Margaret said.

  “That’s not the point.” Constantine did not look at her. “You could have ditched the thing if you saw it before the bulls, Fannin.”

  I shook my head. “Not after I unwrapped another dead one. I’ve got the matter of my own license to protect in these things.”

  “Your goddam license—” He spat across his shoulder. His thick lips were drawn back against his gums when he stepped toward me.

  “Twenty-three girls. You get an expense-account convention in this town, it takes one phone call. Six years I’ve spent building up the reputation, until every big public relations man in the East knows I’m his man, and now some dollar-an-hour peeper spills the details in the wrong office. You know what this can do to my set-up? You got any idea what this can cost me?”

  I didn’t answer him. I could feel Klobb breathing behind my ear.

  “I asked you if you know what this means to me, Fannin—”

  Constantine poked me with the Colt so I nodded. “I know,” I told him. “I’m sorry. You might have to go to work for a living.”

  He was going to satisfy those aggressions sooner or later anyhow. He hit me in the stomach with a fist like a runaway Greyhound bus and I doubled over, heaving sickly.

  “Twenty-three girls. And if I have to lay low too long every damned one of them will be running for somebody else. All because of a punk halfback I used to punch holes for. Damn it to sweet hell—”

  He was standing a foot in front of me when I got myself straightened up. He was pretty much oblivious to the cannon at his side, breathing hard and nurturing his hate, and it was a moment for heroics on my part. It was a swell moment, for noticing that Margaret would have had to tilt the Beretta about a sixteenth of an inch to take out my eye. I let him hit me in the stomach again.

  He liked the way I folded in half. He liked the sounds I made, like cats being squashed. He liked the color of my face when I got it lifted. When I couldn’t lift it anymore Klobb did it for me, jamming a knee into my back and using it for a fulcrum, and he liked that too.


  When he quit, Klobb stepped back and I sank to my knees like something sticky being poured down a drain.

  I vomited everything I’d had to eat since they took me off formula.

  “The lad who was going to make them forget Tom Harmon.” Constantine laughed, turning away. “Let’s get out of here now, huh?”

  “Half a moment,” Margaret said. She might have been stifling a yawn. “I didn’t mention it earlier because you said he was a friend, but he didn’t just take the gun away from me at Audrey’s. If I hadn’t convinced the poor sap it would mean his life, I would have been raped on the floor.”

  “Well, now. Well, how about that, now?” Constantine was gripping the Colt by the snout when he turned back. Margaret was being careless with the Beretta also, and Klobb seemed to have wandered off. I couldn’t be sure, but I was beyond caring. I threw myself at Constantine with every remnant of strength I could muster.