Epitaph For A Tramp

by David Markson

  “But—” The woman was gaping at me. “You mean you won’t—” She was sputtering. I choked the car and she was shocked. When I released the handbrake she was outraged.

  New York at night. You think anybody sleeps? The loonies in Bellevue, maybe they sleep.

  The woman stuck her tongue out at me. “Get a rickshaw at the corner, lady,” I told her. I heard the cat yowl once and then saw it racing along the sidewalk as I pulled out. I went over to Second Avenue and straight down.

  Around midtown I remembered Cathy’s mother and sister.

  That did not make the night any better. Someone was going to have to tell them and I didn’t much want it to be any tactful plainclothes cop working overtime with a hangover.

  I liked them both. Mrs. Hawes was over sixty and stone deaf. She had taken to me and had been broken up when things did not work out for us. She had not understood Cathy, but then who had?

  Estelle was thirty-six or so. She taught grammar school and you wouldn’t mistake her for Moll Flanders in the darkest bedroom in town. She wore steel-rimmed glasses and straight plain dresses that had gone out with the N.R.A. I had always suspected that buried under that Iowa-spinster get-up she had a shape something like Cathy’s, but she did as much with it as a baker does with last Tuesday’s bagels. It was as if she had given up all hope of ever getting a man and did not much care. Or probably she was frigid and had found that out somewhere along the line and did not care about that either. But she worried about Cathy and I was not ecstatic knowing I would have to break it to her and the old woman.

  I cut across 14th and then down again. I left the MG in front of a Sanitary Valet shop on 11th, just off Seventh Avenue. It was 4:28.1 walked the single short block down to Perry and then the block and a half across. I walked jauntily, tossing my keys as if I made book for every widow in the neighborhood. I did not see anyone to have to convince, however, either on the street or in the alley across from Sally Kline’s number. There were no lighted windows in her building, a three-story brownstone.

  I rang five, where the card said Kline—Hawes. I had intended to ring three at the same time, so that the light would go on in another front apartment, but with no one outside I didn’t bother. I glanced at my watch again. I was a half-minute overdue on my promise.

  I was about to ring again when the hall door finally buzzed.

  I went in. There was a wide stairway that was well carpeted and softly lighted and I climbed the two flights. The place was as quiet as a prairie in the moonlight. I saw Five ahead of me at the front end of the top corridor and I went down and tapped on the door.

  Nothing happened. I waited six or eight seconds, tapped again, then tried the handle.

  It turned. I eased the door inward several inches, seeing only darkness. I had just decided to unsheath the Luger when someone else’s gun nosed through the crack and parked itself cordially against my navel.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was not a very nice gun. It was home-made, of the sort that enterprising young high-school boys put together in machine shops when teacher is preoccupied with the bottle in the cloakroom. I stared at it, giving it about C-minus for sloppy craftsmanship.

  There was a voice behind it somewhere. “Okay, Jack,” it told me. “Inside.”

  The voice was not particularly nice either, nor was it Sally Kline’s. Hormones, my dear Watson. Two sexes, don’t you know? Elementary. Sure. So meanwhile what do we do now?

  We close the door. Because whoever he was, Zip-Gun was not much of a thinker. The rod and the fist holding it were poked out at an angle through the eight-inch crack like roses ftom a bashful admirer. And my own hand was still on the knob.

  There was not much noise, just a quick muted cracking. A broken ulna generally makes that kind of sound. Or maybe it was the radius that went. One of those insignificant bones about two inches above the wrist.

  The gun clattered to the floor without going off. I’d heaved myself to the side, but I hadn’t seriously expected it to fire. Jam your wrist into a vise and your fingers open, they don’t close on any triggers.

  My friend had let out a sickening gasp. He let out a louder one when I grabbed the wrist. It made a nifty fulcrum, bent that way. I jerked him forward and shouldered the door inward at the same time, then swung the arm in a fast arc so that his body followed it around. I could feel the cracked end of the bone through the skin when I pressed the arm up between his shoulderblades.

  “You may take one giant step,” I told him then. He didn’t want to so I shoved him. My foot got in his way and the poor slob fell on his face into the room. He lay there clutching the break and sucking air through his teeth like the little choo-choo that couldn’t.

  I let him lie for a minute. They’d be running off the next few heats without him.

  I picked up the zip-gun. It was taped together. I broke it apart, dropped the handle section onto a chair just inside the doorway, slipped the lethal end of it into my pocket. The barrel had been cut from an automobile aerial, most of which are perfectly chambered for .22’s. Detroit ingenuity. I found a lamp switch and shed a little light on the subject.

  I was in the living room. It was an ordinary middle-class furnished apartment. Grand Rapids had been nuts about it once. Nothing had been changed in it since the Titanic went down and wouldn’t be until it came up again. Off to the left there was a closed door with a crack of light under it and that was the only element of the decor which interested me.

  My welcoming committee was still chewing a corner of the carpet. He made a feeble effort to get to his feet when I closed the door to the hall. I caught him by the back of his collar and helped him along.

  “No more,” he said. “Damn, Jack, no more.”

  “Mr. Jack to you.” I could have wheeled him around like a pushcart by latching onto the wrist again, but I decided it would be easier with the Luger. “This one’s glued together nicer than yours,” I told him. “How about you and me taking a stroll to that bedroom, huh, doll?”

  He looked at me with glassy black eyes that were either out of focus from too many needles or else were naturally bleary. Anyhow they hadn’t gotten their dim look from poring over books. He was a punk as I had thought, maybe a year or two past twenty, narrow-jawed with a lot of greasy black hair and a mustache like an eraser smudge. If the leather jacket was in hock he’d have it back as soon as he jimmied his next pay phone. He said nothing and his breath was still coming hard.

  “Move,” I told him.

  He was no bigger than he had felt when I’d handled him in the darkness. He shuffled forward without much enthusiasm, protecting the wrist as if he thought I might not let him have his share when mealtime came around. When he got to the door he stopped again.

  “You want the other one, too? You want it so you can’t bat from either side of the plate?”

  He opened it. I elbowed him in but he didn’t go anxiously. He was hurting but he was also scared now. Nobody told me why. Bright Harry. I just had to look at the girl who would be Sally Kline.

  She was a pretty girl. She was a redhead, with freckles and green eyes, and she had lovely high breasts. I could see clearly how lovely they were, because Junior hadn’t bothered to cover them up when he’d come out to answer the door.

  She was tied into a chair with her arms drawn back and locked behind it. There was a gag over her mouth that was probably her last matching nylon. She was wearing slacks the color of crème de menthe and she had on a yellow pullover blouse which Junior had ripped down the front and left hanging open. Her torn brassiere was on the floor.

  The cigarette Junior’d been puffing for something more than the simple joy of fine tobacco was still burning in an ashtray near her.

  Junior’s head was tilted around and he was looking at me now. He hadn’t moved away from the muzzle of the Luger but you could see from the quiver in the line of his jaw that he guessed the latrine didn’t quite pass inspection. You could also see from the way his shoulders were drawn up that he knew da
mned well he was about to get a scolding.

  Now a Luger does not have a particularly heavy barrel, but you do the best you can. The front sight helps some. I laid his skull open to the bone with the first one and then I gave him two more, which made one for each of the dirty black burns on the upper curve of the girl’s left breast. He was already going down when the second one landed. The third one was a knee in the neck to get him out of the way of the decent folk as he fell.

  The girl’s eyes were wide and she was still frightened. The knot in the stocking came apart quickly and her head drew up and back and she sucked in air. I untied the belt from around her wrists.

  Her hands went to her face. For a minute she sat forward, breathing deeply. Then she began to sob.

  Junior was going to nap until Mommy kissed him and brushed back his precious locks. I put the Luger away and went into the John. There were a couple of washcloths on a rack and I held one of them under the warm water, then wrung it out.

  “Easy,” I told her then. Her head was on the back rest of the chair now and her arms were limp at her sides. She was still inhaling deeply and her eyes were closed. I stood next to her and pressed the wet cloth across the upper part of her breast, cupping it there but not rubbing it. Most of the ash came away.

  I went back and found some Unguentine. She sat there while I coated the burns with a heavy film. I lifted a torn half of her blouse and tried to drape it across her. I kept running out of material.

  She’d stopped crying. She lifted the other half of the blouse herself, holding it and looking down, and then she dropped it again.

  “I guess it doesn’t much matter, does it?”

  I showed her my best don’t-you-fret-about-old-Uncle-Silas grin. “You feel all right?”

  “You are Mr. Fannin?”

  “Harry,” I told her.

  “I thought—”She looked at Junior, then shook her head. “The bell rang and I thought it was you. About fifteen minutes ago. I looked down and I didn’t see anybody outside. I was just so darned scared by then that I—I went to the door and asked if it was you and he said yes. And then he put his gun against my stomach and I—” Her breath caught. “Oh, I’m so glad you came. I was—”

  The butt end of Junior’s smoke was still burning. I crushed it out, then went and sat on the bed.

  “Will there be... will the scars last long?”

  “A few months,” I told her. A generous racketeer had let me smell a six-bit panatela along the cheekbone once. He had been going for the eye so I’d still consider myself the big winner if I was seeing a mark every time I shaved. But it had faded out.

  “He put that gag on when I rang the bell?”

  “Yes.”

  “You tell him what he was trying to find out before that?”

  “I couldn’t. I don’t know where she is, Mr. Fannin. Harry. I tried to tell him I haven’t seen her since the day before yesterday. But he wouldn’t believe me. He kept standing there and puffing on that cigarette until it would glow and then he’d put his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t scream and—”

  I waited for her. She bit her lip, turning her head away. The flap of her blouse had fallen away again but she did not seem aware of it. Part of her had gotten a suntan someplace.

  “I don t know where she is. That’s why I called you. She told me she was going away with him and Duke, the one she’s been seeing, and that was Tuesday and I—”

  “You mean a friend of this one’s?”

  “Duke something, yes. And then when Eddie came in he said something about them getting split up—something about some kind of job,’ I don’t know what he meant—and—”

  I had gone across and put my hand on her shoulder. “Sally, listen, can we start with the cast of characters maybe? Eddie is this throw rug on the floor here?”

  “I’m sorry. Yes. It’s Bogardus or something like that. And his friend’s name is Duke. Duke Sabatini. Duke’s the one Cathy was going out with. She brought them up here one night, it was about two weeks ago. I didn’t like them and I told her so then, Mr. Fan—Harry. Duke is older, maybe Cathy’s or my age, and he’s handsome, but he still looks like one of those horrible kids you see all over. I wanted to hide my pocketbook while they were here. I told her she’d get into trouble hanging around with them but Cathy just laughed. You know how she is, never taking anything seriously, always running around after somebody new and—”

  She had been looking at me. She didn’t turn away. “I’m sorry.”

  “Tell it the way you want to.”

  “Have you—may I have a cigarette?”

  I gave her one. Her hands trembled a little when she took the light. She took a long drag and then stared at the cigarette.

  “I don’t know what it is,” she went on. “It’s as if—well, as if she’s sick in some ways. Lord knows, every girl who gets to be old enough starts sleeping around a little. But golly, you discriminate about it, you wait to see how it works out with someone, if it’s going to be a good thing. Oh, sure, sometimes you get a little tight and you crawl into bed the first night, that can happen too, but you don’t make a habit of it. You do it and then you hate yourself for it, and so you’re all the more careful the next time, or at least most girls are that way. Lord knows we talk about it enough. But Cathy always just laughs. It’s as if she has to have adventures all the time—new experiences, whatever you want to call them. She goes out to the places down here where the Village crowd hangs out, bars mostly, and—well, sometimes three or four nights a week she doesn’t come home at all except to change to go to work in the morning. And then sometimes she stops. Sometimes she won’t go out for two or three weeks, not once, just sitting here all evening and reading or something. Then it starts again. It isn’t anything that shocks me—I don’t mean it that way—but it seems like such a waste. I mean she’s so bright and she can be so good to be with, I always think it’s such a shame that she doesn’t get married—

  “I keep forgetting,” she said then. “I suppose this is the same kind of thing that happened when she was married.”

  She had looked away awkwardly, but when she went on with it she was still off on the same side road. I was going to have to tell her pretty soon that it was a dead end.

  “Gee, I’ve, well... I asked her about you a dozen times, but she won’t ever say anything. She changes the subject every time, but I can see she’s still in love with you. It’s all over her face when she mentions your name. But if I ask her why you don’t try it again or something she—”

  “Sally, you were telling me about Junior here. And somebody named Duke.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry, I am. I guess it’s just seeing you this way after knowing about you for so long, and being worried about Cathy. I suppose I sort of wish you and she would get together again. Probably I’m butting in, but Cathy s so good, basically, that if there was only someone who could understand her and try to help—”

  “Sally—”

  I had wanted to get the story first, and maybe get her out of there, too. Once upon a time I had also wanted to be Johnny Ringo or Wild Bill Hickok and ride a big white mare. Life is rough.

  “Cathy’s dead, Sally.”

  She didn’t react, not for the first few seconds. She looked at me as if she hadn’t heard what I’d said. The corners of her mouth twitched. Then her face melted and she began to shake.

  “Oh, no! No!”

  She started to bawl. I walked across the room and held her by the shoulder. It took a couple of minutes.

  “What happened? Oh, it can’t be true, it—”

  I gave her the Reader’s Digest version. There were tears on her face and she kept shaking her head. And then she jumped up and ran to where the guy named Eddie was lying. She had soft ballet slippers on. She kicked him eight or ten times in the small of the back. I supposed the kicks would have cracked an egg if he’d had one with him. She kept saying, “I told her not to go with them, I told her, I told her!”

  It didn’t last long.
I was standing next to her when it finished and she turned and fell against me with her head on my chest. I held her until that finished also.

  “Tell me now,” I said. “Just let me know what you can and then I’ll get you out of here for a day or two.”

  “Yes,” she said raggedly. “All right.” She found the chair again. I gave her another cigarette and took one myself.

  “Whatever you can think of. Don’t skip anything.”

  “There isn’t much, I’m afraid.” She was staring at the burns and her voice was tiny and mechanical. “I think I said they came up here with her one evening about two weeks ago. Cathy was with Duke. She didn’t bring Eddie along as a date for me or anything, he was just with them. Anyhow I was going out. They were gone when I came back, but I told Cathy the next morning I didn’t like them. They were—well, you can see what this one looks like. Maybe they think it’s clever to talk that way, as if everybody owes them something. I couldn’t understand what Cathy was doing with them. All she’d say was that she thought they were amusing. Amusing! And now she’s...”