Epitaph For A Tramp Read online

  She missed the best part of it. I hadn’t even worked up a light sweat. The door had not swung shut all the way and I could hear her on the steps. Then the downstairs latch clicked and after that there was the sound of a car door closing that would be a cab and then there was nothing.

  The glass smashed low against the wall across the room when I heaved it. The whisky left a stain which I finally scrubbed off but there was a small permanent mark where the paint had been chipped. The mark was still there a year later when Cathy came back up the stairs for the first time since that night and giggled once in the hallway and then fell into my arms and died.

  CHAPTER 4

  I had not seen her in all that time. She had come a day later to collect the rest of her gear, and a few months after that I’d gotten divorce papers in the mail, stamped from a place called Athens, Alabama, where I suppose they peddle those things on the corner newsstands. And that had been the end of it. The end, except that I still had the pail and shovel but all the sand was gone from the sandbox.

  And now I stood in the doorway of the bedroom holding the phone and not listening to a girl named Sally Kline who was trying to tell me something she thought was urgent. The Second Coming could have waited.

  I wondered how much of it had been my fault. “Help me,” she’d said. I wondered if it would have made any difference if we really had talked, if I’d tried to understand it and had had the guts to try and work it out. But I’d had to be one muy tough hombre. I’d had to let her walk out that night and I’d had to bury the ache in whisky and the job and other women and not once even ask anybody if she were alive or dead.

  And now there she was on the floor like the armful of kindling after somebody’d tripped.

  It had happened right outside. It didn’t take Dashiell Hammett to figure that much of it without going down. She’d come in the sports car I’d heard, fast, screeching her rubber along the gutter. And then the second car had stopped, the bigger one, probably right behind her, and someone had caught her between third and home and had poked it into her ribs. Here, smack in the middle of Fannin’s own ball park.

  So whatever kind of mess she’d been in, she’d been coming to me. And then she’d let go without telling me who did it because she’d known she didn’t have too many words left and it had seemed more important to her to talk about something else.

  But she’d been coming here in the first place because she’d thought she needed me. I kept looking at her, standing there. I’d been as much help as a ruptured aorta. So now all I could do was find out what had happened; and maybe also find out some of the things I should have learned about her a long time before, the things that might have made everything different.

  All right, I said, I’ll do that, yes. And then I said I was sorry. Cathy, I said. Baby, I...

  I made myself come out of it. Cop, I said. Be cop again, Fannin. Who did it, cop? I lifted the phone.

  It was dead. I took the directory and looked up Kline, Sally. There were two of them. One of them lived on 200th Street. I dialed the one in Greenwich Village.

  She must have been poised over it like a kitten at a wounded housefly. The first ring didn’t even finish. And then she didn’t give me time to say hello.

  “Who.;, who is it?”

  “Easy,” I said, “Fannin.”

  “Oh, thank heaven! Are you drunk, Mr. Fannin? Is that it? Every time I call you— Oh, please don’t be drunk, Mr. Fannin.”

  “I’ll talk now.”

  “It’s Cathy, Mr. Fannin. It’s those two boys she went away with yesterday, I think. Those hoodlum ones. Oh, Lord, I told her she’d get into trouble. And the one who’s out there watching the house. I don’t know if he’s one of them or somebody else, but he goes away and then he comes back, it’s been all night now, and then the phone keeps ringing and when I pick it up there’s nobody there, and—”

  I pulled out the plug. She was dialing me every channel on the set. “Look,” I said, “I’ll come down. Are you in any trouble yourself?”

  “Oh, thank heaven. No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. But I’m scared, Mr. Fannin. That one outside, just standing there. In the alley across the street. I can see his shadow from the window. And I don’t know what to do. I wanted to call you earlier. I thought you would be better than the police, but then I didn’t know whether I should or not because you’re not married to her anymore, but I couldn’t think of anything else, and... can you do something, Mr. Fannin? Do you think you can?”

  “What’s your apartment number?”

  “Five. We’re on the top floor in front.”

  “Your lights on or ofl?”

  “I’ve got the bedroom lamp on, Mr. Fannin. But not the ones you can see from the street, if that’s what you mean. That’s how I can see him. He was there when I came in—that was about eleven—but he must think I’m in bed now. I can look out through the blinds in the dark.”

  “Keep it that way. Don’t put on any extra lights when I ring.”

  “But won’t he see you come in?”

  “There’s a front apartment below yours?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “What number?”

  “Three, I think. Yes.”

  “All right.”

  “But what are you—?”

  “Never mind that now. Look, I’ll be thirty minutes, more likely forty. You sit tight and keep your door locked. I mean that.”

  “Gosh, Mr. Fannin, you make it sound so—”

  “Never mind how I make it sound.” I wanted her to stay edgy and cautious until I got there. The duck outside seemed a pretty good bet to be watching for Cathy, but I didn’t know whether Sally Kline might be in any danger from whoever else was involved in it. Whatever in hell it was.

  “All right,” she told me hesitantly.

  I didn’t tell her about Cathy. She did not sound like the first girl you’d pick to share a rooftop with when the dam broke. “Sort the laundry or something,” I said again.

  “All right, Mr. Fannin.”

  I hung it up. The alarm clock said 3:49. Fifteen minutes. Maybe only ten. That would have been the time to get downstairs, when Cathy had first buzzed. So I’d sat here thinking it was some lush or other. Now I wasn’t going to find anything outside but frustrated mosquitoes who’d missed the last open window.

  I had to ease her leg aside to get through the door.

  There were stains along the floor in the hall, still wet. There were prints of her hand on the wall where she had had to brace herself. None of it looked real. It never does. It always looks like a promotion stunt for a cheap horror film where you follow the painted gore across the lobby to the ticket office. I went down the steps and out.

  No one was around. I hadn’t been expecting a B.P.O.E. convention.

  There was a red MG at the curb with the keys in the ignition, but the blood did not lead to it. It went off at an angle to the edge of the sidewalk about a dozen feet behind it. To where the second car I’d heard had probably pulled in behind her.

  There had been a rush of blood when the knife had come out. It had slowed quickly but you could have painted a country firehouse with what had spilled in those first seconds. If she’d fallen it must have been to her hands and knees, because it had hardly stained her coat.

  It was as easy to read as a scrawl in a latrine. It just made you sicker.

  She’d been in a jam or she wouldn’t have been coming here, but she hadn’t thought the trouble was the kind you can get dead over. She’d seen the second car and she’d known the person driving it She’d gotten out of the MG and walked back to talk things over with whoever it was. The poor kid had walked right into it.

  I tried to map the rest of it. She must have hung there a minute, long enough for the killer to decide she was dead or dying before he gunned off. Or had he seen her get up and start for my door first? Had he seen that and been just too gutless to go for her a second time?

  I hoped that was it. I hoped he had seen her make the d
oor and was having to sweat over whether she’d managed to tell me what it said on his dogtags. Oh, yeah. I hoped he was sweating over that enough so he figured he would have to get me next. I hoped he would try that, the son of a bitch.

  Yes, I said, try that. Come on, you son of a bitch.

  I was standing there in the empty street. Probably I looked like the neighborhood drunk. I must have, because the drunk from the next neighborhood pegged me for a brother the second he reeled around the corner. He let out a bellow like he’d found out what happened to Amelia Earhart and started circling the sidewalk for a landing, coming on full throttle. I went back to the MG and took out the keys. There was a celluloid case on the steering rod which said the car belonged to an Adam Moss of West 113th Street. I left that where it was, pocketed the keys and caught the drunk by the shoulders before he nose-dived the sixty or eighty feet to his shoe tops.

  “Buddy,” he said. “Frien’. Customer. You wanna buy a polishy? Sure, you wanna buy a polishy.” He was about fifty. He had gray hair cropped short and he was still very well dressed in spite of the two quarts he’d spilled on his tie. It was an expensive tie and there were probably two maids and a butler watching anxiously for him with a light in the window. “No policy,” I said. “Be nice and sleep it off in your own gutter, huh?”

  There was no point in asking him if he’d seen anything. He was too far gone. He wouldn’t be seeing anything but hideous pink snakes.

  “Extra speshal polishy,” he insisted. “New kind.” I would have let him go but it would have been like letting go of a piano from high up. “New polishy. Group shuishide plan. Why die wish strangers when you can die wish friends? We pick time, plaish, monuments. Monuments won’t wilt, won’t shrink, won’t shiver, Guar’raranteed. Painlish and inshtant death. Torture clause—”

  I caught him off balance and stepped away when the sidewalk wasn’t tilted. I’d tricked him. He hung there on a cord. “You hate me,” he decided then. “Jush how long have you hated me? When did it start? Jush tell me when it started?”

  I left that one for his head doctor. He’d have one at about forty bucks a session. The hall had not gotten any prettier but I’d have to leave that, too, for the cops who didn’t make forty bucks in two days. I went upstairs and inside.

  She did not have a purse. There was eighty-six cents in change in one of the pockets of her coat, plus a lipstick and a tiny chain with three keys. Two of the keys would be for the place on Perry Street, one for the main entrance and the other for the apartment. The third was for a mailbox lock.

  Her wallet was in her other pocket. She had twenty-four dollars in bills and an uncashed paycheck from the publishing house. There was a driver’s license still made out to Mrs. Catherine Fannin, a beat-up birth certificate for Catherine June Hawes, female, and a single ticket for Row E at the Cherry Lane Theater dated for a week from that night. There were folded sales slips from Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue and two deposit slips from her bank for small amounts. These said Catherine Hawes. There was a snapshot of me.

  I left everything. I went into the bathroom. I washed quickly, scrubbing the blood from my hands, shaved fast, brushed my teeth. I went into the bedroom, took off the G.I. slacks, changed into a tan suit. I took the modified sportsman’s Luger out of the bottom dresser drawer, removed it from its pocket holster, checked it, put it back in the sheath, clipped the whole thing over my belt and into my right rear pocket. I called Dan Abraham.

  It rang three times. His wife took it.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Wake him for me, will you, Helen?”

  “Harry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Must I?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a minute and then I could hear him groaning. He was an old Army friend and the only P.I. in town I trusted enough to ring in on it. We worked with each other from time to time when one or the other of us had a job too big to handle alone. He was still making unhappy noises when he found the mouthpiece.

  “It isn’t bad enough that I’m in the racket myself,” he said. “I’ve got to have friends in it, too. Why don’t we take up something where they let you sleep, Harry? Maybe I’ll try out for concert violinist someplace. You know anybody needs a good concert violinist who can move to his left? How about Kansas City? Sure. Hell, they got holes all over the infield—”

  “Dan, I’ve got a dead one.”

  He took his head out of the quilt then. “Yeah? You getting trigger-happy in your old age or did somebody dump it on your doorstep?”

  “Doorstep is close enough. It’s Cathy, Dan.”

  “Oh, no, Harry—”

  I could hear him telling Helen. We had spent ten or a dozen evenings together the year before. I heard Helen cry out.

  “Listen, Dan—”

  “Right here. Where are you?”

  “Home. Look, I’m going out on it. The girl she’d been living with just called me, worried about her. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “You want me to take it from over there?”

  “Right. Everything’ll be just the way it happened. Roughly 3:30, give or take five. Somebody knifed her on the street but she made it up. Give me an hour or so and then try to get Nate Brannigan at Homicide. Rouse him up if he’s off, his home number’s in the book on my desk. He’ll ride with me longer than most. I’ll call you when I get a chance. Up till then you don’t know where I am.”

  “You haven’t told me anyhow.”

  “And, Dan, if you see anything that doesn’t look kosher, you might square it away before they start pulling up the floor boards.”

  “Harry, you haven’t been seeing her lately?”

  I didn’t answer him. He knew better than that.

  “Delete that,” he said then. “Be on my way in six minutes. You going to leave it open?”

  “I’ll stick an extra set of keys under the mat in the outside hall.”

  “Right. And Harry—”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry, fella. If there’s anything else you want me to do? Or Helen maybe—”

  “Thanks, Dan. Nothing. I’ll leave the lights on. You’ll trip over her if you’re not looking.”

  I cradled it, went back into the living room, glanced at everything except Cathy. The two bourbons I’d poured were still sitting on the stand next to the chair. It would be a dumb sort of thing to have to explain, pouring one of them for an unidentified female sot who took five or seven minutes getting up the stairs and then turned out dead. I carried them into the kitchen, dumped them, washed the glasses. The bottle was still out but the cops would find that quick enough anyhow.

  I took the extra set of keys out of the desk. It had been Cathy’s set. I looked at her then, thinking it was probably for the last time. It was all there again. I bit down hard on it and went out.

  It followed me down. She’d be stiff before Dan got there. I was thinking about that and I was outside before I remembered I was holding the extra keys. I told myself to quit it. I turned back, opened the outside door and edged the two keys under the rubber.

  It was twenty-five minutes since I’d spoken to Sally Kline. It would probably take the night man ten more to unshuffle my Chevy from the loft in the garage around the corner, and I did not see a cab. I had promised the girl I’d be there in forty. I wondered if Mr. Adam Moss of West 113th Street would mind if I borrowed the MG. I wondered who Mr. Adam Moss was. I expected to find out soon.

  I was just contorting my hundred and ninety-seven pounds below the low wheel when she came around the corner. I got out again, fast, because this time it wasn’t any drunk’s mating call I heard. The cry was sick with agony or horror or both.

  She started to run toward me. She was an old woman and her hair was disheveled and it didn’t matter to her that her housecoat was flapping loose from the flimsy white nightgown she wore under it. She lost a slipper but she couldn’t bend for it, not with what she was carrying pressed against her breast.

  It was swaddled in a white b
lanket. The blanket had blood on it.

  I jerked open the door on the sidewalk side of the MG. “Here!” I told her. “Quick!”

  “Oh, thank the Lord, thank the Lord! Any hospital, any hospital at all. She fell out of the window. On the fourth floor. She—”

  There was no movement in the blanket, no sound. “She what?”

  The woman had started to get into the car. “Why, she’s always out there at night,” she said. “She was just playing. She—”

  I had taken her by the elbow. I eased her around firmly before she could get seated and lifted a corner of the blanket. The cat was an expensive angora. Its head was bloodied up some but it had a good seven or eight other lives ahead of it. I kept propelling the woman around until I could swing the door shut. Then I ducked around to the other side of the car.