Текст книги "Epitaph For A Tramp"

Автор книги: David Markson

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

CHAPTER 9

Brannigan didn’t ask me how the money had gotten there. It was just as well. For the moment all I could think of was that I’d eaten my oatmeal every day that week without making a single naughty face, so maybe the Good Fairy had left it as a reward. I grunted something unsociable and said I’d be over fast. Brannigan said he’d bet on it.

Actually he would have lost. I had a stop to make first.

Estelle was still inside. I called so long through the door, took the eerie silent elevator down to the lobby and walked toward the MG. From across the street it looked as if some industrious member of the city’s overworked traffic force had ticketed it.

It was only a handbill. Men and women everywhere,it said, make sure today of the salvation of your souls. Are you living a spiritual life or a carnal life? Be saved now!I tossed it into the glove compartment. Let Adam Moss worry about such things, if and when he got the car back. For myself I was more interested in my dirty drawers.

Obviously the killer had been inside after I’d left. Framing me to cover himself would be his only possible out if he thought Cathy had talked before she died.

He.Four hours on it and I came up with a personal pronoun. I wasn’t even sure I had the right gender. Her, maybe. It.

I wondered if Moss was going to have any notions. I was going to find out just about then.

I went up Riverside Drive, cruising more slowly than Bran-nigan would have liked. My broken head would have liked it a lot slower than that. A morning haze was trying to overextend its visa along the Jersey shore across the Hudson, but the sun was cutting it quickly. It was going to be another scorcher.

Moss’s address would fall somewhere between the Drive and upper Broadway. A new Caddy was pulling away just short of his corner and I nosed the MG in. There would have been room for a fleet of us.

Across the street a junior-grade Eddie Bogardus of perhaps fourteen was hacking away at the seat of a park bench with a knife of the sort they outlawed about five years back. He saw me watching him.

“Don’t you know a mean cop you could practice on with that thing?”

“Drop dead twice,” he told me indifferently.

The place I wanted was a rundown apartment building of six or seven stories, several doors up from the Drive. Moss’s registration listed him for 3-G but there were no names on any of the bells and no letters either, merely numbers. The vestibule door was open and hooked back. Behind it a couple of unshaded 25-watt bulbs were trying unsuccessfully to make the long narrow lobby look like something other than the esophagus of a submerged whale.

Moss would not have a full apartment ofhis own. It was one of those buildings in which the original railroad flats had been broken up into separate singles, where they sold you one room for yourself and you got to use the John and the kitchen if the other half-dozen people along the corridor happened to oversleep that morning. The landlords got away with the deal because of all the tight-budgeted Columbia University kids from around the corner.

The hall marked 3was around to the right in the rear on the main floor. It was exactly seven o’clock when I rang the bell near the outside door. I had to wait a fall minute and then I drew a beautiful young Chinese girl with an armfal of potted plant who wasn’t interested in me at all except to let me hold the door.

“Moss?” I said after her.

“Last room on the right,” she called over her shoulder. I stood there a moment, watching to see if she had on one of those slit skirts that Chinese girls always wear. I wondered why they always do that. Not that I had any complaints. This one had good legs and I watched them until she turned into the lobby.

The doors along the corridor were marked with peeling gilt letters. I found G and rapped twice. The door behind me opened while I was standing there and a face poked itself out. It was a woman’s face, about forty years older and not too much longer than Seabiscuit s. The face stared at me, probably wondering if I’d brought the hay. I stared back. Finally the woman grunted and went away.

I rapped on Moss’s door again, harder this time.

I heard bedsprings, then footsteps and what I judged to be unpleasant muttering. The bolt snapped from inside. “For crying out loud, what time is—?”

I looked at Adam Moss. He was a kid, eighteen or nineteen at most. He was husky and good-looking, with a mop of curly brown hair. He was wearing white boxer shorts and a pair of shoulders that the young Max Baer might have envied. He was patently annoyed.

“Moss?”

“Yeah. Who’re you? I don’t know you—”

I had my wallet in my hand and I flashed it. “You want to step back inside?”

He glanced at the card and then back at me, puzzled. “Police?”

And then his face brightened. Adam Moss grinned at me as if I’d just told him he’d earned his first varsity letter.

“Hey, that’s great. That’s sure what I call fast action!” He glanced at his watch. “Gee, not even five hours since I reported it. Where is it? You bring it back, officer? It wasn’t wrecked, was it? Come in, come in!”

He was beaming. My one lead. My only lead. I sat down on the kid’s rumpled bed and took a cigarette. I would have been · happier with a cyanide inhaler but I’d left it in my other suit.

“You leave the keys in it, Moss?”

“Yeah. Like I told them when I called. I parked it around midnight, up on Broadway near 111th, and then I had a couple of beers with some of the guys from school in the West End bar. I guess it was around 2:15 or so when I realized I’d forgotten them. We ran down, but you could see it was gone even before we got to the place. Boy, I was pretty worried for a while. What a dumb stunt. My old man would have booted me one. He just bought it for me last month. Can I get dressed and get it now? Is it here or do I have to pick it up someplace?”

“You never ran into a girl named Catherine Hawes?”

“What? Who?”

“Hawes?”

“No, why? She the one who had the car? You didn’t tell me – it isn’t smashed up or anything, is it?”

“Runs like a top. I use your phone?”

“Yeah, sure.” He gestured but I had already seen it. “Say, what do you mean, runs like a… you been driving it or something? What’s all this about a girl?”

“You call the local precinct?”

“Of course,” he said. He was eyeing me uncertainly.

I dialed Central and asked for 103rd Street. When I got the desk I said, “Hello, my name is Adam Moss, 113th Street. I called last night about 2:30 to report a stolen car. I wonder if you’ve gotten anything on it yet?”

He asked me the make and license number. I told him and he said to hang on.

Adam Moss was scowling at me. “Hey, what is all this?”

“Just checking.”

“Checking what? Now you look here, friend—”

The desk sergeant came back on. “Nothing yet, Mr. Moss. If s pretty early, but the listing has gone out on it. We’ll let you know if we find it.”

“Thanks.”

Adam Moss had his hands on his hips. “Relax,” I told him. “The car’s okay. I’m a EL, not a regular officer.” I showed him the card again and this time he stopped to read it. “There’s no trouble, Moss, but you might have had some if you hadn’t called in as soon as you did. A girl took it. She was in a hurry and she must have spotted the keys when she came out of one of the hotels up here. An hour and a half later she was killed.”

“Say, now—”

“The police will be checking you sooner or later. You go back to that bar after you found out it was gone?”

“Yeah, sure, that’s where I called from. The guys were with me. The bartender knows me too.”

“You’re all right then. The car’s around the corner but I’ll have to turn it over. They’ll probably hold it for a day or two until they get you squared away.”

“Well for crying out loud, my heap in a murder case. Isn’t that something?”

I had opened the door. I took two singles out of my wallet and tossed them on his dresser. “Gas,” I told him.

“Say, you don’t have to do that. Thanks. Who’s the girl, anyhow? She good looking?”

“Aren’t they always?”

Seabiscuit opened the stall across the way again as soon as I started out. I turned and winked at her. She slammed the door and something fell inside the room.

Young Moss was grinning at me. “Mishugganah,”hesaid. He had a good smile and he was a nice healthy kid who had most likely never seen the inside of a squad room in his life. It would have been no trouble to hate him for it.

“See you, Mr. Fannin. Thanks again. Boy, wait’ll I tell my old man.”

I went along the corridor and out into the lobby. The Chinese girl was coming back. She had dumped her plant and was carrying a man’s suit about Moss’s size on a cleaner’s hanger. I waited until she went past.

“Say, uh, just out of curiosity, you think maybe you could tell me why all Chinese girls wear dresses with—”

She had stopped and turned toward me. “Yes?”

“Never mind. I was being silly.”

I was grinning at her and she looked at me vaguely. Then she smiled. “It’s out of deference to old custom, obviously. Why, don’t you approve?”

She had a voice like a small bell tinkling under water. I told her I approved in spades and she laughed. I went out of there wondering if Moss’s old man knew about that personal valet service. In my day at school I’d had to room with a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound reserve fullback named Irving.

I took my time walking back to the Drive. I supposed I’d expected exactly what I’d gotten from Moss. I knew I’d expected it. I didn’t have a gun. I’d walked in on two of them already that morning, and I wouldn’t have rapped on the door to the vestry at St. John’s Cathedral without the Luger if I’d seriously thought I might run into a third.

I cut through Central Park and made it across town in the MG without getting squashed by any of the large economy-size models. It was just 7:42 when I swung off Lexington toward my apartment building. I didn’t go all the way down the block. I didn’t go down the block at all. I jerked the car over to the side just after I made the turn and pulled in at a fire plug. I sat there for a minute, watching him.

Anybody could stare at the house. At least a dozen other people were doing it, either at the building itself or at the three squad cars parked out front. Most of them were clustered on the other side of the street but there were also two or three near the door, talking to the plain-clothes cop on duty who wouldn’t be telling them anything but to move along. But the one I cared about was a good hundred yards up from the others, standing alone almost directly across from me.

He was wearing a brown tweed sports jacket that Brooks Brothers had never been ashamed of, and the lizard briefcase under his left arm would have gone for close to a hundred dollars in any shop on the same avenue. In the light of day the crewcut took ten years off his age, even with the gray at the temples. His tie was Countess Mara or Bronzini and every bit as sleek as the stained one he’d probably tossed under the bed a few minutes after I’d seen him that morning.

I was over there next to him before he noticed me, and then his head did an almost imperceptible nervous shudder before he turned fully. But if it should have been an ace of a hangover there wasn’t any other sign of it.

“You selling many of those policies?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It isinsurance?”

“Why, yes, only I don’t seem to recall—”

“Must have been at the lodge. I’ll tell you though, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. Maybe you’re right. Fellow shouldn’t go round with such inadequate coverage, certainly not a family man like myself. I’m afraid I’ve misplaced your card, but if you could spare another I’d—”

“Why certainly/’ I stood there while he slipped a calfskin wallet out of his jacket and fumbled in it. “Spragway,” he was saying. “Ethan J.” I’d already looked at him so I let him look at me while I read the card. It listed a Lexington Avenue agency address in one corner and a Park Avenue home address in the other. The home number would be only two or three blocks from where we were.

“I’m frightfully sorry, but I don’t seem to recall your name at all.” He had decided to frown slightly.

“Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes.”

“How curious. Just like the philosopher.”

“Doesn’t bother me if he doesn’t mind. Something going on down the block there?”

“Evidently. Well, yes, good to have seen you again, Hobbes. Afraid I’ve got to be running.”

“You didn’t notice anything when you passed here last night?”

“Last night?” Spragway frowned fully now. “Here? What makes you suggest that I—?”

“Come off it, mister. You were here all right, drunk as an owl. A little before four. I asked you if you noticed anything.”

He got indignant. “My good man, if I happened to come down this street last night, or for that matter any night, it would be because I live only two blocks away – as you saw on my card and which, it strikes me now, is no business of yours. I am not accustomed to being called an alcoholic. Good day, Mr. Hobbes.”

He turned on his heel and I let him go, the only insurance man in captivity who ever let a prospect slip by without taking an address and phone number. I supposed a respectable drunk would have a lot of practice deliberately not remembering people he’d met when he was boozed up. Even one whose eyes were perfectly clear four hours later and whose breath smelled of nothing stronger than Ipana.

I stood there sucking air through my teeth and thinking about nothing while he disappeared around the corner.

CHAPTER 10

The plainclothes dick in front of my building started toward me with an expression of bored annoyance when I eased the MG between two of the squad cars, all three of which were double parked. He reached the curb being so weary of the stupidity of the unenlightened masses that it was killing him.

“This look like a parking field, Mac?”

“I could have sworn.”

“Move it! Move it!”

“How you going to watch it if I do that? Its evidence. I was even thinking maybe we ought to wrap it in tissue paper or something.”

He grimaced sourly. “Funny man. They been biting their nails upstairs there, waiting for all the jokes. Lets see it, huh?”

I showed him the wallet. He glanced at it and then nodded.

They had cleaned up the blood, or probably they’d let the superintendent do it after they’d gotten their pictures. A well-clipped poodle was sniffing at the sawdust. He went off, limping a little in the left forepaw.

The door was wedged open with a folded tabloid. BERRA HITS TWO, YANKS… something or other, it said. When I turned at the top of the stairs I could see that the apartment door was open also. There was another detective in the hall, a gaunt, underfed younger specimen of the breed with a neck as long as a beer can.

“Fannin,” I told him.

He turned to relay the name inside but he didn’t get to say anything. Young cops rarely do. Brannigan came into the doorway, a beefy, red-faced, Sequoia-size man I’d once seen get jumped by a trio of longshoremen during a rackets case. He hadn’t had time to get his gun unsheathed and so he’d used his fists. He’d left the three of them propped unconscious against a wall like so much garbage. His tie was pulled down now and he was looking at me in a way that was supposed to make me stand on one foot with my head hanging. He got over that in a minute, not saying anything. He jerked his thumb disgustedly and went in.

A hawk-nosed medical examiner I had met once or twice was just leaving. “I’ll send the wagon,” he told Brannigan. He had to step across the body to get out.

Someone had covered her with my raincoat, probably Dan. He was sitting near a window in his shirtsleeves, dark-eyed and unshaven and looking sleepy. He nodded, smoking.

There were dead flash bulbs in a couple of ashtrays and one or two drawers were open. Print powder was dusted around. The laundry bag was on the floor and the money was stacked up in piles of different denominations on the desk. Home. The place looked as inviting as the rumpus room at Buchenwald.

There was one other detective with Brannigan, a lieutenant named Coffey who was totally bald. The skin under his eyes was pouchy and discolored. Possibly too much night duty had done that, I didn’t know. But it hadn’t put the glaze of menacing resentment in his eyes that you saw the minute you looked at him. That would be part of the personality and it was probably why he was a cop. A grand cop, and I was glad he was there. If we had to use a rubber hose on anybody he’d have two in each pocket.

I said a single filthy word which no one paid any attention to. Finally I went in and walked around to the kitchen and stuck my fingers into five glasses and picked up the bottle of Jack Daniels I’d left out earlier. I carried the bottle and the glasses back into the living room. I poured myself about an inch of the sour mash and drank it straight. I poured myself one more, not drinking it, and left the bottle open. “Fannin’s back,” I said. “Party time.”

Coffey took one. No one else did. I went across the room and pulled out a straight chair and sat down where I would not have to face her. Part of her was sticking out, like spillage from a dropped pocketbook.

Brannigan still had not said anything. He was giving me a minute. He had been on the force for twenty years but he could still drink his morning coffee without somebody’s blood in it. I supposed I might as well get to it anyhow.

“Can somebody take it down? I don’t much want to have to repeat it later.”

“The kid can,” he said. “Pete?”

The young flagpole came in from the hall. He already had his notebook out. Brannigan walked across and closed the door and came back. He sat down in the good chair, slumping forward and tilting his hat across his eyes. Dan was still by the window and the kid sat next to him.

“No questions until I’m done, huh? I know how to tell it.”

“Tell it,” Brannigan said.

I did. I gave it to them in detail. I skipped the things Cathy had said, knowing that Brannigan would ask me about that afterward anyhow, and I left out some of the things Estelle had told me, which were purely personal. I didn’t mention Ethan J. Spragway, but I wasn’t sure why, except that the whole business was probably irrelevant. I didn’t make any bones about the kind of life Cathy had been leading, or about why we’d split up. I suggested that it would be a good move to stake out the Perry Street apartment on the chance that Duke might nose around there during the day. I had been talking nineteen minutes when I finished.

“What did the girl say when she came through the door, Harry?”

“She was dying, Nate. She knew she was. She told me she was sorry about things.”

“That all?”

“That’s all.”

Brannigan sat up and pushed his hat back. “Somebody followed her here from wherever she’d gone after two o’clock. He knifed her for forty-two thousand dollars. And then he came upstairs and made you a present of it.”

I didn’t answer him. “The rest will be pure speculation, Pete,” he said. “You can cut it there.” He jerked his tie lower across his shirt. “I hate to begin hot days with guesswork, Harry. But you might as well.”

“No premeditation,” I said.

“Meaning?”

“He was looking for the money, not trouble. Maybe he thought he could talk her out of going to anybody else about it, I don’t know. Anyhow all he wanted was more conversation on the subject. And probably she had the stuff in her hand when she walked back to the guy’s car. I don’t know in what, but the guy’d seen it when she first went to him.”

“Canvas sack.” Brannigan motioned and I saw it on the floor at the side of the desk.

“All right, she’s carrying that. He wants it, and bad, but this time she tells him to make his pile some other way. Maybe this sets it off, maybe something else, but either way it’s quick, so probably they’d had the start of an argument about it before. And then they’re not arguing anymore. The guy grabs the sack but at the same time he sees that she’s not dead. He panics, but he hasn’t got the guts to stab her again. So what does he do?”

“You’re telling it.”

“Okay, I am. So he sees her get up and make the bell, and a minute later he hears the buzzer. He gets out of there like a shot.”

“With the money?”

“Sure with the money. But he’s probably not even shifted into third before it hits him. A fat lot of good it’s going to do him to scram if she’s lived long enough to talk. For all he knows she could have come up to borrow a Band-Aid. Hell, she may live to be ninety, and either way he’s damned sure got to find out. He comes back and watches the place. I come out twice, and the second time I take off in the MG.”

“And he comes over and walks in. Through the door you’ve conveniently forgotten to lock.”

“Hell, Nate, I left the keys under the rubber for Dan.”

Brannigan didn’t say anything.

“So what else?” I said. “The minute he gets inside he knows he’s done murder. He also knows that if she’s talked you’ll have him on it so fast it will make him nauseated. But if he plants the money here it’s my word against his – and I’m the one with the dead horse in the bathtub.”

“Fine,” Brannigan said. He had taken out a cigar. “But if she hasn’t talked he’s throwing the money away.”

“Wouldn’t you? You going to take the odds that she didn’t spill? Standing here with the body on the floor and me possibly on my way to the police at that very moment? You leave the coin, Nate. You leave it and you pray like hell at the same time that she didn’t talk so you’ll be out of it completely. You can’t get a much better bargain for the price.”

Coffey had gone to the bottle. “You’ve got the killer’s impulses figured out pretty clearly for pure speculation, Fannin,’’ he said sarcastically. “Any of this based on anything you know and haven’t told us, maybe?”

I let the sarcasm ride. “It’s based on what didn’t happen.”

“Namely?”

“Namely that the guy didn’t come up and try to take me out myself while I was still here. A pro wouldn’t take the chance that I could tag him for it. It’s got to be somebody who didn’t intend to do it to start with, and who chickened out fast after it happened.”

“How do we know he saw her get up?” Coffey said. “Suppose she lay there a minute. Suppose the guy drove off and left her for dead?”

“Say what you mean. You mean there wasn’t anybody out there at all.”

“I didn’t say that, Fannin.”

I turned to Brannigan. “Look, Nate, if there’s anybody else in it but me it’s got to be my way. He sees her come in because he comes in himself. If the guy drives off like Coffey says then there’s no point in putting him out there to start with, because it means I’ve got the dough all along. It kills the motive for anybody else. It means I knife her on my own doorstep and then come back up and wait while she crawls up after me. She’d do that. And I’d leave the loot stashed away with my sweat socks. I’m clever like that. Just like I’d have Dan call you. Hell, I’d call the papers, too. I’d print invitations. Come see Fannin electrocute himself. One wire in his ear and the other up his back. Free smoked mussels for everybody.”

“Fannin, I didn’t accuse you,” Coffey said.

“Who the hell did you have in mind, W. C. Fields?”

“Look, Fannin – bug off. The body’s in your apartment. The money’s here. The victim’s your ex-wife. So you come back three or four hours after you should have, tossing off some story on pure spec, and you get touchy if I question any part of it. Well, you can shove your touchiness, friend. You greasy private Johns give me a swift pain anyhow. If I made a list of every time one of you meddlers make us take three weeks to do what we could have done in three hours the department wouldn’t have enough paper to type it on. For my money you still got a lot of scrubbing to do before you stop smelling bad.”

If Brannigan hadn’t been there Coffey probably would have spit on the carpet. He sat there eyeing me like something in the gutter he’d stepped in on the way to work.

“Funny,” I told him, “I’ve got a list, too. Not as significant as yours, Coffey, just something I think about when I run out of comic books. People who’ve given me kicks, added an extra dimension to my prosaic life. Guys like, say, Einstein, Gandhi, Adlai Stevenson, Toscanini, Willie Mays – people like that, you know? And you know something else? There ain’t a cop on the list. Not one.”

“You’re funny as sick people, Fannin. Be funny, what I said still goes. Who the hell are you that I got to wear kid gloves? You somebody’s favorite nephew all of a sudden? Chew nails, huh?”

It wouldn’t get any pleasanter so I let it drop. His wife had to live with it, not me. Probably some of it was my own fault anyhow. They weren’t setting any departmental records to get her off the floor over there. The room was still for a minute.

“You girls about finished?” Brannigan said.

Coffey grunted.

“Take a drink,” I told him. Mine was on the floor near me and I picked it up and stared at it.

Brannigan made a clicking noise with his teeth. “All right, it’s as handy as we can establish for now.” He turned to the stenographer. “Pete, get out that description on Sabatini first of all. And run a check on that Adam Moss, too; see if there’s any file on him just in case. You might as well get started now. Call in on the way and put through the stake-out for that Perry Street address, my authority.”

“Right, Captain.”

“And take the money in. Report the recovery of it, but tell the insurance mob it’s impounded indefinitely. They’ll probably be on your neck in four minutes. And put through the pick-up on that cousin of Sabatini’s in Troy.”

“Yes, sir.” I watched him load the satchel. He threw a half salute like a scarecrow flapping in a breeze and when Brannigan returned it he went out. Brannigan got up and walked into the kitchen. Water ran into a glass.

“So it all hinges on who she’d go to,” he said when he came out. “Whose doorbell she’d push when she found herself in a jam. No family besides the mother and sister?”

“None.”

“Then I suppose we check with the Kline girl first, get a list of everybody she can tie in with the deceased.” He stared at Cathy for a minute, then at me. “It’d seem like there’d be a fair-sized list of names.”

“And no-names.”

“One-night stands?”

“Something like that.”

He cursed once, chewing on the cigar. It wasn’t burning. “You want to call the Kline girl?”

“I’m working with the department?”

“You don’t think maybe it’s about time?”

“Nuts,” Coffey said.

“You got a problem, Art?”

“Damn it, yeah. There’s nothing in the book says we got to play potsie with some hot-shot peeper just because he used to be married to the dame.”

“Report me,” Brannigan said. “I haven’t had a reprimand in fourteen years. The commissioner probably stays up nights worrying that I’m getting complacent. You going to make that call, Harry?”

“Right now,” I said. I dug out the slip of paper with the Gramercy Park address and number. My hand was no more than six inches from the phone when it started to ring.

“Let me,” Brannigan said. “If somebody’s checking on what happened to his investment it might just relax him into a slip or two later on if he figures you’re not running loose.”

He lifted it as it started its third ring. He said, “Brannigan, Homicide,” and then nothing else. All of us were close enough to hear the click and then the dead buzzing.

He stood there for a minute, holding the receiver and looking at the chewed end of his cigar. “Don’t you just love a son of a bitch who’d tease like that?” he said then.