Текст книги "Epitaph For A Tramp"

Автор книги: David Markson

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

That was when I noticed that the heat was getting to Brannigan also. He was sweating badly and his face was flushed. We heard a voice say, “Get that, will you, Henry,” and then when Henry opened the door and said, “Who intrudes?’’ Brannigan did not ask for Leeds the way he had asked for Sommers or Neva. He had his wallet in his hand and he lifted it with a tired gesture and said, “Police.”

The man in the doorway did almost nothing. He squinted out at us behind thick glasses as if he had not heard us correctly, and then he turned to repeat the word over his shoulder. “Police, dads?” he said curiously.

He didn’t get an answer. There were about six quick footsteps and then there was the sound of a chair clattering to the floor. A second after that a window went up, hard, jarring the weights inside its molding. The man in the doorway had blocked us unintentionally, but I had a hunch the elbow I planted in his liver would remind him to be less careless in the future. I saw the second man’s back as he cleared the window ledge, which was about twenty feet away in the far wall of a rear room, and then he was out of sight and rattling down a fire escape.

Twenty feet. A man with my stride, or Brannigan’s, can cover the distance from a standstill in approximately a second. We both started to, but neither of us quite made the window. Because the second hadn’t fully elapsed when the sound began, and when it came we were both rooted like snow-heavy birches, bent forward and frozen.

It was a man’s scream. I had heard one exactly like it a dozen years before in North Africa. Press me and I could tell you the date, the name of the crossroads, exactly what I’d been doing when it happened. The G.I. had been sleeping off a binge on the edge of a ditch. When they’d backed the tank off him you could have peeled up what was left of his legs to wrap your holiday mailing.

Brannigan looked out first. He said, “Oh, God, oh, my God,” and a priest giving final rites would have had a voice just as hushed. After that he choked and was fighting to keep himself from vomiting and you could hardly blame him for that.

The man had gone down one flight of the fire escape toward the narrow yard below and then had changed his mind. There was an alley behind the building which faced on the next block and he had decided to go over there. There was a spiked fence between the yard and the alley, with its spikes sticking up about a foot above the crossbar which held them in place. The spikes were about an inch thick at the bar, tapering sharply to four-sided points from there upward. Evidently the man had climbed the railing at the second landing and tried to jump it.

Whoever he was, athletics obviously hadn’t been his long suit. Half of him had gotten across.

He was hanging face-downward with his arms and trunk over the far side and his legs toward us. The spikes were set closely enough together so that he had caught three of them in the bowels. They were sticking up through the back of his pants like dirty fingers through a moth-eaten scarf.

The shoelace he had tripped over was still swinging loose.

CHAPTER 15

I climbed out. Brannigan was turning back to the man called Henry as I went, but Henry was not leaving. He wanted a look, too.

He got it as I was climbing down. From the way it tore him up, I gathered that the lad on the fence would be a grief he’d find hard to sustain. “Man,” I heard him say, “like shishkebob!”

I got down there. “Any point in an ambulance?” Brannigan said.

“Hearse, Nate.”

The deceased had been about thirty-five and a redhead, but you could not tell much from his face about anything else. He had bitten a deep gash into his tongue, which was hanging out like an empty mitten, and his eyes were bulging.

I stood there for a minute. He was impaled at just about the level of my shoulders and he did not look heavy. He would have leaked, however.

I glanced up. “You want me to?”

Brannigan’s face was drawn. The other man was still gaping. He was small and thin-faced and maybe forty, and his lenses looked thick enough to double as casters. “Leave him,” Brannigan said finally. “Wait a second.”

He moved away from the window. There was already a fly or two at the man I supposed had been Arthur Leeds. I doubted that he was the boy who had killed Cathy, since he would not have been just waiting around for us that way, so I shooed the flies off.

Brannigan came back. He had a balled-up tan bedspread in his hands and he tossed it down to me. He was right enough about that. There were only eight or ten windows looking out that way, but sooner or later someone’s favorite aunt was going to open one of them to sprinkle the geraniums. Some of them should have shot up when he’d screamed. Probably there was a quiz show on.

I billowed out the spread and threw it over him, then ripped it across some of the spikes so that it would not slip off. I left him like that.

The other man was slumped in a straight chair when I came up. He was wearing a red and gray plaid jacket that some peddler’s stout horse was happier for the lack of, and a black string tie which disappeared into the top of his pants. That left all of four inches of the tie showing, since the pants ended under his armpits somewhere. He had taken off his glasses and was holding them, and it seemed to have finally gotten through to him. His face was the color of soggy oatmeal.

Brannigan was standing over him with his hands on his hips. “Leeds, man, oh, yes,” the man was muttering. “Arthur indeed. Like wow, what a fadeout!”

“Damn it,” Brannigan said, “what was it all about? What made him run?”

“Sugar, man, you’re the flatfoot. I just spin tunes, you know? Like I mean, you ought to know what he bugged out for.”

Brannigan hit him. He brought the back of his hand across the man’s jaw from right to left and the man sucked in his breath with a sound like a punctured accordion. He scrambled backward, losing the chair. It started to go over and he caught it with one hand, dancing behind it and waving his glasses hysterically. “Don’t, man!” he screeched. “Like don’t! Sugar, it ain’t none of mine! Like I couldn’t whistle note-one of that tune, that’s for real, except that he just now told me. I just ambled over to spin some lyrics, you know? Like right there – there’s my notebook on the piano, see? Oh, yes, oh, yes, Henry Hen-shaw, like it’s got my name on the cover. Like I wouldn’t even blow my mother-in-law’s coin for that stuff, you dig me? I ain’t been hooked for lo, these ten years. I—”

His voice trailed off as Brannigan stood up. Brannigan’s jaw was set and his lips were tight. He grunted disgustedly. “What did he have? Had Narcotics been on to him?”

“The real goods, oh, yes. Far out. The mighty H, like. He announced they had been bugging him bad. They picked him up two weeks ago but he was clean. But like he was terrified, man. He just got in this new horn full. That cat on the fence, you know? I mean not me. All this is just what he mentioned in passing. True, dad, that’s straight. I don’t lay a hand on hide nor hair, you know? Like I don’t even want to hear any of that chatter, not Henry Hiram Henshaw!”

“He push it?”

“I’m weak on details, man. Like he’s in the middle someplace, kind of a transfer point, you take my meaning? Like some cat dumps it into his pocket and another cat lifts it out again. He gets maybe two bills a week for this inconvenience, like it’s better than they leave it in a locker in Grand Central. He—”

“Where is it? Where’s he keep it?”

“In yon head. Like that’s what he informed me. You dig how calm and cool I’m telling you, don’t you, man? Like I mean, sugar, why ought I not? I’m just here to spin a tune, oh, yes, oh, yes. If I just happen to be coincidentally cognizant of the feet that the cat stashes his nasty old heroin under the sink, like, that saves labor all around, does it not? Doesn’tit?”

Brannigan did not answer him. He nodded to me and I went into the latrine and felt around on the underside of the sink. It was taped into place but it pulled away easily. It was a carton about the size of two packs of Pall Malls end to end, maybe a little more thick. I brought it out.

Brannigan’s mouth was still set. The carton was sealed with transparent tape and he tore it open. He glanced inside.

Henshaw giggled, clutching the back of his chair. “Like you want to be sure of the contents,” he said, “you sniff it. Ha! Like you could be the coolest cat in coptown, man. Hahahaha!

Brannigan walked across the room and set the carton on top of the piano. It was a fairly new upright, probably the only item in the apartment which did not come with the rent. Everything else had that same twenty-seven-tenants-and-still-holding-its-own look of the stuff in Sally’s place.

When Brannigan turned back he was taking out a set of cuffs. Henshaw had just gotten seated again. He jerked himself upright with his knees drawn up and his heels clutching the front edge of the seat. “Hey, man, like ain’t I been coming on real cooperative like? True now? Am I to be a victim of circumstance? I, Henshaw, innocent bystander? Like I’ve got my rights—”

Brannigan ignored him. He yanked Henshaw’s left wrist toward him and clicked the bracelet into place, then locked the other ring around a narrow steam-heat pipe which ran up to the ceiling next to the chair.

“Like help, now,” Henshaw kept protesting. “For crying out loud, dad, I want a lawyer. I want ten lawyers. I want my agent. You can’t bug me like this, I’m—”

Brannigan took him by the lapels. “Shut up,” he said. He did not raise his voice. “Just shut up and don’t say another word. If you’re clear you’ll get offand that will be the end of it. But in the meantime you’re going to sit here until I straighten this thing out and you’re not going to be any bother. You’re not going to talk unless you’re spoken to. You’re going to be seen and not heard. You’re not even going to breathe too heavily. You got that?”

Henshaw gulped helplessly. He glanced toward me but I did not have anything for him. He opened his mouth, had a second thought, said nothing. He stared at the cuffs as glumly as a stripteaser confronting a low thermometer.

Brannigan had picked up a phone across the room. He dialed a number. When he got it he said, “This is Nate Brannigan, Central. Give me somebody big in Narcotics, will you? Somebody who knows what’s current. Charley Peakes, maybe…Sullivan’ll do. Thanks.”

He looked back to Henshaw while he was waiting. “Where was Leeds last night?”

“We were blowing, your majesty, sir,” Henshaw said bitterly. “This joint over on Second Street. We’re there four nights a week, you know?”

“How late?”

“We retired early, your highness. One A.M., your kingship. We had another session scheduled for aprèsthat, but Leedsie wasn’t coming on too cool. Sir. Like he was all shook up on this police bit, comprenez vous?He kept flatting. What occurs if I got to go to the head here? I am like sometimes prone to have complications with my kidneys. They—”

Brannigan had gotten his connection. “Brannigan, Sully. Fine. Listen, an Arthur Leeds, Jones Street – there be a reason why he’d take a dive out a window rather than talk to two cops at the front door?”

The Narcotics man had a gravel voice and I caught a few random words as he talked. He went on for a minute or two and Brannigan frowned once or twice. “Yeah,” he said finally, “working on something else entirely. Just walked in on it. Yeah, dead. No, that’s all right, Sully, I’ll call. But I’ve got what reads like eight or ten thousand dollars’ worth of the stuff sitting on a piano here, so you can send a pick-up on that. I’ve got a pal of his cuffed to a pipe also, name of Henshaw. Might be a delivery, I’m not sure, but I’ll leave him for your boys at the same time. No, never mind, I’ll get a precinct wagon for the body. Right. You want to give me a switch? Thanks. See you in church, Sully.”

He turned back to me while he was waiting for his transfer. “They’ve been sweating him out for months,” he said, “trying to get a make on his contacts. Some bonehead rookie picked him up by mistake two weeks ago and they figured the whole thing was shot. If Henshaw here isn’t their boy it’s dead now completely. Leeds was a heavy traffic point.”

“Me!” Henshaw screamed. He clattered his cuffs. “Hey, now, man, like I declared, I was just here to spin a—”

Brannigan got his other call. “Brannigan, Central,” he said. He gave the Jones Street address. “Corpse impaled on a fence, accident while fleeing interrogation. Central operation. A wagon, one car. No, nothing else, it’s a Narcotics mix. They’re on the way. Right, I’ll be here. Yes.”

He hung up and glanced my way again. “Twice,” he said. “Twice in one morning. That punk through the shop window and now this. Damn it.”

I didn’t say anything. He stood there a minute, staring at nothing, and then he dialed once more. He was looking rotten. “Brannigan,” he said. “Get me Pete Weller in my office.”

I sat down across from Henshaw and took a cigarette. It was my last one.

“Me, Pete,” Brannigan said. “What’s with the Hawes sheet? Coffey make that hotel check? Yeah, I expected as much. You match up the Bogardus story with what came out of Troy? Right. What about the run-down on Fannin’s block? That too, huh? Hospital report on Sabatini? Well, that’s something, at least. What’s on red MG’s? Oh, sweet damn. No, give it to me now, just read them down so I can see if any of the locations sound interesting—”

He listened expressionlessly to something for several minutes. “Hell,” he said finally. “All right, yeah, tell him to keep checking in. No, all looks like a big bust. Yeah. Stick on it. So long.”

He put the phone back and looked at me. “Last Monday I had three different tips on the same horse,” he said somberly. “Three. Thirty bucks I put down, money the wife doesn’t even know I’ve got. You know where the horse comes in? I should have known what kind of week it was going to be.”

“All of it?”

“All of it. Coffey couldn’t get a tumble at any of the hotels. About sixty different overnights and any names in the bunch could have been Sabatini and the girl. The plainclothesmen I had checking your street for possible witnesses got nothing at all, a couple of people might have heard tires screech around three-thirty but nobody bothered to look out of any windows. Sabatini’s all right, but his version of the story pairs up with the other punk’s – no variations, no loose ends to make anything of. All we’ve got are red MG’s. You know how many of them? Forty-one, for hell’s sake. Twenty-eight cops and thirteen hack drivers saw vehicles of that description on the streets last night, but not one of them had any reason to pay attention to plate numbers. Forty-one, all the way from the Cloisters down to the Battery and back, all between roughly two and three-thirty in the morning. Every shoe clerk and his brother drives a red MG, for crying out loud. And not one of the locations fits with anything we know so far – none here or at Neva’s or at Sommers’s. Nobody even saw it parked out in front of your place. Damn it to hell. We’re nowhere, Harry. Except at a nice rosy dead end.”

He walked across the room and parked himself heavily on a studio couch, then took out a cigar and looked at it. When he did, Henshaw began to giggle.

Brannigan heaved the cigar at him. The small man ducked, but he reached out deftly with his free hand at the same time and snatched the cigar out of the air. He righted himself and flipped it into his mouth, wrapper and all, and sat there grinning smugly.

Dead end – except that we’d forgotten to wind up one small aspect of the interrogation. Henshaw had the cigar tilted up at a rakish angle, watching me merrily as I walked across.

“Okay,” I told him, “so like it’s a canary. So swallow it or spit it out. What did Leeds do after one o’clock?”

He wiggled the cigar. He tittered. He slapped his knee. “The Hawes sheet,” he chortled. “Oh, I dig that, oh, yes, oh, yes! That’s what the man said, is it not? The Hawes sheet? What a far-out place to get high! Who needs a measly fix when the Hawes sheets lie awaiting!”

And then Henry Hiram Henshaw abruptly stopped paying any attention to me at all. I took him by the shirt front and he dropped the cigar, but he did not seem to notice. I shook him but all he did was turn his head. He shuddered, and then two wet tears trickled out from under the hubcaps he wore for glasses.

“Ah,” he said softly then, “alas, poor Leedsie. Last night the Hawes sheets, this morning the cold, cold shaft.”

CHAPTER 16

I was at a window which faced the street. Everything was bright and sharply etched in the sun, and I watched a woman come out of one of the brownstones across the way, smartly dressed in a conservative aqua summer suit and leading a small boy by the hand. The boy was blond as snow, six or seven at most, and they made a lovely picture together. At the bottom of the steps the boy stopped and said something and the woman gave him a belt across the ear which would have felled a first-growth spruce. I turned back to Henshaw.

Brannigan was standing over him. It left me cold. Leeds, the thing on the fence, anonymous as a side of cheap beef. I’d wanted a live one. I’d wanted one with a face I could put a fist into. I wanted a cigarette also, but I didn’t have any. I chewed on a match.

“All of it,” Brannigan was saying. “In plain, simple, ordinary American English, Henshaw. When did you see the Hawes girl here?”

“Okay, dads, okay. But give a cat room, stand back, you’re fogging my spectacles. I’ll reconstruct, I’ll come on strong in all details. But like allow me room to stroll my thoughts, huh, man?”

Brannigan took a deep breath. “From the beginning, Henshaw. The name of the joint on Second Street. Everything from the time you left there.”

“I’m recalling, man. The handle on the house is indisputable. I mean unless they sold out shop this morning, like. Handleman’s Happy Hour. They even got my picture out front – under glass, you know? The Bird blew there once, man. Charley Parker in the flesh. You cats dig jazz, incidentally? Or am I cast awash on an alien shore, like?”

“You’ll be awash someplace if you don’t get to it,” Brannigan said. “You finished a performance at one o’clock. Leeds was nervous about the heroin so you canceled the next show. Then what? Where’d you go? Who was with you?”

“Awash, I am awash at that. So I will feed it to you straight, like, sans rhythm, sans melody, sans life! Ah, lackaday!” Henshaw sighed dejectedly. Brannigan took a quick step toward him and the small man made a protective gesture with his free hand. “No, man, like no! All, I’ll tell all. One, yes, one o’clock. Here, man, we lit out for here. To this very pad.”

“Just you and Leeds?”

“You dig me, your highness.”

“Damn it, and then what?”

“Bliss, man, bliss. An exclusive cutting of a new Charley Mills disc. Private, unreleased, for our own hip ears alone. Man, if that Mills ain’t the coolest with the longhair stuff, if that cat ain’t the sole last living genius in Greenwich Village, I’m—”

“Henshaw, you want me to hook that bracelet higher up on that pipe? You want to tell this hanging by your wrist from the ceiling?”

“Well, man, man, ain’t I coming on? Am I obfuscating, like? Like you requested, in detail. In detail, I, H. H. Henshaw, and the late lamented A. Leeds, repaired from the pad known as Handleman’s Happy Hour to this here pad known as where we are now in session, solo and by ourselves, to soothe our savage breasts by paying profound heed to a rendition of something trèscool, trèsfar out, by that yet unrecognized master, C. Mills. We listened and then I kid you not, we listened anew. And then the chick made an entrance/*

“Catherine Hawes?”

“Well now, dads, get with it, huh? Who else? Edna St. Vincent Millay? Bess Truman? The siblings Bronte, maybe? The Hawes chick, man. But, yes, oh, yes.”

“What time?”

“Give or take a chorus, the little hand was at the two and the big hand was breathing down the neck of the four. Like two-eighteen, maybe.”

Brannigan was sitting across from him. He stared at his right fist, then covered it with his other hand. “And?” he said patiently.

“And Henshaw departed. I mean, sugar, man, like I could share a cat’s coin, or borrow his pad, or even, when my straits are dire, might I sip the last ounce of Grade A in the big white box. But a cat’s mouse, never! Anyhow he told me to fly. The chick was coming on real queer, like maybe she put butane in her syringe by mistake, and I am not one to mix unnecessarily in troubles. I debouched.”

Brannigan glanced at me. “No needle marks,” he said. “She wasn’t on anything.” He turned back to Henshaw. “Could she have been just scared?”

Henshaw shrugged, gesturing. The cuffs rattled when he did. “I write them like I see them, dads. He was an old man, like, and he got hung up looking for big fish down there in the Gulf Stream, you know? But like he wasn’t hooking them, and so he dreamed of Joe DiMaggio. You read that book? Man, she couldhave been scared. She could have had hepatitis like, too. If I’d been cognizant of the fact that I’d be contending for a Nobel Prize like this, I’d have done a biopsy and penned a report in pure iambic, you dig me?”

“All right, all right. What did she say when she got here? What next?”

“Like who listened? Like she whispered to him a minute, and then she gave him a gander at something she had in this reticule. That’s a sack, Jack. And then Leedsie gives me the nod. I’m all bugged up for home-fried potatoes anyhow, had the things on my mind all day. Like you know how you get bugged that way sometimes, man? So I amble up the square to Kirker’s and get me a double order. Which is when I espy the chick again. When I’m satiated with home-fries, that is. I’m strolling home, back past this pad here again, when I see the chick make for her heap like Leedsie blew the wrong riff, you know? Those forty-one rougeMG’s you cats are all shook up over, she had one of those. That heap came on like Louis himself, I josh you not. You get all forty-one of those fiddles jamming together on one block sans mufflers that way, you couldn’t dig that sound with a shovel.”

“Damn it, Henshaw, what in hell are you talking about? You had two orders of French-fries and then you saw the Hawes girl beat it out of here in the MG?”

“Home-fries, man, like h-o-m-e-fries!”

“She still have the sack with her?”

“Pressed to her bosom like it wouldn’t grow tooth number-one for lo, these many months yet.”

“What about Leeds? You see Leeds again?”

“Man, how can I blow this tune if you keep standing on the score? Like sure, I saw Leeds again. But, man, I ain’t cometo that part yet. Chapter three, book sixty-four, verse nineteen, brought to you by Welch’s Grape Juice. You know? Like I say, first she blasts off in this MG bomb. I’m maybe five pads up the block, and I’m debating. If Leedsie flubbed the dub with the chick, maybe we can dig that Mills record one more time. I’m still giving the matter considerable ratiocination when he bounces out the front door like some cat set fire to the joint and who’s got the gauze, you know? He’s got his Dodge across the road and zoom, he’s oiflFIike a tall bird. And I am alone in the still night!”

“He go in the same direction she did?”

“There were stars above, man. I paused to dig the stars. I saw no more.”

Brannigan was looking across at me with his tongue pressed into his cheek. He stood up, put his hands into his pockets, paced two strides, took them out again. “Arthur Leeds,” he said then.

“Two-twenty,” I said. “Make it two-thirty after Henshaw here had his meal. Even two-forty. It wouldn’t take her that long to get to my place, Nate.”

Brannigan grunted, turning toward Henshaw. “What time is it now?” he asked him.

“I dig the big hand approaching nine and the small hand touching one.”

“You ain’t got a watch?”

“Don’t need one, man. Infallible sense of rhythm. It ticks off in my head, like.”

I looked at my wrist. “Thirty minutes off,” I told Brannigan. “It’s a quarter after.”

“Sure. Hell, this loony probably loses a week every time he misses a fix. What the devil, say she got here about three. You’re not positive it was three-thirty when she got to your place. Call it three-twenty. She comes here, asks him for help, gets turned down. He changes his mind, follows her… well, why bother? We’ve been through all that.”

“Wouldn’t convict him in court,” I said meaninglessly. “Not without a later witness.”

“If I had him alive to take to court, I’d have a confession.”

“I suppose,” I said. I didn’t know why I was questioning it. Henshaw wouldn’t have known the right time if they’d roped him to one of the hands of the clock on the city hall tower. I was simply feeling let down, maybe cheated a little. It was a trifle tough to feel vengeful toward what was left of Arthur Leeds.

The apartment didn’t tell me anything about him either. He had a lot of records, good hi-fi equipment off in a corner. He subscribed to half a dozen music magazines. He was reading a paperback called Sidewalk Caesarby someone named Donald Honig. That morning’s Tribunewas folded back to Red Smith.

I turned to Henshaw. “What about today?” I asked him. “Leeds say anything about last night?”

“Never asked, dad. Man’s chicks are his castle.”

“He act like he had something on his mind?”

“Dad, you cats just don’t pay heed. Like I pronounced previously, he was all dismembered over that H. If that cat acted anymore shook up, you could have traded him in for a new Waring blender and got coin thrown in on the deal.”

“How did you know Catherine Hawes?”

“Her?” He shrugged. “She pops up, man. Like she’s here, like she’s there, comprenez?How do I know my old lady? Who remembers? How do I know God? Like I mean, that cat is around, too. I believed in him the other day, for true. Last Tuesday. Great, man, great!”

Brannigan cracked his knuckles disgustedly. “You satisfied?”

I nodded.

“Police routine,” he said. “Meet every nitwit in town. You want an answer to anything, you go to the nuts. I got a couple calls to make, Harry. You going to knock off now?”

“Might as well get some sleep,” I said. I knew I had to see Estelle first. I also wanted to see Sally Kline, to get some background on Leeds. I wanted to make the son of a bitch come to life a little.

Brannigan was at the phone. “You going to want anything else from me?” I asked him.

“This morning’s statement will probably do. Take it slow, fellow. And next time call a cop who doesn’t spend all his time at a desk, huh? I’m a menace when I get out on the street, for crying out loud.”

“See you, Nate. Thanks.”

“Right, Harry.”

I went out, still feeling anti-climactic. Probably part of it was the temperature. I was just beyond the door when Henshaw started to giggle obscenely behind me. “Hey, man,” he said, “how about that? When the chicks ask me where Leedsie is I got to inform them, that cat is hung up. You dig that? Hung up? Hung up?”

He was laughing like a jackass but I stopped hearing him before I got to the second landing. I picked up Vesti la Giubbadown there instead. Someone was bellowing it in an off-register Haig and Haig tenor behind a door that had been left open against the heat. The man had a swell audience out back in the yard, but apparently he didn’t know it yet.

Caruso’s girlfriend didn’t know it either. Or probably it was only his wife. “Can I get dressed now, Herb,” I heard her call out, “or do you want to use me first?”

Life was going on. You couldn’t be sure exactly why.