Текст книги "Epitaph For A Dead Beat"

Автор книги: David Markson

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CHAPTER 13

I pulled out the knife, staring at him. I didn’t say a word.

He showed me several large teeth. “Scared you, huh?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that either. I was still holding the bottle, so I let him watch me run the blade around its neck. Then I flipped the knife over in my palm, hefting it. Its lethal end could have pinned my hand to the table with about five inches of steel to spare.

He smelled unsubtly of sweat. He had a clean white basque shirt on, but the jacket over it was the same seersucker he’d worn the other night. The jacket looked as if he’d been sleeping in it ever since. A few more jolly little tricks with the knife and someone would bury him in it.

“That was neat,” I told him finally. “You develop the skill with practice, or did it just come to you during one of those naked Zen sessions on the living-room couch?”

“Hell,” he said. He flushed. “But I suppose that slut would shoot off her mouth at that, wouldn’t she?”

I pressed the point of the blade back into the wood, snapping it shut. “If you mean Fern Hoerner, maybe you ought to call her by name.”

“Sure. Okay, so you got friendly – I didn’t know. So I’m even sorry. Hell, you don’t think I was especially happy about that mess over at Vinnie’s? I don’t usually go around slapping females.”

“Or shooting them, evidently.”

He gave me a wry grimace. “You’re funny. They let me out this afternoon. How about the knife, huh?”

He lifted a hand, but I shook my head.

“Okay, so keep the thing. I just found it back there in the hall five minutes ago anyhow. It might be McGruder’s.”

“He shaves with it.”

The little man shrugged, then stepped past me. I poked a Camel into my mouth and watched him pour himself a glass of white wine. I realized I wasn’t really surprised to see him. A record stopped with another screech, this time sounding like chalk going the wrong way on a blackboard. Ephraim winced.

“You were with her when she found Josie?” he said then.

I nodded. He was being pleasant enough, but there was something almost spinsterish about his manner. In spite of his baby face he made me think of things that get shriveled up, like prunes. “How come they let you scram?” I asked him.

“I had an alibi. They finally got around to believing it.”

“What about that gun?”

“Aw, hell—” He screwed up his enormous forehead in disgust. “People know about my record. Every damned time something gets stolen around here I get put down for it. Just because I got arrested for shoplifting in California once. You know what I hooked? Six cans of smoked oysters and a slab of Bel Paese cheese. I was trying to write a blank verse epic on Sacco and Vanzetti and I was practically starving. Boy, I began to feel like Sacco and Vanzetti myself over there this week. You know who they were?”

“Vaguely. Somebody planted the gun after the killing– picking you because it would look convincing?”

“I’ll plant something on him quick enough, when they find out who. Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italians up in New England in the—”

“A lot of people know about the smoked fish?”

“Oysters are animals, not fish. Sure, that’s the trouble. I gave the fuzz at least twenty names.”

“Just names wouldn’t convince them.”

“I told you. I had an alibi. A guy was with me – he even walked me to Vinnie’s, just before I ran into you.”

Somebody named Peters—”

He started to answer, then stopped. “—Somerset Maugham?” a voice wailed. “Somerset Maugham!”

“Evidently it took your pal a while to show up,” I said.

He was considering me. “He got drunk that night,” he said after a minute. “He didn’t hear about anything until today.”

“I thought the upstairs neighbor said you were alone over there?”

“Pete was down on the landing. The human eye isn’t constructed to see around corners.” He grinned suddenly. “You’re asking as many questions as they did.”

I didn’t smile back. “I just realized I know more than they do,” I told him.

He had been drinking. He lowered the glass, then reached to the table and set it down. “Just what is that supposed to mean, huh?”

“Nobody walked you as far as Vinnie’s,” I said without emphasis. “Maybe I didn’t make it clear to the police, but you came in there on the dead run. It doesn’t prove anything about the killing – just that for one reason or another both you and Peters are lying.”

“Why, you son of a—”

His face got livid. June Allyson could have made herself look more ferocious with a minimum of effort, and I was a little sorry I had badgered him. I had simply been thinking out loud, and there wasn’t any real reason for it.

“So run the hell back and tell them,” he snarled then. “Don’t you think they checked the story? What’s it your business anyhow, you—”

I didn’t answer him. I was chewing on a knuckle awkwardly when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I started to turn, thinking that it was probably Henshaw.

It was Mount Everest.

It fell on me.

CHAPTER 14

I caught it flush on the jaw. I staggered back three or four drunken steps, flailing my arms, but that was only for effect. I crashed down like something miscalculated at Cape Canaveral.

A thousand lights came on. They kept bursting like expanding stars. I was the only one seeing them.

All by myself on the floor of a seedy Greenwich Village basement, and I was forging ahead of whole nations in the race for outer space.

I had a remote idea that the party had come to an abrupt halt. “Well, for crying out loud!” someone screamed. “I saw that, Pete Peters! Why, that man wasn’t even looking at you, you brute!”

Good old Donnie McGruder, just the ally I needed. I couldn’t make him out in the mists. All I could see was a bearded monster nine feet tall, with forearms like hams and shoulders like a yoke.

Nobody had told me Peters was nine feet tall. That worried me. I closed my eyes tightly and shook my head before I let myself look at him again.

So it was only six feet. So I’d still never get up there without help.

I didn’t want to get up anyhow. Let somebody else go climb mountains just because they’re there. I didn’t have any spirit of adventure. I didn’t have any pride either. I just sat, sucking in air.

“You’ve got some damned nerve,” McGruder was sputtering. “Now just what was that all about?”

“Aw, he was bugging Ephraim,” Peters said. “Giving the poor kid a hard time. After Ephraim spends two days in jail, for gosh sakes.”

“That’s still no reason to sneak up behind a man and hit him,” McGruder said. “Especially you, you big ape. Why, you might have killed him.”

It was me they were talking about. That was nice. Even Ephraim was interested. “He had it coming,” he contributed brightly. He was dancing around as gaily as a doll on a string. “He’s that private detective who found Josie the other night. What’s he butting in down here for anyhow? Maybe that will teach him to stay where he belongs, the carpetbagger.”

“That’s not the point,” Peters said. He had a remarkably soft voice for a big man, a voice like marshmallows toasting. Soft and gooey, like my head. But that was nice too. I found comfort in his marshmallowy tones.

I got myself lifted to one knee, with all the cosmic temerity of a creature emerging from a Darwinian swamp.

“Nobody should bother Ephraim,” Peters went on. “Two days in jail is enough. Ephraim suffered. Do you people have any concept of how he suffered? It makes him – why, it makes him holy.”

“So get him a tin cup, like,” somebody put in. Good old Henshaw also. “He can go beg alms.”

“It isn’t something to joke about,” Peters told him. “You people don’t comprehend the alchemy of it. Being in jail does something to a man’s soul. Something ultimate.”

“It makes him a saint,” I said then. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was intruding upon a religious awakening. Fact is, I must have come to the wrong party altogether. I was looking for the protest meeting about Sacco and Vanzetti. Whatever became of Sacco and – oh, sure, poor old Sacco and Vanzetti—”

People were looking at me strangely. It didn’t mean a thing. They were just disturbed by the sound of my scrambled brains. They kept sloshing around in the pan when I got to my feet. I hadn’t known I was going to say a word.

“What were we talking about?” I said. “Oh, yeah, oysters. I always thought they were fish myself. Actually I like toasted marshmallows better. No I don’t either. Ha! Come to think about it – you know what, about toasted marshmallows?”

“Say, listen, fellow – are you all right?”

That was Peters. He was watching me with genuine concern. I laughed in his face, swaying like a lunatic. I hadn’t known I was going to laugh either.

“Listen, there are beds out back, maybe you better—”

“No, no, first ask me – what about toasted marshmallows—”

“Sure,” Peters said. “Sure. You take it easy now, fellow.” He glanced past me, nodding anxiously to someone. “You want me to ask you about toasted marshmallows. Sure. What about toasted marshmallows, fellow?”

I grinned at him. “They make me nauseated,” I said. Then I hit him dead in the middle of that beard with as hard a left hand as I had ever thrown in my life.

Somebody gasped, but it wasn’t Peters. His head jerked, but for a second his body hardly moved at all. Then he went over like a felled oak.

A girl decided to shriek. Peters took two or three ringsiders with him, going back. One of them was Ephraim. I didn’t break up about it. The girl I’d spoken to before with the unmowed black hair and the figure like an ironing board was another one. She wound up sitting spraddle-legged with her mouth open and Peter’s head in the lap of her black skirt. She had on black stockings that ended just below her bony knees.

A man snickered. “The ultimate, man,” a woman added profoundly.

I was still pulling in air a little desperately. I waited another moment, watching until Peters came up groggily on one elbow. A fellow astronaut. His head dropped onto his chest and someone accommodatingly dumped the contents of a beer glass onto it. Ephraim was still sitting there also, staring at me in sullen outrage, as if I’d just maligned James Dean.

The mob had begun to chatter again and I pushed through them toward the bar. I didn’t see Henshaw or Fern, but McGruder took me by the arm. He gave me a precious, shy smile, the fairy princess I’d just won in the lists.

“I’m sorry about that, Harry. Dreadfully sorry. You must think we’re all beasts.”

“Forget it. I hope it didn’t bust up the party.”

“Say now, say, youforget it. You’re most welcome. If anyone should leave it’s Pete. That – that—”

He was leading me toward a corner. I didn’t have the strength to fight it.

“You area private investigator, Harry?”

“I think somebody hung a sign on my back.”

He didn’t smile. In fact when I glanced at him I realized he had discarded almost all of his mannerisms. He was picking at a corner of his thin lower lip, and the serious expression made him look unexpectedly older.

“This is all very puzzling,” he said after a minute. “If not to mention tragic. I knew poor Josie Welch quite well. She was so young that I was something of a – well, a big brother to the girl. She used to come to me with her problems.”

I was working my jaw. “Any problems the cops would be interested in?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that at all. Just her bad childhood, general depression – psychological problems more than any other kind. She was raised on a farm in Kansas. The poor kid was attacked criminally by an uncle when she was no more than fourteen. It soured her on men pretty badly.”

I grunted. “I hear she slept with enough of them. You should pardon the expression.”

He still didn’t grin. “She did chase around a lot,” he said. “Too much. But she never found any satisfaction in it. I think it was a fairly obvious syndrome – a way she had of getting even.”

“You’re going to lose me,” I told him.

“Oh, you know what I mean. Giving her body contemptuously, almost as if she wanted to watch men make fools of themselves.”

That was worth another grunt. “You didn’t know she was a call girl?”

McGruder’s head jerked, it startled him that much. “You’re joshing?”

“I might be. But the possibility existed when the cops started digging Tuesday night. I’d guess it’s pretty high on their agenda now that Ephraim’s out.”

He was scowling. “She could be a bitter girl sometimes. I even used to think she was capable of – well, violence. But I never suspected she’d found that sort of outlet. All of this is why you’re down here, I suppose?”

I started to shake my head, then clamped my teeth together. A great Georgia halfback named Frank Sinkwich once played a fall season with his jaw broken. I wondered how it felt to be beyond human frailty. “I’m looking for Audrey Grant. Strictly a family interest.”

McGruder lifted an eyebrow, then shrugged as if he were disappointed. “She’s around somewhere. I’ll try to find her, if you’d like.”

Td appreciate it. Nothing personal, but I’ve had about enough of your party. And thanks.”

“You already paid me by hitting Pete.” He tittered suddenly. Just as suddenly he was the old McGruder again, the one that all of two or three people undoubtedly treasured. “The big butch used to be my husband. We had four months of sheer bliss together before he decided to go straight. He’s been just impossible ever since!”

That white hand went limp again. I sighed, watching him use it to toss some of that drooping hair out of his eyes. Zen Fruitism. By the time he was ready to flutter away he wasn’t even touching the floor.

They’d gotten Peters off the launching pad and into an aid station somewhere. Henshaw was at the bar and I headed back over. The girl Peters had fallen against was standing behind him. I took a second look and decided I might have been hit too hard at that.

It wasn’t the same girl. I realized that the one Peters had crashed into had not been the Ginsberg-Corso rooter I’d seen before either. But all three of them had the same stringy black hair and scrawny figure, the same black jersey, the same black stockings. They could have been members of some new uniformed sect.

“Something called The History of Rome Hanks”I heard this one say. “The paperback title is Dishonored Flesh—”

Henshaw was grinning at me. “Slugger,” he said. “What do you do with the right hand – save it for Guy Fawkes’ Day?”

“I work out two or three times a week. It gives me an edge.”

“Like a cleaver. You saw the chick, huh?”

“When? When I was on my back?”

Henshaw was drinking. “I thought maybe previous to that. I spied her back in the end corridor. It was a trifle queer, come to reconsider.”

I had picked up the Old Crow. “Queer how?”

“Ephraim. I guess people haven’t been made cognizant he’s one of the populace again. The Grant chick ambled out of the head back there and sort of turned sallow when she spotted him, you know? Real shook up.”

I had put down the bottle. “Then what?”

“Well, man, I was sort of more interested in your small brawl. She’s still yonder, I presume. I saw Ivan Klobb back there, but whether or not they made words I cannot avow.” He looked at me, puzzled, then whistled softly. “Hey, like I see some light. If Ephraim is out, some other cat is due to go in, no? You think the sight of him gave the Grant chick some ideas? Like maybe, since it ain’t Eph, she’s got a hunch who?”

I was staring at him.

“Although on third hand I could be blowing hysterical,” he decided. “Missing the whole beat. The chick might have just had heartburn, you know?”

“A brunette,” I said. “What was she wearing?”

“Man’s T-shirt.” Henshaw giggled obscenely. “I am not as observant as many, but the Grant chick in a man’s T-shirt I would long remember. Like better men than I have left hearth and home for dream of what lies beyond yon distant hills, you dig me?”

He was smirking into his glass. I left him with it, heading back toward that corridor.

CHAPTER 15

The corridor was roughly the length of a bowling alley. There were four closed doors along its left-hand side, and evidently it turned at the rear. The dim rose glow of the kerosene lamp made it hard to be sure. The sudden proximity of Dana O’Dea made it harder to be interested.

She swam up in front of me just as I reached the doorway. I stopped, and not just because I remembered that she lived with Audrey Grant. That red dress had made her noticeable from a distance, but at close range she would have been noticeable in a diving rig.

She was a big girl. Her fall breasts swelled up out of the sheath into a pair of fleshy shoulders as sensuous as heavy cream, and there was enough ripe womanhood in her bare arms alone to melt nonferrous metals. She had boldly painted lips and flashing dark eyes, and her hair was so brilliantly black that it looked almost wet. She was as luxuriously molded as the hull of a yacht.

She was also drunk as a tadpole.

She pulled up short a foot in front of me, swaying, and then she almost fell. She took a fall breath. “Wow,” she said.

“Wow,” I told her. She swayed some more. Those milky shoulders were unbelievable. I reached out with a finger and touched the dress where it turned beneath the fold of her arm.

She eyed me speculatively. “Excuse me,” I said. “I just wanted to see if it was painted on.”

She gave me a smile that could have paid her rent for a year. I grinned back at her. I would have liked to spend a year doing it.

“You know where your roommate is?”

“Audrey?” She frowned. “You know Audrey? Audrey know you? Whore you?”

Her voice was no thicker than bread pudding. She steadied herself with a hand on my sleeve, looking at me more intently.

“Audrey doesn’t know you,” she said. “You know something? I’m glad. Don’t even care what your name is.” She nodded profoundly. “Don’t care ‘tall. Like you anyhow. You know my name? My name’s Dana ‘Dea. You know something else? I’m drunk. Been drinking since three ‘clock this afternoon. Home all alone. You ‘magine that?”

“You could do better,” I told her. “Why don’t we find Audrey? The three of us can get drunk together.”

“Sure. Find Audrey. Good old Au’rey. Swell idea.” She turned back into the corridor, took two steps and then almost went over again. I caught her by the wrist, so she decided to play. She hung away from me, balanced on her heels, and let me take all her weight. She had a few more pounds of it than the boys in the fashion business would have allowed, but then the same guys would design a blanket roll without ever spending a night in the woods. She was as yielding as gelatin. I hauled her back onto a level keel, so then she tittered and poked a finger into my chest. “Nope,” she said emphatically, “don’t know you. Wish I did.”

“Audrey, huh? Like a pal?”

“Abs’lutely.”

She had slithered away from me once more when a girl with a face like a wedge of cheese stepped past us into the hall. She was a mousy, intellectual sort, hiding a concave chest behind a bulky yellow sweatshirt. She glanced at Dana, then paused, lifting an eyebrow. “My heavens, girl,” she said.

“It’s disgusting, isn’t it?* Dana agreed. “Started drinking at three ‘clock. You ‘magine that?”

“I don’t have to imagine,” the girl said. “You’re a mess.”

That disheartened Dana briefly. “I am?” She glanced down into the pasteurized cleavage at the top of her dress. Then she looked back to the mousy girl, lifting her gaze to approximately the same anatomical vicinity. It wasn’t being very fair. Several seconds passed. Then Dana snickered.

“Well, of all the—” The girl whirled and stomped off.

Dana sighed. “All I said was I was drunk. She didn’t have to call me a mess. You think I’m a mess?”

“You’re no mess,” I said. She wasn’t. She had too much raw sensuality to move sloppily. She just swelled and receded, like surf.

“I’m glad you say that,” she told me. “Been drinking all day, you know?”

“Audrey,” I said.

“Oh, sure, Audrey.” She brightened up again, nodding toward the first closed door. She beckoned. “Shhh—”

I followed her over. She twisted the knob, then pushed in the door silently. The room was dark and I reached past her and fumbled for a switch. A muffled masculine voice changed my mind.

“Let’s just leave it be, shall we?”

“Oops!” Dana fell against me. I could see the vague form of a bed in the gloom as I eased her out of the way.

I got the door almost back where it belonged, then stopped again. There were two pair of shoes on the floor, both at least size twelve.

“Not Audrey,” Dana told me with assurance. “Not Audrey ‘tall.”

I closed it, then stood there shaking my head. It didn’t rattle. There had been two motorcycle crash helmets inside also.

Dana was already lurching onward, undismayed. She turned and winked at me from the next door, then threw it inward gleefully. This time there was a light on. I followed her in, a little grimly.

Furniture was not one of McGruder’s passions. The room contained a single uncovered cot set about a foot away from a side wall, a straight chair under a high barred window, a telephone on the floor. I supposed we would have to make the grand tour. I turned back, but Dana had slipped around me to the door.

She was being playful again. She pushed the door shut and leaned against it, peering up at me slyly from under her dark brows. That made her about as coy as Mae West. The girl would have been bringing out the eroticism in every man who had run into her since she was fifteen, and I had to wonder what she would be like when she was sober. I pressed a fist along her cheek, then gestured toward the outside.

“Uh-huh.” She nodded sincerely. “Find Audrey. Lil while. That’s a promise.”

“The faster we find her, the faster we get drunk.”

“Drunk already. Started to get drunk at—”

“I know. Three o’clock. You were home all day.”

“I tell you that?”

“I think so, yes.”

She frowned. “You’re not drunk ‘tall, are you?”

“Things keep coming up. You know how it is.”

“Shame,” she said. “Guy like you.” Her eyebrows had knit. Then suddenly she beamed. “Got it,” she told me brightly. “Doesn’t matter if you’re drunk or not.”

“I’m glad. You’ve got what?”

“Nope, doesn’t matter ‘tall. Got something better. Was going to save it, but it just makes me sick when I’m drunk myself.”

I had a pretty good idea what she was talking about. I waited while she hunched those lush shoulders and reached into her bosom, showing me the top of her gleaming dark oblivious head. It was folded into a small tube of white tissue, and she had difficulty unwrapping it. Finally she held out the thin marijuana reefer.

I gave her my best rueful smile.

“You mean you don’t wantit?”

“Maybe later, huh? As soon as we find Audrey.”

She was pouting. “Just don’t understand. Don’t understand ‘tall. Not drunk. Won’t accept generous’st offer I can make. What doyou do for kicks, anyway?”

In her soused way she was seriously troubled. I had to grin at her.

It took a minute. Then her eyes lit up. She giggled absurdly.

“Well, crying out loud, why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

I grinned some more. “We can go now, can’t we?”

“Crying out loud. Never thought of it. How do you like that?” She pursed her lips. Then she nodded decisively. “Well, by golly, nobody’s going to say Dana ‘Dea’s no sport. No, sir, nobody’s going to say that. You just don’t go ‘way and I’ll—”

This time she was a step ahead of me. She lurched downward, pawing at the hem of her skirt, and came up with two handfuls of it. There was no slip under there to hamper the friendly little impulse. She laughed in delight, crossing her arms as she straightened, and then yanked upward. Her head disappeared in a twisted red tangle.

She got stuck, squirming like something trying to work its way out of a cocoon, and her voice came merrily out of the depths. “Well, where’d you go? Crying out loud, have to give a poor girl some help—”

She needed as much help as Lady Chatterley. She was stumbling toward the cot, bent from the hips. I was probably going to regret it on cold winter nights in the future. I knew I was. The girl had a pair of thighs that could have sent the Crusades wandering off down the wrong roadway. I gave her a swift whack where her bright orange girdle was stretched most memorably and sent her sprawling.

She let out a startled little cry, skidding across the mattress with her arms flung outward and her calves flailing. I headed for the door.

I stopped again. I wasn’t sure why, except that the incident should have merited some inane comment or other, and she hadn’t made any. She had scampered to her knees and was staring into the gap between the cot and the wall. The dress had unfurled a bit, but she was still going to catch half a cold. She turned toward me, grinning stupidly.

“Told you,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t believe me. Said I’d find old Audrey.”

I had taken out a cigarette. Dana frowned then, but not because I dropped it.

“Don’t understand. Lots of swell beds around. Why would she sleep on the floor?” She shook her head. “And how do you suppose she went and got all bloody that way?” she said.