David Markson

Epitaph For A Tramp

CHAPTER 1

You know how hot the nights can get in New York in August, when everybody suffers — like the vagrants in the doorways along Third Avenue without any ice for their muscatel? Or all the needy, underprivileged call girls with no fresh-air fund to get them away from the city streets for the summer?

I’d taken a cold shower at one o’clock. Since then I’d recited the line-ups of six out of the eight National League baseball teams from the early thirties, I’d tried twice to make a mental list of every woman I’d ever known carnally, and now I was running through parts and nomenclature of common American hand weapons. I’d even had the light on and read for half an hour, but it was no good. It was still steaming. I was still awake. I was still thinking about her.

Cathy. I did that once in a while. Lying there alone like a chump and remembering. Things like the little cries she’d made, my name the way she’d always said it over and over, and then the way it would come in a gasp and her fingers would tear at my shoulders and—

Me Tarzan, you Jane. It was a recollection you’d cherish, like your first swift hobnail boot in the shins. I wondered how much lower she’d sunk in the year since I’d seen her.

No, I didn’t wonder that. All I wanted was to get some sleep. I started doing the linemen of the 194 °Chicago Bears. Stydahar. Artoe. Fortman. Musso. Plasman. Turner. Bray. Wilson. Fortman. Or had I said Fortman? I was almost glad when the phone rang.

I knocked my book to the floor, reaching for it. One considerably bushed private investigator with a healthy dose of insomnia, at your service. “Hello,” I said.

There was nobody there. Or rather somebody was, but he wasn’t saying anything. Probably just shy. “Take your time,” I told him.

I heard one long exhale. Then the steady dull buzz of a disconnected line.

“At the tone,” I said to no one in particular, “the time will be sort of damned near three-thirty in the morning.”

I put back the receiver, then fumbled for the book and put that back too. Nothing else to do, so I supposed I might as well be neat. Maybe I’d even get up and iron. I took a smoke, rolled over on the damp sheets with my hands behind my head and stared at shadows.

The book was a gay little thing by Thomas Mann called The Magic Mountain, another one of the forty-nine thousand and thirteen items I hadn’t had time for when I was day-laboring my way through the University of Michigan at left halfback. Or before that, in North Africa. Or for that matter later, when I had been night city editor in too many saloons. I had been slogging through it for weeks and was having a rough time. Hardly any shooting at all.

I heard a car screech around a corner and then pull up abruptly near my building, burning rubber extravagantly along a curb. It had to have come in from Lexington Avenue, since I live on 68th just off Third and the traffic runs one-way east. The car door slammed with a squeaky sound, as if a terrier had had its tail in the way. High heels clicked a few irresolute steps on the pavement, paused, clicked indecisively some more, stopped altogether. The car was very likely something small, probably a foreign sports job. The indecisive lady was very likely potted.

I heard another car door closing, a heavier one this time. And this time when the telephone started I did not lift it immediately. I let it tease me until after the sixth ring, just to give my playful chum an idea of how valuable my time could be.

“Hi,” I said then, “this is Judge Crater. Where is everybody?”

“Mr. Fannin? Mr. Harry Fannin?”

“Fannin’s dead. Wasted away from lack of sleep. People kept calling him in the middle of the night.”

“Oh, please, this is urgent. May I have Mr. Fannin?”

She wasn’t one of the names in the little black book. She sounded young and pretty. But then they always sound that way. Also they always think it’s urgent.

“This is Fannin.”

“Mr. Fannin, you don’t know me, but my name is Sally Kline. m—

“You call a few minutes ago?”

“What? No. Please, Mr. Fannin, I started to say, I—”

I lost the rest of it, or at least the next sentence. The doorbell blasted in my ear like time to change to the next classroom. When I caught Sally Kline again she was saying,”—and I think she might be in trouble, Mr. Fannin, in serious trouble.”

“Who?” I said. “Listen, Miss Kline, hang on, will you? All of a sudden we’ve got a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler running up here.”

“A what? But—”

“One minute. I’ve got to get the door.”

I left her angled on top of ponderous friend Mann and went to the buzzer. I’ve got one of those speaker things at the bell, rigged by an electrician who should have been a tuba player, and it sometimes works. “Who is it?” I said brightly.

Another female, but that was all I got out of it. My name and a lot of static. This one seemed to know me, however. She called me something that sounded intimate, like hlmphlmph or phrugg, instead of formal old Fannin.

I pressed the button and unlatched the door, but I didn’t bother to look out. I’m on the second floor in front, and with the stairs moving toward the rear you couldn’t see a pole vaulter carrying his gear home from practice until he was almost to the top. I started over to Miss Kline again, and then I remembered that it might be appropriate to greet my guest in something more dignified than common perspiration.

I pulled on G.I. suntans, then leaned down to the phone and said, “Can you hang on there for one more minute?” I went to the door again without listening for an answer. “Who is it?” I called down.

There was no reply but I knew it would be the gal from the sports job, the one I’d decided was drunk. I could hear her using both dainty left feet on each of the steps, taking them slowly enough so that for all I could tell she might have been lugging that little car on her shoulder. I wasn’t going to help her with it. “If you’ve got any friends or pets maybe, bring them along too,” I told her. I went back to the phone.

Miss Kline had found some other form of amusement. I put the receiver on the cradle, crossed the living room once more and went into the kitchen, took ice out of the bucket and poured two Jack Daniels on the rocks. There were a couple of steaks in the Frigidaire, but they were frozen solid and I wasn’t quite sure they’d be fully thawed before my guest got there.

I decided I wasn’t feeling too hospitable anyhow. Snow White was in the outside corridor now, but she was so tight that even on a level keel she was bumping into dwarfs all over the forest. A professional call, no doubt about it.

I could see it all. One of my legion of admirers, alone and bewildered in the night, come to seek succor at Harry’s hearth. Eight to five I’d have to listen to some incoherent sob story until she passed out, all the while doing valiant combat with my conscience to keep from taking advantage of her condition — which would be precisely what she would have come up to have taken advantage of. I dropped myself into my one good chair and took a short snort of the sour mash as the door opened.

No one came in. The door had swung inward toward me, so that I could see her shadow where the light behind her threw it on the rug, but nothing else.

The shadow swayed. Whoever it was, she giggled.

I’d expected a belch. So now we were playing guessing games. “Garbo,” I said. “Anna Magnani.” I couldn’t think of any woman with a foreign car, but I decided I ought to be sporting about it. I supposed I’d given out the license when I’d pressed the buzzer to let her in. “Dietrich. Wendy Hiller. Maria Meneghini Calks.”

Still nothing. I had a paperback Book of Quotations on the stand next to the chair and I tried that, stabbing a page at random. “The life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Thomas Hobbes. And don’t ask me who Thomas Hobbes is, because governess hasn’t come to that part yet.”

“Old Harry,” she said then.

I closed the book. I put down the glass. I put down my cigarette also, so there were only my hands left, and since there wasn’t anymore room on the table I picked those up and stared at them.

“The same… same old Harry.”

It was a year. I supposed it was a year, but when I looked up at her everything was the way it had always been. There was the face, there were the eyes. It was all there and it still did it to me, and even if I’d had a last name like Onassis or Getty or Zeckendorf this was still the only counter in the world I could buy it at.

She had one hand on the doorknob. She was wearing one of those white linen summer coats which weigh about as much as an overseas airmail stamp and her other hand was inside of it, holding herself below the left breast so that she looked as if she had knocked aside six or eight old ladies in her breathless sprint to get here. But she generally looked like that. That was just another one of the little things that made her so easy to forget.

She had moved toward me half a step, unsteady on her feet, and then had thought better of it. She stood there, clinging to the knob, and all I could do was flip some more pages in the book.

A mighty fortress is our God, said Martin Luther. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees, said Emiliano Zapata. Work out your salvation with diligence, said Gautama Buddha. Everyone had something right on the tip of his tongue except Fannin.

“You’re stoned,” I said then. “You’re stoned and you ought to be in bed. Go the hell home, won’t you? Or wherever it is you’re shacked up now.”

I didn’t want to say it like that, God knows I didn’t. But there wasn’t any other way. I’d found that out a year ago and I wasn’t going to leave myself open for it again.

She was still swaying slightly, the out-of-breath smile still in her eyes, being so lovely you could pawn your poor brains for five minutes of not remembering what had happened. “Old Harry,” she said again. “The same tough, hard… same old… same…”

I was out of my chair when she started to buckle, but it came too fast. She hadn’t given any sign, hadn’t even closed her eyes, just turning a little and then going over as if she’d simply gotten tired of standing there and thought she might like to try the rug for size, and I had to go down on one knee to keep her from hitting. I took her weight with one arm around her shoulders and eased her down, holding her head and shoulders up. And then all of a sudden all of the lovely, lovely toys were smashed and scattered all at once.

“Cathy,” I said. “Oh, good God, Cathy—”

The coat had covered it while she was standing. The stain was as big as a six-dollar sirloin below her breast, dark and seeping, and the inside of her hand was soaked with it from where she had had her palm pressed against herself. I saw the slash in the blouse where the blade had gone in, no wider than a man’s leather watch band, centered and near the top of the seepage.

Her eyes were open, staring at me, but they weren’t smiling now. There wasn’t any expression in them at all. They were as empty as two spoonfuls of weak tea.

“Harry. Know what I did, Harry? Real… cops and robbers. You would have…”

“Easy, baby,” I said. “Tell me later. Let me get a doctor. You just lie here and—”

“No!” She had clutched me by the wrist. A four-year-old at his first Hershey bar would have had a hand about as sticky. Or with as little strength in the grip. “Harry, don’t let me go. Hold me, Harry, I…”

Her hand slipped away. All I could think of were the five minutes I’d spent counting the sterling while she was dragging herself up the stairs.

“Cath, you’ve got to let me—” I was stretching, trying to reach a pillow from the couch without letting her go. I couldn’t make it.

“Cathy, I’m going to make you lie back. Just don’t move and 111—”

“Harry—”

“Yes, baby, yes. Here I am.”

“Harry… just for a minute… both your arms. Hold me, Harry.”

My right arm was still beneath her shoulders. I put my other hand along her cheek and it was tearing me apart then. Because it wasn’t going to make any difference if I called a doctor now or ever. I could save the dime for my estate.

I lowered my hand to below her breast, cupping it tight against the wound. The blade had missed her heart but it had been close enough. It had to have happened just before she rang the bell. It was seconds before I caught the faint small beat, like a whisper behind heavy draperies.

“Harry…”

“Here, baby, here.”

“Nobody else, Harry. Rotten… so rotten for you. The only one… only one it was ever right with. You, Harry…”

“I know, baby, I know.”

“Harry…”

And then there was nothing else. “Cath,” I said. “Cath. Baby, I—” Or maybe I didn’t say it out loud, I’m not sure. It didn’t matter. I knelt there holding her for another minute, feeling her hair against my neck, and then I put her down.

The phone was ringing. I had no idea how long it had been doing that again. I got up and walked toward the bedroom extension to answer it. I had a dead one on the living-room carpet and all my instincts told me there were a dozen things I’d better start doing, but I couldn’t think of any of them. Because this one wasn’t just silver dollars for Harry Fannin, private cop. This one was about Cathy.

The phone was in my hand. “Yes?” I said stupidly.

“Mr. Fannin, please, this is Sally Kline again. I tried to tell you before, I live with Cathy. I’m worried, Mr. Fannin, and I didn’t know who else to call. I think Cathy’s in trouble. I think something might happen to her.”

I was staring into the other room. The irony of it registered very remotely. “What?” I said.

“Oh, heavens, what’s the matter? Are you asleep, Mr. Fannin? I said it’s about Cathy, about your wife…”

CHAPTER 2

I met her in the summer of ‘56. It had been one of those weeks when all the business is the kind the competition deserves. On Monday a pleasant Mrs. Dijulio told me that her sweet, innocent, sixteen-year-old Maria was being kept out all night by a nota so nice’a crowd, and could I perhaps tella the boys to leave her alone? Sure. I told’a the boys, although I had to confiscate a few switchblades to do it, and that left me with Maria. Alone in Central Park with charming, innocent Maria. First she ripped off her blouse and screamed rape. No patrolman was close enough to be impressed so she ripped off her skirt too. That impressed me, enough to spank her. So then she threw her arms around my neck and wailed that this was what she had wanted all along, a man, a real man. She had lovely arms, only thirty or forty needle punctures above the elbows. I went over there again the next morning and dialed the number myself to make certain that Mrs. Dijulio got through to the juvenile bureau.

That was Monday. Wednesday it was a pharmacist named Heppenstall whose wife had wandered. I found her easily enough, holed up with a Matterhorn-size lesbian and the dregs of a case of rum in a dollar-a-night Third Avenue hotel.

Agnes Heppenstall threw a sheet-shredding tantrum while I booted out her playmate, then turned whisky coy the minute we were alone. She was such a dreadful mess, she said. And it was all psychological. Heppenstall hadn’t excited her in seventeen years and so she had been experimenting. And I was such a pretty man, couldn’t I help her experiment some more? She was sick four times in the cab on the way home, and not psychologically.

Nice week, nice profession. Friday it was a tavern keeper named O’Rourke from Eighth Avenue whose night-shift barmaid was clipping the payments on a Mercedes-Benz out of the till, but would I go a little easy because the dame was his deceased brother’s only child? No thanks, Mr. O’Rourke. Even if the doll didn’t have nineteen sailor pals guzzling for free along the rail, there would probably be a light machine gun behind the blackberry brandy. Or a folding bed under the rear booth. No, O’Rourke, sorry, but I was just leaving. I had a date to wrestle a python. Something undemanding, you know?

I locked the office and got out of there fast. Three newspaper guys I knew had rented a shack on the Long Island shore. Ants, roaches, linen that had been dirty when the last of the Mohicans abandoned it and hadn’t been washed since, dishes in the sink from one leap year to the next. And no Maria Dijulio, no Agnes Freud, no worldly little barmaid. Just a couple of fifths of Jack Daniels, a little sun, and I was my clean, wholesome old self again.

The newspaper guys drove back into the city late Sunday evening, but I decided to give it another night. I sat around for a couple of hours, disciplining myself by not opening the next bottle until I could manage it without defacing the tax stamp, and trying to make sense out of something called The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot which was the only book in the joint. About midnight I decided I’d take a stroll on the beach.

I did not have anything in mind. The tide was out and I went along the edge of the wet sand. I walked for twenty minutes and used up a couple of cigarettes and then I decided it might fill my later years with fond memories if I left my clothes on some rocks and went in.

The water was fine. I took my bearings on a tank tower behind some dunes and swam easily for about ten minutes, going straight out from the shore. When I checked the tower I had not veered off much. I lay there and rode the swells for a while, thinking about original sin and the fallibility of the human intellect and what the Red Sox would do for base hits when Ted Williams finally quit, and then just to impress myself I sprinted back.

I touched bottom with the water up to my chest and stood there waiting for my lungs to straggle on home. That was when it came to me that I was never really going to amount to anything in life. Here I was with an audience, and I hadn’t even had the foresight to print up tickets.

She was at the edge of the water. I could not see her face but in the dim light her hair looked the color of Palmolive soap. She was wearing a light-colored blouse and a dark skirt and no shoes, and she was standing with her feet wide apart. The wash went in and churned around her ankles and buried them as it slipped back. She had a cigarette in her hand.

I was still twenty yards out and she spoke quietly but I had no trouble hearing her over the surf. She had a deep, throaty voice and she seemed amused. “The cigarette’s yours,” she said. “I didn’t go through your pockets. I just sort of felt around the outside for the pack.”

“I’m glad,” I told her. “None of the rest of that stuff is supposed to be opened before Christmas.”

“I guess I can wait. But we can have a tree, can’t we?”

“I’ll tell you what. You turn your back for half a minute and I could maybe get started trimming it right now.”

“Don’t tell me!”

She was laughing. She walked forward a few short steps, so that the water swirled around her calves. Her hair was tinted more yellow than green now, but her face still might have been Jolson’s just after they’d painted him up to do Mammy.

She had edged forward even more. When it swelled inward now the water was almost to the level of her skirt.

“Suppose I don’t turn?” she said. “Suppose I just camp right here?”

“You’ll get a little damp when the tide comes in,” I told her. “Me, I’ll be home by the fire. I’m coming out just about now.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t come out.”

“Oh, now look, I know it was probably a dumb stunt, but I just drained out all my anti-freeze last month. If you don’t turn your back I’m going to—”

“Turn yours.” She was laughing again. And then her hands were at her blouse.

“For crying out loud—”

I decided my only hope was to start swimming around to my clothes the back way, via the Oriental trade routes. I went perhaps a dozen lazy overhand strokes, hearing nothing, and then she came up ahead of me. She took a deep breath and grinned after it and her face caught the light now. I saw the way her hair was flat along her skull and the way her eyes sparkled. I saw how beautiful she was.

“Hello, Harry Fannin,” she told me.

We were treading water. “I know you. You’re the trustworthy girl who didn’t go through my pockets.”

“Wouldn’t you? If you found someone’s clothes on the sand?”

“No doubt about it.”

“I thought all sorts of things. Foul play, mayhem, drunk and disorderly conduct—”

“Death by water. The fire sermon—”

“I know that poem. Eliot. And I thought all detectives were illiterate. Anyhow I was all set to rush off screaming. You ruined it all.”

“I’m sorry. I would have squandered my savings on a heavy meal first if I’d known.”

She laughed again, a rich, husky laugh that had nothing false about it. It was as real as the way she’d let her hair get wet like that. Hell, it was as real as her being there. She splashed water at me and then slipped away, going under so that I saw the flash of her back arching just beneath the surface and then the gleam of her long legs, and then coming up ten yards off and swimming out. She did a crawl well, moving with sharp clean strokes and heading off” at an angle against the current. I’d decided she wasn’t tight after all. I watched her for a minute and then I went in and walked back up the beach to where my clothes were.

I was smoking when she came out. Her own things were scattered along the sand and she stood there at the edge of the water for a long minute before she started to put them on, brushing water from her body and bending over to wring out her hair. Her hair was chopped fairly short. She did not look at me but she did not turn away either. She had a lovely body, with the long legs that I had seen and good hips and breasts that were high and round when she turned into profile against the water.

I think that was when it happened. She was standing there with her legs wide apart and her back half toward me, and she was wearing nothing but her panties. The line of her thighs was turned beautifully and I watched it as she moved. She wrung out her hair again but did it by leaning backward this time, arching her body the way a diver might at the height of a back dive and holding it that way with her arms lifted back and all of her being fluid and lovely in the moonlight, and I felt the tightening along my jaw. Because she was not doing it for my benefit. She had decided she could be just as batty as the next guy, and now she was getting dressed the best way she could without a towel and it was as simple as that.

Sure, simple. So why not run and fetch your zither, Fannin, strum us a little mood music? Come off it, huh? Probably she’d turn out to be an untouched little Bryn Mawr sorority president who’d never had a night in bed worth remembering since the time she’d snuggled up with a hot copy of Studs Lonigan. I chucked my smoke into the sand and started walking down the beach away from her.

And then I decided I was nuts altogether. A screwball dame comes prancing into the locker room and offers it to me all wrapped up with a red ribbon and I start acting like some bashful adolescent too mixed up by puberty to kiss his own mother good night. For crying out loud, Fannin.

I stopped when she caught up with me. She’d had to run and she was out of breath. Her breasts were rising and her blouse was tight across them where it had gotten wet. I reached out and touched the wet ends of her hair.

“I tell you you’re the prettiest nitwit I’ve met in months?”

She laughed. “And I haven’t had a drink since the V-8 juice at breakfast, that’s the silly part of it. I think you’re probably pretty nice, Harry Fannin.”

We were near the dunes. She was lovely, all right. So make up your mind, I told myself.

“You’re staring at me.”

“The way you stare at four aces,” I told her.

“Because you always think you’ve misread the hand?”

“Partly. Mainly because you’re sure somebody’s going to call a misdeal before you get a chance to bet.”

She was smiling. Her eyes were dark and bright under her wet lashes. There was something so alive about her it made my throat ache.

“Bet,” she said then. “Bet the hand, Harry Fannin.”

But I was still looking at her. “The limit,” I said. “With four it can’t be anything under the limit.”

“Suppose I raise? Suppose I’ve got a straight flush. That would win, wouldn’t it? You and your measly four aces.”

“Have you? My bets in.”

“God, we’re talking. Have you got any idea why we’re talking so much?”

There were beer bottles. There were tin cans and chunks of driftwood and seashells. There could have been hot coals.

Her arms were across my shoulders. Her body was warm and damp beneath me and her face was turned against the sand. My face was along her neck where her hair had fallen away and I could feel a pulse, fast at first and then slowing. And after a very long time the sound of the surf came back.

“Who dealt that?” she said then. “Oh, my God, did I deal that?”

I pressed my hand over her lips, turning my head. They were coming toward us along the water’s edge, talking, and she saw them and lay still.

One of them was sketching jerky little abstractions against the darkness with a cigarette. His voice was high-pitched and nasal but it carried across clearly as they passed us. “He’s a beautiful little boy,” he said, “beautiful. But the only person who knows if he’s mine or not is my wife. I love that kid, I do. But I tell you, I just don’t know if he’s mine—”

Surf took the rest of it. I watched them going away, not moving and hearing her breathing softly next to me.

Her voice was distant. “If you go now you won’t have to fumble through the talk,” she said. “It can be messy to fumble through, particularly when you don’t even know the girl’s name.”

“Mrs. Harry Fannin,” I told her.

I could feel her laughing without hearing any sounds or seeing her face. She said, “I did have the straight flush, Harry, and thanks. But it would be kind of silly to think there could be two winners in the same hand, wouldn’t it?”

“Marry me,” I told her. I didn’t know I was going to say that. You’ve got to think the whole thing was something you’d just invented to say that, and it was something I had had before. But I could count the times. I had had it once in the army in Texas but after a while it had come out that the girl had a husband getting shot at somewhere, and so there was nothing to do but go off with my lip quivering and get shot at myself. I’d had it once at college also but the girl was killed in an automobile wreck and what I did after that I didn’t much like to remember. I’d had it those two times and here it was again after six or eight years and how do you know you’ll ever find your way back to the same stretch of sand? So I said it again.

I had lifted myself to my elbows and she turned her head, watching me. “I told you I went through your wallet,” she said. “I saw your investigator’s license and that Sheriff’s Association card and the gun permit and, gosh, all sort of impressive things. But I guess I must have missed the release papers from that mental institution. I never did see them at all.”

I was kneeling. I dug out two cigarettes and lit them and gave her one, grinning back at her. I picked up her wallet where it had slipped out of her skirt and lit another match. Hawes, it said. Catherine.

“Harry?”

“Let’s get out of here, Hawes. Right now.”

She had lifted herself slightly, braced on one arm. She took up a handful of sand and let it run through her fingers. “It would be gone before we got to Pennsylvania Station,” she said remotely. She was looking past me. “Something like this, so damned quick. What was it, maybe twenty minutes? Old first-glance Cathy. You don’t think it’s the first time, do you? Go away, Fannin. Take another swim and wash the hayseed out of your hair. I was reading a Dostoievski novel before I came out for my little walk. I’ll go back and finish it now, so I can see what it’s like when people really suffer things that tear out their guts instead often cents’ worth of romantic twinge just because there’s moonlight and for five minutes you don’t have to feel alone anymore or—”

I had taken her by the shoulders. “Hawes, come on.”

“Oh, damn,” she said. “Oh, goddam.” She was chewing her lip and I was sure of it then if I hadn’t been before. Because you get so many with whom there’s never anything left. But here it was afterward and I was kneeling there and I was still feeling it. It hurt me to look at her. It hurt me the way her voice was, the way the line of her thigh joined her hip.

Which was romantic as all hell, but was still no concern of our two wandering companions. They were coming back up the beach and this time the other one of them was holding forth:

“I’m telling you, Lou, with three kids around you’re paying for fifteen meals a day. Fifteen. That’s one hundred and five meals a week. And when you’re doing it without love, well, brother—”

Her arms slipped around my neck then. “Fannin, Fannin, Fannin, it’s insane. Of all the idiotic, impossible, scatter-brained, impulsive… and I just don’t know what I’m going to tell Frank Sinatra in the morning!” She was trembling, maybe laughing, maybe crying, I don’t think it mattered which. Because we came together and it was all there again and it had to be right. It was. For maybe ten months.

CHAPTER 3

She was twenty-four. She had gone to Barnard College for two years, and she worked as a secretary in the sales department of a publishing house on Fourth Avenue. She had a mother and an older, unmarried sister named Estelle who lived on West 72nd Street, and she had been sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village with two other girls. She had a tiny scar under her left eyebrow from diving into water that was too shallow; and when she was six years old, before her father had died, she’d been lost in the Adirondack Mountains for three days. She’d camped out her share of times since then also.

“Sometimes it’s gotten a little messy, Harry,” she told me. “But I never knew what I was looking for. Now I don’t want anything else, just you and me.”

Just us, and Beautyrest made three. Maybe we could have gotten a patent on it after all. Once in a while we also boiled some eggs or went to the films.

Fannin had it, all right, and he had it badly. During his mottled career Fannin had also had several.32 and.38 caliber bullet holes in various inconsequential portions of his anatomy, a knife wound in his right shoulder, shrapnel in his left, not to mention two broken noses and sundry other minor disabilities. Once in a while he has even been known to pick up something which lasts, like smoker’s hack.

It happened on the 4th of June.

I’d been to Chicago for three days. I had those out-of-town jobs from time to time. This one was blackmail. I’d been trying to pick up some of the cash my client had paid out before the Illinois law could move in and impound it all. I’d made out well enough, but there’d been a lot of chasing around and I’d missed sleep. It was five o’clock in the morning when I hit LaGuardia Airport coming back, and I took a cab to the place without calling Cathy. She flicked on a small light while I was undressing.

“Baby,” she said. She could even look beautiful waking up.

“I was trying to be quiet,” I told her.

“Old Harry, the silent sleuth. I’ll bet you were.”

“I really was. I’m one weary husband, mam.”

“That weary?”

I got into bed. The sheets were crushed and warm and her arms came around me. “I’ll live,” I told her.

I woke up about eleven and phoned the client to make an appointment. I did not get out of bed to make the call. I kept looking at the mirror across the room and grinning at what Cathy had written on it in soap before she’d gone to the office. It said, “Go ahead, you bastard, sleep while I slave.” I called her next.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Fine time to be getting up.” They should have paid her extra for the way her voice sounded on the phone. “Thanks for what?”

“For saying hello on the mirror. I just called to return it.”

“You already did.”

“What, talking in my sleep?”

“You said hello this morning, idiot. Most of my men don’t forget such things.”

“Shucks,” I said. “That.”

“Ummm, that.” She was laughing. “You going to the office?”

I was taking a cigarette, holding the phone wedged against my neck. “Couple hours,” I said. I shook out the match and leaned across to drop it into the ashtray on the telephone table. That was when I noticed it.

“Bye, Harry.”

I did not answer her. I was staring at the tray.

“Harry?”

“Here,” I said.

It must have gotten into my voice. “Harry, is anything wrong?”

I kept looking at it. “No,” I told her. “Just thinking about something. I’ll see you tonight, Cath.”

She hung up. I let the phone dangle in my hand for a minute and then I put it back. The ashtray was one of those big ceramic modern things you could have served chops in. There were ten or a dozen butts in it. Three or four had Cathy’s lipstick on them.

I remembered it clearly. The tray had been loaded when I’d been packing to catch the plane three days before. Tidy Harry had picked it up and carried it to the trash basket in the John and dumped it.

Cathy did not smoke much. A pack of short-size Kents lasted her close to a week and frequently she would go another three or four days without buying any, chiseling a few of my Camels. The butts with the lipstick stains in the tray were Kents. The other seven or eight were Pall Malls.

I was sitting there and seeing them, trying not to think what I was thinking. Try that sometime, especially when you’re in the trade.

I got out of bed and picked up the thing and dumped it. I got dressed and heated up the coffee she’d left and toyed with a cup. I picked up the phone three or four times to dial her office number. Each time I stared at the receiver and then put it back.

It was just somebody who had dropped in. An old friend. Yes, old. So old he’d been too weak to sit on a chair and had had to lie down on the bed.

No. Cathy had brought the tray out into the living room, put it back without emptying it.

Cathy.

It was no good. I went up to the client’s office on Park Avenue and delivered the money and collected what was due on my fee. I walked up three blocks to the bank on the 47th Street corner and deposited the check. It was a bright summer day and there were a lot of women on the streets. All of them were very smart-looking and very chic and not one of them had that quality of being alive that Cathy managed even when she was shaving her legs.

Mrs. Harry Fannin.

I dialed her at four o’clock from the office. She got on and I told her I had rotten news. There was a rush deal and I’d have to be away again for two or three days. Cleveland, I said. I was making a flight in forty minutes.

“Oh, Harry—”

“I’m sorry. Just came up. I’m in a hurry, Cath.”

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“Harry, you’ve been so strange on the phone today. So kind of — of distant.”

“Cath, look, I’ve got to scram.”

“All right, Harry.”

“See you, huh?”

“Bye—”

I hung up. She’d sounded forlorn as hell. The first guy who came along with a tin cup, I was going to buy every pair of shoelaces he had.

I went out and took a cab down Fifth Avenue to the nearest You-Drive-It and I rented a two-year-old Ford sedan. I drove over to Third Avenue and stopped at one of the cheap saloons the fags hadn’t decided was quaint yet and I had three bourbons while watching the clock. At 5:151 left and swung around to Lexington and went back up town. It had started to drizzle. I pulled in at 68th at exactly 5:28 and parked near the end of the block, away from the direction in which she would come home. Four minutes later I saw her make the corner on the double, running with a newspaper over her head. She went inside. I sat there.

I chewed cigarettes, thinking how the one kind of job a legitimate P.I. won’t take are those cheap divorce things where you climb through transoms with a fresh load of Sylvania 25’s in your flashholder. I could make a couple thousand more a year if I was hard up enough to do that. I could have probably even afforded an electric lathe or a power saw, so that my wife would have had a hobby when I was out nights.

The rain stopped in an hour. No one had gone in or out of the building who I didn’t know. There are only four apartments in it. Collins, the architect on the top floor, went in about ten minutes after Cathy. Jojo Pringle came out a little after six. He’s a jazz clarinetist and a hophead and I knew he’d be on his way for a light brunch. Three or four patients went into Dr. Salter’s private entrance on the ground floor.

I began to dislike myself around seven. By eight o’clock the feeling had become one of contempt. I had planned to park there for three days if I had to, but now I told myself I’d give it one more hour and then if I had any sense I’d go upstairs and apologize.

She came out at 8:33.

She had changed out of her office clothes. She was wearing a tight, candy-striped summer skirt and a white blouse. She was great on white blouses. Her hair glinted under the street lamp.

She began walking away from me, going with the one-way traffic and glancing over her shoulder. I started the engine in the Ford when I spotted the empty cruiser cab in the mirror. It picked her up and went a block and then cut downtown on Second.

Go to a movie, I said. Do that, Cathy. Tell the driver to head over to midtown.

Get rich wishing. The cab went all the way down to 14th before it turned. It went across to Seventh Avenue and then south again into the Village. It stopped at Sheridan Square. The light was green and I had to pass it. I double parked in front of a liquor store, using the mirror while she paid and got out. A panel truck pulled away a little up the block. I waited until she turned a corner and then I eased the Ford into the gap.

There was a small off-Broadway theater over a few blocks. Maybe she was going there. Maybe she was going to Hobo-ken or Las Vegas or Guam, since they were all in that general direction.

The joint was called Angelino’s.

It was one of those seedy basement places some landlord had had to turn into a bar twenty years before because no one would pay United States currency to live in it. I knew the kind of crowd it would get. Guys with a notion they wanted to be artists who didn’t shave because they thought you were halfway there if you looked the part. Girls in grimy sweat shirts with the complete poems of Dylan Thomas under their arms when what they needed were cartons of Rinso. Sophisticated young uptown ladies slumming with their toothbrushes in their pocketbooks.

I supposed she’d known the place from when she’d lived in the Village before we were married. I went past the doorway once and saw her standing in the crush at the bar. If she was meeting any one guy in particular he wasn’t doing any downhill schuss to get there.

I went back and got the Ford and parked it a few doors down from the entrance. I walked down the opposite side of the street to the liquor store and picked up a pint of bourbon. When I came back past the doorway this time three or four of the guys near her were working on it. It was all palsy enough so that she was laughing about something. I went back to the car and opened the pint.

People drifted in and out or along the street. So did their conversation, and it was too muggy to roll up the window:

“—Look, if you can call my mother Jocasta, and me narcissistic—”

“—Talk about paranoia—”

“—The really accomplished Mexican painters, like Orozco and Tamayo—”

The bohemians. The intellectuals. Tamayo and Tamayo and Tamayo, seeps in this petty paste from plate to plate. If they stopped that talk for three consecutive minutes the world would blow up.

“—Do I know Willie? Why, he quotes me three separate times in one chapter—”

“—If I saw Heathcliff on the street I’d just die—”

It got to be ten. It got to be midnight and then one o’clock. You can drink a goodly amount of whisky in that time, say a pint. I was saving a buck or two by drinking it out of the bottle instead of across a bar. Be sensible that way for another decade and I could probably even manage that two-week cruise to the Bahamas I’d been dreaming about all those years.

It was 1:49 when I tagged them. He was a tall slender kid with fairly good shoulders under his denim jacket. He was wearing tan slacks and a black knit tie and white sneakers and if someone had told him that the frat was holding a stag beer party he would have trotted off on the spot. Nobody told him. She had him by the arm and when they came up the stairs onto the sidewalk she said something and he laughed.

They came past the car. She never saw me. They were both laughing now but she was not that tight. She walked easily and when they were turning the corner I saw his arm go around her hip.

They walked two more blocks and then they went into a rundown building with a grocery store on the street floor. I was sixty yards behind them on the other side of the street. Next to me a sign in a plumber s window said, IS THERE WATER IN YOUR BASEMENT?

After a minute a light went on two flights up. Third floor front. I lit a cigarette. The grocer was pushing haddock that year. I smoked the cigarette hard. I was still trying to finish it when the light went out again.

I went across.

There were a lot of bells and a lot of names. Lonergan. Goldman. Zachery. Hoy. Cranley. Philkins. When I was nine years old an avant-garde juvenile delinquent named Philkins knocked half the spokes out of the front wheel of my Western Flyer with a baseball bat. Or maybe that was Filkins. There was no lock on the outside door.

There was one naked light bulb for each flight. There was a faint odor of turpentine. The walls were a drab schoolroom brown. The door I wanted was like any other dingy door in any other dingy walk-up anywhere. I wondered what I was doing there.

I rang the bell hard, hearing it blast inside the apartment.

A minute passed. If they had the turpentine I wondered why they didn’t get some paint. I heard him padding toward me. “Who is it?” he said through the door.

“Delivery.”

“Huh? Here?” The door opened. “You want Cranley, mister?”

He was peering out at me, tying the sash around a blue robe. He was a good-looking boy, no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. The line of his nose was sharp and straight where the light from the hall cut it half into shadow. I would not have had to move my right hand more than ten inches from where it lay near the bell to change all that.

“You sure you want Cranley, mister?”

“Go back inside,” I said. “Tell her it’ll be cleaner if she’s got something on when I come in.”

“What? Hey now, what is this? Who do you think you’re—”

I took him by the front of the robe, moving close to him. “Maybe you better say you never saw her before tonight,” I told him. “Maybe you better get that over with first.”

He got with it quickly enough then. I let him go and he edged away a step or two, his eyes going toward a closed door that would be a bedroom and then back to me. He was pushing six-one which made him almost as tall as I am but I had him in all the other ways and he knew that. He was about as thick through the chest as a breakfast lox. He swallowed once, scared.

“Look,” he said then, “if you’re her husband, honest, I didn’t know. I never did see her before, really. She said she was divorced and she—”

“You got a can?”

“What? Yes, sure, right over there—”

“Get in it,” I said. “Get in it and lock the door and scrub the bowl or something until you hear us leave.”

He didn’t argue. He wasn’t going to write home about the experience but he went. I waited until he closed the door and then I walked across and opened the other one.

The candy-striped skirt and the white blouse and her underclothes were thrown over a straight-backed chair. She was lying across a rumpled spread with her back toward me, looking at a magazine. One small shaded bulb threw a tarnished circle of light over the bed, and if I’d been Leonardo da Vinci I probably would have started fumbling around in a panic for paper and crayons.

She thought I was the kid. “Aren’t you lucky,” she said. “People bringing you surprises in the middle of the night.”

“What was it, a race?” I said. “Do you get a trophy for it?”

She hadn’t moved, not consciously. I saw the muscles tighten beneath the flesh of her shoulders as her arms went rigid to the elbows beneath her. Then her head came around slowly. Her face was the color of ice cubes.

“You had to go marry a cop,” I said.

She came apart then. Her lower lip quivered and her eyes filled. I had never seen her cry before. It broke me up real bad. “Wrap it up,” I told her. I shut the door on her and went back into the other room.

I stood there, feeling the whisky in my stomach and seeing the place for the first time. She’d found herself an adult one. He collected things. There were lanterns from construction barriers, signs that said No Parking 8 AM. to 6 P.M. Near the door there was a cross-wired Department of Sanitation street-corner trash basket big enough to turn over and cage a walrus in. He didn’t have the walrus but it wouldn’t have taken more than a word. The kid’s jacket was hanging over a chair and the label said Whitehouse and Hardy, Fifth Avenue, so good old Dad had paid for that the same way he was paying for the graduate school. There were enough books to repave the Jersey Turnpike.

There was a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it. G P. Cranley, it said at the top, Comp. Lit. 207, Page 4, and under that it said:

And thus it is my conclusion that The Recognitions by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since Moby Dick, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that—

She was dressed. She went straight to the door and out without saying anything and I followed her down. When we got to the street she turned the wrong way and I said, “This way.” I said, “Here,” when we got to the car. I ran a red light on Hudson Street and said, “Nuts,” when some guy yelled at me. So I won. That made four more words than she had said.

Coming out of Central Park I had to wait for a light at 66th. “He didn’t even know my name,” she said then.

“That’s all right,” I told her. “I didn’t once either. Maybe something lovely will grow out of it for you both.”

She sucked in her breath. I found a parking slot directly in front of the apartment and she went in ahead of me with her own keys while I was locking the car. I wondered why I was bothering to do that with a rented job. She was in the good chair with one small light on when I came up, sitting with her head on her chest and her arms dangling, looking like a thrown coat.

I made myself a drink, spilling an inch and a half of Jack

Daniels into a kitchen tumbler and taking it without ice. It had the same effect as a short carrot juice. I went out and sat across from her.

You could hear the busses out on Third Avenue.

“Why?” I said.

She said nothing.

“I thought it was good. Plodding, dull-witted old Harry, I thought nothing could be better. And all the while I—”

“It is good. But I’m just—”

“Good, yeah. It must be remarkable. You’re just what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.” Her voice was ragged and she looked up at me. I stared at the rug.

“You go away,” she said then.

“Good God — three, four times in a year?”

“It doesn’t matter. Whenever you do, the minute you’re gone, the minute I’m alone I start pacing. I start walking around this room as if I don’t belong here, as if I’m a stranger.” She was talking from very far away. “It’s as if something is pushing me. I’ve got to get out of here. Just out. And I can’t stop myself, I want to be with — with I don’t know who. It doesn’t make any sense and I can’t explain, I—”

“How many times?”

“Almost every time.” I heard her swallow. “You were in Phoenix four days. When you were in New Orleans it was five. And just now three when you were in Chicago. Almost every one of those nights.”

I didn’t feel sore. I didn’t feel cheated or betrayed or outraged or anything else. I felt nothing. I was sitting there hearing her say all that and somehow it did not have anything to do with me. I knew it would have something to do with me later but it didn’t now. I got up and poured myself another drink and then I came back and sat there again.

“The same guys? How many guys?”

“They’re different each time. A different one each night, Harry. I see one and then they want to make dates but I won’t. It’s all confused, like if it’s only one night it’s not so bad, as if I’m not really doing anything wrong if I don’t let any of them get to mean anything. I go into bars and I meet them the way I did tonight and I… Oh, God in heaven, I—”

She had her face in her hands. She was sobbing and saying, “Help me, help me.” She said it over and over. And four plus five made nine and three made the dozen. And tonight was thirteen. I stood up.

“Harry, I’m sick. Something’s the matter with me. It’s all right when you’re here, when I’m with you, but the minute you’re gone I’m—”

I went into the bedroom. I dug out a suitcase and opened it on the bed. She came into the doorway.

“I’ll go,” she said. She had stopped crying. “It was your place before I came. I can stay with my mother and Estelle until I find someplace else.”

I didn’t answer. I did not have a particularly distinct concept of the ethics involved in that kind of thing.

“It will be easier that way,” she said. “I’ll take one bag. I can come back when you’re at the office and get the rest.”

I went past her and into the living room. She did not take long. She came out with the suitcase and stood it near the door. She hung there like something wet on a hook.

“It’s going to sound pretty silly, isn’t it? But I–I’m sorry, Harry.”

“Forget it,” I said. “You told me all about it that first night on the beach, all about the other ones. I didn’t buy anything without a label on it.”

I wasn’t looking at her. Outside they were running every bus on the line.

“I deserve that and more,” she said. “But that was different,

Harry. Before we were married I wasn’t hurting anyone but myself. I didn’t want to hurt you. Oh, dear God, I didn’t! I—” Her voice broke. She was sobbing again with her head turned, softly now. “Harry, I love you, I—”

“That’s swell,” I told her. “I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll remember it every time I think about you in that crummy room down there tonight with your drawers flung over that chair and your bare butt sprawled all over the bed. ‘Aren’t you lucky, people bringing you surprises in the middle of the night. And, oh, by the way, my name’s Cathy. Mrs. Cathy Fannin but don’t worry about that, the sucker’s gone chasing off someplace and—m

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 door 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 blanket. 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.

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

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

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

Around midtown I remembered Cathy’s mother and sister.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Move,” I told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are Mr. Fannin?”

“Harry,” I told her.

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

“You mean a friend of this one’s?”

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

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

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

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

“Tell it the way you want to.”

“Have you — may I have a cigarette?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sally—”

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

“Cathy’s dead, Sally.”

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

“Oh, no! No!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She dragged on her smoke. She was all right, however. “Anyhow I forgot about it after that, until the other night when she said she was going with them someplace for a day or two. She said she’d told the office that she had to leave town but that she’d be back yesterday. And then she said something about an experiment — that was the word she used — but she wouldn’t tell me what. She kept smiling about it all evening, so that I thought maybe she was a little drunk, but she wasn’t. I was upset about it, Harry. I tried to make her tell me, but the only other thing she’d say was something strange, about ethics. How she was going to prove to herself that nothing really mattered at all. I thought about it all the time she was gone. She’d gone away with boys other times, on weekends or things, but this time I kept imagining all sorts of things. And then when she wasn’t back when I got home from work tonight I got scared. I had a date but I called home a couple of times to see if she was in. I came back early, deliberately, and when I did I noticed Eddie across the street. I didn’t recognize him, not until he came up. The phone rang a few times too, and there was never anybody there. I guess he must have gone someplace and called. I thought about calling you right away but I didn’t know whether you’d — Oh, dear Lord, maybe if I’d called you earlier it wouldn’t have happened, maybe she’d still be—”

She came apart again. I left her alone with it this time, going into the John. There was a galvanized pail under the sink and I held it under a bathtub faucet until it was a third filled. There was a white blouse over a wire hanger on the shower nozzle. I’d known a girl once who was crazy about white blouses. I’d bought her this one.

Sally was watching me when I came out. Her eyes were raw.

“I’m going to wake up Lefty here,” I said. “I’ll wait until you put something on.”

She looked down at herself as if she had forgotten about the ripped blouse. I supposed she had. “It doesn’t hurt now,” she said vaguely.

‘I’d put some cotton over them, maybe. You won’t need a doctor.”

She had picked up the brassiere from the floor. She walked past me to a dresser and took out a laundered shirt the shade of freshly minted pennies. She held the blouse and the brassiere in her hand for a minute, staring at them with her back turned as if she wasn’t sure just what they were for, and then she set them both down. I started to move toward her when her hands came around to the back of her slacks and jerked out the tails of the torn blouse she was wearing. The blouse dropped into a heap on the floor before I made it across so I stopped again. Her hands were little fists opening and closing at her sides when she turned around naked from the waist and stared at me.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” she said. “All the things you do, the way sex is the most important part of half of them. Cathy showed me your picture once or twice and I used to think, Lord, she cheated on a man like that, and if I had him and he was half the man she said he was I’d never let myself get out of his sight. I even used to have fantasies about it once in a while, how with somebody like you it would be one of those first night things but it would be one that would last. And then something like this happens and I sit here half undressed in front of you for twenty minutes and it doesn’t mean anything at all, not one goddam thing because Cathy’s dead and—”

Her mouth was twisted and her breasts rose once as a sob racked her body. There was a rip in the paper of my cigarette. I stood there wondering just what the hell you could do about that while she ran with her shirt and brassiere into the bathroom and shut the door.

CHAPTER 6

The punk named Eddie Bogardus groaned almost sadly when I dumped the bucket on his head. Probably I’d busted in on the middle of his favorite Bach cantata. His greasy black curls fell into his eyes when he shook himself.

He came out of it but his co-ordination was all loused up. He started to reach for the back of his skull with his right hand, then fell forward again and clutched the break. He lay there with his teeth grinding. Finally he looked up at me.

“All right, Bogardus, let’s have it.”

“Bananas, Jack, I gotta get a doctor. You gotta get me to a doctor.”

I sauntered over to Sally’s chair and sat down. I got comfortable. I grinned at him.

“Look, now, look, it’s all out o’ shape. If I don’t get to a—”

“We’ll do it make-believe, Bogardus, how about that? You must be the ailing prince and I must be the royal physician. Won’t that be fun?”

He didn’t dig games much. He sucked in his breath with his lips drawn back and he didn’t answer.

“Talk. All of it.”

“Can I sit up?”

I nodded. He built himself up against the bed, working with the weight on his good arm, and then leaned there with his head back. Sweat had broken out on his boyish face with the effort. He breathed deeply three or four times, then let his head fall against his chest. He did not look at me.

“What did you want here, punk? Let’s start there.”

“The broad,” he muttered grudgingly. “I dint mean to rough up the other one, the redhead. Honest, Jack. All I want is my split. I got a right to my split.”

“What split? All right, you and Duke pulled something. What?”

He wet his lips. “You a cop?”

“I got the milk route here. Talk, punk.”

He was studying me blankly. The next expression would be the one that was supposed to tell me he knew his rights. I leaned forward.

“Look, punk, you might have some luck. You might even last long enough to get your full growth.”

“Okay, okay, I don’t want no more.”

“Your split of what?”

“We pulled a job yesterday. Big stuff. We—”

Sally came out and he let it hang there while he looked at her. She wasn’t the same girl he’d had on that raw edge a while back. They never are when they can get five minutes in front of a mirror. She hadn’t done much with the tired lines around her eyes, however. She looked at me as if she wanted to say something and then she changed her mind. I waited until she went to a chair.

“Whenever you feel up to it, Bogardus,” I said then. “What kind of big stuff? What about the girl? You keep making me ask questions, I’ll ask some hard ones.”

“Okay, I tole ya. This shirt factory up in Troy. The payroll. They deliver from an armored car, half a month’s loot on the first and the fifteenth. The broad was Duke’s brainstorm, not mine. I knew she’d mess it up, but the minute Duke gets hot on a broad you cant make him see nothin’. She drove. I kept tellin’ Duke she’d—”

“Bogardus, I’m slow. Even when my old man helps me with the homework it ain’t right. Are you trying to tell me that Cathy Hawes drove the car while you and Sabatini pulled a heist on an armored truck?”

“Not on the tin truck, no. Not them bananas. You think we’re nuts? Hell, we had it figured. They dump the loot at one-thirty on the button. There’s only one guard from the factory, see? He comes out and gets it, and then the tin truck goes off again. The guard’s got to bring it back upstairs in this freight elevator. Sometimes the elevator goes back up while he’s picking up the bag, see? There’s always a minute, maybe two, but me an Duke had it lined up even better. Duke’s cousin works in the joint. He’s the one who lined it up. He fixes it so he’s on the second floor when the guard goes down, and then he pushes the button for the elevator to come back up. When he gets it on the second he presses for it to keep on going up and stop on all the floors. It’s one of them self-service things and it’s slow. By the time it goes up to six and the guard can get it back down, we got three, four extra minutes. We wait until after the truck pulls out and then we hit. Bananas, you think we’d mess with a tommy gun behind all that tin plate?”

“Come on, come on, the girl. What about Catherine Hawes?”

“She’s in the car. We pull in about twenty-nine minutes after one, see? Duke’s cousin has it down sharp. Duke’s drivin’ with the broad next to him and I’m in the back. Duke leaves the motor running and gets out and switches places with the broad. The truck comes by while we’re makin’ the switch. Hell, it don’t look like nothin’. Anyhow they been deliverin’ the same way for years, nothin’s ever happened. We sit there for the minute and the guard comes out. He’s an old guy. The guards on the truck don’t even get out, just open up and hand it to him. He stands there gabbin’, maybe another minute, and then the truck pulls out. That’s when the broad drives up. The truck turns the corner a block away, so it’s already gone when we hit the freight door. Duke an’ me is out and runnin’ while the old guy is still waitin’ for the elevator. But then the fruity old jerk starts to give us trouble. There’s this wooden loading platform that we got to jump on, and he hears us. He turned around the first damn thing, he’s goin’ for his gun. But there’s no shootin’. We’re right on him, see? Duke clobbers him and grabs the dough. It’s supposed to be forty, forty-one grand, accordin’ to what Duke’s cousin tole us. And then the damned broad don’t wait for me. Duke jumps down and makes the car and I fall. I tripped on a damned plank and went on my kisser, and when I look up the damned bananas are sprayin’ gravel in my face and goin’ off with the loot faster ‘n hell.”

He stopped. When he did I heard an alarm clock ticking. It was the first time I’d heard it. Observant Fannin, the astute private eye. I, eye. Ask me what the bedroom looked like and I’ll tell you it had some walls.

I was trying to see her driving the car. For the experience. I looked at Sally Kline. She was staring at the Castro they’d squeezed in against a far wall. They could squeeze it out again.

“Tell me the rest,” I said.

“There ain’t no more. The bananas leave me to take the rap. But I get a break. Some dame in a Caddy is pulling up just as I start to run. She’s still got her keys in her hand and I grab ‘em and shove her the hell out of the way and take the Cad. Me an’ Duke had this other car stashed, see? That was the thing, we’d switch cars and beat it out of town easy. But I donno the town so good and when I get to the place where the other heap is, Duke and the broad is already there an gone. I kept the Caddy as far as Albany and then dumped it and swiped an Imperial.

“What time did you get back here?”

“Five, maybe. I couldn’t see pushin’ it, not in a stolen heap.”

“Then what?”

“What the hell you think? I start lookin’ for the rat.”

“Where?”

“Where he lives. The joints he hangs out. Here.”

“Where?”

He gave me addresses. Nice addresses, if you were a pander or a two-bit hustler. You’d be sure to tuck a picture of your mother in your locket when you went down there.

“Where’s he live?”

“This hotel on lower Bleecker. The Watling. But he ain’t gonna show up there again. All right, I tole ya. How about a smoke now, Jack?”

I threw him one. He picked it up with his left hand and put it where you use those things and looked at me.

“You’ll get a match when I get the rest of it.”

“What else? Damn, I tole ya the whole thing.”

“How did you get her into it? What did Duke have on her?”

“Have on her? Bananas. Don’t make me laugh, will ya? He dint have nothin’ on her, not on that one. The minute she got wise that we were onto somethin’ she started squealin’ she wanted in. Hell, you couldn’t keep her out of it.”

“Tell me.”

“Tell ya what?”

“You want to Indian wrestle, Bogardus? I’ll give you the edge, my left hand against your right.”

“Okay, okay, just tell me what you wanna—”

“ Where’d Duke meet her? How’d she get into it?”

I was leaning forward. I wasn’t sure whether I was going to hit him on principle or just throw up. I could feel Sally watching.

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you really want to hear it? Does it make any difference now?”

“Sure,” Bogardus said, “why all the interest anyhow? What is she, your ex-piece or somethin’?”

If s nice when other people make your decisions for you. The back of my hand took him across the jaw and the cigarette shot out of his mouth like something researched by Wernher von Braun. He let out a yelp like an unpaid madam.

I was standing there. Maybe Sally was right, maybe there was no point in finding out how she’d gotten into it. Maybe there was no point in breathing. Sometimes you wonder. I went back to my chair.

Bogardus was being a stretcher case again. He was huddled over the wrist like a monkey trying to make time with a football.

“You keep grinding your teeth like that, I’ll sharpen a file in there.”

“Okay, okay. But ifs just like I tole you. She’s just nuts, is all.” He took a deep breath and sat up. I showed him another Camel.

“We met her in this bar,” he said wearily, “maybe three weeks ago. Yeah, that’s all, maybe three weeks. Duke was half bagged and he shot off his mouth some. He’s always talkin’ anyhow. He starts braggin’ about jobs we pulled. The broad’s eyes all lit up, for hell’s sake. Duke took her to the hotel and he saw her a lot o’ times after that. He said she wanted to go along on it. We was gonna do it alone, just leavin’ the motor on while we was inside, but he said she could push the wheel until we switched cars. I tole him she’d probably chicken out but he said she wouldn’t. Duke drove up from here in the morning. We had the second car goin up, the one we stashed to switch to later. That one was stole, too, but it was fixed up, you know? We got there about noontime, maybe, an’ we met Duke’s cousin on his lunch hour. We put the car in the place we were supposed to an then he helped us swipe another one for the job. He had it all lined up. The broad was scared while we were waitin’. She was all white, like. We killed an hour in this lunchroom and she dint eat nothin’. I tole Duke he shouldn’t ought to let her drive but he said she’d be okay when it got movin. I guess maybe she was, I donno. She pulled in by the freight door okay, and she waited okay, even when the old geezer saw us comin’. I donno whether it was her idea to pull out without waitin’ for me or whether Duke tole her to. I donno nothin’ else. Damn, Jack, what else do you want me to tell you? She’s just a broad, is all. Just a broad wants some kicks.”

I gave him the cigarette and lit it. “What was the setup for last night? For when you got back to New York?”

“Nothin’. We were gonna come down here, to this joint. We figured we’d get here before this other broad — dame — got home. We were gonna split the take, me and Duke and a corner for his cousin. Then I was gonna blow. I dint have no special plans.”

“Not split for the girl?”

“Let Duke worry. He brung her in on it, not me. But she dint want none anyhow. Like I’m tellin’ ya, she comes in on it for laughs. Different, she says. Just to see what it feels like. How you gonna figure broads anyhow?”

“She supposed to go somewhere with Duke?”

“Who knows? Duke was tryin’ to talk her into it but she wouldn’t say. But anyhow, we figured we didn’t have to leave

New York. Hell, Troy’s a hundred-sixty, a hundred-seventy miles up. Once we got clear this was as good a place as any.”

“What kind of heap is the doctored one?”

“Chevy sedan. Fifty-six. Dark green.”

“You know the plates?”

He shrugged.

“You call here before you came up?”

“Two, three times, yeah. I wanna see who’s answerin.”

I looked at Sally. “Three calls?”

“I think so, yes.”

“You ever hear of Harry Fannin?”

“Just when this here broad said the name. That you?”

“Ain’t it been a pleasure?”

Bogardus grunted. I sucked on a knuckle, wondering who’d phoned me that way. There’d been that one anonymous call just before Sally’s. Cathy herself maybe, checking to see if I was there before she came over? Or Duke? Duke would know more about her background than this clown did. If they’d gotten split up he might have called, decided she hadn’t gotten there yet, then parked himself along the street to wait. It would have been a fair bet for him if he hadn’t been able to find her anywhere else.

I sat there staring at Bogardus. He still looked like exactly what he was, a poolhall rumdum whose head would shrink in a light rain, and the trouble with his story was that you could believe it. You could see her doing it, see her getting just fed up enough with her Keats-spouting Village boyfriends to think that Duke might be exciting. Exciting. And what will we do after we give syphilis to all the natives, Mr. Columbus?

“Duke Sabatini,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I suppose he’s another rugged ninety-seven-pound terror just like you. What’s he look like?”

“Taller ‘n me.”

“I suppose he’s got the same greasy hair you pretty bastards put up in curlers every night, too. I suppose he’s—”

“I don’t put up my—”

“Shut up, scum. What’s his cousin’s name?”

“Sabatini. Just like him. Freddie Sabatini.”

“What’s Duke’s first name?”

“Angelo. Hey, look, this thing hurts bad, Jack. Ain’t I gonna get a doctor?”

I told him what he could do with the wrist. I supposed Angelo Sabatini would be a hundred miles off already. With a murder rap on his neck a punk like this one would be sprinting fast enough to make Roger Bannister look like a hitchhiker. It was Duke all right. All that cash in the balance, a girl like Cathy who probably started feeling guilty or scared when it was over — anything could have set it off. I’d find out the details after the cops picked him up. The cops. Sure, they’d get him sooner or later, but I wasn’t going to be in on it. Hell no, Fannin would be home reading witty lines out of his Bartlett’s Quotations and waiting for some potted dame to climb the stairs and fall into his lap for the big romp in the hay. You could set fire to the end of the bed and Fannin wouldn’t smell smoke until morning.

Sally had come across to where I was pacing. Her hand was on my arm.

“Harry — now let me be the one to tell you to take it easy.”

I didn’t say anything because anything I would have said would not have had more than four letters in it. I picked up the phone and dialed my home number. Dan got it on the first ring.

“You called Brannigan yet?”

“Just about to. You said an hour. You onto anything?”

“Looks open and shut. Don’t ask me how, but she rode along on a payroll heist up in Troy yesterday with two punks. Guy named Bogardus I got wrapped up, another one named Sabatini. Sabatini’s the one who killed her. They—”

“Killed her!” Bogardus was staring up at me from the floor, slack-jawed. I ignored him.

“Evidently she got scared,” I said. “She’d probably told the guy what I did for a living, and then she was probably just innocent enough to think she could go to me and promise him she wouldn’t mention any names.”

Dan did not say anything. Bogardus was still gaping like a six-year-old watching three of them sneak up on James Arness at once.

“I’m going to ice this joker I’ve got down here,” I said. “When the badges get there just tell them I’ll have it when I come. I’ve got a couple of stops to make first.”

“Right. You got any line on where this Sabatini might have ducked to?”

“He’s got forty thousand in his glove compartment.”

“Makes it tough.”

“Yeah. I’ll see you in an hour or so. But listen—” I gave him Sally’s address. “Tell them to pick up Bogardus here. Brannigan can put through a call on it. I’ll leave a key, same as up there.”

I put back the phone and turned to Eddie Bogardus. He screwed up his face. “Damn, Jack, you sure you got it figured straight? Duke wouldn’t of killed the broad, not her. He was nuts about her. He even wanted to marry her an’ all.”

“He’d have a sweet honeymoon doing twenty for armed robbery.”

“He still wouldn’t of killed her, even if she was gonna rat on us. Hell, for all he knew I might of got caught and ratted before that. He could of just run and hid out. He had the loot, dint he?”

“Did he?”

He thought about that, sitting there against the bed like Newton under the tree. After a while you could see it fall on him. Cathy had somehow managed to wind up holding all the coin. Duke hadn’t knifed her to keep her from talking. Repossessing the forty thousand had been a better reason.

I had turned to Sally. “You know an Adam Moss, 113th Street?”

She’d been sitting with her hands in her lap like the little lost girl at the station house. It took a minute, then she frowned. “Not at all. Is he involved in it somehow?”

“Cathy was driving his car. He must be somebody she went to before she came to me.”

“Funny, it’s not a name she’s ever mentioned.”

I’ll check it. You have someplace you can stay a day or two?”

“Golly, you don t think there’s going to be anymore—”

“Just until the other one’s picked up. There might be loose ends.”

“I guess I could call one of the girls from the office—”

“Do that,” I said. It was 5:34. “Meanwhile I’ll take care of the southpaw here. On your feet, Gomez.”

“What re you gonna do? I thought you tole that guy to send the cops down?”

He was still hanging onto that leg of lamb at the end of his sleeve. It was beginning to look overcooked. I took him by the elbow and nudged him into the chair.

“Hey now, bananas, you said you’d get me a doctor. I got to get a splint on this or somethin’. Damn, Jack, it’s—”

“You’ll get a splint,” I told him. “You’re sitting on it. There tape in the bathroom, Sally?”

She went for it. Bogardus was squirming.

“Put your wrist on that armrest.”

“What? Hey, you ain’t gonna—”

I frowned at him, so he put the arm down. He did it the way you’d set down nitroglycerin during an earth tremor. He clamped his jaws tight against the yell when I took hold of it, changed his mind and opened it again. The yell didn’t come because I snapped the bone into place just then. That Bach cantata came back instead. He could hum it for the cops when he woke up. I took the tape from Sally and told her to make her call.

“Tell her you’ll explain later,” I said. “And scribble down the name and number for me, will you? And your office number if you think you might go to work.”

“I won’t go in.”

I taped Sleeping Beauty into the chair, then picked up the stocking he had used to gag Sally and bound it around his mouth. I didn’t want him rousing up any neighbors and convincing them he was the victim of foul play before the wagon got there. The stocking had a run in it anyhow. Sally got her friend out of bed after a wait. She wrote the name Judy Paulson and the address and number on a sheet of yellow tablet paper. I chewed a cigarette while she threw some stuff into a blue leather bag which might have been manufactured to carry manhole covers.

I looked around the bedroom. Furnished apartments. Toss your gear into the closet, come in to use the sack after the last bar closes and there’s no place else to go. Live in one sometime. See if the place ever shows anymore outward trace of your personality than an iron lung.

Sally put her hand on my wrist. “I guess I didn’t say it before. I’m sorry, Harry.”

“Let’s go,” I said. Bogardus was wheezing with his head on his chest. I double checked the tape and the gag and then we locked the door. We went down the quiet stairway and I left the key under the rubber in the lower hall. The street was as hushed as a sickroom. We walked the block and a half to Seventh and then up to the MG. We were not talking.

Her girlfriend lived off Gramercy Park and I drove her over there. The car didn’t make anymore noise than four flatulent drunks in a YMCA shower. If Adam Moss turned out to be a nice guy maybe I’d buy him a muffler.

She did not get out when I parked. You could see a few streaks of gray in the sky and a bird was acting moronic about it in the park. We were just sitting there when the couple turned the corner. The man looked as if he would have been willing to quit hours before. He kept telling Evelyn it was time to go home.

“My neck, home,” Evelyn said. “I’m going up to the church and scream bloody murder—”

Maybe she went. We were under a street lamp. “There’s something else I didn’t say,” Sally Kline told me. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“Just for coming. Are you going up to see the police now?”

“Somebody’s got to tell Cathy’s mother and sister. I thought I’d get it over with.”

“Oh, Lord, I’d forgotten all about them—” My hands were together on the wheel and she put one of hers over them. “Would you like me to come along, Harry? If it might make it easier I’d—”

“You get some sleep. I’ll call you later.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

She was turned toward me. She leaned across and kissed me on the cheek like a sister. I never had a sister so I turned around and looked at her, and then we weren’t related anymore. Why do people do those things? People do all sorts of things. I once had a client worth seven and one-half million dollars and she used to do her laundry in the toilet bowl. So we sat there stuck together like two halves of a boiled potato with the water burned out of the pot. After a while she got out. I watched her until the door buzzed and I saw her open it and go inside, and then I pulled out and headed up toward 72nd Street West.

I had thought about calling, but I hadn’t spoken to Estelle in almost a year. She would know something was wrong the minute she recognized my voice. The decent thing was to go there.

I took Lexington all the way and then cut across. There were the beginnings of traffic now, and the sanitation trucks were out. I found a slot about a block from the building and walked over.

I pushed Howes, which was 12-C. Cathy’s mother was too deaf to hear the ring. There was another one of those broadcast systems in the center of the block of bells and I knew it would be Estelle who would call down.

It was a good minute and then her voice came clearly. The Russians weren’t jamming this one yet.

“It’s Harry Fannin, Estelle.”

“Who?”

“Harry Fannin.”

There was a silence. Finally the buzzer rang. I went in, crossed the long lobby with mirrors and potted stuff that I remembered and pressed for the elevator. It was a self-service job, silent as an anaconda slithering down a cypress, and it got there a lot more quickly than I wanted it to. Because I was wondering what Emily Post might have to say about just how you go barging in on someone at six o’clock in the morning to let her know that her kid sister had gotten caught up in an armed robbery and then had been murdered by a cheap hood named Duke Sabatini.

I was still wondering when I walked along the corridor on the twelfth floor to the door marked C and pressed the bell. And then Estelle opened up and I didn’t wonder anymore, at least not about part of it.

Because part of what I had been going to say was wrong. Duke Sabatini hadn’t done it.

CHAPTER 7

Duke hadn’t done it because he was here, and there could only be one reason why he’d come. He had to be looking for Cathy. So he didn’t even know she was dead.

“In,” he told me. He didn’t say it precisely the way Eddie Bogardus had said it. Bogardus I’d tagged as an Edward G. Robinson fan, and this one was a trifle more suave — say the early Cagney sort. The gun was Cagney’s kind also, a foot-long Army Colt which might have looked less likely to drag him to the floor if it had been mounted on a caisson. He was standing several feet back from the door, calmly pressing the thing into Estelle’s ribs.

It was Duke all right. New York wouldn’t be that lousy with random armed punks waiting behind entrances. Actually he was prettier than Cagney. Taller too, although the Vitalis alone gave him a three-inch edge. He had eyes the color of broomstraw.

We were standing there. “Remember that scene when he squashes the grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face?” I said. “Always got a boot out of old Jimmy. Or was it Jean Harlow’s face?”

“Let’s save the chatter, huh?”

“Well now, sure, if you didn’t see the picture I guess we can’t discuss it. Truth is I can’t stay anyhow. I just dropped by to deliver some bananas.”

He caught the reference and he scowled at me, so I scowled back. I was being rather silly. He knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

“You want to step out of the way,” I asked him finally, “or am I supposed to crawl through your legs?”

“Hard,” he said. “First he’s comic and now he’s hard. Just ease in the door. There’s room for six of your kind, Oliver.”

Oliver, Jack. Different cast, same writers. Same old story-line too. Boys lose girl, so one of them checks out the roommate and the other one checks out the mother and sister. Two wrong endings on the same double feature. A girl like Cathy would go to a man when she got into trouble.

Sure. So what man?

I went in. I’d seen too many females messed up already that morning to want to make him really impatient. Estelle was trembling, next to him. She couldn’t have looked much worse if vandals had trampled the chrysanthemums.

“That wall will do swell,” he told me. “Let’s turn around and get your hands up on it.”

I did that too, standing next to a highboy. I could see a little of the other furniture and it was what I remembered, all very antiseptic and uncomfortable looking. Estelle’s taste. There was a TV set in the corner. Just a little while and the three of us could catch Sunrise Semester.

Duke had closed the door. “On the couch,” he told Estelle. “And get glued there.”

I heard her going, then felt the.45 hook into the small of my back. I’d already made up my mind not to horse around with this one. Years ago I’d made up my mind. It’s a cinch to be psychological, Fannin’s one mental block, but any muzzle you can lose a fountain pen in is just too big.

But he really didn’t make me that nervous. He’d be looking for information, not a murder rap.

He was frisking me, running me down with his left hand. “The gun’s on my right hip,” I told him. “If you’re looking for the forty grand, I already blew that on chewing gum and soda.”

“We’ll get to that news later, Oliver.” He jerked out the Luger and then my wallet. Then he found the barrel and trigger-assembly of Eddie’s zip-gun.

That seemed to amuse him a little. He wheezed contemptuously through his nose and I heard the pieces fall against the seat of an upholstered chair. The.45 crowded my spine some more, so he was probably busy with my wallet. After a while that dropped to the floor.

“Big of you,” I told him. I could see that he’d left the money in it. He wasn’t interested in my paltry fifty or sixty bucks.

“Fannin,” he said. “Cop, huh? Okay, cop, it’s too early for you to be on it for any bonding company. So Bogardus spilled about the heist. What else do you know that’s interesting? Let’s have it.”

He didn’t know me from Little Black Sambo, which meant that Cathy had kept us private after all. I didn’t feel so high-spirited anymore, knowing that. Under the circumstances I suddenly felt considerably like a slob.

“Spill, cop.”

“Shove that rod against me one more time and you’ll get one goddam lot of answers,” I told him. “Back off and let me stop climbing this wall. What the hell do you need besides that howitzer to keep me in line? You want a tin whistle maybe?”

“A wit,” he said. “A real genuine wit.”

“Yeah, I know, the man who wrote Snowbound was wittier.”

A little time passed. He grunted. He could turn colors before I’d explain it to him.

He decided to be accommodating. “Drop ‘em,” he said.

“Keep your feet right where they are when you come around. Anything fishy and this thing goes off.”

I turned. He had backed out into the middle of the room. His gray sharkskin suit had shoulders as outsize as the cannon in his hand and the knot in his purple tie was big enough to moor something of Cunard’s. Cathy’s latest beau. So he hadn’t killed her. So I still wasn’t rushing off to ask permission to bunk with him next semester.

The.45 was centered on my intestines. “Okay,” he said then. “All nice and relaxed, huh? Now where is she?”

I ignored him. He could throw that one at me all night and not get anything, not while Estelle was sitting there that way. She was wearing a drab blue robe and house slippers. Her hands were locked in her lap and her lips had no blood behind them. She was staring at me helplessly and I realized it was the first time I had ever seen her without glasses. Oddly enough it made her look better than I remembered.

“Where, cop?”

“Cathy hasn’t got the money,” I told him evenly. “You don’t have to look for Cathy.”

Estelle winced when I mentioned the name. Obviously I hadn’t changed the subject by butting in on them. I changed it now.

“Where’s your mother, Estelle?”

She looked across at me vaguely and her voice was strained. “She’s in the hospital, Harry. She had an operation last weekend.”

“Oh, my busted back,” Duke said, “if that ain’t touching. How was it? I sure hope everything came out okay?”

“She’s all right,” Estelle said distractedly.

“That’s great. I’m real glad to hear that. You be sure and tell her how glad I am.” He had not taken his eyes off me. “How many times I got to ask you, cop? What’s your pitch in this?”

Estelle’s breath was audible. She was staring at me now, probably wondering the same thing. I did not want her to be putting too much of it together.

“Damn it, where is she? Where’s the broad?”

“What broad? You mean the girl Eddie says you’re nuts about? The one you’re supposed to marry?”

“Yeah, marry. That cheap double-crossing no-good skirt, I’d like to—”

I was pleased to hear how he felt about all that. I wanted a little information myself and that could be just the needle to get it for me. “I told you,” I said. “Your girl hasn’t got the money, Angelo.”

“Can that. My old lady calls me Angelo. Her and the priest. Not you, Oliver.”

I grinned at him. “What does Cathy call you?”

“Spit,” he said.

“Always happens, doesn’t it? Trust a dame and then turn your back for half an hour and she’s—”

“Half an hour, hell. Ten damned minutes. Her and all that chatter about how she’d stick it out. And then all I do is go down for a deck of butts. Not even ten minutes, because the clock in the lobby says two-sharp when I go down and it ain’t even two-ten when I come back. Faking like she’s asleep and then—”

I kept grinning at him. I couldn’t help myself. Another minute and he’d be letting me read his diary.

His face had changed. He wasn’t sure what he’d told me but he realized he’d made a boo-boo. It wasn’t much, actually, but it was all I had and I already loved it dearly. IWo o’clock. And she’d gotten to my place around three-thirty. Time for one or two stops. Adam Moss? Who else?

Duke’s lips had pulled back over his gums in a grimace of disgust. The Colt jerked up an inch or two in his hand. “Turn back to the wall, cop.”

“What’s the matter, Angelo? I thought you wanted me to answer some questions.”

“Turn around, you phony bastard. Who you trying to con anyhow? Spit, Oliver, you ain’t got anymore idea where she is than me. You come up here on what Bogardus told you and you find me so you figure it means she’s got the dough. Bright boy, trying to con me into spilling something else. Well, you been told all you’re getting, bright boy. You phony cops, for crying out loud. Eddie lets out about the loot and you come sniffing around for it like any two-bit chiseler smelling a free beer. Turn around, phony, right now, or I’ll blast that fat smirk right off your kisser.”

I took a last look at the gun. I was sure I could knock him off his feet after one shot. One. And Max Schmeling could have taken Joe Louis if he’d been awake after the first round. I knew I’d hate myself for it in the morning, but I turned around and memorized the wallpaper again.

I suppose it didn’t matter much. He still wasn’t going to do any shooting unless somebody drove him to it. All he wanted was time. Let him go looking for Cathy. The law would pick him up sooner or later on that Troy thing. Me, I wanted someone else.

“Higher, cop,” he told me. He had moved up close. I knew well enough what was coming and I tried to set myself for it.

I heard Estelle suck in her breath and begin to whimper. I hoped he would be dumb enough to switch his grip to the business end of the gun first, but he was finished with being dumb for today. And then I said the hell with it anyhow. I waited until the last second, when the shadow of his arm was lifting along the wall.

I jerked my head aside and went for him.

CHAPTER 8

I was happy. Bach might have been meant for Eddie Bogardus alone, but I had my Wagner. The Siegfried Idyll Far off, through drooping willow trees where gentle rain fell. A small wind was rising, and the rivers flowed. The rug beneath me was soft as new down, and softer daylight was breaking through the windows beyond, bathing me in its warm sweet radiance. I dreamed of fair women.

Innocent peace, melancholy contentment, what more could a man need? Let some other kid grow up to be president.

My wallet was lying three inches from my nose like a dead mouse.

A clock on a desk across the room said it had been less than fifteen minutes when I came out of it. I considered myself extremely clever to figure that out, since the clock was upside down. Curiously enough so was the rest of the furniture. I rolled slightly. Lazy clumps of dust ignored my intrusion along the floorboards.

I had caught it in the temple. Old devil-may-care Harry. Go get’im, Harry! Ha.

I lay there throbbing like a bongo. Was I in the mood to encourage all that by moving? Did it matter, since I could hardly move anyhow? I wondered if the publicity people at that nice Johnson & Johnson company had any idea how many dandy home uses people can find for their ordinary two-inch adhesive.

My hands were behind me somewhere. I tried them a little, delicately, so that only half of the hair on my wrists came out. I gave up on it. Quitter Fannin. Rapidly discouraged, beaten in a nonce.

In a trice?

I rolled over a little more and there was Estelle.

Poor Estelle. Somebody d left her on the couch, tape on her ankles, tape on her toes. Hadn’t clobbered her, though, used a gag instead. Still, pains a chap to see someone all taped up like that, you know?

We stared at each other like a pair of indecently dressed manikins in a Fifth Avenue window wishing all the people would go away.

After an undetermined period of time, roughly an eon, it struck me that I might hazard a small experiment. I opened my mouth.

No gag. If I tried harder I might even say a few well-chosen words.

“You okay, Estelle?”

She nodded, but her eyes were dull and empty. She was reacting badly. But then living with a widowed mother and teaching the third grade for fifteen years would do that. It was not the best conditioning for the rest of what I would have to tell her either.

“I don’t suppose there’s a knife around anywhere but in the kitchen? Anything sharp?”

No response. I wondered precisely how she was supposed to go about giving me directions anyhow. I wondered how my lame head would take to the idea if I started wriggling.

I tried it like a worm first, bracing my shoulders and shoving forward with my heels. Highly commendable. I managed all of about eight inches in the time it takes to roast a small hen. I grinned at Estelle and tried a roll instead.

That was better. I cut the hell out of my wrist, but I made it across to the kitchenette doorway in maybe ten flops. I stopped to let my head screw itself back into place.

I had to twist around and go back to the other method to get through the door. Estelle was watching me. “Keeps me in shape,” I said. “The rolling Fannin gathers no moss.”

I was being the lightheaded lad again. So lightheaded I hadn’t realized it until I’d said it. Moss. Adam Moss. I snaked my way into the kitchen thinking that Mr. Moss was next on the agenda.

No, next was a blade. I was going to have some case getting to one if Estelle was a compulsive housekeeper. I was lucky. I saw the point of a fruit knife extending over the edge of the drain on the sink. I slithered over there.

The sink was just low enough. I swung up and around into something which approximated a sitting position, then wedged my hands under myself and lifted like an automobile jack until I was able to catch the point between my teeth. I let it drop to the linoleum.

The rest was a snap. It didn’t take me more than fifteen minutes and I only cut myself four times.

I stopped for a second in the bathroom, throwing some water on my face and then gritting my teeth like Mike Hammer while I bathed the gashes in iodine. Coming out I glanced into the bedrooms. Duke had given the place a quick ransacking before he’d left.

Estelle sat up numbly when I cut her free. She rubbed her hands, not saying anything. I gave her a cigarette. She took the first couple of drags as if no one might make it back down into that caved-in mineshaft again.

“I suppose you understood part of all that?”

She nodded uncertainly.

“Estelle, Cathy got mixed up in something that I’m afraid— well, it isn’t very pretty.”

She looked at me. All I’d been doing was telling people about it. Dan and Helen Abraham, Sally Kline, now the sister. I could start a service to go with that drunk’s suicide plan. Why leave a note when Smiling Fannin can break the news for you? I was glad her mother wasn’t there.

“Cathy’s dead, Estelle.”

“She—”

I could actually feel her go rigid next to me. After the first gasp she didn’t make another sound. Her eyes were wide and she was staring at me but nothing came out. A kick in the stomach might have brought on roughly the same initial reaction.

I put my hand on her arm when the sobbing began. It was broken and harsh. It was the sort of thing that comes without any tears. It was all inside, which is the rottenest kind.

“I’m sorry, Estelle—”

A while passed. Her cigarette was in a tray. Finally she fumbled in her pocket and came up with a handkerchief.

“How?” she said then. “Oh, Harry, did one of those men—?”

“Somebody. With a knife.”

She gasped, clenching her fists. I stood there and watched the faint curl of smoke.

“Who? Why? Oh, God, why?”

“I don’t know. Until I found him here I thought it was our boy with the cannon. He was… Cathy’d been involved in something with him. I don’t think she understood how serious it was. It was armed robbery, Estelle. What Duke wanted was the money, which seems to be missing. That’s what she was killed for. She’d been… well, running around a lot.”

I didn’t know how you were supposed to tell it to someone like Estelle. You can be doddering, bald and approaching senility and still feel awkward in front of an old-maid school teacher. She and Cathy had been only a dozen years apart, but when I’d been in the family I’d always thought of her more like an aunt than a sister-in-law. I had wondered more than once if she were a virgin.

She looked up at me from no more than two feet away, but her voice might have been coming from a shut closet. “Mother,” she said. “Mother will—”

She made a choking pitiful sound deep in her throat, and then she was running toward the bathroom. The door closed and I could hear her sobbing behind it.

I stood there for a minute, feeling rotten, then I flicked on the TV without the sound. A morning-program MC gave me what was probably a very famous grin. I turned him off.

She was more composed when she came back. She had dried her eyes. She sat down, not close to me.

“Tell me, Harry,” she said. “I… I want to know.”

“It’s nothing more than I’ve already said. Really, Estelle. She got involved with this fellow Duke somehow, and one thing led to another.”

“No,” she said. She was not looking at me. “I want to know about her, Harry. This… running around, you called it. That was it all the time, wasn’t it? When you and she broke up?”

“Estelle, it’s a messy story. She was your sister — you know as much about the kind of girl she was as I do.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know.” She was chewing her lip. “That’s why when I think about telling mother, or trying to hide it from her, I… Oh, Harry, I’ve been hiding things about Cathy from mother for so long. Oh, God, and now this! Now I’ll have to hide this, too! Because I always did it. I always did it and I used to hate myself for it. Oh, Harry, it’s such a terrible thing to say, but I’ve always thought of her as such a—”

She cut herself off but you could guess the word easily enough. Tramp would do. Someone like Estelle could not think of a girl like Cathy in any other way, and I supposed you could not criticize her too much. But now she was being hurt because of it.

She had started to cry again, and her body began to shake like a child’s. I got up and walked across the room and stood by the windows. There was an air-conditioning unit in one of them but it was off. It was almost 6:30. Traffic was loosening up down below. In another couple of hours it would be something to hide from.

“But I know one of the reasons,” she said behind me.

“What?”

She was not looking at me. “Why she was that way.”

“I don’t get you.”

She still did not look up. ‘She must have told you about the time she was lost in the mountains up beyond Lake George. When she was six.”

“Sure.”

“She didn’t get lost, Harry. Someone… a man… attacked her. Criminally.”

“Oh, damn, Estelle.”

“He… they sent him to jail for it. But that isn’t the point. The point is that Catherine somehow forgot about it, Harry. Or she deliberately put it out of her mind. Sublimated it, that’s the word. I heard her talk about it afterward a dozen times, and all she ever remembered was wandering in the woods and being cold. She talked about it like some marvelous childhood adventure she’d had, and the… the other part of it was out of her mind completely. I wanted to tell her about it but I never could.

I never could say anything. But that must have been part of it, I’m sure. She buried the memory of what happened because it was such a shock, but there was some kind of inverse reaction, as if she were unconsciously trying to prove to herself that it hadn’t hurt her, or… I don’t know. But she should have been under analysis. I did tell her that once, two or three years ago, but she merely laughed at me. Maybe I’m making too much of the whole thing, maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference anyhow. But now she’s…”

Estelle had been staring at the rug all the time she was telling it. It was not simply that she was upset. I had to wonder how a woman could grow to thirty-six or thirty-seven and still be embarrassed by something like that.

I didn’t have much idea what the story was worth. Psychology was another one of those things I’d missed because of wind-sprints and signal practice at Ann Arbor. Not that it mattered much now anyhow. I went across to her.

Her head was still down. I put my fist under her chin. “Look, will you be all right? I have to check in with the law. I haven’t seen them yet, Estelle.”

She started to get up and I helped her. For a moment she stood there with my hand on her wrist. She started to say something and then her face twisted up again. After that I was holding her with her face on my shoulder.

“It’ll be all right, Estelle.”

We stood that way. She was breathing unevenly and I could feel her breasts rising beneath the robe. They were full and firm. It was probably a shoddy thing to consider at the moment, but I thought she very likely needed a man a lot more than she needed consolation. I squeezed her shoulders, waiting another minute, then I eased away.

“I better call them.”

“Will you… I won’t go to school today. I’ll see mother this morning, but I won’t tell her. Harry, will you stop back later?”

“Sure.”

I watched her shuffle into one of the bedrooms. She closed the door.

There was a phone on a stand and I dialed my number. Dan wouldn’t be answering. It rang once and then the voice was Nate Brannigan out of Central Homicide.

“Fannin, Nate.”

“Well,” he said. “Well, now. Fannin, huh? Isn’t that grand? Wait until I check my watch and see just how grand that is. Six forty-one. Putting the time of death at roughly three-thirty, that makes a lapse of three hours and eleven minutes. What the hell, let’s call it three hours even. Nice of you to ring, Mr. Fannin. Would you like a little more time, maybe? Would you like to make it four hours? Five? I’d hate to inconvenience you.”

I let him get all that out of his system.

“Well, Fannin?”

“I wasn’t sure you were finished.”

“I’m not. Not by a damned sight. But first I want to hear your end of it. Tell me a story, Fannin. Make it a good one. Where the damned hell you been? Where are you now?”

“I’m across on 72nd. You get that pick-up on Perry Street?”

“Yeah, yeah. Bogardus. I sent a car. They hauled him in twenty minutes ago, but I’m still waiting for a charge. You better have one, Fannin. You get me stuck with a false arrest to cover a fist fight you had with some wet-nosed kid and I’ll—”

“You read a bulletin on a payroll job in Troy yesterday? Some shirt factory? Roughly forty thousand?”

“Not my department. He in on that?”

“Him and another couple, cousins named Sabatini. I had a session with one of them also, but I lost. He’ll be poking around in some of the same places your boys will be working on the killing, looking for the girl. It slipped my mind to tell him she’s dead.”

“Dan gave me the background on you and the girl, Harry. Sorry about that.”

“Thanks.”

“She rigged in on the Troy thing?”

“That’s pretty much it. She was with Sabatini until roughly two o’clock, then she scrammed. That would have been fine, except she took the money with her. She went someplace before she came to me, more likely two places. One of the guys she went to see had a second thought and followed her. I’ve been using the MG she came in. She—”

“Damn it, Fannin.”

“I was in a hurry, Nate. But let me—”

“No, let me. Okay, so the guy stabs her out front and then grabs the money and guns off. And after that the girl gets back on her feet bleeding like a stuck pig and rings your bell and dances up the stairs, huh?”

“I know how it sounds. But either he thought she was dead or he lost his nerve. You can—”

“the girl didn’t say anything?”

“Not about who killed her, no.”

“But you talked?”

“A couple words, yeah.”

“Fannin, you amaze me. How long have I known you — five, six years?”

“Come off it, will you, Nate? What gripe have you got except that I should have called sooner? What the hell would you have done in my position, got up a bridge game maybe? Let’s play it without the weary cop sarcasm, huh? I’m not much in the mood.”

“Fannin, I’ll finish what I started to tell you. And like I say, if I didn’t know you and you hadn’t played it straight for five years I’d have had every badge in nine precincts out of bed and hunting for you two minutes after I got here—”

“Now listen—”

“You listen. All right, the girl comes up and dies on your doorstep. You used to be married to her, maybe that’s good enough reason why she’s there. But don’t tell me you had a cozy little chat before she died and she didn’t say word number one about who—”

“Damn it—”

“And don’t hand me any fairy tale about somebody she went to see who followed her and took the money, don’t give me that either. Don’t give me anything. Just get yourself over here and make it fast. You get me? I don’t know what you’re trying to cover, or who — the girl’s reputation probably — but I don’t like to be suckered. I’ll trust you on it for the fifteen minutes it’ll take you to get across town and not four seconds longer. What the hell do you take me for anyhow?”

“Why, you old rummy. You old dim-witted country Irish jerk. Five years, huh? And just how many things have I handed you in that time? Every damned one of them crated up and slapped on your desk without a loose string anywhere. Which is a damned good thing because if there was a loose string you’d trip over it and fall on your fat face. And here I get one that I’m not even doing for money, see, no fee at all because sometimes I can get to be sentimental as hell, you know? And in three hours I’ve done half your legwork and found your motive and—”

“What motive, Fannin? What motive is that? You mean the forty-two thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven dollars and thirty-four cents?”

“You bet your tin badge I mean the—”

“Yeah? What’s the matter, Fannin, you get hoarse all of a sudden? You lose the voice from trying so hard to make yourself sound good?”

“All right, all right, let’s have it. I thought the Troy heist wasn’t your department?”

“Never said it was.”

“Damn it, Brannigan, where’d you get the exact figure? Do I have to come over there and shake it out of you?”

“Why, hell, Harry, not at all. Like I say, its all among friends. You just trot on over and I’ll be more than happy to show you the cash. After all, we found it in your laundry bag, didn’t we?”

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 of his 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 3 was 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,”he said. 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 is insurance?”

“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.

CHAPTER 11

Sally Kline said on the phone that there were only two or three people Cathy had seen with any regularity. One was a writer on Bank Street in the Village named Ned Sommers. Another was a photographer named Clyde Neva who had a live-in studio loft on East 10th Street. She said Neva was a pretty blatant homosexual.

“But gosh, Harry, I hope I don’t sound as if I’m suggesting that either one of them might have—”

“It’s just routine,” I told her. “One of them might remember something, or know things you don’t. Anymore?”

The only other one she could tag was an Arthur Leeds. She thought he was a musician and she gave me another Village address, on Jones Street this time. I told her to get some sleep.

Coffey had been checking the addresses in my directory when I repeated the names. “No women, huh?” Brannigan said.

“There wouldn’t be.”

“This Kline girl. She came home at eleven, was there all night until she called you?”

“For crying out loud, Nate—”

“Just asking. She’ll have to make a statement anyhow, this afternoon will be good enough. I’ll see her then.” He took the phone and dialed headquarters about something. I went into the bedroom and dug out a.38 Police Special and a shoulder holster to replace the empty Luger sheath. Dan followed me in.

“I got all the time in the world if you want anything,” he said quietly.

I’ll call you.”

“Be at the office. Don’t strain it, huh, fella?”

I stood there a minute after he went out. I took out Ethan J. Spragway’s card and looked at it. Spragway spelled backward was Yawgarps. I stuck the card in a drawer. The sour-faced plainclothesman from outside was just coming up when I went back out front.

“The wagon will be here any minute, Waterman,” Brannigan told him. “Stick around after it leaves. You’ll be called about relief. And take that MG when you go in. Give him the keys, will you, Harry?”

I tossed them over. Waterman dropped them. He bent to pick them up with the same sick-of-it-all expression that he probably had when he made love to his wife. Brannigan had turned to Coffey.

“All right,” he said, “Fannin and I will check out those three intimates, but first we’ll take a look around that Perry Street place, give it a run-through for address books, mail, all the rest. I want that Moss kid seen again, and I want his alibi authenticated. Pete’ll know pretty quick if there’s any local sheet on him. I also want to know if Bogardus is still telling the same story he told this morning. After that you can start checking the hotels up near where that MG was parked on Broadway. I want all of them for three blocks in every direction. A clerk just might remember Sabatini going out for smokes and the girl ducking out five minutes later. Maybe she said something, asked a question, looked scared. You can pick up a partner first, anybody who’s unassigned. If it looks like you’re going to have to waste a day waking up off-duty clerks call in for an extra team. Keep Pete posted on the desk every hour or so.” Coffey grunted in acknowledgment. Maybe in disgust, it was an ambiguous sort of sound. He was leaning against the wall near the door, sucking a flat toothpick.

“You got any questions or are you just learning to like it here?”

“Nuts,” Coffey said. He started for the door, threw Brannigan a salute which could just as easily have been translated into an obscene gesture as anything it was supposed to mean, and went out. The toothpick lay on the carpet where he’d been standing.

I looked at Brannigan. He was still working the unlighted cigar and he did not say anything.

“What the hell is all that?” I asked him. “You guys give him white mice to play with when he wants them, too?”

“Tell you later,” he muttered. “Let’s go, huh?”

I stood there a minute after he was gone, then I knelt next to the door and lifted the raincoat away. Woodsmoke would have had more color than her face. Waterman was watching me. I went downstairs.

The stenographer had taken one of the cars. Coffey was just pulling out in the second one and Brannigan was waiting at the third, one without insignia. “Counting Waterman it looks like three vehicles for four men,” I said when I got in. “Evidently the whole departments gone soft.”

Brannigan looked at me, made a face, then finally got rid of the decimated cigar. “Guys who came with Coffey and Pete have been checking out every apartment on this block for an hour and a half,” he said almost indifferently, “trying to rouse up somebody who might have had insomnia and been staring out a window when the deed was done. I’ve once in a while been known to give a legitimate P.I. his head, Harry, but I don’t particularly sit on my butt and read Ralph Waldo Emerson while I’m letting him run. Four other officers are out pulling hack drivers out of bed to see if any of them noticed that red MG on the streets last night, or any red MG, and where, and every patrolman who was on duty is being asked the same thing. We’ve already talked to everybody in your building, and it may also interest you to know that your office has been pulled apart and put back together again, just in case you might be working on something that could have tied in with this, or for that matter to see if you’d had any communication from the deceased lately which you might not want to mention. Also I used your phone to call and check the figures on that Troy heist. You can bill us on it, I suppose. You got anymore questions or are you beginning to like it here, too?”

“The Perry Street apartment’s in the block between Fourth and Bleecker,” I told him.

He’d had the car idling. He grinned at me, shifted and swung out. He went across to Second Avenue and straight down. He drove like most cops, treating the general run of working men’s cars like moving targets. Once or twice he gave me a nudge and I opened the siren for him. If I’d been in a better mood I would have watched the street corners for familiar faces to wave to.

“You were going to tell me about Coffey,” I said after a while. “What the hell, he walks around as if he knows where the department hides the bodies.”

He stopped the shenanigans with the car when I asked him that, punching his tongue into the side of his cheek for a minute before he answered. “Coffey’s all right,” he said then. “His wife and kid were killed in an auto smash up near Poughkeepsie about two months ago. Son of a bitch driving the other car was drunk as a calf and walked away without a bruise. They booked him on vehicular manslaughter but I don’t suppose that helps Coffey much.”

“He’s going to work it off, you think?”

“Either that or he’ll walk in on some trigger-happy junkie one afternoon and not get his own gun out in time, and who’s going to know whether he was really trying or not? I talked it over with the day chief. At least he still gets things done. He’s thorough.”

“He would be,” I said meaninglessly. I sat there remembering how I’d needled him.

We cruised through the Village slowly. Brannigan cut west on Charles Street, so that we could come back along Perry with the one-way traffic. “I want to roll by once,” he told me. “Perry’s left-side parking only, so the stake-out will be on my side. I’ll tell him to give us a horn signal if anything comes up while we’re inside.” He glanced at his watch. “Not that anything will, though. Sabatini’s had more than three hours since he slugged you. He was probably down here long before I had a chance to put anybody on it.”

“He’ll be back,” I said.

“You got reasons?”

“Two. He still doesn’t know she’s dead. Also he won’t be expecting badges. He thinks I’m in it alone. I’m the same kind of grafter he is.”

We had made the turn from Hudson Street and I could see Sally’s building up ahead. I pointed it out but Brannigan was more interested in locating his stake-out. He was moving on little more than half a horsepower. “Ought to be along in here. Yeah, the Ford. Joe Turner. Now what the silly hell’s he got his motor running for?”

We stopped next to the Ford. The detective named Turner was being busy with a day-old Journal but he had spotted us before we came alongside. He gave Brannigan a nod instead of a salute, showed me a sallow, pock-marked face I had seen in a squad room once or twice and was talking before Brannigan could say anything.

“You’re just on it, Capt’n. Green Chevy sedan, ‘56. The guy driving checks out perfect with the Sabatini make. He’s cruised by twice, circling the block and looking at the house. I was going to wait until I catch him in the mirror again and then pull out easy — let it look as if I’m giving up the parking space but then block him when he gets in close. The street’s narrow enough.”

“How long’s it take him to make it around?”

“Four, five minutes. He’s about due. You want to pull up the block so I can have room to—”

“Too late,” I said.

Turner and Brannigan looked. “That’s it,” Turner said. The green car had just made the turn a block and a half away.

“I’ll fake a stall up ahead,” Brannigan said quickly. “Pull out behind him, Joe. We’ll box him.”

Brannigan accelerated slowly, watching the rear-view mirror. Sabatini was coming on in a crawl. We crept past five or six parked cars, then came to a hydrant area. Brannigan swung left and into it, then backed out again. Sabatini wouldn’t see the hydrant. Nate was being just another incompetent driver, misjudging the size of a parking slot.

Sabatini kept on coming. One more ridiculous maneuver and we were angled across the middle of the road like beginners flunking the test. Brannigan cut the ignition then. “Wait for Turner,” he muttered. He bent forward and began to aggravate the starter noisily.

I was slumped low and out of Duke’s line of vision. He had held up about fifteen yards behind us, probably ready to start leaning on his horn. And then Turner pulled out to barricade the street behind him.

“Now,” Brannigan said.

Duke’s car was facing us like the stem on a letter “T.” Brannigan was on the side closest to him. He threw open his door and swung out fast. I had to go out the opposite side and chase around the rear of our car. Brannigan’s hand was in his jacket before I was moving.

“Police, Sabatinil Get out of there with your hands high!”

But Duke wasn’t buying. His eyes shot to the rear and he saw Tinner running toward him. His gears clattered and the Chevy leaped forward with a roar like something being abused in a wind tunnel.

It lurched wildly. There was no room in the street for it to get by. So Duke decided to take the sidewalk. Brannigan let out a yell and heaved himself aside and I saw him go sprawling into the gutter.

I was coming around from behind our car on the dead run, between it and the curb — just where Duke was aiming the Chevy. I snatched at the post of a no-parking sign to stop myself. My.38 was in my right hand so I snatched with my left. I swung up and around like a kid on a maypole. And then the streamer broke and the playground came up and whacked me in the shoulder.

I heard Turner’s Special fire twice, still from behind Duke somewhere, but somehow I didn’t seem to care. Not really. All I cared about were the four thousand dollars in the First National City Bank it had taken me thirty-one years to accumulate. I lay on the sidewalk, feeling very sad and wishing I’d had the sense to blow some of the money on a little fan in my youth, while the Chevy rocked along the concrete directly at me.

CHAPTER 12

I rolled. I squirmed. I even slud, like in “He slud into third base,” from the collected writings of Jerome Herman (Dizzy) Dean.

There was a barred window at ground level in the building nearest me. I was over there and hugging the bars like a frenzied chimpanzee who can’t reach the peanuts when the car screamed in my ear and jerked around at a lopsided angle back into the street.

Turner sprinted after it. He stopped, fired five more times. The fifth one was the click of his hammer striking an empty shell.

“Son of a—”

I got back on my feet fast. The rear window of Duke’s car was shattered and half torn away, which stopped him as much as water stops a trout. He was a hundred yards off before Brannigan heaved himself into our car. I grabbed up my gun from where it had slithered away and threw myself into the back just as Nate ground gears and started up.

I yanked myself to my knees, clutching the top of the front seat. Brannigan was cursing like an upstaged heroine. We were still angled across the roadway and so he took the curb himself when he swung around. Turner yelled once from somewhere near us.

We were a fall block behind the Chevy before we accelerated past the first corner. Brannigan had it down to the floor, muttering between clenched teeth. “Trying to run us down like—”

He didn’t finish. Tires screeched up ahead. The signal on Seventh Avenue was red and there was a heavy stream of vehicles crossing the intersection. I saw four cars swerve at once as Duke tried to force the Chevy into the line of traffic.

The screeching stopped. A big, Winesap-colored Olds was cutting sharply away as Duke wheeled to the right. There was a fraction of a second of absolute stillness, as expectant as if Mitropoulos had just lifted his baton.

Duke slammed into the Olds. The right rear end of the larger car tilted up like an elephant raising one leg at a tree-trunk, hung there, then rocked back. There was another dull crashing sound as a panel truck marked Flowers Say It Better skidded into the back of the Olds.

We were still moving. A Mercury convertible swung hard to the right and into Perry to avoid the pile-up. It jammed the intersection and blocked us off. Brannigan braked frantically and we shrieked along the curb.

Duke had already bounded out the right-hand door of the Chevy. He was running without looking back, making a long diagonal down and across Seventh.

People shouted. I was no more than thirty yards behind him, already out into the street myself and hearing Brannigan pounding after me, when Duke reached the opposite sidewalk. There was a line of store fronts ahead of him and then a gas station on a corner where another small street cut into Seventh at an angle.

“Stop or I’ll shoot, Sabatini!”

That was Brannigan. The big Army Colt was pumping with the movement of Duke’s arm as he ran but he didn’t turn. I threw myself out of the line of fire, breaking toward a string of parked cars on my left. I was halfway there when the single sharp report of Nate’s revolver exploded behind me.

Brannigan was good. There was only one shot. Duke’s left leg was striding forward when he buckled on it like a ballet dancer with a sudden cramp. He seemed to waver for a fraction of a second, waving his arms like a stricken man on the edge of an abyss. A woman’s scream was lost in an almost gentle tinkling of glass as he finally made up his mind to spin to the left and tumble through a plate glass window.

I got over there. It was an antique shop and there was a lot of junk on display. Furniture mostly. A couple of tall, stiff-backed old chairs which looked almost as good as new because nobody for a dozen generations had been quite tired enough to sit on them. Two or three nervous-looking little tables on legs carved so delicately they would probably collapse under the weight of an empty shot glass. A set of yellowing bone china which Pocahontas had gotten as a shower gift from the girls at the wigwam. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s favorite bronze candlesticks, the ones he wrote Hiawatha by the glow of.

Duke Sabatini was on his back in the middle of it all, writhing in his own blood with his neck against the base of an enormous maroon ottoman. About eight inches to the left of his head a neatly hand-lettered sign had fallen. It said: A MINIMUM DEPOSIT WILL SECURE ANY OBJECT IN THIS WINDOW.

A plump, Slavic-looking woman had come rushing out of the store. She gasped and then stood there with her mouth open, staring at me and then at Brannigan as he puffed toward us. “What?” she said. “How—?” The woman had a kerchief around her head and for some absurd reason she made me think of Nikita Khrushchev at the housework.

People were swarming after us now that the gunplay was obviously done with. Brannigan still had his Special in his hand, however. Duke’s automatic was at rest in a scarred silver serving tray.

“—Lord, did you see that—”

“—Shooting a man just because he caused an accident—”

“—Cops—”

“—Woman in the Olds isn’t even hurt—”

Brannigan said nothing. He jammed the revolver back into his shoulder holster and stepped past me purposefully. Turner was just getting there, red-faced as if he had run all the way, as Nate grabbed Duke by the lapels and hoisted him up effortlessly from the broken glass and the debris. I didn’t offer to help him. It would have been like asking Bronco Nagurski if he was sure he could lift a football with all that heavy air in it. Turner and I followed as he eased into the shop and then set Duke down gently on a low overstuffed chair just inside the door.

Duke was in a semi-conscious daze. His jaw hung loose and his eyes were blank. He was bleeding badly.

There was the sound of a siren, evidently headed for the smash-up from nearby, probably from the Charles Street station. The run had started my head throbbing again where Duke had skulled me a few hours before.

“Turner, get back up to the corner and grab the first team that shows up,” Brannigan snapped. “Radio for another car on the accident. And get an ambulance.”

Turner went off. I shut the door after him. Mrs. People’s Chairman was still gaping. “My window. What happened? Is he—?”

“Law,” Brannigan told her. “Get some wet cloth, cotton, anything. Hurry up about it.”

“Wet — Oh, yes, right away.” She stood there another minute, staring at the widening stain of blood soaking into the upholstery along Duke’s shoulder. Her eyes went hopelessly toward the smashed window. I supposed you couldn’t blame her for being somewhat concerned. Finally she went off.

Brannigan was picking splinters of glass out of Duke’s clothing. Duke was slumped low in the chair and his mouth was working now. “Mother,” I thought he said. He looked like something the Mau-Mau had left behind as a warning. I reached over, found my Luger in his jacket, smelled it. He hadn’t been experimenting on anybody with it. I put it away.

“Damn it,” Brannigan said then. “Oh, damn it. What the hell did he think I’d do, let him try a stunt like that and then romp off like it was a high-school picnic or something?”

“He’ll live.”

“I caught him in the thigh. You saw that.”

“Sure.”

“I thought the silly son of a bitch would just go down.”

“It was just a freak.”

“These punk kids. These damned punk kids.”

There was another siren. We were standing in the middle of enough lamps to illuminate Minneapolis. The woman came back from the rear, hesitated, then bent forward and began to bathe Duke’s forehead with a damp handkerchief. She smelled remotely like a wet spaniel.

Turner got back. Two uniformed cops were with him. “Second car’s there now,” he reported. “There was a woman driving the Olds. Got banged up a little but she looks okay. We called for two wagons just in case.”

“You tell them to get the first one down here?”

“Yes.”

Brannigan gestured toward Duke. “Keep a man on him at the hospital and report in as soon as you’re squared away. All of it goes on the Hawes sheet. Resist of arrest will be enough for now.”

“Right,” Turner said.

Brannigan stared at Duke for another minute, then turned and walked past us. Thirty or forty people were milling around out front, gawking, and one of the patrolmen was trying to force them back. Brannigan shouldered through them.

I started to follow him. “That’s the one who shot him,” a thin-faced busybody was saying after Brannigan. “That big guy—”

“What’d it do, make you stain your bloomers, Mac?” Turner snarled behind me. “Go the hell home and change, huh?”

I walked up. Brannigan was talking to a sergeant behind the Olds. There was a hospital one short block up the street and I could see two ambulances camped outside. Angels of mercy in a bureaucracy. They could have had one of those things parked on the slope at Golgotha and they wouldn’t have used it without official authorization. Brannigan gestured and after a second the sergeant ran over. There was another dick directing traffic around the tie-up.

There wasn’t much damage. The right rear fender of the Olds was crushed back like the lecherous grin of a toothless old man, and the wheel was badly out of line. Duke’s front fender was crumpled also, but then he’d wanted to smash it against my head anyhow. There were three neat punctures in the metal just below his back window from Turner’s shooting. I didn’t see the woman who’d been driving the Olds.

Flowers Say It Better had backed off into Perry. A lanky young Negro unfolded himself from the curb near it, tossed away a smoke and came over to me.

“Can you take my name and tag and let me cruise out of here?” he wanted to know. I’ve got a mess of orchids in there for a party who’s going to be right upset if he gets buried without them.”

I nodded toward Brannigan. “Better see the boss.”

“Don’t you gotta always?” he said wearily. He sauntered over that way.

I went over and leaned against Brannigan’s car, waiting. It was getting hot. The ambulances finally started up, swinging through a stoplight and letting their sirens growl halfheartedly as they came. My suit was filthy where I’d rolled in it keeping out of the way of the Chevy.

I dragged on a Camel, watching a Village fag come by. Not just another amateur, this one was a classic, a prototype. He was wearing purple pants about four sizes too small, desert boots with tiny bells on the ends of the laces, a tailored blouse. He had a single gold earring in his left ear, none in the right. He was leading an expensive Siamese cat on a pink ribbon that matched his blouse. The cat had the same tiny bells on its collar. I supposed the cat was that way, too.

Brannigan came over after another two or three minutes. “You got a cigarette?” he asked me.

I gave him one. He was looking across at the antique shop and his face was flushed slightly. Two young boys in dungarees were staring at him.

“There’s blood on your shirt, mister.”

Brannigan grunted. He had a stain along his tie. He closed his jacket but there was another one along his lapel, shaped like a Dali watch.

“You all cleared?”

“That son of a bitch,” he said. “That crummy punk. I should have put one into the middle of his spinal column, trying to cut us down that way. And instead I feel my guts flop over when I see him go through that window. Twenty-three years on this job and I still… Damn it, Fannin, did that slut of an ex-wife of yours have running hot water up the street here or is it another one of those half-assed Greenwich Village bohemian joints where I’ll have to wash off this mess in the toilet? You got a match for this thing?”

I gave him a folder, ignoring all that. “Listen,” I told him, “I haven’t eaten since about Mother’s Day. You want to sit with a cup of coffee while I grab a bite before we run through the apartment?”

“Hell, what time is it?”

“Twenty to ten.”

“And it was three-thirty when she got knifed.”

“Close enough.”

“Six hours and ten minutes. And what have we got?” He handed me back the matches. I’ll tell you what we’ve got. We haven’t got a pot.”

“Let’s eat, huh?”

“What the hell,” Brannigan said. “What the hell.”

We walked down Seventh. After about two blocks we found a place that looked all right. It was grand. They had imitation Aztec carvings on the orange-and-green-striped walls and they gave us underdone eggs and yesterday’s coffee. We might have stayed all day, but a sign over the register said that occupancy by more than thirty-eight people was dangerous and unlawful and we would have hated for them to get into trouble on our account. Thirty-seven other customers might have dropped in at any moment.

CHAPTER 13

We went back to Perry Street. Bogardus was long gone, but otherwise the place was the same. The dishes and silver were all Woolworth’s pride, the upholstery smelled vaguely of insecticide and old sin, and there were seven different water-color views of the same flower pot on the wall, all executed by that color-blind old lady who turns them out for every furnished apartment in the world. Anything Brannigan and I wanted would be tucked away in drawers or stashed in closets. We washed up before we got to it, and then we gave it almost an hour.

We would have been better off using the time to do pushups. The only item we discovered even remotely connected with crime was a hardcover copy of a Raymond Chandler novel and that had my name in it, dated from eighteen months before. Nothing was hidden under the rug, inside the toilet tank, behind the Shredded Wheat. Nothing slipped out of the pages of the books we flipped except a newspaper recipe for braised squab, and the only notation on any of the recent sheets of the desk calendar was a week-old scribble reminding Cathy to replace something called “Love that Pink.” There were snapshots in one of Sally’s drawers, mostly beach stuff, and we found an expensive set of blown-up portraits of Cathy stamped on the reverse with the signature of Clyde Neva, the photographer on Tenth Street Sally had mentioned. A book called Under the Volcano was the property of Ned Sommers, and two or three re-issue Bix Beiderbecke records had A Leeds scrawled on their jackets, completing Sally’s list. There were no unusual deposits or withdrawals in either girl’s bank accounts. There were bills, receipts, ticket stubs, circulars, theater programs, canceled checks, folksy letters from Sally’s family in Maine, soap coupons, match folders from a dozen Village bars. The only address book had Sally’s initials on the cover and nothing in it which interested us. A small scrap of ruled paper in a cracked vase had a phone number penciled on it and when we had run out of other ideas I dialed the number. A syrupy, old-maidish voice said:

“Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thank you for calling and please give our number to a friend. This is a recorded response. Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is—”

I passed Brannigan the receiver. He listened a minute, hung it up and then stood there picking his teeth with a discolored thumbnail. If the glad tidings had made his day any brighter he was doing his best to hide it. “The Black Knight of Germany,” he said after a little.

“I’m listening.”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I was just remembering a game we used to play on the barn roof, being air aces after the first war. Me and two other kids. The names we always used were von Richthofen, Eddie Rickenbacker and Georges Guynemer. They always stick together in my mind, always in the same order.”

“Too early for me. Tom Mix, Buck Jones and Ken Maynard, maybe. Which one do you want to see first?”

“That Ned Sommers I suppose. Bank Street’s only two blocks up.”

I called Sally before we went out, telling her that Duke had been roped and that she could come home. She had been asleep. It occurred to me that I could probably use some sack time myself, but it had not caught up with me yet. We left the key under the rubber again.

It was pushing eleven o’clock and the asphalt was already the texture of secondhand chewing gum. They had cleared out the intersection up at Seventh. Brannigan drove the half-block to Fourth Street and turned north.

“You expect to get anything out of these guys?” I asked him.

“Who knows? Some background, anyhow. We’ll take it all back to the office later and sort it out with everything else that comes in. Hell, it’s all routine, you know how it goes.”

“I suppose,” I said.

The address we had for Ned Sommers was a beat-up old brownstone with an entrance below street level. Four chipped slate steps went down past a battered regiment of empty trash cans into a tile alcove. It said Sommers — 1-R, on one of the bells, but the front door was unlatched and we went in without ringing. Uncarpeted steps went up again along the left-hand wall but 1-R would probably be back under them. The hallway smelled like a sanatorium for cats with kidney disorders. We found the door where we expected it to be and Brannigan knocked.

It took a minute, and then the door did not open.

“Who is it?”

“Ned Sommers?”

“Who wit?”

“Sommers?”

It could go on that way until one of them got laryngitis before Brannigan would say “Police.” More than one accommodating flatfoot has gotten his wife’s name on the department’s relief list for needy widows by doing that. He just stood there waiting calmly. Finally we got a crack big enough to pass mail through.

“Ned Sommers?”

He peered out at us, furrowing his forehead. He was a sallow-faced man of about twenty-eight, lean almost to the point of being undernourished. I judged him to be close to six-feet-even but he would not have gone in as more than a welterweight. He had wavy black hair which he had gotten cut for his grade school graduation and not since, pale brown eyes and a nose which had been flattened once. It was a nose which might have made another man look belligerent. It only made Sommers look like someone who ought to have known better. He was wearing cord slacks and nothing else, and if he had been dressed there would have been a library card in his shirt pocket.

“I’m Sommers,” he said finally.

One of his hands was on the inside knob and his other was on the door jamb. Brannigan identified himself then, flashing his shield. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”

Sommers continued to frown at us. “Questions about what? I’m pretty busy.”

We were standing there. Sommers had glanced behind himself, pursing his lips. He turned back. “Let me get a shirt on. I’ll come out.”

“Step away from the door,” Brannigan told him.

“Oh, now look, a man has a right to privacy in his own—”

He moved aside. He had to, since Brannigan was already on his way in. The expression on his face suggested that he would have liked nothing better than to bop one of us with a choice volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature. I could see the fall set on the wall behind him, along with what looked like every other juicy bit of bedtime reading from The Nicomachean Ethics to The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones. I couldn’t see the woman, but she would be behind the door someplace.

She wasn’t quite, but only because the bed wasn’t there. It was along the far wall to our left. She was sitting up in it with the sheets drawn around her shoulders. I supposed she might have ducked into another room if that hadn’t been the only room there was.

One room. It seemed hardly adequate for Sommers’s creative pursuits. The books went from floor to ceiling along two walls. There were enormous piles of what must have been every issue of the New York Times since Harper’s Ferry and Sommers appeared to be reading all of them simultaneously. There were copies of Time with pictures of Neville Chamberlain and John Nance Garner on the covers. There were a hundred different photographs tacked on the two empty walls, and every one of them was of Ernest Hemingway.

The girl’s clothes were scattered among the debris as if she’d been caught in a cyclone without enough safety pins.

She was staring at us, still as cut stone. An adder being held by the back of the jaws would have had the same expression in its eyes. She was a Negro and as beautiful a girl as I had ever seen.

Brannigan turned to Sommers, red-necked. “Out front,” he said. “And make it quick.” He turned around and went out without looking at me.

We waited at the foot of the steps below the sidewalk. Across the way a sign in an unwashed store window said: Sonny Tom Laundry Will Moving at Monday for Corner Fourth Street Down-flight. Brannigan had taken out a cigar and stripped it but did not light up.

Sommers got there in a minute. He had pulled on a yellow sports shirt and thonged leather sandals and he was smoking.

He glanced at me, dismissed me as a mere adjutant, then waited expressionlessly for Brannigan.

Brannigan was above him on the steps. “I suppose you were here all night?”

“Most if it, yes.”

“What time did you get in?”

“Three-thirty, perhaps four. Why?”

“Any other people with you before that?”

“Yes. Two or three young writers who come to me for advice and—”

“Where?”

“The White Horse Tavern, then a coffee shop down on Mac-dougal. Exactly what is all this, anyhow?”

“There any gap between the time you left the others and came here?”

“No, none at all. They walked me up, in fact. These other fellows haven’t been published yet, so it’s sort of an obligation to let them hang around as much as they—”

“Okay, okay, you’re a famous writer and the disciples cluster around like flies. We get the general drift, Sommers. The girl with you all evening long?”

Sommers’s face had darkened. He didn’t answer.

“I asked you if the girl was around all night.”

“Yes. Now look, I don’t think I have to answer any of this. If I don’t get an explanation I—”

“ Wherfs the last time you saw Catherine Hawes?”

He frowned slightly. “Cathy? A week or so ago. No, more than that. It was a Sunday, so it’s almost two weeks.”

“Tell us about her.”

“Now just what is that supposed to mean?” He glanced at me then back to Brannigan. “She isn’t in some kind of trouble—?”

“What kind of trouble would she be in, Sommers?”

“Well, how would I know? Look, what’s the point in giving me a hard time? Ask me a sensible question and I’ll give you a decent answer, huh?”

Brannigan bit off the end of his cigar, turning to spit. “Tell us about her, Sommers. What she does, what she thinks.”

“Oh, come on, will you? If you’d let me know what ifs about maybe I could—”

“You’re the writer. So write. Give us a paragraph about Catherine Hawes.”

Sommers shrugged wearily. He studied his cigarette, dragged on it, flipped it out toward the gutter. He would have liked more of an audience but he gave it to us anyhow. “Catherine Hawes,” he said. “About twenty-five, exceptionally pretty. Bright too, but without much intellect. Neurotic, divorced, essentially uninhibited. Just enough sensitivity and awareness so that she can’t be satisfied with the ordinary middle-class existence — husband, family, that sort of thing — but not enough creativity or drive to find anything to take its place. She drifts, goes off the deep end sometimes, generally out of sheer boredom — drinks too much, looks for new kicks. There are a lot of girls like her. They shouldn’t go to college to start with. They get just enough ideas about art and rebellion to get restless. But most of them settle down eventually, wind up at cocktail parties in the country club and forget they ever knew the difference. They play golf. Cathy probably will too, sooner or later.”

“You said she was married.”

“She cheated. It broke up.”

“She a nympho?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. She was knocking around a lot before the marriage. People get used to that. It’s not the sexual satisfaction so much as the excitement of somebody new. Hell, even I was the same way. I was married a couple of times myself, out of this same Village milieu. It was good enough while it lasted — I didn’t need other women, no — but the idea is always there. You get the urge, you follow through. Anyhow it’s an important experience for a writer. You’ve got to—”

“Edifying,” Brannigan cut in. “Who would she go to if she got into a jam? Who is she closest to?”

Sommers shrugged again. “Look, I don’t really know. The girl she lives with, perhaps. Sally Kline. Maybe she’d come to me. How about it now — what kind of trouble?”

“You sure you haven’t seen her in a week and a half?”

“Positive.”

“She come around here often?”

“Once a week, perhaps. A writer has to discipline his use of time. In any event there’s nothing steady about it, if that’s what you mean.”

“I gathered that inside,” Brannigan said.

“Now look, if that’s a crack—”

“Probably it was. Skip it. I don’t read books myself so I wouldn’t know what it takes to write them.”

Sommers chewed his lip, not knowing whether he could afford to get angry or not. We stood there. Two young girls passed us on the street, chattering. “That illiterate,” one of them said. “All he did was say hello and then keep shoving me into corners—”

I was taking a Camel. “I bum one of those?” Sommers asked. “I left mine in back.”

I gave him one and lit it. He nodded, hardly looking at me. He hadn’t really seen me since we’d gotten there, which I supposed explained why he liked Hemingway so much. Hemingway never sees anybody either.

“I don’t know what else to say without knowing what it’s all about,” he told Brannigan.

“That’s good enough for now,” Brannigan decided. “You’ll hear from the department again.” He had started up the stairs.

When he did get the urge to read, it patently wasn’t going to be something of Sommers’s.

“Well, for crying out loud,” Sommers said after us, “this is some deal. You come around asking all kinds of personal questions and then you—”

“You can go back in,” Brannigan said, stopping. “Your sweetheart’s probably getting edgy in there.”

“That’s none of your damned business!” Sommers had made up his mind to get sore after all. “Police. Try to be decent and what does it get you? Thanks a lot, mister.”

“You’re welcome. You’ve been a cooperative, helpful citizen. And now you can blow.”

“The hell with you,” Sommers said abruptly. “Sure, I’ve been cooperative. And I didn’t have to answer a damned one of your questions. You guys give me a royal pain. A bunch of tough, cynical, uncreative clods, what the hell do you know? What I do in my apartment is my own concern and I don’t need any comments from your end. I’m a writer and a good one, and if you want to know I spent four years in jail. Sure, lift an eyebrow when I tell you. Go back and look it up, it’s all there. I stole eleven thousand dollars when I was eighteen. Eighteen! You guys wouldn’t have had the imagination to swipe apples! Well, I did my time and I don’t owe you anything, see?”

I wondered precisely what had brought all that on. Brannigan was at the top of the steps, looking at his cigar. “Nobody said you owed us anything, Sommers,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, well, I don’t have to make any explanations about my private life either. What I do to make myself a better writer is my business. You slobs wouldn’t know an experience if it hit you in the face.”

He made a point of deliberately flinging away the cigarette I’d just given him. That was quite an approach he had toward his profession at that. I could almost visualize him at work, writing stirring exhortations in his notebook: Very important! Every Tuesday and Thursday, nine to eleven, be sure to have an experience! The vestibule door slammed after him when he whirled and went inside.

Brannigan was already walking. “Writer,” he said. “If that self-centered phony is a writer then I’m — I’m—”

“Marcel Proust,” I said. “Ducky Medwick. What the hell, you didn’t have to needle him that way.”

“Greenwich Village,” he grunted. He did not say anything else until we had gotten into the car. Then he said, “And the next one is a queer. That Neva, the photographer. And I suppose the one after that — what’s his name? That Arthur Leeds — will be a hermaphrodite. Why don’t you go the hell home and catch up on some sleep? They’ll have the body out of there by now.”

“You’re a comfort,” I said.

“I get that way.”

He cut down Seventh before turning east on Tenth Street and we passed the antique shop. The smashed window was already being boarded up. “I suppose there’ll be a suit against the city for that,” he said then. “And probably one on the accident. Causing Sabatini to flee at excess speed, some such malar-key. Maybe it isn’t Greenwich Village after all. Maybe it’s just people who make me sick.”

He was still laboring the unlit cigar. We passed the rear of the Women’s House of Detention and that gave him a few more ideas. “And right in there is where she would have wound up if she hadn’t gotten knifed. In with the whores and the junkies and the lovely little seventeen-year-old mothers who get drunk and bash their kids’ heads against the wall for crying too much. Sweating out an arraignment for driving the car on the Troy heist. Because she was bored. Because she was too sensitive to be satisfied with the middle-class way of life — is that what the bastard said it was?”

“Why don’t you shut it off, Nate? I’m the one who ought to be disgusted.”

“Are you? You don’t much seem to be. Buster Keaton I got to ride with. Just how do you feel about all this anyhow?”

“Go to hell,” I told him. “As a favor, huh? Just for me?”

CHAPTER 14

Clyde Neva’s address turned out to be a six-story warehouse structure on a block taken up almost completely by the sides of large apartment buildings which fronted on other streets. The place had two entrances. One of them was a gigantic sliding-gate affair for trucks. That one was boarded up. The other one was small and newly painted, the color of a stale whisky sour. A neatly polished metal plaque in the center of it said:

Neva Portraits — Loft

The smaller door opened into a narrow stairwell with concrete fire steps and a metal handrail leading upward. There was another plaque just inside which said simply Neva, and still another on the first landing, this time with an arrow pointing upward. Underneath the third plaque someone had scrawled in lipstick: Oh, Clyde, ifl come up all thatway I’ll just never, never come down. The fire doors from the unused warehouse were barred on each landing.

The stairwell was sweltering. There was one final Neva at the top, in case someone hadn’t been paying attention, and a bell that you worked by a chain. Brannigan worked it and we heard it tinkle somewhere inside. I crushed out a cigarette, sweating.

Clyde Neva called out to us as he started to open the door, saying, “But darling, you’re so-ooo early,” and then he got a look at us and said, “But it isn’t you either, is it? I don’t know you, do I? But then that’s always so-ooo exciting! Do come in, do!”

“Can it,” Brannigan said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Can the swish talk, we’re not buying. You Clyde Neva?”

He looked at us, pouting. He had the sort of face that was meant to pout, the kind that would have looked charming in the mirror over a lady’s dressing table while its owner plucked her eyebrows, if its owner had been a her. So it had probably looked sickening when its owner had plucked his. He was wearing rouge, and you could have hitchhiked to Rochester and back in the time he’d spent on his hair. Each tiny blond curl had been twisted into place separately, in a way which made his head look as if someone had doused it with mucilage and then dumped the contents of a bait can over it. He was wearing an orange turtleneck sweater, and the buttermilk-colored things he thought were pants were so tight that he had probably had to put them on with Vaseline.

“I said are you Neva?”

“But naa-tur-a-lly. Surely you didn’t miss the darling signs?”

Brannigan had wanted to know what I felt. I could have told him now. Just tag along, Harry, come meet all the jolly sorts she’d shared her Ju-Jubes with in the past dozen months. I felt an incipient nausea just looking at this one.

We’d gone in. Neva had the fall floor, and most of it was one stadium-size room with windows along the rear and a skylight in the roof. The place might have been the ballroom in a sorority house for unmatriculated screwballs on party night.

Instead of chairs there were pillows scattered everywhere, all of them violet and all about the size of recumbent hippopotami. Most of the wall space was taken up with weird, leering African masks, and there were Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling like Yuletide at the Mao Tse Tung’s. A broad platform raised the level of the floor about ten inches in a far corner, and in the middle of the platform, draped in pink, was the largest bed I had ever seen. It would have accommodated the starting five from the Harlem Globetrotters and probably two or three substitutes. They could have practiced in it if they didn’t feel like sleeping. A white picket fence ran around the outside edge of the platform, and in the center of the fence was a little red gate. A lantern hung on the gatepost. A sign said: Neva.

The photographic equipment stood by itself in another corner, near a door marked: Dark Room — For Pictures, Silly. There was another door near that one with a large half moon carved into the paneling.

Neva was reading Brannigan’s shield and being remotely concerned. “But, dears” he was saying, “what can you want with little old me?”

I took a cigarette. I was running out of them.

“Neva, I’ve got some questions and I want some answers,” Brannigan told him. “Straight answers without the phony affectations. Save that for the misfits you think you have to impress. You got some clean young boy who’ll give you an alibi for last night?”

“Have I got — oh, come there, must you be so crude, Mr. Brannigan? And you haven’t even been polite. The least you might do is introduce me to your hand-some friend.”

He looked at me with a sly, simpering sort of grin that was supposed to be clever and quaint and superior all at once. It made his face about as appealing as the back end of a dachshund. I went over to a window and stood there, which was the only thing I could think to do to keep from drop-kicking him through the skylight.

“Neva, I asked you about last night.”

“Well, of course I was with someone, darling. Isn’t everyone?”

Brannigan had meant it about not being on the market for the gay talk. Neva finally got the clue when he found himself being hoisted by the front of the sweater and dumped onto one of the huge purple pillows. He let out a gigglish little squeal, like a goosed hyena.

“You needn’t be so aggressive! Please, my analyst says my psyche is very delicate. I just mustn’t get upset!”

“I bet. And your analyst can lick my old man any day of the week.” Brannigan was towering over him. “I won’t say it a second time, Neva. Anymore of that ‘darling* routine and you’ll do your answering down at headquarters under lights that’ll make that mascara of yours run down into your socks.”

Neva was pouting again. He got to his feet with a gesture like petals opening, then stood there posing with his hands limp in front of him. He nodded grudgingly.

“Who were you with last night?”

“A chap named Anton Quayles. We were developing—”

“Here?”

“—pictures. Here, yes.”

“What time did he leave?”

“About nine o’clock this morning. We were working quite late.”

“He going to admit that?”

“If you’re as offensive with him as you’ve been with me, I’m certain he’ll have no choice.”

“Never mind the editorial comment either. You have any other visitors?”

“Would you?”

“Damn it, Neva—”

“No, no other visitors. We were quite alone.”

“ When’s the last time you saw Catherine Hawes?”

“Catherine—” Neva pursed his lips. His hands were still raised limply, as if he’d just finished an exhausting concerto at an invisible Steinway, but he seemed suddenly conscious of the gesture. He opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it.

“When, Neva?”

“I — well, it’s been weeks, we—”

Brannigan had him by the sweater again, jerking him forward. Neva squirmed, trying to draw away. He kept running his tongue over his lips, and now his eyes were darting from Brannigan’s to mine and then back. I went over there.

“What about her, Neva?”

“I — they weren’t pornography,” he gasped then. “They were art. Anyhow I didn’t send any of them through the mail so there’s no charge that can be—*

“Son of a—” Brannigan flung him aside like something unclean. Neva went to his knees. He snatched at one of the pillows, hugging it to himself and cowering behind it. He had begun to whimper like a setter pup with its first dose of worms.

“There was only one set. Only one, honestly. That’s all I ever printed. And I never took any others. You can ask anyone. I’m a very serious portrait photographer. Some of my young men’s faces have won awards in—”

“Get’em, Neva.”

“But I—”

“Get them!”

Neva swallowed once, getting to his feet, then scampered across the room toward a filing cabinet with a series of mincing, tight-cheeked little steps. A high-jumper with hemorrhoids would have moved just about the same way. Brannigan had glanced at me. I ground my cigarette into the floor with my heel.

Neva was rummaging through a top drawer. He was mumbling.

“Talk up, damn it,” Brannigan said.

“I merely tried to say that it wasn’t my idea, not at all. We were — well, it was after a party and she was tipsy, and the boys she was with were tipsy too, and I—”

“Boys she was with—”

Brannigan took three strides toward the cabinet. “Get the grease off your fingers and hand them over here, Neva!”

“Yes, yes, I—” Neva scurried back toward us, white-faced. He held out a manila folder awkwardly.

I was staring at the palm of my right hand when Brannigan opened it. He did not say anything. He looked at the picture on the top of the pile long enough to flush and then he dropped his hand without looking at any of the others.

“Let’s see them, Nate.”

He handed them over. They were about what I expected. Neva was not even much of a photographer. I had seen better at stag parties in college.

I looked through all of them. Cathy’s eyes were squinting against the light as if she’d been hopped up on marijuana when they were taken, but I did not bother to mention it. I handed them back without saying anything at all.

They would have made splendid illustrations for a book I had just begun thinking about writing. I was calling it Fannin Grows Up.

“Get the negatives, Neva.”

Neva brought out a smaller folder. Brannigan lifted out one negative, held it to the light, put it back. There was a sink on a wall behind us and he went over there. He tore the prints into pieces, then crumpled the negatives on top of them.

“There anymore of these? Anyplace?”

“No, honestly, none at all. Just the single set.”

Brannigan dropped a match into the sink, standing there while the pile flared up. There was a quick stench from the negatives.

He turned back after a minute, talking quietly now. “Neva, if I didn’t want to keep the girl’s name out of a mess like this on top of everything else I’d take you in so fast your jeans would unravel. I’ll forget I ever saw those things, or for that matter you. Especially you. But I’ll give you fair warning. If I ever hear your name once in connection with anything that comes through the department, I’ll have a vice squad cop on your neck twenty-five hours a day and thirty on Sundays. I’ll have you hauled in and booked if you so much as shake hands with a business acquaintance on the street. You got that straight?”

Neva nodded. He was not the same frivolous lad who’d greeted us at the door a few minutes before. But then I had to wonder just who was.

“You pig,” Brannigan said. “You slimy, ugly, perverted son of a bitch. You — ah, the hell with it. You’ve been told. Get even a parking citation from here on out and you’ll see whether or not I’m just making conversation.”

He turned and looked at me, then went out. He went down the concrete stairs quickly and I didn’t rush to keep up with him. I was only a short way down when Neva called after me. I stopped and looked back.

“About Catherine,” he said hesitantly. “You didn’t say. Is anything the matter? I—”

“You know Ned Sommers?”

“Slightly, yes. The writer.”

“You could call him,” I said. “He’ll probably be interested, too. She’s dead.”

I couldn’t have told anybody why I’d bothered. I didn’t wait for his reaction. Brannigan was already in the car when I got down. The street was like a stokehold and my shirt was clinging to me.

“That was some dame, Fannin,” he said when I got in. “I never did congratulate you on getting divorced, did I?”

He didn’t expect an answer so I didn’t make one. He jerked away from the curb and then swung down into the lower east side of the Village before heading across toward Jones Street. I did not say anything all the way over. I kept seeing the photos of Cathy in my mind, and when I tried to get rid of them the only thing that came instead was an image of her on the floor in my doorway. It made the ride fun. I had such a swell choice of things to think about.

The Arthur Leeds address was another brownstone. Brannigan parked across from it and then sat there for a minute without opening the door. “Forget it, huh?” he said. “Rubbing you, I mean. Hell, you didn’t know how far she’d gone.”

“No, I didn’t.”

He made a sucking sound between his lips, leaning forward on the wheel. “I still don’t get it, you know. You. God knows, you’ve been around. And yet you stayed married to her for damned near a year.”

I didn’t answer him. He went on talking without looking at me.

“Promiscuous as a mink. And judging from the evidence, about as discriminating as a hungry hound in the town dump. You’ve gotten or a dozen buddies doing time who’d like to have fooled you that long.”

I still didn’t answer him. I took a cigarette and pulled on it deeply, watching the smoke break against the windshield.

“All right,” he said, “so it’s none of my business. You want to go in?”

I nodded, opening the door. I hadn’t answered him because I didn’t have any answers. I’d spent a year trying to get rid of what I’d felt about Cathy and then this morning had brought it all back. It was still rotten, thinking that things might have been different for her if she’d had some help, and I had to feel guilty about that. But I was not feeling much of anything else now. Brannigan was probably right that it would be something you would figure out sitting at a desk or using a phone, and even that did not bother me the way it would have six or eight hours before.

We were walking across. “Soon as we see this one we’ll check Coffey out,” he was telling me.

Leeds was listed for 3-B and it was another one we didn’t have to ring. Some misguided soul had hooked back the outside door in the hope that it might let a little cool air in. Maybe there was cool air on Annapurna or Orizaba. I dragged myself up the two rickety flights like an old-age pensioner. We found the door we wanted at the end of a corridor and Brannigan rapped on it.

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’t it?”

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 après that, 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 très cool, très far 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 could have 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 rouge MG’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 come to 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 Caesar by someone named Donald Honig. That morning’s Tribune was 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 Giubba down 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.

CHAPTER 17

I felt groggy in the hack on the way uptown. I’d been fighting sleep more than I suspected. With all of it finished now I had abruptly sagged to half mast.

Estelle asked who it was through the speaker and a second later I got the buzz and went in. She was waiting in the doorway as I came down the corridor.

She tried a smile but she didn’t have the tools for it, not today. There were lines around her mouth like cracks in pale china, and her eyes were dull. “I’m so glad you could come,” she said.

“Just got clear,” I told her.

“You look dreadful, Harry. I guess you haven’t been to bed at all, have you?”

“Going now. We just wrapped it up, Estelle.”

She looked at me vaguely, not quite understanding. She was wearing a white linen blouse with ruffles at the collar like Benjamin Franklin, and the plain gray jacket which matched her skirt was across the back of one of the sterile, antiseptic living-room chairs. I supposed the furniture would get sat in by relatives in a day or two and then not again until the next funeral in the family.

The air-conditioning was on and I walked over to the machine. Estelle had closed the door and was standing near it, watching me with a curious frown.

“Someone named Arthur Leeds,” I said. “A musician in Greenwich Village. Cathy went to him when she ran off with the money. He followed her up to my place.”

“You mean—” She swallowed, then clasped her hand over her mouth and whirled toward the wall. She started to sob, biting her fist.

“It’s over now, Estelle. Completely over. Leeds is dead. He had an accident running from us. And you don’t have to worry about our friend Duke anymore either. He was picked up also.”

She stood there with her back turned. I walked over to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Estelle. Listen, what about your mother? Did you see her?”

She nodded, not looking at me. “Yes,” she said distantly. “But I didn’t… I didn’t say anything.”

“Is she all right otherwise?”

“Yes. But, oh, Harry, it’s all so…” She shuddered again, then held her breath for a long moment. Finally she turned back toward me, wiping her eyes and trying the same unsuccessful smile. “I’m sorry. Can I… I’m afraid we haven’t got anything but Scotch. Will that be all right?”

“Fine. But then I better scram.”

She poured the drink at a cabinet. She put in the Scotch first and then had to go into the kitchen for ice. Estelle was the sort who would do it that way.

I dropped myself onto the couch. After a minute she came out and sat down a little away from me. She had not made a drink for herself. She kept her hands in her lap, like something someone had asked her to keep an eye on for a while.

The drink would have been just right for a teetotaling Lilliputian. I sipped it without saying anything. It survived for three or four seconds.

“You never heard Cathy mention this Leeds, Estelle?”

She shook her head, looking as if she were thinking of something else altogether. Probably she was. I put the glass down on a coffee table. When I looked back she had begun to cry again.

“Harry, I’m so… must you go, Harry?”

“God, I’ve got to. I feel like an unplugged lamp. On top of that my head’s been throbbing like six other guys’.”

She was facing me. She reached up hesitantly, touching my temple with her fingertips, and I could feel it when she did. “He hit you so hard, I…” She winced, drawing her hand away. “It’s gotten all black and blue.”

“Another Scotch might help,” I said. “I could stick around that long.”

“Oh, I — of course.” She got up, started to reach for the glass, changed her mind and brought over the bottle instead. “Forgive me. I never do know how much. There hasn’t really been any whisky in the house since you and Cathy stopped visiting. We—”

She broke up again. I poured a second drink.

“Harry… would you sleep here? I’m so alone. If I could just be able to know you’re here, in the next room. I know I haven’t any right to ask, you’ve done so much already. But it would be such a comfort. You could use my bedroom. I can make it dark enough. And I can turn on the air-conditioner in there also, it would be—”

“Oh, look, I even took a roll in the gutter since I was here last, Estelle. I’ve got to get a shower and—”

“The bathroom is right next to my room, Harry. I can shut the corridor door until you’re finished.” She touched my arm. “Harry, I’m so shaky and upset. Just for now — for the afternoon. I’ll wake you whenever you like. Just so I can know I’m not here by myself…”

Her voice tripped over a sob and she lowered her head. “Sure,” I told her then. “What’s a private cop for if he’s not around when you need him?”

She jumped up, having a little more luck with the smile this time. I supposed it did not make a hell of a lot of difference. A bed was a bed, and the way I was feeling the tailgate of a rolling truck would have done the trick.

I’ll fix it,” she was saying. ‘I’ll get clean sheets.”

“Hell, you don’t have to—”

“It’s no bother. Here.” She was at a closet in the hallway, and she held out a folded bath towel. “1*11 have the bedroom ready when you come out. I’ll be back out here, so you can just go through the hall. And here — here are some hangers.”

“Good enough,” I said. “Look, it’s a little after two. Suppose you wake me about five, maybe just before.”

“You’re certain? So early?”

“Be enough.”

“All right. I’m sure I’ll feel better by then. I appreciate this, Harry. I do.”

“Don’t be silly.”

Accommodating old Harry. I took the gear and went into the John. I loafed under the spray for a good ten minutes, then toweled off and hung my clothes behind the door. I was still making like two-gun Doc Holliday, with both the.38 and the Luger, and I tucked them away in a corner with my shoes. I wrapped the towel around my middle and poked my head out.

“Okay to go through?”

“Yes, Harry. And thank you.”

“Right, Estelle.”

I ducked across the hall. There was a tiny crack of sunlight breaking through a lower corner of the blind when I closed the door after myself, but otherwise the room was gloomy, with that odd, cathedral sort of light you get when you draw heavy shades in the daytime. The sheets were crisp and fresh and I melted into them. I rolled over on my right side, jammed a fist into the pillow to give it some substance, and corked off about as quickly as I had when Duke Sabatini had mistaken my skull for a high inside fast ball.

You asleep, Harry? I asked myself sometime thereafter.

Sure, I’m asleep, I told myself.

How come she’s here then? I wanted to know.

How come who’s here?

Me, silly, she said.

It was a dame I’d known once. She’d floated into my arms out of nowhere. I’d thought she was dead. You never know. Was only undressed.

I AM dead, Harry, she said. Isn’t that absurd? I played cops and robbers because I was bored and now I’m dead.

Go away, huh?

She wouldn’t. She said, You should have helped me, Harry. I told you to help me a year ago and you didn’t, and now look what I went and did.

She was chilly as wet oysters. I was doing my damnedest not to touch her, but she wouldn’t be put off. Hold me, Harry, she insisted. Don’t twist may. Everybody holds me, why not you? Anyhow it’s only a silly old dream.

Some dream. I could hear the bedroom air-conditioning as clearly as I could hear her rustling in the sheets.

“Hold me, Harry,’’ she said. “Oh, my God, hold me!’’

I did not know how long it had been. It might have been two minutes or two hours. I could still see the crack of light through the blind but I could not tell how much it had shifted. I had been asleep deeply enough so that I had not heard her come in. It had been the touch of her flesh that woke me.

Her thighs were pressed tight along my own and her face was against my shoulder. She was staring up at me.

“Estelle, for crying out loud—”

My hand had fallen over the curve of her hip and onto her thigh. Maybe I was still dreaming after all. If I hadn’t known better I would have sworn the body was Cathy’s. Everything about its touch was exactly as I remembered it.

“Harry,” she said. “Harry, I need you. I need you so much, so desperately. Hold me, Harry. Oh, God, hold me!”

No dream, Fannin. All very real, oh, yes, oh, yes. But did Fannin dig all this? Fannin was rather confused. He had had a bellyful of lunatic junkies, simpering fags, sour writers, greasy gun-punks. Now he had the frustrated old maid sister. The end of a perfect day.

Her arms had come around my neck, clutching at me, and I could feel the swell of her breasts. Her thighs were heaving. I hadn’t moved.

So talk then, Fannin. Try art maybe, or literature. Try the last quartets of Ludwig von Beethoven. Try your all-time favorite football players. Maybe you can get her distracted and nostalgic over Jay Berwanger, Ace Parker, George Gipp, Whizzer White, Jim Dieckleman, John Kimbrough.

Sure.

“Harry,” she said again. She said it like a cry from down a well, like a wail from a cell in the deathhouse, like a moan from an overturned car in a ditch. Her mouth was chewing my face and her legs were thrashing. Poor goddam Estelle. So you’re tired, Fannin. So Thomas Hobbes says the life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Win one for Hobbes. You can do it, Fannin. Win one for all the loyal alumni, for all our far-flung boys in service, for all those sweet white-haired old ladies who told us they’ll never get off those sickbeds again if we lose, for—

“—Harry!”

It was a high, arching, lazy, end-over-end punt. It hung there, floating, almost suspended. Slowly, very slowly, it drifted down, and I waited for it between the goalposts. Five defense men swam up in front of me as I tucked in the ball and began my return. It was like running under water, and they never touched me.

After the game Knute Rockne himself came down into the locker room to pat me on top of the head.

“Harry,” she said. “Oh, Harry, I’ve wanted you so, needed you so. Don’t leave me, don’t go away. Don’t even move now, don t move.”

Her face was turned. There was still sweat. And then she was crying.

“Harry.” Her voice was ragged against the pillow. “I was so frightened. When you didn’t call me back after this morning, I was so worried. I was afraid they… afraid…”

“Estelle?”

“—Afraid they might arrest you when they found the money in your apartment, might think you killed her and—”

She winced, gasping in pain. She had to, because I’d grabbed her so tightly by the shoulders that I felt bone.

My face was no more than four inches above her own. I could feel her hot breath, see the sudden fierce panic in her eyes. My voice belonged to somebody else who was trying to scream with gravel in his throat, and I was the only one in the room who could hear him.

You never told this woman about the money in your pad, Fannin, the voice roared.

CHAPTER 18

I sat there on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor in the unreal light. There were Luckies on a telephone table and I took one. The match flared and died. The smoke turned to steel wool in my mouth.

So Henshaw’s batty clock had been right. She had had time to make another stop. Probably Leeds had not even found out what direction she’d taken when he tried to go after her.

“Here,” I said. “She came here.”

Estelle did not answer and I turned to look at her. The sheet was twisted low across her thighs and her hands lay motionless at either side of her, upturned and curled like dead things in the wake of plague. Her face was turned so that only the plane of her cheek was there. The line of her breasts was lovely, as beautiful as Cathy’s had ever been.

“And it probably didn’t have anything to do with the money then either,” I said.

“No.”

“Tell me, Estelle.”

“Yes.”

I heard the sheets whisper and when I looked again she was sitting with her knees drawn up. Her arms were clasped around her calves and her head was pressed forward, and a Modigliani or a Gauguin could have done something remarkable with her. She sat that way for a long time and when she finally lifted her face she kept it straight ahead, not looking at me. Her voice was muted and hard to hear.

“Two-thirty,” she said, “perhaps a quarter to three. She was… I thought she was drunk. She told me about the robbery, things about Troy and running away from a man — it was difficult to follow. Perhaps I was too sleepy, too annoyed to want to understand. She hadn’t been here in weeks, hadn’t even been to see mother in the hospital. I told her to take back the money to whomever she’d gotten it from and to stop acting like a child….

“She took the phone and dialed a number, then she hung up without saying anything and ran out. That was when I saw it in her face, I think, whatever it was that made me realize she really was in trouble. I wanted to make her explain it more carefully. My summer coat was in the front closet and I pulled it on over my pajamas. I took my pocketbook and ran to the elevator….

“I had to wait for it. There was a small foreign car pulling out across the way when I got down, one of those MG’s, and I saw that Catherine was driving it. I called out but she didn’t hear me. My Plymouth was right out front. I got in and followed her….”

“You didn’t see anyone else? A red-haired man in a Dodge?”

“No.”

“Go on, Estelle.”

“Yes.” She had not moved. “I thought I could pull up next to her, but she was driving too fast. She didn’t stop for lights. I didn’t either, after the first one. When she got over to 68th I remembered that your apartment was there. I realized it was probably you she’d called. I thought she would be all right with you. I was going to turn around and go back home. I…”

Her voice broke. I butted my smoke in the tray, not saying anything. Her eyes were deeply shadowed in the dimness. After a while she went on.

“I don’t know why I stopped. I remember she made her tires screech. I parked behind her and I opened the door to get out, then I changed my mind. I don’t think she’d been aware of me at all, she was in such a peculiar state, but she did look around when I closed the door. She turned back and came over to me….

“My hands were actually shaking, I had been so unnerved by it all. I opened the door again, almost just to have something to do with them. I asked her what was the matter….

“She had stopped next to the door, and she was smiling at me. She said… she said, ‘Oh, I don’t need you anymore, Estelle. I’m going up to see a man, he’ll help me. The kind of mm you wouldn’t know anything about. The kind couldn’t get in your life.’ And then she laughed…

“She laughed. I don’t think she meant to be cruel, she was simply upset. But to say that to me, after all those years…”

Estelle stopped. She sat there. I waited. “Nineteen,” she said then. “I was nineteen when our father died, and Catherine was seven. Even then mother was deaf, capable of almost nothing. All those years when Catherine was a child I supported us. I brought her up. I never asked her to be grateful. But what time did I have for anything else — for men? What man would have married me anyhow, with two other people to support?

“No, I couldn’t get a man. She was right. She was the one who could. She was sixteen when it started. I tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t listen. Six years it went on, seven, I don’t know how long. She was a slut, there was no other word for it. She had abortions. Not one, two. The first time when she was eighteen. Conceived children without even being sure whose they were and then had them torn out of her while I who was never going to have them, who would have given my life to have one, had to watch while she…

“She came to me for the money. Both times. I went with her to the doctor, hid it from mother. She always came to me, but only when it was something like that, only when it was dreadful and…

“And then she married you. You. And I was so glad for her, so glad, because that should have been the end of it. My God, what else could she ask but a man like you? And then when she threw you away, went back to being a tramp…

“And then to say that to me this morning, whether she meant it or not, to throw it up to me that she could still go back to you whenever she wanted, that even after the way she had been unfaithful she could still have you, while I who had no one, no one…

“There was a fruit knife wrapped in tissue paper on the front seat. I’d bought it the day before and forgotten to bring it upstairs. She was standing there, laughing, and I could hear the mockery of it, and I remembered so many things, so many… And then the knife was in my hand and there was blood on it and… and.. “

“Estelle—”

She sobbed once, making no other move. Her voice was still flat, almost emotionless, and I knew there had to be something she was leaving out. I did not say anything. I told myself to let her finish it first.

“I saw her kneeling there. I threw the knife on the floor. I tried to lean out toward her and I couldn’t, I…

“And then she got up. She.. Oh, God! She stumbled across the sidewalk and she almost fell and I still could not do anything. And then I saw her go into the hall—

“The money was on the curb. I don’t know why I picked it up. And then I was driving, running away….

“But I stopped again. I was on Third Avenue. I sat there,

shaking. I had to go back

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I left the car and walked as far as the tailor shop on your corner and I stood in the doorway. And then you came down and the drunk was there and I was going to scream. I couldn’t make a sound. I could only stand there, even after you went back inside, not knowing whether she was alive or…

“You came out again and drove away. I saw you leave the key and I ran across. I went upstairs and I saw her and I… I…

“I vomited in the bathroom. I flushed it three times. I remember that, three times, to make sure it was clean. I was going to wait for you but I couldn’t, not with Catherine on the floor, not knowing I was the one who…

“I had the sack of money with me all the while. I put it in the laundry bag. I didn’t think anyone would find it there, not right away. I thought I was going to be sick again but I wasn’t. I ran out—

“I put the key back under the mat. I walked slowly, I remember that, too. The knife was still in the car. I drove home and brought it upstairs and washed it. I didn’t know if she had told you who had done it, I thought perhaps you had been here looking for me while I was still out, still… And then when that Duke came I thought it was you at the bell, I didn’t even ask who it was, and then a minute later you were here and I could see that you didn’t know, and… and…”

Estelle suddenly had her face in her hands. Her body shook violently. She threw herself face-down against the pillows.

I sat there. The soft light reminded me of places I’d been under dense high firs. If I hadn’t been looking at her, the sobbing could have been the sounds of scavengers in the brush, chipmunks foraging.

“Why?” I said then. “Not just because she said something about a man you couldn’t get, Estelle. Not just for that.”

The sobs died slowly. She lay still. “Why, Estelle?”

Her face was still buried. She lifted it slightly, not toward me. “Yes,” she said. “For that and… and…”

“What, Estelle? What?”

I was watching her. She pressed her head back against her raised shoulders with her weight on her forearms, holding it there. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Really her head dropped again.

“This morning,” she said. “I told you what happened to Catherine when she was six, what… what a man did to her. The man who attacked her was… his name was Robert Bell. He was twenty. My father was still alive, and Robert was staying with us for a weekend at the cottage we had rented. He was my fiancé, my…

“We were going to be married that autumn. And he did that We were sleeping together. I was giving myself to him because I loved him, because I thought that was the way it should be. And he raped Catherine. She was six years old — six! — and he chose her over me. All right, yes, there was something the matter with him, he was obviously ill, but how do you think I felt? He had come into my bed that very night after my parents were asleep and then the next morning in the woods he…

“It was hideous when it happened, hideous! Catherine wandered off and it was three days before they found her. It was terrible for her, yes. But what about me? Everyone was frantic when the doctor told us what had happened, but no one paid any attention to me at all, no one stopped to understand how I felt, to care—

“My father almost went out of his mind. His heart was bad to start with, and that was one of the things that killed him, I’m sure of it. The first night, after Robert confessed, when she was still in the hospital, we were in the waiting room. I was crying and so was mother. And then all of a sudden father was screaming at me, almost insanely. He told me it was my fault for going with Robert. He said… he said, ‘You! You can’t even get yourself an ordinary man like everyone else! No, the only man you can find is a degenerate, a pervert!’ They had to put him to bed. I almost killed myself the same night. He never fully recovered, he…

“And then she forgot! Catherine forgot! While all my life I’ve had to live with the memory of it! And all my life I tried to give myself to her, because maybe it was my fault in part, maybe I was responsible. I cared for her, cried over what she was, what she had become… and then this morning when she said that to me, said almost the same thing my father had said, that I couldn’t get a man, I…

“I just lost all sense, all reason, I…”

She was clutching the edge of the bed, sprawled across it at an angle near me. Her arms were rigid and her jaws were clamped tight. It was a long moment before her muscles loosened. She drew in her breath deeply.

“But even with that,” she said then, “even with that, my God, do you think I wanted to do what I did? Do you think I meant to do it? Can you imagine how I feel, what I’ve gone through since it happened? I almost started to tell you this morning when I mentioned what happened with Robert Bell but I couldn’t, I was afraid. And then later I even called your apartment but the police officer answered and I couldn’t even ask if you were there. And then when you came in before and said that you believed someone else had done it, and that the person was dead, I thought no one would ever know, I thought I wouldn’t

have to say anything at all. Because I… Oh, God, I didn’t mean to kill her, I didn’t! But when she said that to me about going to you, to you..”

Her voice dropped again. “You,” she repeated. It was almost a whisper. “Yes, Harry, you were a part of it. Not just the contempt I thought I heard in Catherine’s voice, not just the fact that she could get any man she wanted, but that she could still get you. From the first time I saw you I’ve thought about you, I’ve died a thousand times since you and she separated, hoping that through some impossible chance, some miracle, you and I might, that you and I… And then after all that happened she was going back to you, was telling me that you’d take her, and…”

She looked up at me then. Her face was like something sketched in charcoal on coarse gray paper and then abandoned in the rain. A shudder ran through her.

“All those years without anyone, all those years. Do you have any idea what it was? Can you know? There hasn’t been anyone, not anyone else in all that time. After Robert Bell I couldn’t, not for years, and then there wasn’t any chance. Do I have to tell you how I once let myself get picked up by a soldier and let him take me into an alleyway — into an alley, Harry, in that filth, that stench — just to see if I were still capable of being a woman, if I could feel anything at all! And then just now with you, Harry, with you! Can you have any idea what that was for me? Can you? Even lying here with all the horror in my mind, all the horror! Oh, my God, I did it, yes, I killed Catherine! Call the police, do what you must! But hold me first, Harry! Hold me again! Harry, please, again, again!”

She had flung herself toward me. Her arms leaped around my neck and she was tearing at me, trying to drag me across herself with all the fierce, dead weight of her sick agony. Her breath was coming in wild sobs and her voice was choked and pleading. “Harry, yes, tell them, do! But not now! Please, oh, God, later! Stay with me now! Don’t leave me yet, Harry, don’t!”

Her head snapped upward viciously when I jerked away. For a moment she hung there, poised on her knees at the bed’s edge with her arms outstretched and her breasts lifted like some doomed heathen priestess waiting in the twilight to be sacrificed. Then she collapsed in a heap, whimpering.

I stood there biting the knuckles of my right hand until I tasted blood.

I went into the bathroom and got dressed. When I came out again she was lying on her back with her face turned away. She hardly seemed to be breathing at all, and the sheet was twisted and crushed about her loins. It might have been the remnant of a shroud in a violated grave.

The tiny shaft of sunlight through the blind had shifted a little, and my watch said 3:29.1 stood there by the bed, staring down at her and not saying anything, and I waited the minute.

The phone felt as cold as a new Colt automatic in my hand. I put it to my head and dialed Brannigan.

Content

David Markson
Epitaph For A Tramp

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18