David Markson

Epitaph For A Dead Beat

“They are very Christlike.”

Jack Kerouac

“They are scum”

Somerset Maugham

CHAPTER 1

It is a small, not quite square office behind a smaller reception room on the fourth floor of a Paleozoic brick building on Lexington Avenue. Most of the furnishings have been out of style since Lucky Strikes were green, and in professions where they rate you by such things even the dullest girl in the typing pool would pick a more likely doorway to straighten her seams in. But it contains, such as they are, the tools of my trade as a private cop, and I have been spending the better part of five days a week in the place for seven years.

Probably it is a trivial complaint, but I will always have to wonder why nobody ever seems to need my services until I am out of there for the night.

So I was home undressed when the telephone rang, of course. It was after eleven, and I’d been reading on the couch. Lolita, a sad story about a twelve-year-old girl who couldn’t find anyone her own age to play with.

“—This is Mrs. Skelly. Is this Mr. Fannin? The detective?”

A stranger. Not young, not wealthy, not educated. Probably gray and tarnished, and wearing something cut from shapeless cotton she would call a house dress. There would be a cameo pin.

“This is Harry Fannin.”

“Mr. Lubitch said to call you — the lawyer. You’ll have to bring a gun. It’s about my uncle. There’s so much cash, you see, and—”

“You want me to shoot your uncle for some cash?”

“I beg your—”

There was a pause. “You said there was something Ben Lubitch thought I might be able to help you with, ma’am?”

“Well—”

“I do have a gun — and proper permits. If you need one at this hour I suppose it’s got to do with something you want guarded. Until the banks open?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact. It’s Mr. Casey, who just passed on. The poor man was eighty-one, with the railroad for forty-four years. Mr. Lubitch says he’s sure it will all come to us.”

“You’ve found money?”

“In coffee cans, in the closet. Almost four thousand dollars. Mr. Lubitch says you charge sixty dollars a day, but it will be worth it to ease my mind. Especially since he said you would come home and sleep with me, and—”

“Madame?”

“What? Well, really, I certainly didn’t mean—”

“Any old soft chair will do fine, Mrs. Skelly. If you’ll tell me where you are—”

She told me. Grudgingly, but it was me or Jesse James. He’d obviously had an eye on those coffee cans for weeks.

I could have been more enthusiastic. I also could have stopped dreaming that the midnight disturbance, just once, would be a cry of distress from Ava, from Lauren, even from Tallulah. The place was about as far west as you can go in Greenwich Village without driving off a pier, and I said it would take me thirty minutes to get there.

I had to park a block away, on Hudson Street. The building wasn’t quite yet a tenement, although they were already getting interesting effects from the lobby. It was part tile, part chewing gum. The apartment I wanted was 6-B and there wasn’t any elevator.

I made six, puffing, then saw the envelope tacked into the door frame from the length of a dismal corridor away. I put the paper currency into my pocket and scowled at the penciled note:

Dear Mr. Fannin:

I forgot about the police station around the corner. Thank youforyourtrouble,butthemansaidIcouldleavethemoneyin the safe. If you guarded it until 9:30 A.M. that would be tenhours, which is $6 per hour. This $3 is for the time you saidit would take to get here.

Yours truly (Mrs.)

Kate Skelly

PS. Really it would only be 9 A.M. since I would go to the bank as soon as they opened.

I had a smoke before I went down. I wondered if she expected me to leave her a receipt.

It was a nice night, warm for September. On other streets the gears of giant trucks were grinding mournfully, suffering their own version of life’s small abuses, and back on Hudson I patted the Chevy on a fender in sympathy. Fifty yards away a sign which was not entirely unfamiliar said Vinnie’s Place, Beer on Tap, in buzzing red neon. I tried, but I couldn’t think of anyone who would be waiting up for me with a candle in the window. I went in.

It was a mistake, although I could not have known that then. All I had in mind were a few inconsequential drinks.

I thought I could afford it. I’d just picked up all that easy money.

CHAPTER 2

Vinnie’s was a bleak, untinseled cavern about as long as a throw from first base to third, with a bar at the left hand wall and six or seven tables at the right. It had been a sensible longshoreman’s hangout in its day, but since the war the bohemians had been driving out the laboring folk. They had even made something of a shrine out of it, which can happen in the Village. Someone like Edith Sitwell stops a cab one night and trots inside to visit the ladies’ room, and for some people the world is never the same again.

Ten or a dozen stags were scattered along the rail, most of them dressed as if the Kon-Tiki had just discharged passengers at the curb. I found a slot near the back, wondering why my barber hadn’t heard about the strike. Next to me a tall redhead was talking intently to another man I could not see.

“—So like the cat was my best friend, you know? So he sacks out on the sofa for two weeks, and then I can see my wife is giving him the burning glance. So I move out, you know? As long as the cat doesn’t swipe any of my books when he heads back to Frisco—”

“—Touching, man. Like brotherhood.”

A handsome tanned athlete in an open blue button-down set aside a fishing lure with all the care of a museum director situating a mobile, then asked me what it would be. I told him Old Crow and he had to move a paperback called The Way Some People Die to get at the bottle. That made two of us who didn’t belong. I swung around and leaned on one forearm, to get a look at the only girl in there.

She was worth looking at. She was a blonde, with high cheekbones and a delicate face that would not have been out of place on Harper’s Bazaar. It would not have been a calamity on Playboy either, since there was nothing high-fashion about the rest of her. She was wearing jeans and a man’s faded denim work shirt, and after the third button the shirt fell like the sheer drop off a precipice.

She was at a table with two men. One of the men was very young. He had on a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows, and he was toying with an unlit pipe. The other one’s back was to me. That one had the same patches on the sleeves of his black turtleneck sweater, and a spiral notebook was jutting out from the hip pocket of his Levis. I got the impression that neither of them would have been chagrined if I got the impression they were writers.

One of them said something and the girl laughed. It was a soft rich furry laugh, like cashmere, and it was wasted in September. In January you could have wrapped it around yourself to keep warm in. Some guy probably did. It made me sad, because the girl reminded me of someone I had been in love with once who died, named Carole Lombard.

I kept staring at her, being ridiculous. She was drinking beer from a bottle, lifting her head and tilting her chair against the wall as a man might. The way she did it would have made it acceptable at a D.A.R. meeting.

She was still sitting back, holding the bottle between her lifted knees, when the front door slammed inward against a table with a sound like a gunshot.

A man had come in on the dead run. He halted himself just past the entrance, hanging forward in a half crouch like a defensive left end posing for stills. For an instant only his eyes moved. It did not take him long to spot the girl.

He sucked in his breath and began to draw himself up. He wasn’t anybody’s left end. He went to five and a half feet, no more. He had on G.I. slacks, and there was nothing under his seersucker jacket except a T-shirt. The T-shirt had possibly been clean earlier in the month. Barley-colored hair lay flat above his pink, fleshy face, which apparently he was trying to make look menacing.

He needed coaching. He looked as menacing as Rumpelstiltskin.

“You slut,” he said hoarsely. He was either out of breath or somewhat drunk. I had the sensation I could smell sweat from fifteen feet away. “She learned it from you, didn’t she? Where is she, Fern?”

I looked back at the girl. Whatever it was, she wasn’t buying. She wasn’t even in the shop. She lifted the bottle deliberately, gazing at him the way she might gaze at a rain she knew she did not have to go out into.

The man wanted more response than that. He lunged forward, stopping about three feet from her table. That put him into profile for me. His features were babyish, and he had almost no eyebrows, which gave him an exceptional amount of forehead. He could have been thirty, in spite of the outraged seven or eight he was being at the moment. He’d fastened his hands to his hips. In a minute he would stamp his foot.

“Damn it, where is she? Who is she running with tonight?”

Neither of the men at the table had made a move. The young one dug out a tobacco pouch and did some busy rooting around in it.

“Why don’t you take it easy, Ephraim?” the second one said.

“Why don’t you chew axle grease?” Ephraim told him. He was leaning between the two men now, gripping the sides of the table top. “Where is she, Fern? I’ve been ringing the bell over there half the night. You’re the one who gives her all the crummy ideas. Or is she chasing around with that other tramp friend of yours?”

Near me the redhead with the exalted sense of brotherly love coughed meaninglessly once. The girl’s eyes were meeting Ephraim’s evenly. Very slowly she set down the beer. She spoke softly, but what she said was not meant to be cherished by Ephraim alone.

“I don’t really believe them myself, Eph, so why don’t you make a formal denial of the stories? You don’t spend all your afternoons watching little girls on the swings in the park?”

He slapped her. It was not a hard slap, since he was off balance, and she hardly jerked her head. Next to her the lad with the pipe jerked his own just about as much. Then he got to his feet. He did it with all the drawling indolence of James Stewart in the scene when the Bad Guy is about to learn he’s been making sport of the wrong townspeople. I was bourgeois enough to watch for the shoulder to drop before the punch. I had forgotten where I was. His pal in the sweater joined him and the two of them walked away from the table.

They didn’t leave. They merely strolled to the front end of the bar. They shook their heads gravely as they went. It was all extremely unfortunate, but it really did not concern them. Assuredly everyone would understand their position.

“I asked you a question, Fern—”

No one else in the place had moved. The girl’s hands were drawn into fists and her eyes were smarting. Ephraim was still glaring when I took the couple of steps that got me over there.

“Got a match, hombre?” I tried to give it more of the John Wayne touch.

He grunted, not seeing me. “Beat it, huh?”

“All I want is a match—”

He turned. He had thick lips and protruding teeth. He might have been going to bite me, but the eight inches he had to raise his eyes changed his mind. “Well, for Chrissakes—”

He stabbed a hand into his jacket and came up with a folder. He shoved it at me, starting to turn back.

“Say, thanks. How about a cigarette now?”

His jaw dropped. “How about a fist in the mouth instead?”

“Aww,” I said. “A fist or a slap?”

He got red. His corneas were slightly glassy. He could have been junked up, but even so he wasn’t about to fight me. He grimaced, then whirled and started out. Halfway across the room he paused long enough to point a nicotine-stained finger at the girl, being ominous once more. “You can tell Josie she’ll get the same thing—”

“Grrr,”Isaid.

“Agh—” He swung a hand in a gesture of contempt. “Tourists!”

I laughed, a little foolishly. The door banged after him. Those two stalwart young Balzacs were watching me, but they turned when I glanced that way.

The marks of the slap had begun to show on the girl’s cheek. She was staring at the table, sitting rigidly.

“Buy you a refill?”

She looked at me for the first time, biting her lip. I realized that she had no make-up on except lipstick. Her eyes were incredibly blue, and also remote. Or maybe just uninterested. She was a beautiful girl and she appreciated the assistance, but no thanks.

I was wrong. It took a minute but then she smiled. It was quite a smile. Two-Gun Ephraim lay face down in the dust, the streets were safe for womenfolk, law had come to the Pecos.

“I’ll be heartbroken if the chivalry was just to pick me up?”

“Not me, ma’am. Now I saddle my trusty roan and ride off” into the sunset.”

“Inscrutable and alone—” She laughed.

“I like the quick recovery,” I told her.

“I make an even better one when I’m removed from the battlefield. I don’t think I want another drink, but you can take me home if you would?”

“Sure.”

She stood, then nodded toward the rear. “Haifa second—” Her voice was husky, and it hung around after she’d walked away from under it.

There was talk again, and the young bartender came across to pick up her bottle. I’d half suspected he’d left for the evening. “You were real good in there,” I told him. “You keep things running smoothly.”

He bent to wipe the table with a rag. “Be a hero. I can get the skirts without it.”

I put my hand on his wrist. Gently, but he stopped wiping. We considered each other.

“So hit me,” he said. “Six bits a week they withhold, workman’s compensation.”

I let him go. He went away whistling.

There’s that about Greenwich Village. Nobody ever takes a poke at you, but you’re never quite sure who’s winning.

CHAPTER 3

She’d been forcing it. She smiled when we went out, but the power lines were down again. I told her my name and she said that her own was Fern Hoerner, but she would have given it to a kitchenware salesman in the same tone.

She turned south, walking glumly with her hands thrust into her pockets. I indicated the Chevy when we came abreast of it.

“We don’t really need it,” she said. “It’s only Grove Street.”

She shuffled along, kicking out with a tennis shoe once or twice and scuffing it on the concrete. I took her arm when we crossed Hudson. There was no traffic, and the few neighborhood stores were closed. The usual imposing American intellects were going slowly blind in the glare of television screens behind random windows.

“Do you live down this way, Harry? I’ve never seen you in Vinnie’s before.”

“Up off Third Avenue. You don’t have to make conversation if you’re feeling rotten.”

“I’m sorry. I guess it was a little embarrassing at that.” She shook her head. “Although I’m acting childish. I was pretty nasty myself, as I recall.”

“Hell—”

“Maybe, but it was just poor old Ephraim. That’s Ephraim Turk — his mother told him he was a poet.”

“But mother died.”

She managed a laugh. “But now I’m being bitchy all over again. I’m no judge of verse, really — sometimes I can’t tell William Butler Yeats from Woodbine Willie. All I’ve ever done is fiction myself

She said it matter-of-factly, not seeming to notice when I glanced at her. “Can I ask,” I said, “or is that the touchy question?”

“It’s okay to ask. You damned well better—” The smile was warming up again. “I’ve done a novel. In fact it’s coming out next week.”

I frowned. She stopped walking when I did. I kept on frowning when I put my hands on her shoulders.

“You’ve done a novel,” I said.

She nodded uncertainly.

“It’s coming out next week.”

“Um-hum.”

“You’re at least twenty-three years old.”

“Twenty-four.”

“I’m going home,” I said.

Her eyes were bright. I lifted a hand and let it drop, slapping air. “Greenwich Village—”

“You don’t really have to be impressed, Harry,” she decided then. “Sometimes I think the book isn’t much good at all. I get the feeling they just want my picture on the dust jacket.”

“I’ll take a dozen.”

“That’s what they’re counting on. Not that it isn’t a reputable publisher — which could be another reason why Ephraim isn’t too happy with me these days. The only place he sees his name in print is on his phone bill.”

“I gathered he was a little anxious about some girl named Josie?”

“Ephraim would be anxious about what color the grass will come up next April.” We had turned at Grove and were headed toward Seventh Avenue. “Although it’s a funny story, actually. It couldn’t have happened with anybody except Josie — Josie Welch, the girl I live with. She’s as pretty as a picture, but she’s probably the most scatterbrained kid in town. It’s Zen — that started it all.”

“Sin?”

“Zen. Zen Buddhism, you must know about it—?”

“I hear there’s a lot of it going around.”

She threw back her gleaming head. “That’s as good a comment as any. Damn, but I hate these fads — you can’t turn around without hearing words like safari and atman and Lord knows what else, all of it mixed up with undergraduate profundity and stale beer—”

“It sounds pretty subtle for a girl like this one—”

“Oh, it is. But somebody gave her a lecture on it one night. Some intense young man, no doubt. Josie’s always getting lectured, it’s a way she has of being seduced.”

“Zen Bedism—”

“Oww—” She winced. “But you don’t know how right you are. It was all she talked about for a week or two, and then last Sunday I came in about midnight and there were she and Ephraim, sitting on opposite ends of the couch with their legs crossed and their arms folded, both of them stark naked and staring into space. You learn not to be surprised by much of anything Josie does, but this was a little extreme. I thought they were probably high at first, but then Josie admitted just that — they were supposed to be practicing Zen, trying to lose all awareness of their physical natures and achieve a state of absolute spirituality. I asked her when the practice session ended and the game began, but she wouldn’t say another word. The pair of them were still contemplating eternity when I went to bed.”

“Zen Nudism—”

“Clown—”

“And Josie achieved Nirvana while Ephraim didn’t — which explains all his anxieties—”

“Not quite. The next morning Ephraim was coming out of her bedroom when I was leaving for the library. I do freelance reading for film people, incidentally, screening books that might make movie properties — not so much, now that I’ve gotten my advance on the novel. If I have any luck I’ll be quitting altogether. Anyhow, I let it pass, as I do with most of Josie’s sundry indiscretions. But that evening Ephraim showed up again. You’d have to know Josie to appreciate this, but the minute he made the first hint of a pass at her she hauled off and socked him. She told him flatly that she wouldn’t go to bed with him if he were the last man on earth—”

“Huh?”

“That was Ephraim’s reaction, likewise. He asked her where she thought she’d gone the night before, but Josie said she’d had nothing to do with what happened. Even if she’d consented in so many words, it hadn’t been her real self. She’d been withdrawn from the external world, and her mind hadn’t had anything to do with her body. All this in dead seriousness, mind you. It broke me up so much I had to get out of there. And Ephraim’s been chasing her ever since.”

“Waiting for her to come back to earth.”

“Literally. But that’s what I mean about him. All right, she wants to pretend it never happened — so anyone else would leave her to her little self-deception and forget about it. But not Eph. You’d think she’d suddenly spurned him after ten years of wedded bliss.”

“He seemed to want to blame you for something or other.”

“Sure he would. He followed me around like a puppy for months. It wouldn’t occur to him that a girl just might not be interested — if he thinks she’s intimate with anyone else he has to convince himself she’s a tramp he never really wanted to start with. And now after last weekend Josie’s obviously a tramp also, only in this case it’s my influence. Sometimes it does make me a little sore—”

We had stopped walking and were standing below the steps to a three-story brownstone, just off Seventh. It was lighted over there, and cars were passing, but you could have held hearing examinations where we were. I took a smoke, offering her one, and she said no.

“I haven’t shut up since we left Vinnie’s, have I?”

“Most of it about some girl named Josie—”

“Chattering like an imbecile, just so I can hide how I really—” Her voice caught. She was standing two steps up, against the stone balustrade, and she turned away. “Oh, damn him, anyhow. Just because you live in the Village they think they can treat you like—”

The delayed let-down startled me. “Hey,” I said.

She nodded, compressing her lips. I went up. “Listen — that joker isn’t worth three wasted thoughts in thirteen years—”

“Oh, I know it, I just—”

“Anyhow he’s gone. He’s off writing sonnets to a dirty sock. Ain’t nobody here but Shane, ma’am—”

She smiled. She didn’t make anything of it when I kissed her. I had a hand on the rail at each side of her, and only our lips met. It was just light testing, like the first warm drop from an infant’s bottle you touch to your wrist.

“That wasn’t me,” I told her. “I’ve attained other-worldliness, complete withdrawal—”

“You’re a Tibetan monk—” She came up with two keys on a tiny chain. “Do they let you drink coffee — I mean in those monasteries?”

“You show them your Diners’ Club card—”

She grimaced, going to the door. It was an old paneled wood aflair, under an arch, and I pushed it in after she’d worked the key. She skipped lightly up one carpeted flight and led me along a corridor to the front. “Josie must be off somewhere if Ephraim said he rang,” she said quietly. “She goes uptown a lot. If she’d been home she would have let him in to torment him some more.”

I waited while she used the second key on a door marked 3, then followed her into a large living room. A low couch on tubular legs faced us from the far wall, and there were leather sling chairs in corners. There was an expensive hi-fi arrangement, and wrought-iron racks were jammed with records and books. Tan drapes covered the windows overlooking the street. There was no rug but the floor was inlaid of hard dark wood squares and highly polished.

Fern grinned at me. “I’ll bet you wanted something devastatingly bohemian—”

“Orange crates, driftwood, sprawling Beatniks—”

“The furniture’s mine. I was married once, it’s what I got to keep as a souvenir. In the bedrooms also—” She gestured toward two doors in the wall at my left. “Left one’s me, right one’s Josie. You go to the John through the kitchen, but don’t ask me to explain whose concept that was. Do you take it black, Harry?”

“Swell.”

She waved me toward a chair, then slipped through a doorway near the couch. I heard water run. After a minute an inner door closed, which would be that jerry-built latrine.

I was just standing there. The door to Ferris bedroom was open about half a foot. The door to her roommate’s was closed. So I picked the roommate’s.

I don’t know why I do those things. Maybe I do those things because I’m a cop. Maybe I’m a cop because I do those things.

Mother was right. I should have been a poet. There was no iuture in the business I was in, no future at all.

There was a small lamp burning on a table in there. It hadn’t shown with the door closed. I took a single deep breath and then I backed out. I drew the door after me as carefully as if there had been unstrung pearls balanced on its top.

“Nosy,” Fern Hoerner said.

She was at the kitchen door, holding a bag of sugar. Common household granulated sugar. She was going to drop it in a minute.

“That Josie. There’s one door in here to the pantry and one to the bathroom. So I just found this on a shelf in the medicine cabinet. Sometimes I think that girl doesn’t know her own name.”

“Josie Welch,” I said.

“Actually it’s Josephine.”

“Josephine, yes—”

She frowned. “Aren’t you being strange, Harry? What’s so important about her name?”

I wanted to think of a way to tell her. There wasn’t any way. The girl looked as delicate as old dreams, and I despised what it would do to her face. I felt like a man about to slash a Leonardo with a dull blade.

“Someone will have to identify the body,” I said.

CHAPTER 4

I had been right about the sugar. The package twisted in her hands and began to empty itself in a thin, fluid stream, like time spilling. It whispered as it built itself into a mound at her feet.

She never saw it, gaping at me. I hadn’t moved. Heifetz could have strung a bow on the tendons at the back of my calves.

It was not the first time I had found a corpse. But I generally have some vague professional notion when there might be one around. Like the vague notion a steel worker has that one of those high girders might be slippery. It’s the same fall. You just don t expect to take it off a trolley on the way home from work.

The bag was crushed and empty when I finally got across. She had not made a sound.

“She’s been shot, Fern—”

“But—” She shivered once, looking past me toward the bedroom. “But I— Oh, dear God, are you sure? How could—?”

“The police will ask you to go in. If you’d rather do it before they come—”

She turned a little wildly, pressing a hand across her mouth.

Very probably the police would be more comfort than a total stranger, which was a status I had just reverted to. She finally nodded, however.

I took her arm. The shade on the one lamp in there was orange, and it threw an unnatural cast over everything, like wildfire beyond thin curtains. The girl lay across the bed with one arm flung upward and her cheek turned against it. Her long thin legs were bent over the side, and her feet touched the floor. She had slippers on. The strap on the left shoulder of her red brassiere was severed, and the brassiere had slipped toward her throat, exposing that one small breast.

Her face was to the light. She could not have been more than twenty, but somehow there was no innocence about her. The face was small-boned, and she had been pretty. She was fragile, but the way Bardot is fragile. The small blackened stain at her heart was hardly visible.

Fern had come only one step into the room. Her fingers were digging into my forearm.

“Get yourself a drink, Fern—”

She broke away, running jerkily toward the kitchen. I did not follow her.

The girl had been killed instantly. The wound was from a.25 at best, more likely a.22, and a single shot from that kind of bore would have to be perfect to kill at all. There was a faint smear of blood on the girl’s palm, where it had touched the hole in what must have been sheer reflex.

I pressed my hand against the inside of her thigh. There was no stiffness, although the skin seemed cold. That could have been an illusion. I guessed it was an hour. It might have been three.

I let out my breath. There was nothing which did not belong in a bedroom. A freshly laundered brassiere, white this time, lay on the floor between a dresser and the bed. She had been changing, so the other one had evidently ripped of itself, not in any struggle. A window near the bed was lifted two inches. There was a fire escape in the blackness beyond it.

A lot of clothes in the closet, just as many cocktail and semi-formal things as casual items. A girl who had not made a career out of Greenwich Village. A girl who had had a friend intimate enough to change a brassiere in front of. Or had she answered the door and then come back in here alone? None of this was any of my business.

I had touched both doorknobs before, so I touched them again, going back out.

Fern was watching me grimly from the couch. She was clutching a tumbler of whisky in both hands. She was not crying, but her face was the color of cooled ashes. I looked into her room also.

It was the same size as the other, set up almost the same way. The window was not open. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed.

“Would she have had anything in there worth taking, Fern?”

She frowned, not understanding.

“It could have been a prowler, although I doubt it.”

“Could have been — Oh God, who? Why? I—n

I had been waiting for it. She broke apart like a bridge collapsing, in slow motion, letting herself fell to the side with her face in her hands. I could hear the coffee perking and I went in and turned it off. I used up another minute or two brushing the sugar against the base of a cabinet. I found a glass on a draining rack and brought it out. She had a bottle of Four Roses on a table at the end of the couch.

I hadn’t been right about her face. Even torn up that way she was lovely.

“You’re being so calm, Harry. And I don’t know anything about you at all, do I?”

“I’m a detective, Fern. Private.”

“You’re—” She looked up in alarm. “I don’t understand. I mean, you being here and—”

“The police won’t particularly like the idea either. It was just chance that I was in Vinnie’s.”

“Oh, God, it’s so—” She bit hard on a knuckle, fighting it. The phone was on a small stand near the windows. It wasn’t going to go away.

“I better call them now, Fern.”

She said nothing. I dialed. My name, the address, the apartment number. It would have taken longer to order a rib roast.

It was 12:53.1 let myself slide into one of the sling chairs. “They’ll be a while,” I said. “If you want to talk instead of just sitting—”

She stared at me absently.

“Did you know her long, Fern?”

“About a year.” Her voice was ragged. “She’s lived here for five months.”

“That when that marriage you mentioned broke up?”

“That was before. Do you — may I have a cigarette?”

I went across and gave her a Camel. It trembled between her lips.

“You don’t have any ideas?”

“There just isn’t anybody, any reason—”

“Ephraim?”

“But you heard him yourself. He said he was looking for her and she didn’t answer the bell—”

“So did fifteen other people hear him. He could have kept all that private over there. He might have wanted the edge on an alibi.”

“But Ephraim — he’s such an ineffectual sort of boy. He’s frustrated, I guess, and maybe deep down he knows he’s not much of a writer, but I just can’t—”

“There was another girl he mentioned. When he was asking where Josie might be—”

She picked up her glass, sighing, then replaced it. “Dana O’Dea—’’

“A good friend of Josie’s?”

“She was. Until—” She let it trail off.

“You’ll have to tell the cops, Fern.”

She nodded. “They had a fight. At a party, just a few nights ago. Both she and Josie had a crush on Pete Peters, the novelist. He’s — well, just part of the gang down here. I told you before how I met Ephraim coming out of Josie’s room that morning. I’ve met Pete coming out a dozen mornings. But the thing is, if I were Dana’s roommate I would have seen Pete over there also—” She paused, and her arms dropped between her thighs. “I guess Josie and Dana were both kidding themselves, thinking Pete was playing it straight. But then something came up at the party, somebody made a crack, and Dana blew her top. She was drunk, I guess, but she called Josie every name in the book, and then she told Pete to take her home. Pete said no, but it was curious, somehow. He didn’t say he wouldn’t go with Dana — I’m almost certain he said he had to stay. In fact I was tempted to ask Josie later if—”

“She might have been pregnant?”

“I don’t know, Harry, I—”

I was scowling. “Ephraim’s interest doesn’t make much sense if everyone knew Josie was going with this Peters—”

“You saw Ephraim — he’s a little crazy. He told Josie the other night he wanted to marry her. I think he felt — well, I got the idea he wanted to do it deliberately, knowing she might have another man’s child. As if it might add some simulated sort of tragic stature to his life, like Byron’s limp or something—”

“You said she went uptown a lot. Anybody special she saw?”

“Connie, yes.”

“Connie?”

“I don’t know his last name. She’s never said anything about him, nothing at all. He just calls, two or three nights a week, and if Josie isn’t busy she goes up. Oh, God, I mean went up. It was always odd, I guess probably he’s a married man—”

She turned aside. I waited again.

“The cops will have one other set of questions, Fern—”

Her breasts rose and fell sharply in profile.

“I got to Vinnie’s Place about ten to twelve,” I said. “They’ll want to know what time you got there.”

“I saw you come in,” she said distantly. “I couldn’t have been there more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Gregory and Allen might know, those two boys I was sitting with.”

“Before that?”

“I went to see that old Humphrey Bogart film. Casablanca. Over on Sixth Avenue. I guess I went about eight-thirty.”

“Alone?”

The cigarette lifted in a gesture of futility. “I just wish that were all that was on my mind.”

I watched her. Her hands were across her knees. Smoke trailed up from one of them, disappearing against the sheen of her hair.

“That bullet — it was from a twenty-two, wasn’t it?”

“It looked like it.”

“It will be. I owned one. A Colt Huntsman that someone gave me once.”

“Owned?”

“It was stolen out of my dresser. Two weeks ago. I didn’t report it, because we’d had a party that weekend and I thought some poet had probably pawned it for a meal. But now—”

The siren cut her off, whining once like a troubled animal outside. She was looking down desolately and she drew in her breath, holding it. And then she did something that twisted my stomach into a sick knot.

I got over there as fast as I could, but not fast enough. She hadn’t said a word, moving only the hand which held the cigarette. I was standing over her when she let the dead butt drop to the floor.

“Fern,” I said. “Oh, Christ—n

She got up, shaking. I stared at her lifted wrist. The doorbell rang with a single authoritative blast.

The foul odor of singed flesh followed me when I went to the buzzer.

CHAPTER 5

The cop who caught it was a lean, long-necked, wide-shouldered sergeant named DiMaggio. He had a face roughly the shape and color of a clumsily peeled Idaho potato, and he had a jaw like the end of a cigarette carton.

He was strictly business. He let us tell him that we had come in together and found the body, and then he spent twelve or fourteen minutes supervising his lab men. After that he spent twenty more with Fern in her bedroom. There was another detective with him, an amiable, laconic redhead named Toomey.

Fern stayed inside when they came out. Toomey rejoined the technicians and DiMaggio indicated the kitchen with a nod. I followed him. He hoisted one flat hip over the edge of the sink, then swung the door shut with the toe of a shoe big enough to row.

“You have something with your name on it?” he asked me.

I gave him my wallet, open to my state license. He stared at the ticket for a lot more time than it would take to read it. Then he let out his breath, with all the weary resignation of a plumber finding a coat hanger in a drain.

“A private detective,” he said without inflection. He handed the wallet back. “Must be an exciting line of work. Thrills, adventure—”

He wasn’t smiling. I didn’t say anything.

“Anything exciting happen to you lately, Mr. Fannin?”

I supposed I was expected to lend myself to the routine. “I had a real scary one two weeks ago,” I said.

“What would that have been, Mr. Fannin?”

“A dognaping,” I said.

“Oh?”

“The owner decided to pay the ransom. I had to meet the dognaper in a dark street in Flatbush at four o’clock in the morning.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Things work out without trouble?”

“The dog bit me.”

That changed his expression the way drops of syrup change the expression on a buckwheat cake, no more. He took a cigarette.

“What are you working on now, Mr. Fannin?”

DiMaggio. Toomey had called him Joe, which people would do. On his birth certificate it probably said Melvin.

“I was in a bar on Hudson Street,” I told him mechanically. “Vinnie’s Place. Before midnight tonight I’d never seen Fern Hoerner in my life. Somebody insulted her and I walked her home. She was in here and I happened to look into that bedroom. Before approximately twelve forty-five I’d never seen the Welch girl either. Anything else I can tell you would be hearsay, based on conversation with Miss Hoerner. Except for what went on in the bar — that involved Josie Welch also.”

“Tell it.”

I went into detail about Ephraim Turk, then summarized what Fern had said about background. When I finished he leaned there chewing on it. He was an obvious kind of cop and there would be an obvious question for him to ask. He had already asked it once.

“What are you working on, Fannin?”

I didn’t answer.

“You simply happened to be in Vinnie’s. You weren’t there because you were trying to make contact with Miss Hoerner for some reason — or to get into this apartment?”

“Oh, now look, just because I’ve got this license—”

“Just because. I want to know what you’re working on, Fannin. I think I want to know right about now.”

I sat there for another minute. He had too many preconceived notions and too much sheer habit to take any story of mine on faith. “Would Captain Nate Brannigan be on duty up at Central Homicide tonight?” I asked him.

He stared at me. “Exactly what does that mean?”

“It means I went in there for a drink. All the rest was just luck.”

He cracked a knuckle the size of a walnut, not looking at me.

“I had a security case,” I told him then. “Woman named Skelly found some cash. She decided to leave it in the precinct safe instead.”

“You could have mentioned this before, you know.”

“We got off the road.”

“So we did.” He finally made up his mind to smile, although it was still an effort. “You know Brannigan pretty well?”

“Four, five years.”

He went to the door. “What the hell — it didn’t look very kosher.”

“I figured it wouldn’t.”

“Yeah. You’ll have to see a stenographer later. Stick around if you want.”

“Thanks.”

Toomey was alone in the living room. “Watch your language in front of the man, Floyd,” DiMaggio told him. “He’s a P.I. with connections.”

“I’m genuflecting,” Toomey said.

“Ah, I guess he’s not pushing it.” DiMaggio went back into the second bedroom. The lab men had left and someone else was in with the body, probably the M.E. Toomey went to the bottle.

“What’s his real first name?” I asked.

“Who, Joe?”

“Yes.”

“Joe.”

“Joe?”

“So there’s two of them. You know something makes it illegal?”

I let it pass, getting a new drink for myself. Toomey sat down in one of the sling chairs and scratched an ankle.

People wandered in and out. It was only 1:47 when they came for the body, which meant it was a quiet night at the morgue. Maybe the juvenile delinquents had declared a truce for Tuesdays. Fern’s door remained shut while they were getting the stretcher out.

DiMaggio was on the couch. “You see that bankbook in there?” he asked me.

“I didn’t dig around.”

He punched his tongue into his cheek. “Pretty queer. According to Miss Hoemer the girl was nineteen — came here after high school in Kansas City two years back. So first we get regular weekly deposits, checks, which would be a salary from somewhere—” He flipped pages in a notebook. “Yeah, here. Fifty-eight bucks and change. But then for the last eleven, twelve months the girl’d been putting away between one and three hundred a week—”

Toomey whistled. DiMaggio nodded and went on. “Spending a fair bit, but the income is regular enough — all deposits in cash, and never more than an even hundred at one time.” He grunted. “And no visible means whatsoever — at least none since Miss Hoerner met her. The girl claimed a relative was supporting her—”

“Uncle Aga Khan,” Toomey said.

DiMaggio looked from him to me. “The uptown chum?” I said. “This Connie?”

“There’s an address book, but nobody with the name. I think I’m ready to lay about eight to five she was on call.”

“Age nineteen,” Toomey said. “You suppose Vice Squad will have a make on the guy?”

“I want the other end of the odds on that one. Hell, there’s a high-class pimp working out of every other nightclub these days. But anyhow, one other thing. Like I say, all deposits are fairly consistent — and then two months ago there’s a fat one. July tenth. One thousand, eight hundred and fifty-two bills— again cash.”

“Daily double at Belmont,” Toomey said.

DiMaggio did not smile. “Miss Hoerner says she knows nothing about the uptown pitch — she’d rather read this Connie as a married cheater. There’s no lead to him — no letters, not even an uptown match folder. The girl was neat as a squirrel. Almost too neat, as if she had something to hide. And just incidentally we’ve got no family address either. We’ll have to contact Kansas City and see what they can file.”

He dropped the notebook into a side pocket of his jacket. After a minute he lifted his face toward me, squinting. “Ephraim Turk — a runt of a guy with a face like a sponge? A writer?”

“Close enough.”

“For Chrissakes, sure, that son of a bitch has a shoplifting record. Six, eight months ago — somebody had a party, reported some stones missing. One of those rich hens who thinks it’s quaint to let a pack of poets with greasy hands paw the draperies. We checked the guest list and this Turk’s background came out — he’d done a suspended on the coast someplace. San Francisco. We never did find the gems. Yeah, yeah, Turk left the party with friends and slept in someone else’s apartment. It gave him an out, since he didn’t have time or opportunity to get rid of the haul.”

“I remember,” Toomey said. “But didn’t we decide it was too big a job for him?”

“Swiping Miss Hoerner’s twenty-two wouldn’t be,” Di-Maggio said.

“I just thought of something,” I said.

DiMaggio raised his cardboard jaw an eighth of an inch.

“It doesn’t have to mean much,” I said. “Turk didn’t have his fight with the Welch girl until just recently. The gun was taken two weeks ago.”

DiMaggio traced his tongue across the tips of his teeth. “Okay, it’s a point. Still, we run him in the same time we run in these others. This Dana O’Dea, the girl Welch had the fight with at that party. And this Pete Peters — Peter J. Peters, Miss Hoerner says. Although well need the pregnancy report to bring him into it—”

“Me, I like the uptown bird,” Toomey said.

“I’ll let you fly up and find him for us,” DiMaggio said. He glanced toward Fern’s door, then puckered his lips.

“Hell,” I said.

“She has to be automatically suspect.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Okay, you too.” DiMaggio got to his feet. He fished around in his breast pocket and came up with a small white card. “You and Miss Hoerner can see the steno anytime — in the morning, if she doesn’t feel up to it now. Tell her, will you? Meanwhile, here — it’s got my home number on it. In case you just happen to be in some more bars and run into something before we wrap it up.”

I took the card. Only a rare cop would have one. It said:

Giovanni Boccaccio DiMaggio Detective Sergeant

Toomey laughed nasally, heading out.

CHAPTER 6

Once, long ago, a girl had let me kiss her on a darkened stone stairway on a quiet street. Now she was letting me hold her hand, but she wasn’t the same girl, and my hand was any old hand. She would have held Iago’s, if he was the guy she happened to have to go to the station house with.

We had the statements to make. That sent us back past Vinnie’s and around a corner, then up a flight of worn concrete steps between two concrete pillars with green globes at their tops. And then we were in another country.

Cop Country. As bleak as picked bones, as dismal as the floor of the sea. DiMaggio had been and gone, and a young patrolman took down what we had to say in shorthand he had probably learned in hope of a promotion. He was no more than twenty-five, and a promotion was the only thing he would ever hope for in life. He had a face which had already seen everything twice, and had been bored the first time.

Cop Country. As cheerful as a leg in traction, as inviting as a secondhand toothbrush. Other cops came and went while we sat on a bench waiting to sign the typed copies. Cops with faces like wet gray sand, cops with eyes like whorls in hardened wax. One of them passed us carrying what might have been an undershirt. “He still bleeding?” I heard somebody ask him. “You need boots in the squad room,” he said.

Cop Country. It was pushing three o’clock when we got out. It hadn’t taken long. It had only seemed that way. It always will.

That corner of the Village was even more quiet than before. We had not spoken fifty words in an hour, but I stopped her when we came back past the Chevy. She was still wearing that work shirt, and there was a Band-Aid on her wrist.

“Listen — you don’t want to spend the night home alone. Is there some girl you can call? I’ll drop you anywhere you say.”

She stared at the pavement, animated by all the spontaneous gaiety of Joan of Arc on her way to the stake. “I don’t want to call anybody, Harry. Not to have to tell them about it, not tonight.”

“I know. Play it again, Sam.” I opened the door at the curb. “Come on,” I told her.

We got in. Halfway uptown she said, “Damn, oh damn,” and then nothing else. I lived on 68th and used a garage on Third, but there was an empty slot a few doors down from the apartment on the side which would be legal in the morning. I locked the car and we went up the one flight.

I had two and a half rooms. I’d gotten the place as a sublet five years before and the original tenant had never come back. He’d sold me the furniture by mail after a year, most of it battered and masculine, and then a girl named Cathy had added a few things in the ten months she’d used my name. Fern saw that. I’d turned on a Japanese lantern and she fingered its shade, not looking at me. “A woman bought this,” she said.

“Yes.”

“A mess?”

“A mess.”

She slouched to the front windows. The blinds were separated and she stood with her back toward me in the shadows.

There was nothing to look at out there. Her hair glinted, highlighted by a streetlamp down below.

“I guess I know without asking,” she said. “Are they always so rotten? God, but mine was.”

I didn’t say anything, but I did not care if she talked. I could not think of many things she could do or say that I would mind. I might have wished it were another night, when she would not be so vulnerable, but there was nothing I could do about that.

“I was twenty when I married him,” she said. “He was a writer, older than I was. I thought he was a good one, too, and I had all the proud dreams about giving up my own absurd ambition so he could fulfill himself. I quit college and got a job so he could stay home and work. Selfless, dedicated little Fern. It took me two years to discover that he hadn’t done two fall months’ writing in all that time. When he wasn’t in the bars all day he had women in. In the apartment I was paying rent for—”

She let it die, standing there. She did not expect an answer. After a while I crossed behind her and went into the bedroom. I put on another small light.

She followed me. She was toying with the adhesive.

“That hurting?”

“Not at all. It’s almost strange.”

I punched her lightly on the cheek. “It’s just chance, but a maid comes in on Tuesdays. Everything’s fresh. Towels and stuff* in the closet in the John. I’ll throw a sheet on the couch.”

“Breakfast in bed in the morning?”

“Go ahead, be merry. I know how you feel.”

“No, you don’t—”

The way she said it stopped me. I had been headed toward the closet. She was staring at me, and her hand was at the lamp. The light snapped off.

I went across. The girl had hit me hard, but it was still the same bad night. I put a hand on her sleeve. She was shaking.

“Oh, God, does it make me terrible if I want — if I need—?”

I kissed her so hard that my mouth ached. I had to, once at least. Then I picked her up with one arm behind her knees and the other at her shoulders. I put her down on the bed.

I touched her hair. “Get some sleep, Fern.”

She didn’t say anything. Something caught in her throat, but it was only a sob. I went out of there.

It was easy. Like walking out of the Kimberly mines with nothing in your pockets. I tried to remember when I had held a girl as breathtaking. It had been the week before they knifed Julius Caesar. It was when they were starting the Pyramids. I got myself a drink. I managed not to spill too much of it.

I needed a pillow and a couple of sheets. I waited fifteen or twenty minutes, until I was sure she would be asleep. I couldn’t come out of there a second time if she wasn’t. Martin Luther couldn’t have.

She had not gotten undressed. She was breathing softly. I untied the tennis shoes, hardly touching them, and eased them off.

“Do I get a bedtime story also?”

“Oh, hell. Oh, sweet hell.”

She laughed, reaching toward me. “I’m all right now, Harry.”

“You’re all right now,” I said. “That’s fine. I mean I’m glad. You’re sure you’re all right now—”

“I think you’re a little crazy.”

“Yes. I may well be. Yes, indeed. And you’re being a great help. You’re all right now—”

“Oh, heavens, come here. Will you come here—”

We weren’t in another country anymore.

CHAPTER 7

She was gone when I woke up. I’d never heard her.

I hadn’t heard the alarm either, and it was after nine. There wasn’t any note. She’d disappeared without a trace, like Cinderella.

Cinderella would have forgotten a slipper. Three or four meager hours of sleep had left me just groggy enough. I actually caught myself searching around for one of those tennis shoes.

I got to the office by ten, but it was a meaningless achievement. The waiting room was as barren as Pompeii.

I looked her up and dialed the Grove Street number. I didn’t get an answer.

It made the afternoon papers. Not much space, no photo. Police were questioning several unnamed suspects. The body had been discovered by a Miss Fern Hoerner, roommate of the deceased, along with a private investigator named Henry Fannin. I tried her again at four.

I supposed the daylight had made it easier for her to go to a girlfriend’s. I also supposed I might come up with a client if I sat there patiently again tomorrow. I locked the office and went home.

DiMaggio was easy. I caught him at nine-thirty. “We found the gun,” he told me. “In our sneak thief s apartment. I had a hunch.”

“T\irk?”

“Yeah, the first place we looked. Ifs Miss Hoerner’s — it was registered. No prints — he’d wiped it clean — but Ballistics fired it and the slug matched. He claims if s a plant, of course — says he never saw it before. But we also found a neighbor who heard him pounding on the door over there about two hours before you called in. Made enough of a racket so that she took a peek down the stairway, and she’s willing to make a positive identification. She says she heard him threaten the Welch girl with bodily harm if she wouldn’t open up.”

“She hear the shot?”

“No. She says he quieted down, either he was let in or else he went away and came back. Turk is screaming about an alibi, says a friend was with him all evening, but the friend hasn’t shown. We’ll get a confession sooner or later.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“They usually are, Fannin. You should know that.”

“The others get themselves clear?”

“We’re not really interested in them. For the record, that girl Dana O’Dea was too blotto to have handled that kind of shooting. Toomey practically had to carry her in to the station when he picked her up. Which is nice work — she’s quite a looker.”

“Peter J. Peters?”

“Never questioned him. The girl wasn’t pregnant, which eliminates his interest. He’s the friend Turk claims he was with. It’s up to Turk to produce him, if he really is an alibi — which I doubt. The neighbor says she didn’t see anybody else in the hall. It looks pretty cut and dried.”

“I’d hate to think a man was stupid enough to leave a murder gun under his nightshirt.”

“In a coat pocket. Hell, we got over there before three o’clock. He probably planned to dump it later.”

“You look into this uptown joker — Connie?”

“Vice Squad can’t make him for us. Miss Hoerner could be right about him being a married man. I’m not going to worry about it — it’ll be Turk. You know this Village gang, they’re all psycho. We’ll get our confession and then instead of a lawyer hell bring in a head doctor to prove it was his mother he was really mad at.”

“She loved him.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, nothing. Thanks for all the dope.”

“See you around. I spoke to your friend Captain Brannigan, by the way. I’ll mention your name, somebody needs something that isn’t strictly departmental.”

“Ill appreciate it.”

I watched the last few innings of the Yankee game. Jimmy Piersall beat them with a double in the eleventh and it wound up after midnight. Her girlfriend had an extra bed. She was sleeping over.

DiMaggio would be right about the Village. Artists, social exiles — there was always a lot of sensitivity on the loose down there, a lot of overplayed emotion. Even on the chance that it wasn’t Ephraim it would still be something simple. I did not have any investment in it.

She didn’t answer Thursday morning either. There was a girl I had charmed, all right. She was probably locked in a phone booth somewhere, still telling them all about it back home.

I sat some more. The detective profession was on the skids. I hadn’t had a paying customer in eight or ten days.

Maybe it was all in my mind, but the whole building seemed remarkably quiet. Nobody came, nobody went. Only Fannin, who paid the rent.

Percy Bysshe Fannin, the Shelley of the Sherlocks. The Keats of the Keyhole. Me and Ephraim.

So she’d needed a shoulder to dig her nails into, and mine had been closest. So there was another shoulder someplace with her name stenciled on it. So there hadn’t been any reason to mention it.

I couldn’t remember a week so hushed since the Giants went west.

I tried her one more time that evening. I tried another girl after her, and I got an excuse and a promise. I had a substantial file of both items. I didn’t want to see the other girl anyhow.

I was a fool. I sat there again Friday. Nobody wrote me any letters except the University of Michigan Alumni Association, looking for contributions. I sent them what I had left of Mrs. Skelly’s largess. Nobody dialed my number, even by mistake. I stared at the back of the door to the reception room.

Apropos of nothing at all, I wondered whatever became of Wrong Way Corrigan.

It was something to do. I wondered whatever became of Schoolboy Rowe. For that matter, whatever became of Doyle Nave, who beat Duke with that pass in the ‘39 Rose Bowl game? Whatever became of Jean Hersholt?

Oh, sure — poor old Jean Hersholt. So then whatever became of Sonny Tiifts? Sonny Tufts? Whatever became of Lucius Beebe? Who the hell was Lucius Beebe? Whatever became of Sir Stafford Cripps?

So it’s my office, I damned well guess I can use it for what I please.

I decided I better get out of there. It was ten to five. I shut the drawer I’d been occupied with. Since I was leaving I had to take my foot out of it anyway.

I was lifting my jacket off the hook when the buzzer rang, meaning that someone had opened the outer door. It could have been another tenant from along the corridor, wanting a little group therapy. Someone like that would just look in.

Nobody did, so I went over and looked out.

There was a man in the reception room. I stared at him.

I decided I was going nuts altogether.

CHAPTER 8

He said his name was Ulysses S. Grant.

I didn’t argue. For at least fifteen seconds all I could do was gape. He was possibly the tallest man I had ever seen. He also might have been the filthiest.

He reached seven feet at the least. He was as gaunt as he would have to be, and there was no way to guess his age, partly because of his sunken cheeks and his oddly dull eyes, and partly because of his beard. The eyes were a shade of gray I had never seen before, almost opaque, like damp cardboard. The beard was scraggly and needed trimming, preferably with garden shears. It and his hair were the color of rotting straw. So were his teeth.

He had on a raincoat. I thought it was a raincoat. Someone had been wearing it to change truck transmissions in. The coat was torn in a few places also, but no more than five or six.

He was grinning at me, but I wasn’t the man he wanted. He wanted someone at the Bowery Mission, maybe the basketball coach.

“Grant,” I said finally. “Like in Appomattox.”

He had a smudged, dog-eared card to prove it. Just the name, nothing else. Cards were the rage that season. I was thinking of having some done up myself. Also just my name. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

“A whim of my father’s,” he said. “His own name was Thaddeus.” He had a voice about four reaches below baritone. “You are Mr. Fannin?”

“There is that possibility,” I said. I nodded, but I could not take my eyes off that coat. It was streaked, splotched, spilled on. Even a lazy research chemist could have had a field day, taking samples from it. In some remote future era it was going to drive an archaeologist insane.

It bothered Ulysses S. Grant not at all. I’ve grown fond of it,” he told me idly. He brushed at something on a sleeve, soot from the Chicago fire. “One of these days I suppose I ought to drop it off to be cleaned.”

“I think so,” I said. “But not an established firm. Maybe you can find a new shop, one that just opened.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand. Why a firm which—”

“Someone just starting out in the business,” I told him. “Trying to make a reputation.”

He laughed. Not a laugh in any ordinary sense. It came honking up out of his throat like a flight of geese out of a marsh. Of course it would. Friday afternoon, and diligent Fannin had to hang around, wondering whatever became of Jeeter Lester. I trudged back into the office and sat down.

I waved him into a chair. Trying to ignore him would have been like trying to ignore Kanchenjunga.

He had opened the raincoat. That didn’t make the day any brighter. Grandma Moses wiped her paint brushes on rags cleaner than the shirt he had on under there. I leaned forward on my arms, pushing a stray pencil back and forth across the blotter.

He was still clucking. “Trying to make a reputation, indeed!

Excellent. Oswald told me to be prepared for your irreverent sense of humor.”

“Oswald did,” I said aimlessly.

“Oswald Fosburgh, yes. It was he who recommended you.”

I was sure of it then. I was a sick man, sicker than I knew. O. J. Fosburgh, attorney at law. His Park Avenue office was not much more plush than the Four Seasons. I picked up the pencil and tossed it into the tray.

“Oswald J. Fosburgh,” I said. “You and he share the same locker at the Harvard Club.”

“Hunk!” said Ulysses S. Grant. It was only one goose this time, caught on the wing by a load of twelve-gauge shot. He slapped himself on the knee. “Indeed, indeed! Ozzie also informed me that you were not particularly subtle. What you mean, of course, is that you cannot conceive of any connection between myself and someone of the stature of O. J. Fosburgh.”

I shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “You’re an eccentric millionaire.”

Ulysses S. Grant pursed his lips. Slowly he began to nod his head. Then he beamed at me.

I had been reaching for a cigarette. I stopped. I put my hands flat on the desk top.

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

I heaved a sigh. Ulysses S. Grant heaved one in sympathy.

“Millions?” I said.

“Actually only thirteen,” he said cheerfully. “And not the principal, merely the interest. To tell the truth it’s all relatively new. Thirteen is what remained after taxes. My father—”

“Old Thaddeus—”

“The same. Yes. He passed away a year or so ago. I was the sole heir. Coffee, I believe it was. South America.”

He believed it was coffee. I had my head in my hands. I hoped I had a handkerchief. I thought I might weep.

Td like someone located, Mr. Fannin. A daughter, by a marriage long since dissolved. I believe the girl is living in Greenwich Village.”

He flicked away some ashes with an unwashed finger which appeared to have enough joints to bend into a square knot. He was studying me with those odd eyes and he missed the standing ashtray by a foot. I was surprised he hadn’t dropped them into a cuff.

“You appear curiously indifferent, Mr. Fannin?”

“No, no,” I said. “Just a little relieved, maybe.”

“Relieved? I’m sorry, I don’t see—”

“Nothing.” I was reaching for the phone directory. “No, I guess I don’t mind looking for people. I just thought it might be some sort of dull security job. I’ve had a little bad luck with them lately.”

“Security? But I still—”

“All that coffee. I thought maybe you had it piled up in the breakfast nook and wanted a watchman.”

More geese went honking southward. Geese, ganders, goslings. I wondered what it would take to offend the man. I dialed the number I wanted and waited.

“You remember an old American League outfielder named Goose Goslin?” I asked idiotically.

“I don’t know baseball,” he said. “Why?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering whatever became of him.”

I got my party. “Harry Fannin calling,” I said. “Can I reach Mr. Fosburgh at this hour?”

The girl asked me to please hold on. Grant raised a bushy eyebrow at the mention of the name.

“Be sneaky if I waited until you were gone,” I told him.

Fosburgh came on. “Fannin,” he said, “how’s the lad?”

“I’m not quite sure.”

He chortled into the wire. “I should have phoned, but I thought you might find him amusing. It’s all strictly on the up and up, you know. Thaddeus Grant was one of my first clients, left a considerable sum in trust for Ulysses last autumn. Surprising in a way, since they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. On the other hand he’d been supporting Ulysses all that time. Anything in particular I can help you with?”

“Not at the moment, Mr. Fosburgh, no.”

“He’s there with you, eh?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” He laughed. “Actually I can probably anticipate your key question. Old Grant sent him two hundred dollars a month for all those years. I imagine Ulysses got used to living as a bohemian and hasn’t quite gotten around to changing.”

“Literally.”

“Indeed, yes. Although you shouldn’t underestimate him. He’s a bright fellow — could have been a writer, perhaps even a lawyer. But that two hundred started coming in during the depression and for some reason it seemed unnecessary for him to do anymore than live off it. I don’t imagine I’m abusing any confidences here, since he’ll be a client of yours also. He drinks, of course, but at the same time he’s read more books than you or I have heard of. He’s forty-six — tallest man in captivity, isn’t he? I hope you can help him out, Fannin. He’d like to find that girl, assist her in whatever way he can.”

“We haven’t gotten to that yet.”

“Oh. Well, I can’t say I blame you for checking first. I’ll admit quite frankly he has been something of an embarrassment at times. Bill my office when you’ve wound it up, eh?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“Not at all. Don’t hesitate to give me a ring if I can aid you.”

We said something pleasant to each other and hung up. Ulysses S. Grant had been waiting patiently, picking his nose behind a red bandana he could have been carrying since Madrid fell. He was still being amused.

“I hope you’re reassured?”

My hand was draped across the phone. I lifted the hand, frowned at it, dropped it again. I looked around the office.

I decided it was a pretty shoddy place. I supposed I was fond of it, but only in small ways, and only in spite of some of the people who’d sat in that chair Grant was in at the moment. Hoodlums, junkies, crooked cops, racketeers, at least one murderer. Td taken them as they came because they were part of the business, and even the conventional, ordinary customers had always made me a little blue — people with problems, a lot of them piecing out my retainer in crumpled bills I’d known they had hoped to buy some small joy with, instead of the grief which had brought them there. Very few of either kind ever came in with as good a guarantee behind them as O. J. Fosburgh.

So I sat there scowling another minute and then I stood up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I can’t help you. It’s after hours, but most other agencies have answering services.”

“I’m afraid I don’t—”

“I’m busy.”

“But you gave the impression—”

He let it trail off uncertainly when I went around the desk and took my jacket down again.

“The coat I could get used to, Mr. Grant,” I said then. “Maybe it’s almost got a certain style. It would look cavalier as hell over a Brooks Brothers suit. But not on top of—”

I bit down on it. I knew it wasn’t the man or the man’s shirt. Maybe it wasn’t even a girl with a Band-Aid on her wrist who wasn’t answering her telephone that week. I didn’t know what it was. I just wanted to be away from there, and now.

I was at the door. He hadn’t gotten sore. Obviously he wasn’t the type. He was just leaning forward with his head bent and his arms triangulated backward against the arms of the chair, like Ichabod Crane on a slow horse.

Td like to lock up, Grant.”

“Mr. Fannin, I can hardly see—”

“Can’t see what? Okay, it’s none of my business, but damn it, if you’d look in a mirror once you’d—”

“I mean I can hardly see you, sir.”

“Huh?”

He was standing, not facing me. “My sight is approximately eighty percent deficient,” he said distantly. “I have glasses for what reading I do, glasses plus a four-inch magnifying lens. But I believe I appear freakish enough without making my eyes look like a pair of enormous bugs, so I rarely wear the glasses in public. Very few people are aware of the condition, I’ve even hidden it from Fosburgh. But it has hardly seemed important for me to notice whether my clothes are particularly fashionable, or for that matter clean. When a man has not been able to recognize a beautiful woman as such since his late twenties, he can lose interest in certain of the more trivial amenities. I’m sorry if I’ve offended your sense of good taste, Mr. Fannin.”

The door swung into place behind me. The man’s eyes were closed. He was tilted forward with one bony hand lifted, and I could not decide whether he looked more like John Carradine in the role of a tattered preacher, or a parody of Don Quixote, or a dead tree.

I went back and sat down, of course.

CHAPTER 9

His marriage had lasted seven years. He did not tell me in so many words why it had broken up, although he implied that his wife had been something of a tramp.

At the time of the divorce their daughter was six. The girl, named Audrey, went with the mother. Elizabeth Muller Grant asked for no alimony, and Grant assumed she had met another man. She did not marry again, however.

Grant did not question this, asking only to be allowed to visit the child regularly. He also did not question the fact that, two years later, Elizabeth Muller gave birth to a second daughter, not his, who was quickly sent out for adoption. The woman herself was living well, and his own child appeared to lack nothing.

He did not see the girl as frequently as he had intended. Explaining this, Grant said that his vision had taken a severe turn for the worse in that period, and, fearing total blindness, he had begun to keep to himself. Too, the girl had been enrolled in an out-of-state boarding school and was rarely home. The visits had become entirely unrewarding when they died of their own inertia in 1950, when Audrey was fourteen.

Ten years later, and two months before he appeared in my office, Grant happened upon the newspaper obituary of an Elizabeth Muller of Manhattan. It listed as her only survivor a daughter, Miss Audrey Grant, also of New York. Funeral services at a midtown chapel were announced for the following day.

Ulysses Grant evidently lived in considerable disorder. He read the death notice only because, having misplaced his magnifying glass, he found it resting on that page of an opened Times. It did not occur to him to check the date on the paper. When he arrived at the mortuary at the specified hour he learned that the funeral of Elizabeth Muller had been held nine days before.

The mortician was able to furnish Grant with two addresses. The first, Elizabeth Muller’s, led him to an expensive furnished apartment in the East Fifties. There he was told that the personal effects of the deceased had been removed by her daughter almost a week before. The second address was that of a residence hotel in Greenwich Village, where Audrey Grant had rented a single room for several years. She had left no forwarding address when she moved out three days before Grant asked for her.

Grant took about fifteen minutes to tell me all this, gesturing now and then with a hand like a hungry skeleton’s. When he finished he reached into an inside pocket for a billfold fat enough to have his lunch in it. He searched around and came up with a folded white envelope, then did not pass it across. A muscle in his throat might have been working slightly beneath that parched beard.

“This was early in the summer?” I asked him.

“In early July, yes.”

“And you haven’t done anything about it since?”

The hand lifted. “I went to both of those addresses on the first day,” he said. “That night I had second thoughts. The girl knows she has a father. I’ve lived in the same apartment all her life. She could have—”

He turned away. There were traffic noises below the window, remote but savage. It was moving up on six o’clock.

“But now something’s come up to change your mind again?”

“I hadn’t quite changed my mind to start with, Mr. Fannin. Not about wanting to see the girl, or to help her if she needs it. Let us merely say — well, that I held the matter in abeyance. About a month ago I asked Fosburgh to look into the question of my ex-wife’s finances. It was something to be discreet about, since it was no business of mine, but evidently there was no will. I assumed Elizabeth had—”

He studied the linoleum. I waited for him.

“Men would have supported her,” he went on. “She was handsome enough to have lived well in concubinage. She might have left some small amount of cash — it would have been like her to keep money lying about her apartment. And she would have told Audrey about it, I’m sure. The superintendent at the building said that two young women had been there frequently during her illness. It was cancer, I believe—”

“One of the two girls was definitely Audrey?”

“The superintendent knew her by name.”

“Any assumptions about the second one?”

“If you mean it might have been Elizabeth’s other child, yes, I’ve thought of the possibility. In any event the second girl would be of no concern to me.” He realized he was still holding that envelope. “This arrived today, special delivery as you can see.”

The envelope was plain bond, addressed to Grant in a southpaw scrawl, with no return address. It had been postmarked at nine that morning in a Village sub-station. It contained two newspaper clippings.

One of them was a two-column photograph of three men and a girl seated at a table. I recognized one of the men before I read the caption:

BEATNIK TO READ: As part of the new trendin nightclub entertainment, the Blue Soldier in Greenwich Village has announced a series of poetry recitations by noted writers of the Beat Generation. Featured this weekend and next will be Peter J. Peters, novelist and poet, left. Also shown are poet Ephraim Turk, painter Ivan Klobb, and Beatchick Audrey Grant.

The shot had been clipped from the top of a page in the Post and the date had been left above it. It had appeared exactly a week ago. Audrey Grant was a brunette and could have been reasonably attractive. Peter J. Peters had a neatly trimmed beard. Ivan Klobb, who looked old enough to know better, had a sloppy one.

The news story I had not seen, but only because I don’t read the Journal. It was one day old:

BEATNIK WRITER

HELD IN MURDER

It said nothing that DiMaggio had not told me on the phone, except that Turk had been officially booked on suspicion. They were still calling me Henry. I frowned at the two pieces, not really thinking about anything.

“No idea who they came from?”

Grant shrugged.

“Fosburgh told you he knew me when he saw them?”

“He phoned the police first, since your name was incorrectly reported. Then it seemed only logical to come here.”

I nodded. “I know a little about the murder, Mr. Grant. Until now it hasn’t been any of my business. It probably still isn’t.”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

“There doesn’t have to be any connection between your daughter and the killing — except insofar as it’s already been made. Someone could simply be using it as an incidental, to point out to a man worth thirteen million dollars that his little girl is pretty chummy with the riffraff.”

“A crank, you mean?”

“You run into any before?”

“Nothing of any consequence. The usual absurd requests.”

“You want me to try and find out who sent the stuff?”

Grant had wet his lips. He stood up. “I don’t care about the clippings, Mr. Fannin. If it seems necessary to investigate their origin in finding my daughter you may do so.” He shook his head. “I have told you a lot about myself, sir. It has not been pleasant for me, nor, I’m sure, especially interesting for you. I would like to speak to Audrey. Merely once. If she desires no further communication I will not trespass in her life again. You may tell her so.”

“I will,” I said. “Before the end of the weekend.”

“It will be that simple?”

I’ve met some of these people. I might be able to find her at that bar tonight — the Blue Soldier — or there’s a chance I can do it on the phone. After all, she’s not missing in the usual sense.”

He nodded thoughtfully. I had come around the desk, but we did not shake hands. ‘“I’ll call you as soon as I get something,” I told him.

“Yes. Thank you.” He turned to the door, stopped a minute, then went out without adding anything.

He’d run out of geese. Talking about his troubles had even given him a shabby sort of dignity. I supposed loneliness could do that, even if money couldn’t.

Philosophical Fannin. I went back to the desk, got out a manila folder, slipped the clippings and the envelope into it. I scribbled William Tecumseh Sherman on the folder and stuck it away. I locked the office and left.

A block away I passed a haberdashery which wasn’t yet closed. I caught Grant out of the corner of my eye, towering over a neat little clerk like a sequoia over a sightseer. The clerk was busily showing him something that might have been a shirt.

CHAPTER 10

Behind the long dark bar in the Blue Soldier a bald Neanderthal type with a six-ply neck put down a wetly chewed cigar to take my order. It was a few minutes after nine. The man was about fifty-five. His shirt was white-on-white with a monogrammed Z over the pocket, his cufflinks were two more outsized Z’s, and his figured silk tie was as wide as the business end of a shovel where it disappeared into his white smock. There would be another initial on the belt buckle down under there. The man himself would have driven a booze truck during prohibition, would have taken some small independent chances in the petty rackets in the thirties, would have made his pile from black-market peddling during the war. Now he owned a chromed, gaudy tourist trap on lower Sixth Avenue, and within five minutes of the start of any conversation he would say something about being legitimate.

I could have been wrong. He was chewing the cigar again before he poured my bourbon. “No poetry reading tonight?” I asked him.

The man stopped pouring. He stared at me. I could not read his expression, but it was considerably like the one I might have gotten from certain good folk if I’d said something nasty about General MacArthur.

“Poets,” he said. “Beatniks. God almighty.”

He turned, started to walk away, stopped, snorted, came back. He put his elbows on the bar and leaned forward until his face was no more than three inches from my own. When he spoke again I had to strain my ears to hear him.

“In answer to your question, friend — no, there ain’t no goddam poetry reading.”

“You’re going to drop ashes in my drink,” I said just as quietly. “Forgive me. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

He backed away with a grimace. “I get something in your drink, you’ll get another drink. Drinks I got.”

“But no poetry readings.”

The man braced himself with both hands gripping the inner rim of the bar. “You really want to know? You’re not just making what you think would be friendly conversation?”

Td like to know.”

“You’ll stop me if I get violent? Sort of put your hand on my arm? I’ve got a touch of blood pressure.”

“Sure.”

He nodded gravely. He gestured toward my right with a stubby thumb. There were about twenty tables over that way, half of them occupied, and there was an empty bandstand.

“Nice little spot I got here, ain’t it? Brings in a good living, sends the kids to college — all strictly on the up and up, you know?”

I smiled pleasantly.

“No headaches at all. No high-priced entertainment — just a little dance music — steady clientele. So what happens? I get one of these uptown agents dropping in, hocking me, I should have these readings. Me, I donno from nothing — poetry’s out of my line — but be tells me out on the Coast they’re buying it like maybe it’s Equanil. Culture, he tells me.’ Three hundred bucks and I can own a poet for the weekend. A beard the guys got. Big son of a bitch, too, looks like he could wrestle Antonio Rocca better than writing poems. You follow me?”

“Peter J. Peters,” I said.

“Yeah.” He grunted. “So last Friday it goes on. I even bring my wife in, she goes for that sort of thing. First show at eleven, and by nine you can’t get a seat in the joint. Three, maybe four times as many customers as I ever had at one time before.”

“This is bad?”

He set the cigar down carefully on the edge of a glass tray. “Beer,” he said. “They wanted beer.”

I didn’t say anything.

“One,” he said. “One to a customer. Sometimes one to a table.” His nostrils quivered slightly. “This is the part where I tend to get upset. You’ll watch me, huh?”

I put my hand on his arm reassuringly.

“Six, maybe seven at a table usually holds four, see? So a waiter goes over. Maybe one guy orders. The other six don’t want nothing. Or maybe they say not yet. The waiter goes back, the six still don’t want. And the first guy doesn’t reorder, he’s still nursing the first one. You ever see a guy nurse one beer for three hours? Regular customers I got can’t get in, and six fully grown people are watching one guy nurse one beer for three hours. Characters talking all kinds of big words when what it adds up to, they can’t hold a job. Intellectuals. There’s even a table I got to replace, they carved things in. ‘Middle class morality is primeval.’ You want to tell me what the hell that means? A hundred and fifty people, and you know what I take in? I got more in the register since six o’clock tonight. Beatniks. The same slobs been hanging around the Village twenty years, this year they got a name. One more goddam poet or Beatnik son of a bitch sticks his nose in that door, I’m gonna—”

I squeezed his wrist. He stopped. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks.”

“You tell it with admirable restraint.”

“It’s a week, it gets easier. What’s your interest anyhow? You look like a man works for a living.”

“One of them owes me money.”

“The Russians should owe it to you, better. God almighty.”

I put some cash on the bar. He pushed it back toward me.

“You’ll remember it, you could come back,” he said. “A customer wears a tie, a customer’s got socks under his shoes — I’m just starting to see he’s worth being nice to.”

He was lost in thought when I went out of there. There was a cast of stolid, painful determination over his face. Like the look of a man learning to live with disgrace in the family.

CHAPTER 11

I tried Fern Hoerner from a booth in a drugstore. I might as well have tried Eisenhower when he was caught up in crisis on the back nine at Burning Tree.

The Chevy was in a lot around the corner. I left it there, walked a block east to Washington Square, then cut through the park toward Thompson Street. It’s still a nice park, one of the last in New York you can pass after dark without having a homicidal sixteen-year-old step on your spine. I didn’t even mind the prim queens in tight jeans mincing along the pathways, although I was happier with the Italians on the tenement stairs on Thompson. Old women in black with seamed faces, and old men who had hopefully named their sons after Garibaldi or Marco Polo or Boccaccio and were content with a cop or two in the family. I went up a flight of chipped slate steps into a building that only a successful bombing could have improved, climbed two more sagging flights inside, then knocked on a door I had knocked on once or twice before.

After a minute the door opened an inch. A pouchy-faced woman with red eyes and hair like an abandoned floor mop gave me the best she would ever have to offer: “Yeah?”

“Oh, I’m just fine, thank you, Mrs. Henshaw. Nice of you to ask. Is Hiram at home, by chance?”

“Job?”

“Not work, no. I’m just that old sleuth, remember?”

“Agh—”

She jerked the door inward as graciously as an animal hater letting the cat in, then clomped off on a pair of wooden shower mules, trailing gin fumes and the hem of a ratty housecoat. “Hiram!” she bellowed. She slammed another door against loud television noise and disappeared.

The man I wanted came out after a minute, pulling on a jacket the color of cranberry sauce. I supposed it went well enough with his maroon and gray checked pants. He smiled at me from behind a pair of glasses as thick as hockey pucks.

“Well, man,” he said, “good to see, good to see. Fearless Fannin, the ideal of all us red-blooded American youth. Welcome to the humble pad, like.”

He was a jazz musician in his forties, roughly the size of a sparrow with stunted growth and about as nearsighted as a bat at noon. He’d gone through Dixieland and Bop and, when he could get work, into a sort of reactionary’s Progressive, and he’d spent more man-hours in Greenwich Village saloons than any relic since Maxwell Bodenheim. He was too old to be a Beatnik, and even the language he spoke was dead at least a dozen years, but he resurrected it with a flavor I liked, mostly unconscious. If Audrey Grant lived in the vicinity he would not only know her address, but also her mascara shade, her garter-belt size, and where she bought her Stopette.

“I thought you’d be out soothing the savage breast,” I told him.

“Oh, man, don’t bring up the subject, huh? That sax of mine is practically atrophied from lack of use. Last I looked there was rust on the reed. I haven’t seen a taxable dollar since Morgenthau stopped signing them.”

He gripped my hand, then went across to a piano bench against a smeared wall. There wasn’t any piano, but that would not mean anything in there. Everything else in the room had come in on the tide after the Lusitania went down.

I’ve got a small fin not going anywhere, Hiram. A girl named—”

“Man, man!” He gestured excitedly, putting a finger to his lips. He cocked an ear toward the back of the apartment. “Like, shhh—”

I grinned, waiting. Finally he nodded. “Pianissimo on the do-re-me, huh? That witch could hear a dime drop in a deep well. A fin for a chick named—?”

“Audrey Grant. You know where she sleeps?”

He chuckled. “You phrase that question ambiguously. If you mean whereabouts does the damsel have a pad she can call her own, sure. If you want to know where she is prone to rest her bones of an evening, I trust you’ve got an hour or two.”

“Easy mark?”

“Every doll to her own debauch. Leave us just say she is wont to wander.”

“What’s the mailing address?”

“East Tenth.” He gave me a number. “This an event sinister, Harry? I would sleep poorly if I thought I was fingering a frail.”

“Nothing important, Hiram. Just family business.”

“Tame, tame. You anxious to make contact pronto?”

“Wouldn’t hurt.”

“Well, there’s this brawl. A cat named Don McGruder just sold a slim volume of verse and is howling. Audrey Grant swings with that crowd, so McGruder’s is where you’d latch on.”

“A guy need an invitation?”

“To a pad in Crazytown? Man, you just sort of go, you know? But if you’re shy, I could clutch your clammy little hand. For, say, another thin fin?”

“The wife won’t care if you scram?”

He made a face, standing. “So who inquires? Like it’s peaceful coexistence, comprenez?”

I dug out a ten. His eyes went to the rear again, and then the bill jumped out of my hand and into his breast pocket like something unbaited from a mouse trap. “Man, I appreciate that, I truly do. Hell of a thing, but I must be blowing flat lately. I wouldn’t touch your gelt if I could get work, Harry.”

“Sure.”

He had one hand on the doorknob. “Hey, now tromp my tenor, I plumb forgot. I hear tell you were the lucky winner who helped Fern Hoerner strip the cellophane off Josie Welch that dreadful day—”

“Just chance. I ran into her in a bar.”

“Yeah, yeah, Vinnie’s. That creepy Turk. Boy, them poets. Deep, man, deep. I wouldn’t have thought Ephraim could swat flies. Curious. Indeed, curious.”

“Something on your mind, Hiram?”

He nodded absently, pacing back to the bench. “Like sit a second,” he said. I watched him pop a filter cigarette into his mouth and chew on it as if it were a cigar. “Probably it’s idle scratch,” he decided. “Just dust on the needle, you dig me? But a small thought’s been bugging me. I know beans about pistolas, but a bird would have to have a keen eye to commit the big deed with a twenty-two, nest pas?”

“Or else a lot of luck.”

“Yeah, curious. Curious.” He sucked on the cigarette. “So the minute I became cognizant of the gory details, Lucien Vaulting hove into mind. He was my age, but one of them screwball athlete types, you know? Always rupturing himself with a football over in the Square, making bets with the young cats like how many push-ups they could do, all that boff. But the thing that bugs me, he was flipped over guns. He even got hauled in by the fuzz one time for practicing on a roof. But good, man, good—”

He laughed abruptly. “Except here’s the hitch. Loosh bought the box about a year ago. Had a ticker attack, trying to chin himself at a party. Poor old Loosh.” He studied his cigarette, then looked across again. “But like I say, it’s still weird. I mean Josie Welch, and now you put me on about the Grant chick. Loosh was the local thigh man, had a hand under every skirt. But the chicks who were current when he copped out were these very two. I mean simultaneous-current, you dig me? Neither of the wenches bunked with him steady, but the pair of them would be pattering about his pad together on many a cozy night. On many a frosty morn. According to community folk tale, it was a real squooshy ménage-a-trois.”

I took a cigarette of my own. “I don’t get what’s on your mind, Hiram.”

“Man, like I don’t either. Just chatter, you know? But Ephraim bugs in here also. This Lucien was a writer. He scribbled two novels, both pretty hip — anyhow none of this sloppy Beat boff that’s all mushy chorus and no melody. The word was out that he was probably compounding something real far out when he died, because it had been nigh on to half a decade since he’d last spoke for publication, but there weren’t any pages. Like the manuscript had blown away. Probably he’d just dried up — what I mean, down here most of the cats dry up before they get wet, comprenez? Anyhow, Ephraim had a case on him, hero worship. Like if Loosh came into a bar, say, Ephraim had to scoot over and dust off a stool for him. And then when Loosh played the last note Eph started chasing both the chicks. Like he was trying to make it with the pair of them because Lucien did. Identification with the master, like—”

“Trying to beat him, even—”

“Indeed, indeed. Except what’s the moral? Just that Eph finally flipped enough to lay out poor Josie. Writers, man. Too much brain work. It gets real hot inside the skull, you know?”

I didn’t see what point he had. I decided he didn’t have any at all. “A guy named Pete Peters,” I asked him. “I hear he saw a lot of Josie Welch also.”

Henshaw shrugged. “Like saying a cat goes to a house of ill fame two, three times a week. Those beds are swinging when the cat is not there, too.”

“Who’s a painter named Ivan Klobb?”

“A cool specimen. He’s got a showing in some far-out uptown gallery next week. I mean you take a look, you know whether it’s a sunset or a commode. Mucho nudes. Josie Welch used to hold still for him sometimes. So does your Audrey Grant, although mostly he works with a real built body named Dana O’Dea. Sure, I forgot — this O’Dea rooms with the chick you’re looking for. If Audrey Grant isn’t swinging at this ball tonight, Dana probably will be. You can’t count on the Grant chick — she comes, she goes. A traveler. Like I’ve spied her making for home at maybe eleven bells in the morning.’’

“Out all night, you mean?”

“Indeed, but not down here among the peasants. Up where the tall money flows, the nightclub circuit.”

“She goes up—” I cut it off I took a slow breath, staring at him.

“Have I like served up something with a bone in it, dads?”

I didn’t answer. I was looking for Audrey Grant because her father wanted to chat about the family estates. It was supposed to be an innocent matter, and maybe it still was. Maybe the girl had friends uptown. Maybe not one of them was somebody named Connie.

“Let’s check that party, Hiram,” I told him.

CHAPTER 12

It was just after ten when we got to the McGruder place. Henshaw had taken me five blocks west along Christopher Street, then through an iron gate and down a hand-truck ramp into a cluttered alley. Light came from a turning in the rear, where it gleamed on a dozen battered trash cans. There were sounds of a cool horn that could have been Miles Davis as we went back, and there was talk. The air was rank.

The light was from an unshaded bulb over a doorway in the right-hand building. Four plank steps led down into a low room which at a glance looked wide enough to store obsolete bombers in. There was only one light inside, another naked bulb hanging from a cord socket looped over a water pipe in a far corner, and it could not have been more than forty watts. The walls of the room were whitewashed concrete, and there were no windows. There were at least fifty people standing around in clusters. A long table thrown together from sawhorses and boards stood off to the left, crowded with drink-making paraphernalia, and there was a phonograph on another table in the corner which got the light. The only other furniture seemed to be half a dozen auditorium chairs, lost in all that floor space.

“Tut’s other tomb, like,” Henshaw said. “McGruder claims he digs his doom better in the depths. He communes with the dark night of his soul.”

“He’ll commune with pneumonia if he lives here in the winter.”

Henshaw gestured toward the rear. “There’s a lone radiator out yonder. He hibernates in one room when it frosts up.”

There were doorways in the far wall, leading into what looked like a maze of corridors. The corridors were illuminated by kerosene lamps with red chimneys instead of electricity. Except for a section where heating equipment would have to be, McGruder evidently had the full basement to himself. I could think of about ten housing-authority violations his landlord could have been cited for, but I wasn’t particularly trying.

“We just help ourselves to that booze?”

“Like the butler is indisposed, you know?”

We had started over that way when a tall, narrow-shouldered man in a pink-and-white-striped polo shirt waved a limp hand in Henshaw’s direction, peered at me, then detatched himself from a group and pranced toward us. He was in his late twenties, and so thin that a June breeze would have bent him double. That lifted hand flopped around near his shoulder like a drooping epaulet all the way across. “Hiram, dear,” he twittered. He stroked about fourteen excess inches of beer-colored hair out of his gay blue eyes, not looking at Henshaw at all. “I’m so glad. I was certain you would have a previous engagement.”

“If you mean work, man, I’m applying to the sanitation department Tuesday. Meet a cat. Don McGruder, Harry Fannin.”

He didn’t curtsey, which was a small boon. The hand fluttered hither and yon some more, then finally got down to where mine was.

“Delighted, Harry. You’re new blood. I simply adore new blood.”

“Like you could save it, Don,” Henshaw grunted. “Harry goes for dames. It’s kind of a fad.”

McGruder pouted. “A shame,” he said wistfully. I got my hand back, not without a caress. “You’re more than welcome anyway, dear,” he decided. “We try our best to get along with the minority groups. Have a ball, won’t you?” He tweaked Henshaw’s ear, gave me an exaggerated wink and flitted off, as harmless as a falling leaf.

“Poets,” Henshaw said. “I forgot to clue you about that.”

I shrugged. An extremely young girl with wild black hair and a shape like an ironing board was pouring herself a Canadian Club at the makeshift bar. Most of the rest of the stuff appeared to be unadvertised house brands, so I waited for the bottle. On the floor to my right a hulking Negro in a fluorescent white shirt was slumped against the wall with a set of bongo drums between his sprawled knees and a dreamy expression on his face. A girl in a dress that might have been cut from old gunny sacks was hunkering next to him.

Just beyond them a man in a leather jacket and knee-length laced boots was fishing around in an army knapsack. The knapsack seemed to be filled with equal quantities of canned goods and paperback books.

“—You have to read the Lankavatara Sutra” someone said loudly behind me. “It’s the only way to get in—”

“—James Jones?” someone else said. “James Jones! You can’t mean it?”

Ironing Board finished with the bottle and passed it to me. You could have buried bones in the dirt under her fingernails. “Is it true?” she said. “Are they really coming tonight?”

“Who?” I said.

“Corso and Ginsberg.”

“Who are Corso and Ginsberg?”

“Who are Corso and—” She gaped at me as if I’d just heaved a rock through a cathedral window. “Why, only the two greatest poets since, since—”

“The greatest ever?”

She went off shaking her head. “—Herman Wouk?” a voice said. “Herman Woukl You don’t really—” I poured a healthy belt of the Canadian. I expected I might need it.

Henshaw was filling a tumbler with red wine from a gallon jug. “You see the Grant girl?” I asked him.

He squinted, looking around. “Her roommate.” He gestured toward the far corner. “That chick I mentioned — Dana O’Dea.”

There was only one girl over that way. She had short, coal-black hair, and she was wearing a tight shoulderless sheath dress. In better light the dress might have been the color of a burning barn, but its color didn’t matter anymore than color matters on a Rolls Royce. At sixty miles an hour its loudest noise would have been from seams stretching in the appropriate places. I could understand why a painter would make use of her. She was as voluptuous as overripe fruit.

She looked drunk. She was doing a solo shuffle to the music, rocking a pair of hips like two cruisers in a heavy sea. A man coming out of one of the corridors snatched at the back of her dress as he passed. She let out a high-pitched squeal, scampering away.

“She’s worth looking at, isn’t she?” a husky voice said next to me then. It was a voice I knew, one that sounded like fog whispering. It didn’t really sound that way. That was just a metaphor my blurry little brain had come up with in a hectic moment between all those clients in the last three days.

“Hi,” she said. She was wearing tan slacks and a powder-blue blouse which was slashed deeply between her breasts. The blouse had a high collar up under that yellow hair, and the only make-up she had on was lipstick. There was a feint touch of the same shade on a pillow slip I hadn’t gotten around to changing.

“You’re that girl whose phone must be out of order.”

“Oh, Harry, you must think I’m dreadful, but that morning, I—” She glanced past me, but Henshaw was talking to someone. No one else was at the bar. “I was going to leave you a note, Harry, but there just didn’t seem to be anything to say that wouldn’t sound banal. I’m sorry—”

“No harm done.”

“I’ve been uptown almost every minute since. About the book. It’s been a good thing, actually. It’s kept my mind off Josie.”

“Sure.”

“Although I guess I have to admit it’s also kind of exciting. It looks as if there’s going to be a movie sale, a big one.”

I was glad she was going to have a movie sale. That would make her rich and famous. She would be able to afford an answering service to take her incoming messages, like when Sam Goldwyn called. There was still a square of adhesive on her wrist.

“We’re being awfully uncommunicative,” she said.

“I haven’t meant to be, Fern.”

“You did call, didn’t you?”

“Once or twice.”

“I’ll be less busy next week, Harry.”

“Sure.”

“Please? I haven’t meant to make it seem so casual. It wasn’t— well, they weren’t the most romantic circumstances—”

“That’s true.”

“What’s true?” somebody asked. A man Henshaw’s age with a beard like a devastated wheat field had come up in back of us. He was wearing a paint-stained sweatshirt and he had strong features behind the stubble, sharper than they had appeared in Grant’s clipping. An expensive unlit briar hung inverted in one corner of his small mouth, and he took it out to kiss Fern on the cheek.

“Ravishing,” he said.

“Hello, Ivan. Ivan Klobb, Harry Fannin.”

Klobb gave me a firm right hand. “Fannin? The chap who was with Fern on that unfortunate evening?”

“I’d hate to have it make me a celebrity.”

“You’re a private detective, the newspapers said.”

I nodded. He did also. I didn’t like him. There was something bland about his expression, almost vicious. After a moment he took Fern’s arm. “Indeed, yes. Well, look, you two, I hope you’ll pardon the intrusion, but if you’re not discussing something earth-shaking, I’d like to speak with you, Fern. A personal matter — five minutes, no more.” She glanced at me uncertainly. “I’ll bring you back, old girl, if it’s worrying you. You don’t mind, my good man, do you?”

I minded the phony English accent more than anything else, although I had decided what it was about him that grated. Without the beard he would have had a face just like those I remembered from old newsreels of Bund meetings in the days of Fritz Kuhn, when he himself would have been a susceptible twenty.

“You won’t be leaving, Harry?” Fern asked me.

“I’ll see you later.”

“Do, please.” Her hand touched my wrist. I watched them walk off toward one of the rear doors.

Henshaw had disappeared, I hoped in search of Audrey Grant. I took a drink of the whisky I had been carting around and made a face. Evidently McGruder had had some empty bottles stored away. What he had poured into the one with the Canadian Club label had not been Canadian. I turned back to the bar and added water to the glass.

“—James Gould Cozzens?” someone moaned. “James Gould Cozzens! You’re mad—”

A record ended with a screech and someone started to monkey with the machine. Near me the Negro tapped a brief staccato on the bongos in the break. Before I looked he was lolling back against the wall, as if it had all been reflex.

“Go ahead, Rosie, take off on it!” someone yelled.

The man made an indifferent gesture. “I thought maybe Donnie wanted to read us some bright new words now,” he muttered.

People turned toward Don McGruder, but he dismissed them with a flutter of that pale palm. “Later, dears, later. Play some of those old Bird Parkers like a sweet lad, why don’t you, Nicky?”

The boy at the phonograph began to dig through a stack of records. Behind me two others were raving.”—Hitch-hiked all the way? Well, man, I hope you read On the Road—”

“—Now how could I read when I’m on the road? I mean, I’ve got my duffle in one hand and I’m using the other to thumb with, so how could I hold a book?”

A new record started. I saw Dana O’Dea’s red sheath disappear into a cluster of five or six men, several of whom had run out of razor blades as long ago as Klobb had. One of them might have been Pete Peters. I had been trying to spot him out of curiosity, but I was a bust as a beard watcher.

Even water hadn’t helped McGruder’s whisky. I checked the stock more carefully and came up with a fifth of Old Crow on which the seal had not been broken. I was looking around for something to cut it with when I heard a sharp metallic twang, like that of a small spring being released, just off to my right.

A gleaming switchblade flipped past my arm and gouged itself into the bar. It shivered to a stop no more than two inches from my hand.

“Try that on your bottle, hot shot,” a voice said. “And consider yourself lucky you didn’t get it in the ribs about three nights ago.”

I let out my breath. Ephraim Turk was not quite grinning at me.

CHAPTER 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Or shooting them, evidently.”

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

He lifted a hand, but I shook my head.

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

“He shaves with it.”

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

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

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

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

“What about that gun?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Just names wouldn’t convince them.”

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

Somebody named Peters—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, you son of a—”

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

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

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

It was Mount Everest.

It fell on me.

CHAPTER 14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are a private investigator, Harry?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When? When I was on my back?”

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

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

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

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

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

I was staring at him.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 15

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

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

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

She was also drunk as a tadpole.

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

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

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

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

“You know where your roommate is?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Audrey, huh? Like a pal?”

“Abs’lutely.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Audrey,” I said.

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

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

“Let’s just leave it be, shall we?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Drunk already. Started to get drunk at—”

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

“I tell you that?”

“I think so, yes.”

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

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

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

“I’m glad. You’ve got what?”

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

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

I gave her my best rueful smile.

“You mean you don’t want it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 16

She was down there, all right. Her skin was warm and pliant, but there was no trace of a pulse.

I hadn’t expected one. The knife was still sticking out of her breast, like a pencil out of a sharpener.

I turned fast because of Dana. She was on her feet, beginning to get it. She was standing lopsidedly, missing a shoe. A minute earlier it would have made her fall on her face.

“Is she — is she—?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes widened. Her mouth opened again but this time it made only some small gurgling sounds, like a clogged toilet. She spun, breaking for the door.

The dress was still knotted around her hips. I caught a fistful of it. Something tore when I jerked her back.

“Kiss me!” I told her.

She looked at me as if I were mad. I was mad as a loon, but I knew enough to keep her away from that mob out front. She was still gaping when I brought up a short right and tagged her on the point of her gorgeous chin.

I got an arm around her before she could fall. It was like carrying a Volkswagen, but I got her onto the mattress.

It left me light-headed. It also left me with a corpse on the floor and an unconscious girl on the bed. I had a remote idea that the situation called for some firm, decisive action.

So I raised Dana’s hips and pulled her dress down.

Middle-class morality is primeval. There was a key in the door and I got myself over there to turn it. I came back and eased the cot farther from the wall. The body rolled onto its spine.

Audrey Grant. She had on that T-shirt that had made Hen-shaw rhapsodic. The blade had slashed through it just below the heart. A thin red stream had traced itself onto the waist of her green skirt, but it had not been a prolonged bleeding. It could not have taken her much more than six or eight seconds longer to die than it had taken Josie Welch.

I had told Ulysses Grant there did not have to be any connection between the two girls. Astute, discerning Fannin. I probably would have told Alexander Graham Bell he’d never make a connection either.

Audrey Grant. Why? I didn’t know why. It was 11:18. Less than six hours ago Grant had been in my office. That was why.

Now what the hell did that mean, exactly? Nothing, nothing at all. Fannin was just raving, in lieu of thought. Worry about it tomorrow, Scarlett, when your brains stop palpitating.

She had been a pretty girl. She had been tall, but a daughter of Grant’s would have to be. She was leggy, and she had almost too much bosom for her slight shoulders and long neck. There was a tiny gold chain around the neck, twisted now so that the locket lay on the outside of the shirt. I didn’t open it. There would be a picture of Philo Vance inside, sticking his tongue out at me. I kept staring at the knife instead.

That did it. I had simply not been conditioned to come suddenly upon the violently dead. Even when my hand lifted to my pocket it didn’t register immediately. The knife was an exact duplicate of the one I’d taken from Ephraim.

I didn’t have any knife in my pocket.

So I’d lost it when I’d been hit. Any one of fifty people could have picked it up.

There was a deduction for you.

Td talked to Henshaw right after the brawl. No, first to McGruder. Henshaw had said Ivan Klobb was back in the corridor. Had Fern still been with him? Where had Ephraim and Peters gone?

The next question has several parts, Mr. Fannin. Name all the National League batting champions from 1900 to the present, in chronological order, with their averages. You have thirty seconds in the isolation booth.

Zen Boothism. I went to the telephone. There was a book lying under it. The Subterraneans, by Jack Kerouac. I got Central, then the desk at the local precinct. The man said DiMaggio was out. He said Toomey was out also. “You 11 have to do,” I told him.

“Sure, and for what? Just who might this be?”

“My name is Kerouac. Max Kerouac. Take this down.” I gave him McGruder’s address. “It’s a basement, entrance in the rear through an alley. Drinking going on. There’ll be a key under the plank steps where you come in. The key is for the second bedroom door in the right-hand corridor. You got that?”

“That I have, but just what is it we’re to do with it, Mr. Carraway? What is it we’re to find in this locked room?”

“Well, the body. You want me to drag it out front and spoil the party?”

I hung it up. I dug out a pencil and a spiral notebook, tore off a sheet, wrote: Sgt. DiMaggio knows me. Girl knocked out so would not scream. Will call here. I signed the right name this time, then propped the note on an uncovered pillow next to Dana’s head.

There was a small slash pocket on Dana’s left hip. There was a folded five-dollar bill in the pocket, and there were two keys on a rubber band. I left the money.

She didn’t move when I touched her. Young Molly Bloom. She was boozed up enough so that she would be snoring contentedly when the cops arrived. I resisted a moronic impulse to kiss her on one of those creamy shoulders. I decided I was still goofy.

There was no one in the corridor. I was locking the door again when I realized that there was no sound either, not from anywhere in the apartment. No talk, no music. That stopped me cold. One sporty suggestion from the right nitwit and the whole pack of them could have been in a caravan of stolen cars on their way to Denver.

They weren’t. It took me a few seconds in the renewed dark, coming into the main room. Someone had draped a rag over the one bulb. They were sitting on the floor in a scattered half circle, evidently all of them.

There was a chair out in the center, with Don McGruder standing on it. He was holding some papers, but I did not know how he expected to read from them in that gloom. Unless his inner glow would help him. His poetic flame. Maybe that was why he had all his clothes off, so that the glow would not be obstructed. He was naked as a new-dropped giraffe.

His voice came in a whisper. “My latest creation,” he said. “I hope it is worthy of its subject, which has so devastatingly moved us all. I call it, ‘An Ode to Josie, Cruelly Shot’—”

There were some sighs. It was way over my head, but then I’d never attended a poetry recitation before. For all I knew Emily Dickinson had reached immortality the same way. I went quietly along the wall. McGruder started speaking:

“Alas, poor waif, at savage rest, The deadly missile in thy breast— What immoral hand or eye Would scar thy soft virginity? — ”

I stopped long enough to plant the key. Two people were talking in undertones beyond the overhanging light outside. One of them was another of those uniformed witches from that weird sect.

“So I asked her,” the girl said, “how could I protest against social conformity if I wore what everyone else wears—”

This time my head did rattle, I was sure of it. Poor besotted sexy Dana, she was the only sane one in there. I would make it up to her one day. On a slow boat to Patagonia. Just thinking about it would sustain me.

Sure. I’d think about it the next time I treated a murder threat like a missing-persons case.

I told myself I couldn’t have known the clippings Grant got were a threat. Okay, I told myself, so you couldn’t have known. So it isn’t your fault that the girl is dead, but dead she is. Got any ideas, Kerouac?

Yeah, I got some ideas. Shut up and let me think.

I didn’t have time to think. The Chevy was still near the Blue Soldier, but the cab I grabbed at Bleecker Street got me across to East Tenth in five minutes. I found the address that Henshaw had given me for Dana and Audrey Grant, an ordinary brownstone but well enough kept up to be expensive. I read O’Dea-Grant next to a bell marked 2-A, used one of Dana’s keys on the outside door, climbed the one flight. The building was as quiet as a sunken ship.

I found 2-A. Dana’s second key was new and badly filed. It took me two or three turns to drop the tumblers, and then I could not twist the key out of the lock again. My hand was still working at it after I’d pushed back the door and stepped in.

It was my right hand. I do everything with my right hand except deal poker. Even if I could get a gun out with my left I couldn’t hit the Atlantic Ocean from Montauk Point.

Not that I had a gun to reach for anyhow. The woman inside did, naturally.

CHAPTER 17

It was more than just a gun. It was Italian-made, a Beretta Olympic. It had a barrel almost nine inches long, adjustable sights, a compensator at the muzzle. Two hundred dollars would buy it, but you would have to live close to the store if you expected to take a taxi home on your change.

It was a.22, which made it even more interesting. Not that I was in a position to do much about that at the moment. I gave my attention to the woman in back of it instead.

She demanded the attention anyway. She was a young thirty, and she had a head of incredibly wild orange hair which she had apparently not cut since pubescence. Her lipstick, her belt and her shoes matched the hair precisely, and everything else she had on was purple. Including the paint around her eyes, although the eyes themselves might have been green. It was not a cold night, but she was wearing one of those knitted coat sweaters. Its lowest buttons were closed at her knees. With the rest of it open and falling away from her she looked like some exotic hothouse hybrid, just about to blossom. She was as chic as next year’s best buy for the man who has everything.

Her voice curled out from behind the Beretta as idly as a wisp of smoke. “I think “I’ll ask you to step all the way inside, darling. You’ll find that agreeable, won’t you?”

“Surely,” I said.

I went past her into the middle of a living room. The gun nosed firmly into the small of my back. I heard the door close. “I’m sorry, but this does seem necessary. I’m sure you’ll be sensible enough not to move.”

I watched the bobbing of that rampant hair out of the corner of my eye while she frisked me. When she was satisfied that she was the only one who had thought to bring any artillery she backed off. She took my wallet with her.

“It can’t be robbery,” I said. “You forgot your mask.”

“And my bathing cap.” She laughed. “I’ll be happier if you’ll sit now, darling. On the couch, if you please—”

I went across. The place was just another furnished apartment, melancholy as a hand-me-down bathrobe. Overstuffed furniture, a threadbare maroon rug, listing floorlamps. A paperback book lay on the couch near me. By Lucien Vaulking, the dead writer Henshaw had connected with both girls who were now also dead.

My gift-wrapped redhead had perched herself on the arm of a chair near the door. Good calves, even though the stockings were tinted purple also.

She’d opened the wallet and was considering it, resting the Beretta along her thigh. After some seconds she considered me instead. Then she closed the wallet and tossed it across.

“Fannin,” she said casually. “That would make you the chap who found Josie the other evening. We read the first name as Henry.”

“The press is so dreadfully irresponsible these days.”

No smile. “How curious. And now you appear at Audrey’s. You will tell me why?”

“Nope.”

“I could make it difficult. There happens to be a considerable amount of money involved in this operation. I’m not down here for social purposes — surely you realize that?”

“I do now. Does Connie step out from behind the arras, or do we toddle off somewhere to meet him?”

She had small bright teeth. “Perhaps we’ll have to see him at that. Unless you wish to change your mind and tell me what you wanted with Audrey?”

I leered at her.

She lifted an eyebrow. “I rather doubt that. Meaning no offense, darling, but I don’t quite believe you could meet the going rate.” She stood, almost wearily. “You’ll pardon me if I’m so quickly bored — but then it’s not really being scintillating, is it? You don’t intend to answer my questions?”

I looked at her pleasantly. After a minute she reached below the chair and lifted a bulky black pocketbook, moving with all the graceful indifference of a lynx in a forest full of chipmunks. The pocketbook rested against her hip when she adjusted the strap across her right shoulder.

“The gun will be inside,” she said easily, “not obstructed in the least. I have an Austin Healy three doors up. You will drive, of course. I’m certain we understand each other.”

Cool, cool, like a Christmas window in Tiffany’s. So I shrugged, getting to my feet as if I really thought she might shoot holes in my head if I didn’t. Then I nodded in the general direction of her knees. “If we’re joining the maharajah, love, you really ought to hitch up that slip—”

It was so corny I was going to blush when I wrote it in my diary come bedtime. The edge of my left hand caught her at the inside of the wrist when she glanced down, and the gun went skidding noisily toward the base of a chair. She choked off an unfeminine sound, then broke after it.

I grabbed her around the waist. It was a nice waist, trim and girlish. I liked it, so I didn’t let go even when she jabbed a spiked heel into my shin. I hopped on one foot, lost my balance, went down on my seat. It hurt me more when the redhead went down on hers. My lap was under it.

“Tell me honestly — do you feel as silly as I do?”

“If you will kindly release me—”

I kept one hand near her while I stretched for the Beretta, but it wasn’t necessary. Madame was really far too civilized for bodily contact sports. She was already busy with her seams when I checked the gun.

There were five long-rifle cartridges in the magazine, one in the chamber. The bore was clean. I ejected the sixth shell, pressed it into the clip, then dropped that part of the mechanism into my pocket. She’d lost her satchel and I poked my nose into that next.

The usual female junk, nothing anymore lethal than a charge-plate. I stuck the eviscerated gun inside. A card in a calfekin wallet told me I’d been boorish with a Mrs. Margaret Constantine, Sutton Place. Mrs. Constantine carried over seven hundred dollars in subway money.

I handed the purse to her. She’d slipped off her coat. Within a minute she was sitting with those violet legs crossed, doing something remarkably studied with a Parliament and a gold-plated Ronson.

“My turn now,” I said. “We’ll talk about Constantine, huh?”

She fanned away some smoke. “Will we?”

“Okay,” I said. “I know. No cash to toss around on fun and games, my suit’s last year’s also, and on top of everything else you find it uncouth to roll on the rug. So I’ll figure it out myself with my plebeian wit. Constantine would be a man called Connie. He does some kind of fancy pandering uptown — a thriving business because he even runs to part-time help. Josie Welch and Audrey Grant have been supernumeraries of a sort.”

That got me nowhere, so I said, “You hear your husband called a pimp so often you don’t even yawn.”

This time she looked at me as if I were something extraneous she’d unearthed in the vinaigrette sauce. “May I ask how many young girls you’ve hired to undress in cheap hotel bedrooms in divorce cases, Mr. Fannin? That would be your line of work, wouldn’t it?”

I let that go past. 1 was hefting the loaded magazine.

“The newspapers said that Josie was killed with a twenty-two,” she said in a minute. “If you are by chance thinking that it might have been my gun, you can forget about it. I’m here for some information, nothing more. If you are also, it strikes me that we might make some manner of mutually satisfactory arrangement.”

I didn’t say anything to that either. Until I’d discovered who she was I’d thought the character named Connie would know something. But she would not have been waiting around if either of them had any idea what had happened to Audrey Grant.

There was a door off to the right of the couch. “Two bedrooms?” I asked her.

She nodded, curious.

“Which one’s Audrey’s?”

“Her clothes are in the one further back.”

“Stick around,” I said. I went over there and flicked on a light in a short hallway. Doors on the right side led to a kitchen and a bath. I opened the second bedroom and snapped another switch.

It was a place to sleep. A double bed, some maple stuff” with drawers and legs. A clipped-out book-jacket photo of someone who was either D. H. Lawrence or a dissipated young Abe Lincoln tacked into a wall. I started on the dresser.

Margaret Constantine came into the doorway and leaned there, trailing smoke. “Aren’t you being a bit brazen, darling?”

I was riffling a stack of blouses. “The/re both at a party.”

“Oh, yes, this absurd other life of Audrey’s.” She sat down on the bed. “I’m not sure I understand this, you know. But the simple fact is that Josie’s murder could affect us quite adversely. You’re not here because you think Audrey might be involved, by any chance?”

I grunted.

“I don’t imagine you’ll tell me what you’re searching for?”

“Bank book,” I said. “Try that bed table.”

She shrugged, then leaned across. After a second she held out the blue cardboard envelope. “Isn’t this quite against the law? Or no, you had a key, didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer her, scowling at the pass book. Audrey Grant was leaving an estate of $4,100, but that was not what I had wanted to know. What I cared about was that she had made a deposit of $1,852 on July tenth, the same day on which Josie Welch had put the identical sum into her own account at another bank.

Ulysses Grant had told me that Audrey would have gotten whatever cash was left by Elizabeth Muller Grant. She’d only gotten half. Unless I was way off base, the matching deposits meant that she’d split the inheritance with her half-sister, the child Elizabeth Muller had sent out for adoption at birth.

It tied in with what Grant had said about his estranged wife being visited by two girls, and it also tied in with what Don McGruder had told me about Josie Welch and her hard Kansas childhood. I’d remembered the date of Josie’s deposit when Grant had mentioned that Elizabeth Muller died in early July, but it had taken a second killing to make me put two and two together. Except I still did not have the foggiest notion what any of it meant.

I put back the bank book, checking my watch. Margaret Constantine did not know it, but we would be having company any minute. I decided I’d rather talk to her husband before the police at that.

Mrs. Constantine did not know that either. She had been watching me, leaning backward with her weight against her arms. Now she lowered herself to her elbows, lifting one of her crossed legs slightly. That shoe slipped off and dangled from her toes.

There was an amused twinkle in her eyes. In another second she swung around and hoisted both legs, letting both shoes tumble to the floor. It was an obvious play, but she could even be obvious with style. She blew aside some of that fantastic hair when I leaned over her.

“Anything a girl can do to protect the family business, is that it?”

I was wrong. One of her hands shot upward and clamped itself around my neck, and she jerked herself toward me. “You said they were both at a party. If they won’t be back, we — there’s time—”

I was so wrong it startled me. Before I knew it her legs were actually thrashing. The dame was compulsive as a hare.

It didn’t have to mean much, since a sweaty plumber could get the same offer from half of the authentic heiresses in town. But I’d been wondering for twenty minutes how deep that sophistication really ran. “Call me darling again,” I told her.

“Oh, yes. Darling, darling—”

I pursed my lips, braced above her. “One more thing.’’

“What? Yes, anything—”

“Did Constantine marry you right out of the racket, or did you get the retread job before you ran into him?”

“Did I get—? It took a second or two. Then she sprang back onto her haunches like an animal. “Why, you lousy two-bit son of a—”

I laughed, straightening. “That’s pretty much what I wanted to hear,” I told her.

She spat something else in substantiation, snatching up her shoes. She didn’t stop to put them on. No more composure, no more composure at all.

“If you’ll fetch your fancy coat, ma’am,” I called after her, “we can go see Connie now.”

I glanced into the kitchen and the other bedroom on the way out, having a tardy thought about something. Probably it just indicated that she was a neurotic housekeeper, even drunk. But there was no trace of that bottle Dana O’Dea had been home alone with all afternoon.

Mrs. Constantine had fetched the coat. We were climbing into the Austin Healy, as amicably as two hounds after a one-bone meal, when a patrol wagon pulled up sharply and double-parked three or four car lengths behind us.

CHAPTER 18

We discussed philosophy and religion on the way to Sutton Place. When we passed 23rd Street I said, “What shall we talk about — Existentialism?” Ten blocks later I said, “How about the Dead Sea Scrolls? Surely you have an opinion about the Dead Sea Scrolls?” Mrs. Constantine found it all so stimulating she ran three stoplights getting home.

When she finally swerved over to the curb it was in front of a tree-sheltered riverside apartment building where the rents would be as high as any you could pay in New York, or in the world. She left the motor running for a dignified, elderly doorman who wished her good evening by name. I followed her under a canopy and through a richly mirrored lobby, then waited while she pressed for an elevator. The elevator made as much noise coming down as a wounded moth. Its operator was as old and courtly as the doorman. They were both retired bank presidents, supplementing their pensions. He took us up three flights, and then we stepped into a private foyer instead of a corridor.

That meant the Constantines had at least half a floor. Mrs. Constantine discarded her coat across the carved mahogany arm of a towering antique chair, then led me stiff-lipped through an ornate archway into a living room.

King Farouk would have a bigger one. It ran about seventy feet back to where you would see the water, and that whole wall was glass, partly obscured by ungathered drapes. There were tall ferns, and there was a lot of whatever kind of furniture it was. Only one small lamp was burning, and everything was luxurious and dark and furry, like vespers at a mink farm. She stopped in the middle of it all.

Her eyes were still giving off sparks, but I didn’t grin. Maybe it was the sight of all that indulgence, but she wasn’t funny anymore.

“My husband has a slight cold. If you’ll wait, it will be a minute.”

I nodded, watching that orange mane disappear through another arch. I supposed hubby would have a study in there. Sure. He’d be camped in a contour chair in front of a twenty-inch screen, with a nasal spray in one hand and a notebook fall of Johns in the other. I went across to the windows. Dutiful Margaret would stroke his hot little forehead before she told him about the nasty mans out front. Poor darling, has it been a trying evening with the runny nose? Would baby like a hot toddy before he works out the girls’ schedules for tomorrow night? I looked down at the black sweeping river, but it only made me choleric to think of the sort of people who could afford to run it through their back yards.

So all of a sudden I was getting righteous. I was a Puritan. So the lady was wrong, I didn’t do divorce cases. So what? What business was it of mine where the Constantines got the dough to pay the ice man?

Anyhow, I already knew how Mrs. Constantine paid the ice man. There was a bar in a corner to my left, with a single bottle of Chivas Regal on its mosaic top, and I started over that way.

I hadn’t gotten across when he came striding into the room behind me. He was bellowing.

“Harry Fannin! Harry! Why, you old son of a gun, no wonder I never made the connection. The goddam papers said Henry—”

I must have stared at him witlessly for the first second or two. He was my height, but he would have weighed in at close to sixty pounds more than I did. That meant he had put on at least thirty in the dozen years since I had seen him. Oliver Constantine, left tackle.

“Harry, you old renegade! Why, if fid known you were in New York I would have looked you up years ago!” He was pumping my right hand with his own, which was the size of a catcher’s mitt, and his left was crushing my shoulder. “The best damned halfback in that whole crop of sophomores. Why, by George, I remember one time in scrimmage you ran right over me. Took me out so hard I almost didn’t start the Illinois game. Well, I’ll be damned—”

I got rid of the hands, shaking my head. We weren’t quite long lost brothers, since I’d never really said more than two hundred words to the man. “I never thought of it either,” I told him. “You made second-string All-Conference that year.”

“Ah!” He waved it aside. “Should have made first. I mopped up the field with that big Swede from Minnesota they picked.” He lumbered around the bar. He had a face like a chunk of scarred sandstone under a quarter-inch blond crew cut, and he was wearing a dark blue dressing gown with an ascot. “Boy, those were the days, weren’t they, fellow? What’s your poison, Harry?”

I gestured toward the Scotch, watching him dully. He came up with an ice bucket and two old-fashioned glasses, and he poured two drinks. “Yes, sir, best sophomore on the club. Drink up, Harry. To old Michigan—” He tossed off the whisky, grinning at me. “Old Fannin himself, the boy who was going to make them forget Tom Harmon until that knee went sour. Well, hey, hey, you’re not drinking—”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek, nodding. He had been a harmless buffoon at college, but I had had to respect him as an athlete. I remembered a game in which he had played almost sixty full minutes when he was injured badly enough to have been in the infirmary. I was also remembering that Josie Welch had been nineteen years old.

Cotton Mather Fannin. “Ill drink to Michigan,” I said.

“Well, for crying out loud—” He had been looking at me in amazement. “Why, you old son of a gun, you don’t like my business. You really don’t! A private cop. A divorce-case peeper and he’s got a moral streak—”

I shrugged. “I never had to pay for a woman.”

“Ha! Now you’re talking. Listen, fellow, listen — there’s half a million paunchy old men in this town, fat slobs who never got a cheek pinched in their lives except by their fat wives. They dial the right number, all of a sudden they’re free-wheeling downhill on a bright red scooter. Well, they’re going to buy the scooter whether I supply it or somebody else does. I like it better when the scratch turns up in my pocket.” He poured himself another drink, motioning me to the bottle. “Ha! Or am I talking too much, being too defensive? What the hell, Harry, what the hell — to Tom Harmon, eh, boy? Drink up. To old Ninety-Eight!”

I drank to Harmon, then shook loose a cigarette. “I’d like to bat the breeze, Connie—”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. Brother, this mess. That Josie was a nice kid. But listen, listen, Margaret says you came sprinting into Audrey’s place like you were trying to get back into shape—”

“The Grant girl’s dead also.”

“Huh?”

I told him about it briefly. It was obviously news, and I decided it was a fair exchange for anything he could give me in turn. When I finished he blew his nose in a yellow silk handkerchief, turning away. I had not expected that, but I couldn’t think of any valid reason why I shouldn’t have. “You haven’t got any idea what gives?” he asked me.

“There be any chance one of your customers got mixed up with the pair of them?”

“Nah, never happen. Hell, the girls know better than to give out their home addresses.”

He threw down what was left of his second Scotch, then wiped his mouth with the back of one of those meaty hands. “Boy, this can fix me, but good. Even without a tie-in, all I need is one wrong cop getting wind of it being two of my stable.” The hand reached to my sleeve abruptly. “Hey, fellow, you’re not going to have to mention my name—”

I used up the rest of my whisky, not saying anything.

“Hey, now, Harry, we played on the same squad, remember? All right, you can’t promise — hell, I know how you can get hung up with bulls — but you’ll do your best, eh, fellow?”

“Let’s leave it there, Connie. I’ll see what comes up.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure—”

“Where do you get the girls?” I asked him. “Not the ones who hang around the clubs — kids like these two from downtown.”

He was staring at the bottle, preoccupied. “Got a contact, painter named Klobb. I give him half a grand whenever one of them works out.”

I made a face. “Your wife down there for some special reason tonight?”

“Just looking for Audrey. We couldn’t get hold of her all week — the girl she lives with kept saying she was out.”

“Mrs. Constantine always use a gun when she’s herding up absentees?”

“Ah!” The grin came back. “Margaret gets her little kicks. How about that, by the way? A glue-footed old linebacker like me, coming up with that kind of class — pretty neat, eh?”

“Sure,” I said. I put the Beretta’s magazine on the bar. “Look, I guess I better scram. The cops are going to rack me up as it is. Also I ought to get in touch with the girl’s father.”

“Well, here, here — call him.” He pointed out a white phone behind me. “No extra motion, that’s my motto. Always was. Hell, you compare college linemen to the boys in the pro game someday. The pros don’t make a move until they see where the play’s going.” He dropped a shoulder and lunged toward me. “Am I right or am I right?”

“I still remember,” I told him. I did. He’d been able to hit like an irritated rhino. And I was thirty-two years old and still enough of a kid to daydream once in a while about the All-America halfbacks I’d worshiped when I was twelve or fourteen. I supposed I could quit all that now. I dug out Grant’s number.

I let the phone ring eight or ten times before I put it back. It was 12:40, but 0. J. Fosburgh had said the man was a drinker. Most likely he would have a corner in a neighborhood bar somewhere.

Constantine was working the bottle again. “Funny,” he said. “Those two girls. I figured it was something personal with Josie, you know? I mean whatever it was between her and this Beatnik writer they booked. But here’s Audrey too. Whatever the connection is, neither one of them will get their money now, poor kids.”

I frowned at him. “Get what money?”

“Well, that’s the thing. They quit on me, both of them. They’d never mentioned it before, but they told me they were distantly related and that they were coming into a lot of scratch. Like I say, I thought it was just one of those things with Josie, so we were still trying to talk Audrey into sticking. That’s why Margaret was down there tonight, actually.”

“This wasn’t two months ago, in July?”

“When they mentioned the money? No — hell, it was only a week, ten days back.”

I stood there. For a minute it did not make any sense at all. Then it started to. If Audrey Grant and her half-sister had talked about inheriting money, there was only one person I knew that it could be coming from.

I felt as cold as a Christian on the way to the Colosseum.

It must have showed on my face. “Well, listen, fellow, what is it?”

I was already headed toward the foyer. “Just an idea, Connie, but I’ve got to beat it. Thanks for the booze.” I pressed for the elevator, hard.

He followed me. “Well, say, get in touch, will you? I don’t mean just about this — hell, I know you won’t throw my name around with the bulls. Some evening, why not? Strictly social—” He was mauling my hand again. “Old Fannin himself—”

The doors opened, and he stood there grinning at me until they closed again. We were bosom buddies and he knew I wouldn’t mention his name to the cops. Either he was still the campus clown or he was a lot more shrewd than I understood.

It didn’t matter at the moment, either way. Neither did my haste.

Whatever time I got there, Ulysses S. Grant was going to be just as dead.

CHAPTER 19

I stood in front of a door marked 5-D at the end of a corridor which had last been mopped during the candidacy of Alf Landon. There were other doors behind me, all closed, but judging from the odors they would have opened onto three stables and a sty. The Nineties, just east of Broadway. The neighborhood had been more than decent when Grant had first moved in.

Ask a landlord about the rot and he would blame it on the influx of Puerto Ricans. He would be well informed about Puerto Ricans. You would probably have to go to a beach in the Caribbean to find him.

Fannin, the social critic. Try the door, Fannin.

It had taken a cab fifteen minutes to get me across town. I’d pressed a bell at random to get a buzz, since Grant’s had not answered. I could still have been wrong, and there was still that local pub for him to be in. But if Audrey Grant and her half-sister had talked about expecting money this was the only place I knew that it could be coming from.

Try it, Fannin.

A notice for an undelivered telegram was sticking out under the door. I took out a handkerchief before I worked the knob.

I could have been wrong. I’m never wrong. Somewhere down the hall a baby began to cry and I closed the door behind us, against the sound.

A window was open, and in the brief draft a single feather stirred near my foot, then fell again. He’d bought that white shirt.

Another body. Describe it, Fannin. The bullet which took him on the cheek, shattering too much bone to be a.22 this time. The mess where it had emerged at the base of his skull, making it a.38 at least. The whole thing, like how many others? It didn’t make me light-headed this time. I slumped against the wall and stared at my hands, not upset either, just tired.

There were more feathers. They were from an ordinary bedroom pillow which had been used to muffle the report. I wondered remotely if the feathers were goose down.

What else, Fannin? A smashed alarm clock on its back, its hands stopped at 5:47. That was a mistake, although a minor one. Grant had been in my office at 5:47. But he had still been dead three or four hours longer than his daughter, which seemed to be the point the killer had hoped to suggest. He was cold as oceans.

There was a phone. I used the handkerchief again, dialing Western Union. A woman with seaweed in her mouth repeated Grant’s name and address and then said: “‘For information about your daughter try a man named Constantine. Can be located through Morals Squad.’ The message is signed, A Friend.’” I thanked her.

I wasn’t with it. I wasn’t anywhere. Every seemingly logical thought in my head went just so far and then reversed itself like a buttonhook. If Josie and Audrey had anticipated an inheritance they had to have been involved in Grant’s murder themselves. But then they would not have talked about it. Also they should not have been dead.

Button, button, who’s got the button? Not Fannin, not now. I lifted the directory and fumbled pages until I found McGruder, D., Christopher St.

It rang twice. Grant was on the floor in back of me. His daughter was on the floor three feet from where it was ringing. My hand shook.

“Detective Toomey.” A voice said.

“This is Fannin.”

“Oh, brother — where are you?”

I gave him the street number. “I’ve got another one.”

He whistled. “A couple more, you can start charging the department a commission.”

“Yeah.”

“But don’t tell anybody I’m making with the jokes. You’re lucky the sergeant’s in the next room or you’d hear the steam through the wire. You better get yourself down here fast, chum.”

“I just leave this for whoever wanders in?”

“Since when would that be a new trick for you? Hell, stay there, I guess. We might even do you the honor ourselves— we’ve accomplished about all we can in this madhouse anyhow.”

He hung up. I felt like a crankcase full of sludge. I needed draining.

The place was cluttered. Everything was scarred, dilapidated. There were thousands of books. A console phonograph was fairly new, and there were at least two hundred records stacked near it. There was a complex radio mechanism, and there was a tape recorder.

The playthings of a man almost blind, who would have given special devotion to sound. There was no television set.

More books in cartons in the bedroom. The bed unmade, and a week’s filthy laundry flung around the floor, looking like soggy flotsam on an unswept strand. An autographed photo of Eugene V. Debs framed on a wall.

A cockroach scuttled along the drain when I flipped the light in the kitchen. Thoreau’s Walden was propped against a sugar bowl on the table, and something called The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha was held open by a half loaf of black bread. A broken Chablis bottle lay on the window ledge.

Thirteen million dollars. The papers had played Josie’s death as a Beatnik killing, and they would do the same with Audrey’s. If the concept meant anything at all, Grant had been a Beatnik long before they invented the word. Ulysses, son of Thaddeus, by way of Harold Lloyd and Lemuel Gulliver. That classic raincoat was draped over a chair, trailing along the pitted linoleum, and I fingered it. There were even books in the bathroom.

Too many books. A lifetime full, and nothing else, nothing else at all. I found a cold can of Ballantine ale in the refrigerator and I nursed it, waiting for the badges.

CHAPTER 20

I got a pair of them, patrolmen, in about ten minutes. They were both younger than I was, and they took in the situation with all the sentiment of retired storm troopers. “You’re Fanning?” one of them asked me.

I nodded. “They want you to wait here,” he said. He noticed the beer. “Don’tcha know you’re not supposed to touch anything?”

He was serious. He had a vacuous, inoffensive Nordic face that would never mean anything except exactly what it said. “I looked it over first,” I told him. “The can was all misted up. I could see there were no prints on it.”

He pondered that with all the efficacious ratiocination his ninety-two-point-four I.Q. would permit. “Well, I hope you’re sure.” He turned to his sidekick. “It looks under control, Eddie. You better wait in the heap.”

Eddie shrugged, then wandered off apathetically. Santayana shut the door after him, taking a smoke. “Must have been quite a shock for a private citizen. Finding a deceased, I mean.”

“It’s been hours since the last one. I was beginning to think I was slipping.”

“What? Oh, a joker.”

“Makes it easier to take.”

“Sure. Common psychology. Friend of yours, huh? Kind of a sloppy place he kept. All them goddam books, will you look?”

He stuck his face into the back, being curious, but he was just minding the store until some authority got there. I found myself a chair near the front windows.

The patrolman was on a second cigarette when the knock came. He butted the smoke fast and headed for the door, not quite making it. It was shoved inward so abruptly that it almost hit him.

DiMaggio had done the shoving. He stared at the body from the threshold for perhaps six seconds, then turned toward me. His blunt jaw was set squarely, and he had not stepped far enough inside for Toomey to get by. He held his breath. It was another ten seconds before he paid any attention to the patrolman.

“Stand by down below,” he snapped then.

“I’ll have to see some identification, sir. You’re not in my precinct—”

DiMaggio was already past him. The patrolman glanced at Toomey hesitantly and Toomey flashed a badge. “The sergeant’s had a long night, Mac. You know how they fall.”

“Sure. Yes, sir. Just following regulations—”

“Can the goddam talk,” DiMaggio said. “Get that door shut.”

The patrolman pulled it after himself, glowering in my direction as he went. DiMaggio had taken a stance about four feet from my chair with his legs planted wide. “On your feet, Fannin,” he said.

Toomey sauntered over. I sat there.

“Did you hear me, buster?”

“We got to it a lot fester the last time without the drama,” I said.

DiMaggio was kneading his right fist with his left hand. “You got a gun?”

“Four. All home in a drawer next to the Three-in-One oil.”

“Make sure.” He spoke to Toomey without looking at him.

Toomey was at my side. “You 11 have to get up—”

I did what he told me, chewing my lip. He ran me down quickly, then gestured.

“Put the cuffs on him,” DiMaggio said.

Toomey’s hand was still raised. “Oh, now look, Joe—”

DiMaggio came a step closer. His lips were bloodless. Toomey sighed almost inaudibly, finally reaching toward a hip.

I held out my wrists and the metal went on and locked, not tightly. Toomey didn’t look at me. Just once I was going to meet two cops and the reasonable one was going to have the rank.

DiMaggio’s eyes were as dark as wet tar. He was being as outraged as Captain Bligh when Clark Gable set him adrift in that dory. “You lied to me, Fannin.”

I shook my head wearily. He ignored it.

“You used Captain Nate Brannigan’s name and he okay’d you when I checked. So it isn’t just a precinct sergeant the lie fixes you with.”

This time I grunted. He didn’t want answers anyhow.

“You found the Welch body and I let you convince me you weren’t working on anything. The way I read it, the things you didn’t see fit to tell the department Tuesday night might just have prevented the Grant girl’s death and this one too, whoever this one is—”

“I didn’t have a job Tuesday,” I said.

“Don’t lie to me a second time, Fannin. I don’t like to be suckered.”

Toomey had found something to contemplate on Grant’s shoe, most likely a hole. “Why don’t we find out what he’s got to say first, Joe?”

DiMaggio kept measuring me. His forehead was slightly pocked. He flexed his fingers.

“Ten minutes, no more.”

“I’ll need closer to thirty.”

“I’ll know damned well when it stops meaning anything.” He turned toward a chair. “You start at the beginning, Fannin, you got that?”

“Don’t tell me how to tell it, DiMaggio.”

He whirled back. I hadn’t moved.

Toomey was still at the body. “Tallest man since Wilt the Stilt,” he said idly.

“Maybe he’d rather tell it under the lights,” DiMaggio said. “Maybe he thinks it’s more romantic that way. Or maybe he thinks he’ll get somebody else instead of me. Is that it, Fannin? You think because it involves two precincts the boys from Central will take over? Your buddy Captain Brannigan maybe? Well, I’ll let you in on a departmental secret, how’s that? Central’s a little busy tonight, you understand? It so happens this case is mine — so I’m the baby you’re going to have to chat with wherever we do it. And wherever we do it, I still think you’re dirt.”

“The corpse was named Ulysses S. Grant,” I said quietly. “He hired me tonight to find his daughter, Audrey Grant.”

“The corpse was named — why, you fatuous son of a bitch, if you think I’ve got time for a goddam joke—”

Toomey sprang across quickly, stopping him with a hand. “Hold it, Joe—” He flipped open the sandwich-sized wallet

I’d seen when Grant was in my office. “Ulysses S. on his voter’s registration.”

294

DiMaggio curled his lips, controlling himself. “The rest of it, Fannin.”

“I was finished.”

“What the hell—”

I’ve identified my client and told you what kind of a job I was on. I didn’t even have to say that much without a lawyer, not once you put these cuffs on. Although for the record I had a lot more in mind until about twelve seconds after you brought your bedside manner through that door.”

He got around to it then. It was a hard enough punch but I was set for it as well as possible. I caught it along the upper jaw. I hit the cushions of Grant’s couch, elbows first, then slid to the floor with the cuffs biting.

That fluttered a few feathers again. I supposed I could always report him for disturbing evidence before his technicians got there.

Toomey was between us, but DiMaggio had walked off. “Let that team take him in,” he said tightly. “We got work to do here.”

Toomey opened the door and held it for me, saying nothing. DiMaggio was standing over the body with his back turned. I stared at him for a minute and then went out.

That baby was screeching again, or still. I heard it through only one ear. Toomey rang for the elevator. “That was pretty dumb,” he said.

I didn’t answer him.

“So he called you a liar. It ain’t such a highly illogical conclusion under the circumstances, you know. And you got to tell it anyhow, for Chrissake.” The door slid open and he chuckled as we got in. “On the other hand I suppose all we can legally slam you for is leaving that stiff downtown, since you’re right about not having to talk once we make you look like a suspect. If it turns out you’re clean the sergeant will sweat all night, wondering if you’ll mention the incident to your friend Brannigan. The Commissioner’s been pretty touchy about the rough stuff lately. Poor old Joe.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Do me a favor, huh?”

“What’s that?”

“These cuffs — wipe my nose if I cry.”

CHAPTER 21

Someone had taped a newspaper photo of Marilyn Monroe behind the door of the interrogation room. One of her eyebrows was raised, and she was pouting, and she definitely had something in mind.

They’d taken my cuffs off, but for forty minutes she had been my only company. Now Toomey was straddling one of the rooms two desks, and a severely combed civil service stenographer in a shapeless brown suit had just taken a chair near the far wall. It was 2:26. Behind the other desk a mountainous Laird Cregar type in shirtsleeves was considering me impersonally. His name was Vasella and he was a detective lieutenant. He had a chest like a tombstone.

His tone was completely neutral. “You’re ready to make that statement now, I assume?”

I nodded.

I’ve spoken to Nate Brannigan,” he said, “and he’s given me the same endorsement of you he gave Sergeant DiMaggio three days ago. He might be getting tired of it, which is neither here nor there.” He sat down. “DiMaggio told me what went on uptown. He also told me that he’d been handling a separate homicide entirely before your call came in tonight and hadn’t seen bed for thirty hours. I don’t offer this as any sort of apology, but I don’t like to work in bad air.”

He did not wait for any comment on my part, turning to the stenographer. He gave her my name, my office address and my state license number, reading from a sheet he’d brought in, probably my statement about Josie Welch. “Nothing between your previous declaration and the time you were retained by this Ulysses Grant?” he asked me.

“Nothing.”

“We’ll start there, then. You’ve done this before.”

I nodded again, taking a Camel, and then told it. I was able to forget Constantine’s request for silence, since the telegram had taken me off the hook in that regard, although I did skip the matter of Margaret Constantine’s exotic automatic. The whole thing took less than twenty minutes.

Neither Vasella nor Toomey had interrupted. Vasella had taken out a thick yellow copy pencil, which he clicked against his front teeth. “Turk is the keystone, of course,” he said. “But I’d be more comfortable if Grant’s money were all there was to it.”

“Why Turk?” I said.

He looked toward Toomey, who was lounging against the doorjamb. “After that party quieted down over there,” Toomey told me, “this swish who lives in the place, McGruder — he told us that Turk was married to Audrey Grant.”

I frowned at him.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Toomey said. “But according to McGruder it happened about six months back. There was a crew of them, they got one of these automobile bugs and wound up in Maryland. Just for laughs the girl and Turk woke up some J.P. and got spliced. Then she laughed in his face when he tried to claim his rights as a husband. McGruder says there wasn’t much gossip about it because people felt sorry for Turk— evidently he’s that kind of fool. We’re checking it, but McGruder was sure the girl never did anything to cancel it out. The way these fruitcakes live down here—”

“You bring Turk in?” I asked him.

“Nah, that’s the trouble. I suppose you did as well as you could at the party — just reporting the kill and then locking that room, I mean. In fact it was probably best that way, since we were able to surprise the whole mob.” Toomey snorted. “Some screwball dame was standing on a chair in a bedsheet singing old labor songs, for Chrissake—’Join the Needle Workers’ Union.’ We got all the names and addresses, and we got statements from everybody who had anything to tell. But then, like I say, all of a sudden McGruder remembered this marriage bit — only Turk wasn’t there. His name wasn’t on the list, which means he’d ducked out before we showed up.”

Vasella was toying with the pencil. “Turk was the one you booked on the Welch killing Tuesday. I thought he had a corroborated alibi.”

“It has to be fishy under reconsideration, lieutenant,” Toomey said. “This guy Peters didn’t show up with his story until today — said he’d been on a bat. But here’s the thing. Half a dozen people mentioned the brawl he had with Fannin over there tonight, but Peters wasn’t on the list either. He must have scrammed the same time Turk did. DiMag put through an all-areas pick-up on the pair of them. We get Peters in here now, we’ll find out he was just covering for the other guy. Turk could buy an awful lot of alibi for a share in that thirteen million he’s due to inherit.”

“A man would have to be little short of moronic to kill three people for a legacy when everything would point to him,” Vasella said dubiously. “Or even to arrange for the killings. That knife — no one saw it after Fannin was hit?”

“It’s McGruder’s,” Toomey said. “He said he always kept it in the latrine. But after Fannin it doesn’t get mentioned.”

Vasella shook his head. “All right, let’s assume for the moment that Fannin’s basic interpretations are correct. Audrey Grant and Josephine Welch are half-sisters. If Audrey Grant is going to inherit Grant’s money and subsequently die herself, the Welch girl would have a strong claim on the estate. So she’s disposed of first. Then Grant, and then Audrey Grant — the order leaves Turk clear title. But damn it—” He made a wet sound between his lips. “Grant is sent those clippings the day he’s going to die. He contacts his lawyer about them and then he contacts a EI. — but even if he hadn’t done either of those things we’d still probably find the clips in his apartment. The man hadn’t seen his daughter in ten years, and it’s possible that no one would have connected the deaths — but this way we can’t fail to. Except why would anyone want the connection made? If we didn’t know the Grant girl had been worth all that money for the last four hours of her life we’d have no motive to hook Turk on. He could wait almost indefinitely to claim the legacy, or even claim it from somewhere he’d be nonextraditable — or try to.”

“There’s more than just Turk,” I said. “Both of those girls told Constantine they were coming into money.”

Vasella’s hand lifted to slap the desk. “Which would appear to indicate they themselves knew Grant was going to die—”

“Where does that take us, now?” Toomey said. “It’s as if the three of them were in it together — and then Turk crossed the two dames.”

“No one talks about money someone is going to be murdered for,” Vasella said. “It’s too self-evident to mention. You don’t think they could have been referring to some other money altogether?”

“Grant’s dead,” I said.

“So he is. Could this Constantine have been lying — repeating something which hadn’t been said?”

I shrugged. “I don’t get it, if he was. The only reason I went to Grant’s was because of what he told me. Grant’s money has to be the motive, one way or another.”

“Something’s missing, all right.” Vasella reached to a phone. “This O. J. Fosburgh — you have any idea where he lives?”

“His office would probably have an all-night service.”

He told his switchboard to put through the call, hanging up again. “There a collect-for-questioning on Constantine?” he asked Toomey.

“DiMag put it through as soon as we got the message on that telegram. Vice Squad finally admitted they’d heard of him, once we gave them the full name.”

“Yeah, that telegram — wherever that fits in.” Vasella puffed a cheek. “I think we better see that painter in here also, Floyd-Ivan Klobb. If he’s able to provide girls for the racket there could be some sort of intimidation involved.”

Toomey went out. The stenographer was still sitting, patient as a tin can on a shelf. Vasella nodded her out also. The phone rang before the door had closed after her.

Vasella identified himself and then apologized for the hour. There were pauses while he told Fosburgh about Grant’s death. He verified my position, and after that there was considerable talk about Grant’s financial situation. I sat there contemplating Marilyn again.

I decided she had a face that should have been given even more currency than it was. In fact currency was what it belonged on. They should have printed her picture on the one-dollar bill.

Toomey came back just as Vasella hung up. “No one gets it,” Vasella said.

I dropped a cigarette into a dented brass spittoon, waiting.

“I mean no individuals. Grant was to receive all income the trust earned for the duration of his life, but the capital itself couldn’t be touched. Now it gets distributed to charitable and educational organizations. All of it — there’s absolutely no provision for any of Grant’s own heirs.”

“People wouldn’t have to know that,” Toomey said. “Or anyhow, look at the interest on thirteen million bucks. Even at an improbable three percent it’s what? — roughly four hundred thousand a year. The guy lived like he was on relief. Take off three-fourths for taxes — Turk’s still in line for a cool hundred grand—”

Vasella got to his feet heavily. “We’ll get nowhere until we talk to these people,” he said. “I want you to ride herd on those pick-ups, Floyd. Let’s see some action.”

He started for the door. “You want any more from me?” I asked him.

He stopped. “You admit having had one of the murder weapons in your possession within a half hour of the first killing tonight,” he said with no intonation. “You left that corpse and went almost directly to another, telling us it was only your professional sense of deduction which sent you there.” He pressed his lips together. “Should I be able to think of anything else we might want you for? You can sign the statement if it’s ready, or tomorrow if it isn’t. Thank you for your cooperation.”

He let me meet his gaze for another few seconds and then went out, a ponderous, not quite impassive man who did not like having rank pulled on him any better than DiMaggio did, but who would always be too efficient a cop to let it interfere with the way he thought he should do his job. Toomey gave me a parting wave and said, “Take it slow,” but after two meetings Toomey would have found it hard to be unkindly disposed toward Attila the Hun. I made a mental note never to use

Brannigan’s name again, short of finding myself on the wrong end of a hose.

I patted Marilyn on a cheek, following after them. I still liked the idea, although not on paper money at that, and not just her face. Molded on a coin, front and back side both.

I was being light-headed again after all, but I realized I was bushed. The statement wasn’t ready. I took a cab to the lot near the Blue Soldier where the Chevy had been since nine o’clock.

I picked up a Mirror and checked the ball scores, but that only made me feel more stale. Ted Williams had gone hitless, and they’d had Stan the Man on the bench. The good people were getting old. A lot of them were already long dead, like John Garfield, Marcel Cerdan, Mel Ott. Fred Allen was dead too. Pretty soon I’d have no heroes left, unless I could teach myself to believe in Sal Mineo.

I left the car in the garage on Third, walked back the two blocks, climbed my one flight. The overhead bulb in the hall outside my door had burned out. They weren’t making bulbs like they used to.

They weren’t making private detectives like they used to either. I’d already turned the key before it occurred to me to find out who had wanted to make the next flight dark enough to hide on.

It was Peter J. Peters. He was sitting four steps up, as still as hewn rock, but I couldn’t miss the gun in his hand.

I got the door open, grinning from ear to ear.

The gun was a Smith and Wesson military.38, but it might have been a musty volume of Spinoza he’d been browsing through. I went up quietly and worked it out of his fingers before I woke him.

CHAPTER 22

He hadn’t been shooting anybody. There was so much rust in the bore that the weapon might have blown up in his face if he’d tried.

He was slumped against the wall. He started, opening his mouth and blinking. His lips looked pink and wet behind the beard. He saw the revolver and frowned.

“You intend to use this for the next round in our little competition?” I asked him.

“Oh, my gosh—’

I had no idea what that was supposed to mean, so I stood there while he shuddered a couple of times. I supposed he had been wearing the same Levis and turtleneck sweater before, but the view from McGruder’s floor had not been remarkably vivid. He wasn’t as big as I’d thought, but he was big enough. He was also handsome, although in a sallow sort of way.

“What’s on your mind, Peters?”

“Oh, golly, I wish I knew—” He swallowed. “I had to talk to somebody. I saw Henshaw, and he said you were — listen, do you have something to drink, I—”

“Sure. I’m always good for refreshments. Ill open some beer and we’ll nibble on the pistol, like with pretzels.”

He looked at me blankly. For a minute I thought he was going to be another of those blissful nits you can’t affront. His nostrils quivered. Then without any other sign he threw himself against the balustrade and began to sob like a baby.

That moved me. Two hundred pounds of blubbering Beatnik. He’d probably gone home and found a rejected manuscript in the mailbox.

He got to his feet, sniffling. I motioned him into the small dining area between the kitchen and the living room, then tossed the gun on the couch and dug out an open bottle of Jack Daniels. I poured two shots and sat down across from him at the table.

His shoulders were still twitching, and he was clutching an unclean white handkerchief. “Suppose we start with where you came by the firearm,” I said.

“Oh, dear, I didn’t mean for you to think—” He gulped the bourbon. aI work part-time as a security guard,” he said then. “Night watchman jobs — it gives me a chance to write and make some money at the same time. I’ve never carried it before except to work, honestly, I—”

“ Where’d you see Henshaw?”

“Late, after they let people leave the party. We’d been watching from down the block, Ephraim and I—”

I gestured. “Take it from scratch, huh?”

He nodded, sighing. “We left McGruder’s after the fight. I felt — well, gauche. Lord only knows what possessed me, hitting you that way. I deserved the punch you gave me and more. I hope you’ll—”

“Yeah. You beat it right away?”

“It was five minutes at most. I stopped to wash up first.”

“Ephraim with you all the time?”

“He waited in the hall. But look, if you think he did it — that’s the whole point. That’s why I went to the police with that false alibi to start with—”

I stared at him carefully. His expression should have been grim, but it wasn’t. He would have had the same look on his face if he’d been caught slipping a book under his coat at Brentano’s.

“I guess it was a pretty dumb stunt?”

“If he’s guilty you’ll do time for it.”

“Oh, gosh, I know. We were together a few hours Tuesday, not all night. But I know he didn’t do it. Darn it, Ephraim is one of the most angelic people you’ll ever meet. Why, he’s almost saintly, he—”

“We went through all this before—”

“But it’s true. Deep down he’s so sensitive it hurts him to be alive. Why, he could no more have killed those two girls than—”

“They both treated him sensitively, from what I hear.”

“Oh, I know all that. But Eph isn’t like ordinary people. He’s beautiful inside, priestly. Josie and Audrey were the only girls he’s ever been intimate with. He knows the kind of unsanctified lives they led, but it still made them special to him. Loving them both in his tormented way has been a cross he bears, it—”

“All right, already — I’ve got a Gideon bible around someplace, he can autograph it. Skip Ephraim — was the rest of your story straight, at least? About being drunk all week?”

He lowered his eyes. “I wasn’t drunk. I was with Audrey Grant.”

That did get my attention. “That why you ran tonight?”

“I didn’t run. Oh, darn it, we just left for a while. We were on our way back when we saw the police cars. And then when Henshaw told us what happened to Audrey—”

He refilled his glass, spilling some. He started to wipe the table absently with a sleeve, then remembered the handkerchief.

I had a vague thought. “When you went to the cops — did Audrey Grant know you were going to alibi Ephraim?”

“I didn’t make up my mind myself until I was almost at the station/’

“Henshaw noticed her just after she spotted Ephraim tonight — evidently she didn’t seem to like the idea he’d been released. You remember if she mentioned anything during the week about having any other thoughts? I mean about it not being him to start with?”

“No.” He frowned. “Audrey was painfully upset, and we tried to occupy ourselves with other things. That’s why we went off together — she needed solace, spiritual consolation.”

I sucked in air. “You read Corso and Ginsberg to each other—”

“Why, no, as a matter of fact we studied the exalted truths of Sakyamuni, about the suppression of anxiety, but why do you—?”

I lifted a hand. “Never mind,” I managed. All this through that mouth full of starchy confections I’d come to love. “The girl was killed right after that scrap of ours,” I told him in a minute. “Ephraim had time to do it, Peters, if you were alone in the John for a while.”

“Look, please — I’d swear he didn’t. Anyhow, I’m certain of it because of the way he reacted later. Oh, that poor martyred boy, if he—”

He stared at his palms. A little more and I’d be staring at them myself, watching for stigmata. “Something happened after you saw Henshaw?” I said.

“We went to this composer’s studio — the place I’d been with Audrey, in fact. It belongs to a friend of mine who’s out of town. Then Ephraim suddenly got the idea that Dana O’Dea had done it. She was Audrey’s roommate, she—”

“I know who she is.”

“Oh?” He glanced at me, then nodded. “Dana had been angry at Josie Welch,” he said. “Apparently Dana thought she had — well, that she had certain claims on me, and lately I’d been spending more time with Josie. On top of which Dana also knew about me being with Audrey this week. So Ephraim decided it was jealousy, that Dana—” He flushed. “I can’t explain this too well, but Ephraim is capable of thinking a girl would kill two others because of me. He looks up to me, and he’s made me into sort of an idol, as if—”

“The way it was with Lucien Vaulking—”

“You’ve been talking to people. Yes, the same way. But in any event I know he couldn’t have been faking — he was even a little irrational. He said he was going to look for Dana. He ran out. I went over to Dana’s myself, trying to find him, but there was a cop out front — that was Audrey’s apartment too, of course.” Peters bit on the handkerchief. “I guess the impact of everything suddenly panicked me. The next thing I knew I’d gone home and gotten my gun.”

I had run out of cigarettes. I went over to a shelf and took down a fresh pack. He was watching me.

“You’ve played at being a fag, Peters,” I said. “All right, maybe it didn’t take. But maybe you’re also fonder than you think about the idea of a frustrated little man following you around—”

He didn’t flush this time. “I suppose McGruder told you about that. Look, that’s all past — it’s not influencing me in any way about Ephraim’s innocence. Oh, gosh darn it, I don’t expect people to comprehend how we live. Don McGruder is a poet, a fine one, with a clear, radiant vision. We were empathic to each other — we could communicate without even finishing sentences. So we talked gloriously night after night and it led to a homosexual affair — would I know more about the human heart if it hadn’t happened? I’m trying to be alive in the fullest way I can. To be a writer I’ve got to experience all griefs and all joys, I’ve got to touch the inmost soul of man, to—”

“You’ve got to feel the throbbing pulse of the corner grocer, to contemplate the navel of the Chinaman who does your shirts. Oh, sweet damn, okay, you can take me to church some Sunday, we’ll both be better for it. But not tonight, huh? Listen, is it an ecclesiastical secret, or do you think you just might get around to telling me what you wanted up here anyhow?”

He drew in his breath. “I might have known you’d be a square. The complacent, scoffing masses — dear God, a religious revelation could appear on their television screens and they’d phone for a repair man.” He threw the handkerchief away from himself bitterly, like Billy Graham giving up on Las Vegas. “What I had hoped was that, since it’s your profession, you’d come back downtown out of ordinary human compassion and help me find Ephraim before he gets into more difficulties. But I guess I can put it on a strictly business basis. Dedicated people like us don’t have much money, but I can pay you off eventually.”

“People like you—” I pulled a hand across my face. “Look, Peters, maybe you mean it. Maybe you’re a serious writer and all this apocalyptic crap has some point — I wouldn’t know. But I saw that mob down at McGruder’s, and if there’s any religious awakening underway somebody better get Congress to repeal the First Amendment. This is a murder case, not a fraternity bull session on salvation. If your chum Ephraim’s as beatific as you claim, he won’t get into anymore trouble — and if he killed those two girls he’s already bought all he’ll ever need. The gosh-awful truth is that it’s pushing four o’clock in the morning and I don’t much care. For that matter I don’t much care about your offer of an installment payment plan either. I had my client for the weekend, except that somebody killed him.”

“Him?” He had gotten up, gaping at me. “Somebody — you mean three people are—?”

“Yeah. It’s been a long night, padre. You hit me, that wasn’t too bad. But then a cop hit me and that I didn’t like. I’m tired, my jaw aches, and I’m about due to lay me down to sleep. You can go to the cops or you can sack in here if you want, on the couch. I’d advise the former, especially since they already damned well know you lied about Thesday night—”

“Huh?”

I didn’t say anymore. The telephone was ringing and I went across to answer it.

I recognized the voice at a word in spite of its tone. “Harry,” she gasped. “Thank God you’re there! Something’s happened, can—”

“Easy, Fern. What’s—?”

“It’s Dana O’Dea. She just came up the stairs and fell into the apartment looking like — well, as if a truck had hit her. He beat her terribly. I’m afraid he might have followed her, we—”

I cursed once, glancing at Peters. “You mean Ephraim?”

“Ephraim? No — I don’t understand it too well, she’s barely told me anything — but it was Ivan. Ivan Klobb, the painter. You remember, I introduced him to you—”

“You got the door locked?”

“Yes, but—”

“I’ll be about twenty minutes, Fern. If anything happens before I get there call the police. I mean that.”

“Oh, thank you, Harry—”

I hung it up and turned into the bedroom. Peters came into the doorway hesitantly. I yanked open the bottom drawer of the dresser, pushed aside some summer shirts, then settled for the first piece my hand touched, my Colt.357 Magnum. I checked the load, jammed the weapon into a clip holster and slapped that into my hip pocket. “Pick up that relic of your own,” I said. “If you’ve got any sense at all you’ll drop it in the first sewer you pass on the way to the precinct house.”

“God,” he said. “Oh, God! Listen, what’s going on? Has something happened to Fern now too? Will you—?”

“No.” I shoved past him, motioning toward his gun.

“Can I leave it here? Oh, golly, I guess I’ll go down now after all. I won’t stop home—”

“Come on.”

I ushered him out of there and around the corner to the garage, walking hard and not talking. The late-shift attendant looked at me as if I were asking him to change the color on a battleship he’d just that minute finished painting, but for the pound of flesh I was paying they could shuffle the Chevy in and out ten times a night and like it. I broke half a dozen vehicle regulations going down, but all the traffic clicks were busy mooching coffee someplace. Peters sat mutely and meditated on his reflection in the windshield.

I dumped him in front of an all-night restaurant two blocks from Fern’s, roughly the same distance from the station. He started to say something but I didn’t wait. I would read all about it when they updated the Gospels. At the moment I was too busy speculating about an artist with an exhibition scheduled soon in an exclusive uptown gallery, and about a pair of dead prostitutes who had known enough about his spare-time occupation to have shut down the show before the canvases dried.

Most of it still did not make sense. But even an unenlightened sinner like myself could see where blackmail might have played hell with the revival meeting.

CHAPTER 23

Fern made me repeat my name twice through the door of the apartment before she opened up. She had on a pale blue bed jacket which fell just to her fingertips, and her face was wan.

I saw Dana beyond her shoulder, slumped on the low modern couch at the far wall. She was wrapped in an oversized yellow beach towel. There were raw, ridged welts, like parasitic worms, across her naked arms and along her thighs. A cigarette was burning in a tray on the end table near her, and her dark eyes studied me intently as she reached for it.

“It is you, isn’t it? We never did get ourselves formally introduced.”

I grinned at her. “You were pretty soused.”

“You could be right — although I’ve got a hunch I was sober as a hen about two seconds before you gave me that smack.” She puckered her bright lips wistfully. “Hell of a thing for a man to do. I seem to recall I’d been pretty darned accommodating, myself.”

I laughed. “You’re feeling all right?”

“Grand, grand.” She touched her fingers to a swollen bruise at the side of her nose. “Half the pain was mental anyhow.”

Fern was standing near me. “Do you think she needs a doctor, Harry? I didn’t put anything on them except disinfectant—”

“I doubt it, not if the skin isn’t broken.” I went across to one of the sling chairs. “He didn’t do that gaudy a job with his fists alone?”

“He decided I’d be more impressed by a leather strap. Come to think of it, I was impressed at that.”

“You want to tell me about it, Dana?”

She nodded, reaching for her smoke again with one of those milky arms. Damaged as she was, the girl made you suspect that half the women in the world were grossly deficient in protein. Fern had taken a seat next to her, tucking her bare legs beneath her. She wasn’t one of the afflicted.

“I don’t come out lily white in the tale myself,” Dana said. “But then I’m just about beyond salvaging as it is.” She considered me thoughtfully. “That really was a honey of an exhibition I put on for you over there, wasn’t it?”

“It was harmless enough.”

“I’ll bet. But thanks anyhow.”

“You leave McGruder’s with Klobb?”

“No, I didn’t. I felt rotten when they let us go, and I walked around for a while. I ran into Ivan when I stopped for coffee, and we went down to his studio. It wasn’t anything except company, someone to talk to. Although Ivan was pretty upset himself, for reasons most people don’t know about.” She glanced at Fern. “Did Josie ever tell you about a man named Constantine?”

Fern turned to me.”—Connie?”

“I found out tonight. The police hit it pretty close on Tuesday, Fern. Josie’d been taking calls.”

“Taking—” She pressed her lips together. “I did begin to wonder about it, I suppose. It’s just so darn hard to accept—”

“You’re telling me,” Dana said. “Audrey let me in on it a few weeks ago. She was tight one night, feeling sorry for herself. Boy, it knocked me for a loop. We weren’t that intimate — you know how you just share a place to save money. The fact is — well, I guess I didn’t like her too much. I suppose everybody down here is always putting down everybody else, taking advantage of other people’s weaknesses, but Audrey was worse, somehow. Bitchy. Oh, damn, what a thing to be saying. Anyhow, I’d always supposed she was seeing someone else’s husband and had the sense to be discreet about it.” She looked back across. “You know about Ivan introducing her and Josie to this Constantine— for a fee?”

I nodded, watching Fern lift a hand in puzzlement. “But he’s such a successful painter. Sometimes I think he’s the only real artist down here. Why would he—?”

“You go figure it.” Dana butted her cigarette. “He didn’t mention it tonight, of course — it obviously wasn’t supposed to be known — but I was pretty certain that was what he was worried about. We had a couple drinks, and then he—” She made a face. “This is going to sound funny, considering the circumstances, but he decided to paint me. Ivan’s odd. He’s come looking for me more than once after midnight. So it wasn’t anything extraordinary, and God knows I would rather have held still all night than go home by myself. I had some pot, one stick that—”

She frowned. “I tried to pass that off to you, didn’t I?”

“We both could have used it.”

“Be nice. Damn it all, sometimes I just — oh, what’s the use? Anyhow, I smoked it — by myself, since Ivan was working. It did calm me down, even though all I could think about was Audrey under that cot. And I kept remembering the party tonight, too. Or maybe not just tonight, maybe it was all the damned parties all the nights — all the pompous philosophical excuses we make for acting like adolescents when none of us have anymore purpose than goldfish, how sleazy it all finally is — and anyhow all of a sudden I was taking a good look at myself and I guess it made me disgusted. And then I remembered what Audrey’d told me about the blood money Ivan had gotten, and—”

She confronted me squarely. “I told him I knew about it. I also told him he wasn’t paying me enough to pose, and that I wanted fifty dollars an hour — retroactive for the last ten hours. Just like that I said if he didn’t pay me I was going to the police—” She kept on feeing me. “Which is what I mean about not being worth salvaging. Oh, damn, I—” She sobbed, turning aside. “Listen, Fern, have you got some sleeping pills, anything—?”

Fern’s mouth was drawn. She got up forlornly. Dana closed her eyes and let her head fall against the wall. She sat that way without moving until Fern came back.

“It would be so darned easy if I could blame it on the marijuana,” she said then. “At least I’m not going to say I didn’t deserve what he gave me. He threw my clothes down the stairs and just about threw me after them. I don’t know what it means, although when it started I was one mighty scared young extortionist. All I could think of was that Josie and Audrey might have threatened to expose him in the same way, and he’d—”

Fern’s breath caught audibly. “You don’t think—?”

“I don’t know, I just don’t know. What kind of people are capable of blackmail? If I was capable of the impulse myself, I think Audrey certainly would have been — and Josie too, for all that supposed innocence of hers. But my God, if they were blackmailing him and he killed them he would have had to kill me too. I couldn’t prove anything the way they could have, but it still could have ruined his reputation—”

She shuddered once. Fern had set two capsules and a glass of water on the end table, and she brushed the pills into her hand. She swallowed them without water.

“What happens to us, Fern?” she said then. “What? All right, never mind all this, this is extreme, but just the way we live in general — how do we get so sick and miserable and self-destructive? I used to be a nice girl once, I swear it. I used to have clean, wholesome dates with well-meaning clods who actually brought me flowers once in a while. Dates. I haven’t had one in any prearranged sense in so long that I’ve begun to feel like — like a public conveyance. A streetcar named Dana, flag her down in front of any saloon below Fourteenth Street and climb aboard. Do you know what I was going to do if Ivan was fool enough to come through with the money? I was going to pack up and get out of here, go to San Francisco maybe, anyplace — just to see if it’s possible to start fresh. That isn’t such a shameful motive for a blackmailer, is it? But do you know what I’m going to do now? I’m going up to see this man Constantine myself. Oh, yes. Except I’ll have to wait until these bruises heal, won’t I? They like their merchandise pure when they pay cash, don’t they? Do you think it will take long? I’m really anxious, and—”

She had gotten a little hysterical, and Fern grabbed her by the shoulders. The towel fell away and for a second Dana’s eyes darted nervously, but she caught hold of herself. She gulped in air, holding it.

“Come on, there,” Fern said. “Everyone goes through this kind of thing one way or another, you know that—”

Dana let her chin collapse on her chest. “It’s my night to play the fool. Forgive me, Fern, will you, I’m just—”

“Don’t be silly—”

She made a half-hearted attempt to knot the towel back into place. “Aphrodite’s fig leaf. Did Aphrodite have a fig leaf? I don’t even know who Aphrodite was.” She got to her feet, holding it where it had slipped around her hips again. “Cheap theatrics and a thirty-cent striptease to boot, to keep your mind off the bum acting. I better get to bed before I wind up howling Thomas Wolfe from the window ledge. Or aren’t we supposed to like Wolfe anymore? That’s one other damned thing — I keep forgetting who’s hip and who isn’t.” She laughed a hollow, strained laugh. “Oh, good heavens, thanks, Fern, really — I’m sorry I’m such a pathological mess.”

She headed toward the room which had belonged to Josie, moving stiffly. Fern glanced at me and then followed her. They spoke quietly, then Fern closed the door after her, turning back. She looked like a delicate mechanical doll that nobody’d remembered to wind.

“I meant to ask her where Klobb’s studio is,” I said.

“It’s on Downing Street, but — Harry, you’re not going over there with all this—”

“Just to look around, talk to him maybe—”

She had come toward me. “I’m sorry if I seemed cold before.’’ Her voice was husky. “It was just so rotten Tuesday — not us together, you know that, but the way I sort of used you—”

“I’ll call you, Fern.”

“Do, Harry, please. I—” She trembled suddenly, then fell against me. I held her until the shivering stopped. Then I kissed her tightly once and went out.

It was still easy, like walking off a building. But I hadn’t had too many dates in any prearranged sense myself lately. Maybe when this was over I’d have a few with a girl who’d be vulnerable until it was, and whose cheeks had been wet against my neck after I’d let her tell me she wasn’t vulnerable three nights before.

The Chevy was on Seventh. I went down the few blocks with no other moving cars in sight. The number she’d given me was a warehouse, with a small private entrance at one side. A hand-lettered sign said, Klobb-Penthouse, which would mean a shed on the roof, nothing more. The door was not locked.

I went in, not being particularly quiet, not quite knowing what I had in mind. The stairwell was as empty as a tilted tomb, but if the police had only Klobb’s home address and not this one he could still be around. There were six flights of reinforced concrete and then one last section of slatted metal, rising into a gable-like structure which would lead onto the roof. The door up there was open.

The studio sat thirty feet away, beyond a dozen or more random-shaped chimneys and flue pipes. It was built like a greenhouse. There were lights on, either a lot of them or just the brights a painter would use, but the glass panes were smeared and barely translucent. The roof of the warehouse itself was extremely still.

“Klobb?” I said.

A rag on a line flapped once. Maybe he was busy being creative over there, oiling that leather strap. There was a high sill to be stepped over in the doorway where I was, and I stepped over it.

That was when it came to me that I was never going to learn, not ever. This time it wasn’t any slumbering Beatnik with a malfunctioning weapon some old uncle had brought home as a souvenir of the Meuse-Argonne. I was at least a foil second too late reaching for the Magnum I’d concluded I would not need for Klobb alone. Something that could have been a fist lifted out of the shadows and slammed into the back of my neck. Something else that could have been a foot extended itself from nowhere and cracked across my shin. I went down like a defunct sputnik. I chewed tar.

“I used to think about it sometimes,” a familiar voice said then. “No kidding, I really used to wonder — whatever became of that great soph halfback, Harry Fannin? I asked you to leave my name out of it with the cops, fellow. I asked you politely as hell.”

“Do you intend to chat all night, darling,” said another voice I knew, “or are you going to get busy and dump him over the side?”

CHAPTER 24

I got up onto my elbows and knees, then hung there as limply as a sweaty leotard. Someone in rubber-soled desert boots stepped near me noiselessly. It was a task, but I lifted my head high enough to see the grain-colored beard that identified him as Ivan Klobb. I also saw the boxy black Colt.45 automatic in his right hand.

His other hand lifted the Magnum off my hip. “On your feet, fellow,” I was told.

I managed it, a little shakily, watching Klobb pass the Colt to Constantine. That made a total of three pieces I was facing, since lovely Margaret was getting her kicks from the Beretta again. It made me feel dangerous, like Dan McGrew.

Constantine had shed his dressing gown for a dark blue serge suit. He had on a figured gray silk tie, and his collar looked too tight. It probably always did, around that tree stump he had for a neck.

“Damned glad you dropped in, fellow,” he told me. “We would have looked you up one of these days, of course, but this saves trouble all around.”

“I’m glad too,” I said, but I was just making sounds. I’d wanted to find out if I could. Td hate to put anybody out on my account.”

“Sure. That’s why you forgot to mention my name with the bulls, isn’t it? My old buddy.”

“You were in it before I saw them,” I said.

“You won’t write to the alumni magazine if I call you a liar, will you, fellow? The name Connie came up last Tuesday, yeah — I know because my Vice Squad connection tipped me. They played it dumb, and so far as they knew there was no Connie on the books. What did you think this was, Fannin? You think I’m playing sandlot ball?”

“Get to the point, Connie. You don’t much care what I think.”

“Sure, sure — I’ll get to it. The point is that Vice Squad got another call a couple of hours ago — not about Connie this time, but Constantine. That much they couldn’t fake. I might have spent my time in courses like outdoor cookery at Ann Arbor, fellow, but there’s a little something besides oleomargarine between my ears. My old pal Fannin fixed things for me, didn’t you, pal?”

“Let him send you a letter about it,” Margaret said. “From the hospital.” She was off to my right, leaning almost jauntily against a chimney. The glow from the studio left her half in shadow, and there was enough breeze to have flung some of that rampant hair into her face. Except for the Beretta she could have been soliciting over there.

Except for the Beretta. Constantine was still waiting for some sort of answer, and Klobb had moved behind me. I didn’t like not seeing the third gun. I was fairly sure there was not going to be any shooting, not since they knew they were already tied into the case, but I still did not like it.

“There was another killing,” I said finally. “Audrey Grant’s father. Somebody sent him a telegram about the girl’s where abouts. Your name was in it.”

Constantine frowned, watching me carefully. “Somebody who?”

“A Friend*—no other signature.”

He grimaced. “You find the telegram or did the bulls?”

“I got there first, if that’s what you mean.”

“If there was a telegram,” Margaret said.

“That’s not the point.” Constantine did not look at her. “You could have ditched the thing if you saw it before the bulls, Fannin.”

I shook my head. “Not after I unwrapped another dead one. I’ve got the matter of my own license to protect in these things.”

“Your goddam license—” He spat across his shoulder. His thick lips were drawn back against his gums when he stepped toward me.

“Twenty-three girls. You get an expense-account convention in this town, it takes one phone call. Six years I’ve spent building up the reputation, until every big public relations man in the East knows I’m his man, and now some dollar-an-hour peeper spills the details in the wrong office. You know what this can do to my set-up? You got any idea what this can cost me?”

I didn’t answer him. I could feel Klobb breathing behind my ear.

“I asked you if you know what this means to me, Fannin—”

Constantine poked me with the Colt so I nodded. “I know,” I told him. “I’m sorry. You might have to go to work for a living.”

He was going to satisfy those aggressions sooner or later anyhow. He hit me in the stomach with a fist like a runaway Greyhound bus and I doubled over, heaving sickly.

“Twenty-three girls. And if I have to lay low too long every damned one of them will be running for somebody else. All because of a punk halfback I used to punch holes for. Damn it to sweet hell—”

He was standing a foot in front of me when I got myself straightened up. He was pretty much oblivious to the cannon at his side, breathing hard and nurturing his hate, and it was a moment for heroics on my part. It was a swell moment, for noticing that Margaret would have had to tilt the Beretta about a sixteenth of an inch to take out my eye. I let him hit me in the stomach again.

He liked the way I folded in half. He liked the sounds I made, like cats being squashed. He liked the color of my face when I got it lifted. When I couldn’t lift it anymore Klobb did it for me, jamming a knee into my back and using it for a fulcrum, and he liked that too.

When he quit, Klobb stepped back and I sank to my knees like something sticky being poured down a drain.

I vomited everything I’d had to eat since they took me off formula.

“The lad who was going to make them forget Tom Harmon.” Constantine laughed, turning away. “Let’s get out of here now, huh?”

“Half a moment,” Margaret said. She might have been stifling a yawn. “I didn’t mention it earlier because you said he was a friend, but he didn’t just take the gun away from me at Audrey’s. If I hadn’t convinced the poor sap it would mean his life, I would have been raped on the floor.”

“Well, now. Well, how about that, now?” Constantine was gripping the Colt by the snout when he turned back. Margaret was being careless with the Beretta also, and Klobb seemed to have wandered off. I couldn’t be sure, but I was beyond caring. I threw myself at Constantine with every remnant of strength I could muster.

H. Fannin, realist of the old school, like Walter Mitty. The big man took a quick short step to the side, slammed a palm like a spade against my chest, yanked me to my feet, ran with me, and then slapped me against a wall like a trowel full of wet cement. He propped me into place with all the effort of Pancho Gonzales hoisting one for the serve, and then the checkered stock of his thirty-nine-ounce automatic mashed its way into my cheek like a fork through over-cooked potatoes. I saw constellations that Galileo never dreamed of, and after that I tasted blood and frustration and immeasurable sadness all at once, staring without belief at the one hand he was holding me with. The one hand. My head rolled, and he raked the gun across my face from the other side.

There was blood in my eyes also, but I thought I saw that resplendent orange hair bobbing in the vapors near me. My madonna of the rooftops. I even thought I saw a smile on those vengeful orange lips. “Darling,” someone muttered. It was me, with all I had left. Words. “Audrey and her roommate aren’t here. We’ve got time, darling, we’ve got time—”

Colors flashed, only some of them in my imagination. The Beretta jumped across Constantine’s forearm and slashed down at my temple. He let her hit me twice more. Then he threw me aside like so much rank bedding, onto what might have been left of my face.

I kept on bleeding, which seemed a logical result of my activities. A pool of it grew under my nose, but it was only a small pool, like Tanganyika. There was quiet talk, but it did not interest me, not even as much as the latest article on Bing Crosby’s sons. I’d be leaving such mundane things behind anyhow, as soon as they took action on my application to that monastery, the one that honored credit cards. I wasn’t even going to write anymore letters to sportswriters about why they didn’t elect Arky Vaughan to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Arky Vaughan, my all-time favorite shortstop who was long, long gone, who had drowned in a lake.

Someone stooped near me, and I saw those desert boots out of half an eye. I wondered remotely if he’d ever worn them in the desert. Zen Bootism. He was fumbling at my hip, and I had the curious sensation that he was shoving the Magnum back into my holster. He hadn’t said a word since I’d come to call, not one. I’d hardly gotten a look at that incipient fascist face.

“I’m returning your pistol,” he told me. “Solely in the hope that you might decide to blow your stinking brains out, old chap.”

He stepped over me, and the roof door closed. Footsteps echoed in the stairwell, going away.

They’d left me, without a single chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.”

CHAPTER 25

Someone had invented a magic time machine which gave men back their youth, and now in the machine Michigan’s all-time football team was playing Notre Dame in a stadium on the moon. Tom Harmon was on the field, and Willie Heston and Germany Schultz were twenty again, and Harry Fannin was all in one piece. Quarterback Bennie Friedman called the signals for my wide sweep to the right, the ball was snapped back, and up ahead a hulking lineman named Oliver Constantine pulled out to lead my interference. The screams of a hundred thousand fans thundered in my ears. “Go, Fannin, go—”

I lifted my face out of the blood.

We went back into the huddle. Ducky Medwick was calling the plays now. Ducky Medwick hadn’t gone to Michigan. On top of which he’d played baseball, not football. Did it matter? It was only a private fantasy anyhow. “Take it again, Harry, we’ll go all the way this time—”

I dropped my face back into the blood.

They shipped me down to the junior varsity, and I couldn’t make first string there either. I sat on the bench and glared at the players who beat me out, like Truman Capote, Liberace, Clifton Webb. I turned in my uniform.

This was ridiculous. Klobb’s studio was less than ten yards away. What would have become of western civilization if a little travel had ever fazed Leif Ericson, say, or Linda Christian? Come on now, Orville, you can get that thing off the ground.

I crawled to the studio. It didn’t take any longer than the voyage of the Pequod. I was carrying Moby Dick on my back and Moby was carrying Captain Ahab on his. Why the hell should I carry Ahab? All he had to complain about was a wooden leg, and I had a wooden head. Splintered. I dragged myself through the door, across a large room which reeked of turpentine, into a bathroom. Ahab, you hab, he hab. All God’s chillun hab, except Harry.

I lay there, not wanting to get up and wondering why I’d thought of Ducky Medwick when I had football in mind. Oh, sure, because I’d seen him get smashed in the skull by a pitched ball when I was a kid. They’d carried him off the diamond and I’d cried because I thought he was dead. But he’d come back to play again.

There seems to be a moral there, Fannin, if you’ve got sufficient wit to find it.

I was staring at a bathtub. I got the faucets turned for the shower, and then I squirmed over the side, flopping. That was ridiculous too. Let’s go, Ishmael, on your feet. The white whale was still on my shoulders so 1 hoisted him also, clinging to a towel rack.

I remembered the revolver Klobb had returned. And my wallet, with all those engraved pictures that ought to have been of Marilyn. I fished them out of my clothes and dropped them onto a mat. My ribs felt as if they were removable also, but I didn’t experiment.

The roof of the john was glass, like the rest of the structure. Jolly. Nothing like a shower under the stars at five in the morning, especially in your best suit.

I sat down on the edge of the tub to let myself drain, like Katharine Hepburn after she fell into the pool in Philadelphia Story. Did Katharine Hepburn fall into a pool in Philadelphia Story? She should have, if she didn’t. It was the first enjoyable vision Td had since Dana dropped that towel.

I limped back into the other room, making squooshing sounds. A big place, a sloppy place, hardly anything to lean on at all. Paintings on stretchers, paints, rolls of canvas, cans of oil, drafting tools, brushes, filthy rags — and what I was looking for on a chest in a corner. A half-full bottle of gin. Sweet, medicinal, London dry gin. Id have my cup of kindness yet.

The bottle wasn’t any harder to lift than an anvil. Could Ducky Medwick have lifted it? Certainly Medwick could have lifted it. Here’s to Medwick.

There was something on a wall near me that might have been a mirror. If it wasn’t a mirror it was a portrait of someone who’d been buried at sea. Whichever it was, I hoped they didn’t let in children who weren’t accompanied by adults.

It was I, ah sadness, it was I — battered as a bull fiddle, bruised as a fig. There was still a trickle of blood from the deepest tear, where the recoil reducer on the Beretta had taken me. To think I’d given them back that magazine, or she wouldn’t have been carrying it — this the unkindest cut of all. My cheeks were raw and swelling. I took another drink, a sorrowful drink, this time for Pistol Pete Reiser of the old Dodgers, who used to run head-first into concrete outfield walls.

There was alcohol in the John, and I bathed the gashes. They would have heard me in the Bronx if I’d had any sensation above my neck. I found gauze and patched the worst of the mess.

I could work my jaws. Maybe Pete Peters was right about that religious awakening in the air — maybe it was a time for miracles, maybe nothing was broken.

Maybe it was time for another drink. Was it? Of course it was. There was nothing else up there for me anyhow, except misery. To Ted Williams, who cracks bones and spits in the face of adversity.

I retrieved my wallet and the Magnum. I put them away, then reached a cigarette out of my shirt. It fell apart in my hands. I could have used a cigarette. Ah, well. I had a nip for Nile Kin-nick of Iowa, a fine halfback who’d crashed in the war.

I wondered what Klobb would do about his showing next week. I cared. I had a drink for Leslie Howard, who’d also crashed, and for General Gordon whose head got hung on a spear. Poor Leslie Howard. I had one for Billie Holliday. They were small drinks but the feeling was what counted. I had a smaller one for Gunga Din, who was a better man than I was, which was decidedly not much of an achievement. I had half of one for Oliver Hazard Perry, just because I liked the name, and then I had the other half for Dred Scott. There were about six drinks left when I heard the noise.

I was near the studio door and I breast-stroked behind it. I could just see across to the roof doorway through the crack.

The door had been pushed toward me. A shadow hesitated along the wall. Maybe it was the Shadow. Who knew? The Shadow knows — heh, heh, heh. The weed of crime bears… or maybe it was someone from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I took one more quick one for Lamont Cranston, just in case.

Never mind the stupid bottle, you cluck, a voice said. Don’t you think maybe it’s about timeyou got the jump on somebody? You’ve been bopped by a Beatnik, cuflFed by a cop, pounded by a pander….

I took the hint. No need to tell Mrs. Fannin’s boy Harry anything a second time, no sir. I reached into my holster.

My son the detective. I’d put my wallet in the holster. I found the gun in the pocket where I keep my wallet on days when I wake up knowing my name.

The shadow advanced an inch or two. I tilted the revolver downward. Water dripped out of the barrel onto my shoe.

I supposed I could always throw it. Although I’d hand-loaded the cartridges myself, a little dampness was not going to make them defective. Never. Nothing defective about this detective. I suppressed a giggle.

But they were still well-sealed cartridges. Cartridges? Hmmm. I broke open the cylinder. Well — sincere old Ivan, he’d really meant for me to shoot myself.

There was still no activity over there. I was crouching now, like Pat Garrett in that room in Fort Sumner in 1881, waiting to lay out poor Billy the Kid. From 1881 to now was seventy-nine years. Billy the Kid had been twenty-one. If he were still alive he would be exactly one hundred years old. I hoped it was Billy the Kid. Most likely he would be sort of sickly, too.

The shadow finally spoke. Just a cautious whisper. “Ivan?”

I let him wait. I had a snort for Joe DiMaggio, the real one.

“You in there, Ivan?”

“Hrlggr,” I said clearly.

Ephraim. Old son of a gun Ephraim, Bard of Beatville. The seersucker Swinburne. He stepped across the sill timidly, paused, then came toward the studio. On little cat feet, like Sandburg’s fog, and as quiet as a Robert Frost snowfall. There was nothing lethal in his hands. No gun, no switchblade. Not even an Oscar Williams Treasury of Mongolian Verse.

“Ivan?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Geoffirey Chaucer.”

“It’s—?”

He drew up short, halfway over. For a minute he wavered on his toes, like a kid caught at the cookie jar. Like an architect of epic odes, espying the esmoked oysters. Oysters were animals, not fish. I hoped they weren’t neurotic about it.

“Het your gands up,” I said.

“Huh?”

I stepped out and waved the gat at him, snarling like the desperate character I was. Dauntless Fannin, ominous as a crocheted doily.

“My God, what happened to—?”

“Ha! Don t ask,” I said. I’ve been suffering, young Turk. Little does the crass world know. Anguish, agony — just wait until I get it written. It’s going to be the greatest spiritual exercise since Peyton Place. I’ve even had visions, all sorts of people I haven’t thought of in — say, listen, do you have any idea whatever happened to Wallace Beery? It just struck me that I haven’t seen him since—”

“What?”

He was shaking his head, frowning at the bottle. “Take a belt,” I told him. “We’ll drink to Sacco and Vanzetti.”

He didn’t want one. Very slowly he started to back away from me. I took a step after him. I stopped abruptly when my ribs took a step in the opposite direction.

“Don’t leave, like,” I told him. “Let’s have a sermon or something.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you, Fannin.”

“Sure you do. We’ll parse sentences together. Do a textual exigesis of The Cantos of Jayne Mansfield. We’ll talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, make dust our paper and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the — hold it right there.”

“You’re flipped, you know that? You better get to a doctor.”

He kept on backing off, a small, homely man, confused and frightened. So why didn’t he stop when I waved the revolver?

“This is a Colt Three-Fifty-Seven, Ephraim. A Magnum. You know what a Magnum is? It could splatter your frail brains from here to Xanadu, cut you off before you finish your first sonnet sequence. Think of it, The Efforts of Ephraim, left undone—”

“I didn’t kill them, Fannin. You know that—”

“Maybe. What the hell — not maybe, let’s say probably. But we still have portentous matters to discuss—”

“Say, I’m serious about a doctor. You look terrible.”

“I do not love thee, Doctor Fell — the reason why, I cannot tell.” I laughed senselessly, cocking back the hammer on the gun. “Enough of idle literacy, Ezra. Leave us converse.”

“You won’t shoot me, Fannin.”

“Won’t I? Ha! I shoot poets just for practice. Bing — smack in the middle of the iambic pentameter—”

He stepped over the sill.

“Damn it,” I said.

“People don’t kill other people,” he said.

“Sure they don’t. How many of your ex-girlfriends are dead who were reading Dylan Thomas within the week? Listen, they shot Gandhi, didn’t they? They shot Draja Mikhailovitch and Private Prewitt. They even shot Eddie Waitkus — you remember, that first baseman—”

“People are good, Fannin. People have beautiful souls.”

“Come back here, Ephraim.”

“You won’t shoot.”

“Come back,” I said. The door closed. I started to laugh again, like a maniac. “Shane,” I said. “Come back, Shane—”

I had one last fast one for Brandon deWilde before I followed him.

CHAPTER 26

I didn’t run. The stairway was treacherous enough without my showing off. My chest was burning. When I reached the sidewalk a lamppost fell against my shoulder so I held it up for a minute, listening to it wheeze.

There was something under my feet at the curb. An abandoned canvas deck chair. If the fire in my ribs spread, I could be the boy who stood on the burning deck chair.

Ephraim was a block away, trotting toward Seventh Avenue. I made it across to the Chevy.

Was I in shape to handle a car? Don’t bother me with foolish questions when I’m driving. Clutch in, brake off, starter down and we’re rolling. Rolling? Hmmm…

I put the key in the ignition.

Come on, Ahab, get those lifeboats over the side, eh? I swung out sharply, reversed, then made a U-turn that put me facing the wrong way in a one-way street. Signs, signs, everyplace signs. But what did they mean in a spiritual sense, what did they say about man’s true estate? Anyway there wasn’t any traffic.

I saw him cut across Seventh on an angle, turning north. I tooled up there and then slowed again, nosing just far enough into the intersection to get a look. Peek-a-boo. Ha! He was a hundred yards off, turning east again.

I waited a few seconds and then followed him, cruising in low gear with no lights. He glanced across his shoulder once or twice, but only along the sidewalk. Old Ahab, I’d forgotten to drink to his hollow leg. My own wasn’t hollow, but some things would have to wait.

I pulled up at each crossing, idling for as long as I could see that barley hair bouncing above the parked cars, then moving ahead. He made several turns, keeping to back streets except to cross Sixth, working steadily north and east. He had slowed to a walk.

When he hit Macdougal he cut south again. And then I lost him.

I gunned up fast. His head had been clearly visible and now it wasn’t. I stopped, listening.

He’d evaporated like Marley’s ghost.

Marley? Oh, sure, Marley was dead, dead as a doornail. A cliché, or had Dickens invented it? You’re not that potted, Fannin. Poets don’t just vanish.

Up? There were stairways rising to first floors, but the doors were all above the level of the cars. Not up.

Down? Hmmm, down. More stairs, leading into basements and storage cellars. Almost every one of the entrances was blocked by a chain. One of them was swinging slightly, almost imperceptibly. Come back, chain.

Was that sleuthing or wasn’t it?

You down there, Jacob Marley? Don’t try to kid me, Jacob. Not your old partner, not Ebenezer Scrooge.

Darkness. There would not be more than five or six steps, but I could not see the last of them. Hungry aardvarks might have been prowling in a pit at the bottom, wooly bears, boll weevils.

Did it frighten me? Nothing frightened me. People were good, people had beautiful souls. My baby-faced Byron had told me so. My bow-legged Baudelaire. I took out the gun I wasn’t going to shoot any beautiful souls with.

I bent myself under the chain. My shoes squeaked.

Five steps, and then a flat concrete landing. A wooden door swung inward at the barest touch.

The mouth of an alley, very much like the one which had led to McGruder’s. Darkness here also, but not absolute darkness. Back at the right an oblong shaft of light, spilling out of a window at ground level. A high brick facade unbroken along the left. Silence.

Marley? Bob Cratchit? Tiny Tim?

Humbug.

I went down on a wet knee at the window, bracing one arm against my ribs. Miss Fannin’s gowns by Davy Jones, special effects by Oliver Constantine. The miseries of the hero in no way reflect the interests of the sponsor. The window was the type that hinges inward. It was propped open by a paperback book.

Dr. Zhivago? Dr. Spock? Wrong as always. Not even The Metaphysical Speculations of Tuesday Weld. Something called Walk the Sacred Mountains, by one Peter J. Peters. There was an L.P.. record on the ledge beneath it, a session by Thelonious Monk.

I looked in. A small room, a bulb inverted from a cord in the ceiling. A black ceiling. Black, Ebenezer? Certainly black, saves on cleaning costs. Black walls also.

There was a cot opposite me, draped in a bleached sheet which hung to the floor. The only other inanimate object in there was a fluffy, snow-white rug, with two men and a woman sitting on it.

They were sitting cross-legged, like Burmese idols. The woman was a spindling, horsey blonde I might have noticed at the party. One of the men I didn’t know. The other was Don McGruder.

Dashing Don McGruder, mournful footnote from a psychiatrist’s case book. Whatever the diagnosis was, it was catching. This time the other two didn’t have any clothes on either.

God bless us, every one. For this I’d struggled out of a sickbed. But maybe I’d write a book now myself. By H. Fannin-Ebing.

There was an oriental water pipe in the middle of the rug, and they were passing its stem from mouth to mouth. I watched the blonde suck in smoke, then hold her breath. She had a bosom like a mine disaster. Even through the window the sweet stench of the marijuana was overpowering.

“They don’t comprehend,” the girl said. She slurred the words. “‘Get married, Phyllis’—that’s all I hear. What a drag. I love them, I really do, but they don’t dig me, you know? They just weren’t with it at all when I asked for the money for the abortion—”

“This isn’t swinging me tonight,” McGruder said. “It simply isn’t. I’m not high in the least.”

“Recite us some Kerouac then, Donnie. You do him so passionately. The part where he talks about how they make love in the temples of the East—”

“If you really want me to—”

She wanted him to. By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy to the sea, there’s a Beatnik girl a-settin’, and she’s gettin’ high on tea. I was sorry I couldn’t stay, but I had a previous appointment.

I had an appointment with Fagin. We were going to teach a few middle-class youngsters some of the nicer subtleties of felonious assault.

I wondered if they would have a jazz band at that monastery when I got there. If I stole the instruments, would that make me a felonious monk?

There was a turn farther back as I’d anticipated, but at the rear of the building I was in total darkness again. I found a door frame by touch. The door was open.

A hallway. Fifteen or twenty feet inside I saw a tiny wedge of light which would be the room I’d been watching. There could have been other doors in there.

I hesitated a minute, feeling dizzy. I couldn’t hear them from across in that room. I pulled back the hammer on the revolver, making noise with it, then uncocked it again soundlessly.

“Ephraim?” I said softly. “That’s that Magnum, Ephraim.”

The place was as quiet as an unlit cigarette.

“I’m the ghost of Christmas yet to be, Ephraim. Speak to me, lad, unless you don’t want to find anything in your stocking except worms and the bones of your feet.”

“Damn your black heart, Fannin,” he said.

There was a swishing sound after the words. Something flexible and hollow struck me behind the ear, not hard, and I danced away from it. That was fine, except that the abrupt movement sent a new pain through my chest, like tape ripping. I doubled up gasping and the thing hit me again.

It was nothing, maybe a length of rubber hose. On a normal working day I could have caught it between my teeth and chewed it into pieces. I hadn’t had a normal day since they’d fired on Barbara Frietchie. Waves of murky nausea washed over me and I stumbled against a wall.

“Shoot,” he said then. “Go ahead, shoot me—”

His voice was choked and theatrical. For a minute I had the batty notion that he was going to start reciting also, like McGruder. Then I thought I heard him, I could have sworn.

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag,” he said

Dementia, absolute dementia. He was sprinting, going away.

I let him run. I’d had it. I wasn’t even ashamed.

I dragged myself out of there like a feeble old man whose favorite walking cane was sprouting leaves under the backyard porch, just out of reach. Come back, cane.

Sick, sick. I didn’t stop to see how the literary tea was progressing, but I was perverse enough to slip the Peters novel off the ledge. Phyllis would find a husband one day, she’d be a steady fourth for bridge at the country club, a pillar. Me, I had gum on my sole.

It was almost an ultimate satirical indignity. The groaning gumshoe. There was a scrap of paper stuck there also.

It was a photo of a matronly, heavily made-up woman, torn from what looked like an inquiring photographer’s column. The woman had practically fractured her jaw for the camera, getting it lifted to erase the lines in her neck. Next to the picture it said:

Mrs. Burner van Leason Fyfe, Cotillion chairman: “Of course there’s still society in America. There just has to be. Why, what meaning would anything have without it?”

CHAPTER 27

There was a loose page in the Peters book. I stared at it without interest, leaning against a fender:

… digging it with Bennie and Jojo and those wild chicks (one of them an Arab, she had eyes like smothered stars) in the backseat of that broken down Chrysler Bennie had driven to Tampico and back and sold for forty dollars in San Diego and spent the money on a two-week fix and then swiped it back again, and all night long Jojo talking about the Mahayana transcendence of our friend Wimpy, the poet who did not wash except on the coming of the new moon and who was the new culture hero of our time and who once said: 7 dig Brahman and I dig The Bird but I do not dig housewives,” which became a creed: and all the while (younger then and my jeans too tight; I’d borrowed them from a tranquil Taoist midget Td met reading Lincoln Steffens in a public urinal in Times Square — ah, holy times, holy square!) pressing my hand against the knee of that swinging angel Arab lass and not minding the blood where I tore my skin against a broken spring in the seat, oh how I suffered, telling myself as soon as I make it with this chick I will hop a freight and very religiously ride the rails to Albuquerque to tell Herman (butfirst some detail here about Herman, a raw maniac hipster kid who…

That was all I needed. I wadded up the page and tossed it in the general direction of a passing cat, then let myself ooze wetly behind the wheel of the Chevy. I’d leaked water on the floorboards, coming over. I supposed it wasn’t any worse a crime than leaking prose.

I wasn’t sure I could make it uptown. Or maybe I just wanted recognition for all my successful missions. I drove back to Fern’s.

It was almost six, and it got light in the few minutes I was in the car. I leaned against the bell, feeling rotten about waking her. After a minute I heard a window being lifted. I went down a few steps, letting her get a look at me.

“It’s Harry, Fern—”

“Harry, what—?”

She disappeared inside, and a second later the catch released. I hauled myself up the one carpeted flight.

She was in the apartment doorway, wearing that short blue jacket again. Her hair was tousled, and light from the stairwell gleamed on her naked lovely legs. Her face slackened when she saw my own. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Harry—”

“Don’t take me out, coach.”

She extended a hand, but it didn’t look strong enough to support me. I gave her what I could spare of a smile, then went across to one of the leather sling chairs where my damp seat wouldn’t do any harm.

I sat for a minute with both arms crossed against my stomach, hearing the door close. When I raised my head she was kneeling in front of me.

Her fingers traced across my forehead, near the patch of gauze. “It couldn’t have been just Ivan—?”

“He led the cheering section.”

“You look worse than Dana did. Does it hurt badly?”

“Only when I laugh.”

“Oh, stop joking, it isn’t something to—”

“I’m okay, Fern. I shouldn’t have come. You’ve had enough for one night.”

“You can quit that also.” She had gotten up, considering me somberly.

“Have I ever told you how beautiful you are?” I asked her.

“Have I ever told you you’re a little crazy? Yes, I think I did, the other night. There’s coffee, Harry. I made some for Dana before, all I have to do is heat it—”

“Coffee would be swell.”

She shook her head, then went into the kitchen. I worked myself out of the soggy jacket. Bloomingdale’s better grade, eighty-seven bucks for the suit and I still owed them forty. Maybe the old Armenian tailor on my corner could salvage it. He was half blind from reading William Saroyan in the glare of his window all day, and he couldn’t sew a straight seam, but his Negro presser was fair. The Negro read Karen Horney and Erich Fromm.

“It won’t be a minute,” Fern said from the doorway. “Listen, Harry, why don’t—” She glanced toward the closed door to the second bedroom. “Good heavens, I’m not going to be coy. Dana will be asleep for hours with those pills. Get yourself inside and get undressed. There’s a big quilted robe in the closet if you want a hot shower—” She smiled. “Or is that what you tried to take already? Maybe you ought to just jump right into bed, you big oaf. I’ll bring the coffee.”

I grinned at her. “If you touch me, I’ll scream.”

“Go on, now.”

I left my jacket across one of the wings of the chair. A lamp on her bed table was burning, and the covers were flung aside. I gave my tie a yank, then growled at myself in a mirror over a dressing table. The wet knot was as tight as a wet knot.

There was a day-old Times in a magazine rack, and I spread it across the small bench before I sat. Maybe the raw-honed private cop would have more luck with his shoelaces. Not tonight, Napoleon. I bent forward about halfway, which was enough to make me dizzy again. Concussion, sure as shooting.

My elbow had nudged a book on the table. It was lying reverse side up. Fern’s picture was on the glossy jacket.

“Advance copy,” she said. She had come in carrying an enormous steaming white mug. “First one off the presses.”

“I never met a famous author before.”

She wrinkled her forehead, peering across her shoulder. “Who dat? Where he at?”

She looked wind-blown in the photo. The novel was called Go Home, Little Children. A sticker on the cover said that it was a book club selection.

She put the coffee near me. “Drink it before it gets cold. I thought I told you to get out of those wet things—”

“I would of, ma’am. ‘Cepting I need a scissors for my tie.”

“Oh, here, let me—”

She leaned down, working at it, and then stepped back and gave me an exaggerated scowl. “Maybe we’ll need a scissors at that. Or a—” She drew in her breath. “Oh, damn me anyhow, I was almost going to make a joke about a knife, when poor Audrey—”

She pressed a hand across her mouth, looking away. I reached out and pulled her toward me. She came yieldingly, going to her knees again, and my hands slipped beneath that jacket. Her head fell against my chest.

She was not wearing anything under there. The soft flesh of her shoulders was still bed warm. I held her.

“It’s as if it won’t end,” she said. “Three people dead. Dana’s right, things get so terrible sometimes—”

Her face lifted. For a moment I didn’t move. I didn’t even breathe. The muscles in my jaw had gone tight, and something began to twist inside of me — into a hot sickening node, like fear or like horror.

It wasn’t fear. The book thudded to the floor as I got to my feet.

“Three,” I said. “Three people dead—”

“Well, yes, aren’t—?”

“You couldn’t have known about the third, Fern, unless—”

“What—?”

She was still on her knees. Highlights glinted in her silken hair. Her face was as delicately etched as a dream that only time itself was ever going to exorcise.

“Why?” I said. “Dear God, Fern — why did you kill them?”

CHAPTER 28

She got to her feet. Her face had no more color than dispersing smoke. “Are you mad—?”

“Am I? Maybe I am, because I can’t conceive of any reason. Why, Fern—?”

I had taken a step forward. My shoe touched something and I glanced down. Go Home, Little Children. A Novel by Fern Hoerner. I stared at it like a man looking down from the rim of an abyss. By Fern Hoerner.

I saw it then, as clearly as fanatics see hell. I had to brace myself against the dressing table. “By Lucien Vaulking,’’ my mouth said.

“What—?”

“Your husband, the writer who supposedly didn’t write— that was his name, wasn’t it? It has to be. There’s no other answer, none—”

She didn’t speak. Her eyes were wide.

“The author who died without leaving the novel everyone expected him to leave. You didn’t write the book, did you, Fern? Lucien Vaulking did, and somehow you got hold of the manuscript. A manuscript you knew at a glance would sell to Hollywood for big money, since you were in the business. You—”

I had the rest of it. But I had to push the words up out of my throat like uncomprehending draftees out of a slit trench. “Josie and Audrey,” I said. “The same two girls Vaulking had been seeing before he died. They must have found out — recognized the book — and threatened to expose you. Which has to mean that Audrey Grant’s father was killed for no other reason than—”

“You are mad,” she hissed. She let herself drop to the bed. “You have to be — utterly.”

I groped for the cigarettes I didn’t have. “Someone is, Fern. Someone who could kill those two girls to cover a theft, and then take a third life for no other reason than to throw suspicion in a different direction. Someone absolutely wanton, ruthless—”

“I—” Her hand moved, and light flashed on the patch of adhesive on her wrist. I sank to the bench.

“Christ. Someone who could even pretend to such terrible anguish that she would deliberately mutilate herself with a burning cigarette. All the acting you’ve done, every minute, so that I thought you were the only normal human being in this whole crew of psychopaths. My God, how sick you must be—”

Something changed in her face. Her lips parted, and then, incredibly, every trace of shock was gone from her expression. She dropped back onto one elbow, as casually indulgent as if Td started to tell a joke she’d heard a dozen times before. “All this because I said three people were dead, which I shouldn’t have known. You will go on?”

The unreality of the pose struck me like a blow. I stared at her. I didn’t know whether I was physically ill or whether the whole thing had hit me too hard in a place I’d set myself up to be hurt, but I felt dazed. Three of them, over a manuscript, a novel. I had to force myself to realize how much money was involved. I was sweating from every pore.

“You would have been familiar with the background,” I managed. “Josie would not have told many people about her illegitimacy, but her roommate would have known. You would have heard about Grant’s wealth also, and you obviously knew about Ephraim’s marriage—”

“I can admit all of that. And I was married to Lucien — it was never any secret. None of this means a thing.”

I shook my head, thinking it out. “Blackmail,” I said. “Josie and Audrey. Everything I’ve heard about the pair of them indicates they were capable of it. Not ordinary Village kids, but call girls, both of them bitter, opportunistic. Sure. They must have had proof that the book was Vaulking’s. They told Oliver Constantine they were coming into money, and the logical assumption was that they meant Grant’s — except that finally it didn’t make any sense, not with the girls dead themselves. But they meant your money — from the movie sale, the book club. They couldn’t very well admit to Constantine that they were leaving one dirty racket because they’d found an easier one, going from one rotten way of life to another, so they made up an excuse about an inheritance — probably the first idea that came to mind. So a story they contrived in all innocence helped you lead the police in the wrong direction—”

She said nothing, watching me. “Not that you needed the help,” I went on, “since you’d already established a connection between Grant and his heirs by sending those clippings. Or no, you threw in that telegram also, didn’t you? Just in case Ephraim didn’t work out as a patsy, an investigation of Constantine would lead to Ivan Klobb. So he’d be the one the cops would have thought had been blackmailed—”

I let it trail off, feeling unsteady again. “Is this all?” she said.

I nodded. “Although some small items begin to fit now also. Like the twenty-two you said you got as a gift. Vaulking was a marksman. It isn’t important, but it’s a good bet he was the one who gave you the gun — which you planted at Ephraim’s when you were supposed to be at that revival of Casablanca. You didn’t go to the picture, Fern. After we made our statements that night, standing by the car — I said, ‘Play it again, Sam/ It’s ten years since I saw the film, and I don’t even know if Bogart uses the line more than once, but I still remember it. You didn’t react. At the time I chalked it up to your being upset. And sure, one other triviality. Tonight at the party — why was I there? You didn’t ask. You knew the minute you saw me — that Grant had contacted me because of my name being in the paper. I suppose you did have a minute of panic Tuesday when you found out the sucker you’d picked to hold your hand was a private cop. Jesus, I can just see it. If I hadn’t poked my face into that bedroom you would have found a pretense to look in yourself, of course, but what was next on the schedule? A coquettish little scream, a demure faint—?”

There was a minute. “I hope you’re going to notice just a few of the flaws in all this,” she said then. “Audrey and Josie were blackmailing me. And yet Audrey didn’t suspect me in the least when Josie was killed.”

“She did suspect you — tonight, when she saw that Ephraim was out. The gun in his apartment fooled her first, sure, like it fooled the cops. But she got scared the minute she spotted him at McGruder’s. She knew the police didn’t have anything on him. Then you knifed her about three minutes later—”

I had leaned against the table, and my ribs contracted sharply. “I suppose you would have killed her sooner,” I said, “if she hadn’t run off with Peters for the few days. But you were probably fairly sure they’d show up at the party. What weapon did you have for that one, Fern — I mean before you picked up the knife? The same gun you shot Grant with earlier?”

She ignored the question, toying with the top button of her jacket. I could have made more sense out of her reaction if she’d shaved her head and danced on a chandelier. “I killed Ulysses Grant to make Ephraim’s inheritance look like a motive,” she said. “But suppose Ephraim hadn’t gotten out of jail before tonight’s deaths — who would be the murderer then?”

“The cops thought of that. Thirteen million would buy a lot of partner — they would have worked like hell to bring Peters into it.”

She wet her lips. “And you’ve concluded all of this on the basis of something I said which I wasn’t supposed to know. Suppose Dana had made the same slip — could you have built a case against her the same way?”

I must have been staring at her stupidly. “Damn it, Fern, what kind of dumb irrelevancy is that? You made the slip, not Dana. It’s going to send you up for life at the least — can’t you comprehend the fact?”

“Is it? What a shame — just when we were beginning to get along with each other, too.” She came off the bed. I hadn’t believed she could do anything with her face which might distort its beauty, but her lips twisted into a snarl that was more than ugly. “So I couldn’t have known about the third killing,” she said.

I didn’t answer her, but only because the dizziness came back. I had to shut my eyes, fighting a sudden mounting nausea.

“I couldn’t have known,” she repeated. “Well, maybe you ought to ask Pete Peters if I couldn’t have, mister. Or wake Dana — she was here when we heard.”

My head was swimming. “Heard—?”

“Yes, heard. Pete called here, damn you, just a minute before you came down — after you’d dropped him off. He brought up the third killing — which you’d just told him about.”

I forced myself off the bench. The room was murky as a steambath, and I could hardly hear her. “My lover man. I think you better scram, Fannin, before I really do get sore—”

I reached toward her, but I grabbed only mist. I hit the open door with a shoulder, stumbling, before blackness swirled over me like a shroud.

CHAPTER 29

I was back in the magic time machine again. I was a small boy in a white bed in an antiseptic hospital room. I lay with my head buried against an arm, spurning the complicated, pernicious adult world about me.

“Little Harry is just shy,” a voice said. “There’s someone to visit you, Harry, come to cheer you up. It’s that baseball player whose photo you’v tacked on the wall. It’s Mr. Medwick.”

“Ducky Medwick?” I said. “Ducky — is it really you? Will you hit a home run for me today? Will you hit one off Carl Hubbell?”

But Hubbell wasn’t pitching. Someone named Bowman was. Bowman? I remembered too late. Medwick was already at the plate and the ball was rocketing toward him, faster than I could see. My heart stopped in anticipation of the hideous, ringing carom. When I dared to look again the great idol of all my boyhood lay pinioned on his back with his arms outstretched, like a man crucified to earth. He didn’t move, he didn’t move at all.

The machine went out of focus, and a nurse was hovering near me. “No,” I cried, “never mind me, take care of Ducky first—” She was a beautiful nurse, although I was seeing her through a smog. Her hair was the color of golden silk.

“You did it,” I told her.

“You still think so. In spite of my so-called slip not being a slip at all. You poor tenacious sap.”

“I saw you,” I said.

“What?”

“You beaned him. You beaned the only man who ever led the National League three consecutive times in runs-batted-in.”

“More delirium—”

“Shoot,” I said. “Shoot if you must.”

“Poor Harry. What are you jabbering about?”

Who knew? I thought it might help if I got my eyes open, but it didn’t. All I could see was bedroom floor. My entire body was drenched with perspiration. I was weak as a watered cobweb.

A hand pushed something under my nose. “Here — see if you can drink the coffee before it gets cold.”

I tried to lift myself. I couldn’t.

“Drink it, Harry.”

“Drink it yourself. Drown in it.”

“Oh, now don’t tell me you re angry? At little old me?” She tittered. “Just because I upset all your clever deductions? Would it make you feel better if I confessed, Harry? I think perhaps I will. It might be fun to talk about it.”

She thought perhaps she’d confess. Because it might be fun. Somebody in that room was as batty as Lady Macbeth, but I didn’t have time to figure who. I was too preoccupied with the blur in front of my face. Out, damned spot.

“You’re right about it being Lucien’s book, of course. Shall I tell you the details, Harry?”

I shuddered. Audio-hallucination, without doubt. Maybe if I concentrated hard enough on something it would all go away.

Famous dates. 1066, the Battle of Hastings. 1215, the Magna Carta. 1649, Charles the First lost his head. If you can keep your head when all those about you are losing theirs…

“—He’d fiddled with the manuscript for five years. That son of a bitch, treating me like dirt, running around with tramps who weren’t worth my little finger — but that’s beside the point. The book is good, all right. He always liked to get my judgment on things — he thought I had a fair ear, and I was also familiar with what he was trying to bring off He gave me the final handwritten draft to read on a Thursday, and the next night he died. Showing off at a party, doing chin-ups to impress a couple of simpering girls as if he’d been fourteen instead of forty. Nobody knew I had the script—”

— 1620, the Pilgrims. 1773, the Boston Tea Party. Tea? 1588, Spanish Armada…

“—Josie and Audrey were the only two I was worried about. He never let anyone see anything that wasn’t finished, but he’d been playing his he-man games with the pair of them for six months or so, and there was a chance they might have gotten a look. Audrey was over here one day after I had galley proofs and I left the first sheet in the living room deliberately, as a test. She did recognize it, and of course she told Josie. Josie herself wouldn’t have recognized The Scarlet Letter if her name was Hester. Audrey said that she had three pages of manuscript in Lucien’s handwriting hidden away — part of an earlier draft he’d given her as a souvenir. They told me they wanted ninety percent of everything I made.”

I forced my head up then. She was sitting with her legs crossed. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were gleaming, not looking at me. She wasn’t Mrs. Macbeth, but that didn’t keep the thing from being creepy. She was talking almost mechanically.

“They made it so absurdly easy. They told me they had the three sheets in a safe-deposit box.” She grunted. “I found them in Josie’s closet Tuesday afternoon. They’d put them in the obvious place, thinking I’d never look. Like all stupid people they thought everyone else was stupid too. A hundred thousand dollars from Hollywood alone, not to mention the reputation that goes with it, and they thought I’d crawl, let them hold the lie over my head for as long as they lived. Fools—”

She wasn’t conscious of me at all now. I could feel the Magnum on my hip when I shifted my weight. Her hands were in her lap, empty. That made things even weirder.

“You weren’t quite sure why Audrey didn’t suspect me when Josie died. She did, of course, although she couldn’t be sure until she learned if I’d located the three pages. So she ‘dropped in’ yesterday. She brought Pete with her, although he had no idea what was going on. I knew damned well she wanted a look at that closet, so I let her have one. I made a pretense about needing something from the drugstore, and even asked Pete to walk me down so she could be alone in the place. Except by then I’d substituted three pages on matching paper in my own handwriting — close to Lucien’s but unquestionably mine. I didn’t know exactly when or where to kill her yet, you understand. She stole the pages — meaning she didn’t notice the substitution. They’ll most likely turn up in her apartment — absolutely meaningless. That was enough to convince her that I wasn’t involved. I did have some luck with the timing on some things, but then everything was in my favor to start with — the degenerate way these people live, all the sordid relationships, Ephraim and his mockery of a marriage — God, how weary I’d gotten of all that. But I’m out of it now, you see. I’ll be somebody — a rich somebody.”

“With a number over your breast pocket,” I said. “You’ll be able to buy cigarettes and soap for everybody else in death row.”

“Well, the man is recovering.” She came back from wherever she’d been. “He’s his ironic old self again. How droll.”

I used all my hands on the bed, getting to my knees. She watched me indifferently. After a minute she smiled.

“You’re not really one of the stupid ones, Fannin — you’re just stubborn. Why do you think I’ve told you all of this? You’ll go to the police, of course—”

I didn’t answer, busy breathing.

“You will, all right. It’s really quite amusing — except for one thing.”

“I know,” I said. “But you tell me anyhow.”

“You’re dopey. You staggered up here looking like somebody Noah left off the passenger list, and you collapsed on my floor. Tell them I did it. You won’t even be able to explain what gave you the idea to start with, it’s based on such a false premise.” She laughed, rising gracefully in a little half-pirouette. Then she cocked an eyebrow toward the bed. “There truly isn’t any point in rushing about it, you know. I’ve got a hunch your immediate future would be considerably less frustrating if you spent it sleeping. Shucks, I might even fondle you where it hurts.”

I made it the rest of the way up, staring at her. I was gritting my teeth so hard I could hear them. “Three,” I said. “One a man nearly blind you didn’t even know.”

“Two cheap whores and a filthy, odorous wretch who tried to put his hands on me when I walked in claiming to be a friend of Audrey’s. An overwhelming loss to the world.”

“You found the three sheets and killed the girls anyhow, because even without the proof they could still talk and cause doubt. You killed Grant only to cover your trail. Why did you bother? Why, if you were going to tell me all of this?”

“Oh, but I hadn’t intended to tell you anything, you see. This was just impulse—”

“Just—” I swallowed. “My God, I thought people like Ephraim and Peters were in bad shape. Harmless phonies who simply haven’t outgrown their adolescence. But you—”

“What about me, Harry? You were getting stuck on me, to tell the truth, weren’t you? Say that you weren’t, especially after Tuesday night. When I wept on your manly chest, Harry— remember when I cried?”

“I’ll get over it, Fern. “I’ll spend a night in a cesspool.”

“Heck, that’s a pretty flimsy parting line. Too bad you’re not one of those Mickey Spillane detectives — you could shoot me in the belly and be done with it. But that would be murder, wouldn’t it? I mean, since after all, you can’t prove a thing.”

She laughed again, slipping the robe off her shoulders. She glided to the bed, naked as a reptile. “You will excuse me then, but I do have to get my rest — a girl ought to look her best for the reporters. Yes, my little confession — just an impulse, but what a brilliant one. I wonder how many copies it will sell — a million, do you think? Surely, at least a million.”

The light snapped off, and I heard sheets rustling, with sounds like nuts being shelled. “Drop in again, why don’t you — sometime when you’re feeling a little more friendly. I might even autograph a copy for you—’To helpless Harry, who had no proof.’”

I did shoot her—through her twisted, malevolent brain, with every bullet in the Magnum, savoring each separate recoil as it jarred my arm to the shoulder — but only in my imagination, only in my imagination.

“Good night, lover,” she said.

CHAPTER 30

There was a Benzedrine inhaler in the bathroom. I crushed the gummy substance out of the tube with my heel, then chewed on the stuff as long as I could stand the taste. Dana was torpid from the barbiturates, and I had all the capacity for exertion of an anemic amoeba, but I wasn’t going to leave her in that apartment.

It took a glass of water in her face to get her into a sitting position, and she kept mumbling something incoherent about San Francisco while I yanked the red sheath over her head. We went down into the street like walking wounded, but nobody asked us how the rest of our boys were doing at the front. She was out cold again the minute she hit the car.

I double-parked and left her for the five minutes it took to get some response from Joey Pringle, a hophead musician who lived on the third floor of my building. Between the pair of us we carted her up the one flight. Pringle didn’t ask what was going on either, but only because at 7 A.M. he’d be operating on two hours’ sleep at best, all of it induced intravenously.

I showered, worked myself into fresh clothes, then reheated yesterday’s coffee and forced down two cups. After that I got Dana stripped again and between the sheets. I did it with all the jaded worldliness of an aging gynecologist. I made the precinct house just as Lieutenant Vasella was finishing his night’s tour.

If I sounded as inane to him as I did to myself, he didn’t show it. It took the two patrolmen still posted at Audrey Grant’s apartment exactly sixteen minutes to locate the three manuscript pages under the base of a lamp. Their existence proved nothing about Fern’s guilt, but at least suggested that my story wasn’t sheer fantasy. The downtown lab had no sizable samples of either Fern’s or Lucien Vaulking’s handwriting with which to compare them, but within thirty minutes more Vasella was informed that the writing had been done long after Vaulking’s death, in fact most likely within the last seventy-two hours.

A car was dispatched to my office with instructions for finding my Grant file under S, like in General Sherman, which I actually should have been asked to turn over earlier. Central Identification had Fern’s prints on record, because of secretarial work she had once done for an insurance firm which registered all employees, but we learned quickly that they matched none of those on the newspaper clippings or the envelope in which Grant had received them. What prints there were belonged to Grant himself, his lawyer Fosburgh, two mail clerks, a letter carrier and me.

The original message form for Grant’s telegram had been picked up at a midtown Western Union office, but this also bore no prints of any interest. It had been filled out laboriously in left-handed block printing by a right-handed person, and the line requiring identification of the sender listed the name R. E. Lee. The civil service intellect. No clerk had been alert enough to take a second glance at someone who had appended that signature to a communication addressed to one U. S. Grant.

The knife which killed Audrey Grant had been handled with cloth, and there was nothing which could establish Fern’s presence in the death room. The same was true at Grants. A check of the Hudson River near his apartment was already underway in an attempt to turn up the third murder weapon— a.38—and sewers in his neighborhood were being dredged also.

I learned most of this before ten o’clock, by which time the amphetamine and lack of sleep had me flighty. Vasella brought in an M.E. to look me over and the man decided I had a fracture of one rib, the obvious contusions but no damaged bones in my face, and only a lingering trace of my concussion. He taped me up and Vasella told me to get some rest.

Dana was still drugged. She tossed for half a minute when I woke her, then did a double take about the unfamiliar bedroom. She closed her eyes again, turning away with a moan. “Oh, heavenly damn,” she said. “Dana, you done did it again.”

She did another confused shudder when she got a look at my face. “You didn’t done it either,” I told her. She stared at me while I gave her the shortest condensation which would make sense, sitting up with a blanket around her bruised shoulders. I asked her if she could think of anything which might help, but she could only shake her head.

“Boy, I guess I owe you some thanks for getting me out of there. Leave it to perceptive O’Dea to pick the right girl to run to in an emergency.”

“How are you feeling?”

She fingered one of the welts on her arm. “Delicate to the touch, hung over and still woozy from those pills — otherwise downright jovial.” She glanced toward her clothes, then smiled. “I suppose it would be sort of superfluous to ask you to leave the room while I get dressed, wouldn’t it?”

“Hell, there’s no need to scram — the couch is okay for me.”

“Oh, stop. You look like you fell under a tractor.”

I grinned. “I’ll tell you what. They strapped about sixty yards of adhesive around my middle — I’m as safe as Don McGruder, if you want to take a chance on moving over half a foot.”

She lifted an eyebrow impishly. “Like old folks — cohabitation for companionship alone?”

“At least give it some dignity. Like wounded tigers, sulking—”

The clock on the dresser said twelve when I woke up. I had the bed to myself, but I saw the red dress still draped over the chair. I was stiff as Nebuchadnezzar’s femur. My robe wasn’t behind the door so I limped out front in my shorts and found her wearing it, reading something in my big chair.

“You’re a good-looking girl,” I told her. “You were pretty drunk at that party.”

“I’m a shopworn Greenwich Village slut with acute dislocation of all functioning parts,” she said. “I’m twenty-six. I fell in love with a guy when I was nineteen, the way it only happens once — a beautiful goddam scatterbrained hunk of test pilot who got himself disintegrated over some salt flats exactly one year to the day after we were married. Sex was the first thing I tried, then dope. I haven t quite abandoned either, but I guess I prefer Scotch. Although it’s funny — I found where you cache the booze a good two hours ago, and I haven’t had a drop. Did Fern really kill them, Harry?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll make you some breakfast, or whatever you call it at midnight. Bacon and eggs?”

“Four eggs. We did sulk at that, didn’t we?”

“You kissed me once — on the ear. And then you started muttering. Oh, sure, I meant to ask you about that. You were insisting that somebody named Bowman had hit you in the head with a baseball. Do you often have delusions of grandeur— I mean mixing yourself up with Ducky Medwick?”

“For crying out loud, how would you know who—?”

Her eyes sparkled. “Older brothers. The louts used to beat it into me. Who do you want, the old St. Louis Gas House Gang? Durocher, Medwick, Dean, Rip Collins, Pepper Martin—”

“Marry me,” I said. “Or at least bring your fielder’s glove and move in for a month or two.”

“You might just get me to think about it, if you were looking at me instead of the telephone. Call them, for heaven’s sake.”

I got Vasella, and since I asked he told me he’d slept in the office. “We decided to bring her in,” he said. “About seven o’clock. She denies everything, of course. We checked Peters on that slip — he did tell her about the third killing.”

I swore. “She booked?”

“We’d need a good deal more than we have. It’s an odd one, all right — the girl couldn’t be more sure of herself. We allowed her a phone call after a couple of hours, but do you think she contacted a lawyer? She called her publisher. He’s been pacing halls here ever since, trying to make up his mind.”

“I don’t get you—”

“Evidently the book is in the process of being shipped all over the country to go on sale in a few days, with her name on the cover. They don’t know whether to back her or not. He’s anxious to hear things from you directly. Oh, yeah, just incidentally, our friend Ephraim Turk finally appeared — walked in on us twenty minutes ago. Considerate of him, we feel.”

I said I’d be down, then ate and got dressed. Dana had to tuck in my shirt. I told her I’d meant it about sticking around, especially if she didn’t want to spend time alone in the place she’d shared with Audrey. She said she’d stay the rest of the night.

I saw the publisher. He was five-feet-two at most, forty-five at least, shoulderless, pleatless, impeccable. He carried a severely rolled British umbrella, an alligator attaché case, a Burberry.

He was what all good little status-seekers get to be when they grow up.

“I just don t know,” he said. “I’m shocked at the implications. On top of which I was supposed to have dinner this evening with Papa and I had to cancel—”

“Huh?” I said.

“I had copies of the novel rushed to a number of critics by special messenger the moment we heard, along with samples of Lucien Vaulkings work for comparison, but no one seems to want to make an unequivocal judgment about authorship. Lionel and VanWyck and Cleanth have phoned saying they have to have more time, and I haven t yet heard from Edmund. Edmund is in Connecticut, of course—”

“Of course—”

“It’s like Shakespeare and Bacon, isn’t it? I wonder what Bennett would do in such a situation. Perhaps I’ll call him—”

He wandered away to call Bennett. He finally decided to call his lawyers also, three or four of them. A soft-spoken, darkly shaven young man named Dunn from the District Attorney’s office had been brought in, and I told the story again for his benefit. I was going to get it by heart, like Galia omnia divisa est. At 1:10 my friend Nate Brannigan appeared from Central Homicide, big and beefy and sinewed like an ox, assuming responsibility probably because no one else could verify my reliability. “What are we doing about long-range background,” he wanted to know. “Her relationship with this man Vaulking— how much did she see him after the divorce? Can we establish that he’d been writing?”

Floyd Toomey was handling that end of the investigation. He kept looking at me as if he hoped I might disappear into an open manhole. “We’ve dug up four neighbors from when they lived together, captain,” he said. “Two of them claim he worked a lot, all the time.”

“Would seem to indicate there should have been a script,” Brannigan said.

“The other two say he never worked at all,” Toomey went on stonily. “Old ladies. Both of them swear he kissed his wife good-by when she went to work in the morning, then used to crawl back into the sack. Had female visitors three or four times a week. They’re both sure Vaulking is roasting in hell — Tin quoting here — while his wife suffered and was a dear.”

A cop from technical detail came in. They had shut off the plumbing in Fern’s apartment and drained the pipes. No burned papers, no trace of anything that could have been the original sheets in Vaulking’s handwriting. The search for the gun which had killed Grant was also getting nowhere.

I told it one last time at two o’clock, and this time they had me throw it at Fern. She’d gotten that beauty rest, and after it she’d wriggled into a tight black jersey blouse and a tweed skirt that clung to her hips like the primer coating on an Alfa-Romeo. “You deny having made the confession Mr. Fannin claims you made?” Brannigan asked her.

“Wouldn’t you?” she said.

“These pages of your manuscript at Audrey Grant’s — how would Fannin have known about them if you hadn’t told him?”

“Gracious me, how should I know how he knew? Certainly there can’t be any harm in copying out passages of one’s book as a memento for a dear friend? Does someone have a cigarette, please?”

She crossed her legs, waiting. The publisher went over, offering her a Pall Mall.

“Actually there is one thing I might mention,” she decided then. “Embarrassing as it is, it seems pertinent. I spent a certain portion of Tuesday evening in Mr. Fannin’s apartment — after we discovered Josie’s body. It wasn’t really a very successful arrangement. I hadn’t thought of it before, but I imagine the fact that I repudiated Mr. Fannin’s subsequent advances — once I ceased to be vulnerable — might well have some bearing on this curious behavior of his.”

“You spent—” A gleam had come into the publisher’s eyes. “Where is the press room, please? I should like to announce our position.”

There weren’t any reporters, whatever his position was. The police had issued no statement except that unnamed suspects were being questioned, and legally Fern was a material witness only. “We’d like to keep it that way for now,” Vasella said reasonably.

“I’m sorry — but I’ve quite made up my mind. The public must be informed. This girl is innocent. Plagiarism indeed— the whole idea is preposterous—”

“Thank you, Ernest,” Fern told him.

“You poor girl, not at all. I can only hope you’ll learn to forgive me for having permitted myself any doubt—”

She dismissed his chagrin with a gesture, and he turned to motion one of his lawyers to the door. “Phone them,” he said. “All the local papers, the wire services. Yes, don’t forget the wire services—”

Brannigan kicked a drawer shut with a noise like a truck backfiring, walking out. He couldn’t prevent the calls, and once Fern’s identity was made known the department would have to commit itself about booking her. Every tendon in his thick neck was visible when the publisher stopped him in the doorway.

“You’ll make arrangements for her release now, naturally? The entire situation is unthinkable, subjecting one of our most talented writers to this indignity—”

Brannigan brushed the man’s hand from his sleeve as if it were something with eight legs and a sting. “Get me a writ,” he said. “Until then I’d suggest you offer no more advice about police procedure.”

“Well, I certainly shall, if this is to be your attitude.” The publisher waved off another member of his portable bar association to wake up a judge or two. “Call Learned,” he said.

“This man Fannin thinks he is some kind of Sampson,” he told reporters thirty minutes later, “out to betray Delilah. A Delilah whose favors he demanded when she was too stricken with remorse to protest—” He glared at me for emphasis, presumably the way he would glare at some untutored wretch of an editor who’d rejected Bishop Sheen and Jim Bishop on the same afternoon. “But the Philistines shall rise up and slay him,” he went on. “Fern Hoerner’s brilliant novel will be on the best-seller lists within the week, and her thousands of readers will vindicate her. As will millions of other fair-minded Americans when they applaud the film for which negotiations are already underway. Indeed, I’m having lunch with Marlon this Tuesday—”

“Marlon who?” a reporter said.

They tried to corner me when he’d run dry, but Dunn from the D.A. s office told them they would have to wait. They popped bulbs anyhow, wanting to know who had chewed up my face, and I was just sore enough to say a pimp named Oliver Constantine and to toss in the address. They began yelling for shots of Fern and the publisher insisted that they get them. Brannigan blew up then and restricted everybody to the outer lobby, then locked himself in an office with Vasella, Dunn and two of the publisher s lawyers. That left me eating Camels in a corridor, inconsequential as a raindrop in the Irrawaddy.

I was hunting for a drinking fountain up a flight when I ran into Ephraim. The police no longer had any interest in him and he was on his way out, looking whipped. He’d put on a suit before he’d turned himself in, cheap cord off the basement racks in a lower-grade shop and far from new. Tin sorry I tried to hit you last night,” he said clumsily.

“Forget it. Poets are out of my league anyhow.”

He didn’t smile. “Fern did it — there’s no question?”

“A question of proof.”

“Will they prove it?”

“If they don’t come up with anything besides my version they’ll never get into court to try.”

“What happens then?”

I nodded toward the street. “Cocktails with the bookish set. A week from now she’ll be telling Katherine Anne all the clever little things Vladimir said to Tennessee, between canapés.”

That made twice he didn’t smile, but I decided it wasn’t particularly hilarious. “She won’t go to any cocktail parties,” he said.

I looked at him with care. “If that means you know something, now’s the time to spill it, Ephraim.”

The expression on his face was reflective, gloomy, without much meaning. “I don’t know anything,” he said.

He scuffed away, plunging his hands into his pockets. I scowled after him, then got my drink and went back downstairs myself.

The conference had broken up and they were letting the publisher play in the schoolyard again, which could only mean one thing. Nothing had developed which had given me any reason not to expect it. He was chatting with Dunn and one of his attorneys, and he broke away from them beaming like a gimcrack Cary Grant when he spotted her.

“Fern, I’ll escort you home—”

She was coming out from the rear with Vasella. “Thank you again, Ernest, sincerely. You’ve been great—”

“Nothing, nothing—”

“Are there martinis tomorrow, did you say—?”

“Everyone will be there — J. D., E. B., W H., E. E.—”

They went by arm in arm, clucking, like a couple of celibate hens who’d just got word about the new rooster. I was a handful of yesterday’s feed they didn’t glance at in passing.

She had a second thought when she reached the head of the steps. She stopped, said something to the publisher, and then came back.

“I really must say thanks, Harry, since its worked out so beautifully.” She was cooing. “After all, it was you who put the idea into my head. A mock confession to three murders I didn’t commit — perfectly safe, and probably the greatest publicity idea in the history of literature.”

“God almighty—”

“You don’t think it’s possible, do you? In spite of how ripe you were?” She laughed. “Oh, Harry, if you could only have seen the outrage in your face — you were so shocked you even gave these people a more convincing story than I gave you. Ah, well, not that it matters what you believe, not that it matters in the least—”

Bulbs began to flash in the stairwell. A nerve was jumping in my cheek as I watched her walk out of there.

CHAPTER 31

I didn’t tell them. I didn’t say a word. Vasella had gone into the interrogation room, and he and Brannigan were pacing with all the pent frustration of castrated steers when I looked in. Brannigan snorted once and told me to go back to bed.

The Chevy was on Hudson Street. I sat in it for a while, mumbling.

She’d made up the whole story. That was all I would have needed to mention. Pardon me, fellas, tee-hee-hee, but now she says she was just playing. So she could sell her book, you know? You know? I’m really sorry if I’ve put anybody to any trouble…

The girl was as nutty as a two-headed gnu.

Even thinking about it was absurd. There wasn’t anyone else in it. I could run it up and down the flagpole all day, she’d still be the only one to salute.

Okay, Ebenezer. But what have you got to show proof-wise, like?

Let the cops prove it. Me, I’d had enough. I was going back to sleep like the captain said.

Sure I was. So I drove up Hudson two blocks and then parked again. The image in my rear-view mirror was leering at me. I leered back.

This was ridiculous. She did it.

The image kept on leering. It was a dark, amorphous blur, like an inkblot. What do you think you see in the blot, Mr. Fannin?

Fern killed them.

Of course she did. There, now, that’s a good lad. Tell me, when did you first start to get this sensation that people were taunting you? Do you often feel inadequate, left out? Do you find total strangers smirking behind their hands when you walk into a room?

She did it, damn it.

It was 4:19 when I parked in front of a hydrant four doors down from her building. There was a faint mist from the river. The angle was bad, but I could see the glow of a lamp behind her blinds. She probably had a wax statuette of somebody named Harry up there and was huddled over it in a trance, jabbing it with long sharp pins.

Who do it, voodoo it? Something moved in the shadow of an alley across the street and I went over.

“Rotten detail?”

Toomey grunted. “Got to watch her, I suppose. Not that it’ll lead to anything.”

“The publisher with her?”

“Blalock? Yeah.”

“Blalock?”

“Ernest B. Blalock — Junior. I thought you and him got to be pals.”

“I keep telling him to call me by my first name.”

“Those things take time. You look bushed.”

“I’m past knowing.”

“Just feel restless, huh?”

“Unfulfilled. Or does that make me sound like a Beatnik?”

“I know what you mean. They sure can’t dump it on a jury with just your word against hers, in spite of your honest face.” He chuckled. “I supposed you’ll get sued for that, too.”

“Sued for what, too?”

“You missed the cheery news, huh? They’re going to slap papers on you for libel, slander, defamation of character— whatever his lawyers can think of. It’ll make the tabloids for six weeks straight, with pictures of the Hoerner babe looking sexier every day. Hell, I might even buy that book myself.”

I reached for a cigarette. “What’s my face got to do with it?”

“When those newspaper guys asked you what door you walked into — I just meant that Constantine might sue you also. If nothing comes of his end he might feel kind of sore that you called him a dirty name for publication. Although on the other hand I suppose you could prove a few things about him—”

“And his Vice Squad contacts who claimed they didn’t have any file on him last liiesday.” I was fumbling in a pocket. “You got a match?”

“They covered for the guy, huh? Yeah, here—”

He flicked a lighter, and my hand went toward his wrist. I never touched him.

“Jesus!” he said. “Oh, Jesus—”

We both broke into the gutter at the same time. I did not have a gun, but Toomey’s service revolver was in his hand before we had gone three strides. The roar of the gunshots was still reverberating.

They had been incredibly close together, muffled so that they had sounded almost like a single explosion. My brain told me it had counted four but I couldn’t be sure. We bolted around opposite ends of a parked Buick, getting across.

I was ahead of him on the stone steps. I yanked at the door handle once. Toomey pushed me aside, grabbing my arm for balance and slamming a foot against the lock. It gave with a splintering sound and I went through and then doubled over, clamping my jaws against the searing pain in my chest. I stumbled up the one flight after him and around to the front.

The door to the apartment held against his shoulder. He braced himself against the banister opposite it, then vaulted forward and took it with both heels. It rocketed inward.

I stopped dead, and my insides turned to stone.

Ernest Blalock was standing at the far side of the room. He was in his shirtsleeves. The shirt was white, but no whiter than his face. His stare was fixed on the low couch next to him.

She was sprawled hideously. Her head was twisted downward, and her golden hair was trailing along the floor. A trickle of blood had seeped out of her mouth, still gleaming, but I did not have to get over there to know that it would coagulate in a minute. Her eyes were gaping in their sockets.

She was still wearing the tweed skirt, but she’d taken off her blouse and put on that short bluejacket. The jacket was open. The flesh below her black brassiere was so severely charred that the gun had to have been held flush against her. There had been five shots, not four. I could have covered the entire tight grouping with a poker chip.

There were voices in the hall, and I got the door closed somehow. I was vaguely aware of Toomey racing in and out of Fern’s bedroom, and then into the one with the fire escape which had belonged to Josie Welch. He cursed once, reappearing, and I watched him take Blalock by the arm. “Tell it,” he snapped.

Blalock shuddered. His look was glazed. He buckled against the wall when Toomey swung him around.

“Damn it—”

“That — that — Ephraim Turk. We were in the kitchen. He—”

Toomey motioned toward the second bedroom. “He go that way?”

Blalock forced a nod. “Oh, dear God. He literally dragged her around by the hair, he—”

Toomey was already on his way to the phone, jamming the revolver back onto his hip. He dialed rapidly. “Toomey, Lou — get me the lieutenant, fast. Or Captain Brannigan if he’s still on it—”

Blalock had taken a faltering step toward him. He spun suddenly, plunging into the kitchen. “Sure, dead,” I heard Toomey say. “Looks like a forty-five. What the hell, he had half an hour to swipe one someplace, he’s had the habit. Right here, yes sir—”

He hung it up. I was looking at her again, smelling the burned powder and the burned flesh. I could hear Blalock being sick. Toomey frowned at me.

“Hey, fellow, not you too?”

“Too much,” I said. “I better get some air—”

“Yeah, yeah, I can see how you’d feel. It would be your word alone he’d killed her on, wouldn’t it?”

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. I went back outside on legs that did not want to do anything but fold in half.

CHAPTER 32

There were people on the stairway to the next floor, all of them in bathrobes. “Say, did we hear—?”

“Police matter,” I managed, and then I heard Toomey telling them something behind me. I went down and through the smashed lower door, wincing at every step. I took hold of the concrete rail with both hands and hung there, swaying.

My word he’d killed her on. Sensitive, saintly little Ephraim. She won’t go to any cocktail parties. I should have known, dear Christ I should have known.

Audrey Grant and Josie Welch. Call girls, tramps who’d had nothing for him but scorn. One of them had married him as the most brutal kind of joke, the other had given herself to him once and then pretended it never happened. But Pete Peters had been right. In his warped life they had been the only two women who mattered, and I’d told him that Fern had murdered them both.

I’d told him. I’d been so sure, so damned sure. And so convincing that thirty minutes after he’d talked to me he’d not only gotten the gun but had already used five of the six bullets it probably held, and now he’d be… now… I heard the first distant wail of a siren in the darkness as I started to run.

Commerce Street, I’d seen the address in the paper. It took me three minutes to get over there, no more, sprinting through the wet mist with both hands clasped against my side. The building was ancient, brick, and its glass vestibule door was open. E. Turk, 3-EI lurched up the two flights. I stopped, gasping, just steps shy of the landing, fighting vertigo and pain and a dozen other things I could not have named.

“—Listen, listen, we ought to wait for the police—”

“—But time is passing, suppose he needs—”

“—Who’s this coming now? They couldn’t have gotten here so quick—”

Faces turned from a closed door as I dragged myself up the rest of the way. They might have been faces reflected in muddied water, for all I saw them. I staggered through the cluster to the knob. The apartment wasn’t locked.

“Hey, whore you? You ain’t supposed to—”

I turned my head. I must have looked like Raskolnikov on his way to get rid of the ax. I must have looked like Yorick when they dug him up. No one made anymore protest. I pulled the door after me.

There was only one room. It was close, disordered, filthy. He was on a narrow disheveled bed, on his back. One of his shoes was off, and there was a rip in the heel of his blue sock. The gun was still in his hand, although it had jerked out of his mouth at the recoil. A Ruger Blackhawk.

People don’t kill other people. People are good, people have beautiful souls. There had been about forty books on two metal shelves above an unpainted wood table. It didn’t seem that he would have had time, but he’d gotten his hands on each of them, rending bindings and shredding pages as if he’d decided that literature had been the cause of all his troubles. In a way, maybe it had been. The debris was scattered around the bare floor, except for a single page which lay near his shoulder. It could have been there by chance, but it was corny enough for the fanciful son of a gun to have meant it. It shook me, because of the foolishness I’d been quoting to myself before he’d hit me in that alley last night:

…It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

Two cops were pressing up the stairs when I came out. One of them was Sergeant DiMaggio.

“I guess you better go back over, Fannin.”

I nodded. An elderly man touched my sleeve as I started down, lifting a leathery, concerned face. “He was an author, that boy. I don’t know if he was any good or not. He’s dead, eh?”

“As dead as Dickens,” I said, but the voice wasn’t my own. Mine was trying to burst through the top of my skull, screaming in horror.

CHAPTER 33

Hiram Henshaw was perched cross-legged on a deformed hassock in his living room, squinting at me like a myopic canary from behind his thick lenses. He was wearing a stained sleeveless undershirt and a pair of pegged pants the color of rotted apricots. Except to whistle once or twice he had not made a sound in the ten minutes I’d taken to tell him the story.

I wasn’t sure why I was up there. My viscera were still rattling around like loose bolts, and I felt about as sociable as a hangman. It was well after nine o’clock.

He picked at a splotch of dried shaving lather in his left ear. “So you’ve been pacing the paranoic pavements ever since you left the law, like?”

“A couple hours. I had coffee just down the block—” “Indeed, indeed, glad to be of sympathy. I can see how the circumstances would make a cat start gnawing on his nearest leg. Like rough. But man, you couldn’t have been cognizant that crazy Turk would perforate the chick’s pajama tops. Or that he’d do unto himself like he did.”

“Okay, I guess I couldn’t have been. But still, I—” “Still you’re dogged by dismal doubt. She came on with this parting bit about how she’d extemporized the whole solo, and you’re sure she had to be just giving you the big razzoo — but you’re not that sure—”

“You’ve got it, friend.”

“Yet you voiced the conclusion yourself — the chick was the only one with motive for the mayhem, nest pas? This is not reassuring enough for your caviling conscience?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got to come up with something concrete. If I could just prove she’d stolen the book—”

“Oh, yes. But she would have held flame to that script of old Loosh Vaulking’s first thing — tell-tale page after tell-tale page, gone, gone. Alas, I dig your dilemma, I truly do.”

“Yeah.” I took a smoke. “How do writers work, Henny? Damn it, I suppose once a guy copied over a new draft of something he wouldn’t have any reason at all to save the earlier version—”

Henshaw shrugged. “Like as not, not, like. But on the other hand since when does a cat need a reason to save things? Like I cherish three hundred and thirty-seven unpaid traffic tickets in a scented drawer, you know? And—”

He stopped abruptly, tilting his head to one side. His brow was wrinkled. After a minute he began to talk to himself. “In Vinnie’s Place? Surely, in Vinnie’s. Just making idle talk, and Loosh declared — hmmm, now what did Loosh declare? Like his pad had gone to pot since the domestic tranquility had terminated. Like Fern had left his bed and board, his bed and broom, and that cat was such a slob he couldn’t live in the same room with himself. So like he’d been — like — well, pull my daisy—”

He faced me again. He pursed his lips. Very slowly he got to his feet. “Now leave us not let hope spring too eternal, lad, but Loosh Vaulking had this brother. Upstate a ways — where, where? Dobbs Ferry, oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed. And in his brother’s pad are many mansions, you dig me? And like Loosh had taken to stashing stuff for storage—”

Henshaw giggled. And then he bowed from the waist. “Like I reiterate, there could be nothing up there but bags of old bread. But if you’ll remember to make restitution for the long-distance chatter before you debouch, man, there’s like a telephone on the floor under yon sagging chair—”

And it was that simple. That simple. The draft was sketchy, and far from finished, but it was indisputably the same novel. Roger Vaulking, his wife and a housemaid were able to swear it had been in a closet in their home, along with other possessions of Lucien’s, for over two years. An immediate injunction was granted against sale of the Blalock edition, and Roger Vaulking told reporters he would eventually release the work through another firm, but not until its notoriety had substantially lessened. Review copies with Fern’s name on them were around, of course, and Dana O’Dea got hold of one and sent it to me from San Francisco about a month later.

She’d hung around for a day or two, but my ribs got worse before they got better, and that baseball nostalgia goes only so far. I was sorry, but even Medwick had to leave potential scores on base once in a while. I rewrapped the book and mailed it to Sergeant DiMaggio that November, when Constantine and Ivan Klobb were indicted on assorted counts of prostitution.

Not that there was much point in the gesture. The sergeant probably never read it either.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Markson is the author of ten other books, including Vanishing Point, This is Not a Novel, and Wittgenstein’s Mistress, heralded by David Foster Wallace as “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.” Markson’s work has also been praised by Kurt Vonnegut, Ann Beattie, William Kennedy, Gilbert Sorrentino, and many others. He lives in Greenwich Village.

Content

David Markson
Epitaph For A Dead Beat

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

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

ABOUT THE AUTHOR