Epitaph For A Tramp (10 page)

“Where’s your mother, Estelle?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Spit,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I jerked my head aside and went for him.

CHAPTER 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a trice?

I rolled over a little more and there was Estelle.

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

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

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

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

“You okay, Estelle?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I suppose you understood part of all that?”

She nodded uncertainly.

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

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

“Cathy’s dead, Estelle.”

“She—”

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

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

“I’m sorry, Estelle—”

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

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

“Somebody. With a knife.”

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

“Who? Why? Oh, God, why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“I don’t get you.”

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

“Sure.”

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

“Oh, damn, Estelle.”

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