Epitaph For A Tramp (16 page)

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

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

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

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

“Most if it, yes.”

“What time did you get in?”

“Three-thirty, perhaps four. Why?”

“Any other people with you before that?”

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

“Where?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ Wherfs the last time you saw Catherine Hawes?”

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

“Tell us about her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You said she
was
married.”

“She cheated. It broke up.”

“She a nympho?”

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

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

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

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

“Positive.”

“She come around here often?”

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

“I gathered that inside,” Brannigan said.

“Now look, if that’s a crack—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re a comfort,” I said.

“I get that way.”

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 14

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

Neva Portraits - Loft

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

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

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

“Can it,” Brannigan said.

“I
beg
your pardon?”

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

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

“I said are you Neva?”

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

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

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

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