Epitaph For A Tramp (17 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Neva, I asked you about last night.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Who were you with last night?”

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

“Here?”

“—pictures. Here, yes.”

“What time did he leave?”

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

“He going to admit that?”

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

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

“Would you?”

“Damn it, Neva—”

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

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

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

“When, Neva?”

“I—well, it’s been weeks, we—”

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

“What about her, Neva?”

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

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

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

“Get’em, Neva.”

“But I—”

“Get them!”

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

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

“Talk up, damn it,” Brannigan said.

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

“Boys
she was with—”

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

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

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

“Let’s see them, Nate.”

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

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

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

“Get the negatives, Neva.”

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

“There anymore of these? Anyplace?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know Ned Sommers?”

“Slightly, yes. The writer.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No, I didn’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was when I noticed that the heat was getting to Brannigan also. He was sweating badly and his face was flushed. We heard a voice say, “Get that, will you, Henry,” and then when Henry opened the door and said, “Who intrudes?,’’ Brannigan did not ask for Leeds the way he had asked for Sommers or Neva. He had his wallet in his hand and he lifted it with a tired gesture and said, “Police.”

The man in the doorway did almost nothing. He squinted out at us behind thick glasses as if he had not heard us correctly, and then he turned to repeat the word over his shoulder. “Police, dads?” he said curiously.

He didn’t get an answer. There were about six quick footsteps and then there was the sound of a chair clattering to the floor. A second after that a window went up, hard, jarring the weights inside its molding. The man in the doorway had blocked us
unintentionally, but I had a hunch the elbow I planted in his liver would remind him to be less careless in the future. I saw the second man’s back as he cleared the window ledge, which was about twenty feet away in the far wall of a rear room, and then he was out of sight and rattling down a fire escape.

Twenty feet. A man with my stride, or Brannigan’s, can cover the distance from a standstill in approximately a second. We both started to, but neither of us quite made the window. Because the second hadn’t fully elapsed when the sound began, and when it came we were both rooted like snow-heavy birches, bent forward and frozen.

It was a man’s scream. I had heard one exactly like it a dozen years before in North Africa. Press me and I could tell you the date, the name of the crossroads, exactly what I’d been doing when it happened. The G.I. had been sleeping off a binge on the edge of a ditch. When they’d backed the tank off him you could have peeled up what was left of his legs to wrap your holiday mailing.

Brannigan looked out first. He said, “Oh, God, oh, my God,” and a priest giving final rites would have had a voice just as hushed. After that he choked and was fighting to keep himself from vomiting and you could hardly blame him for that.

The man had gone down one flight of the fire escape toward the narrow yard below and then had changed his mind. There was an alley behind the building which faced on the next block and he had decided to go over there. There was a spiked fence between the yard and the alley, with its spikes sticking up about a foot above the crossbar which held them in place. The spikes were about an inch thick at the bar, tapering sharply to four-sided points from there upward. Evidently the man had climbed the railing at the second landing and tried to jump it.