Epitaph For A Tramp (6 page)

“I’ll stick an extra set of keys under the mat in the outside hall.”

“Right. And Harry—”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry, fella. If there’s anything else you want me to do? Or Helen maybe—”

“Thanks, Dan. Nothing. I’ll leave the lights on. You’ll trip over her if you’re not looking.”

I cradled it, went back into the living room, glanced at everything except Cathy. The two bourbons I’d poured were still sitting on the stand next to the chair. It would be a dumb sort of thing to have to explain, pouring one of them for an unidentified female sot who took five or seven minutes getting up the stairs and then turned out dead. I carried them into the kitchen, dumped them, washed the glasses. The bottle was still out but the cops would find that quick enough anyhow.

I took the extra set of keys out of the desk. It had been Cathy’s set. I looked at her then, thinking it was probably for the last time. It was all there again. I bit down hard on it and went out.

It followed me down. She’d be stiff before Dan got there. I was thinking about that and I was outside before I remembered I was holding the extra keys. I told myself to quit it. I turned back, opened the outside door and edged the two keys under the rubber.

It was twenty-five minutes since I’d spoken to Sally Kline. It would probably take the night man ten more to unshuffle my Chevy from the loft in the garage around the corner, and I did not see a cab. I had promised the girl I’d be there in forty. I wondered if Mr. Adam Moss of West 113th Street would mind if I borrowed the MG. I wondered who Mr. Adam Moss was. I expected to find out soon.

I was just contorting my hundred and ninety-seven pounds below the low wheel when she came around the corner. I got out again, fast, because this time it wasn’t any drunk’s mating call I heard. The cry was sick with agony or horror or both.

She started to run toward me. She was an old woman and her hair was disheveled and it didn’t matter to her that her housecoat was flapping loose from the flimsy white nightgown she wore under it. She lost a slipper but she couldn’t bend for it, not with what she was carrying pressed against her breast.

It was swaddled in a white blanket. The blanket had blood on it.

I jerked open the door on the sidewalk side of the MG. “Here!” I told her. “Quick!”

“Oh, thank the Lord, thank the Lord! Any hospital, any hospital at all. She fell out of the window. On the fourth floor. She—”

There was no movement in the blanket, no sound. “She
what?”

The woman had started to get into the car. “Why, she’s always out there at night,” she said. “She was just playing. She—”

I had taken her by the elbow. I eased her around firmly before she could get seated and lifted a corner of the blanket. The cat was an expensive angora. Its head was bloodied up some but it had a good seven or eight other lives ahead of it. I kept propelling the woman around until I could swing the door shut. Then I ducked around to the other side of the car.

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

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

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

Around midtown I remembered Cathy’s mother and sister.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Move,” I told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You
are
Mr. Fannin?”

“Harry,” I told her.

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