Epitaph For A Tramp (7 page)

The butt end of Junior’s smoke was still burning. I crushed it out, then went and sat on the bed.

“Will there be… will the scars last long?”

“A few months,” I told her. A generous racketeer had let me smell a six-bit panatela along the cheekbone once. He had been going for the eye so I’d still consider myself the big winner if I was seeing a mark every time I shaved. But it had faded out.

“He put that gag on when I rang the bell?”

“Yes.”

“You tell him what he was trying to find out before that?”

“I couldn’t. I don’t know where she is, Mr. Fannin. Harry. I tried to tell him I haven’t seen her since the day before yesterday. But he wouldn’t believe me. He kept standing there and
puffing on that cigarette until it would glow and then he’d put his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t scream and—”

I waited for her. She bit her lip, turning her head away. The flap of her blouse had fallen away again but she did not seem aware of it. Part of her had gotten a suntan someplace.

“I don t know
where
she is. That’s why I called you. She told me she was going away with him and Duke, the one she’s been seeing, and that was Tuesday and I—”

“You mean a friend of this one’s?”

“Duke something, yes. And then when Eddie came in he said something about them getting split up—something about some kind of job,’ I don’t know what he meant—and—”

I had gone across and put my hand on her shoulder. “Sally, listen, can we start with the cast of characters maybe? Eddie is this throw rug on the floor here?”

“I’m sorry. Yes. It’s Bogardus or something like that. And his friend’s name is Duke. Duke Sabatini. Duke’s the one Cathy was going out with. She brought them up here one night, it was about two weeks ago. I didn’t like them and I told her so then, Mr. Fan—Harry. Duke is older, maybe Cathy’s or my age, and he’s handsome, but he still looks like one of those horrible kids you see all over. I wanted to hide my pocketbook while they were here. I told her she’d get into trouble hanging around with them but Cathy just laughed. You know how she is, never taking anything seriously, always running around after somebody new and—”

She had been looking at me. She didn’t turn away. “I’m sorry.”

“Tell it the way you want to.”

“Have you—may I have a cigarette?”

I gave her one. Her hands trembled a little when she took the light. She took a long drag and then stared at the cigarette.

“I don’t know what it is,” she went on. “It’s as if—well, as
if she’s sick in some ways. Lord knows, every girl who gets to be old enough starts sleeping around a little. But golly, you discriminate about it, you wait to see how it works out with someone, if it’s going to be a good thing. Oh, sure, sometimes you get a little tight and you crawl into bed the first night, that can happen too, but you don’t make a habit of it. You do it and then you hate yourself for it, and so you’re all the more careful the next time, or at least most girls are that way. Lord knows we talk about it enough. But Cathy always just laughs. It’s as if she has to have adventures all the time—new experiences, whatever you want to call them. She goes out to the places down here where the Village crowd hangs out, bars mostly, and—well, sometimes three or four nights a week she doesn’t come home at all except to change to go to work in the morning. And then sometimes she stops. Sometimes she won’t go out for two or three weeks, not once, just sitting here all evening and reading or something. Then it starts again. It isn’t anything that shocks me—I don’t mean it that way—but it seems like such a waste. I mean she’s so bright and she can be so good to be with, I always think it’s such a shame that she doesn’t get married—

“I keep forgetting,” she said then. “I suppose this is the same kind of thing that happened when she
was
married.”

She had looked away awkwardly, but when she went on with it she was still off on the same side road. I was going to have to tell her pretty soon that it was a dead end.

“Gee, I’ve, well… I asked her about you a dozen times, but she won’t ever say anything. She changes the subject every time, but I can see she’s still in love with you. It’s all over her face when she mentions your name. But if I ask her why you don’t try it again or something she—”

“Sally, you were telling me about Junior here. And somebody named Duke.”

“I’m sorry, Harry, I am. I guess it’s just seeing you this way
after knowing about you for so long, and being worried about Cathy. I suppose I sort of wish you and she would get together again. Probably I’m butting in, but Cathy s so good, basically, that if there was only someone who could understand her and try to help—
”

“Sally—”

I had wanted to get the story first, and maybe get her out of there, too. Once upon a time I had also wanted to be Johnny Ringo or Wild Bill Hickok and ride a big white mare. Life is rough.

“Cathy’s dead, Sally.”

She didn’t react, not for the first few seconds. She looked at me as if she hadn’t heard what I’d said. The corners of her mouth twitched. Then her face melted and she began to shake.

“Oh, no! No!”

She started to bawl. I walked across the room and held her by the shoulder. It took a couple of minutes.

“What happened? Oh, it can’t be true, it—”

I gave her the
Reader’s Digest
version. There were tears on her face and she kept shaking her head. And then she jumped up and ran to where the guy named Eddie was lying. She had soft ballet slippers on. She kicked him eight or ten times in the small of the back. I supposed the kicks would have cracked an egg if he’d had one with him. She kept saying, “I told her not to go with them, I told her, I told her!”

It didn’t last long. I was standing next to her when it finished and she turned and fell against me with her head on my chest. I held her until that finished also.

“Tell me now,” I said. “Just let me know what you can and then I’ll get you out of here for a day or two.”

“Yes,” she said raggedly. “All right.” She found the chair again. I gave her another cigarette and took one myself.

“Whatever you can think of. Don’t skip anything.”

“There isn’t much, I’m afraid.” She was staring at the burns and her voice was tiny and mechanical. “I think I said they came up here with her one evening about two weeks ago. Cathy was with Duke. She didn’t bring Eddie along as a date for me or anything, he was just with them. Anyhow I was going out. They were gone when I came back, but I told Cathy the next morning I didn’t like them. They were—well, you can see what this one looks like. Maybe they think it’s clever to talk that way, as if everybody owes them something. I couldn’t understand what Cathy was doing with them. All she’d say was that she thought they were amusing. Amusing! And now she’s…”

She dragged on her smoke. She was all right, however. “Anyhow I forgot about it after that, until the other night when she said she was going with them someplace for a day or two. She said she’d told the office that she had to leave town but that she’d be back yesterday. And then she said something about an experiment—that was the word she used—but she wouldn’t tell me what. She kept smiling about it all evening, so that I thought maybe she was a little drunk, but she wasn’t. I was upset about it, Harry. I tried to make her tell me, but the only other thing she’d say was something strange, about ethics. How she was going to prove to herself that nothing really mattered at all. I thought about it all the time she was gone. She’d gone away with boys other times, on weekends or things, but this time I kept imagining all sorts of things. And then when she wasn’t back when I got home from work tonight I got scared. I had a date but I called home a couple of times to see if she was in. I came back early, deliberately, and when I did I noticed Eddie across the street. I didn’t recognize him, not until he came up. The phone rang a few times too, and there was never anybody there. I guess he must have gone someplace and called. I thought about calling you right away but I didn’t know whether
you’d—Oh, dear Lord, maybe if I’d called you earlier it wouldn’t have happened, maybe she’d still be—”

She came apart again. I left her alone with it this time, going into the John. There was a galvanized pail under the sink and I held it under a bathtub faucet until it was a third filled. There was a white blouse over a wire hanger on the shower nozzle. I’d known a girl once who was crazy about white blouses. I’d bought her this one.

Sally was watching me when I came out. Her eyes were raw.

“I’m going to wake up Lefty here,” I said. “I’ll wait until you put something on.”

She looked down at herself as if she had forgotten about the ripped blouse. I supposed she had. “It doesn’t hurt now,” she said vaguely.

‘I’d put some cotton over them, maybe. You won’t need a doctor.”

She had picked up the brassiere from the floor. She walked past me to a dresser and took out a laundered shirt the shade of freshly minted pennies. She held the blouse and the brassiere in her hand for a minute, staring at them with her back turned as if she wasn’t sure just what they were for, and then she set them both down. I started to move toward her when her hands came around to the back of her slacks and jerked out the tails of the torn blouse she was wearing. The blouse dropped into a heap on the floor before I made it across so I stopped again. Her hands were little fists opening and closing at her sides when she turned around naked from the waist and stared at me.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” she said. “All the things you do, the way sex is the most important part of half of them. Cathy showed me your picture once or twice and I used to think, Lord, she cheated on a man like that, and if I had him and he was half
the man she said he was I’d never let myself get out of his sight. I even used to have fantasies about it once in a while, how with somebody like you it
would
be one of those first night things but it would be one that would last. And then something like this happens and I sit here half undressed in front of you for twenty minutes and it doesn’t mean anything at all, not one goddam thing because Cathy’s dead and—”

Her mouth was twisted and her breasts rose once as a sob racked her body. There was a rip in the paper of my cigarette. I stood there wondering just what the hell you could do about that while she ran with her shirt and brassiere into the bathroom and shut the door.

CHAPTER 6

The punk named Eddie Bogardus groaned almost sadly when I dumped the bucket on his head. Probably I’d busted in on the middle of his favorite Bach cantata. His greasy black curls fell into his eyes when he shook himself.

He came out of it but his co-ordination was all loused up. He started to reach for the back of his skull with his right hand, then fell forward again and clutched the break. He lay there with his teeth grinding. Finally he looked up at me.

“All right, Bogardus, let’s have it.”

“Bananas, Jack, I gotta get a doctor. You gotta get me to a doctor.”

I sauntered over to Sally’s chair and sat down. I got comfortable. I grinned at him.

“Look, now, look, it’s all out o’ shape. If I don’t get to a—”

“We’ll do it make-believe, Bogardus, how about that? You must be the ailing prince and I must be the royal physician. Won’t that be fun?”

He didn’t dig games much. He sucked in his breath with his lips drawn back and he didn’t answer.

“Talk. All of it.”

“Can I sit up?”

I nodded. He built himself up against the bed, working with the weight on his good arm, and then leaned there with his head back. Sweat had broken out on his boyish face with the effort. He breathed deeply three or four times, then let his head fall against his chest. He did not look at me.

“What did you want here, punk? Let’s start there.”

“The broad,” he muttered grudgingly. “I dint mean to rough up the other one, the redhead. Honest, Jack. All I want is my split. I got a right to my split.”

“What split? All right, you and Duke pulled something. What?”

He wet his lips. “You a cop?”

“I got the milk route here. Talk, punk.”

He was studying me blankly. The next expression would be the one that was supposed to tell me he knew his rights. I leaned forward.

“Look, punk, you might have some luck. You might even last long enough to get your full growth.”

“Okay, okay, I don’t want no more.”

“Your split of what?”

“We pulled a job yesterday. Big stuff. We—”

Sally came out and he let it hang there while he looked at her. She wasn’t the same girl he’d had on that raw edge a while back. They never are when they can get five minutes in front of a mirror. She hadn’t done much with the tired lines around her eyes, however. She looked at me as if she wanted to say something and then she changed her mind. I waited until she went to a chair.

“Whenever you feel up to it, Bogardus,” I said then. “What kind of big stuff? What about the girl? You keep making me ask questions, I’ll ask some hard ones.”

“Okay, I tole ya. This shirt factory up in Troy. The payroll. They deliver from an armored car, half a month’s loot on the
first and the fifteenth. The broad was Duke’s brainstorm, not mine. I knew she’d mess it up, but the minute Duke gets hot on a broad you cant make him see nothin’. She drove. I kept tellin’ Duke she’d—”