Epitaph For A Tramp

  “I don’t put up my—”

  “Shut up, scum. What’s his cousin’s name?”

  “Sabatini. Just like him. Freddie Sabatini.”

  “What’s Duke’s first name?”

  “Angelo. Hey, look, this thing hurts bad, Jack. Ain’t I gonna get a doctor?”

  I told him what he could do with the wrist. I supposed Angelo Sabatini would be a hundred miles off already. With a murder rap on his neck a punk like this one would be sprinting fast enough to make Roger Bannister look like a hitchhiker. It was Duke all right. All that cash in the balance, a girl like Cathy who probably started feeling guilty or scared when it was over—anything could have set it off. I’d find out the details after the cops picked him up. The cops. Sure, they’d get him sooner or later, but I wasn’t going to be in on it. Hell no, Fannin would be home reading witty lines out of his Bartlett’s Quotations and waiting for some potted dame to climb the stairs and fall into his lap for the big romp in the hay. You could set fire to the end of the bed and Fannin wouldn’t smell smoke until morning.

  Sally had come across to where I was pacing. Her hand was on my arm.

  “Harry—now let me be the one to tell you to take it easy.”

  I didn’t say anything because anything I would have said would not have had more than four letters in it. I picked up the phone and dialed my home number. Dan got it on the first ring.

  “You called Brannigan yet?”

  “Just about to. You said an hour. You onto anything?”

  “Looks open and shut. Don’t ask me how, but she rode along on a payroll heist up in Troy yesterday with two punks. Guy named Bogardus I got wrapped up, another one named Sabatini. Sabatini’s the one who killed her. They—”

  “Killed her!” Bogardus was staring up at me from the floor, slack-jawed. I ignored him.

  “Evidently she got scared,” I said. “She’d probably told the guy what I did for a living, and then she was probably just innocent enough to think she could go to me and promise him she wouldn’t mention any names.”

  Dan did not say anything. Bogardus was still gaping like a six-year-old watching three of them sneak up on James Arness at once.

  “I’m going to ice this joker I’ve got down here,” I said. “When the badges get there just tell them I’ll have it when I come. I’ve got a couple of stops to make first.”

  “Right. You got any line on where this Sabatini might have ducked to?”

  “He’s got forty thousand in his glove compartment.”

  “Makes it tough.”

  “Yeah. I’ll see you in an hour or so. But listen—” I gave him Sally’s address. “Tell them to pick up Bogardus here. Brannigan can put through a call on it. I’ll leave a key, same as up there.”

  I put back the phone and turned to Eddie Bogardus. He screwed up his face. “Damn, Jack, you sure you got it figured straight? Duke wouldn’t of killed the broad, not her. He was nuts about her. He even wanted to marry her an’ all.”

  “He’d have a sweet honeymoon doing twenty for armed robbery.”

  “He still wouldn’t of killed her, even if she was gonna rat on us. Hell, for all he knew I might of got caught and ratted before that. He could of just run and hid out. He had the loot, dint he?”

  “Did he?”

  He thought about that, sitting there against the bed like Newton under the tree. After a while you could see it fall on him. Cathy had somehow managed to wind up holding all the coin. Duke hadn’t knifed her to keep her from talking. Repossessing the forty thousand had been a better reason.

  I had turned to Sally. “You know an Adam Moss, 113th Street?”

  She’d been sitting with her hands in her lap like the little lost girl at the station house. It took a minute, then she frowned. “Not at all. Is he involved in it somehow?”

  “Cathy was driving his car. He must be somebody she went to before she came to me.”

  “Funny, it’s not a name she’s ever mentioned.”

  I’ll check it. You have someplace you can stay a day or two?”

  “Golly, you don t think there’s going to be anymore—”

  “Just until the other one’s picked up. There might be loose ends.”

  “I guess I could call one of the girls from the office—”

  “Do that,” I said. It was 5:34. “Meanwhile I’ll take care of the southpaw here. On your feet, Gomez.”

  “What re you gonna do? I thought you tole that guy to send the cops down?”

  He was still hanging onto that leg of lamb at the end of his sleeve. It was beginning to look overcooked. I took him by the elbow and nudged him into the chair.

  “Hey now, bananas, you said you’d get me a doctor. I got to get a splint on this or somethin’. Damn, Jack, it’s—”

  “You’ll get a splint,” I told him. “You’re sitting on it. There tape in the bathroom, Sally?”

  She went for it. Bogardus was squirming.

  “Put your wrist on that armrest.”

  “What? Hey, you ain’t gonna—”

  I frowned at him, so he put the arm down. He did it the way you’d set down nitroglycerin during an earth tremor. He clamped his jaws tight against the yell when I took hold of it, changed his mind and opened it again. The yell didn’t come because I snapped the bone into place just then. That Bach cantata came back instead. He could hum it for the cops when he woke up. I took the tape from Sally and told her to make her call.

  “Tell her you’ll explain later,” I said. “And scribble down the name and number for me, will you? And your office number if you think you might go to work.”

  “I won’t go in.”

  I taped Sleeping Beauty into the chair, then picked up the stocking he had used to gag Sally and bound it around his mouth. I didn’t want him rousing up any neighbors and convincing them he was the victim of foul play before the wagon got there. The stocking had a run in it anyhow. Sally got her friend out of bed after a wait. She wrote the name Judy Paulson and the address and number on a sheet of yellow tablet paper. I chewed a cigarette while she threw some stuff into a blue leather bag which might have been manufactured to carry manhole covers.

  I looked around the bedroom. Furnished apartments. Toss your gear into the closet, come in to use the sack after the last bar closes and there’s no place else to go. Live in one sometime. See if the place ever shows anymore outward trace of your personality than an iron lung.

  Sally put her hand on my wrist. “I guess I didn’t say it before. I’m sorry, Harry.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. Bogardus was wheezing with his head on his chest. I double checked the tape and the gag and then we locked the door. We went down the quiet stairway and I left the key under the rubber in the lower hall. The street was as hushed as a sickroom. We walked the block and a half to Seventh and then up to the MG. We were not talking.

  Her girlfriend lived off Gramercy Park and I drove her over there. The car didn’t make anymore noise than four flatulent drunks in a YMCA shower. If Adam Moss turned out to be a nice guy maybe I’d buy him a muffler.

  She did not get out when I parked. You could see a few streaks of gray in the sky and a bird was acting moronic about it in the park. We were just sitting there when the couple turned the corner. The man looked as if he would have been willing to quit hours before. He kept telling Evelyn it was time to go home.

  “My neck, home,” Evelyn said. “I’m going up to the church and scream bloody murder—”

  Maybe she went. We were under a street lamp. “There’s something else I didn’t say,” Sally Kline told me. “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “Just for coming. Are you going up to see the police now?”

  “Somebody’s got to tell Cathy’s mother and sister. I thought I’d get it over with.”

  “Oh, Lord, I’d forgotten all about them—” My hands were together on the wheel and she put one of hers over them. “Would you like me to come along, Harry? If it might make it easier I’d—”

/>   “You get some sleep. I’ll call you later.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes.”

  She was turned toward me. She leaned across and kissed me on the cheek like a sister. I never had a sister so I turned around and looked at her, and then we weren’t related anymore. Why do people do those things? People do all sorts of things. I once had a client worth seven and one-half million dollars and she used to do her laundry in the toilet bowl. So we sat there stuck together like two halves of a boiled potato with the water burned out of the pot. After a while she got out. I watched her until the door buzzed and I saw her open it and go inside, and then I pulled out and headed up toward 72nd Street West.

  I had thought about calling, but I hadn’t spoken to Estelle in almost a year. She would know something was wrong the minute she recognized my voice. The decent thing was to go there.

  I took Lexington all the way and then cut across. There were the beginnings of traffic now, and the sanitation trucks were out. I found a slot about a block from the building and walked over.

  I pushed Howes, which was 12-C. Cathy’s mother was too deaf to hear the ring. There was another one of those broadcast systems in the center of the block of bells and I knew it would be Estelle who would call down.

  It was a good minute and then her voice came clearly. The Russians weren’t jamming this one yet.

  “It’s Harry Fannin, Estelle.”

  “Who?”

  “Harry Fannin.”

  There was a silence. Finally the buzzer rang. I went in, crossed the long lobby with mirrors and potted stuff that I remembered and pressed for the elevator. It was a self-service job, silent as an anaconda slithering down a cypress, and it got there a lot more quickly than I wanted it to. Because I was wondering what Emily Post might have to say about just how you go barging in on someone at six o’clock in the morning to let her know that her kid sister had gotten caught up in an armed robbery and then had been murdered by a cheap hood named Duke Sabatini.

  I was still wondering when I walked along the corridor on the twelfth floor to the door marked C and pressed the bell. And then Estelle opened up and I didn’t wonder anymore, at least not about part of it.

  Because part of what I had been going to say was wrong. Duke Sabatini hadn’t done it.

  CHAPTER 7

  Duke hadn’t done it because he was here, and there could only be one reason why he’d come. He had to be looking for Cathy. So he didn’t even know she was dead.

  “In,” he told me. He didn’t say it precisely the way Eddie Bogardus had said it. Bogardus I’d tagged as an Edward G. Robinson fan, and this one was a trifle more suave—say the early Cagney sort. The gun was Cagney’s kind also, a foot-long Army Colt which might have looked less likely to drag him to the floor if it had been mounted on a caisson. He was standing several feet back from the door, calmly pressing the thing into Estelle’s ribs.

  It was Duke all right. New York wouldn’t be that lousy with random armed punks waiting behind entrances. Actually he was prettier than Cagney. Taller too, although the Vitalis alone gave him a three-inch edge. He had eyes the color of broomstraw.

  We were standing there. “Remember that scene when he squashes the grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face?” I said. “Always got a boot out of old Jimmy. Or was it Jean Harlow’s face?”

  “Let’s save the chatter, huh?”

  “Well now, sure, if you didn’t see the picture I guess we can’t discuss it. Truth is I can’t stay anyhow. I just dropped by to deliver some bananas.”

  He caught the reference and he scowled at me, so I scowled back. I was being rather silly. He knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “You want to step out of the way,” I asked him finally, “or am I supposed to crawl through your legs?”

  “Hard,” he said. “First he’s comic and now he’s hard. Just ease in the door. There’s room for six of your kind, Oliver.”

  Oliver, Jack. Different cast, same writers. Same old story-line too. Boys lose girl, so one of them checks out the roommate and the other one checks out the mother and sister. Two wrong endings on the same double feature. A girl like Cathy would go to a man when she got into trouble.

  Sure. So what man?

  I went in. I’d seen too many females messed up already that morning to want to make him really impatient. Estelle was trembling, next to him. She couldn’t have looked much worse if vandals had trampled the chrysanthemums.

  “That wall will do swell,” he told me. “Let’s turn around and get your hands up on it.”

  I did that too, standing next to a highboy. I could see a little of the other furniture and it was what I remembered, all very antiseptic and uncomfortable looking. Estelle’s taste. There was a TV set in the corner. Just a little while and the three of us could catch Sunrise Semester.

  Duke had closed the door. “On the couch,” he told Estelle. “And get glued there.”

  I heard her going, then felt the .45 hook into the small of my back. I’d already made up my mind not to horse around with this one. Years ago I’d made up my mind. It’s a cinch to be psychological, Fannin’s one mental block, but any muzzle you can lose a fountain pen in is just too big.

  But he really didn’t make me that nervous. He’d be looking for information, not a murder rap.

  He was frisking me, running me down with his left hand. “The gun’s on my right hip,” I told him. “If you’re looking for the forty grand, I already blew that on chewing gum and soda.”

  “We’ll get to that news later, Oliver.” He jerked out the Luger and then my wallet. Then he found the barrel and trigger-assembly of Eddie’s zip-gun.

  That seemed to amuse him a little. He wheezed contemptuously through his nose and I heard the pieces fall against the seat of an upholstered chair. The .45 crowded my spine some more, so he was probably busy with my wallet. After a while that dropped to the floor.

  “Big of you,” I told him. I could see that he’d left the money in it. He wasn’t interested in my paltry fifty or sixty bucks.

  “Fannin,” he said. “Cop, huh? Okay, cop, it’s too early for you to be on it for any bonding company. So Bogardus spilled about the heist. What else do you know that’s interesting? Let’s have it.”

  He didn’t know me from Little Black Sambo, which meant that Cathy had kept us private after all. I didn’t feel so high-spirited anymore, knowing that. Under the circumstances I suddenly felt considerably like a slob.

  “Spill, cop.”

  “Shove that rod against me one more time and you’ll get one goddam lot of answers,” I told him. “Back off and let me stop climbing this wall. What the hell do you need besides that howitzer to keep me in line? You want a tin whistle maybe?”

  “A wit,” he said. “A real genuine wit.”

  “Yeah, I know, the man who wrote Snowbound was wittier.”

  A little time passed. He grunted. He could turn colors before I’d explain it to him.

  He decided to be accommodating. “Drop ‘em,” he said.

  “Keep your feet right where they are when you come around. Anything fishy and this thing goes off.”

  I turned. He had backed out into the middle of the room. His gray sharkskin suit had shoulders as outsize as the cannon in his hand and the knot in his purple tie was big enough to moor something of Cunard’s. Cathy’s latest beau. So he hadn’t killed her. So I still wasn’t rushing off to ask permission to bunk with him next semester.

  The .45 was centered on my intestines. “Okay,” he said then. “All nice and relaxed, huh? Now where is she?”

  I ignored him. He could throw that one at me all night and not get anything, not while Estelle was sitting there that way. She was wearing a drab blue robe and house slippers. Her hands were locked in her lap and her lips had no blood behind them. She was staring at me helplessly and I realized it was the first time I had ever seen her without glasses. Oddly enough it made her look better than I remembered.

  “Where, cop?”

  ?
??Cathy hasn’t got the money,” I told him evenly. “You don’t have to look for Cathy.”

  Estelle winced when I mentioned the name. Obviously I hadn’t changed the subject by butting in on them. I changed it now.

  “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.