Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 14

I caught it flush on the jaw. I staggered back three or four drunken steps, flailing my arms, but that was only for effect. I crashed down like something miscalculated at Cape Canaveral.

A thousand lights came on. They kept bursting like expanding stars. I was the only one seeing them.

All by myself on the floor of a seedy Greenwich Village basement, and I was forging ahead of whole nations in the race for outer space.

I had a remote idea that the party had come to an abrupt halt. “Well, for crying out loud!” someone screamed. “I saw that, Pete Peters! Why, that man wasn’t even looking at you, you brute!”

Good old Donnie McGruder, just the ally I needed. I couldn’t make him out in the mists. All I could see was a bearded monster nine feet tall, with forearms like hams and shoulders like a yoke.

Nobody had told me Peters was nine feet tall. That worried me. I closed my eyes tightly and shook my head before I let myself look at him again.

So it was only six feet. So I’d still never get up there without help.

I didn’t want to get up anyhow. Let somebody else go climb mountains just because they’re there. I didn’t have any spirit of adventure. I didn’t have any pride either. I just sat, sucking in air.

“You’ve got some damned nerve,” McGruder was sputtering. “Now just what was that all about?”

“Aw, he was bugging Ephraim,” Peters said. “Giving the poor kid a hard time. After Ephraim spends two days in jail, for gosh sakes.”

“That’s still no reason to sneak up behind a man and hit him,” McGruder said. “Especially you, you big ape. Why, you might have killed him.”

It was me they were talking about. That was nice. Even Ephraim was interested. “He had it coming,” he contributed brightly. He was dancing around as gaily as a doll on a string. “He’s that private detective who found Josie the other night. What’s he butting in down here for anyhow? Maybe that will teach him to stay where he belongs, the carpetbagger.”

“That’s not the point,” Peters said. He had a remarkably soft voice for a big man, a voice like marshmallows toasting. Soft and gooey, like my head. But that was nice too. I found comfort in his marshmallowy tones.

I got myself lifted to one knee, with all the cosmic temerity of a creature emerging from a Darwinian swamp.

“Nobody should bother Ephraim,” Peters went on. “Two days in jail is enough. Ephraim suffered. Do you people have any concept of how he suffered? It makes him — why, it makes him holy.”

“So get him a tin cup, like,” somebody put in. Good old Henshaw also. “He can go beg alms.”

“It isn’t something to joke about,” Peters told him. “You people don’t comprehend the alchemy of it. Being in jail does something to a man’s soul. Something ultimate.”

“It makes him a saint,” I said then. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was intruding upon a religious awakening. Fact is, I must have come to the wrong party altogether. I was looking for the protest meeting about Sacco and Vanzetti. Whatever became of Sacco and — oh, sure, poor old Sacco and Vanzetti—”

People were looking at me strangely. It didn’t mean a thing. They were just disturbed by the sound of my scrambled brains. They kept sloshing around in the pan when I got to my feet. I hadn’t known I was going to say a word.

“What were we talking about?” I said. “Oh, yeah, oysters. I always thought they were fish myself. Actually I like toasted marshmallows better. No I don’t either. Ha! Come to think about it — you know what, about toasted marshmallows?”

“Say, listen, fellow — are you all right?”

That was Peters. He was watching me with genuine concern. I laughed in his face, swaying like a lunatic. I hadn’t known I was going to laugh either.

“Listen, there are beds out back, maybe you better—”

“No, no, first ask me — what about toasted marshmallows—”

“Sure,” Peters said. “Sure. You take it easy now, fellow.” He glanced past me, nodding anxiously to someone. “You want me to ask you about toasted marshmallows. Sure. What about toasted marshmallows, fellow?”

I grinned at him. “They make me nauseated,” I said. Then I hit him dead in the middle of that beard with as hard a left hand as I had ever thrown in my life.

Somebody gasped, but it wasn’t Peters. His head jerked, but for a second his body hardly moved at all. Then he went over like a felled oak.

A girl decided to shriek. Peters took two or three ringsiders with him, going back. One of them was Ephraim. I didn’t break up about it. The girl I’d spoken to before with the unmowed black hair and the figure like an ironing board was another one. She wound up sitting spraddle-legged with her mouth open and Peter’s head in the lap of her black skirt. She had on black stockings that ended just below her bony knees.

A man snickered. “The ultimate, man,” a woman added profoundly.

I was still pulling in air a little desperately. I waited another moment, watching until Peters came up groggily on one elbow. A fellow astronaut. His head dropped onto his chest and someone accommodatingly dumped the contents of a beer glass onto it. Ephraim was still sitting there also, staring at me in sullen outrage, as if I’d just maligned James Dean.

The mob had begun to chatter again and I pushed through them toward the bar. I didn’t see Henshaw or Fern, but McGruder took me by the arm. He gave me a precious, shy smile, the fairy princess I’d just won in the lists.

“I’m sorry about that, Harry. Dreadfully sorry. You must think we’re all beasts.”

“Forget it. I hope it didn’t bust up the party.”

“Say now, say, you forget it. You’re most welcome. If anyone should leave it’s Pete. That — that—”

He was leading me toward a corner. I didn’t have the strength to fight it.

“You are a private investigator, Harry?”

“I think somebody hung a sign on my back.”

He didn’t smile. In fact when I glanced at him I realized he had discarded almost all of his mannerisms. He was picking at a corner of his thin lower lip, and the serious expression made him look unexpectedly older.

“This is all very puzzling,” he said after a minute. “If not to mention tragic. I knew poor Josie Welch quite well. She was so young that I was something of a — well, a big brother to the girl. She used to come to me with her problems.”

I was working my jaw. “Any problems the cops would be interested in?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that at all. Just her bad childhood, general depression — psychological problems more than any other kind. She was raised on a farm in Kansas. The poor kid was attacked criminally by an uncle when she was no more than fourteen. It soured her on men pretty badly.”

I grunted. “I hear she slept with enough of them. You should pardon the expression.”

He still didn’t grin. “She did chase around a lot,” he said. “Too much. But she never found any satisfaction in it. I think it was a fairly obvious syndrome — a way she had of getting even.”

“You’re going to lose me,” I told him.

“Oh, you know what I mean. Giving her body contemptuously, almost as if she wanted to watch men make fools of themselves.”

That was worth another grunt. “You didn’t know she was a call girl?”

McGruder’s head jerked, it startled him that much. “You’re joshing?”

“I might be. But the possibility existed when the cops started digging Tuesday night. I’d guess it’s pretty high on their agenda now that Ephraim’s out.”

He was scowling. “She could be a bitter girl sometimes. I even used to think she was capable of — well, violence. But I never suspected she’d found that sort of outlet. All of this is why you’re down here, I suppose?”

I started to shake my head, then clamped my teeth together. A great Georgia halfback named Frank Sinkwich once played a fall season with his jaw broken. I wondered how it felt to be beyond human frailty. “I’m looking for Audrey Grant. Strictly a family interest.”

McGruder lifted an eyebrow, then shrugged as if he were disappointed. “She’s around somewhere. I’ll try to find her, if you’d like.”

Td appreciate it. Nothing personal, but I’ve had about enough of your party. And thanks.”

“You already paid me by hitting Pete.” He tittered suddenly. Just as suddenly he was the old McGruder again, the one that all of two or three people undoubtedly treasured. “The big butch used to be my husband. We had four months of sheer bliss together before he decided to go straight. He’s been just impossible ever since!”

That white hand went limp again. I sighed, watching him use it to toss some of that drooping hair out of his eyes. Zen Fruitism. By the time he was ready to flutter away he wasn’t even touching the floor.

They’d gotten Peters off the launching pad and into an aid station somewhere. Henshaw was at the bar and I headed back over. The girl Peters had fallen against was standing behind him. I took a second look and decided I might have been hit too hard at that.

It wasn’t the same girl. I realized that the one Peters had crashed into had not been the Ginsberg-Corso rooter I’d seen before either. But all three of them had the same stringy black hair and scrawny figure, the same black jersey, the same black stockings. They could have been members of some new uniformed sect.

“Something called The History of Rome Hanks” I heard this one say. “The paperback title is Dishonored Flesh—”

Henshaw was grinning at me. “Slugger,” he said. “What do you do with the right hand — save it for Guy Fawkes’ Day?”

“I work out two or three times a week. It gives me an edge.”

“Like a cleaver. You saw the chick, huh?”

“When? When I was on my back?”

Henshaw was drinking. “I thought maybe previous to that. I spied her back in the end corridor. It was a trifle queer, come to reconsider.”

I had picked up the Old Crow. “Queer how?”

“Ephraim. I guess people haven’t been made cognizant he’s one of the populace again. The Grant chick ambled out of the head back there and sort of turned sallow when she spotted him, you know? Real shook up.”

I had put down the bottle. “Then what?”

“Well, man, I was sort of more interested in your small brawl. She’s still yonder, I presume. I saw Ivan Klobb back there, but whether or not they made words I cannot avow.” He looked at me, puzzled, then whistled softly. “Hey, like I see some light. If Ephraim is out, some other cat is due to go in, no? You think the sight of him gave the Grant chick some ideas? Like maybe, since it ain’t Eph, she’s got a hunch who?”

I was staring at him.

“Although on third hand I could be blowing hysterical,” he decided. “Missing the whole beat. The chick might have just had heartburn, you know?”

“A brunette,” I said. “What was she wearing?”

“Man’s T-shirt.” Henshaw giggled obscenely. “I am not as observant as many, but the Grant chick in a man’s T-shirt I would long remember. Like better men than I have left hearth and home for dream of what lies beyond yon distant hills, you dig me?”

He was smirking into his glass. I left him with it, heading back toward that corridor.