Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 16

She was down there, all right. Her skin was warm and pliant, but there was no trace of a pulse.

I hadn’t expected one. The knife was still sticking out of her breast, like a pencil out of a sharpener.

I turned fast because of Dana. She was on her feet, beginning to get it. She was standing lopsidedly, missing a shoe. A minute earlier it would have made her fall on her face.

“Is she — is she—?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes widened. Her mouth opened again but this time it made only some small gurgling sounds, like a clogged toilet. She spun, breaking for the door.

The dress was still knotted around her hips. I caught a fistful of it. Something tore when I jerked her back.

“Kiss me!” I told her.

She looked at me as if I were mad. I was mad as a loon, but I knew enough to keep her away from that mob out front. She was still gaping when I brought up a short right and tagged her on the point of her gorgeous chin.

I got an arm around her before she could fall. It was like carrying a Volkswagen, but I got her onto the mattress.

It left me light-headed. It also left me with a corpse on the floor and an unconscious girl on the bed. I had a remote idea that the situation called for some firm, decisive action.

So I raised Dana’s hips and pulled her dress down.

Middle-class morality is primeval. There was a key in the door and I got myself over there to turn it. I came back and eased the cot farther from the wall. The body rolled onto its spine.

Audrey Grant. She had on that T-shirt that had made Hen-shaw rhapsodic. The blade had slashed through it just below the heart. A thin red stream had traced itself onto the waist of her green skirt, but it had not been a prolonged bleeding. It could not have taken her much more than six or eight seconds longer to die than it had taken Josie Welch.

I had told Ulysses Grant there did not have to be any connection between the two girls. Astute, discerning Fannin. I probably would have told Alexander Graham Bell he’d never make a connection either.

Audrey Grant. Why? I didn’t know why. It was 11:18. Less than six hours ago Grant had been in my office. That was why.

Now what the hell did that mean, exactly? Nothing, nothing at all. Fannin was just raving, in lieu of thought. Worry about it tomorrow, Scarlett, when your brains stop palpitating.

She had been a pretty girl. She had been tall, but a daughter of Grant’s would have to be. She was leggy, and she had almost too much bosom for her slight shoulders and long neck. There was a tiny gold chain around the neck, twisted now so that the locket lay on the outside of the shirt. I didn’t open it. There would be a picture of Philo Vance inside, sticking his tongue out at me. I kept staring at the knife instead.

That did it. I had simply not been conditioned to come suddenly upon the violently dead. Even when my hand lifted to my pocket it didn’t register immediately. The knife was an exact duplicate of the one I’d taken from Ephraim.

I didn’t have any knife in my pocket.

So I’d lost it when I’d been hit. Any one of fifty people could have picked it up.

There was a deduction for you.

Td talked to Henshaw right after the brawl. No, first to McGruder. Henshaw had said Ivan Klobb was back in the corridor. Had Fern still been with him? Where had Ephraim and Peters gone?

The next question has several parts, Mr. Fannin. Name all the National League batting champions from 1900 to the present, in chronological order, with their averages. You have thirty seconds in the isolation booth.

Zen Boothism. I went to the telephone. There was a book lying under it. The Subterraneans, by Jack Kerouac. I got Central, then the desk at the local precinct. The man said DiMaggio was out. He said Toomey was out also. “You 11 have to do,” I told him.

“Sure, and for what? Just who might this be?”

“My name is Kerouac. Max Kerouac. Take this down.” I gave him McGruder’s address. “It’s a basement, entrance in the rear through an alley. Drinking going on. There’ll be a key under the plank steps where you come in. The key is for the second bedroom door in the right-hand corridor. You got that?”

“That I have, but just what is it we’re to do with it, Mr. Carraway? What is it we’re to find in this locked room?”

“Well, the body. You want me to drag it out front and spoil the party?”

I hung it up. I dug out a pencil and a spiral notebook, tore off a sheet, wrote: Sgt. DiMaggio knows me. Girl knocked out so would not scream. Will call here. I signed the right name this time, then propped the note on an uncovered pillow next to Dana’s head.

There was a small slash pocket on Dana’s left hip. There was a folded five-dollar bill in the pocket, and there were two keys on a rubber band. I left the money.

She didn’t move when I touched her. Young Molly Bloom. She was boozed up enough so that she would be snoring contentedly when the cops arrived. I resisted a moronic impulse to kiss her on one of those creamy shoulders. I decided I was still goofy.

There was no one in the corridor. I was locking the door again when I realized that there was no sound either, not from anywhere in the apartment. No talk, no music. That stopped me cold. One sporty suggestion from the right nitwit and the whole pack of them could have been in a caravan of stolen cars on their way to Denver.

They weren’t. It took me a few seconds in the renewed dark, coming into the main room. Someone had draped a rag over the one bulb. They were sitting on the floor in a scattered half circle, evidently all of them.

There was a chair out in the center, with Don McGruder standing on it. He was holding some papers, but I did not know how he expected to read from them in that gloom. Unless his inner glow would help him. His poetic flame. Maybe that was why he had all his clothes off, so that the glow would not be obstructed. He was naked as a new-dropped giraffe.

His voice came in a whisper. “My latest creation,” he said. “I hope it is worthy of its subject, which has so devastatingly moved us all. I call it, ‘An Ode to Josie, Cruelly Shot’—”

There were some sighs. It was way over my head, but then I’d never attended a poetry recitation before. For all I knew Emily Dickinson had reached immortality the same way. I went quietly along the wall. McGruder started speaking:

“Alas, poor waif, at savage rest, The deadly missile in thy breast— What immoral hand or eye Would scar thy soft virginity? — ”

I stopped long enough to plant the key. Two people were talking in undertones beyond the overhanging light outside. One of them was another of those uniformed witches from that weird sect.

“So I asked her,” the girl said, “how could I protest against social conformity if I wore what everyone else wears—”

This time my head did rattle, I was sure of it. Poor besotted sexy Dana, she was the only sane one in there. I would make it up to her one day. On a slow boat to Patagonia. Just thinking about it would sustain me.

Sure. I’d think about it the next time I treated a murder threat like a missing-persons case.

I told myself I couldn’t have known the clippings Grant got were a threat. Okay, I told myself, so you couldn’t have known. So it isn’t your fault that the girl is dead, but dead she is. Got any ideas, Kerouac?

Yeah, I got some ideas. Shut up and let me think.

I didn’t have time to think. The Chevy was still near the Blue Soldier, but the cab I grabbed at Bleecker Street got me across to East Tenth in five minutes. I found the address that Henshaw had given me for Dana and Audrey Grant, an ordinary brownstone but well enough kept up to be expensive. I read O’Dea-Grant next to a bell marked 2-A, used one of Dana’s keys on the outside door, climbed the one flight. The building was as quiet as a sunken ship.

I found 2-A. Dana’s second key was new and badly filed. It took me two or three turns to drop the tumblers, and then I could not twist the key out of the lock again. My hand was still working at it after I’d pushed back the door and stepped in.

It was my right hand. I do everything with my right hand except deal poker. Even if I could get a gun out with my left I couldn’t hit the Atlantic Ocean from Montauk Point.

Not that I had a gun to reach for anyhow. The woman inside did, naturally.