Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 19

I stood in front of a door marked 5-D at the end of a corridor which had last been mopped during the candidacy of Alf Landon. There were other doors behind me, all closed, but judging from the odors they would have opened onto three stables and a sty. The Nineties, just east of Broadway. The neighborhood had been more than decent when Grant had first moved in.

Ask a landlord about the rot and he would blame it on the influx of Puerto Ricans. He would be well informed about Puerto Ricans. You would probably have to go to a beach in the Caribbean to find him.

Fannin, the social critic. Try the door, Fannin.

It had taken a cab fifteen minutes to get me across town. I’d pressed a bell at random to get a buzz, since Grant’s had not answered. I could still have been wrong, and there was still that local pub for him to be in. But if Audrey Grant and her half-sister had talked about expecting money this was the only place I knew that it could be coming from.

Try it, Fannin.

A notice for an undelivered telegram was sticking out under the door. I took out a handkerchief before I worked the knob.

I could have been wrong. I’m never wrong. Somewhere down the hall a baby began to cry and I closed the door behind us, against the sound.

A window was open, and in the brief draft a single feather stirred near my foot, then fell again. He’d bought that white shirt.

Another body. Describe it, Fannin. The bullet which took him on the cheek, shattering too much bone to be a.22 this time. The mess where it had emerged at the base of his skull, making it a.38 at least. The whole thing, like how many others? It didn’t make me light-headed this time. I slumped against the wall and stared at my hands, not upset either, just tired.

There were more feathers. They were from an ordinary bedroom pillow which had been used to muffle the report. I wondered remotely if the feathers were goose down.

What else, Fannin? A smashed alarm clock on its back, its hands stopped at 5:47. That was a mistake, although a minor one. Grant had been in my office at 5:47. But he had still been dead three or four hours longer than his daughter, which seemed to be the point the killer had hoped to suggest. He was cold as oceans.

There was a phone. I used the handkerchief again, dialing Western Union. A woman with seaweed in her mouth repeated Grant’s name and address and then said: “‘For information about your daughter try a man named Constantine. Can be located through Morals Squad.’ The message is signed, A Friend.’” I thanked her.

I wasn’t with it. I wasn’t anywhere. Every seemingly logical thought in my head went just so far and then reversed itself like a buttonhook. If Josie and Audrey had anticipated an inheritance they had to have been involved in Grant’s murder themselves. But then they would not have talked about it. Also they should not have been dead.

Button, button, who’s got the button? Not Fannin, not now. I lifted the directory and fumbled pages until I found McGruder, D., Christopher St.

It rang twice. Grant was on the floor in back of me. His daughter was on the floor three feet from where it was ringing. My hand shook.

“Detective Toomey.” A voice said.

“This is Fannin.”

“Oh, brother — where are you?”

I gave him the street number. “I’ve got another one.”

He whistled. “A couple more, you can start charging the department a commission.”

“Yeah.”

“But don’t tell anybody I’m making with the jokes. You’re lucky the sergeant’s in the next room or you’d hear the steam through the wire. You better get yourself down here fast, chum.”

“I just leave this for whoever wanders in?”

“Since when would that be a new trick for you? Hell, stay there, I guess. We might even do you the honor ourselves— we’ve accomplished about all we can in this madhouse anyhow.”

He hung up. I felt like a crankcase full of sludge. I needed draining.

The place was cluttered. Everything was scarred, dilapidated. There were thousands of books. A console phonograph was fairly new, and there were at least two hundred records stacked near it. There was a complex radio mechanism, and there was a tape recorder.

The playthings of a man almost blind, who would have given special devotion to sound. There was no television set.

More books in cartons in the bedroom. The bed unmade, and a week’s filthy laundry flung around the floor, looking like soggy flotsam on an unswept strand. An autographed photo of Eugene V. Debs framed on a wall.

A cockroach scuttled along the drain when I flipped the light in the kitchen. Thoreau’s Walden was propped against a sugar bowl on the table, and something called The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha was held open by a half loaf of black bread. A broken Chablis bottle lay on the window ledge.

Thirteen million dollars. The papers had played Josie’s death as a Beatnik killing, and they would do the same with Audrey’s. If the concept meant anything at all, Grant had been a Beatnik long before they invented the word. Ulysses, son of Thaddeus, by way of Harold Lloyd and Lemuel Gulliver. That classic raincoat was draped over a chair, trailing along the pitted linoleum, and I fingered it. There were even books in the bathroom.

Too many books. A lifetime full, and nothing else, nothing else at all. I found a cold can of Ballantine ale in the refrigerator and I nursed it, waiting for the badges.