Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 24

I got up onto my elbows and knees, then hung there as limply as a sweaty leotard. Someone in rubber-soled desert boots stepped near me noiselessly. It was a task, but I lifted my head high enough to see the grain-colored beard that identified him as Ivan Klobb. I also saw the boxy black Colt.45 automatic in his right hand.

His other hand lifted the Magnum off my hip. “On your feet, fellow,” I was told.

I managed it, a little shakily, watching Klobb pass the Colt to Constantine. That made a total of three pieces I was facing, since lovely Margaret was getting her kicks from the Beretta again. It made me feel dangerous, like Dan McGrew.

Constantine had shed his dressing gown for a dark blue serge suit. He had on a figured gray silk tie, and his collar looked too tight. It probably always did, around that tree stump he had for a neck.

“Damned glad you dropped in, fellow,” he told me. “We would have looked you up one of these days, of course, but this saves trouble all around.”

“I’m glad too,” I said, but I was just making sounds. I’d wanted to find out if I could. Td hate to put anybody out on my account.”

“Sure. That’s why you forgot to mention my name with the bulls, isn’t it? My old buddy.”

“You were in it before I saw them,” I said.

“You won’t write to the alumni magazine if I call you a liar, will you, fellow? The name Connie came up last Tuesday, yeah — I know because my Vice Squad connection tipped me. They played it dumb, and so far as they knew there was no Connie on the books. What did you think this was, Fannin? You think I’m playing sandlot ball?”

“Get to the point, Connie. You don’t much care what I think.”

“Sure, sure — I’ll get to it. The point is that Vice Squad got another call a couple of hours ago — not about Connie this time, but Constantine. That much they couldn’t fake. I might have spent my time in courses like outdoor cookery at Ann Arbor, fellow, but there’s a little something besides oleomargarine between my ears. My old pal Fannin fixed things for me, didn’t you, pal?”

“Let him send you a letter about it,” Margaret said. “From the hospital.” She was off to my right, leaning almost jauntily against a chimney. The glow from the studio left her half in shadow, and there was enough breeze to have flung some of that rampant hair into her face. Except for the Beretta she could have been soliciting over there.

Except for the Beretta. Constantine was still waiting for some sort of answer, and Klobb had moved behind me. I didn’t like not seeing the third gun. I was fairly sure there was not going to be any shooting, not since they knew they were already tied into the case, but I still did not like it.

“There was another killing,” I said finally. “Audrey Grant’s father. Somebody sent him a telegram about the girl’s where abouts. Your name was in it.”

Constantine frowned, watching me carefully. “Somebody who?^”

“A Friend*—no other signature.”

He grimaced. “You find the telegram or did the bulls?”

“I got there first, if that’s what you mean.”

“If there was a telegram,” Margaret said.

“That’s not the point.” Constantine did not look at her. “You could have ditched the thing if you saw it before the bulls, Fannin.”

I shook my head. “Not after I unwrapped another dead one. I’ve got the matter of my own license to protect in these things.”

“Your goddam license—” He spat across his shoulder. His thick lips were drawn back against his gums when he stepped toward me.

“Twenty-three girls. You get an expense-account convention in this town, it takes one phone call. Six years I’ve spent building up the reputation, until every big public relations man in the East knows I’m his man, and now some dollar-an-hour peeper spills the details in the wrong office. You know what this can do to my set-up? You got any idea what this can cost me?”

I didn’t answer him. I could feel Klobb breathing behind my ear.

“I asked you if you know what this means to me, Fannin—”

Constantine poked me with the Colt so I nodded. “I know,” I told him. “I’m sorry. You might have to go to work for a living.”

He was going to satisfy those aggressions sooner or later anyhow. He hit me in the stomach with a fist like a runaway Greyhound bus and I doubled over, heaving sickly.

“Twenty-three girls. And if I have to lay low too long every damned one of them will be running for somebody else. All because of a punk halfback I used to punch holes for. Damn it to sweet hell—”

He was standing a foot in front of me when I got myself straightened up. He was pretty much oblivious to the cannon at his side, breathing hard and nurturing his hate, and it was a moment for heroics on my part. It was a swell moment, for noticing that Margaret would have had to tilt the Beretta about a sixteenth of an inch to take out my eye. I let him hit me in the stomach again.

He liked the way I folded in half. He liked the sounds I made, like cats being squashed. He liked the color of my face when I got it lifted. When I couldn’t lift it anymore Klobb did it for me, jamming a knee into my back and using it for a fulcrum, and he liked that too.

When he quit, Klobb stepped back and I sank to my knees like something sticky being poured down a drain.

I vomited everything I’d had to eat since they took me off formula.

“The lad who was going to make them forget Tom Harmon.” Constantine laughed, turning away. “Let’s get out of here now, huh?”

“Half a moment,” Margaret said. She might have been stifling a yawn. “I didn’t mention it earlier because you said he was a friend, but he didn’t just take the gun away from me at Audrey’s. If I hadn’t convinced the poor sap it would mean his life, I would have been raped on the floor.”

“Well, now. Well, how about that, now?” Constantine was gripping the Colt by the snout when he turned back. Margaret was being careless with the Beretta also, and Klobb seemed to have wandered off. I couldn’t be sure, but I was beyond caring. I threw myself at Constantine with every remnant of strength I could muster.

H. Fannin, realist of the old school, like Walter Mitty. The big man took a quick short step to the side, slammed a palm like a spade against my chest, yanked me to my feet, ran with me, and then slapped me against a wall like a trowel full of wet cement. He propped me into place with all the effort of Pancho Gonzales hoisting one for the serve, and then the checkered stock of his thirty-nine-ounce automatic mashed its way into my cheek like a fork through over-cooked potatoes. I saw constellations that Galileo never dreamed of, and after that I tasted blood and frustration and immeasurable sadness all at once, staring without belief at the one hand he was holding me with. The one hand. My head rolled, and he raked the gun across my face from the other side.

There was blood in my eyes also, but I thought I saw that resplendent orange hair bobbing in the vapors near me. My madonna of the rooftops. I even thought I saw a smile on those vengeful orange lips. “Darling,” someone muttered. It was me, with all I had left. Words. “Audrey and her roommate aren’t here. We’ve got time, darling, we’ve got time—”

Colors flashed, only some of them in my imagination. The Beretta jumped across Constantine’s forearm and slashed down at my temple. He let her hit me twice more. Then he threw me aside like so much rank bedding, onto what might have been left of my face.

I kept on bleeding, which seemed a logical result of my activities. A pool of it grew under my nose, but it was only a small pool, like Tanganyika. There was quiet talk, but it did not interest me, not even as much as the latest article on Bing Crosby’s sons. I’d be leaving such mundane things behind anyhow, as soon as they took action on my application to that monastery, the one that honored credit cards. I wasn’t even going to write anymore letters to sportswriters about why they didn’t elect Arky Vaughan to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Arky Vaughan, my all-time favorite shortstop who was long, long gone, who had drowned in a lake.

Someone stooped near me, and I saw those desert boots out of half an eye. I wondered remotely if he’d ever worn them in the desert. Zen Bootism. He was fumbling at my hip, and I had the curious sensation that he was shoving the Magnum back into my holster. He hadn’t said a word since I’d come to call, not one. I’d hardly gotten a look at that incipient fascist face.

“I’m returning your pistol,” he told me. “Solely in the hope that you might decide to blow your stinking brains out, old chap.”

He stepped over me, and the roof door closed. Footsteps echoed in the stairwell, going away.

They’d left me, without a single chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.”