Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 3

She’d been forcing it. She smiled when we went out, but the power lines were down again. I told her my name and she said that her own was Fern Hoerner, but she would have given it to a kitchenware salesman in the same tone.

She turned south, walking glumly with her hands thrust into her pockets. I indicated the Chevy when we came abreast of it.

“We don’t really need it,” she said. “It’s only Grove Street.”

She shuffled along, kicking out with a tennis shoe once or twice and scuffing it on the concrete. I took her arm when we crossed Hudson. There was no traffic, and the few neighborhood stores were closed. The usual imposing American intellects were going slowly blind in the glare of television screens behind random windows.

“Do you live down this way, Harry? I’ve never seen you in Vinnie’s before.”

“Up off Third Avenue. You don’t have to make conversation if you’re feeling rotten.”

“I’m sorry. I guess it was a little embarrassing at that.” She shook her head. “Although I’m acting childish. I was pretty nasty myself, as I recall.”

“Hell—”

“Maybe, but it was just poor old Ephraim. That’s Ephraim Turk — his mother told him he was a poet.”

“But mother died.”

She managed a laugh. “But now I’m being bitchy all over again. I’m no judge of verse, really — sometimes I can’t tell William Butler Yeats from Woodbine Willie. All I’ve ever done is fiction myself

She said it matter-of-factly, not seeming to notice when I glanced at her. “Can I ask,” I said, “or is that the touchy question?”

“It’s okay to ask. You damned well better—” The smile was warming up again. “I’ve done a novel. In fact it’s coming out next week.”

I frowned. She stopped walking when I did. I kept on frowning when I put my hands on her shoulders.

“You’ve done a novel,” I said.

She nodded uncertainly.

“It’s coming out next week.”

“Um-hum.”

“You’re at least twenty-three years old.”

“Twenty-four.”

“I’m going home,” I said.

Her eyes were bright. I lifted a hand and let it drop, slapping air. “Greenwich Village—”

“You don’t really have to be impressed, Harry,” she decided then. “Sometimes I think the book isn’t much good at all. I get the feeling they just want my picture on the dust jacket.”

“I’ll take a dozen.”

“That’s what they’re counting on. Not that it isn’t a reputable publisher — which could be another reason why Ephraim isn’t too happy with me these days. The only place he sees his name in print is on his phone bill.”

“I gathered he was a little anxious about some girl named Josie?”

“Ephraim would be anxious about what color the grass will come up next April.” We had turned at Grove and were headed toward Seventh Avenue. “Although it’s a funny story, actually. It couldn’t have happened with anybody except Josie — Josie Welch, the girl I live with. She’s as pretty as a picture, but she’s probably the most scatterbrained kid in town. It’s Zen — that started it all.”

“Sin?”

“Zen. Zen Buddhism, you must know about it—?”

“I hear there’s a lot of it going around.”

She threw back her gleaming head. “That’s as good a comment as any. Damn, but I hate these fads — you can’t turn around without hearing words like safari and atman and Lord knows what else, all of it mixed up with undergraduate profundity and stale beer—”

“It sounds pretty subtle for a girl like this one—”

“Oh, it is. But somebody gave her a lecture on it one night. Some intense young man, no doubt. Josie’s always getting lectured, it’s a way she has of being seduced.”

“Zen Bedism—”

“Oww—” She winced. “But you don’t know how right you are. It was all she talked about for a week or two, and then last Sunday I came in about midnight and there were she and Ephraim, sitting on opposite ends of the couch with their legs crossed and their arms folded, both of them stark naked and staring into space. You learn not to be surprised by much of anything Josie does, but this was a little extreme. I thought they were probably high at first, but then Josie admitted just that — they were supposed to be practicing Zen, trying to lose all awareness of their physical natures and achieve a state of absolute spirituality. I asked her when the practice session ended and the game began, but she wouldn’t say another word. The pair of them were still contemplating eternity when I went to bed.”

“Zen Nudism—”

“Clown—”

“And Josie achieved Nirvana while Ephraim didn’t — which explains all his anxieties—”

“Not quite. The next morning Ephraim was coming out of her bedroom when I was leaving for the library. I do freelance reading for film people, incidentally, screening books that might make movie properties — not so much, now that I’ve gotten my advance on the novel. If I have any luck I’ll be quitting altogether. Anyhow, I let it pass, as I do with most of Josie’s sundry indiscretions. But that evening Ephraim showed up again. You’d have to know Josie to appreciate this, but the minute he made the first hint of a pass at her she hauled off and socked him. She told him flatly that she wouldn’t go to bed with him if he were the last man on earth—”

“Huh?”

“That was Ephraim’s reaction, likewise. He asked her where she thought she’d gone the night before, but Josie said she’d had nothing to do with what happened. Even if she’d consented in so many words, it hadn’t been her real self. She’d been withdrawn from the external world, and her mind hadn’t had anything to do with her body. All this in dead seriousness, mind you. It broke me up so much I had to get out of there. And Ephraim’s been chasing her ever since.”

“Waiting for her to come back to earth.”

“Literally. But that’s what I mean about him. All right, she wants to pretend it never happened — so anyone else would leave her to her little self-deception and forget about it. But not Eph. You’d think she’d suddenly spurned him after ten years of wedded bliss.”

“He seemed to want to blame you for something or other.”

“Sure he would. He followed me around like a puppy for months. It wouldn’t occur to him that a girl just might not be interested — if he thinks she’s intimate with anyone else he has to convince himself she’s a tramp he never really wanted to start with. And now after last weekend Josie’s obviously a tramp also, only in this case it’s my influence. Sometimes it does make me a little sore—”

We had stopped walking and were standing below the steps to a three-story brownstone, just off Seventh. It was lighted over there, and cars were passing, but you could have held hearing examinations where we were. I took a smoke, offering her one, and she said no.

“I haven’t shut up since we left Vinnie’s, have I?”

“Most of it about some girl named Josie—”

“Chattering like an imbecile, just so I can hide how I really—” Her voice caught. She was standing two steps up, against the stone balustrade, and she turned away. “Oh, damn him, anyhow. Just because you live in the Village they think they can treat you like—”

The delayed let-down startled me. “Hey,” I said.

She nodded, compressing her lips. I went up. “Listen — that joker isn’t worth three wasted thoughts in thirteen years—”

“Oh, I know it, I just—”

“Anyhow he’s gone. He’s off writing sonnets to a dirty sock. Ain’t nobody here but Shane, ma’am—”

She smiled. She didn’t make anything of it when I kissed her. I had a hand on the rail at each side of her, and only our lips met. It was just light testing, like the first warm drop from an infant’s bottle you touch to your wrist.

“That wasn’t me,” I told her. “I’ve attained other-worldliness, complete withdrawal—”

“You’re a Tibetan monk—” She came up with two keys on a tiny chain. “Do they let you drink coffee — I mean in those monasteries?”

“You show them your Diners’ Club card—”

She grimaced, going to the door. It was an old paneled wood aflair, under an arch, and I pushed it in after she’d worked the key. She skipped lightly up one carpeted flight and led me along a corridor to the front. “Josie must be off somewhere if Ephraim said he rang,” she said quietly. “She goes uptown a lot. If she’d been home she would have let him in to torment him some more.”

I waited while she used the second key on a door marked 3, then followed her into a large living room. A low couch on tubular legs faced us from the far wall, and there were leather sling chairs in corners. There was an expensive hi-fi arrangement, and wrought-iron racks were jammed with records and books. Tan drapes covered the windows overlooking the street. There was no rug but the floor was inlaid of hard dark wood squares and highly polished.

Fern grinned at me. “I’ll bet you wanted something devastatingly bohemian—”

“Orange crates, driftwood, sprawling Beatniks—”

“The furniture’s mine. I was married once, it’s what I got to keep as a souvenir. In the bedrooms also—” She gestured toward two doors in the wall at my left. “Left one’s me, right one’s Josie. You go to the John through the kitchen, but don’t ask me to explain whose concept that was. Do you take it black, Harry?”

“Swell.”

She waved me toward a chair, then slipped through a doorway near the couch. I heard water run. After a minute an inner door closed, which would be that jerry-built latrine.

I was just standing there. The door to Ferris bedroom was open about half a foot. The door to her roommate’s was closed. So I picked the roommate’s.

I don’t know why I do those things. Maybe I do those things because I’m a cop. Maybe I’m a cop because I do those things.

Mother was right. I should have been a poet. There was no iuture in the business I was in, no future at all.

There was a small lamp burning on a table in there. It hadn’t shown with the door closed. I took a single deep breath and then I backed out. I drew the door after me as carefully as if there had been unstrung pearls balanced on its top.

“Nosy,” Fern Hoerner said.

She was at the kitchen door, holding a bag of sugar. Common household granulated sugar. She was going to drop it in a minute.

“That Josie. There’s one door in here to the pantry and one to the bathroom. So I just found this on a shelf in the medicine cabinet. Sometimes I think that girl doesn’t know her own name.”

“Josie Welch,” I said.

“Actually it’s Josephine.”

“Josephine, yes—”

She frowned. “Aren’t you being strange, Harry? What’s so important about her name?”

I wanted to think of a way to tell her. There wasn’t any way. The girl looked as delicate as old dreams, and I despised what it would do to her face. I felt like a man about to slash a Leonardo with a dull blade.

“Someone will have to identify the body,” I said.