Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 32

There were people on the stairway to the next floor, all of them in bathrobes. “Say, did we hear—?”

“Police matter,” I managed, and then I heard Toomey telling them something behind me. I went down and through the smashed lower door, wincing at every step. I took hold of the concrete rail with both hands and hung there, swaying.

My word he’d killed her on. Sensitive, saintly little Ephraim. She won’t go to any cocktail parties. I should have known, dear Christ I should have known.

Audrey Grant and Josie Welch. Call girls, tramps who’d had nothing for him but scorn. One of them had married him as the most brutal kind of joke, the other had given herself to him once and then pretended it never happened. But Pete Peters had been right. In his warped life they had been the only two women who mattered, and I’d told him that Fern had murdered them both.

I’d told him. I’d been so sure, so damned sure. And so convincing that thirty minutes after he’d talked to me he’d not only gotten the gun but had already used five of the six bullets it probably held, and now he’d be… now… I heard the first distant wail of a siren in the darkness as I started to run.

Commerce Street, I’d seen the address in the paper. It took me three minutes to get over there, no more, sprinting through the wet mist with both hands clasped against my side. The building was ancient, brick, and its glass vestibule door was open. E. Turk, 3-EI lurched up the two flights. I stopped, gasping, just steps shy of the landing, fighting vertigo and pain and a dozen other things I could not have named.

“—Listen, listen, we ought to wait for the police—”

“—But time is passing, suppose he needs—”

“—Who’s this coming now? They couldn’t have gotten here so quick—”

Faces turned from a closed door as I dragged myself up the rest of the way. They might have been faces reflected in muddied water, for all I saw them. I staggered through the cluster to the knob. The apartment wasn’t locked.

“Hey, whore you? You ain’t supposed to—”

I turned my head. I must have looked like Raskolnikov on his way to get rid of the ax. I must have looked like Yorick when they dug him up. No one made anymore protest. I pulled the door after me.

There was only one room. It was close, disordered, filthy. He was on a narrow disheveled bed, on his back. One of his shoes was off, and there was a rip in the heel of his blue sock. The gun was still in his hand, although it had jerked out of his mouth at the recoil. A Ruger Blackhawk.

People don’t kill other people. People are good, people have beautiful souls. There had been about forty books on two metal shelves above an unpainted wood table. It didn’t seem that he would have had time, but he’d gotten his hands on each of them, rending bindings and shredding pages as if he’d decided that literature had been the cause of all his troubles. In a way, maybe it had been. The debris was scattered around the bare floor, except for a single page which lay near his shoulder. It could have been there by chance, but it was corny enough for the fanciful son of a gun to have meant it. It shook me, because of the foolishness I’d been quoting to myself before he’d hit me in that alley last night:

…It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

Two cops were pressing up the stairs when I came out. One of them was Sergeant DiMaggio.

“I guess you better go back over, Fannin.”

I nodded. An elderly man touched my sleeve as I started down, lifting a leathery, concerned face. “He was an author, that boy. I don’t know if he was any good or not. He’s dead, eh?”

“As dead as Dickens,” I said, but the voice wasn’t my own. Mine was trying to burst through the top of my skull, screaming in horror.