Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 4

I had been right about the sugar. The package twisted in her hands and began to empty itself in a thin, fluid stream, like time spilling. It whispered as it built itself into a mound at her feet.

She never saw it, gaping at me. I hadn’t moved. Heifetz could have strung a bow on the tendons at the back of my calves.

It was not the first time I had found a corpse. But I generally have some vague professional notion when there might be one around. Like the vague notion a steel worker has that one of those high girders might be slippery. It’s the same fall. You just don t expect to take it off a trolley on the way home from work.

The bag was crushed and empty when I finally got across. She had not made a sound.

“She’s been shot, Fern—”

“But—” She shivered once, looking past me toward the bedroom. “But I— Oh, dear God, are you sure? How could—?”

“The police will ask you to go in. If you’d rather do it before they come—”

She turned a little wildly, pressing a hand across her mouth.

Very probably the police would be more comfort than a total stranger, which was a status I had just reverted to. She finally nodded, however.

I took her arm. The shade on the one lamp in there was orange, and it threw an unnatural cast over everything, like wildfire beyond thin curtains. The girl lay across the bed with one arm flung upward and her cheek turned against it. Her long thin legs were bent over the side, and her feet touched the floor. She had slippers on. The strap on the left shoulder of her red brassiere was severed, and the brassiere had slipped toward her throat, exposing that one small breast.

Her face was to the light. She could not have been more than twenty, but somehow there was no innocence about her. The face was small-boned, and she had been pretty. She was fragile, but the way Bardot is fragile. The small blackened stain at her heart was hardly visible.

Fern had come only one step into the room. Her fingers were digging into my forearm.

“Get yourself a drink, Fern—”

She broke away, running jerkily toward the kitchen. I did not follow her.

The girl had been killed instantly. The wound was from a.25 at best, more likely a.22, and a single shot from that kind of bore would have to be perfect to kill at all. There was a faint smear of blood on the girl’s palm, where it had touched the hole in what must have been sheer reflex.

I pressed my hand against the inside of her thigh. There was no stiffness, although the skin seemed cold. That could have been an illusion. I guessed it was an hour. It might have been three.

I let out my breath. There was nothing which did not belong in a bedroom. A freshly laundered brassiere, white this time, lay on the floor between a dresser and the bed. She had been changing, so the other one had evidently ripped of itself, not in any struggle. A window near the bed was lifted two inches. There was a fire escape in the blackness beyond it.

A lot of clothes in the closet, just as many cocktail and semi-formal things as casual items. A girl who had not made a career out of Greenwich Village. A girl who had had a friend intimate enough to change a brassiere in front of. Or had she answered the door and then come back in here alone? None of this was any of my business.

I had touched both doorknobs before, so I touched them again, going back out.

Fern was watching me grimly from the couch. She was clutching a tumbler of whisky in both hands. She was not crying, but her face was the color of cooled ashes. I looked into her room also.

It was the same size as the other, set up almost the same way. The window was not open. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed.

“Would she have had anything in there worth taking, Fern?”

She frowned, not understanding.

“It could have been a prowler, although I doubt it.”

“Could have been — Oh God, who? Why? I—ⁿ

I had been waiting for it. She broke apart like a bridge collapsing, in slow motion, letting herself fell to the side with her face in her hands. I could hear the coffee perking and I went in and turned it off. I used up another minute or two brushing the sugar against the base of a cabinet. I found a glass on a draining rack and brought it out. She had a bottle of Four Roses on a table at the end of the couch.

I hadn’t been right about her face. Even torn up that way she was lovely.

“You’re being so calm, Harry. And I don’t know anything about you at all, do I?”

“I’m a detective, Fern. Private.”

“You’re—” She looked up in alarm. “I don’t understand. I mean, you being here and—”

“The police won’t particularly like the idea either. It was just chance that I was in Vinnie’s.”

“Oh, God, it’s so—” She bit hard on a knuckle, fighting it. The phone was on a small stand near the windows. It wasn’t going to go away.

“I better call them now, Fern.”

She said nothing. I dialed. My name, the address, the apartment number. It would have taken longer to order a rib roast.

It was 12:53.1 let myself slide into one of the sling chairs. “They’ll be a while,” I said. “If you want to talk instead of just sitting—”

She stared at me absently.

“Did you know her long, Fern?”

“About a year.” Her voice was ragged. “She’s lived here for five months.”

“That when that marriage you mentioned broke up?”

“That was before. Do you — may I have a cigarette?”

I went across and gave her a Camel. It trembled between her lips.

“You don’t have any ideas?”

“There just isn’t anybody, any reason—”

“Ephraim?”

“But you heard him yourself. He said he was looking for her and she didn’t answer the bell—”

“So did fifteen other people hear him. He could have kept all that private over there. He might have wanted the edge on an alibi.”

“But Ephraim — he’s such an ineffectual sort of boy. He’s frustrated, I guess, and maybe deep down he knows he’s not much of a writer, but I just can’t—”

“There was another girl he mentioned. When he was asking where Josie might be—”

She picked up her glass, sighing, then replaced it. “Dana O’Dea—’’

“A good friend of Josie’s?”

“She was. Until—” She let it trail off.

“You’ll have to tell the cops, Fern.”

She nodded. “They had a fight. At a party, just a few nights ago. Both she and Josie had a crush on Pete Peters, the novelist. He’s — well, just part of the gang down here. I told you before how I met Ephraim coming out of Josie’s room that morning. I’ve met Pete coming out a dozen mornings. But the thing is, if I were Dana’s roommate I would have seen Pete over there also—” She paused, and her arms dropped between her thighs. “I guess Josie and Dana were both kidding themselves, thinking Pete was playing it straight. But then something came up at the party, somebody made a crack, and Dana blew her top. She was drunk, I guess, but she called Josie every name in the book, and then she told Pete to take her home. Pete said no, but it was curious, somehow. He didn’t say he wouldn’t go with Dana — I’m almost certain he said he had to stay. In fact I was tempted to ask Josie later if—”

“She might have been pregnant?”

“I don’t know, Harry, I—”

I was scowling. “Ephraim’s interest doesn’t make much sense if everyone knew Josie was going with this Peters—”

“You saw Ephraim — he’s a little crazy. He told Josie the other night he wanted to marry her. I think he felt — well, I got the idea he wanted to do it deliberately, knowing she might have another man’s child. As if it might add some simulated sort of tragic stature to his life, like Byron’s limp or something—”

“You said she went uptown a lot. Anybody special she saw?”

“Connie, yes.”

“Connie?”

“I don’t know his last name. She’s never said anything about him, nothing at all. He just calls, two or three nights a week, and if Josie isn’t busy she goes up. Oh, God, I mean went up. It was always odd, I guess probably he’s a married man—”

She turned aside. I waited again.

“The cops will have one other set of questions, Fern—”

Her breasts rose and fell sharply in profile.

“I got to Vinnie’s Place about ten to twelve,” I said. “They’ll want to know what time you got there.”

“I saw you come in,” she said distantly. “I couldn’t have been there more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Gregory and Allen might know, those two boys I was sitting with.”

“Before that?”

“I went to see that old Humphrey Bogart film. Casablanca. Over on Sixth Avenue. I guess I went about eight-thirty.”

“Alone?”

The cigarette lifted in a gesture of futility. “I just wish that were all that was on my mind.”

I watched her. Her hands were across her knees. Smoke trailed up from one of them, disappearing against the sheen of her hair.

“That bullet — it was from a twenty-two, wasn’t it?”

“It looked like it.”

“It will be. I owned one. A Colt Huntsman that someone gave me once.”

“Owned?”

“It was stolen out of my dresser. Two weeks ago. I didn’t report it, because we’d had a party that weekend and I thought some poet had probably pawned it for a meal. But now—”

The siren cut her off, whining once like a troubled animal outside. She was looking down desolately and she drew in her breath, holding it. And then she did something that twisted my stomach into a sick knot.

I got over there as fast as I could, but not fast enough. She hadn’t said a word, moving only the hand which held the cigarette. I was standing over her when she let the dead butt drop to the floor.

“Fern,” I said. “Oh, Christ—ⁿ

She got up, shaking. I stared at her lifted wrist. The doorbell rang with a single authoritative blast.

The foul odor of singed flesh followed me when I went to the buzzer.