Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 8

He said his name was Ulysses S. Grant.

I didn’t argue. For at least fifteen seconds all I could do was gape. He was possibly the tallest man I had ever seen. He also might have been the filthiest.

He reached seven feet at the least. He was as gaunt as he would have to be, and there was no way to guess his age, partly because of his sunken cheeks and his oddly dull eyes, and partly because of his beard. The eyes were a shade of gray I had never seen before, almost opaque, like damp cardboard. The beard was scraggly and needed trimming, preferably with garden shears. It and his hair were the color of rotting straw. So were his teeth.

He had on a raincoat. I thought it was a raincoat. Someone had been wearing it to change truck transmissions in. The coat was torn in a few places also, but no more than five or six.

He was grinning at me, but I wasn’t the man he wanted. He wanted someone at the Bowery Mission, maybe the basketball coach.

“Grant,” I said finally. “Like in Appomattox.”

He had a smudged, dog-eared card to prove it. Just the name, nothing else. Cards were the rage that season. I was thinking of having some done up myself. Also just my name. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

“A whim of my father’s,” he said. “His own name was Thaddeus.” He had a voice about four reaches below baritone. “You are Mr. Fannin?”

“There is that possibility,” I said. I nodded, but I could not take my eyes off that coat. It was streaked, splotched, spilled on. Even a lazy research chemist could have had a field day, taking samples from it. In some remote future era it was going to drive an archaeologist insane.

It bothered Ulysses S. Grant not at all. I’ve grown fond of it,” he told me idly. He brushed at something on a sleeve, soot from the Chicago fire. “One of these days I suppose I ought to drop it off to be cleaned.”

“I think so,” I said. “But not an established firm. Maybe you can find a new shop, one that just opened.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand. Why a firm which—”

“Someone just starting out in the business,” I told him. “Trying to make a reputation.”

He laughed. Not a laugh in any ordinary sense. It came honking up out of his throat like a flight of geese out of a marsh. Of course it would. Friday afternoon, and diligent Fannin had to hang around, wondering whatever became of Jeeter Lester. I trudged back into the office and sat down.

I waved him into a chair. Trying to ignore him would have been like trying to ignore Kanchenjunga.

He had opened the raincoat. That didn’t make the day any brighter. Grandma Moses wiped her paint brushes on rags cleaner than the shirt he had on under there. I leaned forward on my arms, pushing a stray pencil back and forth across the blotter.

He was still clucking. “Trying to make a reputation, indeed!

Excellent. Oswald told me to be prepared for your irreverent sense of humor.”

“Oswald did,” I said aimlessly.

“Oswald Fosburgh, yes. It was he who recommended you.”

I was sure of it then. I was a sick man, sicker than I knew. O. J. Fosburgh, attorney at law. His Park Avenue office was not much more plush than the Four Seasons. I picked up the pencil and tossed it into the tray.

“Oswald J. Fosburgh,” I said. “You and he share the same locker at the Harvard Club.”

“Hunk!” said Ulysses S. Grant. It was only one goose this time, caught on the wing by a load of twelve-gauge shot. He slapped himself on the knee. “Indeed, indeed! Ozzie also informed me that you were not particularly subtle. What you mean, of course, is that you cannot conceive of any connection between myself and someone of the stature of O. J. Fosburgh.”

I shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “You’re an eccentric millionaire.”

Ulysses S. Grant pursed his lips. Slowly he began to nod his head. Then he beamed at me.

I had been reaching for a cigarette. I stopped. I put my hands flat on the desk top.

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

I heaved a sigh. Ulysses S. Grant heaved one in sympathy.

“Millions?” I said.

“Actually only thirteen,” he said cheerfully. “And not the principal, merely the interest. To tell the truth it’s all relatively new. Thirteen is what remained after taxes. My father—”

“Old Thaddeus—”

“The same. Yes. He passed away a year or so ago. I was the sole heir. Coffee, I believe it was. South America.”

He believed it was coffee. I had my head in my hands. I hoped I had a handkerchief. I thought I might weep.

Td like someone located, Mr. Fannin. A daughter, by a marriage long since dissolved. I believe the girl is living in Greenwich Village.”

He flicked away some ashes with an unwashed finger which appeared to have enough joints to bend into a square knot. He was studying me with those odd eyes and he missed the standing ashtray by a foot. I was surprised he hadn’t dropped them into a cuff.

“You appear curiously indifferent, Mr. Fannin?”

“No, no,” I said. “Just a little relieved, maybe.”

“Relieved? I’m sorry, I don’t see—”

“Nothing.” I was reaching for the phone directory. “No, I guess I don’t mind looking for people. I just thought it might be some sort of dull security job. I’ve had a little bad luck with them lately.”

“Security? But I still—”

“All that coffee. I thought maybe you had it piled up in the breakfast nook and wanted a watchman.”

More geese went honking southward. Geese, ganders, goslings. I wondered what it would take to offend the man. I dialed the number I wanted and waited.

“You remember an old American League outfielder named Goose Goslin?” I asked idiotically.

“I don’t know baseball,” he said. “Why?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering whatever became of him.”

I got my party. “Harry Fannin calling,” I said. “Can I reach Mr. Fosburgh at this hour?”

The girl asked me to please hold on. Grant raised a bushy eyebrow at the mention of the name.

“Be sneaky if I waited until you were gone,” I told him.

Fosburgh came on. “Fannin,” he said, “how’s the lad?”

“I’m not quite sure.”

He chortled into the wire. “I should have phoned, but I thought you might find him amusing. It’s all strictly on the up and up, you know. Thaddeus Grant was one of my first clients, left a considerable sum in trust for Ulysses last autumn. Surprising in a way, since they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. On the other hand he’d been supporting Ulysses all that time. Anything in particular I can help you with?”

“Not at the moment, Mr. Fosburgh, no.”

“He’s there with you, eh?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” He laughed. “Actually I can probably anticipate your key question. Old Grant sent him two hundred dollars a month for all those years. I imagine Ulysses got used to living as a bohemian and hasn’t quite gotten around to changing.”

“Literally.”

“Indeed, yes. Although you shouldn’t underestimate him. He’s a bright fellow — could have been a writer, perhaps even a lawyer. But that two hundred started coming in during the depression and for some reason it seemed unnecessary for him to do anymore than live off it. I don’t imagine I’m abusing any confidences here, since he’ll be a client of yours also. He drinks, of course, but at the same time he’s read more books than you or I have heard of. He’s forty-six — tallest man in captivity, isn’t he? I hope you can help him out, Fannin. He’d like to find that girl, assist her in whatever way he can.”

“We haven’t gotten to that yet.”

“Oh. Well, I can’t say I blame you for checking first. I’ll admit quite frankly he has been something of an embarrassment at times. Bill my office when you’ve wound it up, eh?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“Not at all. Don’t hesitate to give me a ring if I can aid you.”

We said something pleasant to each other and hung up. Ulysses S. Grant had been waiting patiently, picking his nose behind a red bandana he could have been carrying since Madrid fell. He was still being amused.

“I hope you’re reassured?”

My hand was draped across the phone. I lifted the hand, frowned at it, dropped it again. I looked around the office.

I decided it was a pretty shoddy place. I supposed I was fond of it, but only in small ways, and only in spite of some of the people who’d sat in that chair Grant was in at the moment. Hoodlums, junkies, crooked cops, racketeers, at least one murderer. Td taken them as they came because they were part of the business, and even the conventional, ordinary customers had always made me a little blue — people with problems, a lot of them piecing out my retainer in crumpled bills I’d known they had hoped to buy some small joy with, instead of the grief which had brought them there. Very few of either kind ever came in with as good a guarantee behind them as O. J. Fosburgh.

So I sat there scowling another minute and then I stood up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I can’t help you. It’s after hours, but most other agencies have answering services.”

“I’m afraid I don’t—”

“I’m busy.”

“But you gave the impression—”

He let it trail off uncertainly when I went around the desk and took my jacket down again.

“The coat I could get used to, Mr. Grant,” I said then. “Maybe it’s almost got a certain style. It would look cavalier as hell over a Brooks Brothers suit. But not on top of—”

I bit down on it. I knew it wasn’t the man or the man’s shirt. Maybe it wasn’t even a girl with a Band-Aid on her wrist who wasn’t answering her telephone that week. I didn’t know what it was. I just wanted to be away from there, and now.

I was at the door. He hadn’t gotten sore. Obviously he wasn’t the type. He was just leaning forward with his head bent and his arms triangulated backward against the arms of the chair, like Ichabod Crane on a slow horse.

Td like to lock up, Grant.”

“Mr. Fannin, I can hardly see—”

“Can’t see what? Okay, it’s none of my business, but damn it, if you’d look in a mirror once you’d—”

“I mean I can hardly see you, sir.”

“Huh?”

He was standing, not facing me. “My sight is approximately eighty percent deficient,” he said distantly. “I have glasses for what reading I do, glasses plus a four-inch magnifying lens. But I believe I appear freakish enough without making my eyes look like a pair of enormous bugs, so I rarely wear the glasses in public. Very few people are aware of the condition, I’ve even hidden it from Fosburgh. But it has hardly seemed important for me to notice whether my clothes are particularly fashionable, or for that matter clean. When a man has not been able to recognize a beautiful woman as such since his late twenties, he can lose interest in certain of the more trivial amenities. I’m sorry if I’ve offended your sense of good taste, Mr. Fannin.”

The door swung into place behind me. The man’s eyes were closed. He was tilted forward with one bony hand lifted, and I could not decide whether he looked more like John Carradine in the role of a tattered preacher, or a parody of Don Quixote, or a dead tree.

I went back and sat down, of course.