Epitaph For A Tramp

CHAPTER 13

We went back to Perry Street. Bogardus was long gone, but otherwise the place was the same. The dishes and silver were all Woolworth’s pride, the upholstery smelled vaguely of insecticide and old sin, and there were seven different water-color views of the same flower pot on the wall, all executed by that color-blind old lady who turns them out for every furnished apartment in the world. Anything Brannigan and I wanted would be tucked away in drawers or stashed in closets. We washed up before we got to it, and then we gave it almost an hour.

We would have been better off using the time to do pushups. The only item we discovered even remotely connected with crime was a hardcover copy of a Raymond Chandler novel and that had my name in it, dated from eighteen months before. Nothing was hidden under the rug, inside the toilet tank, behind the Shredded Wheat. Nothing slipped out of the pages of the books we flipped except a newspaper recipe for braised squab, and the only notation on any of the recent sheets of the desk calendar was a week-old scribble reminding Cathy to replace something called “Love that Pink.” There were snapshots in one of Sally’s drawers, mostly beach stuff, and we found an expensive set of blown-up portraits of Cathy stamped on the reverse with the signature of Clyde Neva, the photographer on Tenth Street Sally had mentioned. A book called Under the Volcano was the property of Ned Sommers, and two or three re-issue Bix Beiderbecke records had A Leeds scrawled on their jackets, completing Sally’s list. There were no unusual deposits or withdrawals in either girl’s bank accounts. There were bills, receipts, ticket stubs, circulars, theater programs, canceled checks, folksy letters from Sally’s family in Maine, soap coupons, match folders from a dozen Village bars. The only address book had Sally’s initials on the cover and nothing in it which interested us. A small scrap of ruled paper in a cracked vase had a phone number penciled on it and when we had run out of other ideas I dialed the number. A syrupy, old-maidish voice said:

“Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thank you for calling and please give our number to a friend. This is a recorded response. Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is—”

I passed Brannigan the receiver. He listened a minute, hung it up and then stood there picking his teeth with a discolored thumbnail. If the glad tidings had made his day any brighter he was doing his best to hide it. “The Black Knight of Germany,” he said after a little.

“I’m listening.”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I was just remembering a game we used to play on the barn roof, being air aces after the first war. Me and two other kids. The names we always used were von Richthofen, Eddie Rickenbacker and Georges Guynemer. They always stick together in my mind, always in the same order.”

“Too early for me. Tom Mix, Buck Jones and Ken Maynard, maybe. Which one do you want to see first?”

“That Ned Sommers I suppose. Bank Street’s only two blocks up.”

I called Sally before we went out, telling her that Duke had been roped and that she could come home. She had been asleep. It occurred to me that I could probably use some sack time myself, but it had not caught up with me yet. We left the key under the rubber again.

It was pushing eleven o’clock and the asphalt was already the texture of secondhand chewing gum. They had cleared out the intersection up at Seventh. Brannigan drove the half-block to Fourth Street and turned north.

“You expect to get anything out of these guys?” I asked him.

“Who knows? Some background, anyhow. We’ll take it all back to the office later and sort it out with everything else that comes in. Hell, it’s all routine, you know how it goes.”

“I suppose,” I said.

The address we had for Ned Sommers was a beat-up old brownstone with an entrance below street level. Four chipped slate steps went down past a battered regiment of empty trash cans into a tile alcove. It said Sommers — 1-R, on one of the bells, but the front door was unlatched and we went in without ringing. Uncarpeted steps went up again along the left-hand wall but 1-R would probably be back under them. The hallway smelled like a sanatorium for cats with kidney disorders. We found the door where we expected it to be and Brannigan knocked.

It took a minute, and then the door did not open.

“Who is it?”

“Ned Sommers?”

“Who wit?”

“Sommers?”

It could go on that way until one of them got laryngitis before Brannigan would say “Police.” More than one accommodating flatfoot has gotten his wife’s name on the department’s relief list for needy widows by doing that. He just stood there waiting calmly. Finally we got a crack big enough to pass mail through.

“Ned Sommers?”

He peered out at us, furrowing his forehead. He was a sallow-faced man of about twenty-eight, lean almost to the point of being undernourished. I judged him to be close to six-feet-even but he would not have gone in as more than a welterweight. He had wavy black hair which he had gotten cut for his grade school graduation and not since, pale brown eyes and a nose which had been flattened once. It was a nose which might have made another man look belligerent. It only made Sommers look like someone who ought to have known better. He was wearing cord slacks and nothing else, and if he had been dressed there would have been a library card in his shirt pocket.

“I’m Sommers,” he said finally.

One of his hands was on the inside knob and his other was on the door jamb. Brannigan identified himself then, flashing his shield. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”

Sommers continued to frown at us. “Questions about what? I’m pretty busy.”

We were standing there. Sommers had glanced behind himself, pursing his lips. He turned back. “Let me get a shirt on. I’ll come out.”

“Step away from the door,” Brannigan told him.

“Oh, now look, a man has a right to privacy in his own—”

He moved aside. He had to, since Brannigan was already on his way in. The expression on his face suggested that he would have liked nothing better than to bop one of us with a choice volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature. I could see the fall set on the wall behind him, along with what looked like every other juicy bit of bedtime reading from The Nicomachean Ethics to The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones. I couldn’t see the woman, but she would be behind the door someplace.

She wasn’t quite, but only because the bed wasn’t there. It was along the far wall to our left. She was sitting up in it with the sheets drawn around her shoulders. I supposed she might have ducked into another room if that hadn’t been the only room there was.

One room. It seemed hardly adequate for Sommers’s creative pursuits. The books went from floor to ceiling along two walls. There were enormous piles of what must have been every issue of the New York Times since Harper’s Ferry and Sommers appeared to be reading all of them simultaneously. There were copies of Time with pictures of Neville Chamberlain and John Nance Garner on the covers. There were a hundred different photographs tacked on the two empty walls, and every one of them was of Ernest Hemingway.

The girl’s clothes were scattered among the debris as if she’d been caught in a cyclone without enough safety pins.

She was staring at us, still as cut stone. An adder being held by the back of the jaws would have had the same expression in its eyes. She was a Negro and as beautiful a girl as I had ever seen.

Brannigan turned to Sommers, red-necked. “Out front,” he said. “And make it quick.” He turned around and went out without looking at me.

We waited at the foot of the steps below the sidewalk. Across the way a sign in an unwashed store window said: Sonny Tom Laundry Will Moving at Monday for Corner Fourth Street Down-flight. Brannigan had taken out a cigar and stripped it but did not light up.

Sommers got there in a minute. He had pulled on a yellow sports shirt and thonged leather sandals and he was smoking.

He glanced at me, dismissed me as a mere adjutant, then waited expressionlessly for Brannigan.

Brannigan was above him on the steps. “I suppose you were here all night?”

“Most if it, yes.”

“What time did you get in?”

“Three-thirty, perhaps four. Why?”

“Any other people with you before that?”

“Yes. Two or three young writers who come to me for advice and—”

“Where?”

“The White Horse Tavern, then a coffee shop down on Mac-dougal. Exactly what is all this, anyhow?”

“There any gap between the time you left the others and came here?”

“No, none at all. They walked me up, in fact. These other fellows haven’t been published yet, so it’s sort of an obligation to let them hang around as much as they—”

“Okay, okay, you’re a famous writer and the disciples cluster around like flies. We get the general drift, Sommers. The girl with you all evening long?”

Sommers’s face had darkened. He didn’t answer.

“I asked you if the girl was around all night.”

“Yes. Now look, I don’t think I have to answer any of this. If I don’t get an explanation I—”

“ Wherfs the last time you saw Catherine Hawes?”

He frowned slightly. “Cathy? A week or so ago. No, more than that. It was a Sunday, so it’s almost two weeks.”

“Tell us about her.”

“Now just what is that supposed to mean?” He glanced at me then back to Brannigan. “She isn’t in some kind of trouble—?”

“What kind of trouble would she be in, Sommers?”

“Well, how would I know? Look, what’s the point in giving me a hard time? Ask me a sensible question and I’ll give you a decent answer, huh?^”

Brannigan bit off the end of his cigar, turning to spit. “Tell us about her, Sommers. What she does, what she thinks.”

“Oh, come on, will you? If you’d let me know what ifs about maybe I could—”

“You’re the writer. So write. Give us a paragraph about Catherine Hawes.”

Sommers shrugged wearily. He studied his cigarette, dragged on it, flipped it out toward the gutter. He would have liked more of an audience but he gave it to us anyhow. “Catherine Hawes,” he said. “About twenty-five, exceptionally pretty. Bright too, but without much intellect. Neurotic, divorced, essentially uninhibited. Just enough sensitivity and awareness so that she can’t be satisfied with the ordinary middle-class existence — husband, family, that sort of thing — but not enough creativity or drive to find anything to take its place. She drifts, goes off the deep end sometimes, generally out of sheer boredom — drinks too much, looks for new kicks. There are a lot of girls like her. They shouldn’t go to college to start with. They get just enough ideas about art and rebellion to get restless. But most of them settle down eventually, wind up at cocktail parties in the country club and forget they ever knew the difference. They play golf. Cathy probably will too, sooner or later.”

“You said she was married.”

“She cheated. It broke up.”

“She a nympho?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. She was knocking around a lot before the marriage. People get used to that. It’s not the sexual satisfaction so much as the excitement of somebody new. Hell, even I was the same way. I was married a couple of times myself, out of this same Village milieu. It was good enough while it lasted — I didn’t need other women, no — but the idea is always there. You get the urge, you follow through. Anyhow it’s an important experience for a writer. You’ve got to—”

“Edifying,” Brannigan cut in. “Who would she go to if she got into a jam? Who is she closest to?”

Sommers shrugged again. “Look, I don’t really know. The girl she lives with, perhaps. Sally Kline. Maybe she’d come to me. How about it now — what kind of trouble?”

“You sure you haven’t seen her in a week and a half?”

“Positive.”

“She come around here often?”

“Once a week, perhaps. A writer has to discipline his use of time. In any event there’s nothing steady about it, if that’s what you mean.”

“I gathered that inside,” Brannigan said.

“Now look, if that’s a crack—”

“Probably it was. Skip it. I don’t read books myself so I wouldn’t know what it takes to write them.”

Sommers chewed his lip, not knowing whether he could afford to get angry or not. We stood there. Two young girls passed us on the street, chattering. “That illiterate,” one of them said. “All he did was say hello and then keep shoving me into corners—”

I was taking a Camel. “I bum one of those?” Sommers asked. “I left mine in back.”

I gave him one and lit it. He nodded, hardly looking at me. He hadn’t really seen me since we’d gotten there, which I supposed explained why he liked Hemingway so much. Hemingway never sees anybody either.

“I don’t know what else to say without knowing what it’s all about,” he told Brannigan.

“That’s good enough for now,” Brannigan decided. “You’ll hear from the department again.” He had started up the stairs.

When he did get the urge to read, it patently wasn’t going to be something of Sommers’s.

“Well, for crying out loud,” Sommers said after us, “this is some deal. You come around asking all kinds of personal questions and then you—”

“You can go back in,” Brannigan said, stopping. “Your sweetheart’s probably getting edgy in there.”

“That’s none of your damned business!” Sommers had made up his mind to get sore after all. “Police. Try to be decent and what does it get you? Thanks a lot, mister.”

“You’re welcome. You’ve been a cooperative, helpful citizen. And now you can blow.”

“The hell with you,” Sommers said abruptly. “Sure, I’ve been cooperative. And I didn’t have to answer a damned one of your questions. You guys give me a royal pain. A bunch of tough, cynical, uncreative clods, what the hell do you know? What I do in my apartment is my own concern and I don’t need any comments from your end. I’m a writer and a good one, and if you want to know I spent four years in jail. Sure, lift an eyebrow when I tell you. Go back and look it up, it’s all there. I stole eleven thousand dollars when I was eighteen. Eighteen! You guys wouldn’t have had the imagination to swipe apples! Well, I did my time and I don’t owe you anything, see?”

I wondered precisely what had brought all that on. Brannigan was at the top of the steps, looking at his cigar. “Nobody said you owed us anything, Sommers,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, well, I don’t have to make any explanations about my private life either. What I do to make myself a better writer is my business. You slobs wouldn’t know an experience if it hit you in the face.”

He made a point of deliberately flinging away the cigarette I’d just given him. That was quite an approach he had toward his profession at that. I could almost visualize him at work, writing stirring exhortations in his notebook: Very important! Every Tuesday and Thursday, nine to eleven, be sure to have an experience! The vestibule door slammed after him when he whirled and went inside.

Brannigan was already walking. “Writer,” he said. “If that self-centered phony is a writer then I’m — I’m—”

“Marcel Proust,” I said. “Ducky Medwick. What the hell, you didn’t have to needle him that way.”

“Greenwich Village,” he grunted. He did not say anything else until we had gotten into the car. Then he said, “And the next one is a queer. That Neva, the photographer. And I suppose the one after that — what’s his name? That Arthur Leeds — will be a hermaphrodite. Why don’t you go the hell home and catch up on some sleep? They’ll have the body out of there by now.”

“You’re a comfort,” I said.

“I get that way.”

He cut down Seventh before turning east on Tenth Street and we passed the antique shop. The smashed window was already being boarded up. “I suppose there’ll be a suit against the city for that,” he said then. “And probably one on the accident. Causing Sabatini to flee at excess speed, some such malar-key. Maybe it isn’t Greenwich Village after all. Maybe it’s just people who make me sick.”

He was still laboring the unlit cigar. We passed the rear of the Women’s House of Detention and that gave him a few more ideas. “And right in there is where she would have wound up if she hadn’t gotten knifed. In with the whores and the junkies and the lovely little seventeen-year-old mothers who get drunk and bash their kids’ heads against the wall for crying too much. Sweating out an arraignment for driving the car on the Troy heist. Because she was bored. Because she was too sensitive to be satisfied with the middle-class way of life — is that what the bastard said it was?”

“Why don’t you shut it off, Nate? I’m the one who ought to be disgusted.”

“Are you? You don’t much seem to be. Buster Keaton I got to ride with. Just how do you feel about all this anyhow?”

“Go to hell,” I told him. “As a favor, huh? Just for me?”