Epitaph For A Tramp

CHAPTER 17

I felt groggy in the hack on the way uptown. I’d been fighting sleep more than I suspected. With all of it finished now I had abruptly sagged to half mast.

Estelle asked who it was through the speaker and a second later I got the buzz and went in. She was waiting in the doorway as I came down the corridor.

She tried a smile but she didn’t have the tools for it, not today. There were lines around her mouth like cracks in pale china, and her eyes were dull. “I’m so glad you could come,” she said.

“Just got clear,” I told her.

“You look dreadful, Harry. I guess you haven’t been to bed at all, have you?”

“Going now. We just wrapped it up, Estelle.”

She looked at me vaguely, not quite understanding. She was wearing a white linen blouse with ruffles at the collar like Benjamin Franklin, and the plain gray jacket which matched her skirt was across the back of one of the sterile, antiseptic living-room chairs. I supposed the furniture would get sat in by relatives in a day or two and then not again until the next funeral in the family.

The air-conditioning was on and I walked over to the machine. Estelle had closed the door and was standing near it, watching me with a curious frown.

“Someone named Arthur Leeds,” I said. “A musician in Greenwich Village. Cathy went to him when she ran off with the money. He followed her up to my place.”

“You mean—” She swallowed, then clasped her hand over her mouth and whirled toward the wall. She started to sob, biting her fist.

“It’s over now, Estelle. Completely over. Leeds is dead. He had an accident running from us. And you don’t have to worry about our friend Duke anymore either. He was picked up also.”

She stood there with her back turned. I walked over to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Estelle. Listen, what about your mother? Did you see her?”

She nodded, not looking at me. “Yes,” she said distantly. “But I didn’t… I didn’t say anything.”

“Is she all right otherwise?”

“Yes. But, oh, Harry, it’s all so…” She shuddered again, then held her breath for a long moment. Finally she turned back toward me, wiping her eyes and trying the same unsuccessful smile. “I’m sorry. Can I… I’m afraid we haven’t got anything but Scotch. Will that be all right?”

“Fine. But then I better scram.”

She poured the drink at a cabinet. She put in the Scotch first and then had to go into the kitchen for ice. Estelle was the sort who would do it that way.

I dropped myself onto the couch. After a minute she came out and sat down a little away from me. She had not made a drink for herself. She kept her hands in her lap, like something someone had asked her to keep an eye on for a while.

The drink would have been just right for a teetotaling Lilliputian. I sipped it without saying anything. It survived for three or four seconds.

“You never heard Cathy mention this Leeds, Estelle?”

She shook her head, looking as if she were thinking of something else altogether. Probably she was. I put the glass down on a coffee table. When I looked back she had begun to cry again.

“Harry, I’m so… must you go, Harry?”

“God, I’ve got to. I feel like an unplugged lamp. On top of that my head’s been throbbing like six other guys’.”

She was facing me. She reached up hesitantly, touching my temple with her fingertips, and I could feel it when she did. “He hit you so hard, I…” She winced, drawing her hand away. “It’s gotten all black and blue.”

“Another Scotch might help,” I said. “I could stick around that long.”

“Oh, I — of course.” She got up, started to reach for the glass, changed her mind and brought over the bottle instead. “Forgive me. I never do know how much. There hasn’t really been any whisky in the house since you and Cathy stopped visiting. We—”

She broke up again. I poured a second drink.

“Harry… would you sleep here? I’m so alone. If I could just be able to know you’re here, in the next room. I know I haven’t any right to ask, you’ve done so much already. But it would be such a comfort. You could use my bedroom. I can make it dark enough. And I can turn on the air-conditioner in there also, it would be—”

“Oh, look, I even took a roll in the gutter since I was here last, Estelle. I’ve got to get a shower and—”

“The bathroom is right next to my room, Harry. I can shut the corridor door until you’re finished.” She touched my arm. “Harry, I’m so shaky and upset. Just for now — for the afternoon. I’ll wake you whenever you like. Just so I can know I’m not here by myself…”

Her voice tripped over a sob and she lowered her head. “Sure,” I told her then. “What’s a private cop for if he’s not around when you need him?”

She jumped up, having a little more luck with the smile this time. I supposed it did not make a hell of a lot of difference. A bed was a bed, and the way I was feeling the tailgate of a rolling truck would have done the trick.

I’ll fix it,” she was saying. ‘I’ll get clean sheets.”

“Hell, you don’t have to—”

“It’s no bother. Here.” She was at a closet in the hallway, and she held out a folded bath towel. “1*11 have the bedroom ready when you come out. I’ll be back out here, so you can just go through the hall. And here — here are some hangers.”

“Good enough,” I said. “Look, it’s a little after two. Suppose you wake me about five, maybe just before.”

“You’re certain? So early?”

“Be enough.”

“All right. I’m sure I’ll feel better by then. I appreciate this, Harry. I do.”

“Don’t be silly.”

Accommodating old Harry. I took the gear and went into the John. I loafed under the spray for a good ten minutes, then toweled off and hung my clothes behind the door. I was still making like two-gun Doc Holliday, with both the.38 and the Luger, and I tucked them away in a corner with my shoes. I wrapped the towel around my middle and poked my head out.

“Okay to go through?”

“Yes, Harry. And thank you.”

“Right, Estelle.”

I ducked across the hall. There was a tiny crack of sunlight breaking through a lower corner of the blind when I closed the door after myself, but otherwise the room was gloomy, with that odd, cathedral sort of light you get when you draw heavy shades in the daytime. The sheets were crisp and fresh and I melted into them. I rolled over on my right side, jammed a fist into the pillow to give it some substance, and corked off about as quickly as I had when Duke Sabatini had mistaken my skull for a high inside fast ball.

You asleep, Harry? I asked myself sometime thereafter.

Sure, I’m asleep, I told myself.

How come she’s here then? I wanted to know.

How come who’s here?

Me, silly, she said.

It was a dame I’d known once. She’d floated into my arms out of nowhere. I’d thought she was dead. You never know. Was only undressed.

I AM dead, Harry, she said. Isn’t that absurd? I played cops and robbers because I was bored and now I’m dead.

Go away, huh?

She wouldn’t. She said, You should have helped me, Harry. I told you to help me a year ago and you didn’t, and now look what I went and did.

She was chilly as wet oysters. I was doing my damnedest not to touch her, but she wouldn’t be put off. Hold me, Harry, she insisted. Don’t twist may. Everybody holds me, why not you? Anyhow it’s only a silly old dream.

Some dream. I could hear the bedroom air-conditioning as clearly as I could hear her rustling in the sheets.

“Hold me, Harry,’’ she said. “Oh, my God, hold me!’’

I did not know how long it had been. It might have been two minutes or two hours. I could still see the crack of light through the blind but I could not tell how much it had shifted. I had been asleep deeply enough so that I had not heard her come in. It had been the touch of her flesh that woke me.

Her thighs were pressed tight along my own and her face was against my shoulder. She was staring up at me.

“Estelle, for crying out loud—”

My hand had fallen over the curve of her hip and onto her thigh. Maybe I was still dreaming after all. If I hadn’t known better I would have sworn the body was Cathy’s. Everything about its touch was exactly as I remembered it.

“Harry,” she said. “Harry, I need you. I need you so much, so desperately. Hold me, Harry. Oh, God, hold me!”

No dream, Fannin. All very real, oh, yes, oh, yes. But did Fannin dig all this? Fannin was rather confused. He had had a bellyful of lunatic junkies, simpering fags, sour writers, greasy gun-punks. Now he had the frustrated old maid sister. The end of a perfect day.

Her arms had come around my neck, clutching at me, and I could feel the swell of her breasts. Her thighs were heaving. I hadn’t moved.

So talk then, Fannin. Try art maybe, or literature. Try the last quartets of Ludwig von Beethoven. Try your all-time favorite football players. Maybe you can get her distracted and nostalgic over Jay Berwanger, Ace Parker, George Gipp, Whizzer White, Jim Dieckleman, John Kimbrough.

Sure.

“Harry,” she said again. She said it like a cry from down a well, like a wail from a cell in the deathhouse, like a moan from an overturned car in a ditch. Her mouth was chewing my face and her legs were thrashing. Poor goddam Estelle. So you’re tired, Fannin. So Thomas Hobbes says the life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Win one for Hobbes. You can do it, Fannin. Win one for all the loyal alumni, for all our far-flung boys in service, for all those sweet white-haired old ladies who told us they’ll never get off those sickbeds again if we lose, for—

“—Harry!”

It was a high, arching, lazy, end-over-end punt. It hung there, floating, almost suspended. Slowly, very slowly, it drifted down, and I waited for it between the goalposts. Five defense men swam up in front of me as I tucked in the ball and began my return. It was like running under water, and they never touched me.

After the game Knute Rockne himself came down into the locker room to pat me on top of the head.

“Harry,” she said. “Oh, Harry, I’ve wanted you so, needed you so. Don’t leave me, don’t go away. Don’t even move now, don t move.”

Her face was turned. There was still sweat. And then she was crying.

“Harry.” Her voice was ragged against the pillow. “I was so frightened. When you didn’t call me back after this morning, I was so worried. I was afraid they… afraid…”

“Estelle?”

“—Afraid they might arrest you when they found the money in your apartment, might think you killed her and—”

She winced, gasping in pain. She had to, because I’d grabbed her so tightly by the shoulders that I felt bone.

My face was no more than four inches above her own. I could feel her hot breath, see the sudden fierce panic in her eyes. My voice belonged to somebody else who was trying to scream with gravel in his throat, and I was the only one in the room who could hear him.

You never told this woman about the money in your pad, Fannin, the voice roared.