Epitaph For A Tramp (11 page)

I never could say anything. But that must have been part of it, I’m sure. She buried the memory of what happened because it was such a shock, but there was some kind of inverse reaction, as if she were unconsciously trying to prove to herself that it hadn’t hurt her, or… I don’t know. But she should have been under analysis. I did tell her that once, two or three years ago, but she merely laughed at me. Maybe I’m making too much of the whole thing, maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference anyhow. But now she’s…”

Estelle had been staring at the rug all the time she was telling it. It was not simply that she was upset. I had to wonder how a woman could grow to thirty-six or thirty-seven and still be embarrassed by something like that.

I didn’t have much idea what the story was worth. Psychology was another one of those things I’d missed because of wind-sprints and signal practice at Ann Arbor. Not that it mattered much now anyhow. I went across to her.

Her head was still down. I put my fist under her chin. “Look, will you be all right? I have to check in with the law. I haven’t seen them yet, Estelle.”

She started to get up and I helped her. For a moment she stood there with my hand on her wrist. She started to say something and then her face twisted up again. After that I was holding her with her face on my shoulder.

“It’ll be all right, Estelle.”

We stood that way. She was breathing unevenly and I could feel her breasts rising beneath the robe. They were full and firm. It was probably a shoddy thing to consider at the moment, but I thought she very likely needed a man a lot more than she needed consolation. I squeezed her shoulders, waiting another minute, then I eased away.

“I better call them.”

“Will you … I won’t go to school today. I’ll see mother
this morning, but I won’t tell her. Harry, will you stop back later?”

“Sure.”

I watched her shuffle into one of the bedrooms. She closed the door.

There was a phone on a stand and I dialed my number. Dan wouldn’t be answering. It rang once and then the voice was Nate Brannigan out of Central Homicide.

“Fannin, Nate.”

“Well,” he said. “Well, now. Fannin, huh? Isn’t that grand? Wait until I check my watch and see just how grand that is. Six forty-one. Putting the time of death at roughly three-thirty, that makes a lapse of three hours and eleven minutes. What the hell, let’s call it three hours even. Nice of you to ring, Mr. Fannin. Would you like a little more time, maybe? Would you like to make it four hours? Five? I’d hate to inconvenience you.”

I let him get all that out of his system.

“Well, Fannin?”

“I wasn’t sure you were finished.”

“I’m not. Not by a damned sight. But first I want to hear your end of it. Tell me a story, Fannin. Make it a good one. Where the damned hell you been? Where are you now?”

“I’m across on 72nd. You get that pick-up on Perry Street?”

“Yeah, yeah. Bogardus. I sent a car. They hauled him in twenty minutes ago, but I’m still waiting for a charge. You better have one, Fannin. You get me stuck with a false arrest to cover a fist fight you had with some wet-nosed kid and I’ll—”

“You read a bulletin on a payroll job in Troy yesterday? Some shirt factory? Roughly forty thousand?”

“Not my department. He in on that?”

“Him and another couple, cousins named Sabatini. I had a session with one of them also, but I lost. He’ll be poking around
in some of the same places your boys will be working on the killing, looking for the girl. It slipped my mind to tell him she’s dead.”

“Dan gave me the background on you and the girl, Harry. Sorry about that.”

“Thanks.”

“She rigged in on the Troy thing?”

“That’s pretty much it. She was with Sabatini until roughly two o’clock, then she scrammed. That would have been fine, except she took the money with her. She went someplace before she came to me, more likely two places. One of the guys she went to see had a second thought and followed her. I’ve been using the MG she came in. She—”

“Damn it, Fannin.”

“I was in a hurry, Nate. But let me—”

“No, let me. Okay, so the guy stabs her out front and then grabs the money and guns off. And after that the girl gets back on her feet bleeding like a stuck pig and rings your bell and dances up the stairs, huh?”

“I know how it sounds. But either he thought she was dead or he lost his nerve. You can—”

“the girl didn’t say anything?”

“Not about who killed her, no.”

“But you talked?”

“A couple words, yeah.”

“Fannin, you amaze me. How long have I known you—five, six years?”

“Come off it, will you, Nate? What gripe have you got except that I should have called sooner? What the hell would you have done in my position, got up a bridge game maybe? Let’s play it without the weary cop sarcasm, huh? I’m not much in the mood.”

“Fannin, I’ll finish what I started to tell you. And like I say,
if I didn’t know you and you hadn’t played it straight for five years I’d have had every badge in nine precincts out of bed and hunting for you two minutes after I got here—”

“Now listen—”

“You
listen. All right, the girl comes up and dies on your doorstep. You used to be married to her, maybe that’s good enough reason why she’s there. But don’t tell me you had a cozy little chat before she died and she didn’t say word number one about who—”

“Damn it—”

“And don’t hand me any fairy tale about somebody she went to see who followed her and took the money, don’t give me that either. Don’t give me anything. Just get yourself over here and make it fast. You get me? I don’t know what you’re trying to cover, or who—the girl’s reputation probably—but I don’t like to be suckered. I’ll trust you on it for the fifteen minutes it’ll take you to get across town and not four seconds longer. What the hell do you take me for anyhow?”

“Why, you old rummy. You old dim-witted country Irish jerk. Five years, huh? And just how many things have I handed you in that time? Every damned one of them crated up and slapped on your desk without a loose string anywhere. Which is a damned good thing because if there
was
a loose string you’d trip over it and fall on your fat face. And here I get one that I’m not even doing for money, see, no fee at all because sometimes I can get to be sentimental as hell, you know? And in three hours I’ve done half your legwork and found your motive and—”

“What motive, Fannin? What motive is that? You mean the forty-two thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven dollars and thirty-four cents?”

“You bet your tin badge I mean the—”

“Yeah? What’s the matter, Fannin, you get hoarse all of a
sudden? You lose the voice from trying so hard to make yourself sound good?
^”

“All right, all right, let’s have it. I thought the Troy heist wasn’t your department?”

“Never said it was.”

“Damn it, Brannigan, where’d you get the exact figure? Do I have to come over there and shake it out of you?”

“Why, hell, Harry, not at all. Like I say, its all among friends. You just trot on over and I’ll be more than happy to show you the cash. After all, we found it in your laundry bag, didn’t we?”

CHAPTER 9

Brannigan didn’t ask me how the money had gotten there. It was just as well. For the moment all I could think of was that I’d eaten my oatmeal every day that week without making a single naughty face, so maybe the Good Fairy had left it as a reward. I grunted something unsociable and said I’d be over fast. Brannigan said he’d bet on it.

Actually he would have lost. I had a stop to make first.

Estelle was still inside. I called so long through the door, took the eerie silent elevator down to the lobby and walked toward the MG. From across the street it looked as if some industrious member of the city’s overworked traffic force had ticketed it.

It was only a handbill.
Men and women everywhere,
it said,
make sure today of the salvation of your souls. Are you living a spiritual life or a carnal life? Be saved now!
I tossed it into the glove compartment. Let Adam Moss worry about such things, if and when he got the car back. For myself I was more interested in my dirty drawers.

Obviously the killer had been inside after I’d left. Framing me to cover himself would be his only possible out if he thought Cathy had talked before she died.

He.
Four hours on it and I came up with a personal pronoun. I wasn’t even sure I had the right gender. Her, maybe. It.

I wondered if Moss was going to have any notions. I was going to find out just about then.

I went up Riverside Drive, cruising more slowly than Bran-nigan would have liked. My broken head would have liked it a lot slower than that. A morning haze was trying to overextend its visa along the Jersey shore across the Hudson, but the sun was cutting it quickly. It was going to be another scorcher.

Moss’s address would fall somewhere between the Drive and upper Broadway. A new Caddy was pulling away just short of his corner and I nosed the MG in. There would have been room for a fleet of us.

Across the street a junior-grade Eddie Bogardus of perhaps fourteen was hacking away at the seat of a park bench with a knife of the sort they outlawed about five years back. He saw me watching him.

“Don’t you know a mean cop you could practice on with that thing?”

“Drop dead twice,” he told me indifferently.

The place I wanted was a rundown apartment building of six or seven stories, several doors up from the Drive. Moss’s registration listed him for 3-G but there were no names on any of the bells and no letters either, merely numbers. The vestibule door was open and hooked back. Behind it a couple of unshaded 25-watt bulbs were trying unsuccessfully to make the long narrow lobby look like something other than the esophagus of a submerged whale.

Moss would not have a full apartment
of
his own. It was one of those buildings in which the original railroad flats had been broken up into separate singles, where they sold you one room for yourself and you got to use the John and the kitchen if the other half-dozen people along the corridor happened to
oversleep that morning. The landlords got away with the deal because of all the tight-budgeted Columbia University kids from around the corner.

The hall marked
3
was around to the right in the rear on the main floor. It was exactly seven o’clock when I rang the bell near the outside door. I had to wait a fall minute and then I drew a beautiful young Chinese girl with an armfal of potted plant who wasn’t interested in me at all except to let me hold the door.

“Moss?” I said after her.

“Last room on the right,” she called over her shoulder. I stood there a moment, watching to see if she had on one of those slit skirts that Chinese girls always wear. I wondered why they always do that. Not that I had any complaints. This one had good legs and I watched them until she turned into the lobby.

The doors along the corridor were marked with peeling gilt letters. I found G and rapped twice. The door behind me opened while I was standing there and a face poked itself out. It was a woman’s face, about forty years older and not too much longer than Seabiscuit s. The face stared at me, probably wondering if I’d brought the hay. I stared back. Finally the woman grunted and went away.

I rapped on Moss’s door again, harder this time.

I heard bedsprings, then footsteps and what I judged to be unpleasant muttering. The bolt snapped from inside. “For crying out loud, what time is—?”

I looked at Adam Moss. He was a kid, eighteen or nineteen at most. He was husky and good-looking, with a mop of curly brown hair. He was wearing white boxer shorts and a pair of shoulders that the young Max Baer might have envied. He was patently annoyed.

“Moss?”

“Yeah. Who’re you? I don’t know you—”

I had my wallet in my hand and I flashed it. “You want to step back inside?”

He glanced at the card and then back at me, puzzled. “Police?”

And then his face brightened. Adam Moss grinned at me as if I’d just told him he’d earned his first varsity letter.

“Hey, that’s great. That’s sure what I call fast action!” He glanced at his watch. “Gee, not even five hours since I reported it. Where is it? You bring it back, officer? It wasn’t wrecked, was it? Come in, come in!”

He was beaming. My one lead. My only lead. I sat down on the kid’s rumpled bed and took a cigarette. I would have been · happier with a cyanide inhaler but I’d left it in my other suit.

“You leave the keys in it, Moss?”

“Yeah. Like I told them when I called. I parked it around midnight, up on Broadway near 111th, and then I had a couple of beers with some of the guys from school in the West End bar. I guess it was around 2:15 or so when I realized I’d forgotten them. We ran down, but you could see it was gone even before we got to the place. Boy, I was pretty worried for a while. What a dumb stunt. My old man would have booted me one. He just bought it for me last month. Can I get dressed and get it now? Is it here or do I have to pick it up someplace?”