Epitaph For A Tramp (3 page)

Surf took the rest of it. I watched them going away, not moving and hearing her breathing softly next to me.

Her voice was distant. “If you go now you won’t have to fumble through the talk,” she said. “It can be messy to fumble through, particularly when you don’t even know the girl’s name.”

“Mrs. Harry Fannin,” I told her.

I could feel her laughing without hearing any sounds or seeing her face. She said, “I did have the straight flush, Harry, and thanks. But it would be kind of silly to think there could be two winners in the same hand, wouldn’t it?”

“Marry me,” I told her. I didn’t know I was going to say that. You’ve got to think the whole thing was something you’d just invented to say that, and it was something I had had before. But I could count the times. I had had it once in the army in Texas but after a while it had come out that the girl had a husband getting shot at somewhere, and so there was nothing to do but go off with my lip quivering and get shot at myself. I’d had it once at college also but the girl was killed in an automobile wreck and what I did after that I didn’t much like to remember. I’d had it those two times and here it was again after six or eight years and how do you know you’ll ever find your way back to the same stretch of sand? So I said it again.

I had lifted myself to my elbows and she turned her head, watching me. “I told you I went through your wallet,” she said. “I saw your investigator’s license and that Sheriff’s Association card and the gun permit and, gosh, all sort of impressive things. But I guess I must have missed the release papers from that mental institution. I never did see them at all.”

I was kneeling. I dug out two cigarettes and lit them and gave her one, grinning back at her. I picked up her wallet where it had slipped out of her skirt and lit another match. Hawes, it said. Catherine.

“Harry?”

“Let’s get out of here, Hawes. Right now.”

She had lifted herself slightly, braced on one arm. She took up a handful of sand and let it run through her fingers. “It would be gone before we got to Pennsylvania Station,” she said remotely. She was looking past me. “Something like this, so damned quick. What was it, maybe twenty minutes? Old first-glance Cathy. You don’t think it’s the first time, do you? Go away, Fannin. Take another swim and wash the hayseed out of your hair. I was reading a Dostoievski novel before I came out for my little walk. I’ll go back and finish it now, so I can see what it’s like when people really suffer things that tear out their guts instead often cents’ worth of romantic twinge just because there’s moonlight and for five minutes you don’t have to feel alone anymore or—”

I had taken her by the shoulders. “Hawes, come on.”

“Oh, damn,” she said. “Oh, goddam.” She was chewing her lip and I was sure of it then if I hadn’t been before. Because you get so many with whom there’s never anything left. But here it was afterward and I was kneeling there and I was still feeling it. It hurt me to look at her. It hurt me the way her voice was, the way the line of her thigh joined her hip.

Which was romantic as all hell, but was still no concern of our two wandering companions. They were coming back up the beach and this time the other one of them was holding forth:

“I’m telling you, Lou, with three kids around you’re paying for fifteen meals a day. Fifteen. That’s one hundred and five meals a week. And when you’re doing it without love, well, brother—”

Her arms slipped around my neck then. “Fannin, Fannin, Fannin, it’s insane. Of all the idiotic, impossible, scatter-brained, impulsive… and I just don’t know
what
I’m going to tell Frank
Sinatra in the morning!” She was trembling, maybe laughing, maybe crying, I don’t think it mattered which. Because we came together and it was all there again and it had to be right. It was. For maybe ten months.

CHAPTER 3

She was twenty-four. She had gone to Barnard College for two years, and she worked as a secretary in the sales department of a publishing house on Fourth Avenue. She had a mother and an older, unmarried sister named Estelle who lived on West 72nd Street, and she had been sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village with two other girls. She had a tiny scar under her left eyebrow from diving into water that was too shallow; and when she was six years old, before her father had died, she’d been lost in the Adirondack Mountains for three days. She’d camped out her share of times since then also.

“Sometimes it’s gotten a little messy, Harry,” she told me. “But I never knew what I was looking for. Now I don’t want anything else, just you and me.”

Just us, and Beautyrest made three. Maybe we could have gotten a patent on it after all. Once in a while we also boiled some eggs or went to the films.

Fannin had it, all right, and he had it badly. During his mottled career Fannin had also had several .32 and .38 caliber bullet holes in various inconsequential portions of his anatomy, a knife wound in his right shoulder, shrapnel in his left, not to
mention two broken noses and sundry other minor disabilities. Once in a while he has even been known to pick up something which lasts, like smoker’s hack.

It happened on the 4th of June.

I’d been to Chicago for three days. I had those out-of-town jobs from time to time. This one was blackmail. I’d been trying to pick up some of the cash my client had paid out before the Illinois law could move in and impound it all. I’d made out well enough, but there’d been a lot of chasing around and I’d missed sleep. It was five o’clock in the morning when I hit LaGuardia Airport coming back, and I took a cab to the place without calling Cathy. She flicked on a small light while I was undressing.

“Baby,” she said. She could even look beautiful waking up.

“I was trying to be quiet,” I told her.

“Old Harry, the silent sleuth. I’ll bet you were.”

“I really was. I’m one weary husband, mam.”

“That weary?”

I got into bed. The sheets were crushed and warm and her arms came around me. “I’ll live,” I told her.

I woke up about eleven and phoned the client to make an appointment. I did not get out of bed to make the call. I kept looking at the mirror across the room and grinning at what Cathy had written on it in soap before she’d gone to the office. It said, “Go ahead, you bastard, sleep while I slave.” I called her next.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Fine time to be getting up.” They should have paid her extra for the way her voice sounded on the phone. “Thanks for what?”

“For saying hello on the mirror. I just called to return it.”

“You already did.”

“What, talking in my sleep?”

“You said hello this morning, idiot. Most of my men don’t forget such things.”

“Shucks,” I said. “That.”

“Ummm, that.” She was laughing. “You going to the office?”

I was taking a cigarette, holding the phone wedged against my neck. “Couple hours,” I said. I shook out the match and leaned across to drop it into the ashtray on the telephone table. That was when I noticed it.

“Bye, Harry.”

I did not answer her. I was staring at the tray.

“Harry?”

“Here,” I said.

It must have gotten into my voice. “Harry, is anything wrong?”

I kept looking at it. “No,” I told her. “Just thinking about something. I’ll see you tonight, Cath.”

She hung up. I let the phone dangle in my hand for a minute and then I put it back. The ashtray was one of those big ceramic modern things you could have served chops in. There were ten or a dozen butts in it. Three or four had Cathy’s lipstick on them.

I remembered it clearly. The tray had been loaded when I’d been packing to catch the plane three days before. Tidy Harry had picked it up and carried it to the trash basket in the John and dumped it.

Cathy did not smoke much. A pack of short-size Kents lasted her close to a week and frequently she would go another three or four days without buying any, chiseling a few of my Camels. The butts with the lipstick stains in the tray were Kents. The other seven or eight were Pall Malls.

I was sitting there and seeing them, trying not to think what I was thinking. Try that sometime, especially when you’re in the trade.

I got out of bed and picked up the thing and dumped it. I got dressed and heated up the coffee she’d left and toyed with a cup. I picked up the phone three or four times to dial her office number. Each time I stared at the receiver and then put it back.

It was just somebody who had dropped in. An old friend. Yes, old. So old he’d been too weak to sit on a chair and had had to lie down on the bed.

No. Cathy had brought the tray out into the living room, put it back without emptying it.

Cathy.

It was no good. I went up to the client’s office on Park Avenue and delivered the money and collected what was due on my fee. I walked up three blocks to the bank on the 47th Street corner and deposited the check. It was a bright summer day and there were a lot of women on the streets. All of them were very smart-looking and very chic and not one of them had that quality of being alive that Cathy managed even when she was shaving her legs.

Mrs. Harry Fannin.

I dialed her at four o’clock from the office. She got on and I told her I had rotten news. There was a rush deal and I’d have to be away again for two or three days. Cleveland, I said. I was making a flight in forty minutes.

“Oh, Harry—”

“I’m sorry. Just came up. I’m in a hurry, Cath.”

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“Harry, you’ve been so strange on the phone today. So kind of—of distant.”

“Cath, look, I’ve got to scram.”

“All right, Harry.”

“See you, huh?”

“Bye—”

I hung up. She’d sounded forlorn as hell. The first guy who came along with a tin cup, I was going to buy every pair of shoelaces he had.

I went out and took a cab down Fifth Avenue to the nearest You-Drive-It and I rented a two-year-old Ford sedan. I drove over to Third Avenue and stopped at one of the cheap saloons the fags hadn’t decided was quaint yet and I had three bourbons while watching the clock. At 5:151 left and swung around to Lexington and went back up town. It had started to drizzle. I pulled in at 68th at exactly 5:28 and parked near the end of the block, away from the direction in which she would come home. Four minutes later I saw her make the corner on the double, running with a newspaper over her head. She went inside. I sat there.

I chewed cigarettes, thinking how the one kind of job a legitimate P.I. won’t take are those cheap divorce things where you climb through transoms with a fresh load of Sylvania 25’s in your flashholder. I could make a couple thousand more a year if I was hard up enough to do that. I could have probably even afforded an electric lathe or a power saw, so that my wife would have had a hobby when I was out nights.

The rain stopped in an hour. No one had gone in or out of the building who I didn’t know. There are only four apartments in it. Collins, the architect on the top floor, went in about ten minutes after Cathy. Jojo Pringle came out a little after six. He’s a jazz clarinetist and a hophead and I knew he’d be on his way for a light brunch. Three or four patients went into Dr. Salter’s private entrance on the ground floor.

I began to dislike myself around seven. By eight o’clock the feeling had become one of contempt. I had planned to park there for three days if I had to, but now I told myself I’d give it
one more hour and then if I had any sense I’d go upstairs and apologize.

She came out at 8:33.

She had changed out of her office clothes. She was wearing a tight, candy-striped summer skirt and a white blouse. She was great on white blouses. Her hair glinted under the street lamp.

She began walking away from me, going with the one-way traffic and glancing over her shoulder. I started the engine in the Ford when I spotted the empty cruiser cab in the mirror. It picked her up and went a block and then cut downtown on Second.

Go to a movie, I said. Do that, Cathy. Tell the driver to head over to midtown.

Get rich wishing. The cab went all the way down to 14th before it turned. It went across to Seventh Avenue and then south again into the Village. It stopped at Sheridan Square. The light was green and I had to pass it. I double parked in front of a liquor store, using the mirror while she paid and got out. A panel truck pulled away a little up the block. I waited until she turned a corner and then I eased the Ford into the gap.

There was a small off-Broadway theater over a few blocks. Maybe she was going there. Maybe she was going to Hobo-ken or Las Vegas or Guam, since they were all in that general direction.

The joint was called Angelino’s.

It was one of those seedy basement places some landlord had had to turn into a bar twenty years before because no one would pay United States currency to live in it. I knew the kind of crowd it would get. Guys with a notion they wanted to be artists who didn’t shave because they thought you were halfway there if you looked the part. Girls in grimy sweat shirts
with the complete poems of Dylan Thomas under their arms when what they needed were cartons of Rinso. Sophisticated young uptown ladies slumming with their toothbrushes in their pocketbooks.