Harry Fannin Omnibus: Epitaph for a Tramp & Epitaph for a Dead Beat by David Markson

Author:David Markson [Markson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781593761349
Google: CjkgAQAAIAAJ
Goodreads: 17684
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 1959-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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 Brannigan 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

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