Free Epitaph For A Tramp by David Markson Page A

a light rain, and the trouble with his story was that you could believe it. You could see her doing it, see her getting just fed up enough with her Keats-spouting Village boyfriends to think that Duke might be exciting. Exciting. And what will we do after we give syphilis to all the natives, Mr. Columbus?
    “Duke Sabatini,” I said.
    “Yeah.”
    “I suppose he’s another rugged ninety-seven-pound terror just like you. What’s he look like?”
    “Taller ‘n me.”
    “I suppose he’s got the same greasy hair you pretty bastards put up in curlers every night, too. I suppose he’s—”
    “I don’t put up my—”
    “Shut up, scum. What’s his cousin’s name?”
    “Sabatini. Just like him. Freddie Sabatini.”
    “What’s Duke’s first name?”
    “Angelo. Hey, look, this thing hurts bad, Jack. Ain’t I gonna get a doctor?”
    I told him what he could do with the wrist. I supposed Angelo Sabatini would be a hundred miles off already. With a murder rap on his neck a punk like this one would be sprinting fast enough to make Roger Bannister look like a hitchhiker. It was Duke all right. All that cash in the balance, a girl like Cathy who probably started feeling guilty or scared when it was over—anything could have set it off. I’d find out the details after the cops picked him up. The cops. Sure, they’d get him sooner or later, but I wasn’t going to be in on it. Hell no, Fannin would be home reading witty lines out of his Bartlett’s Quotations and waiting for some potted dame to climb the stairs and fall into his lap for the big romp in the hay. You could set fire to the end of the bed and Fannin wouldn’t smell smoke until morning.
    Sally had come across to where I was pacing. Her hand was on my arm.
    “Harry—now let me be the one to tell you to take it easy.”
    I didn’t say anything because anything I would have said would not have had more than four letters in it. I picked up the phone and dialed my home number. Dan got it on the first ring.
    “You called Brannigan yet?”
    “Just about to. You said an hour. You onto anything?”
    “Looks open and shut. Don’t ask me how, but she rode along on a payroll heist up in Troy yesterday with two punks. Guy named Bogardus I got wrapped up, another one named Sabatini. Sabatini’s the one who killed her. They—”
    “Killed her!” Bogardus was staring up at me from the floor, slack-jawed. I ignored him.
    “Evidently she got scared,” I said. “She’d probably told the guy what I did for a living, and then she was probably just innocent enough to think she could go to me and promise him she wouldn’t mention any names.”
    Dan did not say anything. Bogardus was still gaping like a six-year-old watching three of them sneak up on James Arness at once.
    “I’m going to ice this joker I’ve got down here,” I said. “When the badges get there just tell them I’ll have it when I come. I’ve got a couple of stops to make first.”
    “Right. You got any line on where this Sabatini might have ducked to?”
    “He’s got forty thousand in his glove compartment.”
    “Makes it tough.”
    “Yeah. I’ll see you in an hour or so. But listen—” I gave him Sally’s address. “Tell them to pick up Bogardus here. Brannigan can put through a call on it. I’ll leave a key, same as up there.”
    I put back the phone and turned to Eddie Bogardus. He screwed up his face. “Damn, Jack, you sure you got it figured straight? Duke wouldn’t of killed the broad, not her. He was nuts about her. He even wanted to marry her an’ all.”
    “He’d have a sweet honeymoon doing twenty for armed robbery.”
    “He still wouldn’t of killed her, even if she was gonna rat on us. Hell, for all he knew I might of got caught and ratted before that. He could of just run and hid out. He had the loot, dint he?”
    “Did he?”
    He thought about that, sitting there against the bed like Newton under the tree. After a while you could see it fall on him. Cathy had