“The wife won’t care if you scram?”

He made a face, standing. “So who inquires? Like it’s peaceful coexistence, comprenez?”

I dug out a ten. His eyes went to the rear again, and then the bill jumped out of my hand and into his breast pocket like something unbaited from a mouse trap. “Man, I appreciate that, I truly do. Hell of a thing, but I must be blowing flat lately. I wouldn’t touch your gelt if I could get work, Harry.”

“Sure.”

He had one hand on the doorknob. “Hey, now tromp my tenor, I plumb forgot. I hear tell you were the lucky winner who helped Fern Hoerner strip the cellophane off Josie Welch that dreadful day—”

“Just chance. I ran into her in a bar.”

“Yeah, yeah, Vinnie’s. That creepy Turk. Boy, them poets. Deep, man, deep. I wouldn’t have thought Ephraim could swat flies. Curious. Indeed, curious.”

“Something on your mind, Hiram?”

He nodded absently, pacing back to the bench. “Like sit a second,” he said. I watched him pop a filter cigarette into his mouth and chew on it as if it were a cigar. “Probably it’s idle scratch,” he decided. “Just dust on the needle, you dig me? But a small thought’s been bugging me. I know beans about pistolas, but a bird would have to have a keen eye to commit the big deed with a twenty-two, nest pas?”

“Or else a lot of luck.”

“Yeah, curious. Curious.” He sucked on the cigarette. “So the minute I became cognizant of the gory details, Lucien Vaulting hove into mind. He was my age, but one of them screwball athlete types, you know? Always rupturing himself with a football over in the Square, making bets with the young cats like how many push-ups they could do, all that boff. But the thing that bugs me, he was flipped over guns. He even got hauled in by the fuzz one time for practicing on a roof. But good, man, good—”

He laughed abruptly. “Except here’s the hitch. Loosh bought the box about a year ago. Had a ticker attack, trying to chin himself at a party. Poor old Loosh.” He studied his cigarette, then looked across again. “But like I say, it’s still weird. I mean Josie Welch, and now you put me on about the Grant chick. Loosh was the local thigh man, had a hand under every skirt. But the chicks who were current when he copped out were these very two. I mean simultaneous-current, you dig me? Neither of the wenches bunked with him steady, but the pair of them would be pattering about his pad together on many a cozy night. On many a frosty morn. According to community folk tale, it was a real squooshy ménage-a-trois.”

I took a cigarette of my own. “I don’t get what’s on your mind, Hiram.”

“Man, like I don’t either. Just chatter, you know? But Ephraim bugs in here also. This Lucien was a writer. He scribbled two novels, both pretty hip — anyhow none of this sloppy Beat boff that’s all mushy chorus and no melody. The word was out that he was probably compounding something real far out when he died, because it had been nigh on to half a decade since he’d last spoke for publication, but there weren’t any pages. Like the manuscript had blown away. Probably he’d just dried up — what I mean, down here most of the cats dry up before they get wet, comprenez? Anyhow, Ephraim had a case on him, hero worship. Like if Loosh came into a bar, say, Ephraim had to scoot over and dust off a stool for him. And then when Loosh played the last note Eph started chasing both the chicks. Like he was trying to make it with the pair of them because Lucien did. Identification with the master, like—”

“Trying to beat him, even—”

“Indeed, indeed. Except what’s the moral? Just that Eph finally flipped enough to lay out poor Josie. Writers, man. Too much brain work. It gets real hot inside the skull, you know?”

I didn’t see what point he had. I decided he didn’t have any at all. “A guy named Pete Peters,” I asked him. “I hear he saw a lot of Josie Welch also.”

Henshaw shrugged. “Like saying a cat goes to a house of ill fame two, three times a week. Those beds are swinging when the cat is not there, too.”

“Who’s a painter named Ivan Klobb?”

“A cool specimen. He’s got a showing in some far-out uptown gallery next week. I mean you take a look, you know whether it’s a sunset or a commode. Mucho nudes. Josie Welch used to hold still for him sometimes. So does your Audrey Grant, although mostly he works with a real built body named Dana O’Dea. Sure, I forgot — this O’Dea rooms with the chick you’re looking for. If Audrey Grant isn’t swinging at this ball tonight, Dana probably will be. You can’t count on the Grant chick — she comes, she goes. A traveler. Like I’ve spied her making for home at maybe eleven bells in the morning.’’

“Out all night, you mean?”

“Indeed, but not down here among the peasants. Up where the tall money flows, the nightclub circuit.”

“She goes up—” I cut it off I took a slow breath, staring at him.

“Have I like served up something with a bone in it, dads?”

I didn’t answer. I was looking for Audrey Grant because her father wanted to chat about the family estates. It was supposed to be an innocent matter, and maybe it still was. Maybe the girl had friends uptown. Maybe not one of them was somebody named Connie.

“Let’s check that party, Hiram,” I told him.

CHAPTER 12

It was just after ten when we got to the McGruder place. Henshaw had taken me five blocks west along Christopher Street, then through an iron gate and down a hand-truck ramp into a cluttered alley. Light came from a turning in the rear, where it gleamed on a dozen battered trash cans. There were sounds of a cool horn that could have been Miles Davis as we went back, and there was talk. The air was rank.

The light was from an unshaded bulb over a doorway in the right-hand building. Four plank steps led down into a low room which at a glance looked wide enough to store obsolete bombers in. There was only one light inside, another naked bulb hanging from a cord socket looped over a water pipe in a far corner, and it could not have been more than forty watts. The walls of the room were whitewashed concrete, and there were no windows. There were at least fifty people standing around in clusters. A long table thrown together from sawhorses and boards stood off to the left, crowded with drink-making paraphernalia, and there was a phonograph on another table in the corner which got the light. The only other furniture seemed to be half a dozen auditorium chairs, lost in all that floor space.

“Tut’s other tomb, like,” Henshaw said. “McGruder claims he digs his doom better in the depths. He communes with the dark night of his soul.”

“He’ll commune with pneumonia if he lives here in the winter.”

Henshaw gestured toward the rear. “There’s a lone radiator out yonder. He hibernates in one room when it frosts up.”

There were doorways in the far wall, leading into what looked like a maze of corridors. The corridors were illuminated by kerosene lamps with red chimneys instead of electricity. Except for a section where heating equipment would have to be, McGruder evidently had the full basement to himself. I could think of about ten housing-authority violations his landlord could have been cited for, but I wasn’t particularly trying.

“We just help ourselves to that booze?”

“Like the butler is indisposed, you know?”

We had started over that way when a tall, narrow-shouldered man in a pink-and-white-striped polo shirt waved a limp hand in Henshaw’s direction, peered at me, then detatched himself from a group and pranced toward us. He was in his late twenties, and so thin that a June breeze would have bent him double. That lifted hand flopped around near his shoulder like a drooping epaulet all the way across. “Hiram, dear,” he twittered. He stroked about fourteen excess inches of beer-colored hair out of his gay blue eyes, not looking at Henshaw at all. “I’m so glad. I was certain you would have a previous engagement.”