Somebody Owes Me Money (15 page)

An hour and a quarter later, at a tenth of a cent a point, I was thirteen dollars to the good and Ralph was looking morose again. Not bored, just morose. Then we heard the unmistakable sound of a key turning in a lock, and Ralph was suddenly on his feet and a gun had appeared magically from within his clothing and leaped into his hand.

I said, “That’s Ab—”

He waved the gun urgently at me to shut up, and whispered, “I told her to ring so’s I’d know it was her.”

Oh, good. Fine.

We heard the door open. Ralph pointed at the closet, at himself. He put his finger to his lips. I nodded. He drifted away into the closet, pulling the door not quite shut behind him.

The cards were laid out for a gin hand. I heard the hall door close. I grabbed the cards up and held them in my left hand as I stared at the doorway, holding the cards like the hero holding a crucifix in a vampire movie.

Someone was walking. The bandage around my head began to itch.

Detective Golderman appeared in the doorway, looking toward the living room. He glanced in at me, as though at an empty room, and did a double-take. He took his hands out of his pockets, stepped to the doorway, pushed his hat back from his forehead, and said, “You.”

“Hello,” I said. I waved the deck of cards in greeting.

“You do get around, don’t you?” He came into the room, glanced this way and that. He didn’t pay any special attention to the closet.

“I guess I do,” I said. And I was probably more nervous now than when I thought it might be somebody coming to kill me. At least a murderer wouldn’t be asking me a lot of difficult questions, and I had the feeling that’s exactly what Golderman was going to start doing.

Which he did, right off the bat. He came over to the bed, looked down at it, and said, “Playing solitaire for money?”

I looked down. Crumpled bills, coppered quarters, loose change all on the blanket. “Uh,” I said.

He sat down, in the chair Ralph had just left. He watched me, waiting for an answer.

Ralph. Would he know who this was? He might think it was one of Droble’s men, and come out and shoot him. I said, “Well, Detective Golderman, the fact is, I was playing gin rummy with Abbie before she left.”

“Abbie?”

“Abbie McKay. Tommy’s sister.”

He nodded. “She’s at the funeral?”

“She’ll be back afterwards,” I said. “Is she the one you wanted to see?”

“Just looking around, Chester. What happened to your head?”

I’d been waiting for that question, I’d known it was coming, it had to be coming, and I was fascinated to know what I would say in response to it. So here it was, and what did I say? I said,
“My head?” As though I hadn’t realized I had one. And touched the bandage.

“Your head,” he agreed, and nodded at it.

“I fell down,” I said. “I slipped on the ice outside and fell down.”

“That’s too bad. Did you see a doctor?”

“Yes. Abbie called one. He came and he put this bandage on. He said I shouldn’t move for a while, that’s why I’m still here.”

“It didn’t happen today?”

“No. Wednesday night.”

“Must have been a bad fall.”

Why did I always feel as though Detective Golderman was disbelieving me? Maybe because I was always telling him lies. “It was,” I said. “I got like a cut on the side of my head.” I made vague motions with the hand holding the cards.

“You’re lucky you didn’t have to go to the hospital,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess I was.”

“Lucky you weren’t killed,” he said. “You an old friend of Abbie McKay’s?”

“No, uh. I just met her a little while ago.”

“When was that?”

“Uh, Wednesday.”

He smiled faintly. “You might say you fell for her on first sight, eh?”

“Heh heh,” I said.

“Nice of her to go out of her way to take care of you,” he said. “After just meeting and all.”

“Yeah, well...Yeah, it was.”

He looked around the room again. “I take it Mrs. McKay isn’t staying here these days. Tommy McKay’s wife.”

“No. No, she isn’t.”

He glanced at me, with that casualness I distrusted. “Where is she staying, do you know?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I haven’t seen her since Monday. Since Tommy was killed.”

“That isn’t her in the closet, in other words,” he said.

I said, “Uh. In the closet?”

“In the closet,” he agreed. “If Tommy’s sister is at the funeral and you haven’t seen his wife since Monday, that can’t be either one of them in the closet, can it?”

“Uh...Well...”

“So it has to be somebody else,” he said. “Doesn’t it, Chester?”

“I...” I made a helpless gesture with the deck of cards, and Ralph came out of the closet. He looked morose again.

Detective Golderman casually turned his head and looked at Ralph. “Do I know you?”

“No,” Ralph told him.

“You waiting for a bus in there?”

“Developing pictures,” Ralph said.

“Ah,” said Detective Golderman. “Would you have some sort of identification on you?”

“Yeah,” said Ralph. He dragged his wallet out and extracted a driver’s license from it, which he handed over to Detective Golderman.

Detective Golderman reached into an inner pocket for notebook and pencil and copied some information into it from Ralph’s license, then handed the license back and put the notebook away. Finally he got to his feet and said, “Ralph, you wouldn’t mind if I frisked you, would you?”

Ralph’s face showed that the thought didn’t make him happy, but all he said was, “If you got to.” And lifted his arms up at his sides.

“Thank you, Ralph,” Detective Golderman said, and patted
him thoroughly all over without finding the gun I knew Ralph possessed. When he was done, he glanced at the closet and said, “I wonder if I should go over the closet, too.”

Ralph made an after-you-Alphonse gesture and said, “Be my guest.” But his tone was still morose and not at all sarcastic.

“Not worth the aggravation,” Detective Golderman decided, and looked back at me again. I’d known he would get back to me again sooner or later, and I hadn’t been looking forward to it. “Chester,” he said, “you haven’t told me the entire truth, have you?”

“Uh,” I said. That seemed to be my favorite word with him. “About what?” I said.

“Well, Ralph, for instance,” he said. “You hadn’t planned on introducing me at all, had you?”

“Well,” I said. “I felt it was up to him. Whether he wanted to come out or not.”

“Still and all, Chester,” he said, “you did hold out on me.”

“Yes, sir,” I admitted. “I guess I did.”

“It would have been a very simple thing, Chester,” he said. “When I came in, all you had to do was say, ‘I’d like you to meet my friend Ralph Corvaccio in the closet.’ Then I would have gone on believing you were somebody I could trust. Somebody whose word I could take on various things.” There was nothing for me to say. That’s what I said. Detective Golderman stood there looking at me. He seemed to be thinking about things, considering various ways of dealing with me, none pleasant. At last he said, “Do you remember when I came to see you at your house Wednesday?”

“Yes. Sure.”

“Do you remember I mentioned some names to you, and asked you if you knew any of those men, or had ever heard of any of them?”

I nodded.

“Do you remember those names?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Let’s try your memory,” he said.

“Frank Tarbok,” I said. “Walter Droble. Bugs Bender. Uh, and Solomon Napoli.”

“Very good,” he said. “And do you remember what you told me?”

“That I didn’t know them.”

“Didn’t know a thing about them.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at Ralph. “Is Ralph an old friend of yours, Chester? Or do you just know him since Wednesday, too?”

“Thursday,” I said. “Yesterday.”

“Yesterday. In that brief time, Chester, has Ralph mentioned to you who he works for?”

“Well—”

“Do you know who Ralph works for, Chester?”

I looked at Ralph, but he was moodily studying the back of Detective Golderman’s head and was of no help to me. In a low voice, not looking at anybody at all, I said, “I think he works for Solomon Napoli.”

“Solomon Napoli. That’s one of the four men I asked you about, isn’t it?”

“Detective Golderman, until I got mixed up in all this stuff, I didn’t know any of those people, I swear I didn’t. And I don’t
want
to know them now, take my word for it.”

“Mixed up in all what stuff, Chester?”

“All these people,” I said, and limped to a halt. Even if I wanted to tell him what was going on, there was nowhere to begin. I waved my hands vaguely and said, “Ever since Tommy got killed. I got caught up in all this because I’m the guy that found him.”

“Is that all, Chester?”

“Yes. That’s the worst of it, I’m an innocent bystander and nobody believes me.”

“You’re very convincing, Chester,” he said, “except that I have trouble squaring your innocence with the fact that you seem to be keeping known gangsters in your closet.”

“I am
not
keeping anybody in my closet! That was
his
idea!”

“Still, Chester, you—”

The phone rang. Quickly Ralph said, “That’s for me. That’s the call I been expecting.” He started for the door.

Detective Golderman pointed to the phone beside the bed. “Why not answer it there?”

“That one don’t work,” Ralph said, and left the room.

Detective Golderman looked at the phone. He came over, picked up the receiver, put it to his ear, cradled it again. He bent, looked at the wire under the table, picked it up, fingered the frayed end, glanced at me. I looked at him with my poker face.

He said, “Chester, while we’re alone for a minute, is there anything you want to say to me?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve said it all. I’m not hiding anything from anybody.”

“I find that hard to believe, Chester,” he said.

“Everybody does,” I told him.

He dropped the phone wire, walked to the doorway, and stood there a minute, listening to Ralph talking on the phone in the living room. I could hear his voice, too, though I couldn’t make out the words, and it sounded as though the major part of the conversation was happening at the other end, with Ralph’s part limited mostly to monosyllables.

Detective Golderman looked back at me. He said, “Do you have an explanation for him being here?”

“His boss wouldn’t believe me either,” I said.

He came back into the room. “Wouldn’t believe what?”

“That I wasn’t involved in something somehow.”

“Involved in what?”

“How do I know? I’m not involved in it, so how would I know what it is?”

“I suppose that makes sense,” he said. “So Napoli thinks you’re involved in something, and that’s why Ralph is here.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t explain why Ralph is here,” he pointed out.

“He’s here,” I said, “to wait for a phone call from his boss telling him I’m not involved in anything after all. Then he’ll go away.”

“What if the phone call says you are involved?”

“It won’t, because I’m not.”

“But what if it did? What would happen then?”

“I suppose I’d get shot at,” I said, stopping myself just barely in time. I’d been about to say
again,
a word Detective Golderman would have leaped on with both feet.

As it was, he had sentence enough to intrigue him. He said, “Doesn’t that worry you? Isn’t there a possibility they’ll make a mistake?”

“Not this time,” I said.

“You wouldn’t like to go into the details, would you, Chester?”

I shook my head. “The details are beyond me,” I said. “I’m not trying to be a smart aleck or evade the question or anything, the details are just absolutely beyond me and that’s all there is to it. There are too many details, and they don’t make any sense.”

“Try me,” he said.

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“At the beginning.”

“I found Tommy McKay dead, and all hell broke loose.”

Ralph appeared in the doorway. “That was our friend,” he told me. “He says to tell you everything’s okay.”

“Good,” I said. I looked at Detective Golderman. “See?”

“I see,” he said. He was looking at Ralph.

Ralph returned the look and said, “You mind if I go away now?”

“I’m not sure,” Detective Golderman told him. “I might want to take you along to the station with me and ask some questions.”

“You’d waste your time,” Ralph told him.

“You’re probably right,” Detective Golderman said. “All right, Ralph, you can go.”

“Thanks,” Ralph said. It was impossible to tell whether that was sarcastic or not.

“I’ll see you around, more than likely,” Detective Golderman told him.

“Yeah, maybe,” Ralph said. He looked at me. “You’re lucky,” he said. “With the cards.”

“Uh huh,” I said, and he left.

Neither of us said a word till we heard the door close behind Ralph. Then Detective Golderman said, “Well, Chester? Anything you’d like to say now?”

I considered it, I trembled on the brink of telling him the whole thing, but I didn’t quite do it. In the first place, when you’ve told the same lie to a policeman long enough you tend to shy away from admitting the truth. In the second place, the truth by now really was too complicated for a wounded man with a headache to try to explain. And in the third place, I shouldn’t talk to anybody without checking with Abbie first, it wouldn’t be fair to her.

I believe that third place might have been just an excuse, but any excuse in a storm. I said, “Nothing. Not a thing.”

“Very well, Chester,” he said. “I’ll probably see you around.”

“You probably will,” I said gloomily, and he left.

I was napping over an insoluble hand of solitaire when the doorbell rang. I roused sufficiently to wiggle my knees and knock half the deck off onto the floor, which woke me the rest of the way. My first thought was that my mouth tasted like the inside of a metal garbage can behind a Chinese restaurant, and my second thought was that somebody had rung the bell.

Well, I wasn’t going to do anything about it. If it was Abbie, giving the departed Ralph the signal he’d wanted, she’d let herself in eventually. If it wasn’t Abbie, I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. So I sat there, moving my tongue unhappily over the fur on my teeth, thinking about the fact that my back ached and my head felt fuzzy, and when I heard the hall door open I was surprised to discover that I was scared. I lay there and watched the door.