Somebody Owes Me Money (16 page)

Abbie. She came in all red-faced and sparkly from the cold air, the orange fur coat making her look like a sexy gift-wrapped present from Olympus, sent me to make up for all the bad stuff that had been happening, and she said, “Hi. You look like death warmed over.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You look great.”

“Thank you. Where’s Smilin Jack?”

“He got his phone call and left,” I said. “Napoli found me innocent.”

“Good. Are you hungry?” She shrugged out of the coat, tossed it on a chair.

“Not till I brush my teeth. Then I’m famished.” I threw the covers back. “Was Louise at the funeral?”

“Of course not. Just me, a couple of Tommy’s old customers,
a business associate or two, and a couple of anonymous old ladies. Not even any detectives around to take notes. Do you need help walking?”

“All I need is a robe,” I said.

“Coming up.” She went to the closet, got an old brown robe of Tommy’s, and carried it over to the bed. “Heavy,” she said, frowning, and held the robe up to pat its pockets, from one of which she drew a tough-looking gun. “For Pete’s sake,” she said. “Is this Tommy’s? What a place to keep it.”

I laughed, saying, “No, it’s Ralph’s. He must have forgotten it. I forgot all about it myself.”

“Ralph? Ralph was wearing this robe?”

“Let me brush my teeth first,” I said. “Then I’ll tell you the story.”

“I can hardly wait,” she said.

With her help I got out of bed and into the robe, and found myself only a little weaker and dizzier than usual. I was somewhat short of breath, and my legs were a trifle unsteady when I tried to walk, but compared to yesterday I was now a giant among men, a force to be reckoned with.

By the time I emerged from the bathroom I felt even better. I went down the hall to the kitchen and found Abbie sitting at the table there, making liverwurst sandwiches. I sat across from her and said, “A policeman came to call. A detective named Golderman. So Ralph hid in the closet. Is it all right for me to have coffee, or am I still limited to tea?”

She looked at me. “A detective?”

“Named Golderman. May I have coffee?”

“How do you feel?”

“Strong like an ox.”

She grinned. “Okay. Coffee. But tell me about Ralph and the detective.”

So I did, and in the course of the telling she made a pot of coffee. She found certain parts of my story funny, and so did I now that it was all over. Much funnier in the telling than in the living. When I was done, she said, “I think I’d like to meet this Detective Golderman. He sounds interesting.”

“A dull man,” I said. “With warts. Besides, I think he’s married.”

She looked askance. “You’re jealous and I’ve never even met the man.”

“No, but you want to.”

“I think you’re getting healthy too fast,” she said.

“Growf,” I told her.

We spent a quiet weekend, with me doing a lot of sleeping, a full eight or nine hours at night plus a couple of naps during the day. Every time I woke up I was a little stronger, and Abbie kept telling me I was getting color back in my cheeks.

She changed the bandage Friday to a smaller one, and Saturday to a still smaller one, and Sunday she took the bandage off and washed the wound and decided not to put a bandage on at all. “We’ll let it air,” she said.

It looked odd. Not horrible, the way I’d thought, just odd. There was a line along the side of my head above my left ear, about half an inch wide, in which there wasn’t any hair, just pink flesh, with some dark red scar showing. It was still very sensitive, not in a stinging way like a cut, but with a deep massive head-pounding thump of a pain if I made the mistake of touching the wound or the area around it. I always had to grit my teeth and hold on tight to the rim of the sink when Abbie was cleaning it, and each time I had a bad headache for about half an hour afterward.

We spent most of the weekend with a deck of cards in our hands. We played gin, and ah hell, and after we found the crib-bage board we played cribbage. All for money, of course, but it was seesaw, neither of us ever more than a few bucks ahead.

Abbie also taught me a few stunts with the deck. It took me a while to get used to the mechanic’s grip, a funny way of holding the deck from underneath with the left hand so that the right hand can burrow into it like a mouse into a sack of grain without anybody being the wiser. It would take me years to learn to be
as smooth with a deck as Abbie, but I did pretty well, and by Sunday night I was even faking her out every once in a while.

Our sleeping arrangements were less satisfactory. She insisted on me keeping the bed, since I was the wounded one, but she switched to the living-room couch. I told her I saw no reason to change the policy we’d established Thursday night, and she said I didn’t have to see any reasons, she could see them for both of us. “You trusted me then,” I said, and she said, “You were weaker then.”

Well, that was true enough. By Sunday afternoon I was just about my old self again, and beginning to get bored. I’d been here since Wednesday night, and I’d really had about all of this apartment I wanted. On the other hand, the outside world was potentially full of people who didn’t wish me well, so I didn’t chafe very much about having to hang around here. In between the card-playing I watched television or ate snacks or just sat around bored.

And I napped, whether I wanted to or not. Abbie insisted, and I believe her main concern wasn’t my health at all. She just wanted me out from underfoot for a while. Still, every time she hounded me into the bedroom for a nap I did actually go off to sleep for an hour or two.

I was asleep, in fact, late Sunday afternoon when the visitors arrived. What woke me was a scream. I popped awake, sat up, and saw Frank Tarbok, the blue-jawed questioner from the garage, standing in the hallway with his velvet-collared overcoat on, staring at me. The voice that had screamed was still echoing in my head, recognizable as Abbie’s, but I had already fallen flat again and thrown the covers over my head before it occurred to me the scream hadn’t been a mere and simple scream, it had been a word. A name. Abbie had screamed a name.

Why had Abbie screamed
Louise?

When nothing happened for several days, I peeked up over the top of the covers, blinking and wincing already from the bullet I was sure was coming.

Nobody was there.

What? I pushed the covers down completely off my face and stared at the doorway, and it was absolutely empty. Nobody standing there at all. Not Frank Tarbok, not Louise McKay, not anybody.

Had it been a dream? Had the scream been real and all the rest a dream, or had the scream also been part of the dream? A dream scream. Was I going loony?

I sat up, looked around the room, looked at the empty doorway again, and heard voices. They seemed to be real voices, and they were coming from the direction of the living room. Male and female both.

I got out of bed. My shirt and pants—back from the cleaner’s—were draped carefully on a chair; shoes were on the floor beside the bed. I dressed hurriedly, left the bedroom, and walked down the hall to the living room, where Frank Tarbok was standing and talking, Louise McKay was standing and talking, and Abbie was standing and talking.

Maybe I was still asleep. Maybe this was part of the dream, too. I said, “Hey,” and several other things, trying to attract everybody’s attention, and then I realized I was standing and talking like everybody else, so I said, “Oh, the hell with it,” and went away again. If the world wanted to be crazy, I could be crazy, too. With Frank Tarbok and Louise McKay actually standing
and talking in the living room, I went out to the kitchen and made myself a liverwurst sandwich. I also heated the coffee, a pot of which we kept permanently on the stove since both Abbie and I were endless coffee drinkers.

The yammering in the living room gradually settled down, but I could not have cared less. Here I’d spent five days terrified that Frank Tarbok or one of his minions would find me and shoot me, and when Frank Tarbok finally did show up he didn’t even pay any attention to me. Stared at me through a doorway for a second, and that was that.

As for Louise McKay, her husband had died a week ago, she’d disappeared without a trace, and all of a sudden there she is in her own living room, standing and talking as though she’d been there all along. No, it was all too crazy to be contended with, particularly when I’d just come out of a nap. Particularly when I’d just been thrust out of a nap by a scream.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating liverwurst, drinking coffee and reading the
News,
when they came looking for me. Abbie came in first, the other two behind her. She said, “Chet? Are you out of your mind?”

“Murmf,” I said, with a mouthful of liverwurst. I also shook my head, meaning
no.

“Don’t you see who’s here?” she demanded, and actually pointed at Frank Tarbok as though she thought I couldn’t see him for myself, standing there as big and ugly as life.

I nodded, and pointed at my mouth, and held my hand up to ask for a minute’s grace. Then I chewed rapidly, swallowed, helped the food along with a swig of coffee, swallowed again, burped slightly, and said, “Yes. I see him. I see the two of them.”

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “You’re just sitting there.”

“When your scream woke me up,” I told her, “and I saw Frank Tarbok there in the bedroom doorway, I did some of the
most beautiful terror reactions you ever saw. I carried on like the heroine of a silent movie. And what did he do? He turned around and walked away. So what did I do? I got up and got dressed and went into the living room to find out what was going on, and nobody would pay any attention to me. Everybody was talking at once, nobody was listening, it was like a clambake out at Jones Beach, so I decided the hell with everybody, and I came in here and made myself a sandwich. If you’re all willing to pay attention now, I am prepared to fall on the floor, or scream, or beg for mercy, or try babbling explanations, or whatever you think the circumstances call for. But I’ll be damned if I’ll perform without an audience.” And I took another bite of liverwurst sandwich.

Abbie just stared at me, open-mouthed. It was Tarbok who spoke next, saying in that heavy voice of his, “Conway, for somebody who don’t know nothing about nothing, you do keep turning up.”

I pushed liverwurst into one cheek. I said, “Up until now I thought it was you. Or somebody working for you. But here you are, and you aren’t doing anything, so now I don’t know. Unless maybe you’ve changed your mind since Wednesday.”

“Wednesday?” His face was too square and blocky and white and blue-jawed and heavy to manage very much expressiveness, but he did use it now to convey a sort of exasperated bewilderment. “What do you mean, Wednesday?”

I pointed the sandwich at him. “Did you,” I asked him, “or any other employee of Walter Droble, or any friend of yours or Walter Droble’s, or Walter Droble himself, or an ally of the same, take a shot at me Wednesday night?”

He squinted, as though there was suddenly a lot of cigarette smoke between us. “Take a what?”

“A shot,” I said. I used the sandwich for a gun. “Bang bang,”
I said, and pointed with my other hand at the healing scar on the side of my head.

He put his head to one side and squinted at the scar. “Is that what that is? You was grazed?”

“I was grazed. Did you do it?”

The heavy face made a heavy smile. “Conway,” he said, “if I’d took a shot at you, it would have got you a little bit to the right of that.”

“It wasn’t anybody working for you, or Walter Droble, or et cetera.”

He shook his head. “We don’t kill people just for practice,” he said. “A guy has to really call attention to himself in some outstanding way before we go to a lot of trouble.”

“All right,” I said. “It wasn’t Napoli or any of his people, and it wasn’t—”

“Who says it wasn’t Napoli?”

“Napoli says it wasn’t Napoli.”

His head leaned forward, as though to hear me better. In a soft voice he said, “
Solomon
Napoli?”

“Of course.”

“He told you it wasn’t him? Personally he said so?”

“Yes. Right in that bedroom down there, Thursday night.”

“How come he happened to tell you?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I don’t want to go into it now.”

“I’ll tell you the reason I’m asking,” he said. “When we had our talk last week, you said you didn’t know Sol Napoli. And I believed you. And now you say he come to visit you Thursday and tell you personally he didn’t order you rubbed out.”

“That was the first time I ever met him,” I said. “I’m beginning to feel like Nero Wolfe. I don’t have to leave the apartment ever, sooner or later everybody involved in this damn thing comes calling on me.”

“That was the first time you ever saw Sol Napoli?” Tarbok persisted. He was running his own conversation, and my part of it hardly mattered at all. “And he come here expressly to tell you he didn’t have nothing to do—”

“Oh, really, Frank!” Louise McKay suddenly said, her voice dripping with scorn. “Who are you trying to kid? Why go on with it? Leave these people alone.”

Immediately he turned on her. “I’m done telling you, Louise,” he said. “You got one hundred percent the wrong idea. Now lay off.”

“Is that why you’ve been keeping me under wraps? Because I’ve got the
wrong
idea? Is that why I’ve been a prisoner for a week, I couldn’t even go to Tommy’s wake, his funeral, I couldn’t—”

“Yeah,” he said, his heavy voice crushing hers beneath the one word. “Yeah, that’s just why. Because you got the wrong idea, but wrong ideas have got guys strapped in up at Sing Sing before this. You go around yapping to the cops, that’s all they’d need. No questions asked, brother, they could mark the McKay homicide solved and pat each other on the backs and not lose a minute’s sleep.”

“If you were innocent?” she demanded.

“You’re damn right! Come off it, Louise, you know it as well as I do. I’m guilty of anything the law can pin on me, it don’t matter whether it’s a railroad or not. They figure if they get me for something I didn’t do, it still works out because I’m paying for something I did do.”