Somebody Owes Me Money (17 page)

“You killed my husband,” she said, very bitterly and Abbie and I exchanged quick glances.

“I didn’t,” he said, his heavy voice almost a physical weight in the room. “Any more than I shot at this shlemozzle here.”

“You did.”

Abbie said to him, “Did you?”

He looked at her with a kind of sullen surprise, like a lion who’s just been poked with a stick through the bars of the cage. Don’t people realize he’s the king of the jungle and has big teeth? He said, “You, too?”

“I’m Tommy’s sister,” she said. “I want to know who killed him.”

Louise McKay said, “Well, there he is, honey, take a look at him.” And pointed at Tarbok.

Tarbok made a fist and showed it to her. “Once more,” he said, “and I smash you right in the head.”

“Sure,” she said. “Why not kill me, too? Why not rub me out the way you rubbed out Tommy.”

Tarbok rose up on his toes, as though to recapture his temper, which he was about to lose out through the top of his head. It looked as though maybe he
would
rub her out, or anyway smash her right in the head, if something didn’t happen to break the tension, so I said, as calmly and nonchalantly as I could, “Women are like that, Tarbok. Abbie thought I did it for a while.”

He settled down again, coming off his toes, his fist slightly uncurling. Turning as slowly as Burt Lancaster about to make a plot point, he said, “She did? How come?”

“Everybody did, at one time or another,” I said. “
You
thought I maybe had something to do with it, Napoli thought so, Abbie thought so. For all I know the cops thought so.”

Tarbok leaned forward, the hand that had been a fist now supporting his weight on the table. “Why is that, Conway?” he said. “How come everybody thinks you did for McKay?”

“Everybody had different reasons,” I said. “You remember yours. Abbie thought I was having an affair with Mrs. McKay and killed Tommy so we could be together.”

“That’s what
this
moron did,” Louise McKay shouted, glaring
at Abbie and me as though to defy us to question her.

Tarbok turned his head and looked at her. “Shut up, sweetheart,” he said, slowly and distinctly. “I’m talking to the shlemozzle.”

“I’m not a shlemozzle,” I said.

He gave me a pitying look. “See how wrong people can be? How come Sol Napoli thought it was you?”

“He thought you people found out Tommy had secretly gone over to his side, and you hired me to kill him.”

Tarbok stared at me. The silence suddenly bulged. Tarbok said, “Who did what?”

“Tommy was secretly on Napoli’s side. Napoli told me so him—”

“That’s a lie!”

I looked at Louise McKay. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McKay,” I said. “All I know is what I was told.” I looked back at Tarbok. “And why would Napoli be involved if it wasn’t true?”

Tarbok said, “Don’t nobody go nowhere.” He pushed past the two women as though they were strangers on a subway platform, and left the kitchen, heading in the direction of the rest of the apartment.

We all looked at one another, and I was the first to speak, saying to Mrs. McKay, “Abbie thinks it’s you, you know.”

She looked at me, and I was an annoyance that had just forced itself onto her attention. “What was that?”

Abbie, embarrassed, said, “Chet, stop.”

I didn’t. I said, “Mrs. McKay, your sister-in-law there is convinced that you’re the one who killed Tommy.”

She was a very bad-tempered woman. Her eyebrows came threateningly down and she glared at the two of us. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Abbie said to me, “Chet, I’ve changed my mind.”

I didn’t much care. I said to Mrs. McKay, “Tommy wrote her about your running around with somebody, so naturally—”

“He never did!”

Abbie said softly, “Yes, he did, Louise, I still have the letter, if you want to see it. I tried showing it to the police, but they didn’t seem to much care.”

Mrs. McKay’s glare began to crumple at the edges. She tried to keep it alive, beetling her brows more and more, but when her chin began to tremble, it was all over. Abbie got a sympathetic look on her face and moved forward with a consoling hand out, and Mrs. McKay let go. She dropped into the chair across the table from me, flopped her head down onto her folded arms, and began to catch up on a week of weeping. Abbie stood next to her, one hand on her shoulder, and looked at me with a what-can-we-do? expression on her face. I shook my head, meaning all-we-can-do-is-wait-it-out, and Frank Tarbok bulled back into the room, saying, “What the hell’s the matter with the phone in the bedroom?”

I said, “One of Napoli’s men pulled it out when I tried to call the police.”

He gave me an irritated frown, gave Mrs. McKay a more irritated frown, and pounded away again.

We had about thirty seconds of silence, except for Mrs. McKay’s muffled sobbing, and then somebody pounded on the front door.

I said, “I’ll get it.”

“Be careful,” Abbie said.

“Naturally,” I said. I left the kitchen, went to the front door, and looked through the peephole at Ralph, who was looking both impatient and disgusted.

Oh. I opened the door and he pushed in without a word and thumped on down the hall toward the bedroom. I shut the door
again and went back to the kitchen. At Abbie’s raised eyebrow, I said, “It was Ralph. He came back for his gun.” I went around the table and sat down again.

Abbie said, “Come to think of it, what did you do with my gun?”

“It’s in my overcoat pocket,” I said. “You know, I’d forgotten all about that?”

“No, it isn’t,” she said.

“What?”

“It isn’t in your overcoat pocket. I looked.”

“Well, that’s where I put it,” I said, and Ralph appeared in the doorway. I looked at him.

He said, “Okay, where is it?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s on the dresser.”

“On the dresser?”

“Yes,” I said. “On the dresser.”

He went away again, and Abbie said, “Believe me, Chet, I looked through all your clothing for that gun. I thought it might come in handy.”

“Somebody swiped it,” I said.

“That’s fine,” she said. “I give you the thing to hold for me, and you lose it.”

“In the first place,” I said, and Frank Tarbok came back. “Later,” I said to Abbie, and looked at Tarbok.

“Walt Droble is coming over,” he said.

“I
am
Nero Wolfe,” I said.

He said, “Hah?” and Ralph appeared in the doorway behind him, waving the gun in the air so we could see it, saying, “I got it.”

Tarbok turned, not having known till now that Ralph was in the apartment. He saw the gun, saw Ralph’s face, yelled, and hit the dirt. That is, he hit the linoleum, rolled under the table and into a lot of chair legs, and was pawing around inside his
clothing down there when I stooped and said, “It’s okay. He isn’t going to shoot anybody, it’s okay.”

Ralph, meanwhile, suddenly looking wary, was saying, “Was that Frank Tarbok?”

“Just wait there,” I told Tarbok, and got to my feet. To Ralph, I said, “Come on now. Let’s not make things any more confusing than they already are.”

“Is that Frank Tarbok?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s Frank Tarbok.”

Ralph’s gun was suddenly pointing at me. “Against the wall, mother,” he said.

Tarbok came out from under the table with his hands up, the way Ralph ordered, and stood next to me at the refrigerator. “I won’t forget this, Conway,” he told me.

“Shut up,” Ralph said. He waggled the gun at Abbie and Mrs. McKay. “You two over there with them.”

“No,” Abbie said.

He looked at her. “What?”

“Go away, Ralph,” she said. “We have trouble enough already, so just go away.”

“Oh, yeah? Maybe you don’t think Napoli’s going to be interested about this? How Chester Conway here, who doesn’t know nothing about nothing, is having a nice private chat with Frank Tarbok.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” I said.

“Watch it, you,” he told me.

I said, “Think about it, Ralph. If anything was going on here, would I have let you into the apartment?”

Tarbok said, out of the corner of his mouth, “You and me are gonna talk about
that,
Conway, believe me.”

“Oh, you shut up, too,” I said. “You people are the shlemoz-zles, not me. I never in my life saw so many people jump to so many wrong conclusions. You’re all either paranoid or stupid, and I’m beginning to think you’re both.”

Abbie said, dangerously, “I hope you’re not including
me
in that, Chet.”

“Now don’t you start,” I said. I walked away from the refrigerator toward Ralph, who put a menacing expression on his
face. “Ralph,” I said, “Frank Tarbok is not here to make any plans with me to do anything mean to Solomon Napoli. Frank Tarbok is here as a private citizen, escorting the widow of Tommy McKay, who is that tear-stained lady sitting at the kitchen table.”

“So you say,” said Ralph.

“So I say,” I agreed. “And so it is. You came back for your gun, Ralph, and you have your gun, and now it seems to me you’ve got your choice of either using that gun or going away. Which is it?”

Abbie said, “Chet, be careful.”

I turned to her and said, “No. I’ve had it, Abbie. Every time things quiet down a little, some other lamebrain comes running in with a lot of stupid ideas in his head and starts—”

“Hey,” Ralph said.

“Yes,” I said, turning back to him, “I do mean you. If you weren’t a lamebrain I wouldn’t have taken thirteen bucks from you at gin in an hour.”

“You had the cards,” he said. “I can’t do nothing when you keep getting the cards.”

“Sure,” I said. “And if you weren’t a lamebrain you wouldn’t have walked out of here without your gun.”

“That was that cop.” Ralph was becoming very defensive now. “He screwed things up, made me—”

“Sure, the cop,” I said. “And if you weren’t a lamebrain you wouldn’t be carrying on like a nut just because Frank Tarbok is in Tommy McKay’s apartment. Tommy
worked
for Frank Tarbok, what’s so surprising that Tommy’s widow is
with
Frank Tarbok?”

“I’m not with that bastard!” Louise McKay suddenly shouted, leaping to her feet in order to throw a monkeywrench into the works just as I was beginning to make Ralph see a glimmer of light. She shouted at Ralph, “Go ahead and shoot him! He’s the one killed my Tommy!”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “He did not. Mrs. McKay, you’re carrying on worse than Ralph.”

“Just a second there,” Ralph said. “Let the lady talk.”

“The lady runs off at the mouth,” I told him. “She doesn’t have the brains of a chipmunk.”

“Chet!” Abbie said, shocked. “Louise has been through a lot!”

“Well, it hasn’t smartened her up any,” I said. “She’s had a week to get used to being a widow, and frankly I’m not impressed by how broken up she is, seeing she was running around behind Tommy’s back when he was alive. If you ask me, she’s just making all this fuss because she feels guilty now about what she did to Tommy herself.”

“You’ve got a dirty mind, Chester Conway,” Mrs. McKay told me, “and a dirty mouth to go with it. But it doesn’t change the fact of the matter, and the fact of the matter is, Frank Tarbok killed my Tommy.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because he thought he could get me that way,” she said.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “He already had you, as often as he wanted.”

She went white. “You’re a filthy little bastard,” she said.

“Yeah, and you’re a nun.” I turned to Ralph, saying, “Ralph, think about it. Is Frank Tarbok the kind of man who would kill somebody for a woman? Particularly for a woman he was already shacked up with.”

Ralph was looking from face to face. The whole thing was miles over his head, but he had just enough brains to know it. “I don’t know nothing about nothing,” he said. “All I know is, Sol is going to be very interested in all this.”

“Then you better hurry and tell him about it,” I said. “Maybe he’ll give you a merit badge.”

“Watch that,” he said.

I opened my mouth to say one or two things, but then I changed my mind and instead I said, “Ralph, you weren’t bad to me while I was your prisoner. You were a pretty nice guy, in fact, and believe me I am doing my best right now to remember that. And please, you try and remember me. I haven’t done anything to Sol Napoli or anybody else, and what’s more I’m not in a
position
to do anything to Sol Napoli or anybody else. I am not a threat to you, Ralph, honest to God. Think about it.”

He thought about it. I could see him struggling with the problem, and his eyes kept straying to Frank Tarbok, standing in front of the refrigerator with his hands up. I could see what he had to surmount. Frank Tarbok was the enemy, and I was with the enemy, and that had to mean something was going on. On the other hand, what could be going on? It was a problem.

He finally gave up on it. “All right,” he said. “Okay. I’ll just go talk to Sol. Maybe he’ll want to see you again.”

“I will more than likely be right here,” I said. “Drop in any time. Join the crowd.”

“Sol can find you if he wants you,” Ralph said darkly.

“I know,” I said.

Ralph glared around at everybody, wanting to be sure his reputation as a tough guy was still unflawed, and then he hefted his gun one last time, backed out of the kitchen like the evil foreman leaving a western saloon, and disappeared to the right. A second later we heard the door open and shut.

Tarbok lowered his arms. “Conway,” he said, “just why in holy hell did you let that guy in here?”

“He left his gun behind,” I said, “and he came back for it. To be honest, I completely forgot about you being here. About the implications, I mean.”

“He left his gun behind.” Tarbok picked up an overturned
chair and heavily sat down on it. Shaking his head he said, “Every time I have a conversation with you, Conway, things go crazy.”

“I thought it was the other way around,” I said, and walked around the table and sat down again in front of my liverwurst sandwich. Picking it up I said, “What time do we expect Walter Droble?”

“Half an hour.”

“Shall we make some onion dip? Does he play bridge?”