Somebody Owes Me Money (19 page)

“You better not spell it out.”

I said, “I could wait in the living room if you want.”

Tarbok said, “No. You stay here, you’re a part of this.”

“That’s right,” said Droble. “You just sit right where you are.”

Tarbok said to Droble, “Okay, I’m not spelling it out. But you know and I know we can’t have no wild card in the deck. There’s somebody out there doing something we don’t know anything about. He killed McKay, he took a shot at Conway here, who knows where he’ll crop up again? So we don’t have
the balance screwed up we need to know who he is. Whether we turn him over to the cops is another question. What we got to know is who he is and what he’s up to.”

Droble nodded, reluctantly but judiciously. “You’re right,” he said. “And you want to handle it, is that right?”

Tarbok, being a lot more deft than I would have given him credit for, said, “Right. After all, I got a private stake in this, too. I don’t like Louise McKay thinking it was me killed her husband.”

“The question is,” Droble said, “what’s the situation with this guy?” Meaning me.

“I’ll keep him with me,” Tarbok said. “He’s been in the middle of it all along, while I been holed up with Louise.”

Droble looked at me. “There’s another question,” he said. “How come you been in the middle of it all along?”

I said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” and I then proceeded to tell him about my nine hundred thirty dollars, finishing, “So you’re the one I should talk to about it, I guess.”

“About what?”

“My nine hundred thirty dollars.”

Droble frowned. “What about it?”

“I want to collect it. You still owe it to me.”

He shook his head. “Not on your life,” he said. “That money was turned over to McKay. As far as the organization is concerned, you’ve been paid.”

“Hey, wait a second,” I said. “Maybe
Tommy
got the money, but
I
never did.”

“That’s not our problem,” he said. “You want to take it up with his widow, you go right ahead.”

I looked at Tarbok, but he was no help. I said, “What happened to the money?”

Tarbok shook his head, and Droble shrugged. They couldn’t care less.

I said, “Wait a second, this might be important. Are you sure he got it? Are you sure the money was actually paid to him?”

“Our courier got here at five thirty-five,” Droble told me. “We already checked that out.”

I said, “Are you sure? What about this courier?”

“He’s my son-in-law,” Droble said drily. “He’s being groomed for the top, and he knows it. He didn’t bump McKay for your nine hundred thirty dollars.”

“Hmm,” I said. “And he got here at five thirty-five? Tommy was alive then, and he was dead when I got here at six-ten. That’s thirty-five minutes.”

“He was alive at five-fifty,” Droble said. “We’ve done some checking out, and somebody in our organization talked to him on the phone at ten minutes to six.”

Tarbok said, “So it’s down to twenty minutes.”

I said, “It’s a good thing I didn’t get here much earlier. What happened to the money afterwards?”

“Gone,” Droble said. “Our cop on the scene told us the bundle wasn’t here.”

“How much can you trust
him?
” I asked.

“He picks up no percentage in lying on that one,” Droble said. “If the money was here the cops would have picked it up and divided it, and our cop would of told us so. There wouldn’t be any question about us getting it back or anything.”

“So the murderer took it with him.”

“Right,” Droble said. “So there’s your answer. Go find the killer, and collect your nine hundred from him.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” I said. “I made my bet in good faith, and just because you have an administrative problem
inside your organization is no reason I should—”

“Administrative problem!”

“What else do you call it? I didn’t get my money because somebody in your organization lost it in transit. It should be up to you to make it good.”

“You want to take us to court?” he asked me.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “That money’s important to me.”

“It isn’t the money,” he said, “it’s the precedent. We don’t pay off twice, and that’s all there is to it. Look, the other big winner that day didn’t come squawking,
he
understood the situation. Why don’t you?”

“Another big winner?” I said.

“Yeah. Another guy had the same horse as you, only he had a hundred on it. That’s almost three grand.”

“Who was he?”

“What difference does it make?” Droble said.

“I don’t know, I’m just asking. Who was he?”

Droble shrugged in irritation. “I wouldn’t know. McKay would have the name, it might be in his records around here some—”

He stopped. He looked wide-eyed. He glanced at Tarbok, who looked back in bewilderment and said, “Walt?”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Droble said. “
That’s
what the bastard was doing for Napoli! He was robbing me blind!”

I was happy to see Tarbok didn’t get it any more than I did. He said, “How do you figure that, Walt?”

“I remember,” Droble said, “Higgins in Accounting said it to me a couple months ago, how McKay had a couple of consistent winners, guys who’d pick two, three horses a week, long shots. Cleaning up. McKay was actually running at a loss because of those guys, but it disappeared in the overall accounting picture. Don’t you see it, Frank? The bastard was past-posting us!”

I grinned. How lovely. Napoli, in other words, had been feeding Tommy the names of one or two good money winners a day, getting the information to Tommy right after the race, before the news would be on the wires. Then Tommy would make those bets for non-existent players, and probably he and Napoli split the proceeds. A nice way for Napoli to hit his competition in the cash register and build up his own funds for when the open warfare started. Particularly if Napoli had more than one of Droble’s bookies doing the same thing.

I said, “Mr. Droble, if it wasn’t for me you would never have found out about this. Napoli was suborning your organization from the bottom, and financing it with your own money. Now you know about it and you can do something about it, and if it wasn’t for me you’d have gone under. Now, if
that
isn’t worth nine hundred thirty dollars, I don’t know what—”

“Will you shut up about that lousy nine hundred?” Droble was angry and worried, and in no mood to be fair about things.

But Tarbok, surprisingly, was. He said, “Walt, I think Conway’s right. I think we owe him a debt. And I also think he could go on being helpful to us for some time to come. We could afford to—”

“With that bastard Napoli sucking my blood? Not on your life. Don’t either of you say another word about that nine—”

The doorbell rang.

I said, “I’ll get it,” and got to my feet. As I left the room, Droble started to say something to Tarbok about having the Accounting Department check all the other retail bookies.

I was really angry, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. To be too cheap to pay me my money, when in reality he owed me a heck of a lot more than that. Boy, some people are really pigs.

I looked through the peephole in the front door, and there was Solomon Napoli himself, with several tough-looking types behind him, that snitch Ralph among them.

What did I owe any of these clowns? The debts were all the other way, it seemed to me. I opened the door and bowed them in with a flourish. “Come on in, fellas,” I said. “You’re just in time for the punch.”

Did you ever see two cats meet unexpectedly coming around a corner or through a doorway? Then I don’t have to describe the meeting between Walter Droble and Solomon Napoli. Or how full the hall became of assorted henchmen, with Napoli’s commandos crowding in from outside and Droble’s irregulars hurrying down from the living room.

I slithered back into the kitchen—not bad for somebody who can’t stay on a diet—and over to the far side of the refrigerator, wanting to be out of the line of fire in case there was a line of fire, from where I watched the opening stages of the drama.

Droble had leaped to his feet, of course, the minute Napoli had appeared in the kitchen doorway, and for what seemed several years they just stood glaring at each other, both in a half-crouch, hackles rising everywhere, like the opening of the gun duel scene in a western movie. There was noise and commotion out in the hall from the rival gangs of extras, but that all seemed to be happening in a different world, as though a thick pane of glass separated this room from the planet Earth as we know it. Frank Tarbok had stayed exactly where he was, seated at the table, hands in plain view on the tabletop.

Droble spoke first: “You’ve been past-posting me, you son of a bitch.”

Napoli, small and dapper and vicious, said, “But you were a real boy scout in that East New York business, weren’t you?”

“If you hadn’t pulled that stunt with Griffin, nothing would have happened in East New York.”

Napoli was about to reply, but Tarbok said, “Walt. Remember the civilian.”

Droble looked angrily around, irritated at the interruption, and when he met Tarbok’s eye, Tarbok nodded in my direction. Then everybody looked at me.

I never felt so present in my life. I was right there, right out in the open, plain as the sweat on my face. I resisted the impulse to say, “Uh.”

But I was going to have to say something, because I could sense the mood changing all of a sudden. The room was full of tension looking for an outlet, and I was the stranger, the foreigner, the civilian, the one who didn’t belong. It would relieve everybody’s feelings if they all got together and stomped me into the linoleum.

I said, “Well,” and put a horrible smile on my face. “Here’s a chance for all you people to settle your differences. All you do is make trouble for each other when you argue like this, and New York ought to be big enough for everybody. And here’s a perfect opportunity to sit down and discuss things and work everything out so everybody’s satisfied. Mr. Napoli, why don’t you take my chair, that one there, and I’ll just go wait in the living room. I know you won’t want any outsider listening in. So I’ll just, uh, go on into, uh, the living room now, and if you want to talk to me later on,” as I started moving, slowly but with a great show of the confidence I didn’t feel, toward the doorway, “I’ll be right in there, on tap, ready to help out any way I can,” as I edged around Napoli, talking all the time through the ghastly smile painted on my face, “and looking forward to hearing that you two have ironed out your differences, buried the, uh, settled everything to your mutual...” and through the doorway, and out of their sight.

Successfully. So far. I inched my way through all the hard-
noses in the hall, all standing around like a Mafia wake, filling the hallway with the dark awareness of all the guns tucked just out of sight inside all those suit coats, and though all of them gave me the evil eye none of them made a move to stop me. They wouldn’t without orders from the kitchen.

Which didn’t come. Neither Napoli nor Droble shouted out, “Stop that guy!” or, “Kill him!” or, “Bring that bum back here!” or any other fatal commands. I got past the last of the heavies and continued on to the living room, where Abbie and Mrs. McKay were sitting now alone at opposite ends of the room, and fell in nervous paralysis into the nearest empty chair. “Uhhhhhh,” I said, and let my arms hang over the sides.

Abbie hurried to me and whispered, “What’s going on?”

“Summit meeting,” I said. I took a deep breath and sat up and wiped my brow. “Napoli and Droble are talking things over in the kitchen.”

“Napoli and Droble? Both of them?”

I nodded. “You don’t know how it felt to be in there with them,” I said.

“I can imagine,” she said.

I wasn’t sure she could. I said, “You know, years ago somebody put an ad in a couple of papers in New York for a guaranteed bug killer, to be delivered with complete instructions. It cost a dollar or two, I don’t know how much. So a lot of people sent in their money, and they got a package back, and in the package there were two ordinary bricks, one lettered A and the other one lettered B. And a sheet of paper with instructions: ‘Place bug on brick A. Hit with brick B.’ In that kitchen just now, I finally understood what the bug felt like.”

Abbie, hunkered down in front of me, elbows on my knees, took my hand in hers and squeezed. “I know,” she said. “It must have been terrible.”

“I only hope,” I said, “that when it’s over they don’t decide we’re a couple of loose ends that ought to be tied off. Like Captain Kidd taking care of the diggers after burying treasure. I wish we still had that gun of yours.”

“We’re better off without it,” she said. “It was just about useless anyway. It shot way off to the left all the time, you had to aim
there
if you wanted to hit over
there,
and it was so light even if you did hit somebody you wouldn’t do him much damage. And if we
did
have it and you showed it to that bunch in the hall, they’d fill you up with so much lead we’d have to paint you yellow and use you for a pencil.”

“You don’t have to paint me yellow,” I said.

She smiled and shook her head. “You’re braver than you pretend,” she said.

“Not me. You’ve got it wrong which is the pretense.”

Somebody shouted, angrily.

We looked at one another. We looked at the hallway.

Somebody else shouted, also angrily. Two voices shouted angrily at the same time.

I said, “The foolish thing is, I let them all in. I can’t remember why.”

Abbie said, “Do you think we’re in any danger?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “We’re in a cage full of irritated crocodiles. There’s nothing for
us
to worry about.”

“Maybe we ought to get out of here,” she whispered.

“Have you seen lately what’s between us and the door?”

She leaned closer to me. “Fire escape.”

“What?”

She gestured with her head at the window beside which Mrs. McKay was sitting. She’d continued to sit there since I’d come into the room, ignoring the two of us, ignoring the shouts which had subsided now, ignoring everything. Her arms were
folded, her back was straight and her jaw was set. She glared into the middle distance as though seeing an apparition there of which she disapproved.