Somebody Owes Me Money (23 page)

“Where would one of
them
get it?” she said, frowning at me.

“Out of my pocket,” I said.

“No,” she said.

Why was she bothering me with things like that? I looked at her, exasperated, and said, “What do you mean, no?”

“None of those people took the gun,” she said. “It was gone before you got to the apartment.”

I stared. “Before?”

“Of course,” she said. “When do you think I was looking for it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought one time while I was unconscious in the apartment.”

“In the
car,
” she said. “When you got yourself shot. I took off away from there, and every time I got stopped by a light I searched you some more. That’s how I got so sticky.”

“Never mind that part.”

“Anyway,” she said, “you didn’t have it with you. I could have killed you myself, if you want to know.”

“Not without the gun. Maybe it’s in the car someplace, maybe it fell out of my pocket.”

“I searched, Chet, I really and truly searched. That gun was gone.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. I went over and sat down at the bar and pulled on my Scotch and soda. “Then who the heck took it?” I said.

Abbie came over and sat down beside me. “What difference does it make? The question is, what do we do now?”

“The question is,” I insisted, “who took the goddamn gun. I had it when I got to the poker game, I remember feeling the weight of it in my pocket when I was going up all those stairs.”

She was beginning to get interested, too. “What about afterwards?” she said.

“I don’t remember. But where did we go? I was in the car the whole time. Who could have taken it?”

“Somebody at the poker game,” she said.

“Hmmm,” I said. “It was hanging in the hall closet. Everybody got up from the table at one time or another. Yeah, that’s when it must have been.”

“That’s the only time it could have been,” she said.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” I said. “It was
your
gun that shot
me
in the
head.
”

“What makes you say that?”

“Golderman told us they found the gun that killed Tommy. He also said it was an amateur. So where’s an amateur gonna
get another gun in a hurry when he decides he’ll have to kill again? From the victim!”

“But why do you think it was the same gun?”

“First,” I said, “because your gun was stolen the same night. Second, because the job was done by an amateur who wasn’t going to have ready access to a whole arsenal of guns. And third, because Golderman told us I was shot by a smaller, lighter gun than the one used on Tommy, which is an accurate description of that gun of yours.”

“But my gun always misses to the left, and he just nicked you on what was his right.”

“Of course,” I said. “It should have been obvious all along.”

“What should have been obvious all along?”

“He was shooting at you.”

“Now wait a minute!”

“Abbie, think about it. What did we tell the guys at that game? That you were Tommy’s sister, and you came to New York because he was dead, and because you didn’t have any faith in the police to find your brother’s murderer you were going to look for him yourself.
You,
not me. All I ever said
I
was after was my nine hundred dollars.”

She was shaking her head. “I wasn’t the one who was shot, Chet, you were.”

“Because your goddamn gun shoots crooked.”

“We aren’t even
sure
it was my gun.”

“I am,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I’m sure of. I’m sure I was shot with your gun. I’m sure the bullet was meant for you instead of me. And I’m one hundred percent positive that Tommy’s murderer is one of the guys at that poker game.”

“Hm,” she said. She sat down on the bar stool beside me and swirled the remains of her sidecar in its glass. “I think you’re right,” she said at last.

“You don’t know what a relief it is,” I said, “to know it isn’t
me
that guy is after.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “It’s a relief to know he’s after me instead, is that it?”

“I know how that sounded—”

“Well, what I’ve got after me,” she said, “is one poorly armed amateur, but what you’ve got after you, buddy, is two armies.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said. “We’ve been forgetting. One of those armies is coming
here.
”

“Oh!” She finished her sidecar, and the two of us left the bar.

“Quietly,” I whispered.

“I know, I know.”

We tiptoed up the stairs. Detective Golderman’s wife might not be in on her husband’s nefariousness, but she wouldn’t have to be in on it to take umbrage at two strangers knocking him out and tying him up and leaving him on the floor behind the bar in his downstairs playroom. So we moved slowly and silently up the stairs, and at the top I cracked the door open just a hair and peeked through the slit.

I saw nothing but a hunting print, but I did hear Mrs. Golder-man humming to herself in the kitchen. I nodded back at Abbie, pushed the door open farther, and crept out.

She was humming one of those tuneless things, Mrs. Golder-man, one of those things you hum when you’re absorbed in a simple physical task that will take several hours, like stuffing a turkey or building a birdhouse. I don’t say Mrs. Golderman was stuffing a turkey or building a birdhouse, but from the sound of her she was doing
something
that was going to keep her occupied for a while.

The two of us sidled up to the hall, inched the door shut behind us, and crept away through the dining room and the living room to the front door. I was about to reach for the knob when Abbie tugged my arm. I looked at her, and she pointed at the door of the hall closet.

Was she confused? I shook my head, and pointed at the front door.

She shook her head, and pointed emphatically at the hall closet.

I shook my head harder, and pointed very emphatically at the front door.

She shook her head hard enough to make hair fly, and pointed very
very
emphatically at the hall closet.

Oh, the hell with it. Nothing would do but I had to prove she was wrong. Then she’d come along quietly. So I went over and opened the hall-closet door and gave her a sarcastic smile and gestured to point out to her it wasn’t the way out, it was a closet full of overcoats.

She nodded, and gave
me
a sarcastic smile and gestured to point out to me it was a closet full of overcoats.

Full of overcoats.

I blinked at the closet. “Oh,” I said, out loud.

“Sst!”

I nodded, clamping my mouth shut, and we both listened for a minute. We could barely hear the humming at this end of the house, but it was continuing unabated.

Abbie poked through the closet and came out with a black-and-red-check wool mackinaw for me. I looked at it, looked at her, looked at it. She leaned close and whispered, “It’s warmest. An overcoat won’t do you any good, you don’t have a jacket.”

I nodded without pleasure and shrugged into the mackinaw while Abbie went through the closet some more, like one of those style-conscious women rejecting every dress in Lord & Taylor. Zip, zip, zip, pushing the hangers along one after the other.

Finally she settled, and I could see it was with vast reluctance, on a black cloth coat with a black fur collar. It had a tapered waist and silver buttons, and when she got it on, it looked pretty good on her. With the black boots it made her look vaguely Russian. More like the Cossack than his girlfriend, but that wasn’t so bad at that, and when she found a black fur hat on the shelf and put that on I felt like leaping at once into one of those Russian dances where you end every line by throwing one arm up in the air and shouting, “Hey!”

I also felt like shouting hey and throwing one arm up in the air when she came out with a hat for me, though not exactly in
the same way. It was orange, it had a little peak and earflaps, and it tied under the chin. Apparently Detective Golderman spent his time in the woods hunting animals when not in the city hunting people.

I whispered, “I won’t put that on!”

She whispered, “Then you’ll freeze your ears off!” I think she said ears.

I whispered, “I’ll carry it, and if it’s really cold I’ll put it on!”

She shook her head, probably thinking about the vanity of the male and other examples of the pot calling the kettle black, and I stuffed the offending cap into my mackinaw pocket.

From the same shelf that had produced the hats Abbie now brought out gloves. Hers were sleek and black and went halfway up her forearm. Mine were brown leather, a thousand years old, with the first finger of the right hand poking through. They were also a little too small.

Abbie whispered, “Ready?”

I thought of a sardonic answer, but I nodded instead. Then I opened the door, silently opened the outer door, and we went outside, and my ears fell off.

“Brrrr,” I commented, and closed the door quietly behind me, and said, “Wait.” I then took the cute orange hat out and put it on. I even tied it under my chin.

“That’s darling,” Abbie said.

“One word,” I threatened. “Just one word.”

“I promise,” she said. “Come on.”

We set off down the walk toward the cab and were about halfway there when the two cars squealed to a stop in the middle of the street and all the guys came boiling out of them.

All I hoped was that Detective Golderman’s back yard wasn’t a cul de sac. I grabbed Abbie’s hand—I seemed to be doing that a lot lately—and we took off around the side of the house, headed for the back.

There was still snow in this part of the world. Not much, just enough to reach over my shoe tops and start melting in around my anklebone, soaking my socks and my feet. Not that I cared very much at that particular moment.

There was no shooting, and not even very much shouting. I suppose in a quiet neighborhood like that they would have preferred to take us without calling a lot of attention to themselves.

It was a cloudy moonless night, but there was enough spill from the back windows of the house to show me a snowy expanse of back yard leading to a bare-branched hedge that looked like a lot of scratched pencil marks dividing this yard from the one on the other side.

There was no choice, and when you have no choice it greatly simplifies things. You don’t slow down to think it over at all, you just run through the hedge. It rips your trousers, it gashes your skin, it removes the pocket of your mackinaw, but you run through it.

It also takes your girl away from you. Abbie’s hand was wrenched from mine, I tried to make a U-turn while running at five hundred miles an hour, I slid on the thickness of snow on top of grass, I made my U-turn while simultaneously going forward and falling backward, I landed on gloves and knees in the
snow, looked up, and there was Abbie stuck in the hedge like Joan of Arc just before they started the fire.

“Chet!” she called, and reached her arms out to me.

Your feet are never there when you want them. Every time I got them under me they slid out again. I finally solved the problem by starting to run before I got up. I ran my feet up under my torso, made it through that chancy area of no balance, and ran into the hedge again, this time letting it serve as a cushion to stop me.

Abbie was beside me. A hundred people in tight black overcoats and black snapbrim hats were rounding the corner of the house. I grabbed Abbie’s waving hands and yanked. Something ripped, Abbie popped out of the hedge, my feet went away again, and I wound up on my back in the snow.

Abbie kept yanking at my hands, keeping me from doing anything about anything. “Get up!” she shouted. “Chet, get up!”

“Leggo and I’ll get up!”

She let go, and I got up. I looked across the hedge, and they were right there, on the other side of it. In fact, one of them made a flying leap over the hedge, arms outstretched, and I just barely leaped back clear of his grasping fingers. Fortunately, his toes didn’t quite clear the hedge, so the beauty of his leap was marred by a nose-dive finish as he zoomed forehead first into the snow. The last I saw of him he was hanging there, feet jammed into the top of the hedge and face jammed into the ground, while his pals, ignoring him, pushed and shoved through the hedge on both sides of him, trying to catch up with their quarry, which was us.

And which was gone. Hand in hand again, we pelted across the snowy back yard, around the corner of the house and out to a street exactly like the one Detective Golderman’s house faced on except that it didn’t have my cab parked on it.

Abbie gasped, “Which way?”

“How do I know?”

“Well, we better decide fast,” she said. “Here they come.”

Here they came. There we went. I took off to the right for no reason other than that the streetlight was closer in that direction.

What was it now, a little after eight o’clock on a Sunday evening? And where was everybody? Home, watching television. Ed Sullivan, probably. That’s what’s wrong with America, its people have grown lazy, slothful, effete. They should be out in the air, out on the sidewalks, walking around, filling their lungs with God’s crisp cool midwinter air, forming crowds into which Abbie and I could blend in comfort and safety. Instead of which that whole nation of ingrates was indoors sitting down with a can of beer in front of the television set, getting fat and soft while Abbie and I ran around in stark solitary visibility in the streets outside.

You want drama, America? Forget
Sunday Night at the Movies,
come out on the streets, watch the gangsters chase the nice boy and girl.

We ran three blocks, and we were beginning to gasp, we were beginning to falter. Fortunately, the mob behind us was in no better shape than we were, and when Abbie finally pulled to a stop and gasped, “I can’t run any more,” I looked back and saw them straggled out over the block behind us, and none of
them
could run any more either. The one in front was doing something between a fast walk and a slow trot, but the rest of them were all walking, and the one at the end was absolutely dragging his feet.