Somebody Owes Me Money (6 page)

“I suppose so,” I said.

“You want me to say it first?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Tommy McKay was a bookie.”

I nodded. “I believe so,” I said.

“Mm. Would you say you knew him best as a friend or as a customer?”

It was me doing the grinning this time, nervous and sheepish and out in plain view. “A little of each, I guess,” I said.

“Don’t worry, Chester,” he said. “I’m not looking for gamblers.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Our interest is the homicide, that’s all.”

I said that was good, too.

“Have you got any ideas on that, Chester?”

I suppose I looked blank. I know I felt blank. “Ideas?”

“On who might have killed him.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t. I didn’t really know him that well.”

“Did you see anybody else in the apartment or in the building that day?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did McKay ever express worry to you, any fear that he thought somebody might be after him?”

“No.”

“Was he ever slow in paying off on winnings?”

“Never. Tommy was always straight about things like that.”

He nodded, thought for a second, then said, “Do you know anybody else in that building?”

“Tommy’s place? No.”

“Does the name Solomon Napoli mean anything to you?”

Until last night I could have given that question a straight no with no qualms. Trying to figure out what such a denial would have sounded like and then imitate it, I furrowed my brow, scratched my head, shook my head, stared out the window, and finally said, “Solomon Napoli. Noooo, I don’t think so.”

“You seem doubtful.”

“Do I? I don’t mean to. I really don’t know the name, I just wanted to be sure before I said anything. Who is he?”

“Somebody we’re interested in,” he said, making it clear it was somebody he didn’t want me being interested in.

I said, “Does he live in the same building as Tommy?”

He frowned, as though confused. “Of course not. Why?”

“Well, you asked if I knew anybody in that building, and then right away you wanted to know if I—”

“Oh,” he said, interrupting me. “I see what you mean. No, it’s two different questions.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Did you ever hear of Frank Tarbok?” he asked. “And he doesn’t live in McKay’s building either.”

“Tarbok? No.”

“You don’t want to think about that one first?”

“Well,” I said. “Uh. It’s just, I just knew right away he—”

“Okay,” he said. “How about Bugs Bender?”

“That’s a name? No, if I’d ever heard that one I’d remember it.”

“What about Walter Droble?”

I was about to say no when the name did ring some sort of distant bell. “Walter Droble,” I repeated. “Did I read about him in the papers or some place?”

“That would be the only way you know him?”

“Yeah, I think so. It’s like I’ve heard the name somewhere, a long time ago.”

“All right.” He seemed to consider things for a minute, and then said, “How well do you know Mrs. McKay?”

Him, too? “Not very well,” I said. “Mostly I just had dealings with Tommy.”

“Ever hear any rumors about her? Running around with another man, anything like that?”

I shook my head. “Not a thing,” I said.

“Did she ever make a play for you, flirt with you?”

“Mrs. McKay? Have you ever seen her? Sure you have, the other day.”

“She wasn’t looking at her best the other day,” he said. “You don’t think she’s good-looking enough to flirt?”

“Well, she’s not
bad
-looking,” I said. “I don’t know, I never saw her dressed up or anything, I don’t know what she’d look like.”

“All right,” he said, and got to his feet. “That’s about it. Thank you for your cooperation.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“You’re going to be around town?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll be notified about the inquest.”

“I’ll be here,” I said, and led the way to the front door. He buttoned up his coat and put his hat on and then I opened the door and he slogged out into all that swirling snow. There were little puffs of wind, this way, that way, with still places in between, so when you looked out, it was like looking at a photograph full of random scratches.

I watched him go down the stoop, then shut the door and went back to the living room, but this time I left the television off. I sat there thinking, and it seemed to me if there was anybody in this world I didn’t want to be right now it was probably Solomon Napoli. The cops obviously thought he might have had something to do with Tommy’s death, and so did Tommy’s bosses, and that seemed to leave Napoli square in the middle.

Who was Napoli? Maybe the boss of some other gang that was trying to muscle in. Maybe all this was part of some kind of gang war. There still are gang wars, only they don’t get as much publicity as they used to. Mobsters just disappear these days, they don’t get blown up in barbershops or machine-gunned in front of nursery schools anymore. But still every once in a while
something will get into the papers, usually when something goes wrong. Like the guy a couple of years ago that was attacked in a bar in Brooklyn and two cops just happened to walk in while he was being strangled with a wire coat hanger. He was known to be a member of one of the mobs down there, and the cops figured the killers had to be with some other mob. They got away, both of them, and the victim naturally insisted he didn’t know who they were or why they were after him.

But if Tommy’s death was a gang killing, how come he didn’t disappear? He was very visible, his murder made the newspapers and everything. (There hadn’t been anything about it in today’s paper, but that’s because nothing new had happened.)

Well, it wasn’t my problem. My problem was collecting my money, and losing a day’s work today was making that collection even more urgent than before.

Of course, if 214 came in today my twenty-five cents would bring me back a hundred fifty dollars, but I wasn’t going to hang by my thumbs till it happened. In all the years I’ve played the numbers I’ve never won spit, and sometimes I wonder why I even bother. I treat it like dues, not like a bet at all. Once or twice a week I hand over a quarter at the stationery store. But what the hell, the return is six hundred to one—the odds are a thousand to one, so nobody’s doing anybody any favors—and I figure at a quarter a throw it can’t hurt me to try.

In the meantime, back in the real world 214 was not going to come in today, so the question was how to get my nine hundred thirty dollars, and for that I was going to have to go see Mrs. Louise McKay.

If she knew.

Did she know? Did Tommy tell his wife his business, enough for her to know who I should see now? Some husbands do, some
don’t, and thinking about Tommy now it seemed to me he could best be described as the close-mouthed type.

Listen, I had to have that money. If Mrs. McKay couldn’t tell me how to get it, who could?

I remembered those other names Detective Golderman had mentioned—Frank Tarbok and Bugs Bender and Walter Droble. Maybe one of those guys was in the same syndicate with Tommy, and could tell me who to see now.

But I’d prefer to get it from Tommy’s wife. It struck me as easier, maybe safer, and all around better.

Just to be on the safe side, though, I went to the dining room and borrowed a piece of paper from my father and wrote down the three names, so I wouldn’t forget them. Frank Tarbok. Bugs Bender. Walter Droble.

By three, I couldn’t stand the house anymore. The snow had finally sighed to a stop around one, the plows had continued to rattle their chains down the street for a while after that, and the radio said we’d had eight inches and it was now definitely over. The day was white, tending to gray at the edges, and there was a sort of muffled feeling everywhere, as though I were walking around with cotton in my ears.

I’d made some Campbell’s pea soup for lunch, since my father was still multiplying and dividing in the living room, and after lunch I played myself some solitaire for a while, betting a hypothetical dollar a card against a hypothetical house and quitting in disgust when I owed a hypothetical seventy-six dollars. I hadn’t run the cards once.

So at three o’clock I decided to go try for Mrs. McKay. I put on my overcoat and overshoes and hat and gloves and told my father, “I’ll probably be home for dinner. If not, I’ll call.”

“What’s one-thirteenth of seventy-one?” he said. His face was covered with little blue ink squiggles, and his eyes were a little out of focus.

“See you later,” I said, and left.

No walks were shoveled yet, of course, so I walked down the plowed street to Jamaica Avenue, where I stopped in at the stationery store, paid my quarter dues, bought the
Telegraph
and then went on to the subway. Down underground in the station there was that clammy coldness the place has every year from November till April, and I stood alone on the platform, stamping my feet and reading my paper, till the train came.

The train, too, was almost empty, and when I emerged at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan the city had a weirdly deserted look to it. There were only a few cars and trucks crunching up Eighth Avenue, only a few overcoated people walking around the streets, and some of the stores I could see were shut, the gratings drawn across their windows and entrances. It was one of those rare days when Manhattan did not contain more people than it could contend with.

The sidewalks were impassable, of course, so I joined the trickle of pedestrians in the street. Mountain ridges of snow as tall as a man lined the street on both sides, shoved there by the plows, with here and there the hood or side window of a buried car glinting through. Big old green trucks with dirty snow piled high in their backs clankety-clanked up Eighth Avenue.

I walked down to 47th and turned right. The side streets were worse, not having yet been cleared. Traffic had kept one wavering lane open, two deep black ruts in the dirty snow down the middle of the street, and when there was no car coming, the few pedestrians moved like tightrope walkers along these ruts. When a car did come along, there was nothing for the pedestrians to do but stand knee-deep in snow at one side and wait till the rut was clear again.

Some of the snow in front of 417, Tommy’s place, was more than knee-deep. I flumphed through it, lifting my knees almost up to my earlobes at every step, and went into the entranceway and rang the bell of 4-C. No answer. While waiting, I read a handwritten notice about a stolen baby carriage, asking anybody with information to get in touch with apartment 1-B, and then I rang the bell again and there still wasn’t any answer.

Where the hell was she? Maybe gone to stay with relatives or something, maybe she didn’t want to be around the apartment so soon after Tommy’s death. I had to admit it would be only
natural, if that’s the way she felt, but at the moment it was nothing to me but a swift pain. I needed that money.

There was no point hanging around in here, though, so I left, and outside, standing in two of my inbound footprints, was Detective Golderman. His hands were in his pockets, his hat on his head, his eyes on me, his expression skeptical. “We meet again,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Hello, there.”

“I thought you were staying home today,” he said.

“Well, the snow stopped,” I said. I was feeling very guilty, and afraid I was looking very guilty, and I was trying like crazy to find some reason I could give him for being here, but there didn’t seem to be any. “I was going to work,” I said, “and I thought I’d stop by here and, uh...” I shrugged, and moved my feet around in the snow, waiting for him to stop waiting for me to finish the sentence.

But he wouldn’t. He just kept looking at me, and the unfinished sentence hung in the air between us like a snake hanging down from a tree branch, and I finally said, “To offer my condolences.”

He moved his head slightly, but he kept looking at me. “To offer your condolences,” he said.

“To the widow,” I explained. “Mrs. McKay,” I explained further. Then, beginning to warm up to the lie, I said, “The last time I saw her, she was pretty hysterical, I didn’t get much of a chance to say anything to her.”

“I see,” he said, and it was pretty plain he didn’t believe me. He looked past me at the building front, then up at the upper-story windows, then at me again. “Was she home?”

“No,” I said.

“You’ll probably try again,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to be casual. “If I’m in the neighborhood, I guess.”

“It isn’t all that important,” he suggested.

“Not really,” I said. “It’s just sort of a nice gesture, you know?”

“Uh huh,” he said, in the flat way of a man who doesn’t believe a word you’re saying.

I considered telling him the truth, but it was just impossible. Gambling is against the law, and it didn’t matter if this was a homicide cop or not, I just couldn’t come right out and admit to him that I made off-track bets. I mean, he
knew
I did, he knew the whole thing anyway, but I couldn’t
say
it. All I could do was stand there and act stupid and feel guilty and make him suspicious of me.

I broke an uneasy silence that had settled down between us by saying, “Well, I guess I better get going now, if I want to get some time in today. In the cab.”

He nodded.

“I’ll see you,” I said.

“See you around, Chester,” he said.

I really did go to work. I went over to Eleventh Avenue and took the bus uptown to the garage and checked a car out and got my first fare half a block from the garage, a good-looking girl in an orange fur coat and black boots and pale blond hair. “2715 Pennsylvania Avenue,” she said.

I said, “Brooklyn or Washington?” I kid with good-looking female passengers whether I’m worried about money or not.

“Brooklyn,” she said. “Take the Belt.”

“Fine,” I said, and dropped the flag, and headed south. My luck was finally in. Not only a good-looking blonde in the rearview mirror, but a long haul at that, and it would end not too far from Kennedy.

The highways were all cleared, and carried way below their usual midday load of traffic. We got up on the West Side Highway at twenty to four and left the Belt Parkway at Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn at just four o’clock. In between I’d made a couple of small attempts at conversation, but she was the strong silent type, so I let it go. I’m content to look, if that’s the way they want it.