Somebody Owes Me Money

13

I thought: I’ve been drinking. It was the only explanation I could think of for the head I had. I thought it was morning, and I was waking up in the usual way, but with the kind of splitting headache I get from drinking Scotch or bourbon. I knew the cure was two aspirins and a quart of orange juice followed by another thirty minutes in the sack, but getting out of bed long enough to start the cure was going to be difficult. In fact, impossible, and as you recall, the impossible takes a little longer.

I knew one of the worst moments of the morning would be when I opened my eyes. Brightness was already beating against my eyelids, wanting to slice through my eyes and directly into my brain. Even with my eyes closed I was squinting, my face wrinkled up like a chipmunk. Tentatively I inched up one eyelid, testing my capacity to withstand torture, and what I saw made me snap both eyes open wide and lunge upward to a sitting position on the bed.

I was in a strange bed in a strange bedroom in the middle of the night, the ceiling light was on, and a girl in bra and panties, her back to me, was getting something out of a dresser drawer.

“Detective Golderman!” I shouted.

The girl turned around, and it was Abbie. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you? I thought you were out for the night.” Without haste she walked over to the closet and slipped on a robe.

I had too many things to be confused about at once. I said, “What did I say that for?”

Tying the robe’s belt, Abbie said, “What did you call me, anyway?”

“Detective Golderman,” I said, still bewildered.

So was she. She looked down at herself and said, “Detective Golderman?”

Then I got it. “The room,” I said. “This is Tommy’s bedroom.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“The only other time I was ever in here,” I explained, “was when Detective Golderman questioned me after— This is Tommy’s bed!”

“Sure,” she said.

I leaped out of bed.

“You’re naked, Chet,” she said.

I leaped back into bed. “What — what—”

“The doctor and I undressed you,” she said. “He helped me carry you up here.”

“Doctor?” My confusion getting worse and worse, I lifted a hand to my head, meaning to lean my head against it for a minute, and felt cloth. I felt around on my head, and it was covered with cloth and what felt like adhesive tape. I said, “What the heck?”

“You were shot,” she said.

Then it all came back to me. The car stopping, me opening the door, the light coming on, the backfire, the starred hole in the windshield, the fluttering of my hair, Abbie screaming at me, and then the abrupt darkness, as though I was a television set that had been switched off.

I was awed, I was absolutely reverent in my presence. I said, “I was shot?”

“In the head,” she said.

That struck me as impossible. “That’s impossible,” I said. “If I was shot in the head I’d be dead. Or anyway in the hospital.”

Abbie said, “The bullet just skinned you.”

“Skinned?” What an awful image that conjured.

“It didn’t go into your head,” she said, explaining patiently. “It just sort of sideswiped you. On the side of the head there, above your left ear.”

I touched the side of my head above my left ear, and it hurt. Very badly. Underneath the bandages, my head reacted to the touch of my fingers by going twwaaannngg. “Ow,” I said, and left my head alone after that.

Abbie said, “The doctor said it removed some skin and put a little teeny crease in your skull, but you’ll be all—”

“Crease?” It seemed as though my part of the conversation was limited to astonished repetitions of individual words from Abbie’s sentences, but there were so many different things to be baffled about that I hardly knew where to begin, and in the interim I was reduced to recoiling from everything she said.

“Just a little crease,” she said, and held up two fingers very close together. “Hardly anything,” she said. “The doctor said you should stay in bed for a day or two, and after that you should take it easy for a while, that’s all.”

“I shouldn’t be in the hospital?”

“You don’t have to be,” she said. “Honest, Chet, it isn’t really a bad wound at all. The doctor said the heat from the friction of the bullet going by sort of cauterized it right away, and besides that, it bled a lot, which helped to clean it, so there’s—”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said. I put my hand to my head — the front, not the part that twanged — and said, “My head hurts.”

“The doctor gave me some pills to give you,” she said, and went away.

While she was gone I had leisure at last to do some sorting out in the jumble of my mind, and when she came back I was more or less clear on the situation and had a few questions I wanted to ask. I waited till I swallowed the two small green pills with some water, then gave the glass back, thanked her, and said, “What about the police?”

“What about them?” she said. She put the glass down on the dresser and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Didn’t you call them?”

“Good Lord, no,” she said.

“Good Lord, no? Good Lord, why not?”

“Because,” she said, “the mob tried to kill you.”

I was getting confused again. “Excuse me,” I said, “but it seems to me that would be a hell of a good reason for calling the cops. To get police protection, if nothing else.”

She shook her head, saddened a bit by my ignorance. “Chet,” she said, “don’t you know what happens when the mob is after somebody and he goes to the police for police protection?”

“He gets police protection,” I said.

“He does not. More often than not he gets thrown out a window. Haven’t you ever heard of bribery? Payoffs? Crooked policemen? Do you think Tommy managed to run a book in plain sight here in his apartment in the middle of Manhattan without the police being paid off somewhere along the line? Don’t you think Tommy’s bosses have a lot of cops on their payroll, too?”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You’re getting paranoid again. You keep—”

“The last time you said that,” she reminded me, “you got shot in the head.”

I felt myself duck, which was ridiculous. Like the old superstition about three on a match. On the other hand, how many people do you see either light the third cigarette with a new match or go ahead with the original match but then look vaguely nervous for a few minutes afterward? Hundreds. And I’m one of them.

Still, it struck me there was something wrong somewhere. I’d been shot. In the head. How could I be even contemplating not calling the police?

I said, “What do I do instead? For Pete’s sake, they’ll take another shot at me the next time they see me. I can’t go home, I can’t go to work, I can’t even walk down the street.”

“You’re not supposed to, anyway,” she said. “The doctor said you’re supposed to stay in bed for a couple of days, so you stay right here and you’ll be perfectly safe. Nobody knows you’re here. Nobody even knows I’m here.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “I lie around here for two days, and then I go out and get shot.”

“No, you won’t, Chet,” she said. “They won’t be after you any more by then.”

“That’s good news,” I said, “but I believe I have a doubt or two.”

“Well, you shouldn’t,” she said. “Just think about it for a minute.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Chet, don’t be silly. Ask yourself, why did they try to kill you?”

“I don’t want to ask questions like that. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Well, the answer,” she persisted, “is that they still think you had something to do with Tommy’s death. They think you work for that man Napoli or somebody, and you killed Tommy, and so they’re paying Napoli back by killing you.”

“They’re paying Napoli back!”

“That’s the way they’d think,” she said. “An eye for an eye.”

“Yeah, but it’s my eye.”

“But what if they find out,” she said, “that you didn’t have anything to do with killing Tommy? Then they won’t be after you any more.”

“Praise be,” I said. “Only, how are they going to find out this good news?”

“From me,” she said.

“From you?”

“I’m going to find out who the murderer is. I still think Louise had something to do with it—”

“She didn’t.”

“Whether she did or not,” Abbie said, “I’m sure she wasn’t working alone. There’s a man in the case somewhere, the man who actually pulled the trigger. He’s the one I’m going to find.”

“You are?”

“Yes. Then the mob will know it wasn’t you after all, and they’ll leave you alone.”

I shook my head. “I’m not hearing right,” I said. “Everything’s okay because sometime in the next two days you’re going to find Tommy’s murderer and prove he’s the murderer and turn him over to the police and then the mob won’t try to kill me anymore.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“Abbie,” I said. I reached out to where her hand was resting on the blanket near my knee. I put my hand over hers and said, “Abbie, I don’t want to suggest I don’t have perfect faith in you or anything, but face it. You aren’t a detective, you’re a blackjack dealer.”

“Don’t you worry, Chet,” she said. “I’ll find him.” She slipped her hand from under mine, patted mine, and got to her feet. “You go to sleep now,” she said. “We’ll talk some more in the morning.”

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said. “I’m not tired.”

“The doctor said those pills would make you drowsy.”

The fact was, the pills had made me drowsy, but I was fighting it. “I’m not drowsy,” I said, “and I don’t want to talk in the morning, I want to talk now. I want to talk about what—”

“Chet,” she said. “I’m sorry, maybe you aren’t drowsy, but I am. I was going to take a shower when you woke up, and I really need one. I’m exhausted, I’m sore all over from helping carry you up here, and I’m still sticky.” She made still-sticky wiggles with her fingers.

I said, “Still sticky?”

“Well, you bled all over the place, Chet,” she said. “You should see the car. I don’t know what the Avis people are going to say.”

“Oh,” I said. I suddenly felt very faint, and twice as drowsy as before. I began to blink, blinking because my eyes wanted to be closed and I wanted them to be open.

“I’ll look in on you after I shower,” Abbie said. “And we’ll talk in the morning. Whatever we decide, Chet, it can wait till morning.”

“All right,” I said. I couldn’t struggle against it anymore, I was drowsy. I lay back on the bed, tiredly pulling the covers up to my chin. “See you later,” I murmured.

“See you later,” she said, and through my blinking I saw her in the doorway, pausing to grin at me. “You are cute bare-ass,” she said, and left.

That almost woke me up again. I stared at the doorway for a few seconds until my eyelids grew too heavy to maintain the posture, and then subsided. What a way to talk. Well, a girl who dealt blackjack in Las Vegas for a living, you wouldn’t expect her to be exactly a sheltered maiden. No, neither sheltered nor a maiden.

As my eyes slowly shut, I found myself counting the months. How long had it been since I’d been in bed with a member of the opposition? Six months? Seven months. Not since that girl Rita had last refused to come out to the track with me.

That’s a long time, seven months. I lay there thinking about that, listening to the far-off shush of the shower running, imagining the flesh that water was pouring over, thinking about pouring over that flesh myself sometime maybe, and in an oddly good frame of mind for somebody who had just recently been shot at with bullets I drifted very gradually and pleasantly into a soft and dreamless sleep, not waking till Abbie screamed.