Somebody Owes Me Money

16

How had I gotten so tiny? Swimming upside down in a cup of tea, warm orange-red tea, rolling around, needing air, wanting to get to the surface but sinking instead to the bottom of the cup. White china cup. Looking up through all the tea at the light in the world up there, knowing I had to get out of this cup before I drowned. Before somebody drank me. Holding my breath, orange-red in the face, the weight of the tea too much for me, pressing me down. Straining upward, pushing against the bottom of the cup, and then everything confused. Had the cup broken? I was falling out the side, tea splashing all around me, white cup fragments, falling out, falling down, landing hard on elbow and shoulder and cheek.

I was on the floor surrounded by legs, feet, and even though I was awake now I cowered as though I was still tiny and the feet would crush me. My left arm was pinned under me, but I managed to get the right arm up over my head.

Then hands were holding me, lifting me, voices were jabbering, and the confusions of the dream faded away, leaving the confusions of reality in their wake. When last I’d heard from the real world, somebody was strangling me.

I was placed on the bed and the covers drawn up over me. People were speaking, but I kept my arm up over my head and didn’t look at anything or listen to anything until Abbie touched my shoulder and spoke my name and asked me how I was. Then I came out slowly, warily, like a turtle in a French kitchen, to see Abbie sitting on the bed and leaning over me, with a lot of people I didn’t like in the background.

Abbie asked me again how I was, and I muttered something, and the leader of the pack came forward to say, “I want you to know that wasn’t intentional, Chester. I don’t do business that way.”

I looked at him.

“I hope there’s no hard feelings,” he said, and the expression his face wore now was concerned. Not that I believed there was ever any relationship between what he was thinking and what his face showed.

I looked at Abbie, and she gave me a look that said, “Be circumspect.” So I looked back at Solomon Napoli and said, “No damage done.” My throat was a little hoarse, so that my voice rasped a little, slightly undercutting the meaning of my words, but not so much that he couldn’t ignore the discrepancy, if he chose.

He chose. “That’s good,” he said. He glanced at his watch, gave me a smile that I guess was supposed to be friendly, and said, “I missed my meeting to be sure you were all right.”

“I’m all right,” I said.

“Good. Then we can get back to what we were talking about. Miss McKay?”

So Abbie squeezed my hand and went away, leaving me once again with Napoli and his two elves. Napoli seated himself in his bedside chair once again and said, “I’ve been thinking over what you said, and it’s entirely possible you’re telling the truth. It could be you’re just an innocent bystander in all this, you don’t work for Droble at all.”

Droble. Was that one of the names Detective Golderman had asked me about? It seemed to me it might have been, but I was in no condition to pursue the question. I didn’t really care one way or the other.

Napoli went on, “But if that’s true, if you are an innocent bystander, how is it you’re underfoot all the time? You found the body, you had a meeting with Frank Tarbok, you kept hanging around this apartment, you’re traveling with McKay’s sister, you got yourself shot at. An awful lot of activity for an innocent bystander.”

“I’ve been trying to collect my money,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Money?”

“I had a bet on a horse and he came in. That’s why I came here the time I found Tommy dead. I was coming to get my money.”

Napoli frowned. “And all of your activity since then has been concerned with collecting it?”

“Right. With Tommy dead I didn’t know who should pay me. I wanted to ask Tommy’s wife, but she’s disappeared some place.”

“And the meeting with Tarbok? Didn’t you collect your money then?”

“I didn’t ask,” I said. “I didn’t think to ask till it was all over.”

The frown deepened, grew frankly skeptical. “Then what did you talk about, you and Frank?”

I said, “Frank Tarbok is the man in the garage, right? The one I was taken to see Tuesday night.”

“Of course,” he said.

“You say of course, but I didn’t know his name till just now. He wanted to see me because he wanted to know if I worked for you.”

That surprised him, and he actually showed it. “For me?”

“He thought maybe I killed Tommy for you,” I said. “So he had those other two guys grab me and take me to him, and he asked me questions. The same as you.”

Napoli grew thoughtful again. “So he thought I might have had Tommy taken care of, eh? Mmmm. I wonder why.”

“He didn’t say,” I said.

“But you convinced him,” he said. “Convinced him you didn’t work for me.”

“Sure.”

“Then why did he try to kill you last night?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he changed his mind. I don’t know.”

He sat back, smiling reminiscently. “It’s a good thing for you he did,” he said.

I wasn’t sure I understood. I said, “A good thing he tried to kill me?”

He nodded, still with the reminiscent smile. “If he hadn’t,” he said, “you’d be dead now.”

That didn’t make any sense at all. I said, “Why?”

“Because,” he said, “I’d ordered you shot. What do you think my people were doing outside your house? They were there to kill you.”

I stared at him. A man had just calmly told me to my face that he’d ordered me murdered. What was the correct social response to a thing like that? I just lay there and stared at him. He was unconcerned. The whole thing struck him as no more than amusing. Mildly amusing. “And the funny part of it is,” he said, incredibly enough, “I was going to have you killed for the same reason as Walt Droble. I figured you’d killed McKay, you were working under Frank Tarbok.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No.”

He held a hand up. “I’ll accept that,” he said. “I’ll accept it now. Naturally, I’ll have to check it. My men did the right thing. They were about to contract you out when somebody else took a shot at you. So they did nothing. They followed you here, and phoned me to tell me the situation, and I told them to get you, if you were still alive, and bring you to me to explain yourself. To explain why other people are trying to kill you when I want you killed.” His smile turned chummy, pals together, confidential buddies. “I found it confusing,” he confided.

I nodded, vaguely. I was still stuck on a phrase he’d used, a euphemism that was new to me but which I found as grisly as anything I’d ever heard. “They were about to contract you out,” he’d said. “Contract you out.”

For Pete’s sake. Contract me out? Is that any way to talk about something as brutal and final as murdering me in front of my own house? It sounds like a magazine subscription lapsing. “Sorry we didn’t get your reorder, we’ll just have to contract you out.”

Napoli looked at me. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” I said faintly.

“You mean, why should I think you were responsible for killing Tommy McKay?”

“That. And why should you care? And who are all the people you mention all the time? Droble, and Frank Tarbok.”

“Frank Tarbok,” he said, “works for Walter Droble. Walt is what you might call a competitor of mine. There are territories he has, there are territories I have. For some time there’ve been a few territories in dispute between us.”

“And Tommy was in the middle?”

“Not exactly. McKay worked for Droble, but was also in my employ. I am nearly ready to make a move I’d been planning for some time, and McKay was a part of that move. You’ll forgive me if I don’t get more specific.”

“That’s all right,” I said quickly. “I don’t want to know too much.”

“That’s wise,” he agreed, smiling at me, pleased with me. He looked at his watch and said, “I must be off. You take it easy now.”

“I will,” I said.

He got to his feet. “Get well soon,” he said, and smiled, and left.