Somebody Owes Me Money

22

When nothing happened for several days, I peeked up over the top of the covers, blinking and wincing already from the bullet I was sure was coming.

Nobody was there.

What? I pushed the covers down completely off my face and stared at the doorway, and it was absolutely empty. Nobody standing there at all. Not Frank Tarbok, not Louise McKay, not anybody.

Had it been a dream? Had the scream been real and all the rest a dream, or had the scream also been part of the dream? A dream scream. Was I going loony?

I sat up, looked around the room, looked at the empty doorway again, and heard voices. They seemed to be real voices, and they were coming from the direction of the living room. Male and female both.

I got out of bed. My shirt and pants — back from the cleaner’s — were draped carefully on a chair; shoes were on the floor beside the bed. I dressed hurriedly, left the bedroom, and walked down the hall to the living room, where Frank Tarbok was standing and talking, Louise McKay was standing and talking, and Abbie was standing and talking.

Maybe I was still asleep. Maybe this was part of the dream, too. I said, “Hey,” and several other things, trying to attract everybody’s attention, and then I realized I was standing and talking like everybody else, so I said, “Oh, the hell with it,” and went away again. If the world wanted to be crazy, I could be crazy, too. With Frank Tarbok and Louise McKay actually standing and talking in the living room, I went out to the kitchen and made myself a liverwurst sandwich. I also heated the coffee, a pot of which we kept permanently on the stove since both Abbie and I were endless coffee drinkers.

The yammering in the living room gradually settled down, but I could not have cared less. Here I’d spent five days terrified that Frank Tarbok or one of his minions would find me and shoot me, and when Frank Tarbok finally did show up he didn’t even pay any attention to me. Stared at me through a doorway for a second, and that was that.

As for Louise McKay, her husband had died a week ago, she’d disappeared without a trace, and all of a sudden there she is in her own living room, standing and talking as though she’d been there all along. No, it was all too crazy to be contended with, particularly when I’d just come out of a nap. Particularly when I’d just been thrust out of a nap by a scream.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating liverwurst, drinking coffee and reading the News, when they came looking for me. Abbie came in first, the other two behind her. She said, “Chet? Are you out of your mind?”

“Murmf,” I said, with a mouthful of liverwurst. I also shook my head, meaning no.

“Don’t you see who’s here?” she demanded, and actually pointed at Frank Tarbok as though she thought I couldn’t see him for myself, standing there as big and ugly as life.

I nodded, and pointed at my mouth, and held my hand up to ask for a minute’s grace. Then I chewed rapidly, swallowed, helped the food along with a swig of coffee, swallowed again, burped slightly, and said, “Yes. I see him. I see the two of them.”

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “You’re just sitting there.”

“When your scream woke me up,” I told her, “and I saw Frank Tarbok there in the bedroom doorway, I did some of the most beautiful terror reactions you ever saw. I carried on like the heroine of a silent movie. And what did he do? He turned around and walked away. So what did I do? I got up and got dressed and went into the living room to find out what was going on, and nobody would pay any attention to me. Everybody was talking at once, nobody was listening, it was like a clambake out at Jones Beach, so I decided the hell with everybody, and I came in here and made myself a sandwich. If you’re all willing to pay attention now, I am prepared to fall on the floor, or scream, or beg for mercy, or try babbling explanations, or whatever you think the circumstances call for. But I’ll be damned if I’ll perform without an audience.” And I took another bite of liverwurst sandwich.

Abbie just stared at me, open-mouthed. It was Tarbok who spoke next, saying in that heavy voice of his, “Conway, for somebody who don’t know nothing about nothing, you do keep turning up.”

I pushed liverwurst into one cheek. I said, “Up until now I thought it was you. Or somebody working for you. But here you are, and you aren’t doing anything, so now I don’t know. Unless maybe you’ve changed your mind since Wednesday.”

“Wednesday?” His face was too square and blocky and white and blue-jawed and heavy to manage very much expressiveness, but he did use it now to convey a sort of exasperated bewilderment. “What do you mean, Wednesday?”

I pointed the sandwich at him. “Did you,” I asked him, “or any other employee of Walter Droble, or any friend of yours or Walter Droble’s, or Walter Droble himself, or an ally of the same, take a shot at me Wednesday night?”

He squinted, as though there was suddenly a lot of cigarette smoke between us. “Take a what?”

“A shot,” I said. I used the sandwich for a gun. “Bang bang,” I said, and pointed with my other hand at the healing scar on the side of my head.

He put his head to one side and squinted at the scar. “Is that what that is? You was grazed?”

“I was grazed. Did you do it?”

The heavy face made a heavy smile. “Conway,” he said, “if I’d took a shot at you, it would have got you a little bit to the right of that.”

“It wasn’t anybody working for you, or Walter Droble, or et cetera.”

He shook his head. “We don’t kill people just for practice,” he said. “A guy has to really call attention to himself in some outstanding way before we go to a lot of trouble.”

“All right,” I said. “It wasn’t Napoli or any of his people, and it wasn’t—”

“Who says it wasn’t Napoli?”

“Napoli says it wasn’t Napoli.”

His head leaned forward, as though to hear me better. In a soft voice he said, “Solomon Napoli?”

“Of course.”

“He told you it wasn’t him? Personally he said so?”

“Yes. Right in that bedroom down there, Thursday night.”

“How come he happened to tell you?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I don’t want to go into it now.”

“I’ll tell you the reason I’m asking,” he said. “When we had our talk last week, you said you didn’t know Sol Napoli. And I believed you. And now you say he come to visit you Thursday and tell you personally he didn’t order you rubbed out.”

“That was the first time I ever met him,” I said. “I’m beginning to feel like Nero Wolfe. I don’t have to leave the apartment ever, sooner or later everybody involved in this damn thing comes calling on me.”

“That was the first time you ever saw Sol Napoli?” Tarbok persisted. He was running his own conversation, and my part of it hardly mattered at all. “And he come here expressly to tell you he didn’t have nothing to do—”

“Oh, really, Frank!” Louise McKay suddenly said, her voice dripping with scorn. “Who are you trying to kid? Why go on with it? Leave these people alone.”

Immediately he turned on her. “I’m done telling you, Louise,” he said. “You got one hundred percent the wrong idea. Now lay off.”

“Is that why you’ve been keeping me under wraps? Because I’ve got the wrong idea? Is that why I’ve been a prisoner for a week, I couldn’t even go to Tommy’s wake, his funeral, I couldn’t—”

“Yeah,” he said, his heavy voice crushing hers beneath the one word. “Yeah, that’s just why. Because you got the wrong idea, but wrong ideas have got guys strapped in up at Sing Sing before this. You go around yapping to the cops, that’s all they’d need. No questions asked, brother, they could mark the McKay homicide solved and pat each other on the backs and not lose a minute’s sleep.”

“If you were innocent?” she demanded.

“You’re damn right! Come off it, Louise, you know it as well as I do. I’m guilty of anything the law can pin on me, it don’t matter whether it’s a railroad or not. They figure if they get me for something I didn’t do, it still works out because I’m paying for something I did do.”

“You killed my husband,” she said, very bitterly and Abbie and I exchanged quick glances.

“I didn’t,” he said, his heavy voice almost a physical weight in the room. “Any more than I shot at this shlemozzle here.”

“You did.”

Abbie said to him, “Did you?”

He looked at her with a kind of sullen surprise, like a lion who’s just been poked with a stick through the bars of the cage. Don’t people realize he’s the king of the jungle and has big teeth? He said, “You, too?”

“I’m Tommy’s sister,” she said. “I want to know who killed him.”

Louise McKay said, “Well, there he is, honey, take a look at him.” And pointed at Tarbok.

Tarbok made a fist and showed it to her. “Once more,” he said, “and I smash you right in the head.”

“Sure,” she said. “Why not kill me, too? Why not rub me out the way you rubbed out Tommy.”

Tarbok rose up on his toes, as though to recapture his temper, which he was about to lose out through the top of his head. It looked as though maybe he would rub her out, or anyway smash her right in the head, if something didn’t happen to break the tension, so I said, as calmly and nonchalantly as I could, “Women are like that, Tarbok. Abbie thought I did it for a while.”

He settled down again, coming off his toes, his fist slightly uncurling. Turning as slowly as Burt Lancaster about to make a plot point, he said, “She did? How come?”

“Everybody did, at one time or another,” I said. “You thought I maybe had something to do with it, Napoli thought so, Abbie thought so. For all I know the cops thought so.”

Tarbok leaned forward, the hand that had been a fist now supporting his weight on the table. “Why is that, Conway?” he said. “How come everybody thinks you did for McKay?”

“Everybody had different reasons,” I said. “You remember yours. Abbie thought I was having an affair with Mrs. McKay and killed Tommy so we could be together.”

“That’s what this moron did,” Louise McKay shouted, glaring at Abbie and me as though to defy us to question her.

Tarbok turned his head and looked at her. “Shut up, sweetheart,” he said, slowly and distinctly. “I’m talking to the shlemozzle.”

“I’m not a shlemozzle,” I said.

He gave me a pitying look. “See how wrong people can be? How come Sol Napoli thought it was you?”

“He thought you people found out Tommy had secretly gone over to his side, and you hired me to kill him.”

Tarbok stared at me. The silence suddenly bulged. Tarbok said, “Who did what?”

“Tommy was secretly on Napoli’s side. Napoli told me so him—”

“That’s a lie!”

I looked at Louise McKay. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McKay,” I said. “All I know is what I was told.” I looked back at Tarbok. “And why would Napoli be involved if it wasn’t true?”

Tarbok said, “Don’t nobody go nowhere.” He pushed past the two women as though they were strangers on a subway platform, and left the kitchen, heading in the direction of the rest of the apartment.

We all looked at one another, and I was the first to speak, saying to Mrs. McKay, “Abbie thinks it’s you, you know.”

She looked at me, and I was an annoyance that had just forced itself onto her attention. “What was that?”

Abbie, embarrassed, said, “Chet, stop.”

I didn’t. I said, “Mrs. McKay, your sister-in-law there is convinced that you’re the one who killed Tommy.”

She was a very bad-tempered woman. Her eyebrows came threateningly down and she glared at the two of us. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Abbie said to me, “Chet, I’ve changed my mind.”

I didn’t much care. I said to Mrs. McKay, “Tommy wrote her about your running around with somebody, so naturally—”

“He never did!”

Abbie said softly, “Yes, he did, Louise, I still have the letter, if you want to see it. I tried showing it to the police, but they didn’t seem to much care.”

Mrs. McKay’s glare began to crumple at the edges. She tried to keep it alive, beetling her brows more and more, but when her chin began to tremble, it was all over. Abbie got a sympathetic look on her face and moved forward with a consoling hand out, and Mrs. McKay let go. She dropped into the chair across the table from me, flopped her head down onto her folded arms, and began to catch up on a week of weeping. Abbie stood next to her, one hand on her shoulder, and looked at me with a what-can-we-do? expression on her face. I shook my head, meaning all-we-can-do-is-wait-it-out, and Frank Tarbok bulled back into the room, saying, “What the hell’s the matter with the phone in the bedroom?”

I said, “One of Napoli’s men pulled it out when I tried to call the police.”

He gave me an irritated frown, gave Mrs. McKay a more irritated frown, and pounded away again.

We had about thirty seconds of silence, except for Mrs. McKay’s muffled sobbing, and then somebody pounded on the front door.

I said, “I’ll get it.”

“Be careful,” Abbie said.

“Naturally,” I said. I left the kitchen, went to the front door, and looked through the peephole at Ralph, who was looking both impatient and disgusted.

Oh. I opened the door and he pushed in without a word and thumped on down the hall toward the bedroom. I shut the door again and went back to the kitchen. At Abbie’s raised eyebrow, I said, “It was Ralph. He came back for his gun.” I went around the table and sat down again.

Abbie said, “Come to think of it, what did you do with my gun?”

“It’s in my overcoat pocket,” I said. “You know, I’d forgotten all about that?”

“No, it isn’t,” she said.

“What?”

“It isn’t in your overcoat pocket. I looked.”

“Well, that’s where I put it,” I said, and Ralph appeared in the doorway. I looked at him.

He said, “Okay, where is it?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s on the dresser.”

“On the dresser?”

“Yes,” I said. “On the dresser.”

He went away again, and Abbie said, “Believe me, Chet, I looked through all your clothing for that gun. I thought it might come in handy.”

“Somebody swiped it,” I said.

“That’s fine,” she said. “I give you the thing to hold for me, and you lose it.”

“In the first place,” I said, and Frank Tarbok came back. “Later,” I said to Abbie, and looked at Tarbok.

“Walt Droble is coming over,” he said.

“I am Nero Wolfe,” I said.

He said, “Hah?” and Ralph appeared in the doorway behind him, waving the gun in the air so we could see it, saying, “I got it.”

Tarbok turned, not having known till now that Ralph was in the apartment. He saw the gun, saw Ralph’s face, yelled, and hit the dirt. That is, he hit the linoleum, rolled under the table and into a lot of chair legs, and was pawing around inside his clothing down there when I stooped and said, “It’s okay. He isn’t going to shoot anybody, it’s okay.”

Ralph, meanwhile, suddenly looking wary, was saying, “Was that Frank Tarbok?”

“Just wait there,” I told Tarbok, and got to my feet. To Ralph, I said, “Come on now. Let’s not make things any more confusing than they already are.”

“Is that Frank Tarbok?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s Frank Tarbok.”

Ralph’s gun was suddenly pointing at me. “Against the wall, mother,” he said.