Somebody Owes Me Money

29

Detective Golderman’s house was a nice white clapboard Cape Cod on a quiet side street in Westbury. We got there at twenty-five minutes to seven and parked out front. A Volkswagen and a Pontiac stood side by side on the cleared driveway in front of the attached garage. In the city there was practically no sign left of last week’s snowstorm, but out here in the suburbs there was still plenty of it, on lawns and vacant lots and piled up beside driveways.

It was fully night by now of course, but a light was shining beside the front door. We got out of the warm cab and hurried shivering through the needle-cold air up the walk to the door. I rang the bell and we stood there flapping our arms until at last it opened.

A pleasant-looking woman in her late thirties, wearing a wool sweater, stretch slacks, and a frilly apron, looked through the storm door at us, astonished, and then opened it and said, “You must be freezing. Come in.”

“We are,” I said, and Abbie said, “Thank you,” and we went in.

She shut the door, and I said, “I’m the one who called about an hour ago.”

“And wouldn’t leave his name,” she said. “Arnie and I have been wondering about that.”

“I’ll give it now,” I said. “Chester Conway. And this is Miss Abbie McKay.”

She frowned at us. “Should I have heard of you? Abbie and Chet, like Bonnie and Clyde?”

“No,” I said. “We’re more victims.”

“Well, that’s cryptic,” she said. “Come in and sit down, I’ll call Arnie.”

“Thank you.”

The living room was spacious, modern, and very very neat. I wouldn’t have lit a cigarette in that room for a thousand dollars. The two of us sat on the edge of the sofa while Mrs. Golderman went away to get her Arnie.

Abbie said, under her breath, “It does make you feel safe, doesn’t it?”

I looked at her. “What does?”

She waved her hand, indicating the room in general. “All this. Neat, respectable, middle-class. Germ-free, stable, dependable. You know.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “Yes, you’re right.”

“You should see my place,” she said. “In Vegas.”

“Not like this?”

She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Ooh. It looks like the day the riot broke out in the whorehouse.”

“My father keeps our place pretty neat,” I said. “Not as neat as a woman would, of course.”

“Depends on the woman,” she said.

I looked at her. “You mean if I took you home you wouldn’t clean the place up?”

“Depends what you took me home for,” she said, and looked past me to say, “Hello, there.”

I turned my head, and Detective Golderman had joined us. He was in tan slacks and green polo shirt and white sneakers and he looked very summery and relaxed and not at all like the wintry sardonic detective I was used to meeting in the snow around New York.

“So it is you,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” I got to my feet. “I came to tell you a long story,” I said.

“Then you’ll want a drink,” he said. “Come along.” And he turned away.

Abbie and I looked at each other, shrugged, and followed him. We went through a dining room that looked like a department-store display, and entered a hallway with duck-shooting prints on the walls. “Hold on,” he said, and went to the end of the hall to stick his head into what looked like a yellow-and-white spick-and-span kitchen and say, “We’ll be downstairs, Mary.” Then he came back and opened a door and gestured for us to precede him down the stairs.

“This is my pride and joy,” he said, coming after us and shutting the door again. “Just got it finished last fall.”

A basement game room. Would you believe it? Knotty-pine walls, acoustical tile ceiling, green indoor-outdoor rug on the floor. A dart board. A Ping-Pong table. A television-radio-record-player console next to a recessed shelf containing about a hundred records. And, of course of course of course, a bar.

You know the kind of bar I mean, I hope. The kind of bar I mean is the kind of bar that has all those things all over it. A little lamppost with a drunk leaning against it. Electrified beer signs bouncing and bubbling and generally carrying on. Napkins with cartoons on them. Funny stirrers in a container shaped like a keg. Mugs shaped like dwarfs.

I could go on, but I’d rather not. The mottoes on the walls, and the glasses and objects on the back bar, the ashtrays— No, I’d rather not catalogue it all. Suffice it to say that Abbie and I looked at one another in a moment of deep interpersonal communion. Our two brains beat as one.

“Sit down,” Detective Golderman said, going around behind the bar. “What’s your pleasure?”

The bar stools were light wood with purple seats. We sat on two, and I said, “I’ll take Scotch and soda, if you’ve got it.”

“Of course I’ve got it. What’s yours, Miss McKay?”

“A sidecar, please,” she said sweetly, and smiled at him in all innocence.

A hell of a thing to do. I considered kicking her ankle, but I was more interested in seeing how he’d handle it.

Very well. “One sidecar,” he said, hardly blanching at all, and when he turned around he opened the drawer in the back bar with no fuss at all. We should have chatted with one another now, if we’d done so we probably never would have noticed him leafing through the little book in that drawer, or adjusting the drawer partway open so the book would stay open to the page he wanted.

Of course, the end result was that he made the sidecar first and I didn’t get my simple Scotch and soda forever.

But he did have the ingredients. Out of a little refrigerator under the bar he took a bottle of lime juice and set it down on his work area. He looked around and then said, “Be back in one minute,” and hurried away upstairs.

I whispered, “What a nasty thing to do.”

“I know,” she said. “I just couldn’t help it.”

“You didn’t even try.”

“Oh, Chet, let me have my fun. Don’t be a wet blanket.”

“Nasty woman,” I said, and back came Detective Golderman. Would you believe he was carrying a little bowl containing the white of an egg? Well, he was.

What was eventually set down in front of Abbie looked like a perfect sidecar, and when she tasted it I could see the biter had been bit. “Beautiful,” she said. “This is really great.”

Opening my bottle of soda, he basked in the praise. “I have to use my little recipe book sometimes,” he said, “but I pride myself on having the real touch. Say when, Chester.”

“When.”

He handed over my drink, put the soda and lime juice away, put all the bottles back where they belonged, put the bowl in the bar sink and ran water in it, poured himself a short brandy, took a sip, made a face, leaned his elbows on the bar, and said to me, “Well, now. I believe you’re here to tell me something, Chester.”

“I’m here to tell you everything,” I said, and I did.

He listened quietly, interrupting only once, when I suggested that I’d been shot by the same person who shot Tommy, and added, “Using the same gun.” Then he said, “No, not the same gun. We found that one the same day McKay was killed.”

“You did?”

“Yes, in a litter basket just down on the corner. No fingerprints, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“And it’s a lucky thing for you it wasn’t the same gun,” he said. He gestured at my wound and said, “It would have made a lot more of a mess than that. It was a.45 automatic. All it would have had to do was brush your head like that and you’d still be looking for the top of your skull.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said, and put my hand on the top of my skull, glad I knew where it was.

“Anyway,” he said. “Go on with it.”

So I went on with it, and when I was done, he said, “Chester, why didn’t you simply come to me in the first place and tell me the truth? You could have saved yourself an awful lot of trouble.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Now you’ve not only got two complete gangs of racketeers after you,” he said, “you’ve got a pretty violent amateur killer after you as well.”

I said, “Amateur?”

“Definitely,” he said. “Bears all the earmarks. Undoubtedly fired in anger when he killed McKay.”

“But what about the dum-dum bullets?”

“Exactly,” he said. “Professionals don’t have to do that, their aim is too good. And they prefer to avoid excess mess. Anger again. Some sorehead sitting at his kitchen table, muttering to himself while scoring those bullets, not really sure whether he’d ever use them on anybody or not.”

“But how would he know about doing it?”

“How do you know about it?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Movies or television, I suppose.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“The question is,” Abbie said, “can you help us at all?”

“You want the murderer found,” he said. “And you want both gangs off your necks.”

“Please,” I said.

“I’ll see what I can do. The investigation into McKay’s death isn’t active anymore, you know.”

“We know,” I said. “Not since Thursday night. They didn’t spend much time on it, did they?”

“The force is short-handed,” he said. “If a thing doesn’t start to break fast, and if it isn’t something really special and out of the way, the only place for it is the inactive file.” To Abbie he said, “I’m sorry, Miss McKay, I understand your brother is something special to you, but to us he’s only one more homicide. And nothing broke fast. On the other hand, we didn’t know all the things you two have just told us, so that might make a difference. Let me make a phone call or two. I’ll be right back.”

Abbie said, “You aren’t going to tell your superiors where we are, are you? We don’t want police protection, not regular police protection.”

He smiled at her. “Worried that somebody could be bought off? You might be right. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you myself.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Not at all.” Coming out from behind the bar he said, “If you want refills, help yourself. I’ll try not to be long.”

I said, “One last question before you go.”

“Certainly, Chester.”

“When you came out to my house,” I said, “you mentioned four names. Since then I’ve met three of them, but not the fourth.”

He nodded. “Bugs Bender.”

“That’s the one,” I said. “Who is he?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “We think he was a freelance assassin, he worked for both Napoli and Droble at one time or another. He’d disappeared a couple of months ago, and we were wondering what had happened, but he turned up late last week.”

“Oh,” I said.

“In the bottom of a garbage scow,” he said. “He’d been there for quite a while.”

“Oh,” I said.

“So it’s just as well you didn’t meet him,” he said, and smiled at me, and went away.

“What a lovely story,” Abbie said.

“I’m glad I didn’t miss it.”

“Oh, well.” She swung around on her stool to look at the length of the basement. “Can you believe this room?” she said.

“I bet you,” I said, “if you were to burrow through that wall over there and keep going in a straight line across Long Island, you’d go through a good three hundred basement rooms just exactly like this one before you reached the ocean.”

“No bet,” she said. “But where do they get the money? Golder- man must have put his salary for the next twenty years into this place.”

“Fourth mortgage,” I said.

“I suppose so.”

“Aside from his house, what do you think of him?”

She turned back to her drink. “All right, I guess,” she said. “He does those facial expressions like he’s very sharp, very hip, but I think really he isn’t at all. It’s all front.”

“That’s because you are seeing him in his basement,” I said. “If you want to see the ultimate in cool, you should have been there Friday morning, when he caught Ralph in the closet.”

She grinned. “Yes, I can see how he’d have handled that.”

I squinted at the back bar. “That’s weird,” I said.

She looked where I was looking. “What’s weird? The Gay Nineties lamp that says ‘Bar?’ ”

“No,” I said. “If Tommy’s murder was put on the inactive list by the police Thursday night, how come Detective Golderman came around Friday morning?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he had one or two last questions he wanted to ask.”

“Ask who?”

“Me, I guess. Or Louise.”

“How come he didn’t ask them? And, honey, he had to know when the funeral was, and he had to know if he was going to find any of Tommy’s relatives it would be at the funeral. He came there then, at that time, because he thought the place was empty.”

She looked at me. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning it seems to me I remember Walter Droble saying something about one of the cops on the case being his man on the scene.”

“You mean — Golderman?”

“Maybe he didn’t have to take out a fourth mortgage after all,” I said.

“But — what was he doing at the apartment?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe he thought there might be something there to connect him with Droble’s mob. A payoff record or something like that. Maybe the mob sent him around to give the place a going-over and see there wasn’t anything there that might break security.”

Abbie looked at her sidecar with revulsion. “Do you think he’s poisoned us?”

“He isn’t the killer,” I said. “The killer is somebody outside either mob, that’s pretty sure by now. And if he was the one who shot at me Wednesday night, he had a perfect chance to finish the job after Ralph left Friday morning.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, who do you suppose he’s calling right now?”

“Oh, my Lord,” she said, and spun around on the stool. “There’s always a beige wall phone in places like this,” she said.

“I already looked,” I told her. “This is the exception to the rule.”

“Unless—” She hopped down off the stool and walked around behind the bar, saying, “Sometimes they put it under — Here it is.” She lifted a beige phone and put it on the bar.

“Gently,” I said.

“Naturally.”

Slowly, inchingly, she lifted the receiver. I could suddenly hear tinny voices. Abbie lifted the phone to her ear, put her hand over the mouthpiece, and listened. Gradually her eyes widened, staring at me.

I made urgent hand and head motions at her, demanding to know who it was, what was going on. She made urgent shakes of the head, letting me know I’d have to wait. But I kept it up, and finally she mouthed, with exaggerated lip movements, Frank Tarbok.

“Oh,” I said, aloud, and she frantically shook her head at me. I clapped my hand over my mouth.

But oh. Oh and oh and oh. Even thinking it, even being sure of it, I’d been hoping against hope that I was wrong. Because if I was right, we were on the run again, and this time with absolutely no place to go at all. No place at all.

Abbie carefully and wincingly hung up the telephone, put it quickly away under the counter, and hurried around to sit down beside me at the bar again, saying under her breath. “He doesn’t want any trouble here, his wife doesn’t know anything about anything. He’s supposed to get us out of the house and take us to a rendezvous. A house in Babylon.”

“Then what?” I asked, though I didn’t really have to.

“Tarbok started to say something about the waterfront being a handy place,” Abbie said, “and Golderman broke in and said he didn’t want to know anything about anything like that.”

I remembered what a short time ago it had been that Tarbok and I had shaken hands in solemn partnership. Well, that duet had gone off-key in a hurry.

We heard the door open at the head of the stairs. Getting off the stool, I said, “When he’s sitting down, you distract him.”

“What are you going to do?”

There was no time to answer. Golderman was coming down the stairs. I shook my head and ran around behind the bar. Scotch, Scotch. Here it was. Black & White, a nice brand. A full quart.

Golderman was at the foot of the stairs. I gulped what was left of the Scotch and soda in my glass, and was starting to pour myself a fresh drink when Golderman came over to the bar. “Well, well,” he said. “You the new barman, Chester?”

“That’s me,” I said. “What’s yours?”

He sat down on a stool. “I’ll just take my brandy, if I may.”

“Sure thing.” I slid his brandy glass over to him. “What’s the situation?”

“Well, it’s been taken out of my hands,” he said. “The captain’s going to want to talk to you two. In the morning. In the meantime, he refuses to let me keep you here.”

“Oh, boy,” I said.

“What does he expect us to do tonight?” Abbie asked him.

“It just so happens,” he said, “that my wife’s brother isn’t home right now. He works for Grumman, they have him and his whole family in Washington for three months. I have the keys to his house, there’s no reason you can’t stay there tonight.”

“Where’s the house?” I asked. It was easy to resist the impulse to say something smart-alecky, like, “Oh, the house in Babylon?” Like him with Ralph in the closet. But all I had to do was forecast the dialogue from that point on, if I did such a thing, and the impulse got itself resisted.

“In Babylon,” he said. “Not very far from here.”

“Can you give me directions?”

“Oh, I’ll drive you over,” he said.

“I have my own car out front,” I said.

“You’d better leave that here for tonight. The captain was explicit that I shouldn’t give you two the opportunity to change your minds and take off again. I’ll run you over there, it won’t be any trouble at all.”

“I hope there’s no hurry,” I said, lifting the bottle of Black & White. “I was just about to make myself a second drink.”

“Go right ahead,” he said.

Abbie got down off the stool and started walking away toward the other end of the room, saying, “Is that a color television set?”

Golderman swung around on his stool to watch her. “Yes, it is,” he said, and I bonked him with the Black & White.