Somebody Owes Me Money

3

When the cops came in, everybody talked at once. They listened to Harry first, maybe because he was closest, maybe because he had the hammer, maybe because he had his wife talking with him, and then they told him to take his wife and his hammer and go back across the hall to his apartment and take care of the bereaved lady over there and they, the cops, would stop in a little later. Harry and his wife went away, looking puffed with pride and full of good citizenship, and the cops turned to me.

“I didn’t do it,” I said.

They looked surprised, and then suspicious. “Nobody said you did,” one of them pointed out.

“That guy was holding a hammer on me,” I said. “He thought I did it.”

“Why did he think so?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Tommy’s wife told him I did.”

“Why would she say a thing like that?”

“Because she was hysterical,” I said. “Besides, I don’t even know if she said it. Maybe it was because of the blood on my jacket.” I looked at my hand. “And on my hand.”

They looked at my jacket and my hand, and they stiffened up a little. But the one who did the talking was still soft-voiced when he said, “How did that happen?”

“Tommy’s wife grabbed me,” I said. “That’s when it got on my jacket. She’d gone in to look at Tommy, and I guess she touched him or something, and then she got it on me.”

“And the hand?”

“From the phone.” I pointed to it. “She was holding the phone.”

“Is she the one who called in the complaint?”

“No. I did.”

“You did. Who did Mrs. McKay call?”

“Nobody. She was hysterical, and she wanted to call the co — police, but I was already talking to them. It got kind of confusing.”

“I see.” They looked at one another, and the talking one said, “Where’s the body?”

“In the living room,” I said. I made a pointing gesture. “Down the hall to the end.”

“Show us.”

I didn’t want to go down there. “Well, it’s just—” I said, and then I saw what they meant. They wanted me with them. “Oh,” I said. “All right.”

We went down the hall to the living room, me in the lead, and Tommy was still there, spread out on the floor, sunny side up. With the yolk broken.

I’m sorry I thought that.

I stood to one side, and the cops looked. One of them said to me, “Use your phone?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s not mine.”

The phone was over by the windows, which looked out on the street. While the silent cop went over and made his call the other one said to me, “Why didn’t you use that phone there? Why the one in the kitchen?”

“I didn’t want to be in the same room with him,” I said. I was not looking at Tommy, but I could still see him out of the corner of my eye. “I still don’t,” I said.

He looked at me. “You going to be sick?”

“I don’t think so.”

He pointed near the hallway entrance. “Just wait there a minute,” he said.

“All right,” I said. I went over there and waited, looking down the hall toward the entrance. Behind me I could hear the cops talking together and talking on the phone, low murmurings. I wasn’t interested in making out the words.

After a couple minutes the talking cop and I went across the hall to Harry’s apartment. Harry seemed surprised to see me walking around free, surprised and somewhat indignant, as though he was being insulted in some obscure way. Tommy’s wife was lying on her back on a very lumpy sofa in an overcrowded and overheated living room. She had one forearm thrown over her face, and I saw she’d washed the blood off her hands.

The cop sat down on the coffee table and said softly, “Mrs. McKay?”

Without moving her arm so she could see him she said, “What?”

“Could I ask you a couple questions?” He was even more soft-voiced than before. A very nice corpse-side manner.

I said to Harry, “Can I use your bathroom, please?”

Harry frowned in instant distrust. He said to the cop, “Is it okay?”

The cop looked over his shoulder, nettled at the interruption. “Sure, sure,” he said, and went back to Tommy’s wife.

Harry’s wife, being polite because now I was a guest in her house, showed me to the bathroom. I shut the door with my clean hand, turned on the water in the sink, and washed my hands. Then I used a washcloth to try to wash off the front of my jacket. I got it pretty well, then rinsed the washcloth, dried my hands, and went back out to the living room.

The cop wasn’t alone any more. There were three plainclothesmen there, all with hats on their heads and their hands in their overcoat pockets. They looked at me, and the uniformed cop said, “He’s the one made the discovery.”

One of the plainclothesmen said, “I’ll take it.” He took his hands out of his pockets and came over to me, saying, “You Chester Conway?”

“Yes,” I said. In a corner I could see Harry and his wife both sitting in the same armchair, blinking at everything in eager curiosity. They’d happily given up the participant roles and drifted into their real thing, being spectators.

“I’m Detective Golderman,” the plainclothesman said. “Come along.”

Sensing Harry and his wife being disappointed that I wasn’t going to be questioned — grilled — in front of them, I followed Detective Golderman out and across the hall and into Tommy’s apartment. We went into the bedroom now, and I could hear murmuring in the living room. It sounded like a lot of men in there, a lot of activity.

Detective Golderman, notebook in hand, said, “Okay, Chester, tell me about it.”

I told him about it, that I’d called Tommy at four, that I’d said I’d be over at six, that when I got here I came into the building without his buzzing to let me in, that the apartment door was open, that I found him dead and started to call the police and his wife came in and everything got hysterical. When I was done, he said, “McKay was a friend of yours, is that right?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Sort of a casual friend.”

“Why were you coming over today?”

“Just a visit,” I said. “Sometimes I come over when I quit work.”

“What do you do?”

“I drive a cab.”

“Could I see your license?”

“Sure.”

I handed it to him, and he compared my face with the picture and then handed it back, thanking me. Then he said, “Would you know any reason anybody would do a thing like that to your friend?”

“No,” I said. “Nobody.”

“He didn’t sound frightened or different in any way when you talked to him on the phone this afternoon?”

“No, sir. He didn’t sound any different from usual.”

“Whose idea was it you should come over at six?”

I had a problem there, since I didn’t feel I should tell a cop that my relationship with Tommy was customer to bookie, but on the other hand I felt very nervous making up lies. I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Mine, I guess. We both decided, that’s all.”

“Was anybody else supposed to be here?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Hmm.” He seemed to think for a minute, and then said, “How did Tommy get along with his wife, do you know?”

“Fine,” I said. “As far as I know, fine.”

“You never knew them to argue.”

“Not around me.”

He nodded, then said, “What’s your home address, Chester?”

“8344 169th Place, Jamaica, Queens.”

He wrote it down in a notebook. “We’ll probably be getting in touch with you,” he said.

“You mean I can go now?”

“Why not?” And he turned around and walked out of the bedroom as though I’d ceased to exist.

I followed him out. He turned right, toward the living room, and I went the other way. I went out to the street, which seemed much colder now, and walked over to Eighth Avenue, where I got my subway to go home. I sat in the train thinking about things, and I was all the way to Woodhaven Boulevard before it occurred to me I hadn’t collected my nine hundred thirty dollars.