Somebody Owes Me Money

35

I won’t say climbing the stairs at Jerry Allen’s place was the worst thing I went through that weekend, but it comes close. We’d spent a good forty-five minutes sitting in the back of that cab, relaxing, and we got out of it in front of Jerry’s place feeling pretty good. Then we climbed all those stairs up to the fifth floor and we were dead again.

Abbie more than me, of course, because of her ankle. I’d had the cab stop in front of an all-night drugstore and I’d gone in and bought an Ace bandage, and I’d wrapped it around her ankle so that now she could walk on it at least, but it still slowed her down and drained her energy.

In the cab I’d offered to drop her off somewhere safe and go on to the game alone, but she’d said, “Not on your life, Charley. I want to be in at the finish.” So here she was, hobbling up the stairs with me.

I wondered if they’d all be there. We’d discussed them on the way in, of course, the four of them, the four regulars, trying to figure out which one it could be, and we’d decided if one of them was missing tonight that was tantamount to a confession of guilt. But we’d thought it more likely the killer would try to act as normal as possible now, and so would more than likely show up.

So which one would it be? Jerry Allen. Sid Falco. Fred Stehl. Doug Hallman. There was also Leo Morgentauser, the vocational teacher, the irregular who’d been at the game last Wednesday and who surely wouldn’t be here tonight. He’d known Tommy, in a business way, but very slightly. Maybe because he wasn’t a regular in the game, I just didn’t think he was our man. But if everybody else proved out clean tonight, I’d certainly go make a call on him.

In the meantime, it left four, and the most obvious right away was Sid Falco. But both Abbie and I had rejected him right away. In the first place, he wasn’t an amateur, and Golder-man had told us Tommy’s killing had been the work of an amateur. In the second place, Sid wouldn’t have had to steal Abbie’s gun from me in order to have something to shoot me with. And in the third place, we just didn’t like him for the job.

Then there was Jerry Allen, our host. Part-owner of a florist shop, a possible homosexual, a steady loser at the game, full of sad embarrassed laughter whenever one of his many bad bluffs was called. So far as I knew he’d never met Tommy, and I couldn’t think of a motive for him, and I couldn’t see him shooting anybody anyway. I particularly couldn’t see him sitting at his kitchen table and carving dum-dum bullets.

Of course, the same was true of Fred Stehl. He was the one with the wife, Cora, who called once or twice every week, sometimes every night there was a game, for months, trying to prove Fred was there. What excuses Fred gave her a hundred and four times a year I don’t know, but she obviously never believed any of them. Fred was a loser at the game, but not badly, and his laundromat had to be making pretty good money. He made bets with Tommy a lot, but where was his motive?

Of all of them, the only one I could see getting teed off enough at anybody to sit at a kitchen table and make dum-dum bullets was Doug Hallman, our cigar-smoking gas station man. But I couldn’t see Doug actually shooting anybody. His hollering and blustering and loudness usually covered a bluff of one kind or another. When he was serious he was a lot quieter. If he ever decided to shoot somebody it would be a simple, clean, well-planned job, using one perfectly placed bullet which wasn’t a dum-dum at all. Or at least that’s the way it seemed to me.

So I’d wound up eliminating them all, if you’ll notice. But doggone it, one of those guys had stolen Abbie’s gun from me. It couldn’t have been anyone else, that was the one fact we had for sure. The idea that I’d been shot by the same gun was an inference, but it was based on a lot of circumstantial evidence. The amateur standing of the killer, for instance, combined with the cops’ having found the murder weapon that killed Tommy. And the fact that its aim was off, so that the shot that had hit me had probably been intended for Abbie, was another inference, but it followed logically out of the first one. And finally, that the person who shot at me — Abbie — us — whoever — was the same person who killed Tommy was yet another inference, but one I had no hesitation at all in making. So with one fact and three inferences we wound up with the conviction that one of the guys present at last Wednesday’s poker game was the murderer. And then we went over them one at a time, and eliminated them all.

Hell.

We’d talked all this around and around in the cab, getting nowhere, and after we’d stopped talking about it I’d kept thinking about it and I still hadn’t gotten anywhere, and as I stood now on the fifth floor of Jerry’s building, gasping for breath and waiting for Abbie to catch up, I thought about it some more and I went on getting nowhere.

I also thought of something else. I said to Abbie, “Did I leave the meter running, do you know?”

She looked up at me. She had three steps to go, and she was white as a sheet. She breathed for a while, and then she said, “What?”

“The meter,” I explained. “In the cab I checked out. The one we drove to Golderman’s in. I wonder if I left the meter running.”

“Oh.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Christ, I hope I didn’t.”

She came up the last three steps and leaned against the banister. “I made it.”

“I’ll have to go out there tomorrow and get that cab,” I said. “If everything’s straightened out by then. What the hell am I going to tell the garage?”

“I don’t know, Chet.”

“You ready to go in?”

She nodded.

“Then let’s go.”