Somebody Owes Me Money

36

Jerry himself opened the door. “Well, look at you! We thought you weren’t coming. And you brought the pro, too, how lucky. Come on in. Isn’t that an interesting hat.”

I’d forgotten about it again. I untied the lace from under my chin and took the damn thing off. “Just something I picked up,” I said.

“Where? I might be interested.”

“You can have this one,” I said. “It doesn’t go with my eyes.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“No, I’m not. Here.”

He took the hat, not sure I was serious. He said, “Are you serious?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, thank you. Your trousers are ripped.”

That was that damn hedge I’d run through. “I slipped on the ice,” I said.

“Isn’t it awful? Abbie, what a lovely coat! But don’t give it to me, for heaven’s sake.”

Abbie laughed. “Just to hang up for me?”

“Well, in that case—”

As he took our coats and hung them up, I looked at Jerry Allen and I just couldn’t see it. Not Jerry. Jerry wouldn’t kill anybody, not in a million years. Scratch one. Again.

We all went into the living room, where Fred Stehl took one look, went, “Yip!” and threw his cards in the air.

“No applause,” I said. “No demonstrations.”

He put his hand to his heart. “I thought it was Cora,” he said.

“After what she did the last time?” Jerry said. “And you thought I’d open the door for her?”

“I know,” Fred said. “I know. But boy, just for a second there, wow. And Abbie, you don’t look a bit like Cora, honest to God.”

“I hope that’s a compliment,” she said.

“Oh, it is,” Jerry told her, and Fred nodded solemnly.

Fred? Fred Stehl, the henpecked laundromat man with his glasses and his balding head? No. In his own beer-and-under-shirt way Fred was an even less likely candidate for murderer than Jerry.

I looked around and all the regulars were here tonight, Doug and Sid also sitting there, and besides them there was a fifth man. Leo Morgentauser.

Leo? I frowned at him. What was he doing here, twice in one week? He’d never done that before. That was suspicious, very suspicious. I said, “Leo, what a surprise. I didn’t expect you around for a couple of months.”

“I called him,” Jerry said. “When you didn’t show up I called a couple of guys, and Leo could make it.”

“I won last time,” Leo said, “and I still have some of it left, so I thought I’d give you guys a chance to get it back.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said, and it stopped being suspicious that he was here. Naturally the boys didn’t want to play four-handed, that’s a terrible game, and naturally Leo was one of the people they’d call, and since he had won last Wednesday it wasn’t unusual for him to say yes tonight. Besides, what was a poor but honest vocational high school teacher going to shoot a small-time bookie for? Leo had made his rare two-dollar bet with Tommy, but I knew Tommy would never have let him run up a big tab or anything like that, he wouldn’t let anyone run up a tab too big for them to handle, and why would Leo shoot him? Why would Leo shoot anybody? No, not Leo.

There were two spaces next to each other at the table, so Abbie and I sat down there, Abbie on my left, and that put Doug Hallman on my right. He said, “What’ve you been up to, buddy? You look like you been mugged.”

“I slipped on the ice,” I said. “How you doing tonight?”

He had his inevitable rotten cigar in his face, and he puffed a lot of foul smoke in answer to my question, then amplified with, “Beautiful cards. Great cards. If we’d been playing low ball I’d own New York State by now.”

I grinned at him, and tried to visualize him shooting Tommy. He knew Tommy the same way the rest of us did, but that was all. Because he played at being mean all the time, the tough grimy garage man, big and hairy, chewing his cigar, it was possible to imagine him with a gun in his hand, going bang, but it was not at all possible to imagine why he’d do such a thing. Very unlikely. I put a great big check next to his name in my head, with a little teeny question mark next to it.

The other side of Doug was Leo, and the other side of Leo was Sid Falco. Sid hadn’t looked at anybody since we’d walked in, but had sat there studying the small stack of chips in front of him. Now, though, when Leo picked up the cards and said, “We ready to play?” Sid suddenly said, “Deal me out,” and got to his feet. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, still not looking at anybody.

“Hold it, Sid,” I said.

He did look at me, then, and I was surprised to see he was scared. He said, “What’s the matter, Chet?”

“Sit down, Sid,” I said.

He said, “I got to go to the bathroom.”

I said, “You mean to go into the kitchen and use Jerry’s other phone to call Napoli and tell him Abbie and I are here so he can have some people waiting outside for us when we leave.”

Shaking his head from side to side, looking very nervous and embarrassed, blinking a lot, doing all the things he always does when he’s trying one of his the-book-says-to-do-it bluffs, he said, “You got me absolutely wrong, Chet. I just got to go to the bathroom.”

“Sit down, Sid,” I said. “You can make your phone call in a few minutes, but right now sit down.” I felt everybody else staring at me. Everybody but Abbie, who seemed to have fallen asleep again. I didn’t blame her. I would have liked to fall asleep myself. I said, “Sit down, Sid, and I’ll tell you and everybody else why I’m here now, and why I look like this, and why Abbie’s sitting there with an Ace bandage wrapped around the outside of her boot. I’ll tell you everything, Sid, and then you can go to the bathroom all you want.”

Sid sat down.

I said, “The reason I’m here, Sid, is because somebody in this room killed Tommy McKay.”

Sid stopped blinking. He looked at me cold-eyed. Everybody else went into shock for a second, and then I got a chorus of wha? and you’re putting us on, and things like that. I waited for it to settle down, and then I said, “Sid, when you go to the bathroom, you’re going to have a lot more to tell your boss than just where he can find Abbie and me. You’re going to tell him who killed Tommy McKay, and you’re going to tell him about the lawyer I went to see on my way to town, and you’re going to tell him about the letter I dictated to that lawyer, and you’re going to tell him why his boys and Droble’s boys both should lay off both Abbie and me permanently and forever. This is all going to be very interesting, Sid.”

“Maybe it is,” Sid said. He was very businesslike now, not doing a bluff at all.

I said, “All right. We’ll start with Tommy’s murderer. He’s in this room.”

Jerry Allen said, “Chet, what nonsense. For heaven’s sake, what are you talking about?”

I stopped talking to Sid, and talked to Jerry instead. “When I came here last Wednesday night,” I said, “I had a gun in my coat pocket. It was Abbie’s, she’d given it to me to hold for her that afternoon.”

“You took it,” Abbie said sleepily.

“All right,” I said, “I took it. The point is, I had it when I came here. When I left here it was gone. I didn’t notice it until later, but the only place it could have been taken from my pocket was in this apartment, while my coat was hanging up in the hall closet. Somebody took my gun. Abbie’s gun. Somebody in this room took it.”

Doug said, “Chet, is this on the level?”

“Absolutely on the level,” I told him, and I pointed at the wound on the side of my head. “You see that? I was shot at by that same gun.”

Sid said, “You’ve got something wrong.”

I looked at him. “I do? What?”

“I took the gun out of your coat,” he said. “I was supposed to turn you over to a couple of guys after the game, and I was supposed to make sure you were clean. They told me they wanted to ask you some questions, they didn’t say anything about bumping you off.”

“That’s what they wanted, though,” I said.

“I found that out later,” he said. “They told me the other at first because they didn’t know how close friends we were.”

“Not very close,” I said.

He shrugged. “Anyway, you took off with the girl. I followed you, because maybe you were going to her place or something, but you gave me the slip. So I phoned my boss and he said they’d set things up another way and I gave him your home address.”

“That was thoughtful,” I said.

“He wanted to know. But the point is, I thought you’d got the gun back. I took it out of your coat pocket and put it in my coat pocket, and when I checked after the game it was gone. So I thought you took it back.”

“I didn’t,” I said. I looked around, and everybody was staring at Sid now. So long as I was the only one who’d been talking crazy, they could all remain astonished spectators, but now that Sid had entered into a dialogue with me, the thing was turning real and they were beginning to realize they were in the middle of it. I said, “It looks as though this place was full of pickpockets last Wednesday night. Anybody got any ideas?”

Leo said, “I have the idea I should have stayed home tonight.” He still had the cards in his hand, and he looked at them now, smiled grimly, and put them down.

Doug said to me, “Let me try and get this straight. You got yourself mixed up in Tommy’s murder somehow, and got shot at yourself. And you say it was with a gun that was stolen off you while you were here at the game last Wednesday.”

“Right.”

“Why wasn’t it with the same gun that killed Tommy? Maybe somebody here copped your gun, but didn’t have anything to do with shooting at you.”

“They found the gun that killed Tommy two days before I was shot at,” I said.

“The cops found it?”

“Yes.”

“So much for that,” Doug said. He shook his head. “I pass. It wasn’t me and I don’t know who it was.”

Jerry said, “It wasn’t you, Doug? You have a pretty mean temper sometimes. And you did know this man Tommy, I believe. You couldn’t have gotten angry at him over something—”

“I could get angry at you,” Doug told him. “I could get angry, Jerry, and pull your head off you, but I couldn’t go shoot people.” He held up his hands, saying, “If I ever kill anybody, Jerry, this is what I’ll use. And you’ll be the first to know.”

Leo said, “Doug’s right, Jerry. You’re much more the revolver type than he is. You might get into a pet and blast somebody with a gun.”

“Me?” Jerry absolutely squeaked. “I don’t even own a gun! I didn’t even know the man who was killed! You knew him!”

Doug said, “Hold it. Let’s not go pointing the finger at each other. That won’t get us anywhere, it’ll just get us mad.”

“I disagree,” I said. “Maybe it will get us somewhere. Why don’t we all say what we think, and argue it out, and see if we can come up with something? Because I’ll tell you the truth, I have absolutely no way to narrow it down. I know it has to be somebody in this room, I know it can’t be anybody not in this room, but that’s as close as I’ve been able to get it. Except I’ve eliminated Sid. But the rest of you—”

Sid smiled thinly, and everybody else objected at once. Leo succeeded in getting the floor at last, and said, “Why eliminate Sid? From the way you two have been talking, you and Sid, he knows as much about this as you do. And he’s apparently connected with some underworld figures some way, I get that much from the conversation. Why wouldn’t that make him your prime suspect, ahead of the rest of us?”

“He didn’t have to shoot at me,” I said. “No matter what he says now, he knew his boss was sending people to kill me. Professionals. So why should he bother to shoot me? Also, it made his boss very unhappy when Tommy was killed, and Sid wouldn’t have dared do anything to make his boss unhappy. Right, Sid?”

“Close enough,” Sid said.

Leo shook his head. “None of us knows anything about this, Chet. How can we talk sensibly about it? If one of us makes a suggestion, you tell us five more facts you already knew and we didn’t which shows the suggestion is wrong. That’s futile. What you ought to do is take your suspicions to the police.”

“Of course,” Jerry said. “Instead of coming here disrupting things, why not go to the police? Tell them what you think, what you know. Let them work it out.”

It was Abbie who answered this time. “We can’t go to the police,” she said.

Doug said, “Why not?”

“Because,” she said, “there are two gangs of crooks after us. Not one gang, two gangs. If one of them doesn’t get us, the other one will. Neither Chet nor I can live a normal life while they’re still after us. And part of the reason they’re all excited and upset is because of Tommy McKay’s murder. If we could solve that for them, and also this business about the lawyer Chet mentioned” — I was glad she’d picked up on that, since I’d just made it up and we hadn’t discussed it in the cab — “they’d leave us alone.”

Fred, leaning forward with a worried expression on his face, said, “You mean your lives are in danger?”

“That’s putting it mildly,” I said. “We’ve been shot at, strangled, threatened, chased, I don’t know what all. There are people out in the world with guns right now, and they’re looking for Abbie and me, and they want to kill us. And Sid there wants to go make a phone call and tell one bunch of them where they can find us.”

Fred shook his head. “I can’t understand that,” he said. “How did you get so involved?”

“I was trying to get that nine hundred thirty dollars I was owed,” I said, “and Abbie wanted to do something to avenge her brother, since he was her last living relative.”

Doug said, “Did you get the money?” He held one of my markers.

“No,” I said. “They refused to pay off, in fact.”

“That’s too bad,” Doug said.

Fred said, “How can you think about money at a time like this, Doug? Chet, do they really want to kill you?” He couldn’t seem to get it into his head.

“Yes,” I said. “They really want to kill me. Abbie, too. Ask Sid.”

Fred turned his head and looked at Sid, who said, “Chet’s right.”

Fred said to him, “And it would help him if he found out who killed Tommy McKay?”

Sid shrugged. “It’s possible. I wouldn’t know about that.”

I said, “The funny thing is, I think I know who it is. And yet I don’t believe it.”

Everybody looked at me. Abbie said, “Who?” Leo said, “Why don’t you believe it?”

I answered Leo. I said, “One of the things I wanted to do here was throw this mess on the table and just watch reactions, see how different people acted. I figured maybe the killer would act different from everybody else, and I’d be able to spot him.”

Leo said, “And did he? Have you spotted somebody?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t believe it. There’s something wrong somewhere.”

Abbie said, “For Pete’s sake, Chet, who is it?”

“It’s Fred,” I said.