Somebody Owes Me Money

7

Except I didn’t. When the alarm rousted me out after four and a half hours’ uneasy sleep, the world was white and muffled and socked in. The snow was still lazy, still drifting down the air, but now the flakes were coming down in the millions and the ground was already three or four inches thick with it. Our first snowstorm had finally arrived.

I didn’t say anything to my father about last night’s incident because he’d only get excited and want to call the police, and it seemed to me if I called the police I would run a real risk of meeting those guys from last night again, the which I was in no hurry to do. My whole feeling was of being a little fish floating around in the water, living my little life, and then suddenly being yanked up at the end of a fishing line, caught by powers too strong for me to fight and too big for me to understand, with terrible immediate oblivion all of a sudden staring me in the face, and then the reprieve coming and being tossed back into the water because I’m too small. I didn’t want to hang around and make a fuss, all I wanted to do was go quickly away by myself somewhere and forget the whole thing. So I didn’t tell my father a thing about it.

We had breakfast, and I kept looking out the kitchen window at the snow, and it kept being there. I’d gotten up early in order to work the day shift, since my regular Wednesday night poker game was tonight, but with all that snow out there it was hopeless. After breakfast I called the garage and told them I saw no point adding myself to the snarl-up Manhattan was undoubtedly in the middle of, and the dispatcher said fine by him, and then I had the day in front of me.

My father went back to his percentages at the dining-room table, leaving me essentially alone with myself, so I called a few guys to see if enough were staying home to get a game up, but half of them had gone to work and the other half wouldn’t leave the house. “If you want to play over here, Chet, it’s fine by me.” I didn’t call Sid Falco, feeling very weird about him since knowing what I now knew. I phoned in today’s number — 214, don’t ask me why — to the stationery store and promised to drop by tomorrow with the quarter, and then there was nothing to do but read the sports pages of the News and wait for tomorrow.

When the doorbell rang a little after eleven it was a godsend. I was reduced to watching an old horse-race movie with Margaret O’Brien on Channel 11, and I hate that kind of picture. I know the races are rigged, and they never give you enough information on the entries anyway, but there I sit trying to handicap the damn things.

I switched off the set right away, went to the door, opened it, and in came a swirl of snow and the detective who’d questioned me at Tommy’s apartment. Detective Golderman. The amount of snow I could see through the open doorway was unbelievable, but a plow had been down the street recently, so it was possibly passable. A black Ford was parked out front.

I shut the door, and he took off his hat and said, “Remember me, Chester?”

Why do policemen call everybody by their first names? “Sure,” I said. “You’re Detective Golderman.”

My father called from the dining room, “Who is it?”

Detective Golderman said, “You didn’t go to work today.”

“Who did?” I said.

“I did,” he said.

My father called from the dining room, “I’m expecting an insurance man.”

Detective Golderman said, “Do you have a few minutes?”

“Sure,” I said. “Come on in the living room.”

My father bellowed, “Chet! Is that my insurance man?”

I led Detective Golderman into the living room and said, “Excuse me.”

“Certainly.”

I crossed the living room to the dining-room doorway and said, “It’s a policeman.” I said “policeman” instead of “cop” because Detective Golderman was in earshot.

“Why didn’t you say so?” my father said. He was irritable, which usually meant the math was being too tricky for him. Sooner or later he always worked the policies out, but some of them were very tough, and when he had one of the really tough ones he tended to get irritable.

“We’ll be in the living room,” I said, and went back over to Detective Golderman. I asked him to sit down, he did, I also did, and he said, “You knew Tommy McKay pretty well, did you?”

I shrugged. “Pretty well,” I said. “We weren’t really close, but we were friends.”

“You knew what he did for a living?”

“I’m not sure,” I said doubtfully.

He grinned at me. We were just guys together, I could come off it. He said, “But you could guess.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“You want me to say it first?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Tommy McKay was a bookie.”

I nodded. “I believe so,” I said.

“Mm. Would you say you knew him best as a friend or as a customer?”

It was me doing the grinning this time, nervous and sheepish and out in plain view. “A little of each, I guess,” I said.

“Don’t worry, Chester,” he said. “I’m not looking for gamblers.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Our interest is the homicide, that’s all.”

I said that was good, too.

“Have you got any ideas on that, Chester?”

I suppose I looked blank. I know I felt blank. “Ideas?”

“On who might have killed him.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t. I didn’t really know him that well.”

“Did you see anybody else in the apartment or in the building that day?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did McKay ever express worry to you, any fear that he thought somebody might be after him?”

“No.”

“Was he ever slow in paying off on winnings?”

“Never. Tommy was always straight about things like that.”

He nodded, thought for a second, then said, “Do you know anybody else in that building?”

“Tommy’s place? No.”

“Does the name Solomon Napoli mean anything to you?”

Until last night I could have given that question a straight no with no qualms. Trying to figure out what such a denial would have sounded like and then imitate it, I furrowed my brow, scratched my head, shook my head, stared out the window, and finally said, “Solomon Napoli. Noooo, I don’t think so.”

“You seem doubtful.”

“Do I? I don’t mean to. I really don’t know the name, I just wanted to be sure before I said anything. Who is he?”

“Somebody we’re interested in,” he said, making it clear it was somebody he didn’t want me being interested in.

I said, “Does he live in the same building as Tommy?”

He frowned, as though confused. “Of course not. Why?”

“Well, you asked if I knew anybody in that building, and then right away you wanted to know if I—”

“Oh,” he said, interrupting me. “I see what you mean. No, it’s two different questions.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Did you ever hear of Frank Tarbok?” he asked. “And he doesn’t live in McKay’s building either.”

“Tarbok? No.”

“You don’t want to think about that one first?”

“Well,” I said. “Uh. It’s just, I just knew right away he—”

“Okay,” he said. “How about Bugs Bender?”

“That’s a name? No, if I’d ever heard that one I’d remember it.”

“What about Walter Droble?”

I was about to say no when the name did ring some sort of distant bell. “Walter Droble,” I repeated. “Did I read about him in the papers or some place?”

“That would be the only way you know him?”

“Yeah, I think so. It’s like I’ve heard the name somewhere, a long time ago.”

“All right.” He seemed to consider things for a minute, and then said, “How well do you know Mrs. McKay?”

Him, too? “Not very well,” I said. “Mostly I just had dealings with Tommy.”

“Ever hear any rumors about her? Running around with another man, anything like that?”

I shook my head. “Not a thing,” I said.

“Did she ever make a play for you, flirt with you?”

“Mrs. McKay? Have you ever seen her? Sure you have, the other day.”

“She wasn’t looking at her best the other day,” he said. “You don’t think she’s good-looking enough to flirt?”

“Well, she’s not bad-looking,” I said. “I don’t know, I never saw her dressed up or anything, I don’t know what she’d look like.”

“All right,” he said, and got to his feet. “That’s about it. Thank you for your cooperation.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“You’re going to be around town?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll be notified about the inquest.”

“I’ll be here,” I said, and led the way to the front door. He buttoned up his coat and put his hat on and then I opened the door and he slogged out into all that swirling snow. There were little puffs of wind, this way, that way, with still places in between, so when you looked out, it was like looking at a photograph full of random scratches.

I watched him go down the stoop, then shut the door and went back to the living room, but this time I left the television off. I sat there thinking, and it seemed to me if there was anybody in this world I didn’t want to be right now it was probably Solomon Napoli. The cops obviously thought he might have had something to do with Tommy’s death, and so did Tommy’s bosses, and that seemed to leave Napoli square in the middle.

Who was Napoli? Maybe the boss of some other gang that was trying to muscle in. Maybe all this was part of some kind of gang war. There still are gang wars, only they don’t get as much publicity as they used to. Mobsters just disappear these days, they don’t get blown up in barbershops or machine-gunned in front of nursery schools anymore. But still every once in a while something will get into the papers, usually when something goes wrong. Like the guy a couple of years ago that was attacked in a bar in Brooklyn and two cops just happened to walk in while he was being strangled with a wire coat hanger. He was known to be a member of one of the mobs down there, and the cops figured the killers had to be with some other mob. They got away, both of them, and the victim naturally insisted he didn’t know who they were or why they were after him.

But if Tommy’s death was a gang killing, how come he didn’t disappear? He was very visible, his murder made the newspapers and everything. (There hadn’t been anything about it in today’s paper, but that’s because nothing new had happened.)

Well, it wasn’t my problem. My problem was collecting my money, and losing a day’s work today was making that collection even more urgent than before.

Of course, if 214 came in today my twenty-five cents would bring me back a hundred fifty dollars, but I wasn’t going to hang by my thumbs till it happened. In all the years I’ve played the numbers I’ve never won spit, and sometimes I wonder why I even bother. I treat it like dues, not like a bet at all. Once or twice a week I hand over a quarter at the stationery store. But what the hell, the return is six hundred to one — the odds are a thousand to one, so nobody’s doing anybody any favors — and I figure at a quarter a throw it can’t hurt me to try.

In the meantime, back in the real world 214 was not going to come in today, so the question was how to get my nine hundred thirty dollars, and for that I was going to have to go see Mrs. Louise McKay.

If she knew.

Did she know? Did Tommy tell his wife his business, enough for her to know who I should see now? Some husbands do, some don’t, and thinking about Tommy now it seemed to me he could best be described as the close-mouthed type.

Listen, I had to have that money. If Mrs. McKay couldn’t tell me how to get it, who could?

I remembered those other names Detective Golderman had mentioned — Frank Tarbok and Bugs Bender and Walter Droble. Maybe one of those guys was in the same syndicate with Tommy, and could tell me who to see now.

But I’d prefer to get it from Tommy’s wife. It struck me as easier, maybe safer, and all around better.

Just to be on the safe side, though, I went to the dining room and borrowed a piece of paper from my father and wrote down the three names, so I wouldn’t forget them. Frank Tarbok. Bugs Bender. Walter Droble.