Somebody Owes Me Money

8

By three, I couldn’t stand the house anymore. The snow had finally sighed to a stop around one, the plows had continued to rattle their chains down the street for a while after that, and the radio said we’d had eight inches and it was now definitely over. The day was white, tending to gray at the edges, and there was a sort of muffled feeling everywhere, as though I were walking around with cotton in my ears.

I’d made some Campbell’s pea soup for lunch, since my father was still multiplying and dividing in the living room, and after lunch I played myself some solitaire for a while, betting a hypothetical dollar a card against a hypothetical house and quitting in disgust when I owed a hypothetical seventy-six dollars. I hadn’t run the cards once.

So at three o’clock I decided to go try for Mrs. McKay. I put on my overcoat and overshoes and hat and gloves and told my father, “I’ll probably be home for dinner. If not, I’ll call.”

“What’s one-thirteenth of seventy-one?” he said. His face was covered with little blue ink squiggles, and his eyes were a little out of focus.

“See you later,” I said, and left.

No walks were shoveled yet, of course, so I walked down the plowed street to Jamaica Avenue, where I stopped in at the stationery store, paid my quarter dues, bought the Telegraph and then went on to the subway. Down underground in the station there was that clammy coldness the place has every year from November till April, and I stood alone on the platform, stamping my feet and reading my paper, till the train came.

The train, too, was almost empty, and when I emerged at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan the city had a weirdly deserted look to it. There were only a few cars and trucks crunching up Eighth Avenue, only a few overcoated people walking around the streets, and some of the stores I could see were shut, the gratings drawn across their windows and entrances. It was one of those rare days when Manhattan did not contain more people than it could contend with.

The sidewalks were impassable, of course, so I joined the trickle of pedestrians in the street. Mountain ridges of snow as tall as a man lined the street on both sides, shoved there by the plows, with here and there the hood or side window of a buried car glinting through. Big old green trucks with dirty snow piled high in their backs clankety-clanked up Eighth Avenue.

I walked down to 47th and turned right. The side streets were worse, not having yet been cleared. Traffic had kept one wavering lane open, two deep black ruts in the dirty snow down the middle of the street, and when there was no car coming, the few pedestrians moved like tightrope walkers along these ruts. When a car did come along, there was nothing for the pedestrians to do but stand knee-deep in snow at one side and wait till the rut was clear again.

Some of the snow in front of 417, Tommy’s place, was more than knee-deep. I flumphed through it, lifting my knees almost up to my earlobes at every step, and went into the entranceway and rang the bell of 4-C. No answer. While waiting, I read a handwritten notice about a stolen baby carriage, asking anybody with information to get in touch with apartment 1-B, and then I rang the bell again and there still wasn’t any answer.

Where the hell was she? Maybe gone to stay with relatives or something, maybe she didn’t want to be around the apartment so soon after Tommy’s death. I had to admit it would be only natural, if that’s the way she felt, but at the moment it was nothing to me but a swift pain. I needed that money.

There was no point hanging around in here, though, so I left, and outside, standing in two of my inbound footprints, was Detective Golderman. His hands were in his pockets, his hat on his head, his eyes on me, his expression skeptical. “We meet again,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Hello, there.”

“I thought you were staying home today,” he said.

“Well, the snow stopped,” I said. I was feeling very guilty, and afraid I was looking very guilty, and I was trying like crazy to find some reason I could give him for being here, but there didn’t seem to be any. “I was going to work,” I said, “and I thought I’d stop by here and, uh...” I shrugged, and moved my feet around in the snow, waiting for him to stop waiting for me to finish the sentence.

But he wouldn’t. He just kept looking at me, and the unfinished sentence hung in the air between us like a snake hanging down from a tree branch, and I finally said, “To offer my condolences.”

He moved his head slightly, but he kept looking at me. “To offer your condolences,” he said.

“To the widow,” I explained. “Mrs. McKay,” I explained further. Then, beginning to warm up to the lie, I said, “The last time I saw her, she was pretty hysterical, I didn’t get much of a chance to say anything to her.”

“I see,” he said, and it was pretty plain he didn’t believe me. He looked past me at the building front, then up at the upper-story windows, then at me again. “Was she home?”

“No,” I said.

“You’ll probably try again,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to be casual. “If I’m in the neighborhood, I guess.”

“It isn’t all that important,” he suggested.

“Not really,” I said. “It’s just sort of a nice gesture, you know?”

“Uh huh,” he said, in the flat way of a man who doesn’t believe a word you’re saying.

I considered telling him the truth, but it was just impossible. Gambling is against the law, and it didn’t matter if this was a homicide cop or not, I just couldn’t come right out and admit to him that I made off-track bets. I mean, he knew I did, he knew the whole thing anyway, but I couldn’t say it. All I could do was stand there and act stupid and feel guilty and make him suspicious of me.

I broke an uneasy silence that had settled down between us by saying, “Well, I guess I better get going now, if I want to get some time in today. In the cab.”

He nodded.

“I’ll see you,” I said.

“See you around, Chester,” he said.