Somebody Owes Me Money

9

I really did go to work. I went over to Eleventh Avenue and took the bus uptown to the garage and checked a car out and got my first fare half a block from the garage, a good-looking girl in an orange fur coat and black boots and pale blond hair. “2715 Pennsylvania Avenue,” she said.

I said, “Brooklyn or Washington?” I kid with good-looking female passengers whether I’m worried about money or not.

“Brooklyn,” she said. “Take the Belt.”

“Fine,” I said, and dropped the flag, and headed south. My luck was finally in. Not only a good-looking blonde in the rearview mirror, but a long haul at that, and it would end not too far from Kennedy.

The highways were all cleared, and carried way below their usual midday load of traffic. We got up on the West Side Highway at twenty to four and left the Belt Parkway at Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn at just four o’clock. In between I’d made a couple of small attempts at conversation, but she was the strong silent type, so I let it go. I’m content to look, if that’s the way they want it.

The first half mile of Pennsylvania Avenue is through filled-in swampland. There’s no solid ground at the bottom, just dirt piled into a swamp, so the road is very jouncy and bouncy, full of heaves and holes, and even though there’s little traffic at any time there and no housing or pedestrians around, you can’t make very good time. The snow plows, probably because of the uneven road surface, hadn’t been able to do much of a job here, so that slowed me even more, which meant I was doing about twenty when the girl stuck the gun into the back of my neck and said, “Pull over to the side and park.”

I immediately froze, my hands gluing themselves to the wheel. Fortunately my foot hadn’t been on the accelerator at that instant, so it stayed paralyzed in mid-motion and the cab began at once to lose speed.

My first thought, when I finally had a thought, was: Did she have to run up six bucks on the meter first? Thinking, naturally, that I was about to be robbed.

But then I had a second thought, scarier than the first, and this was: This girl is no mugger.

Tommy again? Something more?

The cab was down to about three miles an hour now, but until I touched the brake or shifted out of drive it would go on doing three miles an hour forever. Across the entire United States and into the Pacific Ocean, at three miles an hour. I put my foot on the brake and shifted into neutral.

There was a cab coming from way behind me, there was a little traffic going the other way on the other side of the center divider, but for all practical purposes I was alone in the world with a girl with a gun.

A little over half the cabs in New York are equipped with bulletproof clear plastic between the driver and the passenger, but naturally this was one of the times when the long shot came home, because I had nothing between me and my passenger but extremely vulnerable air.

Yes, and there’s another thing some cabs have, that when the driver presses a button with his foot a distress light flashes on top of the cab. Most people probably have never heard of it and wouldn’t know what it meant if they saw one, but still I bet it’s a comfort to any cabby who has a hack equipped like that. The V. S. Goth Service Corporation, the cheap bums I work for, wouldn’t even equip their cabs with brakes if there wasn’t a law about it, so you know I didn’t have any distress light to comfort me right now.

When I had stopped the car at last, the girl said, “Turn off the engine.”

“Right,” I said, and turned off the engine.

She said, “Leave both hands on the wheel.”

“Right,” I said, and put both hands on the wheel. I couldn’t see her in the rear-view mirror any more, which meant she was directly behind me. From the sound of her voice she was probably sitting forward on the seat. The gun was no longer pressing its cold nose into my neck, but I could sense that it hadn’t gone very far away.

Well, Robert Mitchum? What now?

The girl said, “I want to ask you a few questions, and you better tell me the truth.”

“I’ll tell you the truth,” I said. “You can count on that.” I didn’t know what she could possibly want to know, but whatever it was I was primed to tell her.

“First,” she said, “where’s Louise?”

“Oh, God damn it,” I said, because all of a sudden there I was back in that office with the hoods again, being asked questions I couldn’t answer because the assumptions were all wrong, and by God enough was enough. Forgetting all about how a sudden movement might make today’s nut get excited and shoot me in the head, I turned around in the seat and said, “Lady, I don’t know who you are, but at least I know it. You don’t know who I am either, but you think you know who I am, and that screws things up entirely because I’m not him. Whoever he is. I’m me.”

She was sitting there in the back seat with her knees and ankles together, shoulders hunched a little, gun hand held in close to her breasts, the little pearl-handled automatic pointing approximately at my nose. She continued to look at me for a few more seconds, and then a frown began on her face, first with a vertical line in the middle of her forehead, then spreading out to curve down her eyebrows, and finally covering her entire face. She said, “What?”

“I don’t know where Louise is,” I said. “If by Louise you mean Tommy McKay’s wife, I don’t know where she is. If you mean any other Louise, I don’t know any other Louise.”

“Then what were you doing at the apartment?” She didn’t ask that as though she wanted an answer, she asked it in the style of somebody zinging in the irrefutable proof that I’m a liar.

I said, “Looking for Louise.”

“Why?”

“None of your business.”

“She killed him, you know,” she said, acting as though she hadn’t heard my last answer. Which was just as well, since I hadn’t intended it. It just popped out. With those hoods last night I’d never for a second lost my awareness of their guns and the threat and the danger, but with this girl it was hard to keep in mind. She was pointing a gun at me and all, but it was almost irrelevant, as though it wasn’t really what we were doing at all.

My belated remembrance of her gun obscured what she’d said for a few seconds, so my take on that was belated too. Then I said, “You mean Mrs. McKay? She killed her husband?”

“You mean you don’t know it?” Said sneeringly, as though I was being a really obvious liar now.

“She didn’t act it,” I said. “I found the body, you know.”

“I know.” Full of menacing overtones.

I rushed on. “And Mrs. McKay didn’t act like any murderess,” I said. “It would have been tough for her to put on an act like that.”

“So you say.”

“Well,” I said, “I was there.” Gun or no gun, I was finding it possible to talk reasonably to this girl now that I was facing her.

“That was very convenient, wasn’t it?” she said. “You being there.”

“Not very,” I said. “I didn’t think it was convenient at all.”

“You and Louise could cover for each other, lie for each other.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Me and Louise? Me? Louise? Look at me, will you? Have you ever seen Louise?”

“Of course I have,” she said. “She’s my sister-in-law.”

“You’re Tommy’s sister?”

“I’m the only one he has,” she said. Her face began to work, as though she was fighting back tears. “There’s nobody else anymore,” she said. Biting her lower lip, blinking rapidly, she looked away out the side window. She’d obviously forgotten all about the gun.

I don’t know why I did it. Because she’d forgotten about the gun, I suppose. And because there’s a touch of Robert Mitchum in all of us, or anyway the desire to be Robert Mitchum is in all of us. Anyway, I made a grab for the gun.

“Oh!” she said, and jumped a foot, and for a few seconds there were four hands on the gun and we were both squirming around, trying to get it, and then it went off.

You talk about loud. Inside that cab, with all the windows shut except the vent on my side, that noise had nothing to do but ricochet, which it did, forever. It was ten times worse than having some clown explode a blown-up paper bag next to your ear, which up until then I’d always thought of as the world’s loudest and most obnoxious noise.

Well, it isn’t. Shooting off a gun in a closed car takes the palm, hands down. It immobilized the two of us for maybe half a minute, both of us staring, both of us open-mouthed, neither of us moving a muscle.

Happily, I recovered first. I grabbed the gun away from her, pointed it at myself, pointed it at her instead, and said, “All right, now. All right.”

She blinked, very slowly, like a mechanical doll coming to life, and said, in a tiny voice, “Are you hurt?”

That hadn’t occurred to me. Only the noise had occurred to me, not the fact that in conjunction with the noise a bullet had left this stupid gun and gone very rapidly through the air of the automobile to somewhere. To lodge in me? I looked down at myself, saw nothing any redder than usual, looked at her to see if she was dead and we hadn’t noticed, looked up, and saw a smudge in the top of the cab. The cloth up there had a dirty smudge on it, an inch or two across. Looking closely at it you could see a burned-looking tiny hole in the middle of the smudge.

“You put a hole in the cab,” I said.

She looked up at the smudge. “Somebody could have gotten killed,” she said.

“How am I going to explain that?” I asked her. “I signed this cab out, you know.”

“You’ve got the gun!” she screamed, staring at it as though it had just popped into existence this second. Then she threw her arms around her head, stuck her pressed-together knees way up in the air, and cowered back on the seat, rolling herself into as much of a ball as possible in the space available.

I stared at her. I couldn’t figure out what she was up to. She was acting as though she was afraid of me. What the hell for?

I looked at the gun, seeing it myself for what was in some ways the first time. The first time I’d ever seen a gun in my hand, that was a first. And also it was the closest to me I’d ever seen a gun. I’m not counting the ones poked into my back, because I didn’t see them when they were against my back. But this one I’d been holding high enough over the top of the seat so the girl could see it and not do anything crazy. I had the butt resting on the seat top and the barrel pointed generally out the back window, which made it only a couple of inches from my nose. I had to look a little cross-eyed to get it in focus.

How small it was. Handy for pocket or purse, I suppose, a small flat silver metal gun with what I guess was a pearl handle. It was an automatic, I knew that because it looked like the baby brother of Colt automatics you see in the movies. It looked about big enough to shoot spitballs, but it had sure put a hole in the cab roof.

I looked back at the girl and she was still crunched up against the back of the seat, nothing but black-booted knees and orange-furred elbows, with here and there a glint of blond hair peeking through. I said, “What are you doing?”

She said something, so muffled it took me a few seconds to make it out: “You’re going to kill me.”

“I am not,” I said. I was insulted. I said, “What would I do a thing like that for?”

Arms and legs shifted a little, enough for a blue eye to be seen way down in there. With a sort of brave but hopeless defiance she said, “Because I know too much.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

Legs lowered, arms shifted some more, and her head emerged like a beautiful turtle. “You can’t fool me,” she said, still with that scared defiance. “You’re an accomplice and I know it. I’d give twelve to one on it.”

“Done,” I said, and without thinking I reached my hand over for a shake, forgetting the gun was in it. Immediately the turtle popped back into her orange shell. I said, “Hey! I’m not going to shoot you. I was just taking the bet.”

She inched out again, mistrustful. “You were?”

I switched the gun to my left hand and held the right out for her to shake. “See? You give me twelve to one odds on a lock, you’ve got yourself a bet. How much? Ten bucks? Make it easy on yourself.”

The legs this time slowly lowered all the way to the floor. She kept looking at me, studying me, very doubtful and mistrustful, as though wondering if somebody had stuck in a ringer. She looked at my hand, but she didn’t touch it. Instead she said, “You are Chester Conway, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. I pointed the gun at my identification on the right side of the dashboard. “There’s my name and picture,” I said. “You’ll have to take my word that’s my picture.”

“And you are the one who found my brother dead.”

“Sure.”

“And you’re the one who’s been having an affair with Louise.”

“Whoa, now,” I said. “Not me, honey. Now you’re thinking about somebody else. I didn’t even know that woman’s first name until yesterday.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?” she said, but the scorn was mixed with doubt.

“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I don’t much care. And what I think I ought to do now is turn you over to the cops.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she said, still with that touch of doubt showing through.

“Why not?” I said. “You’re the one pulled the gun on me.”

“What if I tell them what I know?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “They’re liable to find out if it’s true before they go running up six-dollar meters and sticking guns in my neck.” I waggled the gun at her. “You get in the middle of the seat,” I said, “where I can see you in the rear-view mirror.”

“I don’t—”

“Move,” I said. I’d just heard a click, reminding me that the meter was still running. Another six bucks down the drain.

She licked her lips and began to look worried. “Maybe—” she said.

“Move now,” I said. “I don’t want to listen to any more. I’m supposed to be working now. Go on, move!”

She moved, being somewhat sulky about it, and when she got to the middle of the seat she sat up, folded her arms, gave me a defiant glare, and said, “All right. We’ll see who’s bluffing.”

“Nobody’s bluffing,” I told her. “You just misread your hole card, that’s all.” I turned around, shut off the meter, flicked on the Off Duty sign, made sure the gun was safe on the seat beside me against my hip, made sure I could see her plainly in the mirror, and we took off.