Somebody Owes Me Money

by Donald E. Westlake

  My father had followed me out to the kitchen. “They’ll make a mistake someday,” he said. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

  “Not computers,” I said.

  “Everybody,” he said. “And when they do, I’ll be ready.”

  It is my father’s idea that he is going to beat the insurance companies. As the years have gone by, the insurance companies have competed with one another by presenting more and more complicated insurance packages, the packages getting steadily more intricate and unfathomable, with expanding this and overlapping that and conditional the other. Of course, whatever the package the odds are still with the company. Insurance companies, like the casinos in Las Vegas, are in business to make money, so the edge is always with the house. Except that my father is convinced that sooner or later one of the companies is going to come out with a package with a flaw in it, that the complexities are eventually going to reach the stage where even the company isn’t going to be able to keep up with the implications of the math, and that some company is going to put out a policy where you don’t have to die ahead of time to win. My father’s hobby is looking for that policy. It hasn’t showed up yet, and I don’t believe it ever will, but my father has all the faith and obstinacy of a man with a roulette system, and more often than not I come home to find him and his papers and his adding machine all over the dining-room table.

  Actually, it’s a harmless enough hobby and it does occupy his mind. He’s sixty-three now, and he was forcibly retired from the airplane factory when he was fifty-eight—he worked in the payroll office—and if he didn’t have this insurance thing I don’t know what he’d do with himself. Mom died the year my father retired, and naturally he didn’t want to go off to Fort Lauderdale by himself, so we kept on living at home together, and it’s pretty much worked out. My parents were both thirty-four when I was born, and I was also an only child, so I never knew either of my parents when they were very young and we never did have much of a lively, exuberant household, so things aren’t so much different from the way they always were, except Mom is gone and I’m the one who goes out to work.

  Anyway, while we waited for dinner I told my father about my day, and every once in a while he’d put his head on one side and squint at me and say, “You wouldn’t be telling me tales, would you, Chester?”

  “No,” I’d say, and go on with the story. I finished by saying, “And the upshot of it is, I didn’t collect my nine hundred thirty dollars.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” he said.

  “It sure is,” I said. “I wonder who I collect from, now that Tommy’s dead.”

  “I wonder where you go to get the money now,” he said.

  “That’s what I said,” I said.

  He raised his head and sniffed. “Aren’t those dinners ready yet?”

  I looked at the clock. “Five more minutes. Anyway, I’ll call Tommy’s wife tomorrow and ask her. She should know.”

  “Ask her what?”

  “Where I go to collect my money,” I said.

  He nodded. “Ah,” he said.

  We went on in and had dinner.

  5

  I got up late the next morning, and decided not to go to work till the afternoon. I called Tommy’s wife around noon and she answered the phone on the second ring and I said, “Hello, Mrs. McKay? This is Chet.”

  “Who?”

  “Chet,” I said. “You know, Chet Conway.”

  “Oh,” she said. At least she didn’t call me Chester. She said, “What do you want?”

  I said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. McKay, I know I shouldn’t disturb you at a time like this, and I wouldn’t under normal circumstances, but the fact of the matter is I’m sort of strapped for cash right now.”

  “What is this?” she said. She sounded irritable.

  I said, “Well, the fact is, Mrs. McKay, I went over to your place yesterday to pick up the money from a bet I made that came in, and naturally I didn’t get to collect. So I was wondering if you could put me in touch with whoever I should see now to get my money.”

  “What? What do you want?” Now she sounded as though I’d just woken her up or something and she couldn’t comprehend what I was talking about.

  I said, “I want to know where to go to collect my money, Mrs. McKay.”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well—” I was at a loss. I floundered for a second or two and then I said, “Don’t you know who Tommy’s boss was?”

  “His what?”

  “Mrs. McKay, Tommy worked for somebody. He worked for a syndicate or somebody, he didn’t run that book of his all by himself.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  I said, “Is it because I’m asking you on the phone? Listen, could I come by later on? Are you going to be home?”

  “You’d better forget it,” she said. “Just forget it.”

  “What do you mean, forget it? It’s almost a thousand dollars!”

  Suddenly a different voice was on the line, a male voice, saying, “Who’s calling?”

  A cop. It had to be a cop. I said, “I’ll talk to Mrs. McKay later,” and hung up. So that was why she hadn’t wanted to tell me anything.

  I wondered how long it was going to be before I could find out. I needed that money in the next couple of days.

  I hung around the house till about two in the afternoon, then finally got up the energy to go to work. I read about myself in the News on the subway, under the headline BOOKIE FOUND SLAIN IN APARTMENT. It said Tommy was a known bookmaker with a long history of arrests; it said he’d been shot three times in the back with dum-dum bullets, the kind of bullet that has been creased on the nose so it’ll expand when it hits something, which was why his chest had been so smashed up from where the bullets had come out the other side; and it said the body had been found by “Chester Conway of 8344 169th Place, Jamaica, Queens. Mr. Conway stated he was a friend of the dead man.”

  That made me feel a little odd. It’s one thing to gamble a bit, put down a bet with a bookmaker from time to time, but it’s another thing to read about yourself in the Daily News, listed as the friend of a murdered bookie. All of a sudden I felt like a Mafia hoodlum or something, and I imagined friends of mine reading that in the paper, and I was both embarrassed and—I hate to admit this—secretly pleased. We all of us would like a dramatic secret life that nobody knows about, that’s the whole idea behind Superman and Batman and the Lone Ranger, and here the Daily News was giving me one for free, by implication. All of a sudden I was the kind of guy who knew secret entrances to apparently abandoned warehouses, unknown passageways in the very walls of the apartment itself, meetings at midnight, people who wore masks and never gave their right names. It made me feel very special, sitting there on the train, surrounded by people reading the News and little knowing that in their midst was the very man they were reading about, the ubiquitous Chester Conway, 8344 169th Place, Jamaica, Queens.

  Nobody at the garage had read the paper, apparently, or they hadn’t made the connection, or maybe they were just being very cool. Anyway, nobody said anything. I went in, signed out my car, and took off.

  The first place I went was Tommy’s place. I threw on the Off Duty sign as soon as I was out of sight of the garage and went straight down to 46th Street. There weren’t any police cars stopped out front, so I parked by a hydrant—there are no parking places in New York, the last one was taken in 1948, but a cab stopped for a short time by a hydrant is usually left alone—and I went over and rang the bell, but there wasn’t anybody home, so I went back to the cab and at last to work.

  I tried a couple of the midtown hotels and jackpotted right away with a fare to Kennedy. Unfortunately, the only thing to do after that is take another fare back to Manhattan, which I did, and then hacked around the city the rest of the afternoon and evening.

  I tried Tommy’s place again around seven and there still wasn’t anybody home, and there kept on being nobody at home when I tried for the thi
rd time around eleven.

  I turned the cab in a little after midnight and took the subway home. I got to the house shortly before one, seeing the light in the kitchen that my father leaves for me when I’m out late, and I went up on the front porch, stopped in front of the door, put my hand in my pocket for my keys, and somebody stuck something hard against my back. Then somebody said, in a very soft insinuating voice, “Be nice.”

  6

  I was nice. I stayed where I was, facing the door a foot from my nose, not moving any parts of my body, and the hard thing stopped pressing against my back, and then hands patted me all over. When they were done, the voice said, “That’s a good boy. Now turn around and go down to the sidewalk.”

  I turned around, seeing two bulky guys in bulky winter clothing and dark hats on the porch with me, and I went between them and down the stoop and down to the sidewalk. I felt them behind me, coming in my wake.

  At the sidewalk they told me to turn right and walk toward the corner, which I did. Almost to the corner there was a dark Chevrolet parked by the curb, and they told me to get into the back seat, which I did. I was terrified, and I didn’t know who they were or what they wanted, and all I could think of to do was obey their orders.

  One of them got into the back seat with me and shut the door. He took out a gun, which glinted dark and wicked in his lap in the little light that came in from the corner streetlamp, and I sat as close to the other door as I could, staring at the gun in disbelief. A gun? For me? Who did they think I was?

  I wanted to say something, tell them some sort of mistake was being made, but I was afraid to. I had this conviction that all I had to do was make a sound, any sound at all, and it would break the spell, it would be the signal for carnage and destruction.

  If you spend much time driving a cab around New York City, especially at night, sooner or later you’ll find yourself thinking about anti-cabby violence, and what you would do if anybody ever pulled a gun or a knife on you to rob you in the cab. A long time ago I decided I was no hero, I wouldn’t argue. Anybody with a knife or a gun in his hand is boss as far as I’m concerned. It’s like the old saying: The hand that cradles the rock rules the world.

  One time a guy who works out of the same garage as me had a knife pulled on him by a rider, and he turned around and disarmed the guy and handed him over to the nearest cop. The police department thanked him, and on his identification displayed on the dashboard they rubber-stamped a notification about how he’d been given this special police citation, but all I could do was look at him and wonder what he’d been thinking of. The guy with the knife had been a junkie wanting money, and this cabby had eighteen dollars in the cab at the time. Eighteen dollars. Frankly, I think my life is worth more than eighteen dollars and a rubber stamp.

  Life. I suddenly wondered if these were the guys who killed Tommy. Were they going to kill me?

  Maybe nobody was supposed to bet on Purple Pecunia. Maybe they’re killing all outsiders that bet on that rotten horse. But that couldn’t be, it didn’t make any sense at all. Think of all the hunch betters, all the people that bet horses by their names. “Oh, look at this one, Harry, Purple Pecunia! Ain’t that cute, Harry? Let’s put two bucks on this one, Harry! Aw, come on, Harry!”

  But these two still could be the guys that killed Tommy, maybe for some other reason entirely. I might not know why they did it, or why I was involved in whatever they were up to, but I wouldn’t have to know why. Maybe Tommy hadn’t known why either.

  When the second one opened the door to get in behind the wheel, the interior light went on and I got my first look at the one with me in the back seat. He looked like the sadistic young SS man in the movies, the blond one that smiles and is polite to ladies but his face is slightly pockmarked. He was looking at me like a butterfly collector looking at a butterfly, and I looked away quickly without memorizing his features, not having any need or desire to memorize his features. I faced front, and the driver had black hair between hat and collar. That was all I wanted to know about him, too.

  We drove away from my neighborhood, and quickly into neighborhoods I didn’t know, and through them, and beyond. They never took the car on any of the parkways, they stayed on the local streets, and for a while we were under an El. Now and again something would look vaguely familiar, but not enough for me to be sure. An occasional car passed us, minding its own business, or sometimes an empty bus went blooping along all lit up inside like a diner, but mostly the streets were dark and empty all around us.

  Snowflakes began to drift down, one at a time, fat and lacy, in no hurry to land anywhere. So maybe we were going to get that big snow after all, the one that was four days overdue already. Here it was the middle of January and so far this winter we hadn’t had even one monstrous horrible snowstorm to tie up traffic and give people heart attacks.

  I found myself wondering whether I’d be able to work tomorrow or not, there being no point hacking around New York in the middle of a snowstorm, and then I realized that was a ridiculous thing to be wondering about. I might not work tomorrow, but it wouldn’t be the weather’s fault.

  Should I try to make a run for it? Should I leap from the car one time when it was stopped at a red light? Should I go running zigzag under the streetlights, looking for alleys, maybe an open tavern, some place to hide and wait for these guys to give up and go away?

  No. It seemed to me if I were to reach out and put my hand on the door handle beside me, it would more than likely be the last thing I ever did on this earth. And although it was possible these two were taking me for a one-way ride, there wasn’t any point rushing the finish.

  Besides, how could I be sure they wanted to kill me? Grasping at any consolation at all, I told myself if all they wanted was to kill me they could have done it back at the house and gone on about their business in perfect safety. If they were bringing me with them, it must mean they had something else in mind.

  Maybe they wanted to torture me to death.

  Now why did I have to think a thought like that?

  Trying to think of other thoughts to think, I sat there while the car continued down one dark anonymous street after another until it suddenly made a right turn in the middle of a block. An open garage doorway in a gray concrete block wall loomed before us, blackness inside it, and we drove through and stopped. Behind us I could hear the garage door rattling down, and when that noise stopped, the lights abruptly went on.

  We were in a parking garage. Rows of black low-nosed four-eyed automobiles gave me the fish-eye. Iron posts painted olive-green held up the low ceiling, in which half a dozen fluorescent lights were spaced at distances a little too far apart to give full lighting. Shadows and dim areas seemed to spread here and there, like fog.

  There was nobody in sight. The driver got out of the car and opened the door beside me. The other one said, “Climb out slow.”

  I climbed out slow, and he followed me. The driver pointed straight ahead and I walked straight ahead. It was a wide clear lane with a rank of cars on each side, the cars facing one another with all those blank headlights, me walking between them down the gauntlet. I kept feeling eyes on me, as though I were being stared at, but I knew it was only the cars. I couldn’t help it, I had to terrify myself even more with an image of one of those cars suddenly leaping into life, all four headlights blaring on, the engine roaring, the car slashing out of its slot to run me down like an ant on a racetrack. I walked hunched, facing only front, blinking frequently, and the cars remained quiet.

  At the end there was a wall, and a flight of olive-green metal steps against the wall going upward to the right. As I neared it, I was told, “Go up the stairs.”

  I went up the stairs. Our six feet made complicated echoing dull rhythms on the rungs, and I thought of Robert Mitchum. What would Robert Mitchum do now, what would he do in a situation like this?

  No question of it. Robert Mitchum, with the suddenness of a snake, would abruptly whirl, kick the nearest hood in the jaw, and vau
lt over the railing and down to the garage floor. Meantime, the kicked hood would have fallen backward into the other one, and the two of them would go tumbling down the steps, out of the play long enough for Mitchum either to (a) make it to the door and out of the building and thus successfully make his escape, or (b) get into the hood’s car, in which the keys would have been left, back it at top speed through the closed garage door, and take off with a grand grinding of gears, thus successfully making his escape and getting their car in the bargain.

  But what if I spun around like that, and the guy with the gun was Robert Mitchum? What would he do then? Easy. He’d duck the kick and shoot me in the head.

  I plodded up the stairs.

  At the top was a long hall lined with windows on both sides. The windows on the left looked out on a blacktop loading area floodlit from somewhere ahead of me. The windows on the right, interspaced with windowed doors, looked in on offices and storage rooms, all in darkness except for one room far down at the end of the hall. Yellow light spilled out there, angled across the floor. There was no sound.

  I stopped at the head of the stairs, but a hand against the middle of my back pushed me forward, not gently, not harshly. I walked down the hall toward the yellow light.

  It was an office, the door open. Inside, a heavyset man in an overcoat with a velvet collar sat at a scruffy wooden desk and smoked a cigarette in an ivory holder. His head seemed too large for his body, a big squared-off block matted with black fur everywhere but in front. His face shone a little, as though he’d been touched up with white enamel, and his heavy jaw was blue with a thick mass of beard pressing outward against the skin. He sat half-turned away from the desk, a black velvet hat pushed back from his forehead, his one forearm resting negligently on the papers on the desk top, as though to imply this wasn’t his office really, he was above scraggly offices like this, he’d just borrowed this one from some poor relation for the occasion.