Somebody Owes Me Money

by Donald E. Westlake

He looked over at me when I stopped in the doorway, his eye a pale blue, blank and unblinking. It was as though that wasn’t really his eye, his actual eye was hidden behind that one, was looking through that one at me without giving me a chance to look back.

  The hand in my back again sent me into the room. I stopped in front of the desk, looking at the man sitting there. The other two stayed behind me, out of my sight. I heard the door close with a little tick of finality, like the last shovel-pat over a filled-in grave.

  The man at the desk took the cigarette and holder from his mouth and pointed with them at a wooden chair beside the desk. “Sit down.” His voice was husky, but emotionless, not really threatening.

  I sat down. I put my hands in my lap, not knowing what to do with them. I met his eye—his eye’s eye—and wished I could control my blinking.

  He glanced at one of the papers littering the desk, saying, “How long you been working for Napoli?”

  I said, “Who?”

  He looked at me again and his face finally took on an expression: saddened humorous wisdom. “Don’t waste my time, fella,” he said. “We know who you are.”

  “I’m Chester Conway,” I said, struck by the sudden hope that this whole thing could be a case of mistaken identity.

  It wasn’t. “I know,” he said. “And you work for Solomon Napoli.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe there’s another Chester Conway,” I said. “Did you look in the phone books for all the boroughs? A few years ago I used to get calls—”

  He slapped his palm on the desk. It wasn’t very loud, but it shut me up. “You pal around with Irving Falco,” he said.

  “Irving Falco,” I repeated, trying to think where I knew the name from. Then I said, “Sure! Sid Falco! I’m in a poker game with him.”

  “Irving Falco,” he insisted.

  I nodded. I was suddenly and irrationally happy, having something I knew about to deal with at last. It didn’t change things, it didn’t explain things, but at least I could join the conversation. “That’s the one,” I said. “But we call him Sid on account of a movie with—”

  “But his name’s Irving,” he said. He looked as though he was starting to lose his patience.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “All right,” he said. “And Irving Falco works for Solomon Napoli.”

  “If you say so. I don’t know him well, just at the poker game, we don’t talk about—”

  He pointed at me. “And you work for Solomon Napoli,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Honest. I’m a cabdriver, I work for the V. S. Goth Service Corporation, Eleventh Avenue and—”

  “We know about that,” he said. “We know all about you. We know you got a straight job, and you lose twice that much at the cards every week. Plus you play the ponies, plus—”

  “Oh, now,” I said. “I don’t lose all the time. I’ve been having a run of bad cards, that could happen to any—”

  “Shut up,” he said.

  I shut up.

  “The only question,” he said, “is what you do for Napoli.” He made a show of looking at his watch, a big shiny thing with a heavy gold band. “You got ten seconds,” he said.

  “I don’t work for him,” I said. The young blond SS man came into my line of vision on the right.

  Nobody said anything. We all looked at the heavyset man looking at his watch, till he shook his head, lowered his arm, looked over at the SS man, and said, “Bump him.”

  “I don’t work for anybody named Napoli,” I said. I was getting frantic. The SS man came over and took my right arm, and the other guy came from behind me and took my left arm, and they lifted me out of the chair. “I don’t even know anybody named Napoli!” I shouted. “Honest to God!”

  They lifted me high enough so only my toes were touching the floor, and then they walked me quickly toward the door, me yelling all the time, not believing any of this could possibly be happening.

  We got through the doorway and then the man at the desk cut through all my hollering with one soft-voiced word: “Okay.”

  Immediately the other two turned me around and brought me back to the chair and sat me down again. My upper arms hurt and I was hoarse and my nerves were shot and I figured my hair was probably white, but I was alive. I swallowed, and blinked a lot, and looked at the man behind the desk.

  He nodded heavily. “I believe you,” he said. “We checked you out, and we saw where you buddied up with Falco, and we figured maybe we ought to find out. So you don’t work for Napoli.”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “That’s good,” he said. “How’s Louise taking it, do you know?”

  I experienced a definite sinking feeling. Here we go again, I thought, and very reluctantly I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know who you mean.”

  He looked sharply at me, frowning as though this time I was telling a lie for no sensible reason at all. “Come on,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I really meant it. “I don’t want to get in trouble with you or anything, but I don’t know anybody named Louise.”

  He sat back and smirked at me, as though I’d just made a lewd admission. “So you were having a thing with her, huh? That’s what it is, huh?”

  I said, “Excuse me, but no. I don’t have a girlfriend right now, and I can’t remember ever going out with a girl named Louise. Maybe in high school one time, I don’t know.”

  The smirk gradually shifted back to the frown. He studied me for a long minute, and then he said, “That don’t make any sense.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. My shoulders were hunching more and more. By the time I got out of here, they’d probably be covering my ears and I’d never hear again.

  He said, “You knew McKay well enough to go around to his place, but you don’t know his wife’s first name. That don’t make any sense at all.”

  “Tommy McKay? Is that his wife?” I suddenly felt twice as nervous as before, because obviously I should know Tommy’s wife’s name, and anything at all I could think of to say right now would have to sound phony.

  The man at the desk nodded heavily. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s his wife. You never met her, huh?”

  “Oh, I met her,” I said. “Sometimes she’d come to the door when I went over there, or she’d answer the phone when I called. But we never talked or anything, we never had any conversation.”

  “McKay never said, ‘Here’s my wife, Louise’?”

  I shook my head. “Usually,” I said, “I wouldn’t even go into the apartment. I’d hand him some money, or he’d hand me some, and that’d be it. The couple of times I was in there, his wife wasn’t home. And he never introduced us. I was a customer, that’s all. We never saw each other socially or anything.”

  He seemed dubious, but no longer one hundred percent disbelieving.

  Another part of what he’d been saying abruptly caught up with me, and I said, “Hey!”

  Everybody jumped and looked startled and wary and dangerous.

  I hunched some more. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking about what you said, that’s all.”

  They all relaxed.

  I said, “About me having a thing with Tommy’s wife. I mean, that’s just impossible. She’s not—I mean, she and me—it just wouldn’t—”

  “Okay,” he said. He looked tired and disgusted all of a sudden. “You’re clean,” he said.

  “Well, sure,” I said. I looked around at them all. “Is that what you wanted to know? Did you think I killed Tommy?”

  They didn’t bother to answer me. The man at the desk said, “Take him home.” What beautiful words!

  The SS man said to me, “Up.”

  “All right,” I said. I got quickly to my feet, wanting to be out of there before anybody changed anybody’s mind. Up till a few seconds ago I hadn’t counted on getting out of here at all.

  This time they didn’t grab my arms. I walked of my own accord to the door, and as I was stepping through, the man at the desk
said, “Wait.”

  Run for it? Ho ho. I turned around and looked at the three of them.

  The man at the desk said, “You don’t talk to the cops. About this.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Of course not. I mean, nothing happened, right? What should I talk to the cops for?”

  I was babbling. I made myself stop, I made myself turn around, I made myself walk down the hall and down the stairs and down the gauntlet of cars and over to the Chevrolet. I got into the back seat without anybody telling me. Looking at the dashboard, I saw the keys had been left there after all, so maybe Robert Mitchum does know best.

  The other two got into the car, same seating as before, and behind us the door rattled upward. We backed out, and they drove me home. The trip seemed shorter, through streets that were now even emptier.

  The snow was increasing. It was still slow and lazy, but there were more flakes, and they were starting to stick. A thin white coating of confectioners’ sugar covered the black streets. They let me off in front of the house. “Thank you,” I said as I got out, as though they’d just given me a lift home, and then felt foolish, and then was afraid I’d slammed the door too hard, and then walked quickly into the house while they drove leisurely away.

  Usually I’m a beer man, but my father is a Jack Daniel’s man, and this was a Jack Daniel’s moment. Two ice cubes and some Tennessee mash in a jelly glass, a few minutes of sitting quietly, sipping quietly, at the kitchen table, and slowly my overwound mainspring began to relax its tension a little.

  Now that I could think it over, in safety and solitude, I saw what had happened. Those three guys had to be from the gambling syndicate Tommy worked for. The syndicate, not itself having had Tommy killed, had wanted to know who had done for one of its employees. Apparently they suspected a man named Solomon Napoli, God alone knew why, and they must have read in the News about me finding the body, and they decided to check me out, and they saw the poker game connection with Sid Falco—I hadn’t known he was involved in anything shady—and the rest followed.

  But then to think I was having an affair with Tommy’s wife. Louise? Louise. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with the woman, she’s not bad-looking or anything, but she’s skinny as a telephone pole and about ten years older than me and every time I’ve seen her she’s worn bargain-basement dresses and heavy shoes, and her hair is usually wrapped up in so many huge pink plastic rollers she looks like a refugee from a science-fiction movie.

  Well. The man at the desk, the important one, had seemed convinced at the end there that I was innocent, so that should finish it. I downed the last of the Jack Daniel’s, put the glass in the sink, switched off the light, and went upstairs in the dark to my bedroom, where it occurred to me I could have asked those people tonight who I should see now about collecting my money. Damn. Well, tomorrow I’d go see Tommy’s wife. Louise.

  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 undoubt- edly 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.
<
br />   “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—”