“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.
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 an
swer. 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.
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 approximatel
y 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.”
Somebody Owes Me Money Page 5
