“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.
10
“Maybe I was wrong,” she said in a very small voice.
I was just making my left at Flatlands Avenue, the nearest police station I knew of being on Glenwood Road the other side of Rockaway Parkway. Since even after a snowstorm Brooklyn is full of elderly black Buicks being driven slowly but stupidly by short skinny women with their hair in rollers, I finished making the turn before looking in the rear-view mirror, where I saw my passenger looking very contrite. She met my eye in the mirror and said, “I’m sorry.”
“You’re s
orry,” I said. “You threatened me with a gun, you shot a hole in the roof, you accused me of all sorts of things, and now you’re sorry. Sit back!” I shouted, because she’d started to lean forward, her hand reaching for my shoulder, and I didn’t trust her an inch. That contrite look and little-girl voice could all be a gag.
She sat back. “It made sense,” she said, “before I saw you. Before we had our talk. But now I believe you.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Because,” she said, “if you were having an affair with Louise, and if you did help her kill Tommy, you wouldn’t dare leave me alive now. You couldn’t take a chance on having me running around loose.”
“I can’t take a chance on having you running around loose,” I said. “That’s why we’re on our way to the cops.”
She acted like she wanted to lean forward again, but controlled herself. “Please don’t,” she said. “I was desperate, and I did foolish things, but please don’t turn me up.”
Up? Most people would say “turn me in,” given the situation; “turn me up” was a very insidey gangland way of saying the same thing. And come to think of it, that wasn’t the first odd thing she’d said. Like quoting me twelve to one on my having helped kill her brother. Like talking about seeing who was bluffing when I said I’d take her to the cops.
It looked like she was really Tommy’s sister.
And that might mean, it suddenly occurred to me, that she might know who Tommy’s boss was. Maybe I wouldn’t have to look for Tommy’s wife at all anymore.
This part of Flatlands Avenue is lined with junkyards with wobbly wooden fences. I pulled to the side of the road, next to one of these fences, and stopped the car. Then I turned around and said to her, “I tell you what. I’ll make you a deal.”
She got the instant wary look of the gambler in her eye. “What kind of a deal?”
“There’s something I want to know,” I told her. “You tell me and I’ll forget the whole thing. I’ll let you out of the cab and that’ll be the end of it.”
“What do you want to know?” She was still wary.
“I’ll give you the background first,” I said, and quickly sketched in the incident of Purple Pecunia. I left out the business about the hoods last night, seeing no purpose in opening that can of worms right now, and finished by saying, “So what I want to know is, who do I collect from now that I can’t collect from your brother?”
“Oh,” she said. “Is that why you’ve been hanging around the apartment?”
“I haven’t exactly been hanging around,” I said. “I’ve been over there a couple times is all.”
“Three times yesterday and once today,” she said. “I’ve been waiting in the apartment for Louise to show up so I could confront her—”
“With the gun?”
“With the fact that I know she’s guilty,” she said fiercely.
“Well, you’re wrong,” I told her. “Nobody on earth could do an acting job like that. When Tommy’s wife saw him dead there, she had hysterics, and I mean hysterics.”
“It could have been guilt,” she said. “And nervousness.”
“Sure,” I said. “Only it wasn’t.”
“Then why did she disappear?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she’s staying with some relative, maybe she doesn’t want to be around the apartment now.”
She shook her head. “No. I called both her brothers and they don’t know where she is either. And I had to make all the arrangements for the funeral and the wake myself.”
“Wake? When?”
“It starts this evening,” she said. “At six.” She looked at her watch.
I said, “What time is it?”
She looked at her watch again. Did you ever notice how people do that? They look at their watch and a second later you ask them what time it is and they don’t know. She said, “Twenty after four.”
I said, “I’m losing a whole day’s work because of you. Not to mention the six bucks you ran up on the meter.”
“I’ll pay you for that,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m not a stiff.”
“Never mind that,” I said. “Just tell me who Tommy’s boss was and where I find him.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Okay, sister,” I said, turning around to the wheel again. “It’s the hoosegow for you.”
“No!”
I waited, both hands on the steering wheel. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d tell you if I knew, honest I would.”
“Tommy’s sister would know,” I said. “Especially if she was as close to him as you claim.”
“I didn’t claim to be close,” she said. “I just came to town because he was killed.”
“From where?”
“Vegas.”
I turned around again. “You live in Las Vegas?”
“For a couple of years now,” she said. “Can I show you something out of my purse?”
“If you move very slow,” I said.
She moved very slow, and produced an airline ticket from her purse, which she handed over to me. It was TWA, it was the return half of a round-trip ticket between Las Vegas and New York, it showed she’d come in yesterday morning, and it gave her name as Abigail McKay.
I said, “Abigail?”
“Abbie,” she said.
“That’s very funny,” I said. “Abigail. You don’t look like an Abigail.”
“I’m not an Abigail,” she said. She was getting irritated. “Everybody calls me Abbie.”
But I was enjoying needling her about it, maybe because of the trouble I have about Chester, maybe just to get some of my own back with her. “Abigail,” I said, grinning. “It’s hard to think of you as an Abigail.”
“Well, you’re a Chester, all right,” she said. “You’re a Chester if there ever lived one.”
“That’s it,” I said, twisted around, started the car, and we moved out onto Flatlands Avenue again.
“I think you stink,” she said.
“The feeling is mutual,” I said. “In fact, the feeling is para-mutual.”
In the mirror I could see her looking blank. “What?”
It had been a pun, on pari-mutuel, of course, the betting system at race tracks. I’d meant “para” like more than or above, like parapsychology or paratrooper. But try explaining a pun. Explanations never get a laugh. So I didn’t say anything.
We were stopped by a traffic light at East 103rd Street. We were into an area of brick projects and fake-brick row houses now, the streets full of kids throwing snowballs at each other. As we sat there waiting for the light to change, kids flowing all around us, she said, “I’m sorry. I just hate that business about Abigail.”
“I hate that business about Chester,” I said.
“What do people call you?”
“They call me Chester,” I said. “I want them to call me Chet, but nobody does.”
“I will,” she said. “If you don’t call me Abigail I won’t call you Chester.”
I looked at her in the mirror and I saw she was really trying to be friends, and I realized that she did have the same thing about her name that I had about mine, and it had been kind of mean of me to make a thing about it. “It’s a deal,” I said.
She said, “Would you please don’t take me to the police, Chet? If you do, there won’t be anybody to look for Tommy’s murderer, not anybody at all.”
Watching her in the mirror, seeing that her chin was trembling and she was on the verge of tears, I said, “What about the cops? Let them find the murderer.”
“Somebody who killed a bookie? Are you kidding? How hard do you think they’re going to work?”
“They’re still working now,” I said. “One of them came out to see me just this morning. They don’t suspect me of anything, by the way.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “Not anymore. And I’m not saying the police won’t do all the routine stuff. They’ll do all that, they’ll do enough to be
sure the record looks good on paper, but they won’t really try, not for a bookie, and you know it as well as I do.”
Somebody honked. I looked through the windshield and the light was green. I went across the intersection and found a hydrant to park next to in the middle of the block. I stopped the cab again, turned around, and said, “All right, maybe. The police aren’t going to work as hard as if it was the Governor, I’ll grant you that. But what do you know about any of it? You’re running around with a lot of dumb ideas in your head, leaping to conclusions, waving a gun around, acting like a nut. You aren’t going to solve any murders, all you’ll do is get yourself in trouble.”
“I was wrong about you,” she said. “I admit that. I admit I should have found out more before I made up my mind. But now I’ve learned my lesson, and I’ll be more careful from now on.”
I shook my head. “You don’t get the point. The point is, you don’t know the first thing about detective work. You’re like one of those people goes out to the track, doesn’t know word one about handicapping, and picks the horses with the cute names.”
“Sometimes those people pick a winner,” she said.
“What’s the odds?”
She frowned. “All right. But I’m not wrong about Louise! She’s been having an affair with somebody. Tommy knew about it but he didn’t know who it was. He wrote me months ago about it.”
“Did she ask for a divorce? Did he say no?”
“She didn’t bring anything out in the open,” she said. “Tommy just knew about it, that’s all.”
I shook my head. “There’s no reason for her to kill him,” I said. “It isn’t like she was going to inherit a million dollars. If she wanted to be through with Tommy, all she had to do was pack up and leave.”
“There could be things we don’t know about,” she said.
“My point exactly,” I said. “There could be all sorts of things you don’t know about, and until you find out what they are you can’t be sure about anything. And you certainly can’t go around accusing somebody of murder.”
“Then why did she disappear?” she demanded.
“How do I know? But I’m sure there’s more than one possible explanation. She’s liable to show up at this wake tonight, and you can ask her.”
Somebody Owes Me Money Page 6
