She drove the rest of the way maybe a little too fast and hard, because she was angry, but nothing outlandish. I spoke to her in monosyllables from time to time, giving her directions to my house, but other than that we didn’t talk at all.
When she pulled to a stop in front of my house, I said coldly, “Thanks for the lift.” If she could be hard-nosed, so could I.
“Any time,” she said coldly. So could she.
I opened the door, the interior light went on, I leaned toward the opening, and somewhere there was a backfire. Almost simultaneously, something in the car went koot and something fluffed the hair on the back of my head.
I looked around, bewildered, and saw a starred round hole in the windshield. “Hey,” I said.
Abbie yelled, “Shut the door! The light, the light, shut the door!”
I wasn’t thinking fast enough. I looked at her, confused, meaning to ask her what was going on, and then something very hard hit me all around the head and all the lights everywhere clicked out.
13
I thought: I’ve been drinking. It was the only explanation I could think of for the head I had. I thought it was morning, and I was waking up in the usual way, but with the kind of splitting headache I get from drinking Scotch or bourbon. I knew the cure was two aspirins and a quart of orange juice followed by another thirty minutes in the sack, but getting out of bed long enough to start the cure was going to be difficult. In fact, impossible, and as you recall, the impossible takes a little longer.
I knew one of the worst moments of the morning would be when I opened my eyes. Brightness was already beating against my eyelids, wanting to slice through my eyes and directly into my brain. Even with my eyes closed I was squinting, my face wrinkled up like a chipmunk. Tentatively I inched up one eyelid, testing my capacity to withstand torture, and what I saw made me snap both eyes open wide and lunge upward to a sitting position on the bed.
I was in a strange bed in a strange bedroom in the middle of the night, the ceiling light was on, and a girl in bra and panties, her back to me, was getting something out of a dresser drawer.
“Detective Golderman!” I shouted.
The girl turned around, and it was Abbie. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you? I thought you were out for the night.” Without haste she walked over to the closet and slipped on a robe.
I had too many things to be confused about at once. I said, “What did I say that for?”
Tying the robe’s belt, Abbie said, “What did you call me, anyway?”
“Detective Golderman,” I said, still bewildered.
So was she. She looked down at herself and said, “Detective Golderman?”
Then I got it. “The room,” I said. “This is Tommy’s bedroom.”
“That’s right,” she said.
“The only other time I was ever in here,” I explained, “was when Detective Golderman questioned me after— This is Tommy’s bed!”
“Sure,” she said.
I leaped out of bed.
“You’re naked, Chet,” she said.
I leaped back into bed. “What—what—”
“The doctor and I undressed you,” she said. “He helped me carry you up here.”
“Doctor?” My confusion getting worse and worse, I lifted a hand to my head, meaning to lean my head against it for a minute, and felt cloth. I felt around on my head, and it was covered with cloth and what felt like adhesive tape. I said, “What the heck?”
“You were shot,” she said.
Then it all came back to me. The car stopping, me opening the door, the light coming on, the backfire, the starred hole in the windshield, the fluttering of my hair, Abbie screaming at me, and then the abrupt darkness, as though I was a television set that had been switched off.
I was awed, I was absolutely reverent in my presence. I said, “I was shot?”
“In the head,” she said.
That struck me as impossible. “That’s impossible,” I said. “If I was shot in the head I’d be dead. Or anyway in the hospital.”
Abbie said, “The bullet just skinned you.”
“Skinned?” What an awful image that conjured.
“It didn’t go into your head,” she said, explaining patiently. “It just sort of sideswiped you. On the side of the head there, above your left ear.”
I touched the side of my head above my left ear, and it hurt. Very badly. Underneath the bandages, my head reacted to the touch of my fingers by going twwaaannngg. “Ow,” I said, and left my head alone after that.
Abbie said, “The doctor said it removed some skin and put a little teeny crease in your skull, but you’ll be all—”
“Crease?” It seemed as though my part of the conversation was limited to astonished repetitions of individual words from Abbie’s sentences, but there were so many different things to be baffled about that I hardly knew where to begin, and in the interim I was reduced to recoiling from everything she said.
“Just a little crease,” she said, and held up two fingers very close together. “Hardly anything,” she said. “The doctor said you should stay in bed for a day or two, and after that you should take it easy for a while, that’s all.”
“I shouldn’t be in the hospital?”
“You don’t have to be,” she said. “Honest, Chet, it isn’t really a bad wound at all. The doctor said the heat from the friction of the bullet going by sort of cauterized it right away, and besides that, it bled a lot, which helped to clean it, so there’s—”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said. I put my hand to my head—the front, not the part that twanged—and said, “My head hurts.”
“The doctor gave me some pills to give you,” she said, and went away.
While she was gone I had leisure at last to do some sorting out in the jumble of my mind, and when she came back I was more or less clear on the situation and had a few questions I wanted to ask. I waited till I swallowed the two small green pills with some water, then gave the glass back, thanked her, and said, “What about the police?”
“What about them?” she said. She put the glass down on the dresser and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Didn’t you call them?”
“Good Lord, no,” she said.
“Good Lord, no? Good Lord, why not?”
“Because,” she said, “the mob tried to kill you.”
I was getting confused again. “Excuse me,” I said, “but it seems to me that would be a hell of a good reason for calling the cops. To get police protection, if nothing else.”
She shook her head, saddened a bit by my ignorance. “Chet,” she said, “don’t you know what happens when the mob is after somebody and he goes to the police for police protection?”
“He gets police protection,” I said.
“He does not. More often than not he gets thrown out a window. Haven’t you ever heard of bribery? Payoffs? Crooked policemen? Do you think Tommy managed to run a book in plain sight here in his apartment in the middle of Manhattan without the police being paid off somewhere along the line? Don’t you think Tommy’s bosses have a lot of cops on their payroll, too?”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You’re getting paranoid again. You keep—”
“The last time you said that,” she reminded me, “you got shot in the head.”
I felt myself duck, which was ridiculous. Like the old superstition about three on a match. On the other hand, how many people do you see either light the third cigarette with a new match or go ahead with the original match but then look vaguely nervous for a few minutes afterward? Hundreds. And I’m one of them.
Still, it struck me there was something wrong somewhere. I’d been shot. In the head. How could I be even contemplating not calling the police?
I said, “What do I do instead? For Pete’s sake, they’ll take another shot at me the next time they see me. I can’t go home, I can’t go to work, I can’t even walk down the street.”
“You’re not supposed to, any
way,” she said. “The doctor said you’re supposed to stay in bed for a couple of days, so you stay right here and you’ll be perfectly safe. Nobody knows you’re here. Nobody even knows I’m here.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “I lie around here for two days, and then I go out and get shot.”
“No, you won’t, Chet,” she said. “They won’t be after you any more by then.”
“That’s good news,” I said, “but I believe I have a doubt or two.”
“Well, you shouldn’t,” she said. “Just think about it for a minute.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Chet, don’t be silly. Ask yourself, why did they try to kill you?”
“I don’t want to ask questions like that. I don’t want to think about it.”
“Well, the answer,” she persisted, “is that they still think you had something to do with Tommy’s death. They think you work for that man Napoli or somebody, and you killed Tommy, and so they’re paying Napoli back by killing you.”
“They’re paying Napoli back!”
“That’s the way they’d think,” she said. “An eye for an eye.”
“Yeah, but it’s my eye.”
“But what if they find out,” she said, “that you didn’t have anything to do with killing Tommy? Then they won’t be after you any more.”
“Praise be,” I said. “Only, how are they going to find out this good news?”
“From me,” she said.
“From you?”
“I’m going to find out who the murderer is. I still think Louise had something to do with it—”
“She didn’t.”
“Whether she did or not,” Abbie said, “I’m sure she wasn’t working alone. There’s a man in the case somewhere, the man who actually pulled the trigger. He’s the one I’m going to find.”
“You are?”
“Yes. Then the mob will know it wasn’t you after all, and they’ll leave you alone.”
I shook my head. “I’m not hearing right,” I said. “Everything’s okay because sometime in the next two days you’re going to find Tommy’s murderer and prove he’s the murderer and turn him over to the police and then the mob won’t try to kill me anymore.”
“That’s right,” she said.
“Abbie,” I said. I reached out to where her hand was resting on the blanket near my knee. I put my hand over hers and said, “Abbie, I don’t want to suggest I don’t have perfect faith in you or anything, but face it. You aren’t a detective, you’re a blackjack dealer.”
“Don’t you worry, Chet,” she said. “I’ll find him.” She slipped her hand from under mine, patted mine, and got to her feet. “You go to sleep now,” she said. “We’ll talk some more in the morning.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said. “I’m not tired.”
“The doctor said those pills would make you drowsy.”
The fact was, the pills had made me drowsy, but I was fighting it. “I’m not drowsy,” I said, “and I don’t want to talk in the morning, I want to talk now. I want to talk about what—”
“Chet,” she said. “I’m sorry, maybe you aren’t drowsy, but I am. I was going to take a shower when you woke up, and I really need one. I’m exhausted, I’m sore all over from helping carry you up here, and I’m still sticky.” She made still-sticky wiggles with her fingers.
I said, “Still sticky?”
“Well, you bled all over the place, Chet,” she said. “You should see the car. I don’t know what the Avis people are going to say.”
“Oh,” I said. I suddenly felt very faint, and twice as drowsy as before. I began to blink, blinking because my eyes wanted to be closed and I wanted them to be open.
“I’ll look in on you after I shower,” Abbie said. “And we’ll talk in the morning. Whatever we decide, Chet, it can wait till morning.”
“All right,” I said. I couldn’t struggle against it anymore, I was drowsy. I lay back on the bed, tiredly pulling the covers up to my chin. “See you later,” I murmured.
“See you later,” she said, and through my blinking I saw her in the doorway, pausing to grin at me. “You are cute bare-ass,” she said, and left.
That almost woke me up again. I stared at the doorway for a few seconds until my eyelids grew too heavy to maintain the posture, and then subsided. What a way to talk. Well, a girl who dealt blackjack in Las Vegas for a living, you wouldn’t expect her to be exactly a sheltered maiden. No, neither sheltered nor a maiden.
As my eyes slowly shut, I found myself counting the months. How long had it been since I’d been in bed with a member of the opposition? Six months? Seven months. Not since that girl Rita had last refused to come out to the track with me.
That’s a long time, seven months. I lay there thinking about that, listening to the far-off shush of the shower running, imagining the flesh that water was pouring over, thinking about pouring over that flesh myself sometime maybe, and in an oddly good frame of mind for somebody who had just recently been shot at with bullets I drifted very gradually and pleasantly into a soft and dreamless sleep, not waking till Abbie screamed.
14
I sat up, and the room was full of a man with a gun. He was standing one pace in from the doorway. The light was off now, but gray daylight ebbed in the airshaft window, and unfortunately I could see him. He was wearing a hat and an overcoat and a gun, and the gun was pointed at me, and his eyes were looking at me, and his eyes appeared to be made of slate.
Abbie screamed again, and something crashed. She was in some other room in the apartment, and she was in trouble, but I was convinced I was as good as dead, so I didn’t move.
In that other room something else crashed, and a male voice roared in what sounded like a triplicate combination of anger and surprise and pain. The man with the gun glanced back at the doorway in irritation, then glared at me again and waggled the gun. “Don’t move,” he said, in a voice that was forty percent gravel and sixty percent inert materials.
Move? Wasn’t he going to shoot me anyway? Wasn’t he the one who shot me last night? If not, what was he doing here? What was his gun doing here? What was his friend doing to Abbie?
Crash. The male voice roared again.
What was Abbie doing to his friend?
The man with the gun wanted to know that, too. He backed up a step, looking very irritated, and was about to bend backward and stick his head through the doorway when a table lamp sailed by from the direction of the living room. We both heard it crash, and then we both heard something else crash in or near the living room, and Abbie and the male voice hollered at once, and the man with the gun growled at me, “You don’t go nowhere, see? Not if you don’t want nothing to happen to you.”
“I don’t want nothing to happen to me,” I said, hoping his double negative had been bad grammar.
“Then just stay where you are,” he told me. “Don’t move outa that bed.”
“You can count on it,” I assured him, but I don’t think he heard me. He had already backed up through the doorway and was standing in the hall. With one last glare and gun-waggle at me, he took off toward the living room.
Nothing changed for a minute, the ruckus continued unabated, and then all of a sudden it went absolutely insane. The crashing doubled, it tripled, it sounded like St. Patrick’s Day on Third Avenue.
And then, abruptly, silence.
I squinted, as though to hear better. Silence? Silence.
What had happened? What was happening now? Was Abbie all right?
I should have gone out there, I told myself. Regardless of whether or not I could have gotten out of bed, regardless of the fact that I was naked and weaponless and too weak to move, I should have gone out there and done what I could to help. If anything had happened to Abbie—
Abbie came hurtling into the room, brought up against the dresser, spun around, and shouted at the guy who’d shoved her, “You stink, you bastard!” She was dressed but disheveled, hair awry, makeup smeared, clot
hing wrinkled and all twisted around. She was the most insanely beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.
My old comrade with the gun came through the doorway, pointed the gun at Abbie as though he was pointing a finger at her, and said, “You ain’t no lady.”
“And you’re a gentleman,” she snapped. She turned away from him and came over to me. “How are you, Chet?” she said. “Did they do anything to you?”
I was lying flat on my back, sheet and blanket tucked up around my neck. I blinked up at her, and I felt like an absolute lummox. “How are you?” I said. “Did they do anything—”
“Them,” she said with total disdain.
The man with the gun said, “Lady, you’re outa your mind. My partner would of been dead within his rights to let you have it. You know that? You know what you done to him, if I’d been in his place I’d of shot you down like some kind of wild beast. I think you’re nuts or something.”
“You force your way in here—” she shouted, blazing at him, all set to start brawling again, and I could see by his face that what she was going to get this time was at the very least a hit on the head from the gun-butt, and I reached out and grabbed her hand and said, “Abbie, cool it.”
She tugged, trying to get her hand free. “These people think they can—”
“They can, Abbie,” I said. “They’ve got guns. Don’t try their patience.”
“That’s right,” the man with the gun said. “You just listen to him, lady, he’s got sense. You been trying our patience, and you shouldn’t ought to do that. You should ought to soak your head in some brains for a while and think about things. Like we don’t want to give you two any more trouble than we have to, so why make us make things tough on you?”
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s exactly right.” I tugged on Abbie’s hand, like pulling a bell rope to get the butler, and said, “Abbie, they don’t want to kill us or they’d have done it already. Sit down, why don’t you, and let’s see what they want.”
“That’s a good thought, pal,” the man with the gun said. “You just sit down on the bed there, lady, and let’s conduct this like civilized people and not like a bunch of crazy nuts.”
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