Somebody Owes Me Money

by Donald E. Westlake

  Anyway, we finally got to the garage, at which point it occurred to him to ask, “Why come here? Don’t you want the West Side terminal?”

  “We’ve got to get married first,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. At the rate his mind turned over, it should be three or four days before it occurred to him there weren’t any churches or anything around here.

  I paid him, and gave him a good tip because I want people to give me good tips—but no more horses, please—and we got out into the cold. He drove on into the garage, and I said to Abbie, “See that gas station down there? Wait in the office in there. I’ll pick you up in a couple minutes.”

  “What are you going to do?” Her teeth were chattering.

  “Get a car,” I said.

  “You’re going to steal a cab?”

  “What steal? I’m an employee here, I’m going to sign one out.”

  “Oh,” she said, and smiled in wonderment. “Of course. How easy.”

  “Go get indoors,” I said. “You’re turning blue.”

  “Thank God I’m wearing my boots,” she said, and turned and hurried away. I watched her go, and I hoped for her sake the boots went up to her waist, because the skirt was barely long enough to reach her legs.

  I went on into the garage and talked to the dispatcher. He had a couple of remarks about my not having called in the last three or four days, but there’s a lot of guys less dependable than me and he knew it, so I didn’t say anything and he didn’t keep it up. I signed out a car and while I was walking across the floor to get it, here came the cabby we’d just ridden with, bringing his time sheet into the office.

  He stared at me. “Where’s your girl?”

  “The hell with her,” I said. “I don’t like her family.”

  I felt him staring at me as I walked on.

  28

  At the gas station, the guy who came out to service me gave me a dirty look when Abbie hopped into the cab and I immediately drove away. She’d started to get in front, but I’d waved her to get in the back instead, and as we started up I threw the meter flag. I didn’t want to get stopped by a cop at this stage of the game.

  Abbie said, “You didn’t need gas?”

  “That wasn’t a Sunoco station,” I said, and looked at the gas gauge. “And I don’t need gas.”

  “It’s freezing in here.”

  “It’ll warm up in a couple minutes.”

  “Where are we going now?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “None at all. There’s a diner I’m partial to down here a ways, let’s go in there and have a cup of coffee and think things over.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  So that’s what we did, and in the warmth of the diner we both began to relax a little. I ordered two Danish with our coffee, and when they arrived Abbie said, “That’s what puts the pounds on, Chet.”

  “When people are chasing me with guns,” I said, “I think dieting is a little irrelevant.” I chomped into my Danish, and found it good.

  “All right,” she said. “But when this is over, you go on a diet.”

  “By the time this is over,” I said, “if I’m still around, I expect to be very very thin. Let’s not talk about dieting any more. Let’s talk about what we’re going to do.”

  She sipped at her coffee. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t think anymore.”

  “What if we found the killer?” I asked. “What if we did solve things, and then let the gangs know we weren’t going to tell anybody about any of the stuff we overheard, we were—”

  “I didn’t overhear anything,” she said.

  “Do you want to go back to that apartment and tell them so?”

  “No,” she said.

  “The only reason we managed to stay alive as long as we did,” I said, “was pure dumb luck. Both gangs were too confused, they wanted to know what was going on before they did anything drastic. But it was in the cards all along that we were going to be nuisances they’d feel happier without.”

  “What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why you let that second bunch in the apartment. Napoli and his people. With Droble and all the others already there.”

  “I didn’t know exactly what would happen if I let them in,” I said, “but I did know what would happen if I didn’t let them in. They’d break their way through the door, they’d probably come in shooting. Droble’s people would have been shooting at the people forcing their way in, and we would have had an immediate war on our hands, with us in the middle. The other way, there was a chance the confusion could be maintained for a while. Besides, I didn’t see anything else I could do.”

  “All right,” she said. “What about for now? Any ideas at all?”

  “One,” I said. “And I’m not sure how much I like it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Detective Golderman.”

  She looked at me, uncomprehending.

  I said, “I think I can trust him. He’s had me alone a couple of times and he hasn’t tried any mayhem on me. And I know he’s working on the case. Maybe if we talk to him, tell him every- thing we know, he can put it together with what the police have and come up with something. And in the meantime he can hide us out somewhere. You and I are amateurs, Abbie, and it’s about time we turned our business over to a professional.”

  I didn’t know if I’d talked her into it, but in the process of talking to her I’d convinced me. It had been an idea in the back of my head, and I hadn’t been sure whether it was a good one or not, but now that I’d heard it spoken out loud I thought it was a great idea, so I said, “Unless you have some very strong objection, I’m going to phone him right now and see if I can arrange a meeting in some neutral territory. Like this booth, for instance.”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. Her brow was furrowed. “I hate to trust anybody,” she said.

  “So do I. But we’ve come to the point where we’ve got to trust somebody, and like I say, Golderman has already had a couple of chances at me and hasn’t taken them. I think we can be sure he isn’t the guy who killed Tommy or took that shot at me, and if he isn’t we should be able to trust him.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “All right, go ahead and try it. But listen very carefully to how he sounds on the phone.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “In the last week I’ve grown as paranoid as you are.”

  “Good,” she said. “You might last a few years that way.”

  “Mm,” I said. I took another mouthful of Danish, slurped some coffee, and left the table. The phones were at the rear, and I went back there, dug out a dime, stepped into the booth and called Information, from whom I got the number for the police precinct covering West 46th Street. Then I called that number, asked for the Detective Squad, and when I got them I asked for Detective Golderman.

  “Not here today.”

  “Not at all? Not all day?”

  “Won’t be in till tomorrow morning. Can I do anything for you?”

  “No, I need Detective Golderman. Do you have any idea where I could get in touch with him?”

  “Hold on.”

  I held on. The phone booth grew stuffy, and I opened the door a little, and the light went out. I shut the door enough for the light to come on, and the booth got stuffy again. I had my choice of light or air, it seemed, and I opted for air, opening the door all the way.

  Then he came back and I shut the door again, opting for privacy. He said, “He’s at home. I can give you the number.”

  “Good. Thanks.”

  “Do you have a pencil?”

  “No, I’ll have to remember it. I’m in a phone booth.”

  “Okay. He lives out on Long Island, in Westbury. It’s area code 516.”

  “Yeah, I know that.”

  “Right. The number is ED3-3899.”

  “ED3-3899.” I looked at the phone dial, and E and D were both 3, so the number was 333-3899. “I’ve got it,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Don�
��t mention it.”

  So I called the Westbury number. The operator wanted twenty cents and I had to give her a quarter. Then the phone rang six times before it was answered, by a woman. I asked for Detective Golderman, and she said, “He’s taking a nap right now. Is it important?”

  I said, “I could call when he wakes up, I suppose. When would be a good time?”

  “I’ll be waking him at six,” she said.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll call a little after six.”

  “Who shall I say called?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’d rather tell him myself.” And I broke the connection, not liking to be rude but also not wanting to give my name ahead of time. Just in case, just in case.

  I went back to the table and told Abbie my adventures on the phone, and she said, “So what are we going to do now? Sit here till six o’clock?”

  “Not a bit of it. We’ll drive out to Westbury and go straight to his house.”

  “You got his address?”

  “I got his phone number.”

  “What good does that do you?”

  “How many Goldermans do you suppose are going to be in the phone book,” I asked her, “with the same telephone number?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

  “You’re not drinking either. Let’s finish up and get going.”

  She looked out the window. “Out in that cold again. Brrrr.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  29

  Detective Golderman’s house was a nice white clapboard Cape Cod on a quiet side street in Westbury. We got there at twenty-five minutes to seven and parked out front. A Volkswagen and a Pontiac stood side by side on the cleared driveway in front of the attached garage. In the city there was practically no sign left of last week’s snowstorm, but out here in the suburbs there was still plenty of it, on lawns and vacant lots and piled up beside driveways.

  It was fully night by now of course, but a light was shining beside the front door. We got out of the warm cab and hurried shivering through the needle-cold air up the walk to the door. I rang the bell and we stood there flapping our arms until at last it opened.

  A pleasant-looking woman in her late thirties, wearing a wool sweater, stretch slacks, and a frilly apron, looked through the storm door at us, astonished, and then opened it and said, “You must be freezing. Come in.”

  “We are,” I said, and Abbie said, “Thank you,” and we went in.

  She shut the door, and I said, “I’m the one who called about an hour ago.”

  “And wouldn’t leave his name,” she said. “Arnie and I have been wondering about that.”

  “I’ll give it now,” I said. “Chester Conway. And this is Miss Abbie McKay.”

  She frowned at us. “Should I have heard of you? Abbie and Chet, like Bonnie and Clyde?”

  “No,” I said. “We’re more victims.”

  “Well, that’s cryptic,” she said. “Come in and sit down, I’ll call Arnie.”

  “Thank you.”

  The living room was spacious, modern, and very very neat. I wouldn’t have lit a cigarette in that room for a thousand dollars. The two of us sat on the edge of the sofa while Mrs. Golderman went away to get her Arnie.

  Abbie said, under her breath, “It does make you feel safe, doesn’t it?”

  I looked at her. “What does?”

  She waved her hand, indicating the room in general. “All this. Neat, respectable, middle-class. Germ-free, stable, dependable. You know.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “Yes, you’re right.”

  “You should see my place,” she said. “In Vegas.”

  “Not like this?”

  She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Ooh. It looks like the day the riot broke out in the whorehouse.”

  “My father keeps our place pretty neat,” I said. “Not as neat as a woman would, of course.”

  “Depends on the woman,” she said.

  I looked at her. “You mean if I took you home you wouldn’t clean the place up?”

  “Depends what you took me home for,” she said, and looked past me to say, “Hello, there.”

  I turned my head, and Detective Golderman had joined us. He was in tan slacks and green polo shirt and white sneakers and he looked very summery and relaxed and not at all like the wintry sardonic detective I was used to meeting in the snow around New York.

  “So it is you,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” I got to my feet. “I came to tell you a long story,” I said.

  “Then you’ll want a drink,” he said. “Come along.” And he turned away.

  Abbie and I looked at each other, shrugged, and followed him. We went through a dining room that looked like a department-store display, and entered a hallway with duck-shooting prints on the walls. “Hold on,” he said, and went to the end of the hall to stick his head into what looked like a yellow-and-white spick-and-span kitchen and say, “We’ll be downstairs, Mary.” Then he came back and opened a door and gestured for us to precede him down the stairs.

  “This is my pride and joy,” he said, coming after us and shutting the door again. “Just got it finished last fall.”

  A basement game room. Would you believe it? Knotty-pine walls, acoustical tile ceiling, green indoor-outdoor rug on the floor. A dart board. A Ping-Pong table. A television-radio-record-player console next to a recessed shelf containing about a hundred records. And, of course of course of course, a bar.

  You know the kind of bar I mean, I hope. The kind of bar I mean is the kind of bar that has all those things all over it. A little lamppost with a drunk leaning against it. Electrified beer signs bouncing and bubbling and generally carrying on. Napkins with cartoons on them. Funny stirrers in a container shaped like a keg. Mugs shaped like dwarfs.

  I could go on, but I’d rather not. The mottoes on the walls, and the glasses and objects on the back bar, the ashtrays— No, I’d rather not catalogue it all. Suffice it to say that Abbie and I looked at one another in a moment of deep interpersonal communion. Our two brains beat as one.

  “Sit down,” Detective Golderman said, going around behind the bar. “What’s your pleasure?”

  The bar stools were light wood with purple seats. We sat on two, and I said, “I’ll take Scotch and soda, if you’ve got it.”

  “Of course I’ve got it. What’s yours, Miss McKay?”

  “A sidecar, please,” she said sweetly, and smiled at him in all innocence.

  A hell of a thing to do. I considered kicking her ankle, but I was more interested in seeing how he’d handle it.

  Very well. “One sidecar,” he said, hardly blanching at all, and when he turned around he opened the drawer in the back bar with no fuss at all. We should have chatted with one another now, if we’d done so we probably never would have noticed him leafing through the little book in that drawer, or adjusting the drawer partway open so the book would stay open to the page he wanted.

  Of course, the end result was that he made the sidecar first and I didn’t get my simple Scotch and soda forever.

  But he did have the ingredients. Out of a little refrigerator under the bar he took a bottle of lime juice and set it down on his work area. He looked around and then said, “Be back in one minute,” and hurried away upstairs.

  I whispered, “What a nasty thing to do.”

  “I know,” she said. “I just couldn’t help it.”

  “You didn’t even try.”

  “Oh, Chet, let me have my fun. Don’t be a wet blanket.”

  “Nasty woman,” I said, and back came Detective Golderman. Would you believe he was carrying a little bowl containing the white of an egg? Well, he was.

  What was eventually set down in front of Abbie looked like a perfect sidecar, and when she tasted it I could see the biter had been bit. “Beautiful,” she said. “This is really great.”

  Opening my bottle of soda, he basked in the praise. “I have to use my little recipe book som
etimes,” he said, “but I pride myself on having the real touch. Say when, Chester.”

  “When.”

  He handed over my drink, put the soda and lime juice away, put all the bottles back where they belonged, put the bowl in the bar sink and ran water in it, poured himself a short brandy, took a sip, made a face, leaned his elbows on the bar, and said to me, “Well, now. I believe you’re here to tell me something, Chester.”

  “I’m here to tell you everything,” I said, and I did.

  He listened quietly, interrupting only once, when I suggested that I’d been shot by the same person who shot Tommy, and added, “Using the same gun.” Then he said, “No, not the same gun. We found that one the same day McKay was killed.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, in a litter basket just down on the corner. No fingerprints, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  “And it’s a lucky thing for you it wasn’t the same gun,” he said. He gestured at my wound and said, “It would have made a lot more of a mess than that. It was a .45 automatic. All it would have had to do was brush your head like that and you’d still be looking for the top of your skull.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” I said, and put my hand on the top of my skull, glad I knew where it was.

  “Anyway,” he said. “Go on with it.”

  So I went on with it, and when I was done, he said, “Chester, why didn’t you simply come to me in the first place and tell me the truth? You could have saved yourself an awful lot of trouble.”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “Now you’ve not only got two complete gangs of racketeers after you,” he said, “you’ve got a pretty violent amateur killer after you as well.”

  I said, “Amateur?”

  “Definitely,” he said. “Bears all the earmarks. Undoubtedly fired in anger when he killed McKay.”

  “But what about the dum-dum bullets?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Professionals don’t have to do that, their aim is too good. And they prefer to avoid excess mess. Anger again. Some sorehead sitting at his kitchen table, muttering to himself while scoring those bullets, not really sure whether he’d ever use them on anybody or not.”