Somebody Owes Me Money

by Donald E. Westlake

  “But how would he know about doing it?”

  “How do you know about it?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Movies or television, I suppose.”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “The question is,” Abbie said, “can you help us at all?”

  “You want the murderer found,” he said. “And you want both gangs off your necks.”

  “Please,” I said.

  “I’ll see what I can do. The investigation into McKay’s death isn’t active anymore, you know.”

  “We know,” I said. “Not since Thursday night. They didn’t spend much time on it, did they?”

  “The force is short-handed,” he said. “If a thing doesn’t start to break fast, and if it isn’t something really special and out of the way, the only place for it is the inactive file.” To Abbie he said, “I’m sorry, Miss McKay, I understand your brother is something special to you, but to us he’s only one more homicide. And nothing broke fast. On the other hand, we didn’t know all the things you two have just told us, so that might make a difference. Let me make a phone call or two. I’ll be right back.”

  Abbie said, “You aren’t going to tell your superiors where we are, are you? We don’t want police protection, not regular police protection.”

  He smiled at her. “Worried that somebody could be bought off? You might be right. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you myself.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Not at all.” Coming out from behind the bar he said, “If you want refills, help yourself. I’ll try not to be long.”

  I said, “One last question before you go.”

  “Certainly, Chester.”

  “When you came out to my house,” I said, “you mentioned four names. Since then I’ve met three of them, but not the fourth.”

  He nodded. “Bugs Bender.”

  “That’s the one,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “We think he was a freelance assassin, he worked for both Napoli and Droble at one time or another. He’d disappeared a couple of months ago, and we were wondering what had happened, but he turned up late last week.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “In the bottom of a garbage scow,” he said. “He’d been there for quite a while.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So it’s just as well you didn’t meet him,” he said, and smiled at me, and went away.

  “What a lovely story,” Abbie said.

  “I’m glad I didn’t miss it.”

  “Oh, well.” She swung around on her stool to look at the length of the basement. “Can you believe this room?” she said.

  “I bet you,” I said, “if you were to burrow through that wall over there and keep going in a straight line across Long Island, you’d go through a good three hundred basement rooms just exactly like this one before you reached the ocean.”

  “No bet,” she said. “But where do they get the money? Golder- man must have put his salary for the next twenty years into this place.”

  “Fourth mortgage,” I said.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Aside from his house, what do you think of him?”

  She turned back to her drink. “All right, I guess,” she said. “He does those facial expressions like he’s very sharp, very hip, but I think really he isn’t at all. It’s all front.”

  “That’s because you are seeing him in his basement,” I said. “If you want to see the ultimate in cool, you should have been there Friday morning, when he caught Ralph in the closet.”

  She grinned. “Yes, I can see how he’d have handled that.”

  I squinted at the back bar. “That’s weird,” I said.

  She looked where I was looking. “What’s weird? The Gay Nineties lamp that says ‘Bar?’ ”

  “No,” I said. “If Tommy’s murder was put on the inactive list by the police Thursday night, how come Detective Golderman came around Friday morning?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he had one or two last questions he wanted to ask.”

  “Ask who?”

  “Me, I guess. Or Louise.”

  “How come he didn’t ask them? And, honey, he had to know when the funeral was, and he had to know if he was going to find any of Tommy’s relatives it would be at the funeral. He came there then, at that time, because he thought the place was empty.”

  She looked at me. “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning it seems to me I remember Walter Droble saying something about one of the cops on the case being his man on the scene.”

  “You mean—Golderman?”

  “Maybe he didn’t have to take out a fourth mortgage after all,” I said.

  “But—what was he doing at the apartment?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe he thought there might be something there to connect him with Droble’s mob. A payoff record or something like that. Maybe the mob sent him around to give the place a going-over and see there wasn’t anything there that might break security.”

  Abbie looked at her sidecar with revulsion. “Do you think he’s poisoned us?”

  “He isn’t the killer,” I said. “The killer is somebody outside either mob, that’s pretty sure by now. And if he was the one who shot at me Wednesday night, he had a perfect chance to finish the job after Ralph left Friday morning.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is, who do you suppose he’s calling right now?”

  “Oh, my Lord,” she said, and spun around on the stool. “There’s always a beige wall phone in places like this,” she said.

  “I already looked,” I told her. “This is the exception to the rule.”

  “Unless—” She hopped down off the stool and walked around behind the bar, saying, “Sometimes they put it under—Here it is.” She lifted a beige phone and put it on the bar.

  “Gently,” I said.

  “Naturally.”

  Slowly, inchingly, she lifted the receiver. I could suddenly hear tinny voices. Abbie lifted the phone to her ear, put her hand over the mouthpiece, and listened. Gradually her eyes widened, staring at me.

  I made urgent hand and head motions at her, demanding to know who it was, what was going on. She made urgent shakes of the head, letting me know I’d have to wait. But I kept it up, and finally she mouthed, with exaggerated lip movements, Frank Tarbok.

  “Oh,” I said, aloud, and she frantically shook her head at me. I clapped my hand over my mouth.

  But oh. Oh and oh and oh. Even thinking it, even being sure of it, I’d been hoping against hope that I was wrong. Because if I was right, we were on the run again, and this time with absolutely no place to go at all. No place at all.

  Abbie carefully and wincingly hung up the telephone, put it quickly away under the counter, and hurried around to sit down beside me at the bar again, saying under her breath. “He doesn’t want any trouble here, his wife doesn’t know anything about anything. He’s supposed to get us out of the house and take us to a rendezvous. A house in Babylon.”

  “Then what?” I asked, though I didn’t really have to.

  “Tarbok started to say something about the waterfront being a handy place,” Abbie said, “and Golderman broke in and said he didn’t want to know anything about anything like that.”

  I remembered what a short time ago it had been that Tarbok and I had shaken hands in solemn partnership. Well, that duet had gone off-key in a hurry.

  We heard the door open at the head of the stairs. Getting off the stool, I said, “When he’s sitting down, you distract him.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  There was no time to answer. Golderman was coming down the stairs. I shook my head and ran around behind the bar. Scotch, Scotch. Here it was. Black & White, a nice brand. A full quart.

  Golderman was at the foot of the stairs. I gulped what was left of the Scotch and soda in my glass, and was starting to pour myself a fresh drink when Golde
rman came over to the bar. “Well, well,” he said. “You the new barman, Chester?”

  “That’s me,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  He sat down on a stool. “I’ll just take my brandy, if I may.”

  “Sure thing.” I slid his brandy glass over to him. “What’s the situation?”

  “Well, it’s been taken out of my hands,” he said. “The captain’s going to want to talk to you two. In the morning. In the meantime, he refuses to let me keep you here.”

  “Oh, boy,” I said.

  “What does he expect us to do tonight?” Abbie asked him.

  “It just so happens,” he said, “that my wife’s brother isn’t home right now. He works for Grumman, they have him and his whole family in Washington for three months. I have the keys to his house, there’s no reason you can’t stay there tonight.”

  “Where’s the house?” I asked. It was easy to resist the impulse to say something smart-alecky, like, “Oh, the house in Babylon?” Like him with Ralph in the closet. But all I had to do was forecast the dialogue from that point on, if I did such a thing, and the impulse got itself resisted.

  “In Babylon,” he said. “Not very far from here.”

  “Can you give me directions?”

  “Oh, I’ll drive you over,” he said.

  “I have my own car out front,” I said.

  “You’d better leave that here for tonight. The captain was explicit that I shouldn’t give you two the opportunity to change your minds and take off again. I’ll run you over there, it won’t be any trouble at all.”

  “I hope there’s no hurry,” I said, lifting the bottle of Black & White. “I was just about to make myself a second drink.”

  “Go right ahead,” he said.

  Abbie got down off the stool and started walking away toward the other end of the room, saying, “Is that a color television set?”

  Golderman swung around on his stool to watch her. “Yes, it is,” he said, and I bonked him with the Black & White.

  30

  “We can’t stay here all night,” Abbie said.

  I shut the last cabinet door. “Not a gun down here,” I said. “And none on him. I thought cops were supposed to wear guns at all times.”

  “Not while they’re at home,” she said.

  I went around behind the bar again and looked at him. He was tied hand and foot, he was gagged, and he was unconscious, and it all served him right. But if only he’d had a gun on him.

  “Doggone it,” I said. “That gun of yours might have been a pea-shooter, but it would have been better than nothing.”

  “Stop worrying about guns,” Abbie said. “When we don’t show up at that house in Babylon pretty soon, Tarbok and his men are going to come over to find out what’s the matter.”

  “Yeah, and one of them will probably be carrying that gun of yours, and he’ll stand very close and go pit pit and it’s all over because we don’t have anything to defend ourselves with.”

  “Where would one of them get it?” she said, frowning at me.

  “Out of my pocket,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  Why was she bothering me with things like that? I looked at her, exasperated, and said, “What do you mean, no?”

  “None of those people took the gun,” she said. “It was gone before you got to the apartment.”

  I stared. “Before?”

  “Of course,” she said. “When do you think I was looking for it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought one time while I was unconscious in the apartment.”

  “In the car,” she said. “When you got yourself shot. I took off away from there, and every time I got stopped by a light I searched you some more. That’s how I got so sticky.”

  “Never mind that part.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “you didn’t have it with you. I could have killed you myself, if you want to know.”

  “Not without the gun. Maybe it’s in the car someplace, maybe it fell out of my pocket.”

  “I searched, Chet, I really and truly searched. That gun was gone.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. I went over and sat down at the bar and pulled on my Scotch and soda. “Then who the heck took it?” I said.

  Abbie came over and sat down beside me. “What difference does it make? The question is, what do we do now?”

  “The question is,” I insisted, “who took the goddamn gun. I had it when I got to the poker game, I remember feeling the weight of it in my pocket when I was going up all those stairs.”

  She was beginning to get interested, too. “What about afterwards?” she said.

  “I don’t remember. But where did we go? I was in the car the whole time. Who could have taken it?”

  “Somebody at the poker game,” she said.

  “Hmmm,” I said. “It was hanging in the hall closet. Everybody got up from the table at one time or another. Yeah, that’s when it must have been.”

  “That’s the only time it could have been,” she said.

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” I said. “It was your gun that shot me in the head.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Golderman told us they found the gun that killed Tommy. He also said it was an amateur. So where’s an amateur gonna get another gun in a hurry when he decides he’ll have to kill again? From the victim!”

  “But why do you think it was the same gun?”

  “First,” I said, “because your gun was stolen the same night. Second, because the job was done by an amateur who wasn’t going to have ready access to a whole arsenal of guns. And third, because Golderman told us I was shot by a smaller, lighter gun than the one used on Tommy, which is an accurate description of that gun of yours.”

  “But my gun always misses to the left, and he just nicked you on what was his right.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It should have been obvious all along.”

  “What should have been obvious all along?”

  “He was shooting at you.”

  31

  “Now wait a minute!”

  “Abbie, think about it. What did we tell the guys at that game? That you were Tommy’s sister, and you came to New York because he was dead, and because you didn’t have any faith in the police to find your brother’s murderer you were going to look for him yourself. You, not me. All I ever said I was after was my nine hundred dollars.”

  She was shaking her head. “I wasn’t the one who was shot, Chet, you were.”

  “Because your goddamn gun shoots crooked.”

  “We aren’t even sure it was my gun.”

  “I am,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I’m sure of. I’m sure I was shot with your gun. I’m sure the bullet was meant for you instead of me. And I’m one hundred percent positive that Tommy’s murderer is one of the guys at that poker game.”

  “Hm,” she said. She sat down on the bar stool beside me and swirled the remains of her sidecar in its glass. “I think you’re right,” she said at last.

  “You don’t know what a relief it is,” I said, “to know it isn’t me that guy is after.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “It’s a relief to know he’s after me instead, is that it?”

  “I know how that sounded—”

  “Well, what I’ve got after me,” she said, “is one poorly armed amateur, but what you’ve got after you, buddy, is two armies.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said. “We’ve been forgetting. One of those armies is coming here.”

  “Oh!” She finished her sidecar, and the two of us left the bar.

  “Quietly,” I whispered.

  “I know, I know.”

  We tiptoed up the stairs. Detective Golderman’s wife might not be in on her husband’s nefariousness, but she wouldn’t have to be in on it to take umbrage at two strangers knocking him out and tying him up and leaving him on the floor behind the bar in his downstairs playroom. So we moved slowly and silently up the
stairs, and at the top I cracked the door open just a hair and peeked through the slit.

  I saw nothing but a hunting print, but I did hear Mrs. Golder-man humming to herself in the kitchen. I nodded back at Abbie, pushed the door open farther, and crept out.

  She was humming one of those tuneless things, Mrs. Golder-man, one of those things you hum when you’re absorbed in a simple physical task that will take several hours, like stuffing a turkey or building a birdhouse. I don’t say Mrs. Golderman was stuffing a turkey or building a birdhouse, but from the sound of her she was doing something that was going to keep her occupied for a while.

  The two of us sidled up to the hall, inched the door shut behind us, and crept away through the dining room and the living room to the front door. I was about to reach for the knob when Abbie tugged my arm. I looked at her, and she pointed at the door of the hall closet.

  Was she confused? I shook my head, and pointed at the front door.

  She shook her head, and pointed emphatically at the hall closet.

  I shook my head harder, and pointed very emphatically at the front door.

  She shook her head hard enough to make hair fly, and pointed very very emphatically at the hall closet.

  Oh, the hell with it. Nothing would do but I had to prove she was wrong. Then she’d come along quietly. So I went over and opened the hall-closet door and gave her a sarcastic smile and gestured to point out to her it wasn’t the way out, it was a closet full of overcoats.

  She nodded, and gave me a sarcastic smile and gestured to point out to me it was a closet full of overcoats.

  Full of overcoats.

  I blinked at the closet. “Oh,” I said, out loud.

  “Sst!”

  I nodded, clamping my mouth shut, and we both listened for a minute. We could barely hear the humming at this end of the house, but it was continuing unabated.

  Abbie poked through the closet and came out with a black-and-red-check wool mackinaw for me. I looked at it, looked at her, looked at it. She leaned close and whispered, “It’s warmest. An overcoat won’t do you any good, you don’t have a jacket.”

  I nodded without pleasure and shrugged into the mackinaw while Abbie went through the closet some more, like one of those style-conscious women rejecting every dress in Lord & Taylor. Zip, zip, zip, pushing the hangers along one after the other.