Somebody Owes Me Money (3 page)

“I didn’t do it,” I said.

They looked surprised, and then suspicious. “Nobody said you did,” one of them pointed out.

“That guy was holding a hammer on me,” I said. “
He
thought I did it.”

“Why did he think so?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Tommy’s wife told him I did.”

“Why would she say a thing like that?”

“Because she was hysterical,” I said. “Besides, I don’t even know if she said it. Maybe it was because of the blood on my jacket.” I looked at my hand. “And on my hand.”

They looked at my jacket and my hand, and they stiffened up a little. But the one who did the talking was still soft-voiced when he said, “How did that happen?”

“Tommy’s wife grabbed me,” I said. “That’s when it got on my jacket. She’d gone in to look at Tommy, and I guess she touched him or something, and then she got it on me.”

“And the hand?”

“From the phone.” I pointed to it. “She was holding the phone.”

“Is she the one who called in the complaint?”

“No. I did.”

“You did. Who did Mrs. McKay call?”

“Nobody. She was hysterical, and she wanted to call the co—police, but I was already talking to them. It got kind of confusing.”

“I see.” They looked at one another, and the talking one said, “Where’s the body?”

“In the living room,” I said. I made a pointing gesture. “Down the hall to the end.”

“Show us.”

I didn’t want to go down there. “Well, it’s just—” I said, and then I saw what they meant. They wanted me with them. “Oh,” I said. “All right.”

We went down the hall to the living room, me in the lead, and Tommy was still there, spread out on the floor, sunny side up. With the yolk broken.

I’m sorry I thought that.

I stood to one side, and the cops looked. One of them said to me, “Use your phone?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s not mine.”

The phone was over by the windows, which looked out on the street. While the silent cop went over and made his call the other one said to me, “Why didn’t you use that phone there? Why the one in the kitchen?”

“I didn’t want to be in the same room with him,” I said. I was not looking at Tommy, but I could still see him out of the corner of my eye. “I still don’t,” I said.

He looked at me. “You going to be sick?”

“I don’t think so.”

He pointed near the hallway entrance. “Just wait there a minute,” he said.

“All right,” I said. I went over there and waited, looking down the hall toward the entrance. Behind me I could hear the cops talking together and talking on the phone, low murmur-ings. I wasn’t interested in making out the words.

After a couple minutes the talking cop and I went across the hall to Harry’s apartment. Harry seemed surprised to see me walking around free, surprised and somewhat indignant, as though he was being insulted in some obscure way. Tommy’s wife was lying on her back on a very lumpy sofa in an overcrowded and overheated living room. She had one forearm thrown over her face, and I saw she’d washed the blood off her hands.

The cop sat down on the coffee table and said softly, “Mrs. McKay?”

Without moving her arm so she could see him she said, “What?”

“Could I ask you a couple questions?” He was even more soft-voiced than before. A very nice corpse-side manner.

I said to Harry, “Can I use your bathroom, please?”

Harry frowned in instant distrust. He said to the cop, “Is it okay?”

The cop looked over his shoulder, nettled at the interruption. “Sure, sure,” he said, and went back to Tommy’s wife.

Harry’s wife, being polite because now I was a guest in her house, showed me to the bathroom. I shut the door with my clean hand, turned on the water in the sink, and washed my hands. Then I used a washcloth to try to wash off the front of my jacket. I got it pretty well, then rinsed the washcloth, dried my hands, and went back out to the living room.

The cop wasn’t alone any more. There were three
plainclothesmen there, all with hats on their heads and their hands in their overcoat pockets. They looked at me, and the uniformed cop said, “He’s the one made the discovery.”

One of the plainclothesmen said, “I’ll take it.” He took his hands out of his pockets and came over to me, saying, “You Chester Conway?”

“Yes,” I said. In a corner I could see Harry and his wife both sitting in the same armchair, blinking at everything in eager curiosity. They’d happily given up the participant roles and drifted into their real thing, being spectators.

“I’m Detective Golderman,” the plainclothesman said. “Come along.”

Sensing Harry and his wife being disappointed that I wasn’t going to be questioned—grilled—in front of them, I followed Detective Golderman out and across the hall and into Tommy’s apartment. We went into the bedroom now, and I could hear murmuring in the living room. It sounded like a lot of men in there, a lot of activity.

Detective Golderman, notebook in hand, said, “Okay, Chester, tell me about it.”

I told him about it, that I’d called Tommy at four, that I’d said I’d be over at six, that when I got here I came into the building without his buzzing to let me in, that the apartment door was open, that I found him dead and started to call the police and his wife came in and everything got hysterical. When I was done, he said, “McKay was a friend of yours, is that right?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Sort of a casual friend.”

“Why were you coming over today?”

“Just a visit,” I said. “Sometimes I come over when I quit work.”

“What do you do?”

“I drive a cab.”

“Could I see your license?”

“Sure.”

I handed it to him, and he compared my face with the picture and then handed it back, thanking me. Then he said, “Would you know any reason anybody would do a thing like that to your friend?”

“No,” I said. “Nobody.”

“He didn’t sound frightened or different in any way when you talked to him on the phone this afternoon?”

“No, sir. He didn’t sound any different from usual.”

“Whose idea was it you should come over at six?”

I had a problem there, since I didn’t feel I should tell a cop that my relationship with Tommy was customer to bookie, but on the other hand I felt very nervous making up lies. I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Mine, I guess. We both decided, that’s all.”

“Was anybody else supposed to be here?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Hmm.” He seemed to think for a minute, and then said, “How did Tommy get along with his wife, do you know?”

“Fine,” I said. “As far as I know, fine.”

“You never knew them to argue.”

“Not around me.”

He nodded, then said, “What’s your home address, Chester?”

“8344 169th Place, Jamaica, Queens.”

He wrote it down in a notebook. “We’ll probably be getting in touch with you,” he said.

“You mean I can go now?”

“Why not?” And he turned around and walked out of the bedroom as though I’d ceased to exist.

I followed him out. He turned right, toward the living room, and I went the other way. I went out to the street, which
seemed much colder now, and walked over to Eighth Avenue, where I got my subway to go home. I sat in the train thinking about things, and I was all the way to Woodhaven Boulevard before it occurred to me I hadn’t collected my nine hundred thirty dollars.

My father had papers all over the dining-room table again. He had the adding machine out, ballpoint pens scattered here and there, and lots of crumpled sheets of paper on the floor around his chair. When he’s thinking hard he tends to scratch his face, scratching his nose or his chin or his forehead, and frequently he forgets he’s holding a ballpoint pen at the time, so after a session at the dining-room table he winds up looking like the paper they use for dollar bills, with little blue lines an inch or so long wig-wagging all over his face.

“I’m late,” I pointed out. “It’s after seven.”

My father looked at me in that out-of-focus way he has when his mind is full of numbers. Pointing a pen at me he said, “The question is, are you going to have any children?”

“Not right away,” I said. “Did you put anything on for dinner?”

“If you would just get married,” he said, “it would make it simpler for me to figure these things out.”

“I’m sure it would,” I said. “Maybe I will someday. What about dinner?”

He glared at me, meaning I’d broken his train of thought. “Dinner? What time is it?”

“After seven.”

He frowned and pulled out his pocketwatch and lowered his brows at it. “You’re late,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Did you start dinner?”

“I got involved in this,” he said, waving his hands vaguely at all the paperwork. “Another insurance man came by today.”

“A new one?”

“Same old stuff, though,” my father said. He threw the pen on the table in disgust. “The math still works out against me.”

“Well,” I said, “they’ve got computers.” I went out to the kitchen and got out two turkey TV dinners, put them in the oven, lit the oven.

My father had followed me out to the kitchen. “They’ll make a mistake someday,” he said. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Not computers,” I said.

“Everybody,” he said. “And when they do, I’ll be ready.”

It is my father’s idea that he is going to beat the insurance companies. As the years have gone by, the insurance companies have competed with one another by presenting more and more complicated insurance packages, the packages getting steadily more intricate and unfathomable, with expanding this and overlapping that and conditional the other. Of course, whatever the package the odds are still with the company. Insurance companies, like the casinos in Las Vegas, are in business to make money, so the edge is always with the house. Except that my father is convinced that sooner or later one of the companies is going to come out with a package with a flaw in it, that the complexities are eventually going to reach the stage where even the company isn’t going to be able to keep up with the implications of the math, and that some company is going to put out a policy where you don’t have to die ahead of time to win. My father’s hobby is looking for that policy. It hasn’t showed up yet, and I don’t believe it ever will, but my father has all the faith and obstinacy of a man with a roulette system, and more often than not I come home to find him and his papers and his adding machine all over the dining-room table.

Actually, it’s a harmless enough hobby and it does occupy his mind. He’s sixty-three now, and he was forcibly retired from the airplane factory when he was fifty-eight—he worked in the
payroll office—and if he didn’t have this insurance thing I don’t know what he’d do with himself. Mom died the year my father retired, and naturally he didn’t want to go off to Fort Lauderdale by himself, so we kept on living at home together, and it’s pretty much worked out. My parents were both thirty-four when I was born, and I was also an only child, so I never knew either of my parents when they were very young and we never did have much of a lively, exuberant household, so things aren’t so much different from the way they always were, except Mom is gone and I’m the one who goes out to work.

Anyway, while we waited for dinner I told my father about my day, and every once in a while he’d put his head on one side and squint at me and say, “You wouldn’t be telling me tales, would you, Chester?”

“No,” I’d say, and go on with the story. I finished by saying, “And the upshot of it is, I didn’t collect my nine hundred thirty dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money,” he said.

“It sure is,” I said. “I wonder who I collect from, now that Tommy’s dead.”

“I wonder where you go to get the money now,” he said.

“That’s what I said,” I said.

He raised his head and sniffed. “Aren’t those dinners ready yet?”

I looked at the clock. “Five more minutes. Anyway, I’ll call Tommy’s wife tomorrow and ask her. She should know.”

“Ask her what?”

“Where I go to collect my money,” I said.

He nodded. “Ah,” he said.

We went on in and had dinner.

I got up late the next morning, and decided not to go to work till the afternoon. I called Tommy’s wife around noon and she answered the phone on the second ring and I said, “Hello, Mrs. McKay? This is Chet.”

“Who?”

“Chet,” I said. “You know, Chet Conway.”

“Oh,” she said. At least she didn’t call me Chester. She said, “What do you want?”

I said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. McKay, I know I shouldn’t disturb you at a time like this, and I wouldn’t under normal circumstances, but the fact of the matter is I’m sort of strapped for cash right now.”

“What is this?” she said. She sounded irritable.

I said, “Well, the fact is, Mrs. McKay, I went over to your place yesterday to pick up the money from a bet I made that came in, and naturally I didn’t get to collect. So I was wondering if you could put me in touch with whoever I should see now to get my money.”

“What? What do you want?” Now she sounded as though I’d just woken her up or something and she couldn’t comprehend what I was talking about.

I said, “I want to know where to go to collect my money, Mrs. McKay.”

“How should I know?”

“Well—” I was at a loss. I floundered for a second or two and then I said, “Don’t you know who Tommy’s boss was?”

“His what?”

“Mrs. McKay, Tommy worked for somebody. He worked for a syndicate or somebody, he didn’t run that book of his all by himself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

I said, “Is it because I’m asking you on the phone? Listen, could I come by later on? Are you going to be home?”

“You’d better forget it,” she said. “Just forget it.”

“What do you mean, forget it? It’s almost a thousand dollars!”

Suddenly a different voice was on the line, a male voice, saying, “Who’s calling?”

A cop. It had to be a cop. I said, “I’ll talk to Mrs. McKay later,” and hung up. So that was why she hadn’t wanted to tell me anything.

I wondered how long it was going to be before I could find out. I needed that money in the next couple of days.