Somebody Owes Me Money

We had breakfast, and I kept looking out the kitchen window at the snow, and it kept being there. I’d gotten up early in order to work the day shift, since my regular Wednesday night poker game was tonight, but with all that snow out there it was hopeless. After breakfast I called the garage and told them I saw no point adding myself to the snarl-up Manhattan was undoubtedly in the middle of, and the dispatcher said fine by him, and then I had the day in front of me.

My father went back to his percentages at the dining-room table, leaving me essentially alone with myself, so I called a few guys to see if enough were staying home to get a game up, but half of them had gone to work and the other half wouldn’t leave the house. “If you want to play over here, Chet, it’s fine by me.” I didn’t call Sid Falco, feeling very weird about him since knowing what I now knew. I phoned in today’s number — 214, don’t ask me why — to the stationery store and promised to drop by tomorrow with the quarter, and then there was nothing to do but read the sports pages of the News and wait for tomorrow.

When the doorbell rang a little after eleven it was a godsend. I was reduced to watching an old horse-race movie with Margaret O’Brien on Channel 11, and I hate that kind of picture. I know the races are rigged, and they never give you enough information on the entries anyway, but there I sit trying to handicap the damn things.

I switched off the set right away, went to the door, opened it, and in came a swirl of snow and the detective who’d questioned me at Tommy’s apartment. Detective Golderman. The amount of snow I could see through the open doorway was unbelievable, but a plow had been down the street recently, so it was possibly passable. A black Ford was parked out front.

I shut the door, and he took off his hat and said, “Remember me, Chester?”

Why do policemen call everybody by their first names? “Sure,” I said. “You’re Detective Golderman.”

My father called from the dining room, “Who is it?”

Detective Golderman said, “You didn’t go to work today.”

“Who did?” I said.

“I did,” he said.

My father called from the dining room, “I’m expecting an insurance man.”

Detective Golderman said, “Do you have a few minutes?”

“Sure,” I said. “Come on in the living room.”

My father bellowed, “Chet! Is that my insurance man?”

I led Detective Golderman into the living room and said, “Excuse me.”

“Certainly.”

I crossed the living room to the dining-room doorway and said, “It’s a policeman.” I said “policeman” instead of “cop” because Detective Golderman was in earshot.

“Why didn’t you say so?” my father said. He was irritable, which usually meant the math was being too tricky for him. Sooner or later he always worked the policies out, but some of them were very tough, and when he had one of the really tough ones he tended to get irritable.

“We’ll be in the living room,” I said, and went back over to Detective Golderman. I asked him to sit down, he did, I also did, and he said, “You knew Tommy McKay pretty well, did you?”

I shrugged. “Pretty well,” I said. “We weren’t really close, but we were friends.”

“You knew what he did for a living?”

“I’m not sure,” I said doubtfully.

He grinned at me. We were just guys together, I could come off it. He said, “But you could guess.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“You want me to say it first?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Tommy McKay was a bookie.”

I nodded. “I believe so,” I said.

“Mm. Would you say you knew him best as a friend or as a customer?”

It was me doing the grinning this time, nervous and sheepish and out in plain view. “A little of each, I guess,” I said.

“Don’t worry, Chester,” he said. “I’m not looking for gamblers.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Our interest is the homicide, that’s all.”

I said that was good, too.

“Have you got any ideas on that, Chester?”

I suppose I looked blank. I know I felt blank. “Ideas?”

“On who might have killed him.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t. I didn’t really know him that well.”

“Did you see anybody else in the apartment or in the building that day?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did McKay ever express worry to you, any fear that he thought somebody might be after him?”

“No.”

“Was he ever slow in paying off on winnings?”

“Never. Tommy was always straight about things like that.”

He nodded, thought for a second, then said, “Do you know anybody else in that building?”

“Tommy’s place? No.”

“Does the name Solomon Napoli mean anything to you?”

Until last night I could have given that question a straight no with no qualms. Trying to figure out what such a denial would have sounded like and then imitate it, I furrowed my brow, scratched my head, shook my head, stared out the window, and finally said, “Solomon Napoli. Noooo, I don’t think so.”

“You seem doubtful.”

“Do I? I don’t mean to. I really don’t know the name, I just wanted to be sure before I said anything. Who is he?”

“Somebody we’re interested in,” he said, making it clear it was somebody he didn’t want me being interested in.

I said, “Does he live in the same building as Tommy?”