Somebody Owes Me Money

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she’s staying with some relative, maybe she doesn’t want to be around the apartment now.”

She shook her head. “No. I called both her brothers and they don’t know where she is either. And I had to make all the arrangements for the funeral and the wake myself.”

“Wake? When?”

“It starts this evening,” she said. “At six.” She looked at her watch.

I said, “What time is it?”

She looked at her watch again. Did you ever notice how people do that? They look at their watch and a second later you ask them what time it is and they don’t know. She said, “Twenty after four.”

I said, “I’m losing a whole day’s work because of you. Not to mention the six bucks you ran up on the meter.”

“I’ll pay you for that,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m not a stiff.”

“Never mind that,” I said. “Just tell me who Tommy’s boss was and where I find him.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Okay, sister,” I said, turning around to the wheel again. “It’s the hoosegow for you.”

“No!”

I waited, both hands on the steering wheel. “Well?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d tell you if I knew, honest I would.”

“Tommy’s sister would know,” I said. “Especially if she was as close to him as you claim.”

“I didn’t claim to be close,” she said. “I just came to town because he was killed.”

“From where?”

“Vegas.”

I turned around again. “You live in Las Vegas?”

“For a couple of years now,” she said. “Can I show you something out of my purse?”

“If you move very slow,” I said.

She moved very slow, and produced an airline ticket from her purse, which she handed over to me. It was TWA, it was the return half of a round-trip ticket between Las Vegas and New York, it showed she’d come in yesterday morning, and it gave her name as Abigail McKay.

I said, “Abigail?”

“Abbie,” she said.

“That’s very funny,” I said. “Abigail. You don’t look like an Abigail.”

“I’m not an Abigail,” she said. She was getting irritated. “Everybody calls me Abbie.”

But I was enjoying needling her about it, maybe because of the trouble I have about Chester, maybe just to get some of my own back with her. “Abigail,” I said, grinning. “It’s hard to think of you as an Abigail.”

“Well, you’re a Chester, all right,” she said. “You’re a Chester if there ever lived one.”

“That’s it,” I said, twisted around, started the car, and we moved out onto Flatlands Avenue again.

“I think you stink,” she said.

“The feeling is mutual,” I said. “In fact, the feeling is para-mutual.”

In the mirror I could see her looking blank. “What?”

It had been a pun, on parimutuel, of course, the betting system at race tracks. I’d meant “para” like more than or above, like parapsychology or paratrooper. But try explaining a pun. Explanations never get a laugh. So I didn’t say anything.

We were stopped by a traffic light at East 103rd Street. We were into an area of brick projects and fake-brick row houses now, the streets full of kids throwing snowballs at each other. As we sat there waiting for the light to change, kids flowing all around us, she said, “I’m sorry. I just hate that business about Abigail.”

“I hate that business about Chester,” I said.

“What do people call you?”

“They call me Chester,” I said. “I want them to call me Chet, but nobody does.”

“I will,” she said. “If you don’t call me Abigail I won’t call you Chester.”

I looked at her in the mirror and I saw she was really trying to be friends, and I realized that she did have the same thing about her name that I had about mine, and it had been kind of mean of me to make a thing about it. “It’s a deal,” I said.

She said, “Would you please don’t take me to the police, Chet? If you do, there won’t be anybody to look for Tommy’s murderer, not anybody at all.”

Watching her in the mirror, seeing that her chin was trembling and she was on the verge of tears, I said, “What about the cops? Let them find the murderer.”

“Somebody who killed a bookie? Are you kidding? How hard do you think they’re going to work?”

“They’re still working now,” I said. “One of them came out to see me just this morning. They don’t suspect me of anything, by the way.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “Not anymore. And I’m not saying the police won’t do all the routine stuff. They’ll do all that, they’ll do enough to be sure the record looks good on paper, but they won’t really try, not for a bookie, and you know it as well as I do.”

Somebody honked. I looked through the windshield and the light was green. I went across the intersection and found a hydrant to park next to in the middle of the block. I stopped the cab again, turned around, and said, “All right, maybe. The police aren’t going to work as hard as if it was the Governor, I’ll grant you that. But what do you know about any of it? You’re running around with a lot of dumb ideas in your head, leaping to conclusions, waving a gun around, acting like a nut. You aren’t going to solve any murders, all you’ll do is get yourself in trouble.”