Somebody Owes Me Money

I was in a strange bed in a strange bedroom in the middle of the night, the ceiling light was on, and a girl in bra and panties, her back to me, was getting something out of a dresser drawer.

“Detective Golderman!” I shouted.

The girl turned around, and it was Abbie. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you? I thought you were out for the night.” Without haste she walked over to the closet and slipped on a robe.

I had too many things to be confused about at once. I said, “What did I say that for?”

Tying the robe’s belt, Abbie said, “What did you call me, anyway?”

“Detective Golderman,” I said, still bewildered.

So was she. She looked down at herself and said, “Detective Golderman?”

Then I got it. “The room,” I said. “This is Tommy’s bedroom.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“The only other time I was ever in here,” I explained, “was when Detective Golderman questioned me after— This is Tommy’s bed!”

“Sure,” she said.

I leaped out of bed.

“You’re naked, Chet,” she said.

I leaped back into bed. “What — what—”

“The doctor and I undressed you,” she said. “He helped me carry you up here.”

“Doctor?” My confusion getting worse and worse, I lifted a hand to my head, meaning to lean my head against it for a minute, and felt cloth. I felt around on my head, and it was covered with cloth and what felt like adhesive tape. I said, “What the heck?”

“You were shot,” she said.

Then it all came back to me. The car stopping, me opening the door, the light coming on, the backfire, the starred hole in the windshield, the fluttering of my hair, Abbie screaming at me, and then the abrupt darkness, as though I was a television set that had been switched off.

I was awed, I was absolutely reverent in my presence. I said, “I was shot?”

“In the head,” she said.

That struck me as impossible. “That’s impossible,” I said. “If I was shot in the head I’d be dead. Or anyway in the hospital.”

Abbie said, “The bullet just skinned you.”

“Skinned?” What an awful image that conjured.

“It didn’t go into your head,” she said, explaining patiently. “It just sort of sideswiped you. On the side of the head there, above your left ear.”

I touched the side of my head above my left ear, and it hurt. Very badly. Underneath the bandages, my head reacted to the touch of my fingers by going twwaaannngg. “Ow,” I said, and left my head alone after that.

Abbie said, “The doctor said it removed some skin and put a little teeny crease in your skull, but you’ll be all—”

“Crease?” It seemed as though my part of the conversation was limited to astonished repetitions of individual words from Abbie’s sentences, but there were so many different things to be baffled about that I hardly knew where to begin, and in the interim I was reduced to recoiling from everything she said.

“Just a little crease,” she said, and held up two fingers very close together. “Hardly anything,” she said. “The doctor said you should stay in bed for a day or two, and after that you should take it easy for a while, that’s all.”

“I shouldn’t be in the hospital?”

“You don’t have to be,” she said. “Honest, Chet, it isn’t really a bad wound at all. The doctor said the heat from the friction of the bullet going by sort of cauterized it right away, and besides that, it bled a lot, which helped to clean it, so there’s—”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said. I put my hand to my head — the front, not the part that twanged — and said, “My head hurts.”

“The doctor gave me some pills to give you,” she said, and went away.

While she was gone I had leisure at last to do some sorting out in the jumble of my mind, and when she came back I was more or less clear on the situation and had a few questions I wanted to ask. I waited till I swallowed the two small green pills with some water, then gave the glass back, thanked her, and said, “What about the police?”

“What about them?” she said. She put the glass down on the dresser and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Didn’t you call them?”

“Good Lord, no,” she said.

“Good Lord, no? Good Lord, why not?”

“Because,” she said, “the mob tried to kill you.”

I was getting confused again. “Excuse me,” I said, “but it seems to me that would be a hell of a good reason for calling the cops. To get police protection, if nothing else.”

She shook her head, saddened a bit by my ignorance. “Chet,” she said, “don’t you know what happens when the mob is after somebody and he goes to the police for police protection?”

“He gets police protection,” I said.

“He does not. More often than not he gets thrown out a window. Haven’t you ever heard of bribery? Payoffs? Crooked policemen? Do you think Tommy managed to run a book in plain sight here in his apartment in the middle of Manhattan without the police being paid off somewhere along the line? Don’t you think Tommy’s bosses have a lot of cops on their payroll, too?”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You’re getting paranoid again. You keep—”

“The last time you said that,” she reminded me, “you got shot in the head.”