Somebody Owes Me Money

I nodded, and pointed at my mouth, and held my hand up to ask for a minute’s grace. Then I chewed rapidly, swallowed, helped the food along with a swig of coffee, swallowed again, burped slightly, and said, “Yes. I see him. I see the two of them.”

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “You’re just sitting there.”

“When your scream woke me up,” I told her, “and I saw Frank Tarbok there in the bedroom doorway, I did some of the most beautiful terror reactions you ever saw. I carried on like the heroine of a silent movie. And what did he do? He turned around and walked away. So what did I do? I got up and got dressed and went into the living room to find out what was going on, and nobody would pay any attention to me. Everybody was talking at once, nobody was listening, it was like a clambake out at Jones Beach, so I decided the hell with everybody, and I came in here and made myself a sandwich. If you’re all willing to pay attention now, I am prepared to fall on the floor, or scream, or beg for mercy, or try babbling explanations, or whatever you think the circumstances call for. But I’ll be damned if I’ll perform without an audience.” And I took another bite of liverwurst sandwich.

Abbie just stared at me, open-mouthed. It was Tarbok who spoke next, saying in that heavy voice of his, “Conway, for somebody who don’t know nothing about nothing, you do keep turning up.”

I pushed liverwurst into one cheek. I said, “Up until now I thought it was you. Or somebody working for you. But here you are, and you aren’t doing anything, so now I don’t know. Unless maybe you’ve changed your mind since Wednesday.”

“Wednesday?” His face was too square and blocky and white and blue-jawed and heavy to manage very much expressiveness, but he did use it now to convey a sort of exasperated bewilderment. “What do you mean, Wednesday?”

I pointed the sandwich at him. “Did you,” I asked him, “or any other employee of Walter Droble, or any friend of yours or Walter Droble’s, or Walter Droble himself, or an ally of the same, take a shot at me Wednesday night?”

He squinted, as though there was suddenly a lot of cigarette smoke between us. “Take a what?”

“A shot,” I said. I used the sandwich for a gun. “Bang bang,” I said, and pointed with my other hand at the healing scar on the side of my head.

He put his head to one side and squinted at the scar. “Is that what that is? You was grazed?”

“I was grazed. Did you do it?”

The heavy face made a heavy smile. “Conway,” he said, “if I’d took a shot at you, it would have got you a little bit to the right of that.”

“It wasn’t anybody working for you, or Walter Droble, or et cetera.”

He shook his head. “We don’t kill people just for practice,” he said. “A guy has to really call attention to himself in some outstanding way before we go to a lot of trouble.”

“All right,” I said. “It wasn’t Napoli or any of his people, and it wasn’t—”

“Who says it wasn’t Napoli?”

“Napoli says it wasn’t Napoli.”

His head leaned forward, as though to hear me better. In a soft voice he said, “Solomon Napoli?”

“Of course.”

“He told you it wasn’t him? Personally he said so?”

“Yes. Right in that bedroom down there, Thursday night.”

“How come he happened to tell you?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I don’t want to go into it now.”

“I’ll tell you the reason I’m asking,” he said. “When we had our talk last week, you said you didn’t know Sol Napoli. And I believed you. And now you say he come to visit you Thursday and tell you personally he didn’t order you rubbed out.”

“That was the first time I ever met him,” I said. “I’m beginning to feel like Nero Wolfe. I don’t have to leave the apartment ever, sooner or later everybody involved in this damn thing comes calling on me.”

“That was the first time you ever saw Sol Napoli?” Tarbok persisted. He was running his own conversation, and my part of it hardly mattered at all. “And he come here expressly to tell you he didn’t have nothing to do—”

“Oh, really, Frank!” Louise McKay suddenly said, her voice dripping with scorn. “Who are you trying to kid? Why go on with it? Leave these people alone.”

Immediately he turned on her. “I’m done telling you, Louise,” he said. “You got one hundred percent the wrong idea. Now lay off.”

“Is that why you’ve been keeping me under wraps? Because I’ve got the wrong idea? Is that why I’ve been a prisoner for a week, I couldn’t even go to Tommy’s wake, his funeral, I couldn’t—”

“Yeah,” he said, his heavy voice crushing hers beneath the one word. “Yeah, that’s just why. Because you got the wrong idea, but wrong ideas have got guys strapped in up at Sing Sing before this. You go around yapping to the cops, that’s all they’d need. No questions asked, brother, they could mark the McKay homicide solved and pat each other on the backs and not lose a minute’s sleep.”

“If you were innocent?” she demanded.