Somebody Owes Me Money

“He’s my son-in-law,” Droble said drily. “He’s being groomed for the top, and he knows it. He didn’t bump McKay for your nine hundred thirty dollars.”

“Hmm,” I said. “And he got here at five thirty-five? Tommy was alive then, and he was dead when I got here at six-ten. That’s thirty-five minutes.”

“He was alive at five-fifty,” Droble said. “We’ve done some checking out, and somebody in our organization talked to him on the phone at ten minutes to six.”

Tarbok said, “So it’s down to twenty minutes.”

I said, “It’s a good thing I didn’t get here much earlier. What happened to the money afterwards?”

“Gone,” Droble said. “Our cop on the scene told us the bundle wasn’t here.”

“How much can you trust him?” I asked.

“He picks up no percentage in lying on that one,” Droble said. “If the money was here the cops would have picked it up and divided it, and our cop would of told us so. There wouldn’t be any question about us getting it back or anything.”

“So the murderer took it with him.”

“Right,” Droble said. “So there’s your answer. Go find the killer, and collect your nine hundred from him.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” I said. “I made my bet in good faith, and just because you have an administrative problem inside your organization is no reason I should—”

“Administrative problem!”

“What else do you call it? I didn’t get my money because somebody in your organization lost it in transit. It should be up to you to make it good.”

“You want to take us to court?” he asked me.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “That money’s important to me.”

“It isn’t the money,” he said, “it’s the precedent. We don’t pay off twice, and that’s all there is to it. Look, the other big winner that day didn’t come squawking, he understood the situation. Why don’t you?”

“Another big winner?” I said.

“Yeah. Another guy had the same horse as you, only he had a hundred on it. That’s almost three grand.”

“Who was he?”

“What difference does it make?” Droble said.

“I don’t know, I’m just asking. Who was he?”

Droble shrugged in irritation. “I wouldn’t know. McKay would have the name, it might be in his records around here some—”

He stopped. He looked wide-eyed. He glanced at Tarbok, who looked back in bewilderment and said, “Walt?”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Droble said. “That’s what the bastard was doing for Napoli! He was robbing me blind!”

I was happy to see Tarbok didn’t get it any more than I did. He said, “How do you figure that, Walt?”

“I remember,” Droble said, “Higgins in Accounting said it to me a couple months ago, how McKay had a couple of consistent winners, guys who’d pick two, three horses a week, long shots. Cleaning up. McKay was actually running at a loss because of those guys, but it disappeared in the overall accounting picture. Don’t you see it, Frank? The bastard was past-posting us!”

I grinned. How lovely. Napoli, in other words, had been feeding Tommy the names of one or two good money winners a day, getting the information to Tommy right after the race, before the news would be on the wires. Then Tommy would make those bets for non-existent players, and probably he and Napoli split the proceeds. A nice way for Napoli to hit his competition in the cash register and build up his own funds for when the open warfare started. Particularly if Napoli had more than one of Droble’s bookies doing the same thing.

I said, “Mr. Droble, if it wasn’t for me you would never have found out about this. Napoli was suborning your organization from the bottom, and financing it with your own money. Now you know about it and you can do something about it, and if it wasn’t for me you’d have gone under. Now, if that isn’t worth nine hundred thirty dollars, I don’t know what—”

“Will you shut up about that lousy nine hundred?” Droble was angry and worried, and in no mood to be fair about things.

But Tarbok, surprisingly, was. He said, “Walt, I think Conway’s right. I think we owe him a debt. And I also think he could go on being helpful to us for some time to come. We could afford to—”

“With that bastard Napoli sucking my blood? Not on your life. Don’t either of you say another word about that nine—”

The doorbell rang.

I said, “I’ll get it,” and got to my feet. As I left the room, Droble started to say something to Tarbok about having the Accounting Department check all the other retail bookies.

I was really angry, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. To be too cheap to pay me my money, when in reality he owed me a heck of a lot more than that. Boy, some people are really pigs.

I looked through the peephole in the front door, and there was Solomon Napoli himself, with several tough-looking types behind him, that snitch Ralph among them.

What did I owe any of these clowns? The debts were all the other way, it seemed to me. I opened the door and bowed them in with a flourish. “Come on in, fellas,” I said. “You’re just in time for the punch.”

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