Somebody Owes Me Money

I went back to the table and told Abbie my adventures on the phone, and she said, “So what are we going to do now? Sit here till six o’clock?”

“Not a bit of it. We’ll drive out to Westbury and go straight to his house.”

“You got his address?”

“I got his phone number.”

“What good does that do you?”

“How many Goldermans do you suppose are going to be in the phone book,” I asked her, “with the same telephone number?”

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“You’re not drinking either. Let’s finish up and get going.”

She looked out the window. “Out in that cold again. Brrrr.”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

29

Detective Golderman’s house was a nice white clapboard Cape Cod on a quiet side street in Westbury. We got there at twenty-five minutes to seven and parked out front. A Volkswagen and a Pontiac stood side by side on the cleared driveway in front of the attached garage. In the city there was practically no sign left of last week’s snowstorm, but out here in the suburbs there was still plenty of it, on lawns and vacant lots and piled up beside driveways.

It was fully night by now of course, but a light was shining beside the front door. We got out of the warm cab and hurried shivering through the needle-cold air up the walk to the door. I rang the bell and we stood there flapping our arms until at last it opened.

A pleasant-looking woman in her late thirties, wearing a wool sweater, stretch slacks, and a frilly apron, looked through the storm door at us, astonished, and then opened it and said, “You must be freezing. Come in.”

“We are,” I said, and Abbie said, “Thank you,” and we went in.

She shut the door, and I said, “I’m the one who called about an hour ago.”

“And wouldn’t leave his name,” she said. “Arnie and I have been wondering about that.”

“I’ll give it now,” I said. “Chester Conway. And this is Miss Abbie McKay.”

She frowned at us. “Should I have heard of you? Abbie and Chet, like Bonnie and Clyde?”

“No,” I said. “We’re more victims.”

“Well, that’s cryptic,” she said. “Come in and sit down, I’ll call Arnie.”

“Thank you.”

The living room was spacious, modern, and very very neat. I wouldn’t have lit a cigarette in that room for a thousand dollars. The two of us sat on the edge of the sofa while Mrs. Golderman went away to get her Arnie.

Abbie said, under her breath, “It does make you feel safe, doesn’t it?”

I looked at her. “What does?”

She waved her hand, indicating the room in general. “All this. Neat, respectable, middle-class. Germ-free, stable, dependable. You know.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “Yes, you’re right.”

“You should see my place,” she said. “In Vegas.”

“Not like this?”

She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Ooh. It looks like the day the riot broke out in the whorehouse.”

“My father keeps our place pretty neat,” I said. “Not as neat as a woman would, of course.”

“Depends on the woman,” she said.

I looked at her. “You mean if I took you home you wouldn’t clean the place up?”

“Depends what you took me home for,” she said, and looked past me to say, “Hello, there.”

I turned my head, and Detective Golderman had joined us. He was in tan slacks and green polo shirt and white sneakers and he looked very summery and relaxed and not at all like the wintry sardonic detective I was used to meeting in the snow around New York.

“So it is you,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” I got to my feet. “I came to tell you a long story,” I said.

“Then you’ll want a drink,” he said. “Come along.” And he turned away.

Abbie and I looked at each other, shrugged, and followed him. We went through a dining room that looked like a department-store display, and entered a hallway with duck-shooting prints on the walls. “Hold on,” he said, and went to the end of the hall to stick his head into what looked like a yellow-and-white spick-and-span kitchen and say, “We’ll be downstairs, Mary.” Then he came back and opened a door and gestured for us to precede him down the stairs.

“This is my pride and joy,” he said, coming after us and shutting the door again. “Just got it finished last fall.”

A basement game room. Would you believe it? Knotty-pine walls, acoustical tile ceiling, green indoor-outdoor rug on the floor. A dart board. A Ping-Pong table. A television-radio-record-player console next to a recessed shelf containing about a hundred records. And, of course of course of course, a bar.

You know the kind of bar I mean, I hope. The kind of bar I mean is the kind of bar that has all those things all over it. A little lamppost with a drunk leaning against it. Electrified beer signs bouncing and bubbling and generally carrying on. Napkins with cartoons on them. Funny stirrers in a container shaped like a keg. Mugs shaped like dwarfs.

I could go on, but I’d rather not. The mottoes on the walls, and the glasses and objects on the back bar, the ashtrays— No, I’d rather not catalogue it all. Suffice it to say that Abbie and I looked at one another in a moment of deep interpersonal communion. Our two brains beat as one.