Somebody Owes Me Money

“Sit down,” Detective Golderman said, going around behind the bar. “What’s your pleasure?”

The bar stools were light wood with purple seats. We sat on two, and I said, “I’ll take Scotch and soda, if you’ve got it.”

“Of course I’ve got it. What’s yours, Miss McKay?”

“A sidecar, please,” she said sweetly, and smiled at him in all innocence.

A hell of a thing to do. I considered kicking her ankle, but I was more interested in seeing how he’d handle it.

Very well. “One sidecar,” he said, hardly blanching at all, and when he turned around he opened the drawer in the back bar with no fuss at all. We should have chatted with one another now, if we’d done so we probably never would have noticed him leafing through the little book in that drawer, or adjusting the drawer partway open so the book would stay open to the page he wanted.

Of course, the end result was that he made the sidecar first and I didn’t get my simple Scotch and soda forever.

But he did have the ingredients. Out of a little refrigerator under the bar he took a bottle of lime juice and set it down on his work area. He looked around and then said, “Be back in one minute,” and hurried away upstairs.

I whispered, “What a nasty thing to do.”

“I know,” she said. “I just couldn’t help it.”

“You didn’t even try.”

“Oh, Chet, let me have my fun. Don’t be a wet blanket.”

“Nasty woman,” I said, and back came Detective Golderman. Would you believe he was carrying a little bowl containing the white of an egg? Well, he was.

What was eventually set down in front of Abbie looked like a perfect sidecar, and when she tasted it I could see the biter had been bit. “Beautiful,” she said. “This is really great.”

Opening my bottle of soda, he basked in the praise. “I have to use my little recipe book sometimes,” he said, “but I pride myself on having the real touch. Say when, Chester.”

“When.”

He handed over my drink, put the soda and lime juice away, put all the bottles back where they belonged, put the bowl in the bar sink and ran water in it, poured himself a short brandy, took a sip, made a face, leaned his elbows on the bar, and said to me, “Well, now. I believe you’re here to tell me something, Chester.”

“I’m here to tell you everything,” I said, and I did.

He listened quietly, interrupting only once, when I suggested that I’d been shot by the same person who shot Tommy, and added, “Using the same gun.” Then he said, “No, not the same gun. We found that one the same day McKay was killed.”

“You did?”

“Yes, in a litter basket just down on the corner. No fingerprints, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“And it’s a lucky thing for you it wasn’t the same gun,” he said. He gestured at my wound and said, “It would have made a lot more of a mess than that. It was a.45 automatic. All it would have had to do was brush your head like that and you’d still be looking for the top of your skull.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said, and put my hand on the top of my skull, glad I knew where it was.

“Anyway,” he said. “Go on with it.”

So I went on with it, and when I was done, he said, “Chester, why didn’t you simply come to me in the first place and tell me the truth? You could have saved yourself an awful lot of trouble.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Now you’ve not only got two complete gangs of racketeers after you,” he said, “you’ve got a pretty violent amateur killer after you as well.”

I said, “Amateur?”

“Definitely,” he said. “Bears all the earmarks. Undoubtedly fired in anger when he killed McKay.”

“But what about the dum-dum bullets?”

“Exactly,” he said. “Professionals don’t have to do that, their aim is too good. And they prefer to avoid excess mess. Anger again. Some sorehead sitting at his kitchen table, muttering to himself while scoring those bullets, not really sure whether he’d ever use them on anybody or not.”

“But how would he know about doing it?”

“How do you know about it?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Movies or television, I suppose.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“The question is,” Abbie said, “can you help us at all?”

“You want the murderer found,” he said. “And you want both gangs off your necks.”

“Please,” I said.

“I’ll see what I can do. The investigation into McKay’s death isn’t active anymore, you know.”

“We know,” I said. “Not since Thursday night. They didn’t spend much time on it, did they?”

“The force is short-handed,” he said. “If a thing doesn’t start to break fast, and if it isn’t something really special and out of the way, the only place for it is the inactive file.” To Abbie he said, “I’m sorry, Miss McKay, I understand your brother is something special to you, but to us he’s only one more homicide. And nothing broke fast. On the other hand, we didn’t know all the things you two have just told us, so that might make a difference. Let me make a phone call or two. I’ll be right back.”

Abbie said, “You aren’t going to tell your superiors where we are, are you? We don’t want police protection, not regular police protection.”