Somebody Owes Me Money

He smiled at her. “Worried that somebody could be bought off? You might be right. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you myself.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Not at all.” Coming out from behind the bar he said, “If you want refills, help yourself. I’ll try not to be long.”

I said, “One last question before you go.”

“Certainly, Chester.”

“When you came out to my house,” I said, “you mentioned four names. Since then I’ve met three of them, but not the fourth.”

He nodded. “Bugs Bender.”

“That’s the one,” I said. “Who is he?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “We think he was a freelance assassin, he worked for both Napoli and Droble at one time or another. He’d disappeared a couple of months ago, and we were wondering what had happened, but he turned up late last week.”

“Oh,” I said.

“In the bottom of a garbage scow,” he said. “He’d been there for quite a while.”

“Oh,” I said.

“So it’s just as well you didn’t meet him,” he said, and smiled at me, and went away.

“What a lovely story,” Abbie said.

“I’m glad I didn’t miss it.”

“Oh, well.” She swung around on her stool to look at the length of the basement. “Can you believe this room?” she said.

“I bet you,” I said, “if you were to burrow through that wall over there and keep going in a straight line across Long Island, you’d go through a good three hundred basement rooms just exactly like this one before you reached the ocean.”

“No bet,” she said. “But where do they get the money? Golder- man must have put his salary for the next twenty years into this place.”

“Fourth mortgage,” I said.

“I suppose so.”

“Aside from his house, what do you think of him?”

She turned back to her drink. “All right, I guess,” she said. “He does those facial expressions like he’s very sharp, very hip, but I think really he isn’t at all. It’s all front.”

“That’s because you are seeing him in his basement,” I said. “If you want to see the ultimate in cool, you should have been there Friday morning, when he caught Ralph in the closet.”

She grinned. “Yes, I can see how he’d have handled that.”

I squinted at the back bar. “That’s weird,” I said.

She looked where I was looking. “What’s weird? The Gay Nineties lamp that says ‘Bar?’ ”

“No,” I said. “If Tommy’s murder was put on the inactive list by the police Thursday night, how come Detective Golderman came around Friday morning?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he had one or two last questions he wanted to ask.”

“Ask who?”

“Me, I guess. Or Louise.”

“How come he didn’t ask them? And, honey, he had to know when the funeral was, and he had to know if he was going to find any of Tommy’s relatives it would be at the funeral. He came there then, at that time, because he thought the place was empty.”

She looked at me. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning it seems to me I remember Walter Droble saying something about one of the cops on the case being his man on the scene.”

“You mean — Golderman?”

“Maybe he didn’t have to take out a fourth mortgage after all,” I said.

“But — what was he doing at the apartment?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe he thought there might be something there to connect him with Droble’s mob. A payoff record or something like that. Maybe the mob sent him around to give the place a going-over and see there wasn’t anything there that might break security.”

Abbie looked at her sidecar with revulsion. “Do you think he’s poisoned us?”

“He isn’t the killer,” I said. “The killer is somebody outside either mob, that’s pretty sure by now. And if he was the one who shot at me Wednesday night, he had a perfect chance to finish the job after Ralph left Friday morning.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, who do you suppose he’s calling right now?”

“Oh, my Lord,” she said, and spun around on the stool. “There’s always a beige wall phone in places like this,” she said.

“I already looked,” I told her. “This is the exception to the rule.”

“Unless—” She hopped down off the stool and walked around behind the bar, saying, “Sometimes they put it under — Here it is.” She lifted a beige phone and put it on the bar.

“Gently,” I said.

“Naturally.”

Slowly, inchingly, she lifted the receiver. I could suddenly hear tinny voices. Abbie lifted the phone to her ear, put her hand over the mouthpiece, and listened. Gradually her eyes widened, staring at me.

I made urgent hand and head motions at her, demanding to know who it was, what was going on. She made urgent shakes of the head, letting me know I’d have to wait. But I kept it up, and finally she mouthed, with exaggerated lip movements, Frank Tarbok.

“Oh,” I said, aloud, and she frantically shook her head at me. I clapped my hand over my mouth.

But oh. Oh and oh and oh. Even thinking it, even being sure of it, I’d been hoping against hope that I was wrong. Because if I was right, we were on the run again, and this time with absolutely no place to go at all. No place at all.