Somebody Owes Me Money

I tried hurrying, but Abbie’s ankle just wouldn’t hold her any more, so finally I said, “Okay, let’s do it the easy way,” and I picked her up in my arms.

“Oh, what a grandstander,” she said. “Now that we’re almost there.”

“You want to walk?”

“No!”

“Then be quiet.”

I carried her across the street and into the bar, where the bartender and his three customers sitting at the bar all looked at us in deadpan disbelief. “She’s my sweetie,” I explained, and carried Abbie over to a booth and helped her sit down. Then I asked her, “What do you want to drink?”

“Whatever you’re having.”

“Scotch and soda.”

“Fine.”

I went over to the bar and ordered two Scotch and sodas. The bartender made them and set them down in front of me and I paid him. I put the glasses on the table while he got my change, and then went back to the bar, and he handed me my change and said, “I love your chapeau.”

I looked at myself in his back-bar mirror, and discovered I was still wearing the orange hat. I’d forgotten all about it. I looked like Buddy Hackett being a Christmas elf. I said, “I won it for conspicuous valor.”

“I figured you probably did,” he said.

I took my change back to the booth, where Abbie was giggling behind her hand, and sat down. “Here’s where you should of ordered a sidecar,” I said.

“You do look kind of odd,” she said.

“It keeps my head warm. Besides, it was a gift from a dear friend.”

She got a tender look on her face and reached out to clasp my hand. “And you’re a dear friend, Chet,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“Probably lived a lot quieter a life,” I said. “But let me tell you, if you stick around I can’t promise it’ll all be as thrilling as the last few days.”

“Oh, what a shame,” she said.

I took a slug of Scotch and soda. “And it isn’t over yet,” I said.

“Why? What are we going to do now?”

“As soon as this booze gives me some strength back,” I said, “I’m going over there and ask that very funny man behind the bar to call us a cab to take us back to New York.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s a poker game tonight,” I said, “and one of the people sitting around that goddam table killed your brother. Not to mention winging me in the head while aiming to kill you.”

“I don’t think you can be winged in the head,” she said. “I think you have to be winged in the arm.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I was wung in the head.”

“I thought you were,” she said. She’d picked up the style from the bartender.

“And,” I said, refusing to be sidetracked, “we are going to that poker game, you and I, and we are going to figure out which one of those lovelies it is. Just as soon as I have the strength to stand up.”

35

I won’t say climbing the stairs at Jerry Allen’s place was the worst thing I went through that weekend, but it comes close. We’d spent a good forty-five minutes sitting in the back of that cab, relaxing, and we got out of it in front of Jerry’s place feeling pretty good. Then we climbed all those stairs up to the fifth floor and we were dead again.

Abbie more than me, of course, because of her ankle. I’d had the cab stop in front of an all-night drugstore and I’d gone in and bought an Ace bandage, and I’d wrapped it around her ankle so that now she could walk on it at least, but it still slowed her down and drained her energy.

In the cab I’d offered to drop her off somewhere safe and go on to the game alone, but she’d said, “Not on your life, Charley. I want to be in at the finish.” So here she was, hobbling up the stairs with me.

I wondered if they’d all be there. We’d discussed them on the way in, of course, the four of them, the four regulars, trying to figure out which one it could be, and we’d decided if one of them was missing tonight that was tantamount to a confession of guilt. But we’d thought it more likely the killer would try to act as normal as possible now, and so would more than likely show up.

So which one would it be? Jerry Allen. Sid Falco. Fred Stehl. Doug Hallman. There was also Leo Morgentauser, the vocational teacher, the irregular who’d been at the game last Wednesday and who surely wouldn’t be here tonight. He’d known Tommy, in a business way, but very slightly. Maybe because he wasn’t a regular in the game, I just didn’t think he was our man. But if everybody else proved out clean tonight, I’d certainly go make a call on him.

In the meantime, it left four, and the most obvious right away was Sid Falco. But both Abbie and I had rejected him right away. In the first place, he wasn’t an amateur, and Golder-man had told us Tommy’s killing had been the work of an amateur. In the second place, Sid wouldn’t have had to steal Abbie’s gun from me in order to have something to shoot me with. And in the third place, we just didn’t like him for the job.