Somebody Owes Me Money

Actually, it’s a harmless enough hobby and it does occupy his mind. He’s sixty-three now, and he was forcibly retired from the airplane factory when he was fifty-eight — he worked in the payroll office — and if he didn’t have this insurance thing I don’t know what he’d do with himself. Mom died the year my father retired, and naturally he didn’t want to go off to Fort Lauderdale by himself, so we kept on living at home together, and it’s pretty much worked out. My parents were both thirty-four when I was born, and I was also an only child, so I never knew either of my parents when they were very young and we never did have much of a lively, exuberant household, so things aren’t so much different from the way they always were, except Mom is gone and I’m the one who goes out to work.

Anyway, while we waited for dinner I told my father about my day, and every once in a while he’d put his head on one side and squint at me and say, “You wouldn’t be telling me tales, would you, Chester?”

“No,” I’d say, and go on with the story. I finished by saying, “And the upshot of it is, I didn’t collect my nine hundred thirty dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money,” he said.

“It sure is,” I said. “I wonder who I collect from, now that Tommy’s dead.”

“I wonder where you go to get the money now,” he said.

“That’s what I said,” I said.

He raised his head and sniffed. “Aren’t those dinners ready yet?”

I looked at the clock. “Five more minutes. Anyway, I’ll call Tommy’s wife tomorrow and ask her. She should know.”

“Ask her what?”

“Where I go to collect my money,” I said.

He nodded. “Ah,” he said.

We went on in and had dinner.

5

I got up late the next morning, and decided not to go to work till the afternoon. I called Tommy’s wife around noon and she answered the phone on the second ring and I said, “Hello, Mrs. McKay? This is Chet.”

“Who?”

“Chet,” I said. “You know, Chet Conway.”

“Oh,” she said. At least she didn’t call me Chester. She said, “What do you want?”

I said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. McKay, I know I shouldn’t disturb you at a time like this, and I wouldn’t under normal circumstances, but the fact of the matter is I’m sort of strapped for cash right now.”

“What is this?” she said. She sounded irritable.

I said, “Well, the fact is, Mrs. McKay, I went over to your place yesterday to pick up the money from a bet I made that came in, and naturally I didn’t get to collect. So I was wondering if you could put me in touch with whoever I should see now to get my money.”

“What? What do you want?” Now she sounded as though I’d just woken her up or something and she couldn’t comprehend what I was talking about.

I said, “I want to know where to go to collect my money, Mrs. McKay.”

“How should I know?”

“Well—” I was at a loss. I floundered for a second or two and then I said, “Don’t you know who Tommy’s boss was?”

“His what?”

“Mrs. McKay, Tommy worked for somebody. He worked for a syndicate or somebody, he didn’t run that book of his all by himself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

I said, “Is it because I’m asking you on the phone? Listen, could I come by later on? Are you going to be home?”

“You’d better forget it,” she said. “Just forget it.”

“What do you mean, forget it? It’s almost a thousand dollars!”

Suddenly a different voice was on the line, a male voice, saying, “Who’s calling?”

A cop. It had to be a cop. I said, “I’ll talk to Mrs. McKay later,” and hung up. So that was why she hadn’t wanted to tell me anything.

I wondered how long it was going to be before I could find out. I needed that money in the next couple of days.

I hung around the house till about two in the afternoon, then finally got up the energy to go to work. I read about myself in the News on the subway, under the headline BOOKIE FOUND SLAIN IN APARTMENT. It said Tommy was a known bookmaker with a long history of arrests; it said he’d been shot three times in the back with dum-dum bullets, the kind of bullet that has been creased on the nose so it’ll expand when it hits something, which was why his chest had been so smashed up from where the bullets had come out the other side; and it said the body had been found by “Chester Conway of 8344 169th Place, Jamaica, Queens. Mr. Conway stated he was a friend of the dead man.”