Somebody Owes Me Money

Then there was Jerry Allen, our host. Part-owner of a florist shop, a possible homosexual, a steady loser at the game, full of sad embarrassed laughter whenever one of his many bad bluffs was called. So far as I knew he’d never met Tommy, and I couldn’t think of a motive for him, and I couldn’t see him shooting anybody anyway. I particularly couldn’t see him sitting at his kitchen table and carving dum-dum bullets.

Of course, the same was true of Fred Stehl. He was the one with the wife, Cora, who called once or twice every week, sometimes every night there was a game, for months, trying to prove Fred was there. What excuses Fred gave her a hundred and four times a year I don’t know, but she obviously never believed any of them. Fred was a loser at the game, but not badly, and his laundromat had to be making pretty good money. He made bets with Tommy a lot, but where was his motive?

Of all of them, the only one I could see getting teed off enough at anybody to sit at a kitchen table and make dum-dum bullets was Doug Hallman, our cigar-smoking gas station man. But I couldn’t see Doug actually shooting anybody. His hollering and blustering and loudness usually covered a bluff of one kind or another. When he was serious he was a lot quieter. If he ever decided to shoot somebody it would be a simple, clean, well-planned job, using one perfectly placed bullet which wasn’t a dum-dum at all. Or at least that’s the way it seemed to me.

So I’d wound up eliminating them all, if you’ll notice. But doggone it, one of those guys had stolen Abbie’s gun from me. It couldn’t have been anyone else, that was the one fact we had for sure. The idea that I’d been shot by the same gun was an inference, but it was based on a lot of circumstantial evidence. The amateur standing of the killer, for instance, combined with the cops’ having found the murder weapon that killed Tommy. And the fact that its aim was off, so that the shot that had hit me had probably been intended for Abbie, was another inference, but it followed logically out of the first one. And finally, that the person who shot at me — Abbie — us — whoever — was the same person who killed Tommy was yet another inference, but one I had no hesitation at all in making. So with one fact and three inferences we wound up with the conviction that one of the guys present at last Wednesday’s poker game was the murderer. And then we went over them one at a time, and eliminated them all.

Hell.

We’d talked all this around and around in the cab, getting nowhere, and after we’d stopped talking about it I’d kept thinking about it and I still hadn’t gotten anywhere, and as I stood now on the fifth floor of Jerry’s building, gasping for breath and waiting for Abbie to catch up, I thought about it some more and I went on getting nowhere.

I also thought of something else. I said to Abbie, “Did I leave the meter running, do you know?”

She looked up at me. She had three steps to go, and she was white as a sheet. She breathed for a while, and then she said, “What?”

“The meter,” I explained. “In the cab I checked out. The one we drove to Golderman’s in. I wonder if I left the meter running.”

“Oh.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Christ, I hope I didn’t.”

She came up the last three steps and leaned against the banister. “I made it.”

“I’ll have to go out there tomorrow and get that cab,” I said. “If everything’s straightened out by then. What the hell am I going to tell the garage?”

“I don’t know, Chet.”

“You ready to go in?”

She nodded.

“Then let’s go.”

36

Jerry himself opened the door. “Well, look at you! We thought you weren’t coming. And you brought the pro, too, how lucky. Come on in. Isn’t that an interesting hat.”

I’d forgotten about it again. I untied the lace from under my chin and took the damn thing off. “Just something I picked up,” I said.

“Where? I might be interested.”

“You can have this one,” I said. “It doesn’t go with my eyes.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“No, I’m not. Here.”

He took the hat, not sure I was serious. He said, “Are you serious?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, thank you. Your trousers are ripped.”

That was that damn hedge I’d run through. “I slipped on the ice,” I said.

“Isn’t it awful? Abbie, what a lovely coat! But don’t give it to me, for heaven’s sake.”

Abbie laughed. “Just to hang up for me?”

“Well, in that case—”

As he took our coats and hung them up, I looked at Jerry Allen and I just couldn’t see it. Not Jerry. Jerry wouldn’t kill anybody, not in a million years. Scratch one. Again.

We all went into the living room, where Fred Stehl took one look, went, “Yip!” and threw his cards in the air.

“No applause,” I said. “No demonstrations.”

He put his hand to his heart. “I thought it was Cora,” he said.

“After what she did the last time?” Jerry said. “And you thought I’d open the door for her?”

“I know,” Fred said. “I know. But boy, just for a second there, wow. And Abbie, you don’t look a bit like Cora, honest to God.”

“I hope that’s a compliment,” she said.