Somebody Owes Me Money

“No,” Fred said. “I didn’t shoot Tommy. But I did shoot you, Chet, and God, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hit anybody, I aimed between you and Abbie. When I saw I’d hit you I almost died myself. Christ, I’ve always been a pretty good shot, I don’t know what went wrong.”

“That gun shoots off to the left,” I said. “You should have taken it out on a practice range for a while.”

“It must shoot way the hell to the left,” he said.

“It does,” Abbie said.

Sid said to him, “You took the gun out of my pocket?”

Fred nodded. “I was going through Chet’s and Abbie’s pockets,” he said. “I wanted to see if they had any clues or evidence or anything about the murder they weren’t telling us about. I felt the heavy thing in your pocket, and took a look, and there was the gun. I knew you had something to do with the underworld, so I figured it was your gun, and I swiped it. I didn’t know it belonged to you, Chet.”

“To me,” Abbie said. “Where is it?”

“In the Harlem River,” Fred said. “I thought I’d killed Chet for sure, so I got rid of that gun right away.”

I said, “But you didn’t kill Tommy.”

He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

“Then why do all this other stuff? To cover up for the real killer? But who?”

Fred just smiled sadly at me.

We all stared at him, and it hit all of us simultaneously, and six voices raised as one to cry, “CORA!”

Fred nodded. “Cora,” he said. “Chet, you saw her right after she did it.”

I said, “I did not.”

“Sure you did. She was coming out of the building when you were going in.”

I frowned, drawing a blank, and suddenly remembered. “The woman with the baby carriage!”

“Sure,” he said. “Cora’s a smart woman, Chet. She saw you through the glass, and she didn’t want to be recognized, and there was a baby carriage in the hallway, so she figured that would make a good disguise, and with the two of you meeting in the doorway, you holding the door and the baby carriage in the way and all, her keeping her head down, she got away with it. She went right through and you never even noticed.”

I said, “A day or two later I saw a sign in the entranceway there about a stolen baby carriage, and I never connected it at all.”

Abbie, in an outraged tone, said, “Cora? I don’t even know who she is!”

“She’s Fred’s wife,” I said.

“But that isn’t fair,” she said. “How can I solve the murder if I don’t even know the murderer, if I never even met her? The woman never even put in an appearance!”

“Sure she did,” I said. “She walked right by me with a baby carriage.”

“Well, she never walked by me,” she insisted. “I say it isn’t fair. You wouldn’t get away with that in a detective story.”

I said, “Why not? Remember the story about the dog who didn’t bark in the night? Well, this is the same thing. The wife who didn’t phone in the night.”

“Oh, foo,” Abbie said, and folded her arms. “I say it isn’t fair, and I won’t have any more to do with it.”

Jerry said, “Never mind all that. Fred, why on earth would Cora do a thing like that?”

“You’re the one she punched in the nose,” Fred reminded him. “She’s a very violent woman, Cora. She’d been on Tommy’s back not to take any bets from me, and she found out we were still doing business, and she went down there to really let him have it, and she took the gun along to scare him. She wasn’t even sure she’d show it to him. But he apparently had something on his mind—”

“That’s an understatement,” I said. “His wife was running around with another man, and he was running around with another boss.”

“Well, anyway,” Fred said, “she showed him the gun. Then, instead of getting scared, he made a jump for her, and she started shooting.” To me he said, “It’s an old gun of mine, I’ve had it since I was in the Army. I do pot-shooting with it sometimes. That’s why I didn’t believe it when I saw I’d hit you the other night, because I knew I was a better shot than that.”

“Why did you do it?” I said.

“I wanted to convince you it was a gang thing,” he said. “I was afraid you two would find out the truth if you kept poking around. If you kept thinking about the case, Chet, you might suddenly remember the woman with the baby carriage. I didn’t know. I figured if I took a shot at you, to miss, it might scare you into laying off. Or anyway convince you the mob was behind the killing.”

Nobody said anything then for a minute or two, and then Leo said, “Where’s your wife now, Fred?”

Fred looked embarrassed. “You won’t believe this,” he said.

Doug said, “Try us.”

“She’s in a convent,” Fred said.

Everybody said, “What?”

“It preyed on her mind,” he said. “So Friday night she packed her things and went to a convent. She says she’s going in for good.”

Abbie, returning to us after all, said, “Why didn’t she go to the police if she felt so bad?”

“I didn’t want her to,” Fred said. “I feel responsible for the whole thing, damn it. I knew Cora hated me gambling, but I went right ahead and did it. So finally she blew her top and your brother got killed, but I’m just as much to blame as she is, and I just couldn’t stand to see her go to jail for it.”