Abbie came back a while later with a tray for me, and dressed while I ate. Surprisingly, I did not stab myself in the cheek with my fork. When she was dressed she took the tray away again and came back in her orange fur coat and said, “I’m off to the funeral. Isn’t this an awful thing to be wearing? But it’s all I have.”
“You look great,” I said.
“Do I? Thank you.” She smiled and frowned at once. “But you’re not supposed to look great at funerals.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “Nobody will complain.”
“You say very nice things,” she said. “See you.”
“See you.”
She left, and Ralph came in to help me to the bathroom. He was morose and bored, and when he had me back in bed he asked me if I played gin rummy, asking in a fatalistic way as though sure I was going to say no. He perked right up when I said yes, went and got a deck of cards and a pencil and a score pad, and we settled down to business.
An hour and a quarter later, at a tenth of a cent a point, I was thirteen dollars to the good and Ralph was looking morose again. Not bored, just morose. Then we heard the unmistakable sound of a key turning in a lock, and Ralph was suddenly on his feet and a gun had appeared magically from within his clothing and leaped into his hand.
I said, “That’s Ab—”
He waved the gun urgently at me to shut up, and whispered, “I told her to ring so’s I’d know it was her.”
Oh, good. Fine.
We heard the door open. Ralph pointed at the closet, at himself. He put his finger to his lips. I nodded. He drifted away into the closet, pulling the door not quite shut behind him.
The cards were laid out for a gin hand. I heard the hall door close. I grabbed the cards up and held them in my left hand as I stared at the doorway, holding the cards like the hero holding a crucifix in a vampire movie.
Someone was walking. The bandage around my head began to itch.
Detective Golderman appeared in the doorway, looking toward the living room. He glanced in at me, as though at an empty room, and did a double-take. He took his hands out of his pockets, stepped to the doorway, pushed his hat back from his forehead, and said, “You.”
“Hello,” I said. I waved the deck of cards in greeting.
19
“You do get around, don’t you?” He came into the room, glanced this way and that. He didn’t pay any special attention to the closet.
“I guess I do,” I said. And I was probably more nervous now than when I thought it might be somebody coming to kill me. At least a murderer wouldn’t be asking me a lot of difficult questions, and I had the feeling that’s exactly what Golderman was going to start doing.
Which he did, right off the bat. He came over to the bed, looked down at it, and said, “Playing solitaire for money?”
I looked down. Crumpled bills, coppered quarters, loose change all on the blanket. “Uh,” I said.
He sat down, in the chair Ralph had just left. He watched me, waiting for an answer.
Ralph. Would he know who this was? He might think it was one of Droble’s men, and come out and shoot him. I said, “Well, Detective Golderman, the fact is, I was playing gin rummy with Abbie before she left.”
“Abbie?”
“Abbie McKay. Tommy’s sister.”
He nodded. “She’s at the funeral?”
“She’ll be back afterwards,” I said. “Is she the one you wanted to see?”
“Just looking around, Chester. What happened to your head?”
I’d been waiting for that question, I’d known it was coming, it had to be coming, and I was fascinated to know what I would say in response to it. So here it was, and what did I say? I said, “My head?” As though I hadn’t realized I had one. And touched the bandage.
“Your head,” he agreed, and nodded at it.
“I fell down,” I said. “I slipped on the ice outside and fell down.”
“That’s too bad. Did you see a doctor?”
“Yes. Abbie called one. He came and he put this bandage on. He said I shouldn’t move for a while, that’s why I’m still here.”
“It didn’t happen today?”
“No. Wednesday night.”
“Must have been a bad fall.”
Why did I always feel as though Detective Golderman was disbelieving me? Maybe because I was always telling him lies. “It was,” I said. “I got like a cut on the side of my head.” I made vague motions with the hand holding the cards.
“You’re lucky you didn’t have to go to the hospital,” he said.
“Yeah, I guess I was.”
“Lucky you weren’t killed,” he said. “You an old friend of Abbie McKay’s?”
“No, uh. I just met her a little while ago.”
“When was that?”
“Uh, Wednesday.”
He smiled faintly. “You might say you fell for her on first sight, eh?”
“Heh heh,” I said.
“Nice of her to go out of her way to take care of you,” he said. “After just meeting and all.”
“Yeah, well...Yeah, it was.”
He looked around the room again. “I take it Mrs. McKay isn’t staying here these days. Tommy McKay’s wife.”
“No. No, she isn’t.”
He glanced at me, with that casualness I distrusted. “Where is she staying, do you know?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I haven’t seen her since Monday. Since Tommy was killed.”
“That isn’t her in the closet, in other words,” he said.
I said, “Uh. In the closet?”
“In the closet,” he agreed. “If Tommy’s sister is at the funeral and you haven’t seen his wife since Monday, that can’t be either one of them in the closet, can it?”
“Uh...Well...”
“So it has to be somebody else,” he said. “Doesn’t it, Chester?”
“I...” I made a helpless gesture with the deck of cards, and Ralph came out of the closet. He looked morose again.
Detective Golderman casually turned his head and looked at Ralph. “Do I know you?”
“No,” Ralph told him.
“You waiting for a bus in there?”
“Developing pictures,” Ralph said.
“Ah,” said Detective Golderman. “Would you have some sort of identification on you?”
“Yeah,” said Ralph. He dragged his wallet out and extracted a driver’s license from it, which he handed over to Detective Golderman.
Detective Golderman reached into an inner pocket for notebook and pencil and copied some information into it from Ralph’s license, then handed the license back and put the notebook away. Finally he got to his feet and said, “Ralph, you wouldn’t mind if I frisked you, would you?”
Ralph’s face showed that the thought didn’t make him happy, but all he said was, “If you got to.” And lifted his arms up at his sides.
“Thank you, Ralph,” Detective Golderman said, and patted him thoroughly all over without finding the gun I knew Ralph possessed. When he was done, he glanced at the closet and said, “I wonder if I should go over the closet, too.”
Ralph made an after-you-Alphonse gesture and said, “Be my guest.” But his tone was still morose and not at all sarcastic.
“Not worth the aggravation,” Detective Golderman decided, and looked back at me again. I’d known he would get back to me again sooner or later, and I hadn’t been looking forward to it. “Chester,” he said, “you haven’t told me the entire truth, have you?”
“Uh,” I said. That seemed to be my favorite word with him. “About what?” I said.
“Well, Ralph, for instance,” he said. “You hadn’t planned on introducing me at all, had you?”
“Well,” I said. “I felt it was up to him. Whether he wanted to come out or not.”