“Still and all, Chester,” he said, “you did hold out on me.”
“Yes, sir,” I admitted. “I guess I did.”
“It would have been a very simple thing, Chester,” he said. “When I came in, all you had to do was say, ‘I’d like you to meet my friend Ralph Corvaccio in the closet.’ Then I would have gone on believing you were somebody I could trust. Somebody whose word I could take on various things.” There was nothing for me to say. That’s what I said. Detective Golderman stood there looking at me. He seemed to be thinking about things, considering various ways of dealing with me, none pleasant. At last he said, “Do you remember when I came to see you at your house Wednesday?”
“Yes. Sure.”
“Do you remember I mentioned some names to you, and asked you if you knew any of those men, or had ever heard of any of them?”
I nodded.
“Do you remember those names?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Let’s try your memory,” he said.
“Frank Tarbok,” I said. “Walter Droble. Bugs Bender. Uh, and Solomon Napoli.”
“Very good,” he said. “And do you remember what you told me?”
“That I didn’t know them.”
“Didn’t know a thing about them.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at Ralph. “Is Ralph an old friend of yours, Chester? Or do you just know him since Wednesday, too?”
“Thursday,” I said. “Yesterday.”
“Yesterday. In that brief time, Chester, has Ralph mentioned to you who he works for?”
“Well—”
“Do you know who Ralph works for, Chester?”
I looked at Ralph, but he was moodily studying the back of Detective Golderman’s head and was of no help to me. In a low voice, not looking at anybody at all, I said, “I think he works for Solomon Napoli.”
“Solomon Napoli. That’s one of the four men I asked you about, isn’t it?”
“Detective Golderman, until I got mixed up in all this stuff, I didn’t know any of those people, I swear I didn’t. And I don’t want to know them now, take my word for it.”
“Mixed up in all what stuff, Chester?”
“All these people,” I said, and limped to a halt. Even if I wanted to tell him what was going on, there was nowhere to begin. I waved my hands vaguely and said, “Ever since Tommy got killed. I got caught up in all this because I’m the guy that found him.”
“Is that all, Chester?”
“Yes. That’s the worst of it, I’m an innocent bystander and nobody believes me.”
“You’re very convincing, Chester,” he said, “except that I have trouble squaring your innocence with the fact that you seem to be keeping known gangsters in your closet.”
“I am not keeping anybody in my closet! That was his idea!”
“Still, Chester, you—”
The phone rang. Quickly Ralph said, “That’s for me. That’s the call I been expecting.” He started for the door.
Detective Golderman pointed to the phone beside the bed. “Why not answer it there?”
“That one don’t work,” Ralph said, and left the room.
Detective Golderman looked at the phone. He came over, picked up the receiver, put it to his ear, cradled it again. He bent, looked at the wire under the table, picked it up, fingered the frayed end, glanced at me. I looked at him with my poker face.
He said, “Chester, while we’re alone for a minute, is there anything you want to say to me?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve said it all. I’m not hiding anything from anybody.”
“I find that hard to believe, Chester,” he said.
“Everybody does,” I told him.
He dropped the phone wire, walked to the doorway, and stood there a minute, listening to Ralph talking on the phone in the living room. I could hear his voice, too, though I couldn’t make out the words, and it sounded as though the major part of the conversation was happening at the other end, with Ralph’s part limited mostly to monosyllables.
Detective Golderman looked back at me. He said, “Do you have an explanation for him being here?”
“His boss wouldn’t believe me either,” I said.
He came back into the room. “Wouldn’t believe what?”
“That I wasn’t involved in something somehow.”
“Involved in what?”
“How do I know? I’m not involved in it, so how would I know what it is?”
“I suppose that makes sense,” he said. “So Napoli thinks you’re involved in something, and that’s why Ralph is here.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t explain why Ralph is here,” he pointed out.
“He’s here,” I said, “to wait for a phone call from his boss telling him I’m not involved in anything after all. Then he’ll go away.”
“What if the phone call says you are involved?”
“It won’t, because I’m not.”
“But what if it did? What would happen then?”
“I suppose I’d get shot at,” I said, stopping myself just barely in time. I’d been about to say again, a word Detective Golderman would have leaped on with both feet.
As it was, he had sentence enough to intrigue him. He said, “Doesn’t that worry you? Isn’t there a possibility they’ll make a mistake?”
“Not this time,” I said.
“You wouldn’t like to go into the details, would you, Chester?”
I shook my head. “The details are beyond me,” I said. “I’m not trying to be a smart aleck or evade the question or anything, the details are just absolutely beyond me and that’s all there is to it. There are too many details, and they don’t make any sense.”
“Try me,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“At the beginning.”
“I found Tommy McKay dead, and all hell broke loose.”
Ralph appeared in the doorway. “That was our friend,” he told me. “He says to tell you everything’s okay.”
“Good,” I said. I looked at Detective Golderman. “See?”
“I see,” he said. He was looking at Ralph.
Ralph returned the look and said, “You mind if I go away now?”
“I’m not sure,” Detective Golderman told him. “I might want to take you along to the station with me and ask some questions.”
“You’d waste your time,” Ralph told him.
“You’re probably right,” Detective Golderman said. “All right, Ralph, you can go.”
“Thanks,” Ralph said. It was impossible to tell whether that was sarcastic or not.
“I’ll see you around, more than likely,” Detective Golderman told him.
“Yeah, maybe,” Ralph said. He looked at me. “You’re lucky,” he said. “With the cards.”
“Uh huh,” I said, and he left.
Neither of us said a word till we heard the door close behind Ralph. Then Detective Golderman said, “Well, Chester? Anything you’d like to say now?”
I considered it, I trembled on the brink of telling him the whole thing, but I didn’t quite do it. In the first place, when you’ve told the same lie to a policeman long enough you tend to shy away from admitting the truth. In the second place, the truth by now really was too complicated for a wounded man with a headache to try to explain. And in the third place, I shouldn’t talk to anybody without checking with Abbie first, it wouldn’t be fair to her.
I believe that third place might have been just an excuse, but any excuse in a storm. I said, “Nothing. Not a thing.”
“Very well, Chester,” he said. “I’ll probably see you around.”
“You probably will,” I said gloomily, and he left.
20
I was napping over an insoluble hand of solitaire when the doorbell rang. I roused sufficiently to wiggle my knees and knock half the deck off onto the floor, which woke me the rest of the way. My first thought was that my mouth tasted like the inside of a metal garbage can behind a Chinese restaurant, and my second thought was that somebody had rung the bell.