Well, I wasn’t going to do anything about it. If it was Abbie, giving the departed Ralph the signal he’d wanted, she’d let herself in eventually. If it wasn’t Abbie, I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. So I sat there, moving my tongue unhappily over the fur on my teeth, thinking about the fact that my back ached and my head felt fuzzy, and when I heard the hall door open I was surprised to discover that I was scared. I lay there and watched the door.
Abbie. She came in all red-faced and sparkly from the cold air, the orange fur coat making her look like a sexy gift-wrapped present from Olympus, sent me to make up for all the bad stuff that had been happening, and she said, “Hi. You look like death warmed over.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You look great.”
“Thank you. Where’s Smilin Jack?”
“He got his phone call and left,” I said. “Napoli found me innocent.”
“Good. Are you hungry?” She shrugged out of the coat, tossed it on a chair.
“Not till I brush my teeth. Then I’m famished.” I threw the covers back. “Was Louise at the funeral?”
“Of course not. Just me, a couple of Tommy’s old customers, a business associate or two, and a couple of anonymous old ladies. Not even any detectives around to take notes. Do you need help walking?”
“All I need is a robe,” I said.
“Coming up.” She went to the closet, got an old brown robe of Tommy’s, and carried it over to the bed. “Heavy,” she said, frowning, and held the robe up to pat its pockets, from one of which she drew a tough-looking gun. “For Pete’s sake,” she said. “Is this Tommy’s? What a place to keep it.”
I laughed, saying, “No, it’s Ralph’s. He must have forgotten it. I forgot all about it myself.”
“Ralph? Ralph was wearing this robe?”
“Let me brush my teeth first,” I said. “Then I’ll tell you the story.”
“I can hardly wait,” she said.
With her help I got out of bed and into the robe, and found myself only a little weaker and dizzier than usual. I was somewhat short of breath, and my legs were a trifle unsteady when I tried to walk, but compared to yesterday I was now a giant among men, a force to be reckoned with.
By the time I emerged from the bathroom I felt even better. I went down the hall to the kitchen and found Abbie sitting at the table there, making liverwurst sandwiches. I sat across from her and said, “A policeman came to call. A detective named Golderman. So Ralph hid in the closet. Is it all right for me to have coffee, or am I still limited to tea?”
She looked at me. “A detective?”
“Named Golderman. May I have coffee?”
“How do you feel?”
“Strong like an ox.”
She grinned. “Okay. Coffee. But tell me about Ralph and the detective.”
So I did, and in the course of the telling she made a pot of coffee. She found certain parts of my story funny, and so did I now that it was all over. Much funnier in the telling than in the living. When I was done, she said, “I think I’d like to meet this Detective Golderman. He sounds interesting.”
“A dull man,” I said. “With warts. Besides, I think he’s married.”
She looked askance. “You’re jealous and I’ve never even met the man.”
“No, but you want to.”
“I think you’re getting healthy too fast,” she said.
“Growf,” I told her.
21
We spent a quiet weekend, with me doing a lot of sleeping, a full eight or nine hours at night plus a couple of naps during the day. Every time I woke up I was a little stronger, and Abbie kept telling me I was getting color back in my cheeks.
She changed the bandage Friday to a smaller one, and Saturday to a still smaller one, and Sunday she took the bandage off and washed the wound and decided not to put a bandage on at all. “We’ll let it air,” she said.
It looked odd. Not horrible, the way I’d thought, just odd. There was a line along the side of my head above my left ear, about half an inch wide, in which there wasn’t any hair, just pink flesh, with some dark red scar showing. It was still very sensitive, not in a stinging way like a cut, but with a deep massive head-pounding thump of a pain if I made the mistake of touching the wound or the area around it. I always had to grit my teeth and hold on tight to the rim of the sink when Abbie was cleaning it, and each time I had a bad headache for about half an hour afterward.
We spent most of the weekend with a deck of cards in our hands. We played gin, and ah hell, and after we found the cribbage board we played cribbage. All for money, of course, but it was seesaw, neither of us ever more than a few bucks ahead.
Abbie also taught me a few stunts with the deck. It took me a while to get used to the mechanic’s grip, a funny way of holding the deck from underneath with the left hand so that the right hand can burrow into it like a mouse into a sack of grain without anybody being the wiser. It would take me years to learn to be as smooth with a deck as Abbie, but I did pretty well, and by Sunday night I was even faking her out every once in a while.
Our sleeping arrangements were less satisfactory. She insisted on me keeping the bed, since I was the wounded one, but she switched to the living-room couch. I told her I saw no reason to change the policy we’d established Thursday night, and she said I didn’t have to see any reasons, she could see them for both of us. “You trusted me then,” I said, and she said, “You were weaker then.”
Well, that was true enough. By Sunday afternoon I was just about my old self again, and beginning to get bored. I’d been here since Wednesday night, and I’d really had about all of this apartment I wanted. On the other hand, the outside world was potentially full of people who didn’t wish me well, so I didn’t chafe very much about having to hang around here. In between the card-playing I watched television or ate snacks or just sat around bored.
And I napped, whether I wanted to or not. Abbie insisted, and I believe her main concern wasn’t my health at all. She just wanted me out from underfoot for a while. Still, every time she hounded me into the bedroom for a nap I did actually go off to sleep for an hour or two.
I was asleep, in fact, late Sunday afternoon when the visitors arrived. What woke me was a scream. I popped awake, sat up, and saw Frank Tarbok, the blue-jawed questioner from the garage, standing in the hallway with his velvet-collared overcoat on, staring at me. The voice that had screamed was still echoing in my head, recognizable as Abbie’s, but I had already fallen flat again and thrown the covers over my head before it occurred to me the scream hadn’t been a mere and simple scream, it had been a word. A name. Abbie had screamed a name.
Why had Abbie screamed Louise?
22
When nothing happened for several days, I peeked up over the top of the covers, blinking and wincing already from the bullet I was sure was coming.
Nobody was there.
What? I pushed the covers down completely off my face and stared at the doorway, and it was absolutely empty. Nobody standing there at all. Not Frank Tarbok, not Louise McKay, not anybody.
Had it been a dream? Had the scream been real and all the rest a dream, or had the scream also been part of the dream? A dream scream. Was I going loony?
I sat up, looked around the room, looked at the empty doorway again, and heard voices. They seemed to be real voices, and they were coming from the direction of the living room. Male and female both.
I got out of bed. My shirt and pants — back from the cleaner’s — were draped carefully on a chair; shoes were on the floor beside the bed. I dressed hurriedly, left the bedroom, and walked down the hall to the living room, where Frank Tarbok was standing and talking, Louise McKay was standing and talking, and Abbie was standing and talking.