Maybe I was still asleep. Maybe this was part of the dream, too. I said, “Hey,” and several other things, trying to attract everybody’s attention, and then I realized I was standing and talking like everybody else, so I said, “Oh, the hell with it,” and went away again. If the world wanted to be crazy, I could be crazy, too. With Frank Tarbok and Louise McKay actually standing and talking in the living room, I went out to the kitchen and made myself a liverwurst sandwich. I also heated the coffee, a pot of which we kept permanently on the stove since both Abbie and I were endless coffee drinkers.
The yammering in the living room gradually settled down, but I could not have cared less. Here I’d spent five days terrified that Frank Tarbok or one of his minions would find me and shoot me, and when Frank Tarbok finally did show up he didn’t even pay any attention to me. Stared at me through a doorway for a second, and that was that.
As for Louise McKay, her husband had died a week ago, she’d disappeared without a trace, and all of a sudden there she is in her own living room, standing and talking as though she’d been there all along. No, it was all too crazy to be contended with, particularly when I’d just come out of a nap. Particularly when I’d just been thrust out of a nap by a scream.
I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating liverwurst, drinking coffee and reading the News, when they came looking for me. Abbie came in first, the other two behind her. She said, “Chet? Are you out of your mind?”
“Murmf,” I said, with a mouthful of liverwurst. I also shook my head, meaning no.
“Don’t you see who’s here?” she demanded, and actually pointed at Frank Tarbok as though she thought I couldn’t see him for myself, standing there as big and ugly as life.
I nodded, and pointed at my mouth, and held my hand up to ask for a minute’s grace. Then I chewed rapidly, swallowed, helped the food along with a swig of coffee, swallowed again, burped slightly, and said, “Yes. I see him. I see the two of them.”
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “You’re just sitting there.”
“When your scream woke me up,” I told her, “and I saw Frank Tarbok there in the bedroom doorway, I did some of the most beautiful terror reactions you ever saw. I carried on like the heroine of a silent movie. And what did he do? He turned around and walked away. So what did I do? I got up and got dressed and went into the living room to find out what was going on, and nobody would pay any attention to me. Everybody was talking at once, nobody was listening, it was like a clambake out at Jones Beach, so I decided the hell with everybody, and I came in here and made myself a sandwich. If you’re all willing to pay attention now, I am prepared to fall on the floor, or scream, or beg for mercy, or try babbling explanations, or whatever you think the circumstances call for. But I’ll be damned if I’ll perform without an audience.” And I took another bite of liverwurst sandwich.
Abbie just stared at me, open-mouthed. It was Tarbok who spoke next, saying in that heavy voice of his, “Conway, for somebody who don’t know nothing about nothing, you do keep turning up.”
I pushed liverwurst into one cheek. I said, “Up until now I thought it was you. Or somebody working for you. But here you are, and you aren’t doing anything, so now I don’t know. Unless maybe you’ve changed your mind since Wednesday.”
“Wednesday?” His face was too square and blocky and white and blue-jawed and heavy to manage very much expressiveness, but he did use it now to convey a sort of exasperated bewilderment. “What do you mean, Wednesday?”
I pointed the sandwich at him. “Did you,” I asked him, “or any other employee of Walter Droble, or any friend of yours or Walter Droble’s, or Walter Droble himself, or an ally of the same, take a shot at me Wednesday night?”
He squinted, as though there was suddenly a lot of cigarette smoke between us. “Take a what?”
“A shot,” I said. I used the sandwich for a gun. “Bang bang,” I said, and pointed with my other hand at the healing scar on the side of my head.
He put his head to one side and squinted at the scar. “Is that what that is? You was grazed?”
“I was grazed. Did you do it?”
The heavy face made a heavy smile. “Conway,” he said, “if I’d took a shot at you, it would have got you a little bit to the right of that.”
“It wasn’t anybody working for you, or Walter Droble, or et cetera.”
He shook his head. “We don’t kill people just for practice,” he said. “A guy has to really call attention to himself in some outstanding way before we go to a lot of trouble.”
“All right,” I said. “It wasn’t Napoli or any of his people, and it wasn’t—”
“Who says it wasn’t Napoli?”
“Napoli says it wasn’t Napoli.”
His head leaned forward, as though to hear me better. In a soft voice he said, “Solomon Napoli?”
“Of course.”
“He told you it wasn’t him? Personally he said so?”
“Yes. Right in that bedroom down there, Thursday night.”
“How come he happened to tell you?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “I don’t want to go into it now.”
“I’ll tell you the reason I’m asking,” he said. “When we had our talk last week, you said you didn’t know Sol Napoli. And I believed you. And now you say he come to visit you Thursday and tell you personally he didn’t order you rubbed out.”
“That was the first time I ever met him,” I said. “I’m beginning to feel like Nero Wolfe. I don’t have to leave the apartment ever, sooner or later everybody involved in this damn thing comes calling on me.”
“That was the first time you ever saw Sol Napoli?” Tarbok persisted. He was running his own conversation, and my part of it hardly mattered at all. “And he come here expressly to tell you he didn’t have nothing to do—”
“Oh, really, Frank!” Louise McKay suddenly said, her voice dripping with scorn. “Who are you trying to kid? Why go on with it? Leave these people alone.”
Immediately he turned on her. “I’m done telling you, Louise,” he said. “You got one hundred percent the wrong idea. Now lay off.”
“Is that why you’ve been keeping me under wraps? Because I’ve got the wrong idea? Is that why I’ve been a prisoner for a week, I couldn’t even go to Tommy’s wake, his funeral, I couldn’t—”
“Yeah,” he said, his heavy voice crushing hers beneath the one word. “Yeah, that’s just why. Because you got the wrong idea, but wrong ideas have got guys strapped in up at Sing Sing before this. You go around yapping to the cops, that’s all they’d need. No questions asked, brother, they could mark the McKay homicide solved and pat each other on the backs and not lose a minute’s sleep.”
“If you were innocent?” she demanded.
“You’re damn right! Come off it, Louise, you know it as well as I do. I’m guilty of anything the law can pin on me, it don’t matter whether it’s a railroad or not. They figure if they get me for something I didn’t do, it still works out because I’m paying for something I did do.”
“You killed my husband,” she said, very bitterly and Abbie and I exchanged quick glances.
“I didn’t,” he said, his heavy voice almost a physical weight in the room. “Any more than I shot at this shlemozzle here.”
“You did.”
Abbie said to him, “Did you?”
He looked at her with a kind of sullen surprise, like a lion who’s just been poked with a stick through the bars of the cage. Don’t people realize he’s the king of the jungle and has big teeth? He said, “You, too?”