“I’m Tommy’s sister,” she said. “I want to know who killed him.”
Louise McKay said, “Well, there he is, honey, take a look at him.” And pointed at Tarbok.
Tarbok made a fist and showed it to her. “Once more,” he said, “and I smash you right in the head.”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not kill me, too? Why not rub me out the way you rubbed out Tommy.”
Tarbok rose up on his toes, as though to recapture his temper, which he was about to lose out through the top of his head. It looked as though maybe he would rub her out, or anyway smash her right in the head, if something didn’t happen to break the tension, so I said, as calmly and nonchalantly as I could, “Women are like that, Tarbok. Abbie thought I did it for a while.”
He settled down again, coming off his toes, his fist slightly uncurling. Turning as slowly as Burt Lancaster about to make a plot point, he said, “She did? How come?”
“Everybody did, at one time or another,” I said. “You thought I maybe had something to do with it, Napoli thought so, Abbie thought so. For all I know the cops thought so.”
Tarbok leaned forward, the hand that had been a fist now supporting his weight on the table. “Why is that, Conway?” he said. “How come everybody thinks you did for McKay?”
“Everybody had different reasons,” I said. “You remember yours. Abbie thought I was having an affair with Mrs. McKay and killed Tommy so we could be together.”
“That’s what this moron did,” Louise McKay shouted, glaring at Abbie and me as though to defy us to question her.
Tarbok turned his head and looked at her. “Shut up, sweetheart,” he said, slowly and distinctly. “I’m talking to the shlemozzle.”
“I’m not a shlemozzle,” I said.
He gave me a pitying look. “See how wrong people can be? How come Sol Napoli thought it was you?”
“He thought you people found out Tommy had secretly gone over to his side, and you hired me to kill him.”
Tarbok stared at me. The silence suddenly bulged. Tarbok said, “Who did what?”
“Tommy was secretly on Napoli’s side. Napoli told me so him—”
“That’s a lie!”
I looked at Louise McKay. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McKay,” I said. “All I know is what I was told.” I looked back at Tarbok. “And why would Napoli be involved if it wasn’t true?”
Tarbok said, “Don’t nobody go nowhere.” He pushed past the two women as though they were strangers on a subway platform, and left the kitchen, heading in the direction of the rest of the apartment.
We all looked at one another, and I was the first to speak, saying to Mrs. McKay, “Abbie thinks it’s you, you know.”
She looked at me, and I was an annoyance that had just forced itself onto her attention. “What was that?”
Abbie, embarrassed, said, “Chet, stop.”
I didn’t. I said, “Mrs. McKay, your sister-in-law there is convinced that you’re the one who killed Tommy.”
She was a very bad-tempered woman. Her eyebrows came threateningly down and she glared at the two of us. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Abbie said to me, “Chet, I’ve changed my mind.”
I didn’t much care. I said to Mrs. McKay, “Tommy wrote her about your running around with somebody, so naturally—”
“He never did!”
Abbie said softly, “Yes, he did, Louise, I still have the letter, if you want to see it. I tried showing it to the police, but they didn’t seem to much care.”
Mrs. McKay’s glare began to crumple at the edges. She tried to keep it alive, beetling her brows more and more, but when her chin began to tremble, it was all over. Abbie got a sympathetic look on her face and moved forward with a consoling hand out, and Mrs. McKay let go. She dropped into the chair across the table from me, flopped her head down onto her folded arms, and began to catch up on a week of weeping. Abbie stood next to her, one hand on her shoulder, and looked at me with a what-can-we-do? expression on her face. I shook my head, meaning all-we-can-do-is-wait-it-out, and Frank Tarbok bulled back into the room, saying, “What the hell’s the matter with the phone in the bedroom?”
I said, “One of Napoli’s men pulled it out when I tried to call the police.”
He gave me an irritated frown, gave Mrs. McKay a more irritated frown, and pounded away again.
We had about thirty seconds of silence, except for Mrs. McKay’s muffled sobbing, and then somebody pounded on the front door.
I said, “I’ll get it.”
“Be careful,” Abbie said.
“Naturally,” I said. I left the kitchen, went to the front door, and looked through the peephole at Ralph, who was looking both impatient and disgusted.
Oh. I opened the door and he pushed in without a word and thumped on down the hall toward the bedroom. I shut the door again and went back to the kitchen. At Abbie’s raised eyebrow, I said, “It was Ralph. He came back for his gun.” I went around the table and sat down again.
Abbie said, “Come to think of it, what did you do with my gun?”
“It’s in my overcoat pocket,” I said. “You know, I’d forgotten all about that?”
“No, it isn’t,” she said.
“What?”
“It isn’t in your overcoat pocket. I looked.”
“Well, that’s where I put it,” I said, and Ralph appeared in the doorway. I looked at him.
He said, “Okay, where is it?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s on the dresser.”
“On the dresser?”
“Yes,” I said. “On the dresser.”
He went away again, and Abbie said, “Believe me, Chet, I looked through all your clothing for that gun. I thought it might come in handy.”
“Somebody swiped it,” I said.
“That’s fine,” she said. “I give you the thing to hold for me, and you lose it.”
“In the first place,” I said, and Frank Tarbok came back. “Later,” I said to Abbie, and looked at Tarbok.
“Walt Droble is coming over,” he said.
“I am Nero Wolfe,” I said.
He said, “Hah?” and Ralph appeared in the doorway behind him, waving the gun in the air so we could see it, saying, “I got it.”
Tarbok turned, not having known till now that Ralph was in the apartment. He saw the gun, saw Ralph’s face, yelled, and hit the dirt. That is, he hit the linoleum, rolled under the table and into a lot of chair legs, and was pawing around inside his clothing down there when I stooped and said, “It’s okay. He isn’t going to shoot anybody, it’s okay.”
Ralph, meanwhile, suddenly looking wary, was saying, “Was that Frank Tarbok?”
“Just wait there,” I told Tarbok, and got to my feet. To Ralph, I said, “Come on now. Let’s not make things any more confusing than they already are.”
“Is that Frank Tarbok?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s Frank Tarbok.”
Ralph’s gun was suddenly pointing at me. “Against the wall, mother,” he said.
23
Tarbok came out from under the table with his hands up, the way Ralph ordered, and stood next to me at the refrigerator. “I won’t forget this, Conway,” he told me.
“Shut up,” Ralph said. He waggled the gun at Abbie and Mrs. McKay. “You two over there with them.”
“No,” Abbie said.
He looked at her. “What?”
“Go away, Ralph,” she said. “We have trouble enough already, so just go away.”
“Oh, yeah? Maybe you don’t think Napoli’s going to be interested about this? How Chester Conway here, who doesn’t know nothing about nothing, is having a nice private chat with Frank Tarbok.”