“Oh, don’t be stupid,” I said.
“Watch it, you,” he told me.
I said, “Think about it, Ralph. If anything was going on here, would I have let you into the apartment?”
Tarbok said, out of the corner of his mouth, “You and me are gonna talk about that, Conway, believe me.”
“Oh, you shut up, too,” I said. “You people are the shlemozzles, not me. I never in my life saw so many people jump to so many wrong conclusions. You’re all either paranoid or stupid, and I’m beginning to think you’re both.”
Abbie said, dangerously, “I hope you’re not including me in that, Chet.”
“Now don’t you start,” I said. I walked away from the refrigerator toward Ralph, who put a menacing expression on his face. “Ralph,” I said, “Frank Tarbok is not here to make any plans with me to do anything mean to Solomon Napoli. Frank Tarbok is here as a private citizen, escorting the widow of Tommy McKay, who is that tear-stained lady sitting at the kitchen table.”
“So you say,” said Ralph.
“So I say,” I agreed. “And so it is. You came back for your gun, Ralph, and you have your gun, and now it seems to me you’ve got your choice of either using that gun or going away. Which is it?”
Abbie said, “Chet, be careful.”
I turned to her and said, “No. I’ve had it, Abbie. Every time things quiet down a little, some other lamebrain comes running in with a lot of stupid ideas in his head and starts—”
“Hey,” Ralph said.
“Yes,” I said, turning back to him, “I do mean you. If you weren’t a lamebrain I wouldn’t have taken thirteen bucks from you at gin in an hour.”
“You had the cards,” he said. “I can’t do nothing when you keep getting the cards.”
“Sure,” I said. “And if you weren’t a lamebrain you wouldn’t have walked out of here without your gun.”
“That was that cop.” Ralph was becoming very defensive now. “He screwed things up, made me—”
“Sure, the cop,” I said. “And if you weren’t a lamebrain you wouldn’t be carrying on like a nut just because Frank Tarbok is in Tommy McKay’s apartment. Tommy worked for Frank Tarbok, what’s so surprising that Tommy’s widow is with Frank Tarbok?”
“I’m not with that bastard!” Louise McKay suddenly shouted, leaping to her feet in order to throw a monkeywrench into the works just as I was beginning to make Ralph see a glimmer of light. She shouted at Ralph, “Go ahead and shoot him! He’s the one killed my Tommy!”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “He did not. Mrs. McKay, you’re carrying on worse than Ralph.”
“Just a second there,” Ralph said. “Let the lady talk.”
“The lady runs off at the mouth,” I told him. “She doesn’t have the brains of a chipmunk.”
“Chet!” Abbie said, shocked. “Louise has been through a lot!”
“Well, it hasn’t smartened her up any,” I said. “She’s had a week to get used to being a widow, and frankly I’m not impressed by how broken up she is, seeing she was running around behind Tommy’s back when he was alive. If you ask me, she’s just making all this fuss because she feels guilty now about what she did to Tommy herself.”
“You’ve got a dirty mind, Chester Conway,” Mrs. McKay told me, “and a dirty mouth to go with it. But it doesn’t change the fact of the matter, and the fact of the matter is, Frank Tarbok killed my Tommy.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because he thought he could get me that way,” she said.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “He already had you, as often as he wanted.”
She went white. “You’re a filthy little bastard,” she said.
“Yeah, and you’re a nun.” I turned to Ralph, saying, “Ralph, think about it. Is Frank Tarbok the kind of man who would kill somebody for a woman? Particularly for a woman he was already shacked up with.”
Ralph was looking from face to face. The whole thing was miles over his head, but he had just enough brains to know it. “I don’t know nothing about nothing,” he said. “All I know is, Sol is going to be very interested in all this.”
“Then you better hurry and tell him about it,” I said. “Maybe he’ll give you a merit badge.”
“Watch that,” he said.
I opened my mouth to say one or two things, but then I changed my mind and instead I said, “Ralph, you weren’t bad to me while I was your prisoner. You were a pretty nice guy, in fact, and believe me I am doing my best right now to remember that. And please, you try and remember me. I haven’t done anything to Sol Napoli or anybody else, and what’s more I’m not in a position to do anything to Sol Napoli or anybody else. I am not a threat to you, Ralph, honest to God. Think about it.”
He thought about it. I could see him struggling with the problem, and his eyes kept straying to Frank Tarbok, standing in front of the refrigerator with his hands up. I could see what he had to surmount. Frank Tarbok was the enemy, and I was with the enemy, and that had to mean something was going on. On the other hand, what could be going on? It was a problem.
He finally gave up on it. “All right,” he said. “Okay. I’ll just go talk to Sol. Maybe he’ll want to see you again.”
“I will more than likely be right here,” I said. “Drop in any time. Join the crowd.”
“Sol can find you if he wants you,” Ralph said darkly.
“I know,” I said.
Ralph glared around at everybody, wanting to be sure his reputation as a tough guy was still unflawed, and then he hefted his gun one last time, backed out of the kitchen like the evil foreman leaving a western saloon, and disappeared to the right. A second later we heard the door open and shut.
Tarbok lowered his arms. “Conway,” he said, “just why in holy hell did you let that guy in here?”
“He left his gun behind,” I said, “and he came back for it. To be honest, I completely forgot about you being here. About the implications, I mean.”
“He left his gun behind.” Tarbok picked up an overturned chair and heavily sat down on it. Shaking his head he said, “Every time I have a conversation with you, Conway, things go crazy.”
“I thought it was the other way around,” I said, and walked around the table and sat down again in front of my liverwurst sandwich. Picking it up I said, “What time do we expect Walter Droble?”
“Half an hour.”
“Shall we make some onion dip? Does he play bridge?”
Louise McKay suddenly said, “Abbie, it’s perfectly all right for you to stay here while you’re in New York, but I’d rather you didn’t bring other people in with you. Particularly a foul-mouthed individual like that one.”
I said, “Mrs. McKay, I’m sorry if I offended you.”
“Huh!” she said.
“But,” I said, “you’re going around being very shrill and emotional and you’re not thinking sensibly. We could all have gotten killed if Ralph had decided to start shooting. Do you think he’d have shot Tarbok here and left three witnesses alive to tell about it? Just exactly at the moment when I was about to get him quietly out of here you start yelling all this stuff about Tarbok killing your husband, when you know perfectly well he didn’t.”
She stared at me. “I know no such thing.”
“Maybe you didn’t,” I said. “You probably did think he’d done it at first, but now you know he didn’t and you’re just going on momentum. You’re mad at him and maybe you should be, but that’s why you’re going on saying he killed Tommy.”
“He did.”
“No. You know the motive isn’t right, you know he wouldn’t have killed Tommy in order to marry you. And besides that,” I said, pointing at the wound on my head, “somebody shot at me Wednesday night.”