“That’s not our problem,” he said. “You want to take it up with his widow, you go right ahead.”
I looked at Tarbok, but he was no help. I said, “What happened to the money?”
Tarbok shook his head, and Droble shrugged. They couldn’t care less.
I said, “Wait a second, this might be important. Are you sure he got it? Are you sure the money was actually paid to him?”
“Our courier got here at five thirty-five,” Droble told me. “We already checked that out.”
I said, “Are you sure? What about this courier?”
“He’s my son-in-law,” Droble said drily. “He’s being groomed for the top, and he knows it. He didn’t bump McKay for your nine hundred thirty dollars.”
“Hmm,” I said. “And he got here at five thirty-five? Tommy was alive then, and he was dead when I got here at six-ten. That’s thirty-five minutes.”
“He was alive at five-fifty,” Droble said. “We’ve done some checking out, and somebody in our organization talked to him on the phone at ten minutes to six.”
Tarbok said, “So it’s down to twenty minutes.”
I said, “It’s a good thing I didn’t get here much earlier. What happened to the money afterwards?”
“Gone,” Droble said. “Our cop on the scene told us the bundle wasn’t here.”
“How much can you trust him?” I asked.
“He picks up no percentage in lying on that one,” Droble said. “If the money was here the cops would have picked it up and divided it, and our cop would of told us so. There wouldn’t be any question about us getting it back or anything.”
“So the murderer took it with him.”
“Right,” Droble said. “So there’s your answer. Go find the killer, and collect your nine hundred from him.”
“I don’t think that’s fair,” I said. “I made my bet in good faith, and just because you have an administrative problem inside your organization is no reason I should—”
“Administrative problem!”
“What else do you call it? I didn’t get my money because somebody in your organization lost it in transit. It should be up to you to make it good.”
“You want to take us to court?” he asked me.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “That money’s important to me.”
“It isn’t the money,” he said, “it’s the precedent. We don’t pay off twice, and that’s all there is to it. Look, the other big winner that day didn’t come squawking, he understood the situation. Why don’t you?”
“Another big winner?” I said.
“Yeah. Another guy had the same horse as you, only he had a hundred on it. That’s almost three grand.”
“Who was he?”
“What difference does it make?” Droble said.
“I don’t know, I’m just asking. Who was he?”
Droble shrugged in irritation. “I wouldn’t know. McKay would have the name, it might be in his records around here some—”
He stopped. He looked wide-eyed. He glanced at Tarbok, who looked back in bewilderment and said, “Walt?”
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Droble said. “That’s what the bastard was doing for Napoli! He was robbing me blind!”
I was happy to see Tarbok didn’t get it any more than I did. He said, “How do you figure that, Walt?”
“I remember,” Droble said, “Higgins in Accounting said it to me a couple months ago, how McKay had a couple of consistent winners, guys who’d pick two, three horses a week, long shots. Cleaning up. McKay was actually running at a loss because of those guys, but it disappeared in the overall accounting picture. Don’t you see it, Frank? The bastard was past-posting us!”
I grinned. How lovely. Napoli, in other words, had been feeding Tommy the names of one or two good money winners a day, getting the information to Tommy right after the race, before the news would be on the wires. Then Tommy would make those bets for non-existent players, and probably he and Napoli split the proceeds. A nice way for Napoli to hit his competition in the cash register and build up his own funds for when the open warfare started. Particularly if Napoli had more than one of Droble’s bookies doing the same thing.
I said, “Mr. Droble, if it wasn’t for me you would never have found out about this. Napoli was suborning your organization from the bottom, and financing it with your own money. Now you know about it and you can do something about it, and if it wasn’t for me you’d have gone under. Now, if that isn’t worth nine hundred thirty dollars, I don’t know what—”
“Will you shut up about that lousy nine hundred?” Droble was angry and worried, and in no mood to be fair about things.
But Tarbok, surprisingly, was. He said, “Walt, I think Conway’s right. I think we owe him a debt. And I also think he could go on being helpful to us for some time to come. We could afford to—”
“With that bastard Napoli sucking my blood? Not on your life. Don’t either of you say another word about that nine—”
The doorbell rang.
I said, “I’ll get it,” and got to my feet. As I left the room, Droble started to say something to Tarbok about having the Accounting Department check all the other retail bookies.
I was really angry, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. To be too cheap to pay me my money, when in reality he owed me a heck of a lot more than that. Boy, some people are really pigs.
I looked through the peephole in the front door, and there was Solomon Napoli himself, with several tough-looking types behind him, that snitch Ralph among them.
What did I owe any of these clowns? The debts were all the other way, it seemed to me. I opened the door and bowed them in with a flourish. “Come on in, fellas,” I said. “You’re just in time for the punch.”
25
Did you ever see two cats meet unexpectedly coming around a corner or through a doorway? Then I don’t have to describe the meeting between Walter Droble and Solomon Napoli. Or how full the hall became of assorted henchmen, with Napoli’s commandos crowding in from outside and Droble’s irregulars hurrying down from the living room.
I slithered back into the kitchen — not bad for somebody who can’t stay on a diet — and over to the far side of the refrigerator, wanting to be out of the line of fire in case there was a line of fire, from where I watched the opening stages of the drama.
Droble had leaped to his feet, of course, the minute Napoli had appeared in the kitchen doorway, and for what seemed several years they just stood glaring at each other, both in a half-crouch, hackles rising everywhere, like the opening of the gun duel scene in a western movie. There was noise and commotion out in the hall from the rival gangs of extras, but that all seemed to be happening in a different world, as though a thick pane of glass separated this room from the planet Earth as we know it. Frank Tarbok had stayed exactly where he was, seated at the table, hands in plain view on the tabletop.
Droble spoke first: “You’ve been past-posting me, you son of a bitch.”
Napoli, small and dapper and vicious, said, “But you were a real boy scout in that East New York business, weren’t you?”
“If you hadn’t pulled that stunt with Griffin, nothing would have happened in East New York.”
Napoli was about to reply, but Tarbok said, “Walt. Remember the civilian.”
Droble looked angrily around, irritated at the interruption, and when he met Tarbok’s eye, Tarbok nodded in my direction. Then everybody looked at me.
I never felt so present in my life. I was right there, right out in the open, plain as the sweat on my face. I resisted the impulse to say, “Uh.”
But I was going to have to say something, because I could sense the mood changing all of a sudden. The room was full of tension looking for an outlet, and I was the stranger, the foreigner, the civilian, the one who didn’t belong. It would relieve everybody’s feelings if they all got together and stomped me into the linoleum.