“Well, it’s been taken out of my hands,” he said. “The captain’s going to want to talk to you two. In the morning. In the meantime, he refuses to let me keep you here.”
“Oh, boy,” I said.
“What does he expect us to do tonight?” Abbie asked him.
“It just so happens,” he said, “that my wife’s brother isn’t home right now. He works for Grumman, they have him and his whole family in Washington for three months. I have the keys to his house, there’s no reason you can’t stay there tonight.”
“Where’s the house?” I asked. It was easy to resist the impulse to say something smart-alecky, like, “Oh, the house in Babylon?” Like him with Ralph in the closet. But all I had to do was forecast the dialogue from that point on, if I did such a thing, and the impulse got itself resisted.
“In Babylon,” he said. “Not very far from here.”
“Can you give me directions?”
“Oh, I’ll drive you over,” he said.
“I have my own car out front,” I said.
“You’d better leave that here for tonight. The captain was explicit that I shouldn’t give you two the opportunity to change your minds and take off again. I’ll run you over there, it won’t be any trouble at all.”
“I hope there’s no hurry,” I said, lifting the bottle of Black & White. “I was just about to make myself a second drink.”
“Go right ahead,” he said.
Abbie got down off the stool and started walking away toward the other end of the room, saying, “Is that a color television set?”
Golderman swung around on his stool to watch her. “Yes, it is,” he said, and I bonked him with the Black & White.
30
“We can’t stay here all night,” Abbie said.
I shut the last cabinet door. “Not a gun down here,” I said. “And none on him. I thought cops were supposed to wear guns at all times.”
“Not while they’re at home,” she said.
I went around behind the bar again and looked at him. He was tied hand and foot, he was gagged, and he was unconscious, and it all served him right. But if only he’d had a gun on him.
“Doggone it,” I said. “That gun of yours might have been a pea-shooter, but it would have been better than nothing.”
“Stop worrying about guns,” Abbie said. “When we don’t show up at that house in Babylon pretty soon, Tarbok and his men are going to come over to find out what’s the matter.”
“Yeah, and one of them will probably be carrying that gun of yours, and he’ll stand very close and go pit pit and it’s all over because we don’t have anything to defend ourselves with.”
“Where would one of them get it?” she said, frowning at me.
“Out of my pocket,” I said.
“No,” she said.
Why was she bothering me with things like that? I looked at her, exasperated, and said, “What do you mean, no?”
“None of those people took the gun,” she said. “It was gone before you got to the apartment.”
I stared. “Before?”
“Of course,” she said. “When do you think I was looking for it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought one time while I was unconscious in the apartment.”
“In the car,” she said. “When you got yourself shot. I took off away from there, and every time I got stopped by a light I searched you some more. That’s how I got so sticky.”
“Never mind that part.”
“Anyway,” she said, “you didn’t have it with you. I could have killed you myself, if you want to know.”
“Not without the gun. Maybe it’s in the car someplace, maybe it fell out of my pocket.”
“I searched, Chet, I really and truly searched. That gun was gone.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. I went over and sat down at the bar and pulled on my Scotch and soda. “Then who the heck took it?” I said.
Abbie came over and sat down beside me. “What difference does it make? The question is, what do we do now?”
“The question is,” I insisted, “who took the goddamn gun. I had it when I got to the poker game, I remember feeling the weight of it in my pocket when I was going up all those stairs.”
She was beginning to get interested, too. “What about afterwards?” she said.
“I don’t remember. But where did we go? I was in the car the whole time. Who could have taken it?”
“Somebody at the poker game,” she said.
“Hmmm,” I said. “It was hanging in the hall closet. Everybody got up from the table at one time or another. Yeah, that’s when it must have been.”
“That’s the only time it could have been,” she said.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” I said. “It was your gun that shot me in the head.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Golderman told us they found the gun that killed Tommy. He also said it was an amateur. So where’s an amateur gonna get another gun in a hurry when he decides he’ll have to kill again? From the victim!”
“But why do you think it was the same gun?”
“First,” I said, “because your gun was stolen the same night. Second, because the job was done by an amateur who wasn’t going to have ready access to a whole arsenal of guns. And third, because Golderman told us I was shot by a smaller, lighter gun than the one used on Tommy, which is an accurate description of that gun of yours.”
“But my gun always misses to the left, and he just nicked you on what was his right.”
“Of course,” I said. “It should have been obvious all along.”
“What should have been obvious all along?”
“He was shooting at you.”
31
“Now wait a minute!”
“Abbie, think about it. What did we tell the guys at that game? That you were Tommy’s sister, and you came to New York because he was dead, and because you didn’t have any faith in the police to find your brother’s murderer you were going to look for him yourself. You, not me. All I ever said I was after was my nine hundred dollars.”
She was shaking her head. “I wasn’t the one who was shot, Chet, you were.”
“Because your goddamn gun shoots crooked.”
“We aren’t even sure it was my gun.”
“I am,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I’m sure of. I’m sure I was shot with your gun. I’m sure the bullet was meant for you instead of me. And I’m one hundred percent positive that Tommy’s murderer is one of the guys at that poker game.”
“Hm,” she said. She sat down on the bar stool beside me and swirled the remains of her sidecar in its glass. “I think you’re right,” she said at last.
“You don’t know what a relief it is,” I said, “to know it isn’t me that guy is after.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “It’s a relief to know he’s after me instead, is that it?”
“I know how that sounded—”
“Well, what I’ve got after me,” she said, “is one poorly armed amateur, but what you’ve got after you, buddy, is two armies.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said. “We’ve been forgetting. One of those armies is coming here.”
“Oh!” She finished her sidecar, and the two of us left the bar.
“Quietly,” I whispered.
“I know, I know.”
We tiptoed up the stairs. Detective Golderman’s wife might not be in on her husband’s nefariousness, but she wouldn’t have to be in on it to take umbrage at two strangers knocking him out and tying him up and leaving him on the floor behind the bar in his downstairs playroom. So we moved slowly and silently up the stairs, and at the top I cracked the door open just a hair and peeked through the slit.