She came back.
I thanked her for quite a while, until she finally said, “Chet, this is lovely, but the truth is I’m cold. I’m freezing. And I think my ankle’s swollen. And I’m exhausted.”
I said, “When do you have to go back to Las Vegas?”
“Whenever I want.”
“Do you think you could maybe never want?”
“You mean stay here?”
“In the vicinity.”
“What about you in Vegas?” she said. “Nice and warm all the time, and you can gamble all you want.”
“Not me,” I said. “Look how much trouble I get in where I can only gamble a little. I’d better stay in a state where it has to be a sideline. Besides, Belmont opens in May.”
“We’ll have to talk about it,” she said.
“Later on, right?”
She nodded. “Right.”
“For now, we get you someplace warm where you can sit down, right?”
“Oh, please, sir.”
“Lean on me.”
She did, maybe a little too much, and we staggered around the liquor store we’d landed behind and out to the street. And about a block away, on the other side of the street, was a big red neon sign that said bar.
“Look, Moses,” Abbie said, “it’s the Promised Land.”
I tried hurrying, but Abbie’s ankle just wouldn’t hold her any more, so finally I said, “Okay, let’s do it the easy way,” and I picked her up in my arms.
“Oh, what a grandstander,” she said. “Now that we’re almost there.”
“You want to walk?”
“No!”
“Then be quiet.”
I carried her across the street and into the bar, where the bartender and his three customers sitting at the bar all looked at us in deadpan disbelief. “She’s my sweetie,” I explained, and carried Abbie over to a booth and helped her sit down. Then I asked her, “What do you want to drink?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
“Scotch and soda.”
“Fine.”
I went over to the bar and ordered two Scotch and sodas. The bartender made them and set them down in front of me and I paid him. I put the glasses on the table while he got my change, and then went back to the bar, and he handed me my change and said, “I love your chapeau.”
I looked at myself in his back-bar mirror, and discovered I was still wearing the orange hat. I’d forgotten all about it. I looked like Buddy Hackett being a Christmas elf. I said, “I won it for conspicuous valor.”
“I figured you probably did,” he said.
I took my change back to the booth, where Abbie was giggling behind her hand, and sat down. “Here’s where you should of ordered a sidecar,” I said.
“You do look kind of odd,” she said.
“It keeps my head warm. Besides, it was a gift from a dear friend.”
She got a tender look on her face and reached out to clasp my hand. “And you’re a dear friend, Chet,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“Probably lived a lot quieter a life,” I said. “But let me tell you, if you stick around I can’t promise it’ll all be as thrilling as the last few days.”
“Oh, what a shame,” she said.
I took a slug of Scotch and soda. “And it isn’t over yet,” I said.
“Why? What are we going to do now?”
“As soon as this booze gives me some strength back,” I said, “I’m going over there and ask that very funny man behind the bar to call us a cab to take us back to New York.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a poker game tonight,” I said, “and one of the people sitting around that goddam table killed your brother. Not to mention winging me in the head while aiming to kill you.”
“I don’t think you can be winged in the head,” she said. “I think you have to be winged in the arm.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I was wung in the head.”
“I thought you were,” she said. She’d picked up the style from the bartender.
“And,” I said, refusing to be sidetracked, “we are going to that poker game, you and I, and we are going to figure out which one of those lovelies it is. Just as soon as I have the strength to stand up.”
35
I won’t say climbing the stairs at Jerry Allen’s place was the worst thing I went through that weekend, but it comes close. We’d spent a good forty-five minutes sitting in the back of that cab, relaxing, and we got out of it in front of Jerry’s place feeling pretty good. Then we climbed all those stairs up to the fifth floor and we were dead again.
Abbie more than me, of course, because of her ankle. I’d had the cab stop in front of an all-night drugstore and I’d gone in and bought an Ace bandage, and I’d wrapped it around her ankle so that now she could walk on it at least, but it still slowed her down and drained her energy.
In the cab I’d offered to drop her off somewhere safe and go on to the game alone, but she’d said, “Not on your life, Charley. I want to be in at the finish.” So here she was, hobbling up the stairs with me.
I wondered if they’d all be there. We’d discussed them on the way in, of course, the four of them, the four regulars, trying to figure out which one it could be, and we’d decided if one of them was missing tonight that was tantamount to a confession of guilt. But we’d thought it more likely the killer would try to act as normal as possible now, and so would more than likely show up.
So which one would it be? Jerry Allen. Sid Falco. Fred Stehl. Doug Hallman. There was also Leo Morgentauser, the vocational teacher, the irregular who’d been at the game last Wednesday and who surely wouldn’t be here tonight. He’d known Tommy, in a business way, but very slightly. Maybe because he wasn’t a regular in the game, I just didn’t think he was our man. But if everybody else proved out clean tonight, I’d certainly go make a call on him.
In the meantime, it left four, and the most obvious right away was Sid Falco. But both Abbie and I had rejected him right away. In the first place, he wasn’t an amateur, and Golder-man had told us Tommy’s killing had been the work of an amateur. In the second place, Sid wouldn’t have had to steal Abbie’s gun from me in order to have something to shoot me with. And in the third place, we just didn’t like him for the job.
Then there was Jerry Allen, our host. Part-owner of a florist shop, a possible homosexual, a steady loser at the game, full of sad embarrassed laughter whenever one of his many bad bluffs was called. So far as I knew he’d never met Tommy, and I couldn’t think of a motive for him, and I couldn’t see him shooting anybody anyway. I particularly couldn’t see him sitting at his kitchen table and carving dum-dum bullets.
Of course, the same was true of Fred Stehl. He was the one with the wife, Cora, who called once or twice every week, sometimes every night there was a game, for months, trying to prove Fred was there. What excuses Fred gave her a hundred and four times a year I don’t know, but she obviously never believed any of them. Fred was a loser at the game, but not badly, and his laundromat had to be making pretty good money. He made bets with Tommy a lot, but where was his motive?
Of all of them, the only one I could see getting teed off enough at anybody to sit at a kitchen table and make dum-dum bullets was Doug Hallman, our cigar-smoking gas station man. But I couldn’t see Doug actually shooting anybody. His hollering and blustering and loudness usually covered a bluff of one kind or another. When he was serious he was a lot quieter. If he ever decided to shoot somebody it would be a simple, clean, well-planned job, using one perfectly placed bullet which wasn’t a dum-dum at all. Or at least that’s the way it seemed to me.
So I’d wound up eliminating them all, if you’ll notice. But doggone it, one of those guys had stolen Abbie’s gun from me. It couldn’t have been anyone else, that was the one fact we had for sure. The idea that I’d been shot by the same gun was an inference, but it was based on a lot of circumstantial evidence. The amateur standing of the killer, for instance, combined with the cops’ having found the murder weapon that killed Tommy. And the fact that its aim was off, so that the shot that had hit me had probably been intended for Abbie, was another inference, but it followed logically out of the first one. And finally, that the person who shot at me — Abbie — us — whoever — was the same person who killed Tommy was yet another inference, but one I had no hesitation at all in making. So with one fact and three inferences we wound up with the conviction that one of the guys present at last Wednesday’s poker game was the murderer. And then we went over them one at a time, and eliminated them all.