Hell.
We’d talked all this around and around in the cab, getting nowhere, and after we’d stopped talking about it I’d kept thinking about it and I still hadn’t gotten anywhere, and as I stood now on the fifth floor of Jerry’s building, gasping for breath and waiting for Abbie to catch up, I thought about it some more and I went on getting nowhere.
I also thought of something else. I said to Abbie, “Did I leave the meter running, do you know?”
She looked up at me. She had three steps to go, and she was white as a sheet. She breathed for a while, and then she said, “What?”
“The meter,” I explained. “In the cab I checked out. The one we drove to Golderman’s in. I wonder if I left the meter running.”
“Oh.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Christ, I hope I didn’t.”
She came up the last three steps and leaned against the banister. “I made it.”
“I’ll have to go out there tomorrow and get that cab,” I said. “If everything’s straightened out by then. What the hell am I going to tell the garage?”
“I don’t know, Chet.”
“You ready to go in?”
She nodded.
“Then let’s go.”
36
Jerry himself opened the door. “Well, look at you! We thought you weren’t coming. And you brought the pro, too, how lucky. Come on in. Isn’t that an interesting hat.”
I’d forgotten about it again. I untied the lace from under my chin and took the damn thing off. “Just something I picked up,” I said.
“Where? I might be interested.”
“You can have this one,” I said. “It doesn’t go with my eyes.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“No, I’m not. Here.”
He took the hat, not sure I was serious. He said, “Are you serious?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Well, thank you. Your trousers are ripped.”
That was that damn hedge I’d run through. “I slipped on the ice,” I said.
“Isn’t it awful? Abbie, what a lovely coat! But don’t give it to me, for heaven’s sake.”
Abbie laughed. “Just to hang up for me?”
“Well, in that case—”
As he took our coats and hung them up, I looked at Jerry Allen and I just couldn’t see it. Not Jerry. Jerry wouldn’t kill anybody, not in a million years. Scratch one. Again.
We all went into the living room, where Fred Stehl took one look, went, “Yip!” and threw his cards in the air.
“No applause,” I said. “No demonstrations.”
He put his hand to his heart. “I thought it was Cora,” he said.
“After what she did the last time?” Jerry said. “And you thought I’d open the door for her?”
“I know,” Fred said. “I know. But boy, just for a second there, wow. And Abbie, you don’t look a bit like Cora, honest to God.”
“I hope that’s a compliment,” she said.
“Oh, it is,” Jerry told her, and Fred nodded solemnly.
Fred? Fred Stehl, the henpecked laundromat man with his glasses and his balding head? No. In his own beer-and-under-shirt way Fred was an even less likely candidate for murderer than Jerry.
I looked around and all the regulars were here tonight, Doug and Sid also sitting there, and besides them there was a fifth man. Leo Morgentauser.
Leo? I frowned at him. What was he doing here, twice in one week? He’d never done that before. That was suspicious, very suspicious. I said, “Leo, what a surprise. I didn’t expect you around for a couple of months.”
“I called him,” Jerry said. “When you didn’t show up I called a couple of guys, and Leo could make it.”
“I won last time,” Leo said, “and I still have some of it left, so I thought I’d give you guys a chance to get it back.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said, and it stopped being suspicious that he was here. Naturally the boys didn’t want to play four-handed, that’s a terrible game, and naturally Leo was one of the people they’d call, and since he had won last Wednesday it wasn’t unusual for him to say yes tonight. Besides, what was a poor but honest vocational high school teacher going to shoot a small-time bookie for? Leo had made his rare two-dollar bet with Tommy, but I knew Tommy would never have let him run up a big tab or anything like that, he wouldn’t let anyone run up a tab too big for them to handle, and why would Leo shoot him? Why would Leo shoot anybody? No, not Leo.
There were two spaces next to each other at the table, so Abbie and I sat down there, Abbie on my left, and that put Doug Hallman on my right. He said, “What’ve you been up to, buddy? You look like you been mugged.”
“I slipped on the ice,” I said. “How you doing tonight?”
He had his inevitable rotten cigar in his face, and he puffed a lot of foul smoke in answer to my question, then amplified with, “Beautiful cards. Great cards. If we’d been playing low ball I’d own New York State by now.”
I grinned at him, and tried to visualize him shooting Tommy. He knew Tommy the same way the rest of us did, but that was all. Because he played at being mean all the time, the tough grimy garage man, big and hairy, chewing his cigar, it was possible to imagine him with a gun in his hand, going bang, but it was not at all possible to imagine why he’d do such a thing. Very unlikely. I put a great big check next to his name in my head, with a little teeny question mark next to it.
The other side of Doug was Leo, and the other side of Leo was Sid Falco. Sid hadn’t looked at anybody since we’d walked in, but had sat there studying the small stack of chips in front of him. Now, though, when Leo picked up the cards and said, “We ready to play?” Sid suddenly said, “Deal me out,” and got to his feet. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, still not looking at anybody.
“Hold it, Sid,” I said.
He did look at me, then, and I was surprised to see he was scared. He said, “What’s the matter, Chet?”
“Sit down, Sid,” I said.
He said, “I got to go to the bathroom.”
I said, “You mean to go into the kitchen and use Jerry’s other phone to call Napoli and tell him Abbie and I are here so he can have some people waiting outside for us when we leave.”
Shaking his head from side to side, looking very nervous and embarrassed, blinking a lot, doing all the things he always does when he’s trying one of his the-book-says-to-do-it bluffs, he said, “You got me absolutely wrong, Chet. I just got to go to the bathroom.”
“Sit down, Sid,” I said. “You can make your phone call in a few minutes, but right now sit down.” I felt everybody else staring at me. Everybody but Abbie, who seemed to have fallen asleep again. I didn’t blame her. I would have liked to fall asleep myself. I said, “Sit down, Sid, and I’ll tell you and everybody else why I’m here now, and why I look like this, and why Abbie’s sitting there with an Ace bandage wrapped around the outside of her boot. I’ll tell you everything, Sid, and then you can go to the bathroom all you want.”