Sid sat down.
I said, “The reason I’m here, Sid, is because somebody in this room killed Tommy McKay.”
Sid stopped blinking. He looked at me cold-eyed. Everybody else went into shock for a second, and then I got a chorus of wha? and you’re putting us on, and things like that. I waited for it to settle down, and then I said, “Sid, when you go to the bathroom, you’re going to have a lot more to tell your boss than just where he can find Abbie and me. You’re going to tell him who killed Tommy McKay, and you’re going to tell him about the lawyer I went to see on my way to town, and you’re going to tell him about the letter I dictated to that lawyer, and you’re going to tell him why his boys and Droble’s boys both should lay off both Abbie and me permanently and forever. This is all going to be very interesting, Sid.”
“Maybe it is,” Sid said. He was very businesslike now, not doing a bluff at all.
I said, “All right. We’ll start with Tommy’s murderer. He’s in this room.”
Jerry Allen said, “Chet, what nonsense. For heaven’s sake, what are you talking about?”
I stopped talking to Sid, and talked to Jerry instead. “When I came here last Wednesday night,” I said, “I had a gun in my coat pocket. It was Abbie’s, she’d given it to me to hold for her that afternoon.”
“You took it,” Abbie said sleepily.
“All right,” I said, “I took it. The point is, I had it when I came here. When I left here it was gone. I didn’t notice it until later, but the only place it could have been taken from my pocket was in this apartment, while my coat was hanging up in the hall closet. Somebody took my gun. Abbie’s gun. Somebody in this room took it.”
Doug said, “Chet, is this on the level?”
“Absolutely on the level,” I told him, and I pointed at the wound on the side of my head. “You see that? I was shot at by that same gun.”
Sid said, “You’ve got something wrong.”
I looked at him. “I do? What?”
“I took the gun out of your coat,” he said. “I was supposed to turn you over to a couple of guys after the game, and I was supposed to make sure you were clean. They told me they wanted to ask you some questions, they didn’t say anything about bumping you off.”
“That’s what they wanted, though,” I said.
“I found that out later,” he said. “They told me the other at first because they didn’t know how close friends we were.”
“Not very close,” I said.
He shrugged. “Anyway, you took off with the girl. I followed you, because maybe you were going to her place or something, but you gave me the slip. So I phoned my boss and he said they’d set things up another way and I gave him your home address.”
“That was thoughtful,” I said.
“He wanted to know. But the point is, I thought you’d got the gun back. I took it out of your coat pocket and put it in my coat pocket, and when I checked after the game it was gone. So I thought you took it back.”
“I didn’t,” I said. I looked around, and everybody was staring at Sid now. So long as I was the only one who’d been talking crazy, they could all remain astonished spectators, but now that Sid had entered into a dialogue with me, the thing was turning real and they were beginning to realize they were in the middle of it. I said, “It looks as though this place was full of pickpockets last Wednesday night. Anybody got any ideas?”
Leo said, “I have the idea I should have stayed home tonight.” He still had the cards in his hand, and he looked at them now, smiled grimly, and put them down.
Doug said to me, “Let me try and get this straight. You got yourself mixed up in Tommy’s murder somehow, and got shot at yourself. And you say it was with a gun that was stolen off you while you were here at the game last Wednesday.”
“Right.”
“Why wasn’t it with the same gun that killed Tommy? Maybe somebody here copped your gun, but didn’t have anything to do with shooting at you.”
“They found the gun that killed Tommy two days before I was shot at,” I said.
“The cops found it?”
“Yes.”
“So much for that,” Doug said. He shook his head. “I pass. It wasn’t me and I don’t know who it was.”
Jerry said, “It wasn’t you, Doug? You have a pretty mean temper sometimes. And you did know this man Tommy, I believe. You couldn’t have gotten angry at him over something—”
“I could get angry at you,” Doug told him. “I could get angry, Jerry, and pull your head off you, but I couldn’t go shoot people.” He held up his hands, saying, “If I ever kill anybody, Jerry, this is what I’ll use. And you’ll be the first to know.”
Leo said, “Doug’s right, Jerry. You’re much more the revolver type than he is. You might get into a pet and blast somebody with a gun.”
“Me?” Jerry absolutely squeaked. “I don’t even own a gun! I didn’t even know the man who was killed! You knew him!”
Doug said, “Hold it. Let’s not go pointing the finger at each other. That won’t get us anywhere, it’ll just get us mad.”
“I disagree,” I said. “Maybe it will get us somewhere. Why don’t we all say what we think, and argue it out, and see if we can come up with something? Because I’ll tell you the truth, I have absolutely no way to narrow it down. I know it has to be somebody in this room, I know it can’t be anybody not in this room, but that’s as close as I’ve been able to get it. Except I’ve eliminated Sid. But the rest of you—”
Sid smiled thinly, and everybody else objected at once. Leo succeeded in getting the floor at last, and said, “Why eliminate Sid? From the way you two have been talking, you and Sid, he knows as much about this as you do. And he’s apparently connected with some underworld figures some way, I get that much from the conversation. Why wouldn’t that make him your prime suspect, ahead of the rest of us?”
“He didn’t have to shoot at me,” I said. “No matter what he says now, he knew his boss was sending people to kill me. Professionals. So why should he bother to shoot me? Also, it made his boss very unhappy when Tommy was killed, and Sid wouldn’t have dared do anything to make his boss unhappy. Right, Sid?”
“Close enough,” Sid said.
Leo shook his head. “None of us knows anything about this, Chet. How can we talk sensibly about it? If one of us makes a suggestion, you tell us five more facts you already knew and we didn’t which shows the suggestion is wrong. That’s futile. What you ought to do is take your suspicions to the police.”
“Of course,” Jerry said. “Instead of coming here disrupting things, why not go to the police? Tell them what you think, what you know. Let them work it out.”
It was Abbie who answered this time. “We can’t go to the police,” she said.
Doug said, “Why not?”
“Because,” she said, “there are two gangs of crooks after us. Not one gang, two gangs. If one of them doesn’t get us, the other one will. Neither Chet nor I can live a normal life while they’re still after us. And part of the reason they’re all excited and upset is because of Tommy McKay’s murder. If we could solve that for them, and also this business about the lawyer Chet mentioned” — I was glad she’d picked up on that, since I’d just made it up and we hadn’t discussed it in the cab — “they’d leave us alone.”
Fred, leaning forward with a worried expression on his face, said, “You mean your lives are in danger?”
“That’s putting it mildly,” I said. “We’ve been shot at, strangled, threatened, chased, I don’t know what all. There are people out in the world with guns right now, and they’re looking for Abbie and me, and they want to kill us. And Sid there wants to go make a phone call and tell one bunch of them where they can find us.”