“Okay,” he said. He looked tired and disgusted all of a sudden. “You’re clean,” he said.
“Well, sure,” I said. I looked around at them all. “Is that what you wanted to know? Did you think I killed Tommy?”
They didn’t bother to answer me. The man at the desk said, “Take him home.” What beautiful words!
The SS man said to me, “Up.”
“All right,” I said. I got quickly to my feet, wanting to be out of there before anybody changed anybody’s mind. Up till a few seconds ago I hadn’t counted on getting out of here at all.
This time they didn’t grab my arms. I walked of my own accord to the door, and as I was stepping through, the man at the desk said, “Wait.”
Run for it? Ho ho. I turned around and looked at the three of them.
The man at the desk said, “You don’t talk to the cops. About this.”
“Oh,” I said. “Of course not. I mean, nothing happened, right? What should I talk to the cops for?”
I was babbling. I made myself stop, I made myself turn around, I made myself walk down the hall and down the stairs and down the gauntlet of cars and over to the Chevrolet. I got into the back seat without anybody telling me. Looking at the dashboard, I saw the keys had been left there after all, so maybe Robert Mitchum does know best.
The other two got into the car, same seating as before, and behind us the door rattled upward. We backed out, and they drove me home. The trip seemed shorter, through streets that were now even emptier.
The snow was increasing. It was still slow and lazy, but there were more flakes, and they were starting to stick. A thin white coating of confectioners’ sugar covered the black streets. They let me off in front of the house. “Thank you,” I said as I got out, as though they’d just given me a lift home, and then felt foolish, and then was afraid I’d slammed the door too hard, and then walked quickly into the house while they drove leisurely away.
Usually I’m a beer man, but my father is a Jack Daniel’s man, and this was a Jack Daniel’s moment. Two ice cubes and some Tennessee mash in a jelly glass, a few minutes of sitting quietly, sipping quietly, at the kitchen table, and slowly my overwound mainspring began to relax its tension a little.
Now that I could think it over, in safety and solitude, I saw what had happened. Those three guys had to be from the gambling syndicate Tommy worked for. The syndicate, not itself having had Tommy killed, had wanted to know who had done for one of its employees. Apparently they suspected a man named Solomon Napoli, God alone knew why, and they must have read in the News about me finding the body, and they decided to check me out, and they saw the poker game connection with Sid Falco — I hadn’t known he was involved in anything shady — and the rest followed.
But then to think I was having an affair with Tommy’s wife. Louise? Louise. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with the woman, she’s not bad-looking or anything, but she’s skinny as a telephone pole and about ten years older than me and every time I’ve seen her she’s worn bargain-basement dresses and heavy shoes, and her hair is usually wrapped up in so many huge pink plastic rollers she looks like a refugee from a science-fiction movie.
Well. The man at the desk, the important one, had seemed convinced at the end there that I was innocent, so that should finish it. I downed the last of the Jack Daniel’s, put the glass in the sink, switched off the light, and went upstairs in the dark to my bedroom, where it occurred to me I could have asked those people tonight who I should see now about collecting my money. Damn. Well, tomorrow I’d go see Tommy’s wife. Louise.
7
Except I didn’t. When the alarm rousted me out after four and a half hours’ uneasy sleep, the world was white and muffled and socked in. The snow was still lazy, still drifting down the air, but now the flakes were coming down in the millions and the ground was already three or four inches thick with it. Our first snowstorm had finally arrived.
I didn’t say anything to my father about last night’s incident because he’d only get excited and want to call the police, and it seemed to me if I called the police I would run a real risk of meeting those guys from last night again, the which I was in no hurry to do. My whole feeling was of being a little fish floating around in the water, living my little life, and then suddenly being yanked up at the end of a fishing line, caught by powers too strong for me to fight and too big for me to understand, with terrible immediate oblivion all of a sudden staring me in the face, and then the reprieve coming and being tossed back into the water because I’m too small. I didn’t want to hang around and make a fuss, all I wanted to do was go quickly away by myself somewhere and forget the whole thing. So I didn’t tell my father a thing about it.
We had breakfast, and I kept looking out the kitchen window at the snow, and it kept being there. I’d gotten up early in order to work the day shift, since my regular Wednesday night poker game was tonight, but with all that snow out there it was hopeless. After breakfast I called the garage and told them I saw no point adding myself to the snarl-up Manhattan was undoubtedly in the middle of, and the dispatcher said fine by him, and then I had the day in front of me.
My father went back to his percentages at the dining-room table, leaving me essentially alone with myself, so I called a few guys to see if enough were staying home to get a game up, but half of them had gone to work and the other half wouldn’t leave the house. “If you want to play over here, Chet, it’s fine by me.” I didn’t call Sid Falco, feeling very weird about him since knowing what I now knew. I phoned in today’s number — 214, don’t ask me why — to the stationery store and promised to drop by tomorrow with the quarter, and then there was nothing to do but read the sports pages of the News and wait for tomorrow.
When the doorbell rang a little after eleven it was a godsend. I was reduced to watching an old horse-race movie with Margaret O’Brien on Channel 11, and I hate that kind of picture. I know the races are rigged, and they never give you enough information on the entries anyway, but there I sit trying to handicap the damn things.
I switched off the set right away, went to the door, opened it, and in came a swirl of snow and the detective who’d questioned me at Tommy’s apartment. Detective Golderman. The amount of snow I could see through the open doorway was unbelievable, but a plow had been down the street recently, so it was possibly passable. A black Ford was parked out front.
I shut the door, and he took off his hat and said, “Remember me, Chester?”
Why do policemen call everybody by their first names? “Sure,” I said. “You’re Detective Golderman.”
My father called from the dining room, “Who is it?”
Detective Golderman said, “You didn’t go to work today.”
“Who did?” I said.
“I did,” he said.
My father called from the dining room, “I’m expecting an insurance man.”
Detective Golderman said, “Do you have a few minutes?”
“Sure,” I said. “Come on in the living room.”
My father bellowed, “Chet! Is that my insurance man?”
I led Detective Golderman into the living room and said, “Excuse me.”
“Certainly.”
I crossed the living room to the dining-room doorway and said, “It’s a policeman.” I said “policeman” instead of “cop” because Detective Golderman was in earshot.
“Why didn’t you say so?” my father said. He was irritable, which usually meant the math was being too tricky for him. Sooner or later he always worked the policies out, but some of them were very tough, and when he had one of the really tough ones he tended to get irritable.