Donald Westlake: Somebody Owes Me Money

All at once she let go of me, picked up the phone, and shouted into it, “Get off the line! I want to call the police!”

“That is the police,” I said.

She started clicking the phone at him. “Hang up!” she shouted. “Hang up, this is an emergency!”

“I’m supposed to slap you now,” I said. I tugged at her arm, trying to get her attention. “Hello? Listen, I’m supposed to slap you across the face now, because you’re hysterical. But I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to have to do that.”

She began violently to shake the phone, holding it out at arm’s length as though strangling it. “Will — you — get — off — the — line?”

I kept tugging her other arm. “That’s the police,” I said. “ That’s the police.”

She flung the phone away all at once, so that it bounced off the wall. She yanked her arm away from me and went running out of the kitchen and out of the apartment. “Help!” I heard her in the hall. “Help! Police!”

I picked up the phone. “That was his wife,” I said. “She’s hysterical. I wish you’d hurry up and dispatch some officers.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “You were giving your name.”

“I guess I was,” I said. “It’s Chester Conway.” I spelled it.

He said, “Thank you, sir.” He read back my name and the address and I said he had them right and he said the officers would be dispatched to the scene at once. I hung up and noticed the phone was smeared with red from where Tommy’s wife had held it, so now my hand was smeared, too. Red and sticky. I went automatically to wipe my hand on my jacket, and discovered the front of my jacket was also red and sticky.

A heavyset man in an undershirt, with hair on his shoulders and a hammer in his hand, came into the kitchen, looking furious and determined and terrified, and said, “What’s going on here?”

“Somebody was killed,” I said. I felt he was blaming me, and I was afraid of his hammer. I gestured at the phone and said, “I just called the police. They’re on their way.”

He looked around on the floor. “Who was killed?”

“The man who lives here,” I said. “Tommy McKay. He’s in the living room.”

He took a step backward, as though to go to the living room and see, then suddenly got a crafty expression on his face and said, “You ain’t going anywhere.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m going to wait here for the police.”

“You’re damn right,” he said. He glanced at the kitchen clock, then back at me. “We’ll give them five minutes,” he said.

“I really did call,” I said.

A very fat woman in a flowered dress appeared behind him, putting her hands on his hairy shoulders, peeking past him at me. “What is it, Harry?” she said. “Who is he?”

“It’s okay,” Harry said. “Everything’s under control.”

“What’s that stuff on his jacket, Harry?” she asked.

“It’s blood,” I said.

The silence was suddenly full of echoes, like after hitting a gong. In it, I could plainly hear Harry swallow. Gulp. His eyes got brighter, and he took a tighter grip on the hammer.

We all stood there.

When the cops came in, everybody talked at once. They listened to Harry first, maybe because he was closest, maybe because he had the hammer, maybe because he had his wife talking with him, and then they told him to take his wife and his hammer and go back across the hall to his apartment and take care of the bereaved lady over there and they, the cops, would stop in a little later. Harry and his wife went away, looking puffed with pride and full of good citizenship, and the cops turned to me.

“I didn’t do it,” I said.

They looked surprised, and then suspicious. “Nobody said you did,” one of them pointed out.

“That guy was holding a hammer on me,” I said. “ He thought I did it.”

“Why did he think so?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Tommy’s wife told him I did.”

“Why would she say a thing like that?”

“Because she was hysterical,” I said. “Besides, I don’t even know if she said it. Maybe it was because of the blood on my jacket.” I looked at my hand. “And on my hand.”

They looked at my jacket and my hand, and they stiffened up a little. But the one who did the talking was still soft-voiced when he said, “How did that happen?”

“Tommy’s wife grabbed me,” I said. “That’s when it got on my jacket. She’d gone in to look at Tommy, and I guess she touched him or something, and then she got it on me.”

“And the hand?”

“From the phone.” I pointed to it. “She was holding the phone.”

“Is she the one who called in the complaint?”

“No. I did.”

“You did. Who did Mrs. McKay call?”

“Nobody. She was hysterical, and she wanted to call the co — police, but I was already talking to them. It got kind of confusing.”

“I see.” They looked at one another, and the talking one said, “Where’s the body?”

“In the living room,” I said. I made a pointing gesture. “Down the hall to the end.”

“Show us.”

I didn’t want to go down there. “Well, it’s just—” I said, and then I saw what they meant. They wanted me with them. “Oh,” I said. “All right.”

We went down the hall to the living room, me in the lead, and Tommy was still there, spread out on the floor, sunny side up. With the yolk broken.

I’m sorry I thought that.

I stood to one side, and the cops looked. One of them said to me, “Use your phone?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s not mine.”

The phone was over by the windows, which looked out on the street. While the silent cop went over and made his call the other one said to me, “Why didn’t you use that phone there? Why the one in the kitchen?”

“I didn’t want to be in the same room with him,” I said. I was not looking at Tommy, but I could still see him out of the corner of my eye. “I still don’t,” I said.

He looked at me. “You going to be sick?”

“I don’t think so.”

He pointed near the hallway entrance. “Just wait there a minute,” he said.

“All right,” I said. I went over there and waited, looking down the hall toward the entrance. Behind me I could hear the cops talking together and talking on the phone, low murmurings. I wasn’t interested in making out the words.

After a couple minutes the talking cop and I went across the hall to Harry’s apartment. Harry seemed surprised to see me walking around free, surprised and somewhat indignant, as though he was being insulted in some obscure way. Tommy’s wife was lying on her back on a very lumpy sofa in an overcrowded and overheated living room. She had one forearm thrown over her face, and I saw she’d washed the blood off her hands.

The cop sat down on the coffee table and said softly, “Mrs. McKay?”

Without moving her arm so she could see him she said, “What?”

“Could I ask you a couple questions?” He was even more soft-voiced than before. A very nice corpse-side manner.

I said to Harry, “Can I use your bathroom, please?”

Harry frowned in instant distrust. He said to the cop, “Is it okay?”

The cop looked over his shoulder, nettled at the interruption. “Sure, sure,” he said, and went back to Tommy’s wife.

Harry’s wife, being polite because now I was a guest in her house, showed me to the bathroom. I shut the door with my clean hand, turned on the water in the sink, and washed my hands. Then I used a washcloth to try to wash off the front of my jacket. I got it pretty well, then rinsed the washcloth, dried my hands, and went back out to the living room.