Donald Westlake: Somebody Owes Me Money

The cop wasn’t alone any more. There were three plainclothesmen there, all with hats on their heads and their hands in their overcoat pockets. They looked at me, and the uniformed cop said, “He’s the one made the discovery.”

One of the plainclothesmen said, “I’ll take it.” He took his hands out of his pockets and came over to me, saying, “You Chester Conway?”

“Yes,” I said. In a corner I could see Harry and his wife both sitting in the same armchair, blinking at everything in eager curiosity. They’d happily given up the participant roles and drifted into their real thing, being spectators.

“I’m Detective Golderman,” the plainclothesman said. “Come along.”

Sensing Harry and his wife being disappointed that I wasn’t going to be questioned — grilled — in front of them, I followed Detective Golderman out and across the hall and into Tommy’s apartment. We went into the bedroom now, and I could hear murmuring in the living room. It sounded like a lot of men in there, a lot of activity.

Detective Golderman, notebook in hand, said, “Okay, Chester, tell me about it.”

I told him about it, that I’d called Tommy at four, that I’d said I’d be over at six, that when I got here I came into the building without his buzzing to let me in, that the apartment door was open, that I found him dead and started to call the police and his wife came in and everything got hysterical. When I was done, he said, “McKay was a friend of yours, is that right?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Sort of a casual friend.”

“Why were you coming over today?”

“Just a visit,” I said. “Sometimes I come over when I quit work.”

“What do you do?”

“I drive a cab.”

“Could I see your license?”

“Sure.”

I handed it to him, and he compared my face with the picture and then handed it back, thanking me. Then he said, “Would you know any reason anybody would do a thing like that to your friend?”

“No,” I said. “Nobody.”

“He didn’t sound frightened or different in any way when you talked to him on the phone this afternoon?”

“No, sir. He didn’t sound any different from usual.”

“Whose idea was it you should come over at six?”

I had a problem there, since I didn’t feel I should tell a cop that my relationship with Tommy was customer to bookie, but on the other hand I felt very nervous making up lies. I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Mine, I guess. We both decided, that’s all.”

“Was anybody else supposed to be here?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Hmm.” He seemed to think for a minute, and then said, “How did Tommy get along with his wife, do you know?”

“Fine,” I said. “As far as I know, fine.”

“You never knew them to argue.”

“Not around me.”

He nodded, then said, “What’s your home address, Chester?”

“8344 169th Place, Jamaica, Queens.”

He wrote it down in a notebook. “We’ll probably be getting in touch with you,” he said.

“You mean I can go now?”

“Why not?” And he turned around and walked out of the bedroom as though I’d ceased to exist.

I followed him out. He turned right, toward the living room, and I went the other way. I went out to the street, which seemed much colder now, and walked over to Eighth Avenue, where I got my subway to go home. I sat in the train thinking about things, and I was all the way to Woodhaven Boulevard before it occurred to me I hadn’t collected my nine hundred thirty dollars.

My father had papers all over the dining-room table again. He had the adding machine out, ballpoint pens scattered here and there, and lots of crumpled sheets of paper on the floor around his chair. When he’s thinking hard he tends to scratch his face, scratching his nose or his chin or his forehead, and frequently he forgets he’s holding a ballpoint pen at the time, so after a session at the dining-room table he winds up looking like the paper they use for dollar bills, with little blue lines an inch or so long wig-wagging all over his face.

“I’m late,” I pointed out. “It’s after seven.”

My father looked at me in that out-of-focus way he has when his mind is full of numbers. Pointing a pen at me he said, “The question is, are you going to have any children?”

“Not right away,” I said. “Did you put anything on for dinner?”

“If you would just get married,” he said, “it would make it simpler for me to figure these things out.”

“I’m sure it would,” I said. “Maybe I will someday. What about dinner?”

He glared at me, meaning I’d broken his train of thought. “Dinner? What time is it?”

“After seven.”

He frowned and pulled out his pocketwatch and lowered his brows at it. “You’re late,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Did you start dinner?”

“I got involved in this,” he said, waving his hands vaguely at all the paperwork. “Another insurance man came by today.”

“A new one?”

“Same old stuff, though,” my father said. He threw the pen on the table in disgust. “The math still works out against me.”

“Well,” I said, “they’ve got computers.” I went out to the kitchen and got out two turkey TV dinners, put them in the oven, lit the oven.

My father had followed me out to the kitchen. “They’ll make a mistake someday,” he said. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Not computers,” I said.

“Everybody,” he said. “And when they do, I’ll be ready.”

It is my father’s idea that he is going to beat the insurance companies. As the years have gone by, the insurance companies have competed with one another by presenting more and more complicated insurance packages, the packages getting steadily more intricate and unfathomable, with expanding this and overlapping that and conditional the other. Of course, whatever the package the odds are still with the company. Insurance companies, like the casinos in Las Vegas, are in business to make money, so the edge is always with the house. Except that my father is convinced that sooner or later one of the companies is going to come out with a package with a flaw in it, that the complexities are eventually going to reach the stage where even the company isn’t going to be able to keep up with the implications of the math, and that some company is going to put out a policy where you don’t have to die ahead of time to win. My father’s hobby is looking for that policy. It hasn’t showed up yet, and I don’t believe it ever will, but my father has all the faith and obstinacy of a man with a roulette system, and more often than not I come home to find him and his papers and his adding machine all over the dining-room table.

Actually, it’s a harmless enough hobby and it does occupy his mind. He’s sixty-three now, and he was forcibly retired from the airplane factory when he was fifty-eight — he worked in the payroll office — and if he didn’t have this insurance thing I don’t know what he’d do with himself. Mom died the year my father retired, and naturally he didn’t want to go off to Fort Lauderdale by himself, so we kept on living at home together, and it’s pretty much worked out. My parents were both thirty-four when I was born, and I was also an only child, so I never knew either of my parents when they were very young and we never did have much of a lively, exuberant household, so things aren’t so much different from the way they always were, except Mom is gone and I’m the one who goes out to work.

Anyway, while we waited for dinner I told my father about my day, and every once in a while he’d put his head on one side and squint at me and say, “You wouldn’t be telling me tales, would you, Chester?”