Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online Page A

anymore. But still every once in a whilesomething will get into the papers, usually when something goes wrong. Like the guy a couple of years ago that was attacked in a bar in Brooklyn and two cops just happened to walk in while he was being strangled with a wire coat hanger. He was known to be a member of one of the mobs down there, and the cops figured the killers had to be with some other mob. They got away, both of them, and the victim naturally insisted he didn’t know who they were or why they were after him.
    But if Tommy’s death was a gang killing, how come he didn’t disappear? He was very visible, his murder made the newspapers and everything. (There hadn’t been anything about it in today’s paper, but that’s because nothing new had happened.)
    Well, it wasn’t my problem. My problem was collecting my money, and losing a day’s work today was making that collection even more urgent than before.
    Of course, if 214 came in today my twenty-five cents would bring me back a hundred fifty dollars, but I wasn’t going to hang by my thumbs till it happened. In all the years I’ve played the numbers I’ve never won spit, and sometimes I wonder why I even bother. I treat it like dues, not like a bet at all. Once or twice a week I hand over a quarter at the stationery store. But what the hell, the return is six hundred to one—the odds are a thousand to one, so nobody’s doing anybody any favors—and I figure at a quarter a throw it can’t hurt me to try.
    In the meantime, back in the real world 214 was not going to come in today, so the question was how to get my nine hundred thirty dollars, and for that I was going to have to go see Mrs. Louise McKay.
    If she knew.
    Did she know? Did Tommy tell his wife his business, enough for her to know who I should see now? Some husbands do, somedon’t, and thinking about Tommy now it seemed to me he could best be described as the close-mouthed type.
    Listen, I had to have that money. If Mrs. McKay couldn’t tell me how to get it, who could?
    I remembered those other names Detective Golderman had mentioned—Frank Tarbok and Bugs Bender and Walter Droble. Maybe one of those guys was in the same syndicate with Tommy, and could tell me who to see now.
    But I’d prefer to get it from Tommy’s wife. It struck me as easier, maybe safer, and all around better.
    Just to be on the safe side, though, I went to the dining room and borrowed a piece of paper from my father and wrote down the three names, so I wouldn’t forget them. Frank Tarbok. Bugs Bender. Walter Droble.

8
    By three, I couldn’t stand the house anymore. The snow had finally sighed to a stop around one, the plows had continued to rattle their chains down the street for a while after that, and the radio said we’d had eight inches and it was now definitely over. The day was white, tending to gray at the edges, and there was a sort of muffled feeling everywhere, as though I were walking around with cotton in my ears.
    I’d made some Campbell’s pea soup for lunch, since my father was still multiplying and dividing in the living room, and after lunch I played myself some solitaire for a while, betting a hypothetical dollar a card against a hypothetical house and quitting in disgust when I owed a hypothetical seventy-six dollars. I hadn’t run the cards once.
    So at three o’clock I decided to go try for Mrs. McKay. I put on my overcoat and overshoes and hat and gloves and told my father, “I’ll probably be home for dinner. If not, I’ll call.”
    “What’s one-thirteenth of seventy-one?” he said. His face was covered with little blue ink squiggles, and his eyes were a little out of focus.
    “See you later,” I said, and left.
    No walks were shoveled yet, of course, so I walked down the plowed street to Jamaica Avenue, where I stopped in at the stationery store, paid my quarter dues, bought the Telegraph and then went on to the subway. Down underground in the station there was that clammy coldness