Deadly Honeymoon (10 page)

The gun. Where in hell was the gun?

Then he heard Jill’s voice, cool and clear. “You’d better come down those stairs, Maurie,” he heard her say. “Come down slow and easy or I’ll kill you, Maurie.”

Dave turned. There was a short and plumpish man at the head of the stairs, his hands tentatively raised to shoulder height. His bathrobe, belted snugly around his thick waist, was red silk, monogrammed “ML” over the heart in flowing gold script. He had a moustache, thick and black, about an inch and a half long. His mouth was curled slightly downward at the corners. He was barefoot.

Jill stood at the foot of the stairs. Dave looked at her, then at Lublin. She was holding the gun on the little man, pointing it just as he had taught her to point it that afternoon at the doorknob in their room.

He walked over to her, his head still rocky. He took the gun from her hand and trained it on Lublin. Lublin came down the stairs very slowly, his hands in the air. The whole house was as silent as death.

CHAPTER 9

L
UBLIN STOOD
at the foot of the stairs and looked at them, and at the gun. To Jill he said, “You’re a damn fool, Rita. I don’t keep cash around the house. Maybe a couple of hundred, no more than that.”

“We’re not looking for money.”

“No?” He looked at Dave, eyes wary. “Then what?”

“Information.”

“Then put the gun away. What kind of information?”

“About Corelli.” He didn’t put the gun away.

“Corelli?”

“Joe Corelli.”

“I don’t know him,” Lublin said. “Who is he? And put the gun away.”

The man looked soft, Dave thought, except for the eyes. There was a hardness there that didn’t go with the pudgy body or the round face. “Corelli is dead,” he said.

“I didn’t even know he was sick.”

“You had him killed.”

Lublin was smiling now, with his mouth, not with his eyes. “You made a mistake somewhere,” he said. “I never heard of this Corelli of yours. How could I have him killed?” He spread his hands. “You two oughta relax and go home. What do you want to point a gun at me for? You’re not going to shoot me. What are you? You’re a couple of kids, it’s late, you ought to go home. Then—”

Dave thought, he has to believe it. He has to take it seriously, he has to feel it. But the mood wasn’t right for violence. A plump little man in a bathrobe, talking easily in a calm voice. You couldn’t hit him, not out of the blue.

Jill, he thought. They raped Jill. He fixed the thought very carefully in his mind, and then he stepped forward and raked the barrel of the gun across Lublin’s face. Lublin looked surprised. Dave transferred the gun to his left hand and hit Lublin hard in the mouth with his right. He hit him again, in the chest, and Lublin fell back against the stairs. He sat down there, breathing heavily, holding the back of one hand to his mouth. Blood trickled from his face where the gun barrel had cut him.

“You son of a bitch,” he said.

“Maybe you better start talking.”

“Go to hell.”

Dave said, “Do you think you can take it, old man? You didn’t kill Corelli, you had it done. All I want to know is the names of the men who killed him. You’re going to tell me sooner or later.”

“What’s Corelli to you?”

“He’s nothing to me.”

“Then what do you care who killed him?”

“You don’t have to know.”

Lublin thought this over. He got to his feet slowly, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand. He avoided Dave’s eyes, centering his gaze a foot below them. He patted the pockets of the robe and said he needed a cigarette. Dave tossed him a pack. Lublin caught the cigarettes, fumbled them, bent to scoop them from the floor. He touched the floor with one hand and came up out of the crouch, leaping for the gun. Dave kicked him in the face, stepped back, kicked him again.

They had to get water from the kitchen and throw it on him. His face was a mess. His mouth was bleeding, two teeth were gone, and one was loose. He got up and found a chair and fell into it. Dave lit a cigarette and gave it to him. Lublin took it and held it, looked at it but didn’t smoke it. Dave said, “Corelli,” and Lublin took a deep drag on the cigarette and coughed.

Then he said, “I knew Corelli. We had dealings now and then.”

Dave didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t have him killed.”

“The hell you didn’t.”

Lublin’s eyes were wide. “Why would I have him hit? What did he ever do to me?”

“He owed you sixty-five thousand dollars.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“From Corelli.” He thought a minute, then added, “And from other people.”

Dave watched his face, watched the eyes trying to decide how to manage the lie, whether to tell none or part of the truth. And he thought suddenly of law school. Techniques in Cross-examination. They didn’t teach you this, he thought. You learned how to make a witness contradict himself, how to trip him up, how to discredit testimony, all of that. But not how to worm information out of a man when you held a gun on him. They taught you how to do it with words, not how to get along when words didn’t work any more.

Lublin said, “He owed me the money;”

“How?”

“How? In cash.”

“Why did he owe it to you?”

“A gambling debt.”

“So you had him killed when he didn’t pay.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Lublin said. He was more confident now; maybe his face had stopped hurting. “He would have paid. The minute he died I was out the money. He can’t pay me when he’s dead.”

“When did he lose the money?”

“February, March. What’s the difference?”

“How?”

“Cards. He got in over his head, he borrowed, he couldn’t pay back. That’s all she wrote.”

“What kind of game?”

“Poker.”

“Poker. You let him have sixty-five thousand?”

“Fifty. Fifteen gees was interest.”

He thought a minute, and Jill said, “He’s lying, Dave.”

“How do you know?”

“He made two-dollar race bets. You saw the slips. He wouldn’t plunge like that at a card table.”

Lublin said, “Listen, dammit—”

And she said, coolly, “Hit him again, Dave.”

Techniques in Cross-examination. He used the barrel of the gun, raked it across the side of Maurie Lublin’s face. He was careful not to knock him out this time. He just wanted to make it hurt. Lublin winced and tried to shrink back into the chair. Dave hit him again, and the cut bled lightly. It was easy now, mechanical.

“Start over,” he said.

“I loaned him the money. I—”

“The truth, all the way.”

“We were in on a deal.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“Corelli’s deal. There was a warehouse robbery in Yonkers. Instant coffee, a hijacking deal. The heavies who took the place came up with a little better than a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of instant coffee. That’s wholesale. When they got it, they had it set up to push it to an outfit in Detroit for a hundred thou. The thing fell in.”

“So?”

“So they got in touch with Corelli. Joe handled this kind of a deal before. They didn’t want to play around with the load, they just wanted their money out. He offered fifty grand for the load but they wanted better, it had to be carved up a few ways. They settled for seventy-five.”

“And?”

“And Joe didn’t have the seventy-five. He could raise ten but anything more was scraping, he couldn’t make it. He came to me and offered me half the gross for sixty-five thousand. My capital and his connections. He had other people on the line, in Pittsburgh, to take the pile off his hands for a hundred and twenty-five thousand, which meant a gross profit of fifty thousand dollars with the whole play figured to take a little less than a month. My share would be twenty-five, and twenty-five less costs for Corelli.”

“You went in with him?”

Lublin half-smiled. “For thirty, not for twenty-five. That still gave Corelli twenty thousand for his ten and nobody was going to give him a better deal. Besides, he didn’t have that much time to shop around. The hijackers were in a hurry. He took my sixty-five and his ten and bought them out. That gave us half the coffee in the world, and Joe had the place to move it, to Pittsburgh.”

“What happened?”

“The rest made the papers. This was in March. Corelli hired a trucker. The trucker stopped to make time with a waitress, and the other trucks with him got ahead of him, and this one schmuck got nervous and started speeding to catch up. On the Pennsy Turnpike, in a truck, the son of a bitch is speeding. One of those long-distance trucks and they never speed, they always hold it steady.” He shook his head, still angry with the driver. “So a trooper stopped him and this driver got nervous, and the trooper got suspicious, and the driver pulls a gun and the trooper shoots his head off, like that. They opened the truck and found a load of hot coffee, and they radioed ahead and cut off the other trucks, and that was the shipment, all of it, with the drivers off to jail and the coffee back to the warehouse where it came from in the first place.”

“And you were out the money?”

“We weren’t exactly insured.”

“But why did Corelli owe you the dough?”

“Because it was his fault the deal fell in,” Lublin said. “It was his play. I was investing, and he was supposed to manage it. He was responsible for delivering the load and collecting payment. All I had going was my capital. When it fell in, he owed me my cost, which was sixty-five thousand.” He narrowed his eyes slightly. He said, “I knew he didn’t have it then, because if he had had it he would have carried the deal all by himself, he wouldn’t have cut me in. It wasn’t the kind of debt where I was going to press him for payment. He didn’t have it, and the hell, you don’t get blood from a stone. But he would get it, little by little. He would pay up, and I had no instant need for the money. When he got it he would pay me. In the meanwhile, he owed me. If I needed a favor I could go to him because he owed me. Joe was small but not so small it hurt me to have him owe me favors. That never hurts, it can always be handy.”

“Then why have him killed?”

“I didn’t. That’s the whole point, why I wouldn’t be the one to have him killed. There was nothing personal. It was his fault the deal went sour, sure, but that was nothing personal. And killing him could only cost money without getting any money back. Use your head, why would I kill him?”

“Then who did?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you have ideas.”

“No ideas,” Lublin said.

“He was out his own ten thousand dollars and he owed you sixty-five thousand on top of it. He must have been hungry for big money, and fast. What was he doing?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“Who was he involved with?”

“I don’t know.”

“He mentioned your name when they went to kill him. He said to tell you he would pay up the money, but they shot him anyway.”

“You were there?”

Maybe it was a mistake to let him know that, he thought. The same mistake as Jill’s mentioning his name. The hell with it.

“He mentioned your name,” he said again. “He thought you were the one who had him killed.”

“I don’t get it. Where do you and the broad come in?”

“We come in right here. Corelli thought you killed him. Why should I think any different?”

“I told you—”

“I know what you told me. Now you have to tell me something else. You have to tell me who had him killed, because that’s something you would know, it’s something you would have to know. Corelli left town three months ago, running for his life. He owed you a pile of money. If anybody owed you that kind of money and skipped town you would know why. He was either running from you or running from somebody else, and either way you would damn well know about it.”

Lublin didn’t say anything.

“You’re going to tell me. I’ve got the gun, and your man over there isn’t going to be any help to you, and I don’t care what kind of a job I have to do on you to get you to talk. I’ll take you apart if I have to. I mean that.”

“How did you get so hard?” Dave looked at him. “You talk too clean, you look too clean. You don’t come on like a hotster. But you got guts like a hotster. Who the hell are you?”

“Nobody you know. Who was Corelli running from?”

“Maybe his shadow.”

A slap this time, openhanded across the face. Lublin’s head snapped back from the blow, and he said something dirty. The back of the hand this time, again across the face, the head snapping back once again, the face flushed where the slaps had landed. Techniques in Cross-examination.

Dave said, “I don’t care who had him killed, whether it was you or somebody else. I’m not looking for the man who gave the order.”

“Then—”

“I’m looking for the two men who did the killing.”

“The guns?”

“Yes.”