Deadly Honeymoon (11 page)

“Why?”

He didn’t answer. Lublin looked at him, then at Jill, then said, “I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to.”

“You want to know the names of the two men who took Corelli and shot him. The ones hired to hit him.”

“Yes.”

“Weil, I don’t know that.”

“You don’t?”

“If I had him killed,” Lublin said guardedly, “even then I wouldn’t know the actual names of the guns. I would call someone, a friend, and say that there was this Corelli and I wanted him found and killed, and I would pay so much dough to this friend, and that’s all I would know. He might fly a couple of boys all the way in from the West Coast, and they would do the job, make the hit, and then they would be on the next plane back to S.F. or somewhere. Or even local boys, I wouldn’t know their names or who they were.”

“Then tell me who you called.”

“I didn’t call anybody. I was just saying that even if I did I still wouldn’t know the guns.”

“Then tell me who did make the call. Who had Corelli killed?”

“I told you. I don’t know that.”

“I think you do.”

“Dammit—”

Monotonous Techniques in Cross-examination. It took a long time, a batch of questions, a stonewall of silence, a barrage of pistol-whipping and slapping, a gun butt laid across Lublin’s knee, the barrel of the gun slapped against the side of his jaw. There would be a round of beating, and a round of unanswered questions, and another round of beating.

Jill hardly seemed to be there at all. She stood silent, cigarette now and then, went away once to use the bathroom. Carl never moved and never made a sound. He lay inert on the far side of the room and nobody ever went over to look at him. There was Lublin in the chair and there was Dave with the gun, standing over him, and they went around and around that way.

Until Lublin said, “You’ll kill me. I’m not so young, I’ll have a heart attack. Jesus, you’ll kill me.”

“Then talk.”

“I swear I did not have him hit. I swear to God I did not have that man hit.”

“Then tell me who did.”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You know who it was.”

“I know but I can’t say.”

Progress. “You don’t have any choice. You have to say, Lublin.”

He did not hit him this time, did not even draw the gun back. Lublin sat for a long moment, thinking. Outside, it was light already. Daylight came in around the edges of the drapes. Maybe Lublin was trying to stall, maybe he thought he could take punishment until somebody showed up. But he was running out of gas. No one had come and he couldn’t take it any more.

“If they find out I told you,” he said, “then I’m dead.”

“They won’t find out. And you’ll be just as dead if you don’t talk.”

He didn’t seem to have heard. In a dull dead voice he said, “Corelli wanted money fast. He owed other people besides me but nothing big, not to anybody else. He was strapped for capital. He couldn’t make fast money legit because his construction operation was down to nothing but the office and the name. He was mostly a middleman anyway and everything he had owned before was tied up now or cleared out. He stripped himself pretty badly getting up the ten grand for the instant-coffee deal.”

“Keep talking.”

“He did a stupid thing. He was stuck and he was up against it, and he knew I wasn’t going to wait forever for the sixty-five thou, not forever, and he needed maybe a hundred grand or better to be completely out from under and able to operate. He got a smart idea, he was going to middleman a hundred grand worth of heroin to someone with a use for it. You understand what I mean?”

“Yes. Where did he get the heroin?”

“He never had it. That was the stupid idea. He was going to sell it without having it, get the money and deliver something else, face powder, anything. It was stupid and he would have gotten himself killed even if he pulled it off, but he maybe figured that with a hundred grand he could get into something good and double the money and pay back before his man tipped to the play, and then he would be back in the clear. It was risky as hell and it didn’t stand a chance. He was sure to get himself killed that way.”

“What happened?”

“The man he was dealing with—”

“Who was he?”

Lublin tensed.

“You’ll tell me anyway. Make it easy on yourself.”

“Jesus. It was Washburn. You know him?”

“No. His first name?”

“Ray. Ray Washburn.”

“Where does he live?”

“I don’t know. Up in the Bronx.”

He’s lying, he thought. He said, “You’ve got an address book in the house. Where is it?”

“An address book—”

“Yes. Where is it?”

Lublin was defeated. He said it was upstairs, in the den, and Jill went up for it. He looked under “W” and found a Frank Washburn listed, with a Manhattan address and a telephone number. He said, “You must have gotten the name wrong. It’s Frank Washburn, and he lives in Manhattan. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Lublin didn’t answer.

“All right. He went to Washburn. What happened?”

“Washburn said he would let him know. He checked around, and he found out that Corelli was in hock up to his ears and he couldn’t have the stuff, that it had to be a con. He didn’t let on that he knew, just told Joe he wasn’t interested, that he couldn’t use the stuff. Joe dropped the price still further and Washburn knew it had to be a con then, it couldn’t be anything else at that price, so he just kept on saying he wasn’t interested.

“But the word got around, about what Joe had tried to pull, and Washburn saw it was bad to let him get away with it, if people tried to con him like that and got by with it, he would get a bad name. And he was mad, anyway, because he is not the type of man people set up for stupid con games and Joe should have known this. So he marked Joe for a hit.”

“Who did he hire?”

“I don’t know. If I knew that I would give it to you. I would give it a long time before I would give you Washburn.”

“Why didn’t Corelli know it was Washburn who was after him? Why did he think it was you?”

“Because Washburn turned the deal down. Corelli didn’t know Washburn had it in for him. He thought he just turned the deal down because he had no use for the goods.”

“Then why did he get out of town?”

“Because Washburn sent somebody to make a hit, and Corelli was shot at but the gun missed, and he knew somebody was trying to kill him, and he must have figured it was me because I was the one he owed heavy money to. When somebody’s shooting at you, you don’t look to see the serial number on the gun. You get the hell out of town.”

Dave looked over at Jill. She was nodding thoughtfully. It all made sense. He nodded himself. He looked down at Lublin now and he said, “You’re not calling Washburn. You don’t want to warn him.”

Lublin looked up.

“You took a hell of a beating to keep from giving me his name,” Dave went on. “You don’t want him to know you talked to me. He won’t find out from me. If he finds out, it’ll be from you. You know what he’ll do to you if he finds out, so you don’t want to tell him.”

“I won’t call him.”

“Good.”

“Because I’ll get you myself,” Lublin said. “It may be fast and it may be slow, you son of a bitch, but it is damned well going to happen.” A hand wiped blood from his mouth. “You are going to catch it, you and your pig of a broad. You better get to Washburn very fast, kid, or you won’t get to him at all. Because there’s going to be a whole army with nothing to do but kill you.”

Dave knocked him out. He took him out easily, not angry, not wanting to hurt him, just anxious to put him on ice for the time being. He did it with the gun butt just behind the ear and Lublin did not even try to dodge the blow, did not even shrink from it. Lublin took it, and went back and out, and when Dave poked him he didn’t move.

An army, Lublin had said.

But the army would not include Carl. They checked him before they left and he was still out, all that time, so they checked a little more closely. They saw that the last blow, with the lamp, had caved in the side of his skull. He was dead.

CHAPTER 10

T
HE DINER HAD
no jukebox. Behind the counter a radio blared. The song was an old one, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan doing “Stone Cold Dead in the Market.” The air was thick with cooking smells. The diner had two booths, and both of them had been occupied when they entered it. They had adjoining seats at the counter. He was drinking coffee and waiting for the counterman to finish making him a bowl of oatmeal. She had coffee too and was eating a toasted English muffin. His cigarette burned slowly in a glass ashtray. She was not smoking.

The diner was on Broadway just below Union Square. When they left Lublin’s house, they had walked along Newkirk Avenue as far as Fifteenth, and there was a subway entrance there. They went downstairs and bought tokens and passed through the turnstile and waited in silence for a Manhattan-bound train. The train came after a long wait—the BMT Brighton line, just a few cars at that hour, just a very few passengers. They rode it as far as Fourteenth Street and got out there. From the subway arcade, the diner looked like as good a place as they would be likely to find there. It was around seven when they went into the diner. They had been there for about twenty minutes.

A man who had been sitting next to Jill folded his copy of the
Times
and left the diner. Dave leaned closer to her and said, “I killed him.” She stared down into her coffee cup and didn’t answer. “I murdered a man,” he said.

“Not murder. It was self-defense. You were fighting and—”

He shook his head. “If an individual dies in the course of or as a direct result of the commission of a felony, the felon is guilty of murder in the first degree.”

“Did we commit a felony?”

“A batch of them. Illegal entry as a starter, and a few different kinds of aggravated assault. And Carl is dead. That means that I’m guilty of first-degree murder and you’re an accessory.”

“Will anything—”

“Happen to us? No.” He paused. “The law won’t do anything. They won’t hear about it, not officially at least. I understand there’s a standard procedure in cases like this. Lublin will get rid of Carl’s body.”

“The river?”

“I don’t know how they do it nowadays. I read something about putting them under roadbeds. You know—they have a friend doing highway construction, and they shovel the body into the roadbed during the night and cover him up the next day, and he’s buried forever. I read somewhere that there are more than twenty dead men under the New Jersey Turnpike. The cars roll right over them and never know it.”

“God,” she said.

His oatmeal came, finally, a congealed mass in the bottom of the bowl. He spooned a little sugar onto it and poured some milk over the mass. He got a little of it down and gave up, pushed the bowl away. The counterman asked if anything was wrong with it and he said no, he just wasn’t as hungry as he had thought. He ordered more coffee. The coffee, surprisingly, was very good there.

He said, “We’re in trouble, you know.”

“From Lublin?”

“Yes. He wasn’t just talking. For one thing, we shoved him around pretty hard. He’s a tough old man and he took it well but I hurt him, I know that. I messed him up and I hurt him. He’s not going to write that off too easily. But more than that, I managed to get Washburn’s name out of him, and the whole story of why Corelli was killed. He took a hell of a beating to keep from giving me Washburn’s name. He won’t want Washburn to find out that he let it out, and he’ll be sure that Washburn will find out if we get to him. So he’ll want to get us first. To have us killed.”

“Will he be able to find us?”

“Maybe.” He thought. “He knows my first name. You called me Dave in front of him.”

“It was a slip. Does he still think my name is Rita?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I don’t want to be killed.” She said this very calmly and levelly, as though she had considered the matter very carefully before coming to the conclusion that death was something to be avoided if at all possible. “I don’t want him to kill us.”

“It won’t happen.”

“He knows your first name, and he’s got my name wrong. That’s all he knows, and a description of us. But the description doesn’t have to fit, does it? Do you think it’s time for me to be a blonde again?”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

“Pay the check,” she said. “I’ll meet you outside, around the corner.”

He finished his coffee and paid the check. She got up and went to the washroom in the back. He left a tip and went outside. The sky was clear now, and the sun was bright. He lit a cigarette. The smoke was strong in his lungs. Too many cigarettes, too long a time without sleep. He took another drag on the cigarette and walked to the corner of Thirteenth Street He finished the cigarette and tossed it into the gutter.

When she came to him he stared hard at her. The transformation was phenomenal. She was his Jill again, the hair blond with just a trace of the brown coloring still remaining. She had undone the French twist and the hair was pageboy again, framing her face as it had always done. Her face was scrubbed free of the heavy makeup. She had even removed her lipstick and had replaced it with her regular shade. And, with the transformation, her face had lost its hard angular quality, had softened visibly. She had played the role of cheap chippy so effectively that the performance had very nearly sold him; he had almost grown used to her that way. It was jarring to see her again as she had always been before.