Deadly Honeymoon (13 page)

They waited on the north side of the park, about twenty yards down from the main gate. The privilege of a key to the park was evidently more symbolic than utilitarian. The park was empty except for a very old man who wore a black suit and a maroon bow tie and who sat reading the
Wall Street Journal
and moving his lips as he read. They waited for him to leave the park but he seemed determined to sit on his bench forever. They waited a full half hour before anyone else entered the park. Then a woman came, a very neat and very old woman in a gray tweed suit. She had a cairn terrier on a braided leather leash. She opened the gate with a key and led the dog inside and they watched the gate swing shut behind her.

The woman spent twenty minutes in the park, leading the cairn from one tree to another. The small dog seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for urine. They completed the tour, finally, and woman and dog headed for the gate. Their move was well timed. The two of them reached the gate just as the woman was struggling with the lock. She opened it, and Dave drew the gate open while Jill made a show of admiring the dog. The dog admired them. The woman and the dog passed through the gate, and Jill stepped inside and Dave started to follow her.

The woman said, “You have your own key, of course.”

“I left it in the apartment,” Jill said. She smiled disarmingly. “We’re right across the street.” She pointed vaguely toward Washburn’s building.

The woman looked at them, her eyes bright. “No,” she said gently, “I don’t think you are.”

The dog tugged at the leash but the woman stood her ground. “One so rarely sees younger people at this park,” she said. “Isn’t it barbaric, taking something as lovely as a park and throwing a fence around it? The world has too many fences and too few parks. There are times when I think Duncan”—she nodded at the dog—“has the only proper attitude toward this fence. He occasionally employs it as a substitute tree. You don’t live in this neighborhood, do you?”

“Well—”

“You sound as though you’re from upstate somewhere. Not native New Yorkers, certainly.” She shook her head. “Such intrigue just to rest a moment in a pleasant park. You’re married, of course. Wearing a wedding ring, both of you are, and the rings seem to match. And even if they didn’t I’d be good enough to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re married to each other. From out of town, and anxious to sit together in a park—” The woman smiled pleasantly. “Probably on a honeymoon,” she said. “After a year or two of marriage you’ll have had your fill of parks, I’m sure. And, probably, of each other.

“Oh, I hope not,” Jill said.

The woman’s smile spread. “So do I, my dear, so do I. You’re quite welcome to the park. My late husband and I used to go to Washington Square when we were courting. Isn’t that a dated term? I’m old, aren’t I?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re very charming, aren’t you? But I very certainly am old, nevertheless. Courting. I understand Washington Square’s changed a great deal since then. A great many young persons with leather jackets and beards and guitars. Perhaps that’s an argument for gates and fences after all. Every question has so many sides. I am a silly old woman, aren’t I?”

“No.”

“Enjoy the park,” the woman said, passing through the gate now. “And enjoy each other. And don’t grow old too quickly, if you’ll pardon more advice. Giving unwanted advice is one of the few remaining privileges of the aged, you know. Don’t grow old too quickly. Being old is not really very much fun. It’s better than being dead, but that’s really about all one can say for it.”

The iron gate swung shut. The woman and the dog walked quickly with small and precise steps to the corner and waited for the signal to change. Then they crossed the street and continued down the block.

“We really fooled her,” Jill said.

“Uh-huh.”

They went to a bench on a path running along the western edge of the park. They were almost directly across from Washburn’s apartment house. The same doorman still stood at the door.

“We did fool her,” Jill said suddenly.

“That woman? How?”

“She thought we were a nice young couple,” Jill said. “I guess we used to be.” She looked away. “I’m not sure we are now,” she said quietly.

CHAPTER 12

T
HEIR BENCH
was shaded by two tall elms. There, in the park, the air was cleaner and cooler than in the surrounding city. They sat close together on the bench, looking over a stretch of green and through the grating of the fence at the luxury apartment buildings across the small street. The setting did not match the circumstances at all. Too placid, too secure. His mind would wander, and he had to force himself to remember what they were there for, and why. Otherwise he kept relaxing to fit the old woman’s image. A couple of honeymooners who wanted a few peaceful moments for themselves away from the hot hurry of New York.

Other images helped him concentrate. The five bullets pumped one after another into Joe Corelli’s head. The professionally disinterested beating he himself had taken. The direct and dispassionate rape of Jill. The cold fury of the ride into the city. Carl, Lublin’s personal heavyweight, first lumbering like a gored ox, then dead.

The watching was hard. It had seemed direct enough at the beginning, a stakeout straight out of
Dragnet
. You took a position and you held it and you waited for something to happen. But there was one basic difficulty. Nothing happened.

No one left Washburn’s building and no one entered it. The doorman stood at his post. At one point he lit a cigar, and after about twenty minutes he threw the cigar into the gutter. Cars drove by, the traffic never very thick. Occasionally someone with a key came into the park, either to walk a leashed dog or to sit reading a book or an afternoon paper. The drapes were still open in Frank Washburn’s apartment but it was on the fourth floor, and they were at ground level. They could tell that there were lights on, which meant there was probably someone at home, but that was all they could tell.

So it became hard to concentrate. They talked, but concentration had an unreal quality to it. There wasn’t much to say about the job at hand, about Washburn and where he might lead them. Once they had gone over that a few times they were tired of it. And any other conversation was fairly well out of place. Mostly, they sat together in silence. The silence would be broken now and then—she would ask for a cigarette, or one of them would ask a question that the other would quickly answer. Then the silence would come back again.

Until she said, “That car was here before.”

He looked up quickly. She was nodding toward a metallic-gray Pontiac that was turning west at the corner of Twentieth Street. He caught a quick look at it before another car blocked his view.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. About five minutes ago. This time it just coasted by slowly, as if they were looking for somebody.”

“Like us?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you—”

“I think there were two people in the car. I’m not sure. The first time, I didn’t pay much attention. Who looks at cars? Then the second time, just after they passed us, I remembered the car. There’s a spotlight mounted on the hood. That’s what I noticed that made me remember the car. You don’t see that many of them.”

“And the men?”

“I’m not even sure they were both men. The driver was. By the time I realized that it was the same car they had already passed us and all I saw were the backs of their heads.”

His hand went automatically to the gun, secure under the waistband of his slacks. He patted the gun almost affectionately, a nervous gesture. We are getting close now, he thought. Before we were looking for them, and now people are looking for us.

“I wish you’d had a better look at them.”

“Maybe they’ll be back.”

“Yes.” He started to light a cigarette, then changed his mind. Get up and get out, he thought. They could see into the park. This next time, they might get lucky and spot them. And then—

No, they had to stay where they were. If they could get a look at the men in the Pontiac, they were that much ahead of the game. They could not afford the luxury of running scared.

“Lublin must have sent them,” he said.

“I suppose so.”

“It only stands to reason. He doesn’t want Washburn to know that he talked, and he knows we’re going to try to get information from Washburn. So he would have Washburn’s place watched and try to head us off on the way there. It evidently took him a little while to get organized. That was good luck for us. Otherwise they would have seen us wandering around the street and—”

It was a good sentence to leave unfinished. He reached again for a cigarette, the movement an instinctive one, and his hand stopped halfway to his breast pocket. He said, “That means Washburn doesn’t know.”

“You mean about us?”

“Yes. If he knew, he would have men outside, waiting for us. But if Lublin didn’t tell him, then Lublin would have to accomplish two things. He would have to keep us from getting to Washburn, and at the same time he would have to watch the place without arousing suspicion. He would want to get to us without Washburn knowing anything about the whole play. Where are you going?”

She was standing, walking toward the fence. “To see better,” she said. “In case that car comes back.”

He grabbed her hand and pulled her back. “Don’t be a damned fool. We can see them well enough from farther back. And we can’t risk having them see us.”

He led her back across a cement walk and sat down with her on another bench. There was an extra screening of shrubbery now between them and the street. They could see through it, but it would be hard for anyone passing by to get a good look at them.

“It might not have been anything,” he said.

“The Pontiac?”

“It could have been somebody driving around the block and looking for a place to park. You sort of coast along like that when you’re trying to find a parking place.”

“Maybe, but—”

“But what?”

“I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

And he had the same feeling. It was funny, too—he half-wanted the car to turn out to be innocent, because the idea of being pursued while pursuing added a new and dangerous element to the situation. But at the same time pursuit now would be a good sign. It would mean Washburn didn’t know what was happening, which was good. It would mean for certain that Lublin’s story was true.

A few minutes later he saw the Pontiac again. Jill nudged him and pointed but he had already noticed the car himself. It was coming from the opposite direction this time, cruising uptown past Washburn’s apartment toward Twenty-first Street. It was a four-door car, the windows rolled down, the back seat empty. It was going between fifteen and twenty miles an hour.

There were two men in the front seat. At first he couldn’t get a good look at them. He squinted, and as the car drew up even with them he got a good look at the man on the passenger side. He drew in his breath sharply, and he felt Jill’s hand on his arm, her fingers tightening, squeezing hard. Then as the car moved off he got a brief glimpse of the man behind the wheel.

The man on the passenger side was thickset and short-necked with a heavy face and a once-broken nose. The man doing the driving had thick eyebrows and a thin mouth and a scattering of thin hairline scars across the bridge of his nose.

The car was gone now. It had turned at the corner, had continued west at Twenty-first Street, picking up speed once it rounded the corner. He looked after it and watched it disappear quickly from view. He turned to Jill. She had let go of his arm, and both of her hands were in her lap, knotted into tight fists. Her face was a blend of hatred and horror.

Lee and his friend. Corelli’s murderers. Their target.

They got out of there in a hurry. He said her name and she blinked at him as though her mind were elsewhere, caught up either in the memory of violation or in the plans for vengeance. He said, “Come on, we’ve got to take off.” She got to her feet and they let themselves out of the park and walked off in the opposite direction, toward Third Avenue. An empty cab came by and they grabbed it. He told the driver to take them to the Royalton.

They started uptown on Third. Jill said, “Suppose they know about the hotel?”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I’m just panicky, I guess.”

“They might know,” he said. He leaned forward. “Just leave us at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street,” he said.

“Not the Royalton?”

“No, just on the corner.”

Thirty-fourth and where?”

“And Third,” he said.

There was a bar on Third halfway between Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth. They got out of the cab and walked to it. He didn’t relax until they were inside the bar and seated in a booth in the rear. It was ridiculous, he knew. The Pontiac was nowhere near them, they were safe, they were clear. But he couldn’t walk in the open street without the uncomfortable feeling that someone was watching them.

There was no waitress. He went to the bar and got two bottles of Budweiser and two glasses, paid for the beers and carried them to the booth. He poured beer into his glass and took a drink. She let her beer sit untouched on the table in front of her. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then shook her head suddenly and closed her mouth again without saying anything.