Deadly Honeymoon (9 page)

At twenty minutes after four, the phone rang. He was sitting right next to it, sitting on the edge of the bed. When it rang he dropped a cigarette onto the rug. He didn’t bother to pick it up but ground it into the carpet while he reached for the phone.

“Dave? Did I wake you?”

“My God, where are you?”

“I’m calling from a drugstore. Relax, darling. I’m all right. I didn’t mean to frighten you, but—”

“Where are you?”

“Get a pencil.”

He started to say something, changed his mind and got up. His pen and his little notebook were on the top of the dresser. He got them and opened the notebook and said, “All right. Where are you?”

“A drugstore. It’s on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Ditmas Avenue—that’s in Brooklyn.”

“What are you—”

She cut in on him. “Get in a cab,” she said easily. “Come here as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting right here, in the store. And bring the thing in my brown purse. All right?”

“Jill—”

“Flatbush and Ditmas,” she said. “I’m sorry if I worried you, darling. And hurry.”

CHAPTER 8

T
HE DRUGSTORE’S LUNCH
counter was to the left of the door, separated from the door by a magazine rack and the tobacco counter. She was drinking coffee at the counter, the only customer. He looked at her and, for a second or two, did not recognize her. Then he looked again and saw that it was Jill.

She looked entirely different. Her hair was a different color, a sort of medium brown, and she wore it off her face now, brought back and done up in a French twist. When she turned to him he stared. Her hair style altered the whole shape of her face.

And her face was different for other reasons, too. Her lips looked fuller, redder. Her eyes were deeper, and she seemed to be wearing a lot of makeup. She was only twenty-four but she looked a good three years older now.

He started to sputter questions but she silenced him with a finger to her lips. “Sit down,” she said. “Have a cup of coffee. I’ll explain it all to you.”

“I think you’d better.”

He sat down, and an old man with thick wire-rimmed glasses came over to take his order. He asked for coffee. He forgot to order it black, and it came with cream in it. He stirred it with a spoon. The counterman went away, and Dave waited.

She said, “I went to see Lublin.”

“You must be crazy.”

“No,” she said. “Dave, it was the only way. We couldn’t go after him until we knew what his place was like, if he lived alone or with anybody, all of that. And you couldn’t go to meet him because he would have been suspicious, you never would have gotten past the door. Suppose he had live-in bodyguards. He does have one man who lives with him, as a matter of fact. If we went there without knowing it—”

“But why did you go?”

“Because I knew he would let me in.” She drank coffee. “He wouldn’t let a man in, one that he didn’t know, on a night when he was having some people over. But a girl is something else again. Almost any man will open a door for a pretty girl. And let her stay as long as she wants. I told him I was supposed to meet a man there. I said—”

“What man?”

“Pete Miller. You’ve been using the name so much it was the first one that came to mind.” She grinned quickly. “He said he didn’t know any Pete Miller. I stood there looking lost and pathetic and told him I was sure that this was the address, that I was supposed to come there. I guess he decided that I must be a call girl. He said it was probably somebody’s idea of a joke but that I should come in out of the rain and have a drink to warm up. It was still raining then.” She patted her hair and grinned again. “I was afraid it would wash the color out of my hair.”

He pointed to her hair. “Why?”

“Because I was afraid one of the men might be there, one of the two men. Or anyone who might have seen the two of us this afternoon, in case Corelli’s office was watched. But mostly because I thought Lee or the other one might be there. I don’t know if they would remember us or not, if they paid any attention to what we looked like. I didn’t want to take chances.”

“You took plenty of chances.”

She sipped at her coffee again, finished it. He tried his own. It tasted flat with cream, but at least it was hot

She said, “After I left the hotel, I went to a drugstore, the one where you tried to call Lublin before. I bought some makeup and a different shade of lipstick and a color comb. They use them to color gray hair, mostly, but it worked. I went into a restaurant, into the rest room, and I colored my hair and pinned it up like this. And did my lips and used some eye shadow. Do I look very different?”

“I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Like me this way?”

“Not too.”

“I wanted to look different, and I also wanted to look like a girl who might ring a man’s doorbell in the middle of the night. Do I look cheap? Not terribly cheap, but slightly tacky?”

“Slightly tacky.”

“Good. Don’t worry—the makeup comes off and the hair color will wash right out. It’s not a permanent transformation. Do you want to hear about Lublin?”

“Yes.”

“First give me a cigarette.” He gave her one, lit hers and one for himself. “Lublin lives in a house, not an apartment. A two-story house. His bedroom is upstairs, in the back. He—”

“How do you know?”

She coughed on smoke, laughing. “Are you jealous? I waited until somebody was in the bathroom downstairs and then I said I had to use the john and they sent me to the upstairs bathroom, and I looked around upstairs. There are three bedrooms up there, one where he sleeps, one that’s a television room and one set up as an office. So he sleeps upstairs. He has a man who lives with him, sort of a bodyguard, I guess. Very muscle-bound and not bright. His name is Carl and people carry on conversations in front of him and pretend he isn’t there. Nobody talks to him. Like the movies. He sleeps downstairs, on a daybed in the den.”

Go on.

“There were half a dozen people there, all men, plus Lublin and Carl. They were doing some fairly heavy drinking and talking about things that I couldn’t understand. About horse racing, mostly, and other things, but nothing that I could follow. Nobody mentioned Corelli and nobody mentioned Lee or anything. They all left by the time I did. They left first, as a matter of fact. Lublin told me, very nicely, that he would pay me a hundred dollars if I spent the night with him.”

“He—”

“I told him I couldn’t, that I was just supposed to meet this Pete Miller as a favor. He didn’t press.” Her face was thoughtful. “He’s a very pleasant man,” she said quietly. “Very soft-spoken, and he tries very hard to show class. Only the most expensive brands of liquor. And very polite when he propositioned me, and very gracious when I turned him down.”

There were little lines at the corners of her eyes, largely obscured by the eye shadow she wore. They were the only signs of tension he could see. Her voice was a little brittler than usual, but otherwise she spoke as calmly as though she were telling him about some mediocre film she had seen. In the hotel, he had worried about her panicking and rushing back to Binghamton because she was in over her head. He could hardly have been more wrong about her.

How little you know, he thought. How little you know about any other person. You could marry a girl and never realize what she was truly like inside, could not begin to assess her separate strengths and weaknesses. And he had never realized how very strong Jill was. He was learning.

“We can go there now,” she was saying. “You have the gun, don’t you?”

“Yes.” It was tucked under his belt, the butt hidden by jacket and raincoat.

“I think we can take him now. Newkirk is one block over, and then he lives about a dozen blocks down Newkirk. We ought to be able to get a cab outside. This is a busy street, even at this hour. There were cabs cruising by while I was waiting for you.”

“I’ll go,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. He knows me and Carl knows me. They’ll open the door for me without thinking twice about it. If you went alone they would be on guard, but they already know me.”

He opened his mouth automatically, to argue, and changed his mind. She was right, she had to come along. He touched the side of her face with his fingers and grinned at her. “You’re one hell of a woman,” he said.

“Surprised?”

“A little.”

“I surprised myself,” she said.

In the cab he said, “You never should have left like that. In the middle of the night without saying anything.”

“I had to.”

“Why?”

“Would you have let me go otherwise?”

“No. Why didn’t you leave a note?”

“I didn’t think you would wake up. I hoped you wouldn’t. I thought about leaving a note, anyway, but I was afraid it would worry you.’

“It worried me enough this way.”

“I’m sorry. I thought if I left you a note you would come running straight to Lublin’s, and we both would have been in trouble. It’s the next block, on the left. Three houses down.”

The cab pulled to a stop. They got out, and he paid the driver and told him not to wait. The cab drove off. They stood on the sidewalk and looked at Lublin’s house. All the lights were off.

“They’re asleep,” she said.

The house was white clapboard, with a screened-in porch in front. He could see rocking chairs on the porch. A Cadillac was parked in the driveway just in front of the garage. They walked up the driveway to the side door. He reached inside his coat and pulled the revolver from under his belt. The metal of the gun was warm with his body heat. The butt fit snugly in his hand, and his finger moved to the trigger. He stood in darkness at the side of the door. She rang the bell.

“If Carl answers the door,” she whispered, “let me get inside with him. Then get him from behind. He’s big, he must be strong as an ox.”

He could hear nothing inside the house. He nudged her, and she leaned on the doorbell, a little more insistently this time. He heard something. She poked the bell again for emphasis, and inside the house footsteps moved slowly toward them.

“Who’s it?”

A voice, deep and guttural. He tensed himself in the shadows, and Jill called, “It’s me, Carl. Rita. You wanna let me come in for a minute?” Her voice, he thought, was as different now as her face and her hair. Harsh and strident, with a New York inflection which sounded utterly foreign coming from her lips.

The curtains parted. He saw a face, large, heavy. A thick nose, a very broad forehead. Carl’s eyes did not look at him but stayed on Jill. The doorknob turned, the door opened inward. She stepped inside.

“Whattaya want, Miss Rita?”

“Is Maurie up?”

“Sleeping. You want him?”

Dave moved softly, quickly. Carl had his back to the door now. Dave came through the door, the gun gripped by the barrel. He swung it downward with full strength, and Carl turned toward the sound just in time to catch the butt of the gun on the side of his head instead of at the base of the skull. He blinked dizzily and Dave hit him again, across the forehead. This time he went down.

But not out. He was an ox, a hardheaded ox, and a tap on the head wasn’t enough to stop him. He got to his knees and looked at Jill and at Dave. He didn’t seem to notice the gun; if he saw it, he didn’t pay any attention to it. He pushed himself up into a crouch and lowered his head and charged.

Dave brought up a knee that caught him in the mouth, then smashed the gun down across the broad skull once again. But Carl had momentum working for him. They both went down, with the big man on top. A table tipped and a lamp crashed down and the room went dark. The gun was still in Dave’s hand but his arm was pinned to the floor. Carl was on him, too dazed to hit him, too dazed to do anything but wrestle around with his weight as a lever. He had plenty of weight to work with.

Dave heaved, tried to swing free. He drove a knee upward and caught the big man in the groin. Carl didn’t seem to notice. Dave twisted, first to the left, then hard to the right. Carl was hitting him in the chest. He let go of the gun and pushed Carl’s face back with both hands, then let go with his right hand and hammered at Carl’s nose with the side of his palm. Blood came. Carl rolled away, holding his face with both hands. Dave hit him openhanded on the side of the throat. Carl croaked like a frog, slipped forward, fell off to the side.

The room was swaying. Dave’s head ached and his mouth was dry. He didn’t know where the gun was. Carl was trying to get up again, and Dave moved toward him and kicked him in the side of the head. Carl’s nose was bleeding freely now. His head snapped to the side from the force of the kick. He groaned and tried again to get up but he couldn’t make it. He slumped forward and lay still.

There were lights on upstairs, and sounds. A loud voice wanted to know what the hell was going on. Carl tried to get up again. Dave looked for the gun and couldn’t find it. The room was lighter now with illumination from upstairs. Carl was on his knees, shaking his head and trying to clear it. Dave got the lamp, the one that had spilled from a table earlier in the fight. It was almost too heavy to lift. He picked it up and half-swung, half-dropped it on Carl. There was a thudding sound and Carl sprawled forward again and did not move.