Deadly Honeymoon

by Lawrence Block

  “Why will he tell us?”

  “We’ll make him tell us.”

  Her eyes darted to the gun, then away. She said, “Now?”

  “Now.” He stood up, gun in hand. “We’ll check the drugstore phone books. We’ll find the Lublin who matches the number in Corelli’s book, and then we’ll go see him.”

  Dave tried the gun in each of his jacket pockets. In the inside pockets, it made a revealing bulge. In the outside pockets it hung loose and awkward. He jammed it under his belt but it didn’t feel right there, either.

  Jill said, “Give it to me.” He gave her the gun and she put it in her purse. The purse was a flat one, black calf, and the gun did not fit well. She got another purse from the dresser, a larger one, and she put the gun and her other things into it. There was no bulge this time.

  It was raining now, raining steadily, with a wind whipping the rain into their faces as they walked to the drugstore. Cars streaked by on wet asphalt. She held his arm with one hand and the purse with the other. In the drugstore, he started to look through all the phone books. She saved time by calling Information and asking the operator which borough Lublin’s exchange would be in. The exchange was Ulster 9, and the operator told her that would be in Brooklyn.

  They found him in the Brooklyn phone book: “Lublin, Maurice 4412 Nwkrk . . . ULster 9-2459.” He looked at the listing and couldn’t figure out what the street was supposed to be. There was a New York street directory on the magazine rack, and he thumbed back to the index and checked the Brooklyn streets in alphabetical order. There was a Newkirk Avenue listed; it was the only street that fit.

  He tried Lublin’s number, and no one answered. He called again and got no answer, then checked the phone book again to see if there was an office listed. There wasn’t.

  “He’s not home,” he told her.

  “Then let’s have dinner. I’m starving.”

  He was, too. They hadn’t eaten at all since morning, and it was almost six already. But he hadn’t noticed his hunger until she mentioned it. He interpreted this as a sign of their progress. They were moving now, growing involved in the mechanics of pursuit, and he had been hungry without even realizing it.

  They went to an Italian restaurant down the block and ate lasagne and drank bottles of beer. In the middle of the meal he left the table and used the phone to dial Lublin’s number. There was no answer. He came back to the table and told her.

  “He’ll get home eventually,” she said.

  “I suppose so.”

  After dinner, he called again. There was no answer. They stopped at a drugstore and bought a couple of magazines, and he tried again on the drugstore phone. No answer. They went back to the hotel room. At seven-thirty he tossed a magazine aside and picked up the phone, then cradled it.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you suppose they listen in?”

  “Who?”

  “The hotel operators.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He went downstairs and around the corner to the drugstore and tried again. There was no answer. In the hotel room, he kept looking at his watch. He went back to the drugstore again at eight, and called, and a man answered.

  He said, “Mr. Lublin?”

  “Just a minute, I’ll get him.” Then, “Maurie. For you.”

  He hung up and went back to the room. He told her, “Lublin’s home now but he’s not alone. Somebody else answered the phone.”

  ‘Was it—”

  “No, I’m sure it wasn’t. I’d remember their voices.” He thought a moment. “There were noises in the background. They may have been having a party. I don’t know. I think there were a lot of people there. But there’s at least one other man, the one who answered the phone. And he called Lublin by name. If Lublin were the only other person there, he wouldn’t have called him by name, I don’t think.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “I’ll call again in a little while. Sooner or later he’ll be the only one left, and then I’ll go after him.”

  She didn’t say anything for several minutes. Then she said, “Don’t call again tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’ll be suspicious. Calling and then hanging up—if it just happens once he’ll shrug it off, but if it happens more than that he’ll get suspicious. We can’t let him be on guard. The best thing for us right now is that nobody even knows about us. Lublin doesn’t know we exist and the two men don’t know we’re looking for them. We can’t afford to let them find out.”

  She was right. “I’ll go there around three in the morning,” he said. “The party’ll be over by then.”

  “No.”

  “Why not, Jill?”

  “He might not live alone.” She sat next to him and held his hands in hers. “Please,” she said. “We don’t know anything about him yet, about the setup there. Let’s wait until tomorrow. We can go there after a call, or if nobody’s home we can go there and break in and wait for him. Either way. Right now he’s there and he has company, and we don’t even know if he lives in a house or an apartment, we don’t know anything. Can’t we wait until morning?”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “Partly. And I’m exhausted, for another thing. A good sleep wouldn’t hurt either of us. Tomorrow—”

  He nodded slowly. She was right, there was no sense wasting their major advantage of surprise. And it wouldn’t hurt to wait another day. They had plenty of time.

  He got the bottle of V.O. from the drawer and lay on the bed with it. She went over and turned on the television set. There was a doctor program on, something about an immigrant who wouldn’t consent to surgery, and they watched it together. He didn’t pay very much attention to it. He stretched out on the bed and sipped the V.O. straight from the bottle, not working hard at it but just sipping as he watched the program. She said she didn’t want anything to drink.

  After that, they watched a cops-and-robbers thing for an hour, then caught the eleven o’clock news. There was nothing important on the news. During the weather report she turned off the television set and suggested that they go to sleep. He was tired without being sleepy. He could feel the exhaustion in his body, the need for sleep, but at the same time he felt entirely awake. But sleep was a good idea. He took another long swig from the bottle to make sleep come easier.

  They undressed in the same room with no embarrassment, no need for privacy. The adjustment of the honeymoon, he thought wryly. They had accomplished that much, surely. There was no longer any question of embarrassment. He felt that he could not possibly be embarrassed now in front of this woman, that they had lived through too much together, had shared too much, had grown too intimate to be separated by that variety of distance. They undressed, and he switched on the bedside lamp and turned off the overhead light, and they got into bed, and he switched off the bedside lamp and they lay together in darkness.

  She was breathing very heavily. He moved toward her and she flowed into his arms and her mouth was warm and eager. He kissed her and felt her warmth against him, and he kissed her again and touched her sleeping breasts and she said his name in a husky whisper. His hands were filled with the sweet flesh.

  It didn’t work. It began well, but there was tension for him and tension for her and it did not work at all. The desire was there but the capacity was not.

  She lay very close to him. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Shhhh.”

  “I love you. We were married Sunday. What’s today? Tuesday night? We’ve only been married two days.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Two days,” she said. “It seems so long. I don’t think I knew you at all when we got married. Not at all. Courtship, engagement, all of that, and I hardly knew you. And two days.”

  He kissed her lightly.

  “I love you,” she said. “Sleep.”

  He lay in the darkness, sure he would
n’t sleep. Lublin was in Brooklyn, on Newkirk Avenue. He had called him on the phone, had hung up before Lublin could take the call. He should have waited another minute, he thought. Just long enough to hear the man’s voice so he would know it.

  But it was real now, it was all real. Before there had been the fury, the need to Do Something, but the reality had not been present. And then that day there had been the article in the paper, the visual proof again of Corelli’s death. And the trip to Hicksville, to Corelli’s home and to Corelli’s office.

  It was very real. He had a gun now, Corelli’s gun, and all he knew about a gun was what he had learned ages ago in basic training. Could he hit anything with a gun? Could he use it properly?

  And he had never fired at a human target. Not with a revolver, not with a rifle, not with anything. He had never aimed at a living person and tried to kill that person.

  He reached out a hand and lightly touched his wife’s body. She did not stir. He drew his hand back, then, and settled himself in the bed and took a deep breath.

  He woke up very suddenly. He had fallen asleep without expecting to, and now he woke up as though he had been dynamited from the bed. His mouth was dry and his head ached dully. He sat bolt upright in the bed and tried to catch his breath. He was out of breath, as if he had been running furiously for a bus.

  His cigarettes were on the bedside table. He reached out and got the pack, shook out a cigarette, lit it, cupping the flame to avoid awakening Jill. The smoke was strong in his lungs. He smothered a cough, breathed in air, then drew once more on the cigarette.

  He looked at her side of the bed and could not see her in the darkness. He reached out a tentative hand to touch her.

  She was not there.

  In the bathroom, then. He called her name, and there was no answer, no answer.

  “Jill!”

  Nothing. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. It was empty. He turned on lights, looked around for a note. No note.

  She was gone.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE DESK CLERK said, “Mrs. Wade left about a half hour ago, sir. Or maybe a little more than that. Let me see, I came on at midnight, and then I had a cup of coffee at two-thirty, and then your wife left the hotel just as I was finishing my coffee. It must have been a quarter to three, I would guess.” It was just three-thirty now. Forty-five minutes, he thought. Jill had been gone for forty-five minutes.

  “Is anything wrong, Mr. Wade?”

  “No,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong.” He forced a smile. “She probably couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Probably went out for coffee.”

  He went back upstairs and sat in the room and smoked another cigarette. Jill was gone. Jill had gotten up in the middle of the night, alone, and had dressed and left. For coffee? It was possible, he guessed. But for three-quarters of an hour?

  She had left the hotel by herself. The immediate fear, the automatic reaction once he realized she was gone, was the worry that someone had come to take her away. But that was senseless. No one knew about either of them, no one knew where they were staying. And no one had called their room, either. He would have heard the phone no matter how deeply he was sleeping, for one thing. And the desk clerk would probably have mentioned a call.

  He checked the whiskey bottle. It was as full as it had been. If she wanted a drink, he thought, she would have had it there. She wouldn’t go barhopping by herself in the middle of the night. Coffee, then. Coffee and a sandwich, maybe.

  Why hadn’t she come back?

  He put on a coat and went down to the lobby and out into the night. It was still raining, but the rain had slowed to a drizzle. Most of the lights were out on Forty-fifth Street. He walked to the corner of Sixth. The Cobb’s Corner was open, and he went inside and looked around, but she wasn’t there. He went out again and stood on the corner in the rain, looking around, trying to figure out where she might be. There were three or four open restaurants that he could see and, along Sixth Avenue, more than a dozen bars. She could be anywhere. Or she could be somewhere else, and not in any of these places.

  Check them all? It didn’t make any sense. And suppose she wanted to get in touch with him, and called him, and he wasn’t there. Or suppose she got back to the hotel while he was out looking for her.

  He went back to the Royalton. He sat in a chair, and then he got up suddenly and looked for her purse. The large brown purse was on a chair. He opened it, and saw the gun; she had left it behind. But the purse was empty otherwise, and he guessed that she had transferred everything to the black-calf purse before leaving.

  Where could she have gone? Just out for coffee, he told himself. Just out for coffee, and if he would just sit back and relax she would return to the room in no time at all. But he couldn’t make himself believe it She wouldn’t be gone this long.

  He remembered again, unwillingly now, the sudden rush of reality that had come that night after the call to Lublin. The quick and certain proof that this was no game they were playing, no treasure hunt. That, and then the unsuccessful attempt to make love.

  And he thought, We never should have come. We should have left that place and gone somewhere else until the honeymoon was over, and then we should have gone back to Binghamton. No pursuit, no chase, no revenge. We should have gone home.

  Because he knew, now, what had happened. Jill had panicked. The initial shock of violation had steeled her, had made her determination for revenge equal to his own, but by now her reactions had cooled and jelled and had changed from determination to panic. He remembered the look in her eyes when he had taught her to use the gun, and he remembered the way she had wanted to wait a day before going after Lublin. Panic, panic. The hunt was wrong for a woman, for a girl; she was no huntress, no killer, and she had not been able to take it, and now she was gone.

  Where? Back to Binghamton, he thought. Back to her home, where she knew everyone and where she would be safe. He had misjudged her and now she was running, and he paced the floor of their room and tried to figure out what to do next. At one point he started to pack their clothes into their suitcases, then suddenly changed his mind and put everything back where it had been. He took the gun from her purse and held it first in one hand and then in the other, switching it nervously back and forth, finally sighing and returning it to the large brown bag.

  Twice he picked up the bottle of V.O. and each time he put it back without drinking. One time he uncapped it. The other time he just held it in both hands and looked at the amber whiskey.

  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

  THE 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.”