Deadly Honeymoon

by Lawrence Block

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.”

  “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

  THE 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 Turn
pike. 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.