Deadly Honeymoon

by Lawrence Block

  But they had to get some rest. They walked half a block west on Thirty-fourth Street, and Dave went into a leather-goods store and bought a cheap suitcase. There was a haberdashery two doors down; he bought socks and underwear and two shirts there and packed them in the suitcase. Further down the same block they bought underwear and stockings for Jill.

  They took a cab to a third-rate hotel on West Thirty-eighth between Eighth and Ninth, a place called the Moorehead. A sallow-faced clerk rented them a double room on the second floor, five-fifty a day, cash in advance. They registered as Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Cassiday of Albany, Georgia. There was an elevator but no operator to run it. The desk clerk took them upstairs and unlocked the door for them. He didn’t wait for a tip.

  The room held an old iron bedstead that had been repainted with white enamel long enough ago so that the paint had begun to flake away from the metal. The bed itself was a little smaller than a double, about three-quarter size. It sagged slightly in the middle. The bed linen was clean but old and worn. There was a dresser which had been repainted with brown enamel fairly recently. The painter had covered up the scars of neglected cigarettes without bothering to sand them down. Since then, three more burns had been added to the dresser top.

  There was no rug. The floor was covered with brownish linoleum which was cracked in several places. The walls were a greenish gray, and very dirty. A fixture on the high ceiling held three unshaded light bulbs, one of which had burned out. A light cord hung down from the fixture over the center of the bed. The room had one window, which needed washing. It faced out upon a blank brick wall just a few feet away. The desk clerk had said that there was a bathroom down the hall.

  He stood in the room, looking for some place to put the suitcase, finally setting it on top of the bed. She walked over to the window and opened it. “This is a dump,” he said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “We could get out of here and go someplace better. Will you be able to sleep here? It’s pretty bad.”

  “I don’t mind. I think I could sleep anywhere, now.”

  He went over to her and put his arm around her. “Poor kid. You must be dead.”

  “Almost.” She yawned. “This place isn’t so bad. There’s a bed—that’s all I care about right now. What time is it?”

  “Dinnertime.”

  “I’m not hungry. Are you?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll eat when we wake up. Right now I wouldn’t know whether to order breakfast or dinner, anyway, so let’s just get to sleep. We couldn’t stay at a better hotel anyway, honey. We’re such a mess they wouldn’t take us in. Don’t unpack the suitcase.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I wouldn’t want to put any clothes in that dresser. None that I ever intended to wear. What are our names, incidentally? I didn’t see what you wrote.”

  He told her.

  “Cassiday,” she said. “So many different names lately. Did you ever use phony names when you took other girls to motels?”

  “Huh?”

  “I bet you did. What names did you use?”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  She grinned suddenly, a quick and wicked grin. Then she stepped away from him and began to unbutton her blouse. She took it off and asked him to unhook her bra. He did this. She took the bra off and crossed the room to set it and the blouse on the room’s only chair, and he looked at her and was surprised when a sudden uncontrollable burst of desire shot through him. She began getting out of her skirt. He tried looking away from her but her body drew his eyes magnetically.

  For God’s sake, he thought. He turned away, toward the door, and said that he had to go downstairs for a minute.

  “What for?”

  “There’s a drugstore on the corner,” he said. “A few things I wanted to pick up.”

  “Just don’t pick up any girls.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  She laughed happily at him. “First kiss me goodbye,” she said.

  He turned again. She was wearing a slip and stockings, nothing else. Her face was drawn with exhaustion and her skin was pale but this only served to make her still more desirable. She held her arms out to him and he caught her and kissed her. She pressed herself tightly against him and held the kiss.

  When he let go of her she said, “I’ll wait up for you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Well—”

  “I might be a while,” he said.

  He wound up going to the drugstore after all. He bought a street guide there but it didn’t do him much good. It told him what streets Lorring Avenue crossed, but he had never heard of any of those streets and wasn’t even sure what borough East New York was in, or whether it was a separate suburb on Long Island. There was a West New York, he knew, and it was in New Jersey.

  The drugstore had a pocket atlas of New York, with maps of the whole city, and he bought that. East New York turned out to be a part of Brooklyn. Brooklyn was a slightly lopsided diamond, and East New York was just above the eastern point of the diamond, north and west of Canarsie. He managed to find Lorring Avenue but couldn’t figure out how to get there.

  He bought two packs of cigarettes at the drugstore. He ate a candy bar. He weighed himself on a penny scale. According to the scale, he was a full twelve pounds under his normal weight, but he wasn’t sure how accurate the scale might be.

  He killed a few minutes that way to give Jill a chance to fall asleep. He could have made love to her, he thought. She would have let him, might even have been able to enjoy it, and God knew he wanted her, the passion no less strong because of its suddenness.

  On the way back to the room he stopped at the floor’s communal bathroom. He thought of taking a shower but changed his mind when he saw what the tub looked like. He washed his hands and face at the sink and went to the room, let himself in with his key. She was asleep, lying on top of the bedclothes, naked. She slept on her side facing the door with her knees bent, one arm under her head, the other up in front of her face. He saw the curves of her breasts.

  He got undressed and lay down beside her, facing away from her. The bed was too small. Their bodies touched. She made a small sound in her sleep. He moved a little away from her and closed his eyes, trying to relax. He lay there for quite a while, wide awake, and then sleep came all at once.

  CHAPTER 14

  THERE WAS this dream. In it, he was representing the plaintiff in a negligence action. His client had fallen down a department-store escalator and was suing for damages in the amount of sixty-five thousand dollars. The department-store floorwalker had just finished testifying that Dave’s client had not fallen but had been pushed by a companion, as yet unidentified. Dave cross-examined. He argued brilliantly, but the defense witness ducked every question, slipping them off his shoulders and winking surreptitiously at Dave. There was no justice, he thought, frustrated, and he took out a gun and shoved the barrel into the man’s slick face. He shouted questions at him and beat him over the head and shoulders with the butt of the gun. The man bled from the wounds and slumped in his chair. The judge pounded with his gavel, and Dave raised the gun and shot him. The bailiff moved toward him, gun drawn, and Dave shot him, too, and turned toward the gallery and fired into the rows of spectators. The faces of the spectators melted away when his bullets hit them.

  He woke up bathed in sweat. Jill was sitting on the edge of the bed beside him, holding his shoulder and asking if everything was all right. She was dressed and her face was fresh and alive. The overhead light was on. He turned toward the window. It was dark outside, still. He shook his head to clear the dream away. She asked what was the matter.

  “A dream,” he said.

  “A bad one?”

  “An odd one. Very surrealistic.”

  “Dave—”

  “It’s nothing.” He shook his head again and swung his legs over the side of the bed. She was smoking a cigarette. He took it from her and dragged on it. He asked her how long she had been up.
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  “Just a few minutes.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Four-thirty.”

  “The middle of the night,” he said. He got dressed and went down the hall to the bathroom to wash up. He had a bad taste in his mouth and he needed a shave, but he hadn’t bought a razor or a toothbrush. He washed his mouth with soap and gargled with tap water. He came back to the room, put on a tie and knotted it carefully. “I look like hell,” he told her.

  “You need a shave. That’s all.”

  Outside, the streets were dark and empty. The corner drugstore was closed. Even the bars were closed. He bought a safety razor and a small pack of blades at an all-night drugstore on Forty-second Street. Down the block, Hector’s cafeteria was open, one of four lighted spots on Times Square. The block itself was dark, movie marquees unlighted, almost every place closed. They got coffee and rolls at Hector’s and he went upstairs to the men’s room and shaved, lathering up with bar soap. He nicked himself, but not badly. When he was done he put the razor and the blades in a wastebasket and went back downstairs. His coffee had cooled off but he drank it anyway.

  He said, “I was just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Going back to Binghamton. It’s going to feel funny, don’t you think? Moving into the apartment, getting back to work.”

  “You mean after all of this?”

  “Yes,” he said. He got up and took their coffee cups back to the counter and had them filled again. He came back to the table and stirred his coffee methodically with a spoon. “Right back to another world,” he said quietly. “Searching titles and filing deeds and drawing wills.”

  “That’s not all you do.”

  “Well, no, but our kind of law is pretty quiet and orderly. You don’t get up in the middle of the night. Or carry a gun.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  He sipped coffee and put the cup back on the saucer. “You’ll be a housewife,” he said.

  “With a weekly bridge game, I suppose.”

  “Probably.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “What—your bridge game? It’s pretty bad.”

  She didn’t smile. “That’s not what I mean. Going back, and what our life will be like there.”

  “No, it’s not bad. Why?”

  “The way you were talking.”

  “I didn’t mean it to sound that way,” he said. “Just that it’s very different from, well, this. What day is it?”

  “I think Thursday.”

  “I’m supposed to pick up the Scranton papers. At that newsstand. I don’t think I’ll bother. Are you sure it isn’t Friday?”

  “No, it’s Thursday.”

  “It seems longer. We haven’t been married a week—can you believe that?”

  “It does seem longer.”

  “I killed a man yesterday.” He hadn’t meant to say it. It had come out all by itself. Nice day today. Maybe it’ll rain. I killed a man yesterday. Want more coffee?

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “I think I was dreaming about it. No one knows about it. You and I know, and Lublin knows, but no one else knows about it. Back home, nobody would dream it. If they heard about it they wouldn’t believe it.”

  “So?”

  “I was just thinking,” he said.

  They had to go back to the Moorehead. The gun was there, tucked between the mattress and the bed-spring. The extra shells were in their room at the Royalton and he thought that a maid might stumble across them while she was cleaning the room. And the people at the Royalton might get suspicious if they didn’t occupy the room at all. He decided to call the hotel later in the day.

  They locked the room door and went through the pocket atlas to try to figure out the best way to get out to Lorring Avenue. Two subways came close. There was an IND train that ran out Pitkin Avenue, but he couldn’t make out from the maps how you picked up the train in the first place. It seemed to originate somewhere in Brooklyn. One line of the IRT Seventh Avenue ran as far as Livonia Avenue and Ashford Street, which would put them about a dozen short blocks from Lorring. And he could figure out how to get that train. They could take a cab, of course, but he wasn’t sure he could find a driver who would want to go all the way out there, or who would know the route.

  Downstairs, he left the key at the desk and paid another five-fifty for the next night. They might return to the hotel and they might not, but this way the room would be there for them if they needed it in a hurry. The five-fifty was insurance.

  They got on the subway at Thirty-fourth Street a few minutes before seven. The train was fairly empty at the start. It thinned out even more at the Wall Street stop, and when they crossed over into Brooklyn there were only five other passengers in their car. He got up to check the map on the wall of the car near the door. The train had a full twenty stops to make in Brooklyn. A few people got on while the train followed Flatbush Avenue; most of them left at the Eastern Parkway stop. The .38 was in Dave’s pants pocket now. When he sat down his jacket came open, and he didn’t want the gun butt to show. The pocket that held the gun bulged unnaturally and he kept fighting the impulse to pat it. No one seemed to notice the bulge.

  The ride lasted forever. Once the train came up out of the earth and ran elevated for four stops before disappearing into the ground once more. Then it came up and stayed up. At a quarter after eight they hit the last stop, the end of the line. They were by then the only passengers in their car. They got off the train and walked to the staircase at the end of the subway platform. The sun was out but there was a strong breeze blowing that chilled the air. They went down the stairs and passed through a turnstile.

  He found a street sign. They were at the comer of New Lots and Livonia. He dug out the pocket atlas and thumbed to the map of that area, trying to figure out which direction to take next. He knew what route they had to take but he couldn’t tell which way they were facing or how to start off. He looked back at the subway platform, trying to orient himself, and Jill nudged him. He looked up and saw a uniformed policeman heading across the intersection toward them. The only thing he could think of was the gun. The cop knew about it, the cop was coming to pick him up. He was almost ready to start running when he realized he was acting crazy. The cop came closer and asked if they were lost, if he could help.

  Dave laughed now, unable to help it. The cop looked at him curiously. He broke off the laughter and said yes, they were lost, and asked how to get to Lorring Avenue. The cop gave him directions—two blocks over Ashford to Linden Boulevard, then a dozen or so blocks to the left on Linden and he couldn’t miss it. They thanked the cop and left.

  The neighborhood was a marginal slum, less densely populated than a Manhattan slum would be, but run-down and dirty, with a similar air of chronic depression. Most of the houses were only two or three stories tall. They were set close together with no driveways and no lawns. Stores were beginning to open, kids walked to school in bunches. About a third of the kids were Negroes.

  Further along Linden Boulevard the neighborhood improved a little. The housing there was similar to where Corelli had lived in Hicksville, two-story semidetached brick fronts. The lawns here were smaller, and few of them had more than scattered patches of weeds springing up from hard-packed dirt. There were trees, but they were scrawny.

  “I made a mistake,” he told her. They were waiting for a light to change. “I told that cop Lorring Avenue. He could remember.”

  She didn’t answer him. He lit a fresh cigarette, thinking that this was something new, another unfamiliar element. The policeman was to be feared, to be avoided. He should have just asked the way to Linden Boulevard and found his own way from there. There were so many things to learn, a whole new approach to social phenomena that had to be fixed in the mind.

  At Fountain Avenue, Linden Boulevard cut forty-five degrees to the left. Lorring Avenue started across the intersection from it, running due east. It was almost entirely residential. Here and there an ol
der building remained, with a grocery store or delicatessen on the ground floor and apartments over it. The rest of the homes were semidetached brick fronts, blocks of them, all very much the same. Most of the houses had very tall television antennas. The cars at curbs or in driveways were Fords and Plymouths and Ramblers and Chevys. There were a lot of station wagons and a few Volkswagens.

  When they crossed Grant Street, they moved into an older part of the neighborhood and the scenery changed abruptly. For half a block there were brick fronts on one side of Lorring, but the rest of that block and the other side of the street were made up of older frame houses, larger buildings set somewhat further back from the street. A sign in the front window of one white-clapboard house announced that tourists were welcome.

  The block after Grant was Elderts Lane. Lee Ruger lived at 723 Lorring, between Elderts and Forbell. His house, like several others on that block, was three stories tall. A wooden sign on the lawn said “Rooms,” and a small metal strip on the front of the house beside the door said “Rooms for Rent.”

  They walked past the house and kept walking almost to the end of the block. The Pontiac they had seen yesterday was not at the curb, nor had they seen it alongside the house. It might be at the back, in the rear of the driveway or in a garage.

  He said, “I don’t know if he’s home or not. I didn’t see the car. Of course, it might be Krause’s car, the one we saw.”

  “They don’t live together?”

  “I don’t think so. They might share an apartment, but this is just a furnished room. They wouldn’t share a room. Unless they both have rooms in the same building. There’s still a lot we don’t know. We have to know whether or not anybody’s home.” The gun was still in his pocket, and its weight made him uncomfortable. He looked around quickly to make sure no one was watching him, then took the gun from the pocket and jammed it once again beneath the waistband of his slacks.

  “This is crazy,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “What we’re doing now. Standing on the corner waiting for him to come by in a car and blow our brains out. I feel like a target, standing here in the open.”