“We could call up and—”
“The hell with it,” he said. “I don’t want to call him. A phone call would only put him on guard if he is home, anyway. And I’m sick of calling people on the phone. Look, there are two possibilities. He’s there or he isn’t. If he isn’t home, I want to know about it, and I also want to get upstairs and search his room. Or take another room at the house so that we can sandbag him when he comes in.”
“What’s sandbag?”
“Surprise him, I don’t know. They say it on television. If he is home, there’s no sense waiting in the shadows for him to leave the house. He might be there now, lying in bed, sound asleep. It’s still early. He could be sleeping. If he’s home, the only thing to do is go upstairs and kill him.”
She shivered.
“That’s what we came for,” he said.
“I know. Would you shoot him in bed?”
“If I got the chance.” Her eyes were lowered. He cupped her chin with his right hand and raised her face so that her eyes met his. “Listen to me,” he said. “It’s not fair play. Fine. We are not playing. They were not playing before, not with Corelli and not with us, and we are not playing now. I’m not Hopalong Cassidy. I don’t want to be a good sport and let that bastard draw against me. I’d much rather shoot him in the back, or while he’s sleeping.”
He watched as she put her tongue out to lick her lower lip. “All right,” she said.
“Do you understand, Jill?”
“I understand.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Only—”
“Only what?”
“Nothing,” she said. He waited, and she started to say something else, then gripped his arm and pointed.
He spun around. A car was coming toward them down Lorring, a car the color of the one they had seen at Gramercy Park the day before. He shoved Jill behind him and dropped automatically to one knee. His hand went for the gun. The front sight snagged momentarily on his clothing. Then he got the gun out. The car came closer.
It was a convertible, though, and it wasn’t a Pontiac; it was a Dodge, and a woman was driving it. There were two kids and three bags of groceries in the back seat. The car passed them, and he looked at the gun in his hand and felt like an idiot. He shoved it under his waistband and got to his feet. She said, “I thought—”
“So did I.” He pointed down Forbell Avenue. There were stores a block away at the corner. “Go down there,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you’d be in the way now. I have to go inside, and I have to go alone.”
“Now?”
“Now. There’s no sense waiting. That car wasn’t them, but the next one might be, and we’re perfect targets like this. Go on.”
She hesitated, then turned and went. He waited until she was a few doors down the block. Then he went back to 723 and walked quickly to the front door. A sticker on the windowpane said “We Gave.” There was a red feather under the inscription. There were curtains behind the window and he couldn’t see into the house. He tried the door. It was locked. He rang the bell.
Nothing happened. He took a breath and rang the bell again. An angry voice, sounding neither male nor female, said, “I’m coming!” He waited. There were footsteps, coming closer, and he put his hand inside his jacket and let his fingers settle on the butt of the .38. The metal felt very warm now.
The door opened warily. He saw a face, and for a shadow of a second he thought it was Lee’s face and he tensed his hand to draw the gun. Then the door opened wider, and he saw that it was a woman, an old woman with rheumy eyes and a mannish moustache. Her hair was black, sprinkled with flat gray. She looked at him and waited for him to say something.
“Does Lee Ruger live here?”
“Ruger?” She looked at him. “He’s here,” she said. “Why?”
“Is he home?”
She looked exasperated. “Eight rooms here,” she said. She drew the door open, stepped back. “Eight rooms, and seven of ’em rented. You think I own this place? I just run it, I get the rent, I make sure it’s clean. You expect me to keep track of who’s here and who isn’t? I got enough without that.”
He entered the house, looked over her shoulder at the staircase. There was a table at the second-floor landing. On it was a vase of withered flowers. The house smelled of cigarette smoke and old furniture. He said, “Ruger—”
“Room Six. If he’s here he’s in it. If he’s not he’s not. You want to go upstairs, then go. The top floor.”
She didn’t wait to be thanked. She turned bulkily and went back to the kitchen and he started up the stairs. They creaked under his feet. At first he tried to walk softly and slowly, placing his feet on the edges of the steps to cut down their creaking. But it didn’t matter whether or not anyone heard his approach. Now he was just another man walking up the flight of stairs.
The dying flowers at the second-floor landing were roses, their petals mostly gone. He thought, The woman can be a witness, she can identify me. But that didn’t matter either, he decided. Her description would not be enough to lead the police to him, and if he were picked up by them, they wouldn’t need her as a witness. If he and Jill were picked up, they would confess. He was fairly sure of this.
He climbed another flight of stairs to the top floor. There were four rooms on the floor, four doors off the small hallway. Room 6 was at the end of the hall away from the staircase. The door was closed. He walked over to the door and tried to listen for movement inside the room. He couldn’t hear anything. Downstairs, in another part of the rooming house, someone flushed a toilet, the noise carried clearly. He waited while the plumbing noises died down and listened again at the door. No sounds came from within.
He took the gun out and held it in his right hand. He positioned himself at the side of the door and held the gun so that it was pointed just above and slightly to the side of the knob. His finger curled expectantly around the trigger. He held his breath for a moment, then let it out slowly, then breathed in again. With his left hand he reached for the doorknob.
CHAPTER 15
THE ROOM was anticlimactically empty. The door was not locked. He turned the knob and threw the door open, gun in hand, like Broderick Crawford bulling his way into George Raft’s hideout, and the room was empty. He stood in the doorway looking at an unmade empty bed. Cigar butts filled an ashtray on the bedside table. There were ashes on the floor. He stepped inside and pulled the door shut quickly. He started to bolt the door, then decided that was crazy. He took a deep breath and sat down on the edge of the unmade bed and put the gun down beside him, then remembered and rotated the gun’s cylinder so that there was no bullet under the chamber.
Ruger wasn’t around. But this was Ruger’s room and the man would come back to it, sooner or later. And he would be waiting for him. Ruger would open the door and he, Dave, would be sitting on Ruger’s bed with a gun in his hand, waiting.
The bathroom. He remembered the flushing of the toilet and thought that Ruger might still be in the house. He could be in the bathroom on a lower floor. He could bump into the woman and find out that a man had come to his room, looking for him.
He ran his hand over the bed linen. It was cool, and he guessed that it hadn’t been slept in for hours. He picked up the ashtray and several of the cigar butts. They were cold and smelled stale. The air in the room was also stale, and there was a thin layer of dust over the chair and dresser and night table. It didn’t look as though anyone had been in the room in a day or more. Just to make sure, he slipped out of the room and walked halfway down the stairs. The door of the second-floor bathroom was slightly ajar. He perched himself on the stairs and waited until the bathroom’s occupant finished and left. It was a man, a very old man who walked with a slight limp, carrying a towel and a toothbrush and an old-fashioned straight razor down the hall to his room.
So Ruger was out. He got to his feet and went back up to the third floor again and let himself into Ruger’s room o
nce more. He closed the door and walked over to the window. There were curtains, lacy ones that didn’t quite fit the image of the hired killer. He pushed them apart and looked out through the window. It needed washing, and the room needed airing out. He opened the window three inches at top and bottom and looked out through the glass. A small boy was riding his bicycle in the street, poised precariously on a seat that was too high for him. The boy rode off. A sports car breezed by and cornered sharply at Elderts Lane. A mailman, his leather sack bulging, walked down one driveway and up another.
Perfect, he thought. Ruger was out, and sooner or later Ruger would come back. Alone, or with Dago Krause in tow. Either way, he would be able to see them coming from the window. That was luck, the window facing the street. Ruger couldn’t get to the house without being seen on the way. He would be ready for him, ready and waiting.
His mind hurried ahead, sketching in the details. The escape shouldn’t be too difficult. There would be no gun battle to draw attention, because Ruger wouldn’t know he was there until it was too late for him to do anything about it. There would only be one shot, the one he himself would fire. People would hear it, but few people ever recognized a single shot for what it was. A truck backfiring, a kid with a firecracker—no one ever thought it was a gun-shot. And by the time people reacted to the shot he would be on his way out of the house.
Jill, thank God, was out of the way around the corner. He would kill Ruger and get clear of the house. He would hurry around the corner and find her, and they would get a cab back to Manhattan or get on a subway, anything at all. All he had to do was wait.
Fingerprints. With Ruger’s body left behind, the police would be all over the place checking for prints. And his were on file. He had been printed in the army, and he had vague memories of his fingerprints having been taken years ago as a matter of course when he held a summer job with the Broome County welfare department. He went around the room wiping the things he had touched—the doorknob, the ashtray, the window. He did a thorough job, then hauled Ruger’s chair over to the window and cleared a pile of dirty clothes off the seat. He sat down facing the window and waited.
Time crawled. Three cigarettes later he got up from the chair and began searching Ruger’s room. There might be something the police shouldn’t find, he thought. A note mentioning Washburn of Lublin or Corelli, anything that would enable the cops to make a connection between Ruger and them. But there was nothing like that. Ruger’s room was strangely barren of artifacts of any sort. There were two or three paperbound books, their bindings cracked and pages dog-eared. There was a mimeographed thirty-page pamphlet of hard-core pornography illustrated with crude drawings and featuring a sadomasochistic theme and a semiliterate prose style. There were clothes, selected with little evident thought for quality or fashion. There were no guns, so Ruger was evidently carrying one—Dave couldn’t believe the man could get along without owning one. There was a knife, a switchblade stiletto with a five-inch blade. The edge was quite sharp. There was a homemade blackjack—a length of lead pipe with a leather loop for a handle and several thicknesses of black electrical tape wrapped around the pipe.
No notes, no addresses, no telephone numbers. There was a key, evidently to a safe-deposit box somewhere. Dave pocketed it; there was no telling what the police might find in the box, and he decided it couldn’t hurt to keep them from it.
He wiped everything clean of prints and sat down again. Outside, the street was calm and clear. He wondered how long it would be before Ruger came back. If the man had been out hunting them all night long, he would probably be tired, ready to sleep. But he might have slept. He could have spent the night with a girl, or anywhere.
And his mind filled suddenly with a picture of Ruger with a girl and then of Ruger with Jill. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth painfully. The image passed and he opened his eyes again and gazed again out the window.
How long? It was going slowly enough for him, there in in Ruger’s room, and he realized how much slowly it must be going for Jill. She didn’t know what was happening, where he was, where Ruger was—she was stuck around the corner and had no idea what was happening or when she would see him again. He pictured her sitting over a cup of coffee and not knowing for certain whether he was alive or dead, and he realized all at once what a bad arrangement this was.
She should have stayed in the hotel, of course. He had suggested that, briefly, but as he said it he had known she wouldn’t go along with it. And once he decided to go straight up after Ruger, he should have sent her back to the city to wait for him. She probably would have put up an argument but he might have been able to talk her into it.
This way, everything was up in the air. She was close by but not close enough to know what was going on. He thought of leaving the rooming house for a minute. He could duck around the corner, find her, let her know what was happening, and then get her into a cab headed for their hotel. But if he left the room, how could he get back in? He might not be able to bluff his way past the woman again. Even if he managed that, it would just get her wondering, and if she wondered enough she might make a point of tipping Ruger off when he came through the door.
And if he left the place, Ruger could come back while he was looking for Jill. He wouldn’t know about it one way or the other and he could come bouncing up the stairs into a trap he wouldn’t be able to get out of. As things stood, he had the advantage, he held all the cards. But if he left the room he would be chancing the loss of that edge. He couldn’t risk it.
She would just have to wait.
He reached for a cigarette. There were only two left in his pack, and he didn’t have a spare. He hesitated, then shrugged and took out one of the cigarettes and lit it.
They drove up just as he was finishing the cigarette. He saw the car coming down Lorring, moving slowly toward the house, and he dropped his cigarette to the floor and covered it with his foot. He took hold of the gun, spun the cylinder to put a bullet under the hammer once again. It was their car this time. The Pontiac, and the right color, and coasting to a stop in front of the house and across the street.
He opened the window a little wider at the bottom and drew the curtains almost shut. Looking down, he could see them through the front windshield. Ruger was on the passenger side and Krause was behind the wheel. They were sitting there now, making no move to leave the car.
Come on, he thought. Both of you. Come on.
He rested the gun barrel on the windowsill. They were still in the car. They might both drive away, he thought. They might change their minds and drive away and leave him there. His grip tightened on the butt of the gun, and beads of sweat dotted his forehead. He couldn’t breathe.
A car door opened, on Ruger’s side. One of them spoke in an undertone. They both laughed. Then Ruger was coming and Krause was driving off, he thought. He was both glad and sorry. He wanted them both, right away, but one would be better than none at all.
Hurry up, dammit—
Ruger put a foot out of the car, then drew it back in again. Dave gritted his teeth. Ruger swung the foot out again, then shifted his weight and stepped out of the Pontiac. He stood with one hand on the open door and the other on the roof of the car. He was talking with Krause but Dave couldn’t hear anything.
He straightened up, then, and slammed the car door shut. Krause gunned the motor. Ruger nodded to him, and Krause pulled off, slowed down briefly for the stop sign at Forbell and continued east on Lorring. Ruger stood watching the Pontiac until it disappeared from view. He made no move to cross the street.
Dave aimed the gun at him, tentatively. He lowered it and looked at the man. For the first time, he didn’t know if he could do it. He did not know if he could shoot him.
His words to Jill: “Listen to me. It’s not fair play. Fine. We are not playing.” But it was less clear-cut when you had time to think about it, less certain when you had the man centered in your sights.
He watched Ruger. The gunman seemed stubbornly determ
ined to wait forever before he crossed the street. He reached into his breast pocket now and drew out a stubby cigar. Dave watched as he unwrapped the cigar slowly, carefully. He dropped the cellophane wrapper. It fell to the sidewalk and the wind played with it Ruger bit off the end of the cigar, spat it out, took out a windproof lighter, thumbed it open, lit the cigar, closed the lighter, returned it to his pocket, and puffed on the cigar. He moved to the curb and glanced across the street.
Then Dave saw him glance to his right, saw the cigar drop unnoticed to the street. Ruger was staring. Dave grabbed the curtains, tugged them aside.
Jill.
She had just turned the corner. She was walking toward the rooming house, looking straight ahead. He looked at Ruger. The man had a gun in his hand, he recognized her.
He yelled, “Jill, get back!”
He saw Jill look up, then clap one hand to her mouth. Ruger shot at her, missed, spun around to look up at the window. Dave pointed the .38 and squeezed the trigger. The sound was deafening and the recoil jolted up his arm to his shoulder. Jill had not moved. He yelled at her to get back, to get the hell out of the way. She hesitated and then spun abruptly around and dashed for the corner. Ruger looked at her but did not shoot. He aimed the gun at the third-story window, steadied himself, and fired.
CHAPTER 16
RUGER’S SHOT went off to the left. It slammed into the house a few feet to the side of the window and the whole house seemed to rock. Dave kicked the chair back out of his way and dropped into a crouch in front of the window. He looked out. Ruger was crouching, too, trying to present the smallest possible target. He looked around for a place to hide himself but stayed where he was. The trees there were young ones, too small to hide behind, and the nearest parked cars were three doors down the street.
Dave shot at him. This time his arm anticipated the recoil and the gun stayed steady. He missed; the bullet dug into the pavement a few feet in front of Ruger. Ruger snapped off a shot in reply. It shattered the window and glass flew.
Deadly Honeymoon Page 12
