Lawrence Block - Deadly Honeymoon

“I can go back there during the night,” he told her. He explained the way the building was kept open. “I can sign some name to the book and break into that office.”

“Break into it?”

“Pick the lock. Or break the window and unlock it There won’t be anybody around, and once I’m in I can get a good look into his place. Washburn’s.” But then he stopped and shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“It sounds risky. If anybody heard you—”

“More than that. In the first place, he probably closes his drapes when it gets dark out. Everybody does. Besides, all I could see would be the one room of the apartment, and it’s probably a bedroom anyway. I couldn’t keep an eye on the front door, and I would never know if he left the building. We have to be able to see the front of his building, not the back of it.”

A few minutes later she looked up and said, “But there is something we can do, honey.’

“What?”

“Instead of breaking into the office. Or sneaking in. And it should be easier, and less dangerous. We could break into Gramercy Park.”

They waited on the north side of the park, about twenty yards down from the main gate. The privilege of a key to the park was evidently more symbolic than utilitarian. The park was empty except for a very old man who wore a black suit and a maroon bow tie and who sat reading the Wall Street Journal and moving his lips as he read. They waited for him to leave the park but he seemed determined to sit on his bench forever. They waited a full half hour before anyone else entered the park. Then a woman came, a very neat and very old woman in a gray tweed suit. She had a cairn terrier on a braided leather leash. She opened the gate with a key and led the dog inside and they watched the gate swing shut behind her.

The woman spent twenty minutes in the park, leading the cairn from one tree to another. The small dog seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for urine. They completed the tour, finally, and woman and dog headed for the gate. Their move was well timed. The two of them reached the gate just as the woman was struggling with the lock. She opened it, and Dave drew the gate open while Jill made a show of admiring the dog. The dog admired them. The woman and the dog passed through the gate, and Jill stepped inside and Dave started to follow her.

The woman said, “You have your own key, of course.”

“I left it in the apartment,” Jill said. She smiled disarmingly. “We’re right across the street.” She pointed vaguely toward Washburn’s building.

The woman looked at them, her eyes bright. “No,” she said gently, “I don’t think you are.”

The dog tugged at the leash but the woman stood her ground. “One so rarely sees younger people at this park,” she said. “Isn’t it barbaric, taking something as lovely as a park and throwing a fence around it? The world has too many fences and too few parks. There are times when I think Duncan” — she nodded at the dog — “has the only proper attitude toward this fence. He occasionally employs it as a substitute tree. You don’t live in this neighborhood, do you?”

“Well—”

“You sound as though you’re from upstate somewhere. Not native New Yorkers, certainly.” She shook her head. “Such intrigue just to rest a moment in a pleasant park. You’re married, of course. Wearing a wedding ring, both of you are, and the rings seem to match. And even if they didn’t I’d be good enough to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re married to each other. From out of town, and anxious to sit together in a park—” The woman smiled pleasantly. “Probably on a honeymoon,” she said. “After a year or two of marriage you’ll have had your fill of parks, I’m sure. And, probably, of each other.

“Oh, I hope not,” Jill said.

The woman’s smile spread. “So do I, my dear, so do I. You’re quite welcome to the park. My late husband and I used to go to Washington Square when we were courting. Isn’t that a dated term? I’m old, aren’t I?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re very charming, aren’t you? But I very certainly am old, nevertheless. Courting. I understand Washington Square’s changed a great deal since then. A great many young persons with leather jackets and beards and guitars. Perhaps that’s an argument for gates and fences after all. Every question has so many sides. I am a silly old woman, aren’t I?”

“No.”

“Enjoy the park,” the woman said, passing through the gate now. “And enjoy each other. And don’t grow old too quickly, if you’ll pardon more advice. Giving unwanted advice is one of the few remaining privileges of the aged, you know. Don’t grow old too quickly. Being old is not really very much fun. It’s better than being dead, but that’s really about all one can say for it.”

The iron gate swung shut. The woman and the dog walked quickly with small and precise steps to the corner and waited for the signal to change. Then they crossed the street and continued down the block.

“We really fooled her,” Jill said.

“Uh-huh.”

They went to a bench on a path running along the western edge of the park. They were almost directly across from Washburn’s apartment house. The same doorman still stood at the door.

“We did fool her,” Jill said suddenly.

“That woman? How?”

“She thought we were a nice young couple,” Jill said. “I guess we used to be.” She looked away. “I’m not sure we are now,” she said quietly.

Their bench was shaded by two tall elms. There, in the park, the air was cleaner and cooler than in the surrounding city. They sat close together on the bench, looking over a stretch of green and through the grating of the fence at the luxury apartment buildings across the small street. The setting did not match the circumstances at all. Too placid, too secure. His mind would wander, and he had to force himself to remember what they were there for, and why. Otherwise he kept relaxing to fit the old woman’s image. A couple of honeymooners who wanted a few peaceful moments for themselves away from the hot hurry of New York.

Other images helped him concentrate. The five bullets pumped one after another into Joe Corelli’s head. The professionally disinterested beating he himself had taken. The direct and dispassionate rape of Jill. The cold fury of the ride into the city. Carl, Lublin’s personal heavyweight, first lumbering like a gored ox, then dead.

The watching was hard. It had seemed direct enough at the beginning, a stakeout straight out of Dragnet . You took a position and you held it and you waited for something to happen. But there was one basic difficulty. Nothing happened.

No one left Washburn’s building and no one entered it. The doorman stood at his post. At one point he lit a cigar, and after about twenty minutes he threw the cigar into the gutter. Cars drove by, the traffic never very thick. Occasionally someone with a key came into the park, either to walk a leashed dog or to sit reading a book or an afternoon paper. The drapes were still open in Frank Washburn’s apartment but it was on the fourth floor, and they were at ground level. They could tell that there were lights on, which meant there was probably someone at home, but that was all they could tell.

So it became hard to concentrate. They talked, but concentration had an unreal quality to it. There wasn’t much to say about the job at hand, about Washburn and where he might lead them. Once they had gone over that a few times they were tired of it. And any other conversation was fairly well out of place. Mostly, they sat together in silence. The silence would be broken now and then — she would ask for a cigarette, or one of them would ask a question that the other would quickly answer. Then the silence would come back again.