Lawrence Block: Deadly Honeymoon

“Oh, God,” she said. “I didn’t even think. You’ve been worrying about this, haven’t you? All night, probably.”

“Well—”

“I’m not pregnant. I’m taking these pills, oral contraceptives. That was one of my surprises for you. The doctor gave me pills to take. Little yellow pills. I couldn’t possibly be pregnant.”

She began to cry then. He started to pull off the road but she told him to go on driving, that she would be all right. He went on driving, and she stopped crying. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m not going to cry any more, at all.”

They made good time. They stopped once on the road for gas and food and were in New York by twelve-thirty. They came in on the Saw Mill River Parkway and the West Side Drive. They took a room with twin beds at the Royalton, on West Forty-fourth Street. The doorman parked their car for them.

Their room was on the eleventh floor. A bellhop carried their luggage, checked the towels, showed them where their closets were, opened a window, thanked Dave for the tip, and left. Dave walked to the window. You couldn’t see much from it, just the side of an office building.

“We’re here,” he said.

“Yes. Have you spent much time in New York?”

“A couple of weekends during college. And then for six weeks two years ago. I was studying for the bar exams, and there’s a course you take just to cram for the bar. A six-week cram course. I stayed downtown at the Martinique and didn’t do a thing but eat and sleep and study. I could have been in any city for all the attention I paid to it.”

“I didn’t know you then.”

“No, not then. Do you know this city?”

She shook her head. “I have an aunt who lives here. A sister of my father’s. She never married, and she has a job in the advertising department for one of the big department stores. Had, anyway. I don’t know if she still does, I haven’t seen her in years. Name some department stores.”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Saks, Brooks Brothers—”

“She wouldn’t work at Brooks Brothers.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about department stores. Bonwit? Is there one called Bonwit?”

“It was Bergdorf Goodman. I remember now. We went to visit her, oh, two or three times. I was just a kid then. We didn’t see her very often because my mother can’t stand her. Do you think she might be a lesbian?”

“Your mother?”

“Oh, don’t be an idiot. My aunt.”

“How do I know?”

“I wonder. There was a lesbian in my dormitory in college.”

“You told me.”

“She wanted to make love to me. Did I tell you that, too?”

“Yes.”

“Everybody said I should have reported her, but I didn’t I wonder if Aunt Beth is a lesbian.”

“Call her up and ask her.”

“Some other time. Dave?” Her face was serious now. “I think we ought to figure out what we’re going to do first. How we’re going to find them, the two men. We don’t know anything about them.”

“We know a few things.”

“What?”

He had a notebook in his jacket pocket, a small loose-leaf notebook for appointments and memos. He sat down in an armchair and flipped the book open to a blank page. He took his pencil and wrote: “Joe Carroll.”

“They killed a man named Joe Carroll,” he said. “That’s a start” She nodded, and he said, “If that was his name.”

“Huh?”

“That was the name he gave us, and that was the name he used at the lodge. But he was running away, trying to hide. He might not have used his own name.”

“What did the men call him?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t think they called him anything. I couldn’t hear that much from where we were.”

“Wouldn’t the police know his real name?”

“The troopers?” He thought a minute. “He might have had some identification on him. They called him Carroll. They might have done that in front of us just to keep from confusing us, but maybe not Or maybe he wasn’t carrying any identification.”

“Or maybe they took his wallet with them.”

“Maybe.” He lit a cigarette. “But they would fingerprint him,” he said. “They would do that much automatically, and they would send his prints to Washington, to the FBI. If he’s ever been fingerprinted, then, his prints would be on file and they would get a positive identification of him.”

“How could we find out?”

“If he’s important, then it would be in the New York papers. If not, it would just be in the local papers. If Pomquit has a paper. Or one of larger cities around there. Scranton — I don’t know.”

“Can you get Scranton papers in New York?”

“Yes. There’s a newsstand in Times Square. I used to pick up Binghamton papers during that bar-exam stretch. The papers run late, but they would have them.”

In the notebook he wrote: “Scranton paper.”

He looked up. “Let’s take it from the top. Carroll, whatever his name is, said he was in construction. And semiretired.”

“He was probably just talking.”

“Maybe. People usually stay close to the truth when they lie. Especially when they’re lying just for the sake of convenience. Carroll wanted to be friendly with us, and he had to invent a story, not to keep anything from us, specifically, but because he couldn’t tell the truth without drawing the wrong kind of attention to himself. He was probably a criminal. I got that picture from the way he talked with the two of them.”

“So did I.”

“But I think he was probably a criminal with some background in the construction business. A lot of rackets have legitimate front operations. You know the cigar store across from the Lafayette?”

“In Binghamton?”

“Yes. It’s a bookie joint.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s not exactly a secret. Everybody knows it, they operate pretty much in the open. Still, the place is a cigar store. They don’t have a sign that says ‘Bookie Joint,’ and the man who runs it tells people he runs a cigar store, not a bookie joint. It’s probably something like that with Carroll. He was probably in construction, or on the periphery of it, no matter what racket he may have had on the side.”

He was talking as much to himself as to her now. If they were going to find Lee and the other man, they would do it by reasoning from the few facts and nuances at their disposal.

“Carroll did something wrong. That was why the two of them came after him. He double-crossed somebody.”

“He said that he would make it good.”

He nodded. “That’s right. There was a name. Their boss, the one they work for. Carroll told them to tell the boss that he would make it good.”

On the notebook page he changed the first entry to read: “Joe Carroll — Construction.” Then he wrote: “Nassau County,” which was where Carroll had said he was in business.

Jill said, “They mentioned the boss by name. Or Carroll did.”

“I think Carroll did.”

“I can remember it. Just a minute.” He waited, and she closed her eyes and put her hands together, pressing the palms one against the other.

“Dublin,” she said.

“No, that’s not it.”

“Dublin, it was Dublin. Tell Dublin that I’ll make it good. No, that’s not right either.”

“It’s not what they said.”

“Lublin, maybe?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, say the sentence for me. I think I can tell if I hear it, if you say it for me. Like a visual memory, I except different. Say the sentence the way he said it.”

“With Lublin?”

“Yes.”

He said, “‘Tell Lublin I’ll make it good.’”

“That’s it. I’m positive, Dave. Lublin.”

He wrote: “Lublin — Boss.”