Lawrence Block: Deadly Honeymoon

“They worked for Lublin? Is that it?”

He shook his head. “I think he hired them. I don’t think they were regular... well, employees of his. They were paid to kill Carroll. And when one of them wanted to kill us, so that we wouldn’t be able to tell the police anything, the other said something about not killing anybody unless he was getting paid for it As if they had been specifically hired to kill Carroll, to do that one job for a set fee.”

“That was Lee who said that. I remember now.”

He wrote: “Hired Professional Killers. Lee.” He said, “I know one name — Lee. It could be his first name or his last name.”

“Or a nickname,” she said. “If his name is LeGrand, or something.”

“It could be anything. That was all he was called, wasn’t it? I didn’t hear him called anything else. And he didn’t call the other one anything.”

“No, he didn’t.”

He lit a fresh cigarette. He looked at the notebook, at the neat entries one beneath the other: “Joe Carroll — Construction. Nassau County. Scranton paper. Lublin — Boss. Hired Professional Killers. Lee.” He went to the window and looked across at the office building. He wanted to look out at the city but the building was in the way. There were eight or nine million people in the city, and he was looking for two of those millions, and he couldn’t even see the city itself. There was a building in the way.

“Dave.”

He turned. She was next to him, her hair brushing his cheek. He put an arm around her and she drew close. Her head settled on his shoulder. For a moment he had thought of those two, lost in that huge crowd, and that it was hopeless and ridiculous. But now his arm was around her, and he remembered what they had done to her and what they had taken from her and from him. He closed his eyes and pictured both men dead.

He missed the out-of-town-newspaper stand on the first try. He passed it on the wrong side of the street and walked to Seventh Avenue and Forty-second, then got his bearings and retraced his steps. The stand was at Forty-third Street, in the island behind the Times Tower. He asked for a copy of the Scranton morning paper. The newsie ducked into his shack and came back with a folded copy of the Scranton Courier-Herald. He looked at the date. It was Saturday’s paper.

“This the latest?”

“What is it, Saturday? That’s the latest. No good?”

“I need today’s.”

The newsie said, “Can’t do it. The bigger cities, Chicago or Philly or Detroit, we get in the afternoon if it’s a morning paper or the next day if it’s a night paper. The towns, we rim about two days behind. You want Monday’s Courier-Herald, it would be Wednesday afternoon by the time I had it for you, maybe Thursday morning.”

“I need this morning’s paper. Even if it’s late.”

“You could use it Wednesday?”

“Yes,” he said. “And tomorrow’s, too.”

“Yeah. Say, we only get two or three. You want ’em, I could set ’em aside for you. If you’re sure you’ll be coming back. Any paper I’m stuck with, then I’m stuck with it. But if you want ’em, I could hold ’em for you.”

“How much are they?”

“Half a buck each.’

“If I give you a dollar now, will you be sure to have a copy of each for me?”

“You don’t have to pay me now.”

“I’d just as soon,” Dave said. He gave the man a dollar, then had to wait while the newsie scrawled out a receipt and made a note for himself on a scrap of paper.

Around the corner, he bought the New York afternoon papers at another newsstand. They didn’t have any of the morning papers left. But the news of Carroll’s murder wouldn’t have gotten to New York in time for the morning papers anyway. He took the papers to a cafeteria on Forty-second Street, bought a cup of coffee, and sat down at an empty table. He checked very carefully and found no mention of the shooting in any of the papers. He left them on his table and went out of the cafeteria.

Two doors down, he stopped at an outdoor phone booth and flipped through two telephone directories, the one for Manhattan and the one for Brooklyn. There were seven Lublins listed in Manhattan and nine in Brooklyn, plus “Lublin’s Flowers” and “Lublin and Devlin — Bakers.” The other local phone books were not there, just Manhattan and Brooklyn. He went to the Walgreen’s on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-second, and the store had the books for the Bronx and Queens and Staten Island. There were fourteen Lublins listed in the Bronx, six in Queens, and none in Staten Island. The Walgreen’s did not have telephone books for northern New Jersey, Long Island, or Westchester County. And Lublin might live in one of those places. There was no guarantee that he lived in the city itself.

In the classified directory — a separate book in New York, not just a section of yellow pages at the back — he turned to “Contractors, General.” He looked first for “Lublin,” because he had grown used to looking for Lublins, but there were no contractors listed under that name. He tried looking for “Carroll, Joseph.” He found “Carroll, Jas” and “Carrel, J.” He waited until one of the phone booths was empty, and then he dropped a dime in the slot and dialed the number for Carroll, Jas in Queens. A man answered. Dave said, “Is Mr. Carroll there?”

“Speaking.”

He hung up quickly and tried another dime. He | called Carrel, J., also in Queens, and the line was busy. He hung up. There was a woman waiting to use the booth. He let her wait. He called again, and this time a girl answered.

“Mr. Carrel, please,” he said.

“Which Mr. Carrel?”

Which Mr. Carrel? He said, “I didn’t know there were more than one. Was more than one.”

“There are two Mr. Carrels,” the girl said. “Whom did you wish to speak to?”

“What are their names?”

“We have a Mr. Jacob Carrel and a Mr. Leonard Carrel. Lennie... Mr. Leonard Carrel, I mean, is the son. He’s not in, but Mr. Jacob Carrel—”

He hung up the phone. For the hell of it, he looked up “Joseph Carroll” in the Brooklyn book. There were listings for fourteen Joseph Carrolls in Brooklyn. He did not bother looking in the other books.

The only way was through Carroll, he thought. They had to learn who the man was. If they learned who Carroll was they could find the right Lublin, and once they got Lublin they could find the men he had hired to do the killing. It was impossible to find Carroll or Lublin or anyone else through the phone book. The city was too big. There were thirty-six Lublins listed in New York City and God knew how many more with no phones or unlisted numbers. And he had never heard the name Lublin before, even. A name he’d never heard, and there were too many of them in New York City for him to know where to begin.

She was waiting in the room at the Royalton. He told her where he had gone and what he had done. She didn’t say anything.

He said, “Right now there’s nothing to do but wait There should be a story in one of the morning papers, and then there should be a longer story in the Scranton papers when we get them. Maybe we should have stayed around the lodge for a day or two, maybe we would have found out something.”

“I couldn’t stay there.”

“No, neither could I.”

“We could go to Scranton, if you want. And save a day.”

He shook his head. “That’s going around Robin Hood’s barn. We wait. We’re here, and we’ll stay here. Once we find out who Carroll is, or was, then we can think of what to do.”

“You think he was a gangster?”

“Something like that.”

“I liked him,” she said.

Around six-thirty they went across the street and had dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The food was fair. They went back to the hotel and sat in the room but it was too small, they felt too confined. There was a television set in the room. She turned it on and started watching a panel show. He got up, went over to the set, and turned it off. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here, let’s go to a movie.”