Deadly Honeymoon

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.

“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 older 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.”

“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.