Deadly Honeymoon

Chapter 17

In the cab he moved the gun from one pocket to the other. He could smell powder burns on his hands and it seemed to him that the whole back seat of the taxi reeked of the smell, that the driver couldn’t help noticing it. He sat stiffly in his seat, trying not to look over his shoulder for policemen. They had caught the cab on Linden Boulevard, and they were already approaching the Manhattan Bridge, so they seemed to be in the clear, but he couldn’t shake off the feeling that carloads of police were hot on their trail.

They crossed over into Manhattan. He waited for guilt to claim him, waited to be moved once again by a feeling of having crossed a great moral boundary. But this did not happen. He felt that he had been a very lucky bungler. He had very nearly gotten Jill killed, and had watched a prospective one-sided ambush turn into a gun battle. Good shooting and good position had won the battle, and pure blind luck had let them get out uncaught from the mess he had created. He was ashamed of the bungling and grateful for the luck. But the confused guilt that had come over him after he had killed the bodyguard in Lublin’s house — this did not come now. He wondered why.

They got out of the cab at Forty-second Street and ducked into a cafeteria. He went to the counter to get coffee and stood in line just long enough to decide that he didn’t want coffee. He left the line and took Jill around the corner. There was a bar there, and it was open already. They sat at a table. He had a straight shot of bar rye with a beer chaser. She didn’t want anything.

They lit cigarettes, and she said, “I’m so stupid, I almost ruined everything. I thought I was being so good at all this. And then like an idiot—”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I kept waiting and waiting and you didn’t come. I didn’t know what was happening. I couldn’t stand it.”

“It’s all right now.”

“I know.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “I’m okay. It was the waiting. I thought I was very brave. When I went to Lublin’s—”

“You were a little too brave then.”

“But it was easy. I was doing something, I could see what was going on. This time all I could do was stand around and find things to worry about. I had to see what was going on. I picked a hell of a time, didn’t I?”

“It was a bad arrangement. Forget it”

“I m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. We’re out of it”

“Are you sure he’s—”

“Yes, he’s dead.” The coup de grace, the bullet in the back of the skull. Yes, Lee was dead.

“Did anyone see you?”

“Half the world saw me.”

“Will they find us?”

“I don’t think so.” He sipped beer. “They’ll know what we look like, but they won’t know where to look for us, or who to look for. The big worry was that we might have been picked up on the spot. They would have had us then, and cold. A dozen different people could have identified me. But I think we’re out of it now.”

“What now?”

“Now we check out of the Royalton,” he said. “I was going to call them and tell them to hold our room. But that’s silly. If we’re not going to stay there, we might as well clear out altogether. And there are things there that we need.”

“What?”

“Our clothes and all. And the rest of the bullets.”

“I forgot that.”

“For Krause,” he said.

There was no problem at the Royalton. They went to their room and packed, and he called the desk and told them to make out the bill and to get the car ready. He packed everything and took the suitcases downstairs himself. The hotel took his check. The doorman brought the Ford around, and Dave gave him a dollar and loaded the suitcases into the back seat. They got into the car. He drove around until he found a Kinney garage on Thirty-sixth Street between Eighth and Ninth and left the car there. They carried the suitcases back to the Moorehead and walked upstairs to their room there instead of waiting for the ancient elevator.

Around four in the afternoon he went around the corner and came back with a deck of cards, a six-pack of ginger-ale and a bottle of V.O. They played a few hands of gin rummy and drank their drinks out of water tumblers. There was no ice. At six he found a delicatessen and brought back sandwiches. They ate in the room and drank more of the ginger ale, plain this time. He brought back a paper, but they couldn’t find anything about Ruger.

“You never did get those Scranton papers,” she said.

“So we’re out a dollar.”

Later he felt like talking about the shooting. He told her how he had sat at the window watching Ruger with the cigar, how he had pointed the gun at him, how he had felt.

“I don’t think I could have shot him just like that,” he said.

“But you did.”

“Because all hell broke loose. There was no time to debate the morality of it, not with the bastard shooting at us.”

“You would have killed him anyway.”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel bad about it. Not even uneasy.”

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“I feel relieved,” she said.

“Relieved?”

“That we’re both alive. And that he’s not, too. We came here to do something, and we’ve done part of it, and we’re still safe and all right, and I feel relieved about that.”

They went to sleep early. They had both gotten a little drunk. She didn’t get sick, just sleepy. They got undressed and into bed, and the liquor made sleep come easily. And there was no attempt at lovemaking to complicate things, not this time. He held her and kissed her and they were close, and then he rolled aside and they slept.

In the morning she asked what they were going to do now, about Dago Krause.

“Lie low for a little while,” he said.

“Here at the hotel?”

“It’s as good a place as any. If we let things cool down, we’ll be in a better position. There’s the cops to think about, for one thing. With Ruger’s murder so fresh, they’ll be on their toes. If they have a little time to relax they’ll just let it ride in the books as another gang killing. They won’t break their necks looking for us or keeping a watch on Krause. You remember the amount of attention they paid to Corelli’s death. Everybody was delighted to find an excuse not to try finding Corelli’s murderers. It’ll be the same here. They’ll decide Ruger was killed by a professional, and they’ll bury the whole thing in the files.

“The same thing with Krause, in another way. He’ll be on guard right now. He won’t tell the police anything. He’ll be sure we’re coming for him, and he’ll walk around with eyes in the back of his head. In three days he’ll manage to convince himself that one killing was enough to satisfy us or that we panicked once Ruger was dead and beat it out of the city. Let him relax.”

“How will we find him?”

“We’ll find him.”

“He won’t be in the phone book. I mean, there must be a million Krauses, even if he has a phone, and we don’t know his first name. Just a nickname. Why do you suppose they call him Dago? Krause isn’t an Italian name, is it?”

“No. We’ll find him.”

“How?”

“We’ll find him. One way or another, well find him.”

They spent the morning in the hotel room. At noon he went to the drugstore and picked up a stack of magazines, plus the morning papers. All the papers had the story, but not even the tabloids gave it a very big play. It wasn’t good copy. There had been a gun battle of sorts, which was on the plus side, but no innocent bystanders had been killed, and since no one had spotted Jill there was no sex angle to work on. The prevailing theory seemed to be that Ruger had been killed by a professional killer, a common enough ending for a criminal. The eyewitness reports contradicted one another incredibly, and the composite description of the killer made him about thirty-five, shorter and heavier than Dave. The whole pattern of the killing itself was confused in the papers. One witness insisted that Ruger had been ambushed by two men, one firing from the rooming house and the other gunning him down from behind a parked car. The woman at Ruger’s place told reporters that the killer had showed her false credentials and had posed as a federal officer.

They read all the articles together, and he laughed and folded up the papers and carried them down the hall and stuffed them in a large wastebasket. “I thought so,” he told Jill. “They would have had to pick us up on the spot in order to get us. Now they’re a million miles away.”

They went out for lunch and sat a long time with coffee and cigarettes. They walked up to Forty-second Street. There were a pair of science-fiction movies playing at the Victory, and the daytime rates were less than a dollar. It seemed like too much of a bargain to pass up. They walked in somewhere around the middle of a British import about a lost colony on Alpha Centauri and sat in the balcony. The theater was fairly crowded. They watched the end of that picture, a newsreel, three cartoons, a slew of coming attractions, and the other movie, one in which the fate of the world is menaced by giant lemmings, beasts that rushed pell-mell to the sea and devoured all the human beings in their path. Then there were more trailers, and they saw the Alpha Centauri movie up to the point where they had come in.

There was a comfortable feeling of security in the theater, a feeling of being in a crowd but not of it, of being surrounded by other persons while remaining comfortably anonymous. At first they were tense and on guard, but this stopped, and they got quickly lost in the action on the screen.

He picked up the evening papers on the way back to the hotel. In the room, he checked through them while Jill went down the hall to wash out underwear and stockings in the bathroom sink. He didn’t expect to find anything much in the papers, just checked them out methodically as a matter of form. For the most part, the material on the shooting was just a rehash of the stories in the morning papers, with a little extra material on Ruger’s background and criminal record and some hints at the police investigation of the murder.

But a final paragraph in one article said:

He took the paper down the hall to Jill and showed it to her. “Look at that,” he said, excited. “I told you we’d find him. The damned fools drew us a map.”

That night they had dinner at a good steak house on West Thirty-sixth Street. They went back to the hotel and drank more V.O. The ginger ale was gone. He drank his straight, and she mixed hers with tap water. They played gin rummy part of the time and spent the rest of the time sitting around reading magazines. She washed out some socks for him and hung them on the curtain rod over the window to dry. She muttered something about playing housewife on her honeymoon, and he smiled thoughtfully. It was the first time in days that either of them had mentioned the word “honeymoon.”

The next day was Saturday. There was nothing new on Ruger’s killing in any of the papers. Most of them had dropped it. One of the tabloids had a brief and pointless follow-up piece, but that was about all there was. They stayed close to the hotel.

By Sunday she was getting impatient, anxious to get it over and done with. “It’s better to wait,” he said. “Another couple of days. It won’t be long now.” They spent the afternoon at another Forty-second Street movie house and had dinner at the Blue Ribbon, on Forty-fourth Street. They had drinks before dinner and steins of Wurzburger with their meal and brandy with the coffee, and they were feeling the drinks by the time they left the place. He wanted to go back to the Moorehead, but she suggested stopping at a jazz place down the street and he went along with it. They sat at a circular bar and listened to a man play piano, until she lowered her head suddenly and fastened her fingers around his wrist

She said, “Don’t look up. Not now.”

“What’s the matter?”

“There’s a man across the bar, he was one of the ones at Lublin’s that night. I don’t remember his name but I met him there. The one with the red tie. Don’t look straight at him, but see if he’s looking at us.”

He saw the man she meant, watched him out of the corner of his eye. The man hadn’t seemed to notice them yet.

“He may not recognize me,” she said softly. “I looked different then, and I think he was drunk that night, anyway. Is he looking this way?”

“No.”

“We’d better get out of here. Let me go first.” She slipped off her stool. He left change on the bar and followed her out the door. Outside, she stood leaning against the side of the building and breathing heavily. He took her arm and led her down the street. A cab stopped for them. They got in and rode back to the hotel without saying a word.

In the room she said, “It’s dangerous. The more time we spend in this city—”

“I know.” He lit a cigarette. “Tomorrow.”

“Is that too soon?”

“No. I was going to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday, but you’re right, we can’t stick around here too long. It was only a matter of time before we bumped into somebody. It was lucky he didn’t spot us.”

“Yes.”

“And lucky you recognized him.”

He stayed with her until after midnight. Then he left the hotel and walked downtown for a dozen blocks. On a dark side street he found a two-year-old Chevy with New Jersey license plates. The plates were in frames fastened by bolts. He used a quarter to loosen the bolts, took both plates, and carried them back to the hotel inside his shirt.

They packed up everything except the gun and the box of shells. He loaded the revolver with five bullets and carried the remaining shells outside to another dark street. There were about fifteen shells left in the box. He dropped them one by one into a sewer and chucked the empty carton into a mailbox.

At seven the next morning, he left the hotel again and walked to the Kinney garage. The place was just opening. He got his car, paid the attendant three and a half dollars, and parked the car on the street a few doors down from the hotel. He went upstairs for the luggage. Jill came down with him. She had the gun in her purse. They walked down to where the car was parked and loaded their bags into the trunk and locked it. He drove the car and she sat close beside him. He took the West Side Drive uptown to Ninety-fifth Street, then drove around the side streets between Broadway and West End Avenue until he found what he was looking for, an alleyway alongside a warehouse. He drove through the alley to the back of the warehouse and switched license plates, bolting the New Jersey plates loosely to the car and putting his own plates in the trunk of the Ford. He backed out of the alley and drove up to 125th Street and swung east to the Triborough Bridge.

They crossed the bridge. The heavy traffic was coming across the bridge into Manhattan, rush-hour commuters coming into the city. He drove through Astoria, and she checked the route in the pocket atlas and told him which turns to take. They made only one wrong turn; it took them three blocks out of their way, but they found their mistake and got back where they belonged. He found Krause’s block and then Krause’s building and drove around looking for a parking place.

The only spot was next to a fire hydrant. He drove around the block twice, and by the second time around someone had come out and moved a car. It was a tight fit, but he managed to squeeze the Ford into the space.

He killed the motor, got out of the car. He walked around to the curb side while she moved over behind the wheel. He got in and sat beside her. Her purse, with the.38 in it, was on the seat between them. From where he sat he had a good view of the entrance to Krause’s apartment building. It was about half a block away, on their side of the street.

And Krause was home. Dave could see the gunmetal Pontiac just across the street from Krause’s building. Krause was inside, and he would not stay there forever.

“This time,” he said quietly, “we do it right.”

She nodded. Her hands gripped the steering wheel securely and her eyes were fixed straight ahead. He offered her a cigarette but she didn’t want one.

His window was up. He rolled it all the way down.

He said, “The easy way, the simple way. Listen, back up as far as you can, and swing the wheel so that we can get out of here in a hurry. We don’t want to be stuck in this spot.”

She did as he told her, backing the car all the way against the car behind them and turning the wheel so that they would be able to pull out quickly when the time came. He smoked his cigarette and flicked the ashes out of the open window.

Waiting, he thought, was always the hardest part. Once things began to happen, a good percentage of your actions were automatic. You didn’t have to sit and think, and you had no time to worry, no chance to second-guess yourself. But waiting required a special sort of personal discipline. You had to accept that stretch of time as something to be endured, a wasted period during which you turned yourself off and let the time pass by itself.

His mind went over details. He tested the plan from every angle, and each time it held up. It was simple and direct. There were no little tangles to it, no sharp corners that could catch and snag. It held.

And they waited.

A few people left Krause’s building. Two or three entered it. One time he saw a man framed in the doorway who looked very much like Krause, and he had to look a second time before he realized it was someone else. He felt annoyingly conspicuous, sitting like this in a parked car, but he told himself that it was safe enough. No one would pay any attention to them. People sat in parked cars. There was no law against it. And the people who walked past them seemed in too much of a hurry to waste valuable time noticing them.

It was cool out, and once he started to roll up the window. She asked what he was doing, and he caught himself and rolled the window down again. He reached over and opened her purse. The gun was there, waiting.

At twenty-five minutes after ten, Dago Krause came out of the building.

They both saw him at the same moment. Krause stepped out of the doorway, a cigarette in one hand, and he took a drag on the cigarette and flipped it toward the curb. He was wearing a tan trench coat, unbelted, the cloth belt flapping. His shoes were highly polished. He moved toward the curb, and Jill turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of the parking space. The Ford rolled forward. Dave took the gun from her purse and held it just below the window on his side.

There were two cars parked in front of Krause’s building with a four-foot space between them. Krause stood at the curb’s edge between the two cars. He moved out to cross, saw the Ford, and stepped back to let it pass him. The Ford moved even with Krause.

Dave braced the barrel of the gun on the window frame. Jill hit the brake, not too hard, and the car slowed.

Krause looked at them. There was an instant of recognition — of the gun, of Dave. Then Dave emptied the gun at him.

One bullet missed and broke glass in the door of the building. The other four bullets were on target. Three hit Krause in the body, one in the stomach and two in the center of the chest. The final bullet caught him as he was falling and took half his head off. The combined force of the shots lifted Dago Krause off his feet and tossed him back on the curb. He never had time to move, never uttered a sound.

Jill’s foot left the brake pedal and put the accelerator on the floor. The Ford jumped forward as though startled and raced straight ahead for two blocks. There was a red light at the second intersection. She slowed the car briefly, then took a hard left through the light and sped down that street for two more blocks. She turned again, right this time, and slowed down to normal speed. The.38 was back in her purse, the window rolled up. The car had a heavy gunpowder smell to it, and he opened the vent slightly to let it air out.

On a residential street about a mile away she stopped the car and he got out and switched the plates. The whole operation — removal of the Jersey plates and substitution of his own — took less than five minutes. He got back in the car and she headed for the Triborough Bridge again while he wiped his fingerprints from the stolen license plates. When they passed a vacant lot, she slowed the car and he unrolled the window and threw the plates out into the middle of the field.

They crossed the bridge. She drove the width of Manhattan on 125th Street, then stopped at the entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway and let him take the wheel. He headed north on the Henry Hudson, picked up the Saw Mill River Parkway and followed the throughway signs. There were three bridges to cross and a lot of tolls to pay, and the traffic was moderately heavy on the Saw Mill River Parkway, but they were on the throughway by noon.