Deadly Honeymoon

Chapter 3

In the diner the waitress said, “Mondays, how I hate ’em. Give me any other day, but Monday, just never mind. Coffee?”

“One black, one regular,” he told her.

There were two men at the counter who looked like truckers and one who looked like a farmer. The waitress brought the coffee and he carried the two cups over to a table on the side. Some of the coffee in her cup spilled out onto the saucer. He took a napkin from the dispenser and wiped up the coffee. She added sugar, one level spoonful. He drank his straight black.

When the waitress came over he ordered toast and a side order of link sausages. Jill wanted a toasted English muffin, but the diner didn’t have any. The waitress said there would be some coming in around nine-thirty. Jill had a cheese Danish instead and managed to eat half of it.

He spread a road map on the table and studied it, marking a route with a pencil. She sipped her coffee and looked across the room while he traced the route they would take. By the time he was finished, she had drunk her coffee. He looked up and said, “This is how we’ll do it. We’re on 590 now. We take it to Ford — that’s just across the state line — and pick up 97. We go about five miles on 97 to Route 55. That’s at Barryville. Then 55 runs just about due north to something called White Lake, where we get 17B. Then we hook up with 17 at Monticello. That carries us all the way to the throughway at Exit 16, and then we just drive down into New York.”

“I never heard of those towns,” she said.

“Well, Monticello you’ve heard of.”

“I mean the others.”

He sipped his coffee, checked his watch with the electric clock over the counter. “Twenty to eight,” he said.

“Should we get going?”

“Pretty soon.” He got to his feet. “I’m having another cup of coffee,” he said. “How about you?”

“All right.”

He carried the two cups back to the counter. The waitress was busy telling one of the truckers what a terrible day Monday was. She was a heavyish woman with stringy hair. When she finished talking to the truck driver Dave got two fresh cups of coffee and carried them back to the table.

They passed through the town, a small one, and a sign told them to resume their normal speed. He bore down on the accelerator. The sun was bright on the road ahead. The sky had been overcast when they got up, but the clouds were mostly gone now.

“That was Forestine,” she said. “White Lake in three miles.”

“And then what?”

“Then right on 17B.”

He nodded. So far, in close to an hour of driving, they had talked only about the route and the road conditions. She had the road map open on her lap, the map with their route penciled in, and she told him when to slow down and where to turn. But most of the time passed in long silences. It was not for lack of things to say to each other, or because any distance had sprung up between them. Small talk did not fit and larger talk came hard.

The night before they had stayed at a motel called Hillcrest Manor. They slept in a double bed. After he checked in, they left their suitcases in the locked car and went inside. They undressed with the lights on, then he turned off the lights, and they got into the large bed. She took the side near the windows, and he had the side nearer to the door. He waited, and she came to him and kissed him once, on the side of the face. Then she went back to her side of the bed. He asked her if she thought she would be able to sleep and she said yes, she thought so. After about fifteen minutes he heard her easy rhythmic breathing and knew that she was sleeping.

He couldn’t fall asleep. The beating had tired him, and his body wanted sleep, but it didn’t work. He would manage to relax and would start drifting off and then the memory would come, racing in at his mind, and he would suck in breath and shake his head and sit up in the bed, his heart beating fast and hard. From time to time he got out of the bed and sat in a chair at the window, smoking a cigarette in the darkness, then putting out the cigarette and returning to bed.

Around four, he dozed off. At a quarter to six he heard a frightened yelp and was instantly awake. She lay on her back, her head on a pillow, her eyes closed, and she was crying in her sleep. He woke her up and soothed her and told her that everything was all right. After a few minutes she fell asleep again, and he got up and put clothes on.

Now he talked to her without looking at her, his eyes conveniently fixed on the road ahead. “When we get to Monticello,” he said, “you’re going to see a doctor.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He looked at her. She was worrying her lip with her teeth. “I don’t want anyone, oh, touching me. Now. Examining me.”

“Is that all?”

“I just don’t want it. And if a doctor could tell anything, wouldn’t he have to report it? Like a gunshot wound?”

“I don’t know. But if they injured you—”

“They didn’t hurt me,” she said. “I mean, they didn’t do any damage. I checked, I know. There were no cuts or bleeding.” Her voice, flat until then, came alive again. “Dave, those policemen were stupid.”

“Why?”

“They figured it all out. The mess in Carroll’s cabin, the way everything was turned upside down. They think Carroll fought with his murderers and then they dragged him outside and shot him.”

“I didn’t even think about that. That’s what they figure?”

“They were talking outside, before you got out of the shower. Dave, they didn’t hurt me. I don’t have to see any doctor.”

“Well—”

“There wasn’t even that much pain,” she said. “The doctor I saw, before we were married—”

He waited.

“He told me about some exercises. To make it easier for us to—” She stopped, and he waited, and she caught hold of herself and started in again. “—to consummate our marriage.”

He kept his eyes on the road. He swung to the left, passed a station wagon, cut back to the right again. He looked at his hands on the steering wheel, the knuckles white, the fingers locked tight around the wheel. He moved his hands lower on the steering wheel so that she would not see them.

Suddenly he was grinning.

“Is something funny?”

“I was just picturing you,” he said. “Doing your exercises.”

He laughed then, and she laughed. It was the first time either of them had laughed since Carroll was murdered.

A little later he said, “There’s another reason you ought to see a doctor.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know how to say it well. Suppose you’re pregnant?”

She didn’t say anything.

“It’s no fun to think about,” he said. “But it could be. Jesus.”

“Oh, Dave—”

He slowed the car. “It’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “They can always do something about it. The legal question varies from state to state, but I know a dozen doctors who wouldn’t worry about the law. If a... rape victim is pregnant, she can get an abortion. There’s no problem.”

“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.”

“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.