Deadly Honeymoon

Chapter 4

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.”

“What’s playing?”

“What’s the difference?”

They went to the Criterion on Broadway and saw a sexy comedy with Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. He bought loge tickets and they shared cigarettes and watched the movie. They got there about ten minutes after the picture started, left about fifteen minutes before it ended. On the way back to the hotel they stopped at a newsstand, and he tried to buy the morning papers. The early edition of the Daily News was the only one available. He bought the News and they went back to their room.

He divided the paper in half and they went through it. There was nothing about the murder in either section. He picked up both halves and threw them out. She asked what time it was.

“Nine-thirty.”

“This takes forever,” she said. “Do you want to try getting the Times again?”

“Not yet.”

She got up and walked to the window, turned, walked to the bed, turned again and faced him. “I think I’m going crazy,” she said.

He got up, walked to her. She turned from him. She said, “Like a lion in a cage.”

“Easy, baby.”

“Let’s get drunk, Dave. Can we do that?”

Her face was calm, unreally so. Her hands, at her sides, were knotted into tight little fists with her long fingernails digging into her palms. She saw him looking at her fists, and she opened her hands. There were red marks on the palms of her hands — she had very nearly broken the skin.

He picked up the phone and got the bell captain. He ordered a bottle of V.O., ice, club soda, and two glasses. When the lad brought their order he met him at the door, took the tray from him, signed the tab, and gave the kid a dollar.

“My husband is a big tipper,” she said. “How much money do we have left?”

“A couple of hundred. Enough.”

He started making the drinks. She said, “How much is the hotel room?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“We could go to a cheaper hotel. We’ll be here a while and we don’t want to run out of money.”

“They’ll take a check.”

“They will?”

“Any hotel will,” he said. “Any halfway decent hotel.”

She took her drink and held it awkwardly while he finished making one for himself. He raised his glass toward her and she lowered her eyes and drank part of her drink. When their glasses were empty he took them over to the dresser and added more whiskey and a little more soda.

“I’m going to get drunk tonight,” she said. “I’ve never been really stoned in front of you, have I?”

“The hell you haven’t.”

“I don’t mean parties. Everybody gets drunk at parties. I mean plain drinking where you’re just trying to get stoned, like now. We used to at college. My roommate and I, my junior year. My roommate was a girl from Virginia named Mary Beth George. You never met her.”

“No.”

“We would get stoned together and tell each other all our little problems. She used to cry when she got drunk. I didn’t. We swore that we would be each other’s maid of honor. Or matron, whoever got married first. I didn’t even invite her to the wedding. I never even thought to. Isn’t that terrible?”

“Is she married?”

“I think so.”

“Did she invite you to her wedding?”

“No. We lost track of each other. Isn’t that the worst thing you ever heard of? We drank vodka and water. Did you ever have that?”

“Yes.”

“It didn’t have any taste at all. It tasted like water with too much chlorine in it, the way it gets in the winter sometimes. You know how I mean, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“With a little provocation I think I could maybe become an alcoholic. Will you make me another of these, please?”

He fixed her another drink. He made it strong, and he added a little of the V.O. to his own glass. She took several small quick sips from her drink.

She said, “I didn’t even know you then. Both in Binghamton and we never even met. We went to two different schools together. That’s a stupid line, isn’t it? There was a comedian who used to say that, but I can’t remember who. Can you?”

“No.”

“There are some other lines like that. Would you rather go to New York or by train?’ Silly. ‘Do you walk to school or take your lunch?’ I think that’s my favorite. I didn’t fall in love with you the first time I saw you. I didn’t even like you. What dreadful things I’m telling you! But when you asked me out I felt very excited. I didn’t know why. I thought here I don’t like him, but I’m excited he asked me out. I can’t stop talking. I’m just babbling like an idiot, I can’t stop talking.”

She drank almost all of her drink in one swallow and took a step toward him, just one step, and then stopped. There was a moment when he thought she was going to fall down and he started for her to catch her but she stayed on her feet. She had a worried look on her face.

She said, “I might be sick.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I want you to make love to me, you know that, don’t you? You know I want that, don’t you?”

He held her and her face was pressed against his chest. She put her hands on his upper arms and pushed him away a little and looked up into his eyes. Her own eyes were a deeper green than ever, the color of fine jade.

She said, “I want to but I can’t. I love you, I love you more than I ever did, but I just can’t do anything. Do you understand?”

“Yes. Don’t talk about it.”

“This afternoon I thought I would wait for you and when you came back I would get you to make love to me, and everything would be all right. You haven’t tried to make love to me. I think if you’d tried, before, I would have gone crazy. I don’t know. But I sat here in this room and I planned it out, all of it, and just what I would do and just how I would feel, and I was all alone in the room, and all of a sudden I started to shake. I couldn’t do it. Oh, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t be.”

“Will I be all right?”

“Yes.”

“How can you tell?”

“I know.”

“I think you’re right. I think everything’s just stopped, just shut up in a box, until we do what we have to do. Those men. I can shut my eyes and see their faces perfectly. If I knew how to draw I could draw them, every detail. I’ll be all right afterward, I think.”

A few minutes later she said, “This is some honeymoon, isn’t it? I’m sorry, darling.” Then he took her into the bathroom and held her while she threw up. She was very sick and he held her and told her it was all right, everything was all right. He helped her wash up and he undressed her and put her to bed. She did not cry at all through any of this. He put her to bed and covered her with the sheet and the blanket and she looked up at him and said that she loved him, and he kissed her. She was asleep almost at once.

He had one more drink, no soda and no ice. He capped the bottle and put it in the dresser with his shirts. In the morning, he thought, he would have to take a bundle to the laundry, the two shirts he had worn and a pair of slacks. And he would have to buy some things if he got the chance. He had packed mostly sportswear for the stay at the lodge and he would need dress shirts in New York.

The liquor helped him sleep. He woke up very suddenly and looked at his watch and it was seven o’clock, he had slept eight hours. He got dressed and went downstairs and outside. Jill was still sleeping. He bought the morning newspapers and went back to the room, and one of them had the story.