He got out of the booth. She started to ask him a question, but he shook his head and began writing in the little notebook. He wrote: “Maurie Lublin.” Under that he wrote: “George White and Eddie Mizell.” On the next line he wrote: “Corelli owed money.” Then: “No Investigation.”
The drugstore was too crowded to talk in. He took her arm, put the notebook back in his breast pocket, and led her out of the store. There was a Cobb’s Corner across the street. They waited for the light to change, crossed Sixth Avenue and went into the restaurant. It was past nine already. Most of the breakfast crowd had gone to work and the place was near empty. They took a table for two in the rear and ordered orange juice and toast and coffee. He gave her the whole conversation by the time the waitress brought the food.
“You’d make a good reporter,” she said.
“And you’d make a good telephone operator. I kept waiting for him to catch on and start wondering who the hell I was and why I was bothering him, but he believed it all the way. We learned a lot.”
“Yes.”
“A hell of a lot. George White and Eddie Mizell—I don’t know what we can do with those names. But there is a Lublin. And he’s a crook, and he’s in New York somewhere. Maurie Lublin. Maurice, I guess that would be.”
“Or Morris.”
“One or the other. And everything still holds together the way we figured it. That Joe Corelli owed money, I mean. And that was why he was running.”
She nodded and sipped her coffee. He lit a cigarette and set it down in an oval glass ashtray.
“The big thing is that there’s no investigation. Not in New York and not in Hicksville. Isn’t that a hell of a name for a town?”
“Probably a description.”
“Probably. But the cops there won’t bother with the murder. They may close a file on Corelli but that’s all. That means we go out there.”
“To Hicksville?”
“That’s right.”
“Is that safe?”
“It’s safe. There won’t be any police there, not at his place and not at his office either. The New York police aren’t interested in Corelli any more. And Lublin’s men won’t be there, either.”
“How do you know?”
“They had about three months to search Corelli’s room and office. Maybe that was how they found out where he was, how they got the idea. That lodge was out of the way. They must have had some information or they never would have dug him up. They’ve probably sifted through his papers and everything else a dozen times already. Now he’s out of the way. They won’t be interested any more.”
She looked thoughtful. He said, “Maybe you should stay at the hotel, baby. I’ll run out there myself.”
“No.”
“It won’t take long. And—”
“No. Whither thou goest and all that. That’s not it. I was just wondering what we could find there. If they already searched—”
“They were looking for different things. They wanted, to find out where Corelli was hiding, and we want to find out why he was hiding, and from whom. It’s worth a try.”
“And I’m going with you, Dave.” He argued some more and got nowhere with it. He let it go. It seemed safe enough, and perhaps she’d be better off with him than alone with her thoughts at the hotel.
The doorman at the Royalton got the car for them. He told them how to find the Queens-Midtown tunnel and what to do when they were through it. The sky was clouded over and the air was thick with the promise of rain. They drove through the tunnel and cut east across Queens on an expressway. The road was confusing. They missed the turnoff for Hicksville, went five miles out of their way and cut back. At an Atlantic station they filled the gas tank and found out where Bayview Road was. They hit Bayview Road in the 2300 block and drove past numbered streets until they found the address listed in the newspaper story. Hicksville was monolithic, block after block of semidetached two-story brick houses with treeless front yards and a transient air, a general impression that all the inhabitants were merely living there until they could afford to move again, either further out on the Island or closer to the city.
Corelli’s building, 4113, was another faceless brick building jammed between 4111 and 4115. There were wash lines in the back. According to the mailboxes, someone named Haas lived upstairs and someone named Penner lived on the ground floor. Dave stepped back into the street to check the address, then dug the newspaper clipping from his wallet to make sure he had read it correctly the first time around: “Corelli, a bachelor, lived alone at 4113 Bayview Road in Hicksville ...”
Jill told him to try the downstairs buzzer. “Probably the landlord,” she said. “They buy the house and live downstairs and rent out the upstairs. The income covers the mortgage payments.”
He rang the downstairs bell and waited. There were sounds inside the house but nothing happened. He rang again, and a muffled voice called, “All right, I’m coming, take it easy.”
He waited. The door opened inward and a woman peered suspiciously at him through the screen door. Her face said she thought he was a salesman and she wasn’t interested. Then she caught sight of Jill and decided that he wasn’t a salesman and her face softened slightly. She still wasn’t thrilled to see him, her face said, but at least he wasn’t selling anything, and that was a break.
He said, “Mrs. Penner?”
She nodded. He searched for the right phrasing, something that would fit whether or not she knew Corelli was dead. “My name is Peter Miller,” he said. “Does a Mr. Joseph Corelli live in the upstairs apartment?”
“Why?”
“Just business,” he said, smiling.
“He used to live here. I rented the place after he skipped on me. He lives here for three years, he pays his rent every time the first of the month, and then he skips. Just one day he’s gone.” She shook her head. “Just disappears. Didn’t take his things, that’s his furniture and he left it, everything. I figured he would be back. Leaving everything, you would think he’d be back, wouldn’t you?”
He nodded. She didn’t know Corelli was dead, he thought. Maybe that was good.
“But he never shows,” she said, shifting conveniently into present tense again. “He never shows, and I hold the place a month, waiting for him. That’s seventy dollars I’m out plus another week before I could rent it. I don’t rent to colored and it took a full week before they moved in, Mr. and Mrs. Haas. Eighty-five dollars he cost me, Corelli.”
“Do you have his things? His furniture and all?”
“I rented the place furnished,” Mrs. Penner said. She was defensive now. “Mrs. Haas, she didn’t have any furniture. They just got married. No kids, you know?” She shook her head again. “There’ll be kids, though. A young couple, they’ll have kids soon enough, you bet on it. One thing about Corelli, he was quiet up there. What about his things? He send you or something?”
Jill said, “Mrs. Penner, I’m Joe’s sister. Joe called me, he’s in Arizona and he had to leave New York in a hurry.”
“Cop trouble?”
“He didn’t say. Mrs. Penner—”
“There was cops came around right after he left. Showed me their badges and went pawing through everything.” She paused. “They don’t look like cops, not them. But they show me their badges and that’s enough. I don’t like to stick my nose in.”
Jill said, “Mrs. Penner, you know Joe was in business here. There was a lawsuit and he had to leave the state to stay out of trouble. It wasn’t police trouble.”
“So?”
“He called me yesterday,” she went on. “There were some things of his, some things he had to leave here, and he wanted me to get them for him.”
“Sure.”
“If I could just—”
The screen door stayed shut. “As soon as I get that eighty-five dollars,” she said. “That’s what he cost me, that eighty-five dollars. There was no lease so that’s all, just the eighty-five, but I want that before he gets his stuff.”
Jill didn’t say anything. Dave took out a cigarette and said, “You can hold the furniture for the time being, Mrs. Penner. In fact I think Joe would just as soon you kept the furniture, and then you can go on renting the flat furnished. It’s worth more than eighty-five dollars, but just to make things easier you could keep the furniture for the rent you missed out on.”
He could see her mind working, balancing the extra five or ten dollars a month against the eighty-five dollars Corelli had cost her. She looked as though she wanted a little more, so he said, “Unless you’d rather have the money. Then I could have a truck here later this afternoon to pick up the furniture.”
He could imagine her trying to explain that to the Haases. Quickly she said, “No, it’s fair enough. And easier all around, right?”
“That’s what I thought. Now if we could see Joe’s other stuff, his clothes and all. You kept everything, didn’t you?”
She had everything downstairs in large cardboard boxes. Suits, ties, slacks, underwear. Corelli had had an extensive wardrobe, sharp Broadway suits with Phil Kronfeld and Martin Janss labels in them. There was one boxful of papers. Dave took the carton and carried it out to the car. Jill waited in the car, and he went back to the house and told Mrs. Penner he would send somebody around for the rest of the stuff, the clothes and everything. “Today or tomorrow,” he said.
That was fine with her. He got into the car and drove off.
At the Bascom Building, in Hicksville’s business district, Jill waited in the car with the box of papers while he went inside and managed to get into Corelli’s office. This was easier, because they hadn’t moved him out for nonpayment of rent. He had been gone for three months but they had left his office as he had left it, the door locked and everything undisturbed. He found the superintendent and told him he wanted to get into Corelli’s office, and the old man said he had to have the key or written authorization.
Dave gave him a story off the top of his head—that Corelli had sent him down to pick up copies of a contract, that it would only be for a minute, and that he didn’t want to take the time to get a written authorization from Corelli. The super didn’t believe it but he just nodded, waiting. Dave gave him ten dollars and the super made the bill disappear and took him upstairs and unlocked the door for him. He seemed to be doing something he had done before—for the men who had been looking for Corelli.
“Don’t be long now,” he said. “And lock the door behind you, hear?”
He wasn’t long. The office was a cubbyhole, one window facing out on the main street of Hicksville, a single dark-green filing cabinet, a cheap oak desk, a standing coatrack. The wooden desk chair was padded with a cushion that smelled slightly of old rubber.
There were three drawers to the filing cabinet. The bottom drawer held a half-full bottle of Philadelphia blended whiskey. The middle drawer was empty. In the top drawer there was a disorganized pile of contracts and invoices and letters. The letterheads, as far as he could see, were of various companies in the building trades. He shuffled all the papers into a moderately neat pile and stuffed them into a brown manila envelope.
The desktop was free from clutter. There was a thick layer of dust across it but nothing else. In the top drawer of the desk he found a box of paper clips, a year-old copy of Argosy folded open to an article on skin-diving paraphernalia, a memo pad with no entries in it, a Zippo cigarette lighter initialed “J.C.,” a four-by five-inch glossy print of a girl in panties and bra, a pigskin address book, and a packet of contraceptives. He added the address book to the manila envelope and closed the drawer. In another drawer, far in the rear, he found an unloaded gun and, behind it, a nearly full box of cartridges.
He picked up the gun, then stopped and glanced automatically at the window. No one was watching him, of course. He hefted the gun and felt its weight. He hesitated just a moment, then tucked the gun into his pants pocket, the right-hand pocket. He put the box of shells in his left-hand jacket pocket, stopped, lit a cigarette, and checked the one remaining drawer in the desk. It was empty, and he closed it and straightened up.
Outside, it was getting ready to rain. He got behind the wheel and Jill asked him if there had been anything important in the office. He told her he didn’t know yet, that they would have to see. She said she had forgotten how to get back to the city and asked him if he remembered the route. He started the car and told her that he remembered the way.
CHAPTER 6
THE GUN WAS a Bodyguard, by Smith & Wesson. It was a five-shot revolver that took .38-Special shells, and it was hammerless, so you didn’t have to cock it—a pull on the trigger would fire the gun. It had a two-inch barrel, it was black, it was steel, it weighed a pound and a quarter. The grip was textured, and formed to fit the hand.
The purpose of the gun was implicit in its design. Because it was short-barreled, its accuracy was somewhat limited; it would be a poor bet for target shooting or long-range plinking. The short barrel meant that it was designed to be carried easily on the person, probably concealed. The absence of a hammer facilitated quick draws; a hammer might catch on clothing, might leave the gun snagged in a pocket or under a belt. The gun had been made to carry, to fire easily and quickly, to shoot ammunition that would kill a man with a well-placed hit. It was a gun for killing people.
Now, it was unloaded. He sat on the edge of the bed in their hotel room and held the gun in his right hand, his hand curled around the butt, his finger just resting lightly upon the trigger. The box of shells was on the bed beside him. He opened the box and loaded the gun, putting shells in four of the five chambers. He rotated the cylinder so that there was no cartridge under the hammer and so that nothing would happen if the trigger was pulled accidentally.
He looked up. Jill’s eyes were on the gun, and they were nervous. She raised her eyes to meet his.
“Dave, do you know how to use that?”
“Yes.” He looked at the gun again, set it down on the bed beside him. He closed the box of ammunition. “In the army. They taught us guns. In basic training. Mostly rifles, of course, but there was a brief course on handguns.”
She didn’t say anything. He picked up a stack of papers and ruffled through them. They had gone through everything in less than an hour, finding almost all of Corelli’s papers less than useless. The business papers might have been clues to something, but they couldn’t tell—they were just various bills and receipts and letters relating to Corelli’s construction business. He had evidently been something of a middleman in construction, setting up jobs and parceling them out among subcontractors.
The personal papers included a slew of IOU’s, around a dozen of them representing money owed to Corelli, debts canceled now by his death. They ranged from thirty-five dollars to one for an even thousand, with most of them running around a hundred. There were four rather stiff letters from the sister in Boston, written neatly in dark-blue ink, telling him about her husband and her children and her house and asking him how business was going. There were irritatingly obscure little bits of memoranda—telephone numbers, addresses, names, none linked to anything in particular, each of them standing alone on its own sheet of paper: “Room 417 Barbizon Plaza”; “Henrich, 45 @ 71/2 = $337.50”; “Flowers for Joanie”—a few tickets on losing horses that had run at Aqueduct, at Belmont, at Roosevelt.
In the address book, there were more than fifty entries, most of them tersely inscribed with initials or just a first name or just a last name. There were seventeen girls listed only by first name and telephone number, no address, no last name. Maurie Lublin was listed by last name alone, with a phone number and no address.
Several slips of paper contained just numbers—columns of figures, isolated numbers, bits of addition and subtraction. The number 65,000 came up on several sheets, twice with a dollar sign: $65,000.
Dave said, “Sixty-five thousand dollars. That must be what he owed.”
“To Lublin?”
“I suppose so. I don’t know whether he stole i
t or owed it. Lee and the other one didn’t find that money, so he didn’t take it with him. If he had it, and he was running away, wouldn’t he have taken the money with him? I think he must have owed it to Lublin and then couldn’t pay. He left town in a hurry, not as though he had planned it or anything. I think he owed the money and planned on paying it, and then he couldn’t pay it and he panicked and ran. And they found him.”
“And killed him.”
“Yes.”
She sat next to him on the bed. The gun was between them, and she looked down at it and said, “Guns scare me.”
“Pick it up.”
“Why?”
“Pick it up.” She did. He showed her how to hold it and made her curl her index finger around the trigger. “Aim at the doorknob,” he said.
She aimed. He sighted along the barrel and showed her how her aim was off, and taught her how to line up a target. He took the gun from her and spilled out the shells, clearing all five chambers. Then he made her aim at the doorknob and squeeze the trigger to get the feel of the gun. After she practiced for a few minutes he took the gun from her and loaded it again.
He said, “There’s only one way. We could try to dig up Corelli’s life history if we wanted. We could call up each of the girls he knew and find out what they all knew about him. We could look him up in the New York Times file, and we could look up all the people in his address book, and we could find out everything there is to know about Joe Corelli.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“No.” He took out two cigarettes, lit one for himself and offered the other to her. She shook her head and he put the cigarette back in the pack. “No,” he said again. “Corelli doesn’t matter any more. We’re not trying to find Corelli. He’s dead, and we don’t need him. We’re not writing his biography. We’re looking for the two other men.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Lublin hired those men,” he said. “We have Lublin’s name and we have his phone number. We can find out where he lives. We’ll see him, and he’ll tell us who the men were who killed Corelli.”