He pointed to her hair. “Why?”
“Because I was afraid one of the men might be there, one of the two men. Or anyone who might have seen the two of us this afternoon, in case Corelli’s office was watched. But mostly because I thought Lee or the other one might be there. I don’t know if they would remember us or not, if they paid any attention to what we looked like. I didn’t want to take chances.”
“You took plenty of chances.”
She sipped at her coffee again, finished it. He tried his own. It tasted flat with cream, but at least it was hot
She said, “After I left the hotel, I went to a drugstore, the one where you tried to call Lublin before. I bought some makeup and a different shade of lipstick and a color comb. They use them to color gray hair, mostly, but it worked. I went into a restaurant, into the rest room, and I colored my hair and pinned it up like this. And did my lips and used some eye shadow. Do I look very different?”
“I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“Like me this way?”
“Not too.”
“I wanted to look different, and I also wanted to look like a girl who might ring a man’s doorbell in the middle of the night. Do I look cheap? Not terribly cheap, but slightly tacky?”
“Slightly tacky.”
“Good. Don’t worry—the makeup comes off and the hair color will wash right out. It’s not a permanent transformation. Do you want to hear about Lublin?”
“Yes.”
“First give me a cigarette.” He gave her one, lit hers and one for himself. “Lublin lives in a house, not an apartment. A two-story house. His bedroom is upstairs, in the back. He—”
“How do you know?”
She coughed on smoke, laughing. “Are you jealous? I waited until somebody was in the bathroom downstairs and then I said I had to use the john and they sent me to the upstairs bathroom, and I looked around upstairs. There are three bedrooms up there, one where he sleeps, one that’s a television room and one set up as an office. So he sleeps upstairs. He has a man who lives with him, sort of a bodyguard, I guess. Very muscle-bound and not bright. His name is Carl and people carry on conversations in front of him and pretend he isn’t there. Nobody talks to him. Like the movies. He sleeps downstairs, on a daybed in the den.”
Go on.
“There were half a dozen people there, all men, plus Lublin and Carl. They were doing some fairly heavy drinking and talking about things that I couldn’t understand. About horse racing, mostly, and other things, but nothing that I could follow. Nobody mentioned Corelli and nobody mentioned Lee or anything. They all left by the time I did. They left first, as a matter of fact. Lublin told me, very nicely, that he would pay me a hundred dollars if I spent the night with him.”
“He—”
“I told him I couldn’t, that I was just supposed to meet this Pete Miller as a favor. He didn’t press.” Her face was thoughtful. “He’s a very pleasant man,” she said quietly. “Very soft-spoken, and he tries very hard to show class. Only the most expensive brands of liquor. And very polite when he propositioned me, and very gracious when I turned him down.”
There were little lines at the corners of her eyes, largely obscured by the eye shadow she wore. They were the only signs of tension he could see. Her voice was a little brittler than usual, but otherwise she spoke as calmly as though she were telling him about some mediocre film she had seen. In the hotel, he had worried about her panicking and rushing back to Binghamton because she was in over her head. He could hardly have been more wrong about her.
How little you know, he thought. How little you know about any other person. You could marry a girl and never realize what she was truly like inside, could not begin to assess her separate strengths and weaknesses. And he had never realized how very strong Jill was. He was learning.
“We can go there now,” she was saying. “You have the gun, don’t you?”
“Yes.” It was tucked under his belt, the butt hidden by jacket and raincoat.
“I think we can take him now. Newkirk is one block over, and then he lives about a dozen blocks down Newkirk. We ought to be able to get a cab outside. This is a busy street, even at this hour. There were cabs cruising by while I was waiting for you.”
“I’ll go,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. He knows me and Carl knows me. They’ll open the door for me without thinking twice about it. If you went alone they would be on guard, but they already know me.”
He opened his mouth automatically, to argue, and changed his mind. She was right, she had to come along. He touched the side of her face with his fingers and grinned at her. “You’re one hell of a woman,” he said.
“Surprised?”
“A little.”
“I surprised myself,” she said.
In the cab he said, “You never should have left like that. In the middle of the night without saying anything.”
“I had to.”
“Why?”
“Would you have let me go otherwise?”
“No. Why didn’t you leave a note?”
“I didn’t think you would wake up. I hoped you wouldn’t. I thought about leaving a note, anyway, but I was afraid it would worry you.’
“It worried me enough this way.”
“I’m sorry. I thought if I left you a note you would come running straight to Lublin’s, and we both would have been in trouble. It’s the next block, on the left. Three houses down.”
The cab pulled to a stop. They got out, and he paid the driver and told him not to wait. The cab drove off. They stood on the sidewalk and looked at Lublin’s house. All the lights were off.
“They’re asleep,” she said.
The house was white clapboard, with a screened-in porch in front. He could see rocking chairs on the porch. A Cadillac was parked in the driveway just in front of the garage. They walked up the driveway to the side door. He reached inside his coat and pulled the revolver from under his belt. The metal of the gun was warm with his body heat. The butt fit snugly in his hand, and his finger moved to the trigger. He stood in darkness at the side of the door. She rang the bell.
“If Carl answers the door,” she whispered, “let me get inside with him. Then get him from behind. He’s big, he must be strong as an ox.”
He could hear nothing inside the house. He nudged her, and she leaned on the doorbell, a little more insistently this time. He heard something. She poked the bell again for emphasis, and inside the house footsteps moved slowly toward them.
“Who’s it?”
A voice, deep and guttural. He tensed himself in the shadows, and Jill called, “It’s me, Carl. Rita. You wanna let me come in for a minute?” Her voice, he thought, was as different now as her face and her hair. Harsh and strident, with a New York inflection which sounded utterly foreign coming from her lips.
The curtains parted. He saw a face, large, heavy. A thick nose, a very broad forehead. Carl’s eyes did not look at him but stayed on Jill. The doorknob turned, the door opened inward. She stepped inside.
“Whattaya want, Miss Rita?”
“Is Maurie up?”
“Sleeping. You want him?”
Dave moved softly, quickly. Carl had his back to the door now. Dave came through the door, the gun gripped by the barrel. He swung it downward with full strength, and Carl turned toward the sound just in time to catch the butt of the gun on the side of his head instead of at the base of the skull. He blinked dizzily and Dave hit him again, across the forehead. This time he went down.
But not out. He was an ox, a hardheaded ox, and a tap on the head wasn’t enough to stop him. He got to his knees and looked at Jill and at Dave. He didn’t seem to notice the gun; if he saw it, he didn’t pay any attention to it. He pushed himself up into a crouch and lowered his head and charged.
Dave brought up a knee that caught him in the mouth, then smashed the gun down across the broad skull once again. But Carl had momentum working for him. They both went down, with the b
ig man on top. A table tipped and a lamp crashed down and the room went dark. The gun was still in Dave’s hand but his arm was pinned to the floor. Carl was on him, too dazed to hit him, too dazed to do anything but wrestle around with his weight as a lever. He had plenty of weight to work with.
Dave heaved, tried to swing free. He drove a knee upward and caught the big man in the groin. Carl didn’t seem to notice. Dave twisted, first to the left, then hard to the right. Carl was hitting him in the chest. He let go of the gun and pushed Carl’s face back with both hands, then let go with his right hand and hammered at Carl’s nose with the side of his palm. Blood came. Carl rolled away, holding his face with both hands. Dave hit him openhanded on the side of the throat. Carl croaked like a frog, slipped forward, fell off to the side.
The room was swaying. Dave’s head ached and his mouth was dry. He didn’t know where the gun was. Carl was trying to get up again, and Dave moved toward him and kicked him in the side of the head. Carl’s nose was bleeding freely now. His head snapped to the side from the force of the kick. He groaned and tried again to get up but he couldn’t make it. He slumped forward and lay still.
There were lights on upstairs, and sounds. A loud voice wanted to know what the hell was going on. Carl tried to get up again. Dave looked for the gun and couldn’t find it. The room was lighter now with illumination from upstairs. Carl was on his knees, shaking his head and trying to clear it. Dave got the lamp, the one that had spilled from a table earlier in the fight. It was almost too heavy to lift. He picked it up and half-swung, half-dropped it on Carl. There was a thudding sound and Carl sprawled forward again and did not move.
The gun. Where in hell was the gun?
Then he heard Jill’s voice, cool and clear. “You’d better come down those stairs, Maurie,” he heard her say. “Come down slow and easy or I’ll kill you, Maurie.”
Dave turned. There was a short and plumpish man at the head of the stairs, his hands tentatively raised to shoulder height. His bathrobe, belted snugly around his thick waist, was red silk, monogrammed “ML” over the heart in flowing gold script. He had a moustache, thick and black, about an inch and a half long. His mouth was curled slightly downward at the corners. He was barefoot.
Jill stood at the foot of the stairs. Dave looked at her, then at Lublin. She was holding the gun on the little man, pointing it just as he had taught her to point it that afternoon at the doorknob in their room.
He walked over to her, his head still rocky. He took the gun from her hand and trained it on Lublin. Lublin came down the stairs very slowly, his hands in the air. The whole house was as silent as death.
CHAPTER 9
LUBLIN STOOD at the foot of the stairs and looked at them, and at the gun. To Jill he said, “You’re a damn fool, Rita. I don’t keep cash around the house. Maybe a couple of hundred, no more than that.”
“We’re not looking for money.”
“No?” He looked at Dave, eyes wary. “Then what?”
“Information.”
“Then put the gun away. What kind of information?”
“About Corelli.” He didn’t put the gun away.
“Corelli?”
“Joe Corelli.”
“I don’t know him,” Lublin said. “Who is he? And put the gun away.”
The man looked soft, Dave thought, except for the eyes. There was a hardness there that didn’t go with the pudgy body or the round face. “Corelli is dead,” he said.
“I didn’t even know he was sick.”
“You had him killed.”
Lublin was smiling now, with his mouth, not with his eyes. “You made a mistake somewhere,” he said. “I never heard of this Corelli of yours. How could I have him killed?” He spread his hands. “You two oughta relax and go home. What do you want to point a gun at me for? You’re not going to shoot me. What are you? You’re a couple of kids, it’s late, you ought to go home. Then—”
Dave thought, he has to believe it. He has to take it seriously, he has to feel it. But the mood wasn’t right for violence. A plump little man in a bathrobe, talking easily in a calm voice. You couldn’t hit him, not out of the blue.
Jill, he thought. They raped Jill. He fixed the thought very carefully in his mind, and then he stepped forward and raked the barrel of the gun across Lublin’s face. Lublin looked surprised. Dave transferred the gun to his left hand and hit Lublin hard in the mouth with his right. He hit him again, in the chest, and Lublin fell back against the stairs. He sat down there, breathing heavily, holding the back of one hand to his mouth. Blood trickled from his face where the gun barrel had cut him.
“You son of a bitch,” he said.
“Maybe you better start talking.”
“Go to hell.”
Dave said, “Do you think you can take it, old man? You didn’t kill Corelli, you had it done. All I want to know is the names of the men who killed him. You’re going to tell me sooner or later.”
“What’s Corelli to you?”
“He’s nothing to me.”
“Then what do you care who killed him?”
“You don’t have to know.”
Lublin thought this over. He got to his feet slowly, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand. He avoided Dave’s eyes, centering his gaze a foot below them. He patted the pockets of the robe and said he needed a cigarette. Dave tossed him a pack. Lublin caught the cigarettes, fumbled them, bent to scoop them from the floor. He touched the floor with one hand and came up out of the crouch, leaping for the gun. Dave kicked him in the face, stepped back, kicked him again.
They had to get water from the kitchen and throw it on him. His face was a mess. His mouth was bleeding, two teeth were gone, and one was loose. He got up and found a chair and fell into it. Dave lit a cigarette and gave it to him. Lublin took it and held it, looked at it but didn’t smoke it. Dave said, “Corelli,” and Lublin took a deep drag on the cigarette and coughed.
Then he said, “I knew Corelli. We had dealings now and then.”
Dave didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t have him killed.”
“The hell you didn’t.”
Lublin’s eyes were wide. “Why would I have him hit? What did he ever do to me?”
“He owed you sixty-five thousand dollars.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“From Corelli.” He thought a minute, then added, “And from other people.”
Dave watched his face, watched the eyes trying to decide how to manage the lie, whether to tell none or part of the truth. And he thought suddenly of law school. Techniques in Cross-examination. They didn’t teach you this, he thought. You learned how to make a witness contradict himself, how to trip him up, how to discredit testimony, all of that. But not how to worm information out of a man when you held a gun on him. They taught you how to do it with words, not how to get along when words didn’t work any more.
Lublin said, “He owed me the money;”
“How?”
“How? In cash.”
“Why did he owe it to you?”
“A gambling debt.”
“So you had him killed when he didn’t pay.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Lublin said. He was more confident now; maybe his face had stopped hurting. “He would have paid. The minute he died I was out the money. He can’t pay me when he’s dead.”
“When did he lose the money?”
“February, March. What’s the difference?”
“How?”
“Cards. He got in over his head, he borrowed, he couldn’t pay back. That’s all she wrote.”
“What kind of game?”
“Poker.”
“Poker. You let him have sixty-five thousand?”
“Fifty. Fifteen gees was interest.”
He thought a minute, and Jill said, “He’s lying, Dave.”
“How do you know?”
“He made two-dollar race bets. You saw the slips. He wouldn’t plunge like that at a card table.”
/> Lublin said, “Listen, dammit—”
And she said, coolly, “Hit him again, Dave.”
Techniques in Cross-examination. He used the barrel of the gun, raked it across the side of Maurie Lublin’s face. He was careful not to knock him out this time. He just wanted to make it hurt. Lublin winced and tried to shrink back into the chair. Dave hit him again, and the cut bled lightly. It was easy now, mechanical.
“Start over,” he said.
“I loaned him the money. I—”
“The truth, all the way.”
“We were in on a deal.”
“What kind of a deal?”
“Corelli’s deal. There was a warehouse robbery in Yonkers. Instant coffee, a hijacking deal. The heavies who took the place came up with a little better than a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of instant coffee. That’s wholesale. When they got it, they had it set up to push it to an outfit in Detroit for a hundred thou. The thing fell in.”
“So?”
“So they got in touch with Corelli. Joe handled this kind of a deal before. They didn’t want to play around with the load, they just wanted their money out. He offered fifty grand for the load but they wanted better, it had to be carved up a few ways. They settled for seventy-five.”
“And?”
“And Joe didn’t have the seventy-five. He could raise ten but anything more was scraping, he couldn’t make it. He came to me and offered me half the gross for sixty-five thousand. My capital and his connections. He had other people on the line, in Pittsburgh, to take the pile off his hands for a hundred and twenty-five thousand, which meant a gross profit of fifty thousand dollars with the whole play figured to take a little less than a month. My share would be twenty-five, and twenty-five less costs for Corelli.”
“You went in with him?”