Deadly Honeymoon

  When she came to him he stared hard at her. The transformation was phenomenal. She was his Jill again, the hair blond with just a trace of the brown coloring still remaining. She had undone the French twist and the hair was pageboy again, framing her face as it had always done. Her face was scrubbed free of the heavy makeup. She had even removed her lipstick and had replaced it with her regular shade. And, with the transformation, her face had lost its hard angular quality, had softened visibly. She had played the role of cheap chippy so effectively that the performance had very nearly sold him; he had almost grown used to her that way. It was jarring to see her again as she had always been before.

  “I didn’t do a very good job,” she said. “I didn’t want to soak my hair, and I couldn’t get all the brown out. I’ll take care of it later, but this ought to do for now. How do I look?”

  He told her.

  “But it was fun pretending,” she said. “I liked being Rita, just for a while. I must be a frustrated actress.”

  “Or a frustrated prostitute.”

  “Frustrated.”

  “Jill, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I was teasing, I didn’t think—”

  “It’s my fault. We ought to be able to tease each other.”

  “It was tactless.”

  “We should not have to be tactful with each other. Let’s forget it. What do you want to do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where should we go?”

  “We could go back to the hotel,” he said. “You must be exhausted.”

  “Not especially.”

  ‘You didn’t sleep at all. And you didn’t sleep very well the night before last, either. Aren’t you tired?”

  “Very, but not sleepy. I don’t think I could sleep. Are you tired?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to go back to the hotel?”

  “No.” He lit another cigarette. She took it from him and dragged on it. He told her to keep it and lit another for himself. He said, “I think we ought to find out a little about Washburn. If he’s so important he probably made the papers at one time or another. We could spend an hour at the library. They keep the New York Times on microfilm, and it’s indexed. It might be worth an hour.”

  “All right. Do you know how to get there? The library?”

  He had used it once before, during the course for the bar exam, and he remembered where it was. They couldn’t get a cab. The morning rush hour had started and there were no cabs. They walked along Thirteenth Street to catch a bus heading uptown.

  He said, “You know, with Carl dead, that’s one less person who knows what we look like. Lublin is the only one who can identify us.”

  “You’re upset, aren’t you?”

  He looked at her.

  “About Carl,” she said.

  “That I killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Partly,” he said. He threw his cigarette away. “And I’m partly upset that I didn’t kill Lublin. I should have.”

  “You couldn’t do that,” she said.

  “All I had to do was hit him a little too hard. Later I could tell myself I didn’t mean to kill him, that it was just miscalculation on my part or weakness on his. And we wouldn’t have anyone after us, we would be in the clear. It would have been logical enough.”

  “But you couldn’t do it, Dave.”

  “I guess not,” he said.

  Francis James Washburn had appeared in the Times almost a dozen times in the course of the past five years. Twice he had been called to Washington to testify before senatorial investigating committees, once in a study of gangland control of boxing, once in an investigation of labor racketeering. In each instance he had pleaded the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer any and all questions on the grounds that he might incriminate himself. The questions themselves suggested that Washburn had some hidden connections with a local of a building-trade-workers’ union, that he was unofficial president of a local of restaurant and hotel employees, that he owned a principal interest in a welterweight named Little Kid Morton, and that he was otherwise fundamentally involved in the subjects of the senatorial investigations to a considerable degree.

  He had been arrested three times. He was charged with conspiracy in a bribery case involving a municipal official. He was charged with suspicion of possession of narcotics. He was picked up in a raid on a floating crap game and was then charged with vagrancy and with being a common gambler. Each time the charges were dropped for lack of evidence and Washburn was released. In one of the stories, the Times reported that Washburn had served two years in prison during the Second World War, having been convicted for receiving stolen goods. He had also done time during the thirties for assault and battery, and had been acquitted of manslaughter charges in 1937.

  His other mentions in the newspaper were minor ones. He was listed as a major contributor to the campaign fund of a Republican member of the New York State Assembly. He was among those attending a Tammany Hall fund-raising dinner. He was a pallbearer at another politician’s funeral.

  The over-all picture that emerged was one of a man fifty-five or sixty years old, one who had started in the lower echelons of the rackets and who had done well, moving up the ladder to a position bordering upon unholy respectability. Washburn had a great many business interests and a great many political connections. He was important and he was successful. He would be harder to reach than Maurice Lublin.

  They spent a little more than a hour in the library’s microfilm room. When they got back to the hotel, the night clerk was gone and another man was behind the desk. They went upstairs. They showered, and Jill rinsed the remaining coloring out of her hair and combed and set it. Dave put on a summer suit. Jill wore a skirt and blouse. They were in the room for about an hour, then went downstairs and left the hotel.

  Washburn lived at 47 Gramercy Park East. They didn’t know where that was, and Dave ducked into a drugstore and looked up the address in a street guide. It was on the East Side, around Twentieth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues.

  They took a cab and got off three blocks away at the corner of East Seventeenth Street and Irving Place. They were only a few blocks from the diner where they had had breakfast. The neighborhood was shabby-genteel middle class, unimpressively respectable. The buildings were mostly brownstones. There were trees, but not many of them. The neighborhood picked up as they walked north on Irving Place.

  He wondered if Lublin had Washburn’s place staked out. It was possible, he thought. He reached under his jacket and felt the weight of the gun tucked beneath his belt. They kept walking.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE BUILDING at 47 Gramercy Park East was a large four-story brownstone that had been thoroughly renovated around the end of the war. There were four apartments, one to a floor. There was a doorman in front, a tall Negro wearing a maroon uniform with gold piping. No, the doorman told Jill, there was no Mr. Watson in the building, but there was a Mr. Washburn up on the fourth floor, if that was who she wanted. She said it wasn’t and he smiled a servile smile.

  So Washburn was on the fourth floor. They crossed the street and moved halfway down the block, out of range of the doorman. The green square of park was bordered on all sides by a high iron fence. There was a gate, locked. A neat metal sign indicated that if you lived in one of the buildings surrounding the park you were given a key to that gate, and then you were allowed to go into the park when you wanted. Otherwise the park was out of bounds. They stood near the gate and Dave smoked a cigarette.

  Jill said, “We can’t stand here forever. Lublin will send somebody around sooner or later.”

  “Or the police will pick us up for loitering.”

  “Uh-huh. What do we do? Can we go up there after him?”

  “No. He wouldn’t be alone. One of the newspaper stories mentioned a wife, so she would be there with him, I suppose. And he probably has plenty of help. Bodyguards, a maid, all or that.”
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  “Then what do we do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  They walked to the corner. A uniformed policeman passed them heading downtown. He didn’t smile. They stood on the corner while the light changed twice.

  “If we could get into the park—” he said.

  “We don’t have a key.”

  “I know,” he said. “From the park, we could keep an eye on the doorway without being seen. It would be natural enough. We could sit on a bench and wait for something to happen. We don’t even know if Washburn’s home, or who’s with him. Or what he looks like, for that matter. The one picture in the paper wasn’t much good. Blurred, the way news photos always are—”

  “All those little dots.”

  “And not a close-up anyway. We might be able to see him, he might come out alone, we could have a crack at following him. He’s the key to it. Unless Lublin was doing an awfully good job of last-minute lying, Washburn is our only connection with the killers.”

  “Do you think we could get him to talk?”

  “I don’t know. For a while I didn’t think Lublin would talk.” He looked over at Washburn’s building. “The damn thing would have to face a park,” he said. “In the movies, they always rent an apartment right across the street from the suspect and set themselves up with binoculars and gun-shot microphones and tape recorders and everything else in the world, and they’ve got him cold. But what the hell do you do when the son of a bitch lives across from a park that you can’t even get into?”

  “Maybe next door?”

  The buildings on either side of Washburn’s were more of the same, renovated brownstones with an air of monied respectability about them. There would be no rooms for rent there, he thought. Not at all. But maybe around in back . . . “Come on,” he said.

  A Fourth Avenue office building was around the block from Washburn’s brownstone. They looked at the building directory in the lobby. There were three lawyers, two CPA’s, one insurance agency, one employment agency, a commercial-art studio, and a handful of small businesses identified in such a way that they might have done anything from advertising layout to import-export. The elevator seemed to be out of order. They walked up steep stairs to the fourth floor. The whole rear wall of the floor was taken up by one business, an outfit called Beadle & Graber. The office door was shut and the window glass frosted. A typewriter made frantic sounds behind the closed door.

  He went to the door and knocked on it. The typewriter stopped quickly and a gray-haired woman opened the door cautiously. Dave asked if a Mr. Floyd Harper worked there, and the gray-haired woman said no, there was no Mr. Harper there. He looked over her shoulder at the window. It faced out upon a courtyard, and across the courtyard he could see the rear windows of Washburn’s apartment. The drapes were open, but he didn’t have time to see much of anything. But if he were closer to the windows, and if he had a pair of binoculars—

  “You can see Washburn’s apartment from their window,” he told Jill.

  “Then it’s a shame they have the office. If it were vacant, we could rent it.”

  “There’s still a way.”

  “How?”

  “Wait for me in the lobby,” he said.

  They walked as far as the third floor together. Then she went on downstairs while he knocked on the door of one of the CPA’s. A voice told him to come in. He went inside. A balding man in his forties asked what he could do for him.

  Dave said, “Just wanted to ask a question, if I could. I was thinking of taking an office in this building. There’s space available, isn’t there?”

  “I think so. On the top floor, I believe.”

  “Just one thing I wanted to know. Is this a twenty-four-hour building? Can you get in and out any time?”

  You could, the accountant told him. They kept a night man on duty to run the elevator, and from six at night until eight in the morning you had to sign a register if you entered or left the building. “It’s not a bad location,” the accountant said. “The address has a little more prestige than it used to. It’s Park Avenue South now, not Fourth Avenue. Everybody in the city still calls it Fourth Avenue, of course, but it gives you a more impressive letterhead, at least for the out-of-town people. You want the rental agent’s phone number?”

  “I’ve already got it,” Dave said.

  There was a coffee shop two doors down the street, empty now in the gap between breakfast and lunch crowds. They ate at odd times lately, he thought. They settled in one of the empty booths and ordered sliced-chicken sandwiches. She had coffee, he had milk. The sandwiches were good and he was hungrier than he had thought. And tired, suddenly. He didn’t want to sleep, but he felt the physical need for it. A couple of times he caught himself staring dully ahead, his mind neatly empty, as if it had temporarily turned itself off. He ordered coffee after all and forced himself to drink it.

  “I can go back there during the night,” he told her. He explained the way the building was kept open. “I can sign some name to the book and break into that office.”

  “Break into it?”

  “Pick the lock. Or break the window and unlock it There won’t be anybody around, and once I’m in I can get a good look into his place. Washburn’s.” But then he stopped and shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  “It sounds risky. If anybody heard you—”

  “More than that. In the first place, he probably closes his drapes when it gets dark out. Everybody does. Besides, all I could see would be the one room of the apartment, and it’s probably a bedroom anyway. I couldn’t keep an eye on the front door, and I would never know if he left the building. We have to be able to see the front of his building, not the back of it.”

  A few minutes later she looked up and said, “But there is something we can do, honey.’

  “What?”

  “Instead of breaking into the office. Or sneaking in. And it should be easier, and less dangerous. We could break into Gramercy Park.”

  They waited on the north side of the park, about twenty yards down from the main gate. The privilege of a key to the park was evidently more symbolic than utilitarian. The park was empty except for a very old man who wore a black suit and a maroon bow tie and who sat reading the Wall Street Journal and moving his lips as he read. They waited for him to leave the park but he seemed determined to sit on his bench forever. They waited a full half hour before anyone else entered the park. Then a woman came, a very neat and very old woman in a gray tweed suit. She had a cairn terrier on a braided leather leash. She opened the gate with a key and led the dog inside and they watched the gate swing shut behind her.

  The woman spent twenty minutes in the park, leading the cairn from one tree to another. The small dog seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for urine. They completed the tour, finally, and woman and dog headed for the gate. Their move was well timed. The two of them reached the gate just as the woman was struggling with the lock. She opened it, and Dave drew the gate open while Jill made a show of admiring the dog. The dog admired them. The woman and the dog passed through the gate, and Jill stepped inside and Dave started to follow her.

  The woman said, “You have your own key, of course.”

  “I left it in the apartment,” Jill said. She smiled disarmingly. “We’re right across the street.” She pointed vaguely toward Washburn’s building.

  The woman looked at them, her eyes bright. “No,” she said gently, “I don’t think you are.”

  The dog tugged at the leash but the woman stood her ground. “One so rarely sees younger people at this park,” she said. “Isn’t it barbaric, taking something as lovely as a park and throwing a fence around it? The world has too many fences and too few parks. There are times when I think Duncan”—she nodded at the dog—“has the only proper attitude toward this fence. He occasionally employs it as a substitute tree. You don’t live in this neighborhood, do you?”

  “Well—”

  “You sound as thoug
h you’re from upstate somewhere. Not native New Yorkers, certainly.” She shook her head. “Such intrigue just to rest a moment in a pleasant park. You’re married, of course. Wearing a wedding ring, both of you are, and the rings seem to match. And even if they didn’t I’d be good enough to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re married to each other. From out of town, and anxious to sit together in a park—” The woman smiled pleasantly. “Probably on a honeymoon,” she said. “After a year or two of marriage you’ll have had your fill of parks, I’m sure. And, probably, of each other.

  “Oh, I hope not,” Jill said.

  The woman’s smile spread. “So do I, my dear, so do I. You’re quite welcome to the park. My late husband and I used to go to Washington Square when we were courting. Isn’t that a dated term? I’m old, aren’t I?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re very charming, aren’t you? But I very certainly am old, nevertheless. Courting. I understand Washington Square’s changed a great deal since then. A great many young persons with leather jackets and beards and guitars. Perhaps that’s an argument for gates and fences after all. Every question has so many sides. I am a silly old woman, aren’t I?”

  “No.”

  “Enjoy the park,” the woman said, passing through the gate now. “And enjoy each other. And don’t grow old too quickly, if you’ll pardon more advice. Giving unwanted advice is one of the few remaining privileges of the aged, you know. Don’t grow old too quickly. Being old is not really very much fun. It’s better than being dead, but that’s really about all one can say for it.”

  The iron gate swung shut. The woman and the dog walked quickly with small and precise steps to the corner and waited for the signal to change. Then they crossed the street and continued down the block.

  “We really fooled her,” Jill said.

  “Uh-huh.”