Check them all? It didn’t make any sense. And suppose she wanted to get in touch with him, and called him, and he wasn’t there. Or suppose she got back to the hotel while he was out looking for her.
He went back to the Royalton. He sat in a chair, and then he got up suddenly and looked for her purse. The large brown purse was on a chair. He opened it, and saw the gun; she had left it behind. But the purse was empty otherwise, and he guessed that she had transferred everything to the black-calf purse before leaving.
Where could she have gone? Just out for coffee, he told himself. Just out for coffee, and if he would just sit back and relax she would return to the room in no time at all. But he couldn’t make himself believe it She wouldn’t be gone this long.
He remembered again, unwillingly now, the sudden rush of reality that had come that night after the call to Lublin. The quick and certain proof that this was no game they were playing, no treasure hunt. That, and then the unsuccessful attempt to make love.
And he thought, We never should have come. We should have left that place and gone somewhere else until the honeymoon was over, and then we should have gone back to Binghamton. No pursuit, no chase, no revenge. We should have gone home.
Because he knew, now, what had happened. Jill had panicked. The initial shock of violation had steeled her, had made her determination for revenge equal to his own, but by now her reactions had cooled and jelled and had changed from determination to panic. He remembered the look in her eyes when he had taught her to use the gun, and he remembered the way she had wanted to wait a day before going after Lublin. Panic, panic. The hunt was wrong for a woman, for a girl; she was no huntress, no killer, and she had not been able to take it, and now she was gone.
Where? Back to Binghamton, he thought. Back to her home, where she knew everyone and where she would be safe. He had misjudged her and now she was running, and he paced the floor of their room and tried to figure out what to do next. At one point he started to pack their clothes into their suitcases, then suddenly changed his mind and put everything back where it had been. He took the gun from her purse and held it first in one hand and then in the other, switching it nervously back and forth, finally sighing and returning it to the large brown bag.
Twice he picked up the bottle of V.O. and each time he put it back without drinking. One time he uncapped it. The other time he just held it in both hands and looked at the amber whiskey.
At twenty minutes after four, the phone rang. He was sitting right next to it, sitting on the edge of the bed. When it rang he dropped a cigarette onto the rug. He didn’t bother to pick it up but ground it into the carpet while he reached for the phone.
“Dave? Did I wake you?”
“My God, where are you?”
“I’m calling from a drugstore. Relax, darling. I’m all right. I didn’t mean to frighten you, but—”
“Where are you?”
“Get a pencil.”
He started to say something, changed his mind and got up. His pen and his little notebook were on the top of the dresser. He got them and opened the notebook and said, “All right. Where are you?”
“A drugstore. It’s on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Ditmas Avenue — that’s in Brooklyn.”
“What are you—”
She cut in on him. “Get in a cab,” she said easily. “Come here as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting right here, in the store. And bring the thing in my brown purse. All right?”
“Jill—”
“Flatbush and Ditmas,” she said. “I’m sorry if I worried you, darling. And hurry.”
Chapter 8
The Drugstore’s lunch counter was to the left of the door, separated from the door by a magazine rack and the tobacco counter. She was drinking coffee at the counter, the only customer. He looked at her and, for a second or two, did not recognize her. Then he looked again and saw that it was Jill.
She looked entirely different. Her hair was a different color, a sort of medium brown, and she wore it off her face now, brought back and done up in a French twist. When she turned to him he stared. Her hair style altered the whole shape of her face.
And her face was different for other reasons, too. Her lips looked fuller, redder. Her eyes were deeper, and she seemed to be wearing a lot of makeup. She was only twenty-four but she looked a good three years older now.
He started to sputter questions but she silenced him with a finger to her lips. “Sit down,” she said. “Have a cup of coffee. I’ll explain it all to you.”
“I think you’d better.”
He sat down, and an old man with thick wire-rimmed glasses came over to take his order. He asked for coffee. He forgot to order it black, and it came with cream in it. He stirred it with a spoon. The counterman went away, and Dave waited.
She said, “I went to see Lublin.”
“You must be crazy.”
“No,” she said. “Dave, it was the only way. We couldn’t go after him until we knew what his place was like, if he lived alone or with anybody, all of that. And you couldn’t go to meet him because he would have been suspicious, you never would have gotten past the door. Suppose he had live-in bodyguards. He does have one man who lives with him, as a matter of fact. If we went there without knowing it—”
“But why did you go?”
“Because I knew he would let me in.” She drank coffee. “He wouldn’t let a man in, one that he didn’t know, on a night when he was having some people over. But a girl is something else again. Almost any man will open a door for a pretty girl. And let her stay as long as she wants. I told him I was supposed to meet a man there. I said—”
“What man?”
“Pete Miller. You’ve been using the name so much it was the first one that came to mind.” She grinned quickly. “He said he didn’t know any Pete Miller. I stood there looking lost and pathetic and told him I was sure that this was the address, that I was supposed to come there. I guess he decided that I must be a call girl. He said it was probably somebody’s idea of a joke but that I should come in out of the rain and have a drink to warm up. It was still raining then.” She patted her hair and grinned again. “I was afraid it would wash the color out of my hair.”
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.”