“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 big 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.