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?”