“How will we find him?”
“We’ll find him.”
“He won’t be in the phone book. I mean, there must be a million Krauses, even if he has a phone, and we don’t know his first name. Just a nickname. Why do you suppose they call him Dago? Krause isn’t an Italian name, is it?”
“No. We’ll find him.”
“How?”
“We’ll find him. One way or another, well find him.”
They spent the morning in the hotel room. At noon he went to the drugstore and picked up a stack of magazines, plus the morning papers. All the papers had the story, but not even the tabloids gave it a very big play. It wasn’t good copy. There had been a gun battle of sorts, which was on the plus side, but no innocent bystanders had been killed, and since no one had spotted Jill there was no sex angle to work on. The prevailing theory seemed to be that Ruger had been killed by a professional killer, a common enough ending for a criminal. The eyewitness reports contradicted one another incredibly, and the composite description of the killer made him about thirty-five, shorter and heavier than Dave. The whole pattern of the killing itself was confused in the papers. One witness insisted that Ruger had been ambushed by two men, one firing from the rooming house and the other gunning him down from behind a parked car. The woman at Ruger’s place told reporters that the killer had showed her false credentials and had posed as a federal officer.
They read all the articles together, and he laughed and folded up the papers and carried them down the hall and stuffed them in a large wastebasket. “I thought so,” he told Jill. “They would have had to pick us up on the spot in order to get us. Now they’re a million miles away.”
They went out for lunch and sat a long time with coffee and cigarettes. They walked up to Forty-second Street. There were a pair of science-fiction movies playing at the Victory, and the daytime rates were less than a dollar. It seemed like too much of a bargain to pass up. They walked in somewhere around the middle of a British import about a lost colony on Alpha Centauri and sat in the balcony. The theater was fairly crowded. They watched the end of that picture, a newsreel, three cartoons, a slew of coming attractions, and the other movie, one in which the fate of the world is menaced by giant lemmings, beasts that rushed pell-mell to the sea and devoured all the human beings in their path. Then there were more trailers, and they saw the Alpha Centauri movie up to the point where they had come in.
There was a comfortable feeling of security in the theater, a feeling of being in a crowd but not of it, of being surrounded by other persons while remaining comfortably anonymous. At first they were tense and on guard, but this stopped, and they got quickly lost in the action on the screen.
He picked up the evening papers on the way back to the hotel. In the room, he checked through them while Jill went down the hall to wash out underwear and stockings in the bathroom sink. He didn’t expect to find anything much in the papers, just checked them out methodically as a matter of form. For the most part, the material on the shooting was just a rehash of the stories in the morning papers, with a little extra material on Ruger’s background and criminal record and some hints at the police investigation of the murder.
But a final paragraph in one article said:
Philip “Dago” Krause, described by police as a longtime friend and associate of the murdered man, was among those brought in for questioning. Krause, who lives at 2792 23rd Avenue in Astoria, has a record of arrests dating back to 1948. He was released after close interrogation...
He took the paper down the hall to Jill and showed it to her. “Look at that,” he said, excited. “I told you we’d find him. The damned fools drew us a map.”
That night they had dinner at a good steak house on West Thirty-sixth Street. They went back to the hotel and drank more V.O. The ginger ale was gone. He drank his straight, and she mixed hers with tap water. They played gin rummy part of the time and spent the rest of the time sitting around reading magazines. She washed out some socks for him and hung them on the curtain rod over the window to dry. She muttered something about playing housewife on her honeymoon, and he smiled thoughtfully. It was the first time in days that either of them had mentioned the word “honeymoon.”
The next day was Saturday. There was nothing new on Ruger’s killing in any of the papers. Most of them had dropped it. One of the tabloids had a brief and pointless follow-up piece, but that was about all there was. They stayed close to the hotel.
By Sunday she was getting impatient, anxious to get it over and done with. “It’s better to wait,” he said. “Another couple of days. It won’t be long now.” They spent the afternoon at another Forty-second Street movie house and had dinner at the Blue Ribbon, on Forty-fourth Street. They had drinks before dinner and steins of Wurzburger with their meal and brandy with the coffee, and they were feeling the drinks by the time they left the place. He wanted to go back to the Moorehead, but she suggested stopping at a jazz place down the street and he went along with it. They sat at a circular bar and listened to a man play piano, until she lowered her head suddenly and fastened her fingers around his wrist
She said, “Don’t look up. Not now.”
“What’s the matter?”
“There’s a man across the bar, he was one of the ones at Lublin’s that night. I don’t remember his name but I met him there. The one with the red tie. Don’t look straight at him, but see if he’s looking at us.”
He saw the man she meant, watched him out of the corner of his eye. The man hadn’t seemed to notice them yet.
“He may not recognize me,” she said softly. “I looked different then, and I think he was drunk that night, anyway. Is he looking this way?”
“No.”
“We’d better get out of here. Let me go first.” She slipped off her stool. He left change on the bar and followed her out the door. Outside, she stood leaning against the side of the building and breathing heavily. He took her arm and led her down the street. A cab stopped for them. They got in and rode back to the hotel without saying a word.
In the room she said, “It’s dangerous. The more time we spend in this city—”
“I know.” He lit a cigarette. “Tomorrow.”
“Is that too soon?”
“No. I was going to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday, but you’re right, we can’t stick around here too long. It was only a matter of time before we bumped into somebody. It was lucky he didn’t spot us.”
“Yes.”
“And lucky you recognized him.”
He stayed with her until after midnight. Then he left the hotel and walked downtown for a dozen blocks. On a dark side street he found a two-year-old Chevy with New Jersey license plates. The plates were in frames fastened by bolts. He used a quarter to loosen the bolts, took both plates, and carried them back to the hotel inside his shirt.
They packed up everything except the gun and the box of shells. He loaded the revolver with five bullets and carried the remaining shells outside to another dark street. There were about fifteen shells left in the box. He dropped them one by one into a sewer and chucked the empty carton into a mailbox.
At seven the next morning, he left the hotel again and walked to the Kinney garage. The place was just opening. He got his car, paid the attendant three and a half dollars, and parked the car on the street a few doors down from the hotel. He went upstairs for the luggage. Jill came down with him. She had the gun in her purse. They walked down to where the car was parked and loaded their bags into the trunk and locked it. He drove the car and she sat close beside him. He took the West Side Drive uptown to Ninety-fifth Street, then drove around the side streets between Broadway and West End Avenue until he found what he was looking for, an alleyway alongside a warehouse. He drove through the alley to the back of the warehouse and switched license plates, bolting the New Jersey plates loosely to the car and putting his own plates in the trunk of the Ford. He backed out of the alley and drove up to 125th Street and swung east to the Triborough Bridge.