Deadly Honeymoon by Lawrence Block Page B

coffee and paid the check. She got up and went to the washroom in the back. He left a tip and went outside. The sky was clear now, and the sun was bright. He lit a cigarette. The smoke was strong in his lungs. Too many cigarettes, too long a time without sleep. He took another drag on the cigarette and walked to the corner of Thirteenth Street He finished the cigarette and tossed it into the gutter.
    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