Free Deadly Honeymoon by Lawrence Block Page B

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.”
    “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