and this time a girl answered.
“Mr. Carrel, please,” he said.
“Which Mr. Carrel?”
Which Mr. Carrel? He said, “I didn’t know there were more than one. Was more than one.”
“There are two Mr. Carrels,” the girl said. “Whom did you wish to speak to?”
“What are their names?”
“We have a Mr. Jacob Carrel and a Mr. Leonard Carrel. Lennie ... Mr. Leonard Carrel, I mean, is the son. He’s not in, but Mr. Jacob Carrel—”
He hung up the phone. For the hell of it, he looked up “Joseph Carroll” in the Brooklyn book. There were listings for fourteen Joseph Carrolls in Brooklyn. He did not bother looking in the other books.
The only way was through Carroll, he thought. They had to learn who the man was. If they learned who Carroll was they could find the right Lublin, and once they got Lublin they could find the men he had hired to do the killing. It was impossible to find Carroll or Lublin or anyone else through the phone book. The city was too big. There were thirty-six Lublins listed in New York City and God knew how many more with no phones or unlisted numbers. And he had never heard the name Lublin before, even. A name he’d never heard, and there were too many of them in New York City for him to know where to begin.
She was waiting in the room at the Royalton. He told her where he had gone and what he had done. She didn’t say anything.
He said, “Right now there’s nothing to do but wait There should be a story in one of the morning papers, and then there should be a longer story in the Scranton papers when we get them. Maybe we should have stayed around the lodge for a day or two, maybe we would have found out something.”
“I couldn’t stay there.”
“No, neither could I.”
“We could go to Scranton, if you want. And save a day.”
He shook his head. “That’s going around Robin Hood’s barn. We wait. We’re here, and we’ll stay here. Once we find out who Carroll is, or was, then we can think of what to do.”
“You think he was a gangster?”
“Something like that.”
“I liked him,” she said.
Around six-thirty they went across the street and had dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The food was fair. They went back to the hotel and sat in the room but it was too small, they felt too confined. There was a television set in the room. She turned it on and started watching a panel show. He got up, went over to the set, and turned it off. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here, let’s go to a movie.”
“What’s playing?”
“What’s the difference?”
They went to the Criterion on Broadway and saw a sexy comedy with Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. He bought loge tickets and they shared cigarettes and watched the movie. They got there about ten minutes after the picture started, left about fifteen minutes before it ended. On the way back to the hotel they stopped at a newsstand, and he tried to buy the morning papers. The early edition of the Daily News was the only one available. He bought the News and they went back to their room.
He divided the paper in half and they went through it. There was nothing about the murder in either section. He picked up both halves and threw them out. She asked what time it was.
“Nine-thirty.”
“This takes forever,” she said. “Do you want to try getting the Times again?”
“Not yet.”
She got up and walked to the window, turned, walked to the bed, turned again and faced him. “I think I’m going crazy,” she said.
He got up, walked to her. She turned from him. She said, “Like a lion in a cage.”
“Easy, baby.”
“Let’s get drunk, Dave. Can we do that?”
Her face was calm, unreally so. Her hands, at her sides, were knotted into tight little fists with her long fingernails digging into her palms. She saw him looking at her fists, and she opened her hands. There were red marks on the palms of her hands—she had very nearly broken the skin.
He picked up the phone and got the bell
Michelle Fox, Kristen Strassel