Authors: Lawrence Block
Deadly Honeymoon (19 page)
On a residential street about a mile away she stopped the car and he got out and switched the plates. The whole operation—removal of the Jersey plates and substitution of his own—took less than five minutes. He got back in the car and she headed for the Triborough Bridge again while he wiped his fingerprints from the stolen license plates. When they passed a vacant lot, she slowed the car and he unrolled the window and threw the plates out into the middle of the field.
They crossed the bridge. She drove the width of Manhattan on 125th Street, then stopped at the entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway and let him take the wheel. He headed north on the Henry Hudson, picked up the Saw Mill River Parkway and followed the throughway signs. There were three bridges to cross and a lot of tolls to pay, and the traffic was moderately heavy on the Saw Mill River Parkway, but they were on the throughway by noon.
T
HE SKY
was turning dark. They stood together at the crest of the hill and looked out over the rolling countryside. There was very little traffic on the highway. The sun had set minutes ago. There was a red glow to the west. Behind them, the motel’s neon sign winked on and off, on and off.
The motel was on Route 28, a two-lane state highway that curved through the Catskills. They had left the throughway at the Saugerties exit and had driven this far before he decided to call it a day. They spent the afternoon by the side of the motel pool, ate dinner at a roadhouse a few miles down the road to the east
She said, “I can’t believe it, you know.”
“That it’s over?”
“That it’s over. Or that it happened at all, the crime or the punishment. Neither one seems real now. Just eight days, I can’t believe any of it.”
He slipped an arm around her waist. She leaned against him and he smelled the fragrance of her hair. “After a year,” she said, “we won’t be able to believe it at all, any of it. You’ll be a very very promising young attorney and I’ll be a charming young married in the social swim and it will seem so completely unreal we’ll think we dreamed it.”
He kissed her. She looked at him with the biggest eyes on earth and he held her close and kissed her again, and when he released her there was no need to say anything, not a word. Together they turned and walked to their room. The door was not locked. They went inside, and he locked the door while she drew the blinds. Together, they took the spread off the bed and drew the covers down.
They undressed slowly and silently. He took her in his arms and kissed her again, gently, and she sighed, and he drew her down upon the bed and lay down beside her. She was incredibly beautiful.
“My wife,” he whispered. “My love.”
There were tears in the corners of her eyes. She blinked them away. His hands filled up with the warmth of her body, and desire welled up within him, a living force. He had never wanted anything, ever, as much as he wanted her now.
The bars were gone, the blocks were kicked aside. When it was time, her thighs opened to him and her breasts cushioned him. He took her, and she gave a small sweet cry of joy, and they were together.
Whole concepts fled—time, space, memory, self. Love lived its own life, an island to itself, and sleep came quick on its heels.
They spent four days at the motel. Almost all of that time was spent in the room, in the bed. Their need for each other was overpowering, irresistible. They would laugh about it and tell each other that they had turned into sex maniacs, and suddenly the laughter and the banter would die in the air and they would fall hungrily back into bed.
Once she said, “I’m very good, aren’t I?”
“And modest too.”
“But good,” she said, yawning. “Am I the best you ever had?”
“The only one I ever had.”
“Ah.” She yawned again, stretching her arms high overhead. “But I don’t mind the others,” she said. “I’m not even a little jealous. They couldn’t make you like this. Only me.”
And another time, after a meeting that was fast and furious, she put her head on his chest and cried. He stroked her hair and asked her what was the matter. She wouldn’t tell him. He held her in silence, and after a few minutes she looked up at him with tears in her eyes, tears staining her cheeks. She said, “I wish—”
“What?”
“That I could have been a virgin for you.”
“But you were,” he said.
She thought that over for a few minutes. Then, slowly, she nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I was, wasn’t I?”
It wasn’t my idea.
The premise of
Deadly Honeymoon,
that is. It was my friend Don Westlake’s idea, and I remember the evening he recounted it to me. My then-wife and I were at an upper flat in Brooklyn’s remote Canarsie neighborhood, where Don and his then-wife lived. We’d get together a few times a month, at their place or ours, and sit for hours talking and listening to records. And, as often as not, drinking something.
Don and I sometimes showed each other work in progress on evenings like that. I remember reading a dozen pages he’d typed on the same model Smith Corona manual portable typewriter that he’d use for the next half century. In those pages a man was striding purposefully across the George Washington Bridge when a motorist offers him a lift; the fellow—Parker, by name—told him to go to hell.
“This is great,” I said, or words to that effect. Do you know where it’s going?”
“No,” he said, “but I think it’ll be interesting to find out.”
Indeed. Don wrote twenty-four books about Parker without ever telling us his first name; the last,
Dirty Money
, was published in 2008 a few months before Don’s death.
Besides showing each other what we’d been writing, Don and I talked about what we were thinking of writing, and one night Don mentioned an idea he had: a young couple on their honeymoon, the groom beaten up and the bride raped, and the couple, rather than report the incident to the police, decide to seek justice on their own. Did he have a title? He did.
Deadly Honeymoon
.
We drank some more beer and talked of other things, and that was that. This would have been in 1961. By the middle of the following year my wife and infant daughter and I had relocated to a house in a suburb of Buffalo, New York, and Don and his wife and sons had moved to a house in Englishtown, New Jersey. And it would have been sometime in 1963–4 that I picked up the phone and called him.
“Remember
Deadly Honeymoon
? Did you ever do anything with that idea?” He hadn’t. “Well, do you think you’re going to?” He allowed that it seemed unlikely. “Here’s the thing,” I said. “I can’t get it out of my head. Would you mind if I took a crack at it?”
He told me to go ahead.
So I did.
I don’t remember much about the actual writing of
Deadly Honeymoon
, which suggests that it went smoothly enough. It was published in 1967 by Macmillan, and constituted my first appearance in hardcover. Everyone assumed this was a Big Step Up for me, and in a way I suppose it was, but I knew the book had not gone to Macmillan until half a dozen paperback publishers, starting with the folks at Gold Medal Books who’d brought out
Mona
(now
Grifter’s Game
) and
Death Pulls a Doublecross
(now
Coward’s Kiss
) had declined to publish it. Gold Medal had paid a two thousand five hundred dollar advance for each of the books they’d done, while Macmillan was willing to go a thousand dollars.
Still, hardcover publishers took you to lunch, and I got two or three very pleasant lunches with my editor, a thoroughly charming woman named Mary Heathcote. That has to count for something. And my parents were very proud, and that’s something, too.
When Don read the book, his reaction was interesting. He liked my idea of having Dave and Jill go after the bad guys together. “I’d have sent her home to her parents for the duration,” he said, “or stuck her in a motel somewhere. And he’d have done it all on his own, and then reclaimed his bride in triumph.”
Here’s the thing—I’d always assumed, from that initial moment in Canarsie, that their revenge would be a team effort. That was the idea I thought I was stealing. But it turned out that I’d stolen that part of the idea from my own self.
Never mind. I dedicated the book to Don. Least I could do.
It was my agent Henry Morrison who sold
Deadly Honeymoon
to Macmillan, and the ink was barely dry on the book’s first printing when he sold movie rights to producer William Castle. No end of screenwriters took a shot at adapting it, and the project just got worse and worse as it went long. The film did get made and was released rather tentatively in 1973 with the title
Nightmare Honeymoon
. It starred Dack Rambo and Rebecca Dianna Smith, with Pat Hingle as the crime boss, and it was set in New Orleans. And, let us come right out and say it, it stank on ice.
In case you were wondering, it’s not available from Netflix. And that’s okay with me.
In book form,
Deadly Honeymoon
has been in and out of print over the years. Macmillan sold paperback rights to Dell Publishing, and a couple of other paperback houses have reprinted it since then. And now it’s available as an ebook, and isn’t that a wonder?
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.
Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.
Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in
Manhunt
, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including
American Heritage
,
Redbook
,
Playboy
,
Cosmopolitan
,
GQ
, and the
New York Times
. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including
Enough Rope
(2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.
In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel
The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep
. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in
No Score
,
Chip Harrison Scores Again
,
Make Out with Murder
, and
The Topless Tulip Caper
. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.
A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.
