Coward's Kiss Read online

  TWELVE

  IT was so quiet I could hear the country noises outside. Birds singing, crickets chirping, the wind in the trees. A scene of pastoral bliss. I looked at him, then at the gun and then at him again.

  “That’s the trouble with muscle,” I said. “It can work both ways. Billy’s muscle just got him killed.”

  The gun didn’t waver. The mouth smiled but the eyes were colder than Death.

  “Cute,” he said. “Very cute. What was that? Judo?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Using his own muscle against him,” he said slowly. “Yeah, I get it. I had a Jap working for me once, little guy skinny as a bird. He could get cute like that, toss a guy my size clear across the room and off the wall. You know what you just did?”

  I let him tell me.

  “Same thing as Billy,” he said. “You used your brains against you. You got so cute that in a minute or so I shoot you and you’re dead. Your brains get blown out. What good are they then?”

  I put my hands in my jacket pockets and tried to look casual about it. The Beretta was right where it was supposed to be. I tried not to think what would have happened if Ralph or Billy had taken it away from me. It was better not to think about things like that.

  “You’d kill me anyway,” I told him. “What’s the difference?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Sure you would. You’ve got enough killings under your belt. One more wouldn’t hurt you.”

  He laughed like a clown. “Dumbhead,” he said. “I haven’t killed anybody all by myself in fourteen years. You’ll be the first. Unless Ralphie wakes up to save me the trouble.”

  I looked at Ralph and decided he wouldn’t wake up for a while. “So you don’t pull the trigger yourself,” I said. “You order the hits instead. It’s the same thing.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You’re just a killer, Bannister. You killed a batch of jewel thieves to save yourself a hundred grand. You killed a girl when she crossed you. Now I’m next. Congratulations.”

  He looked amused. I kept my hands in my pockets. My right hand closed around the Beretta and my index finger looked around for the trigger and found it. I was glad now that it was such a small gun. It made a neat bulge in the pocket, small enough so that he didn’t even notice it.

  “You’re a pig,” I said. “With all your money and all your power you’re still fresh from the gutter. And the gutter smell clings to you. It won’t wash off. You’ll go on killing like an animal and living like an animal until somebody blows your brains out. Or until they strap you in the chair and throw the switch.”

  He wasn’t Billy and he didn’t get angry. His voice came out low and flat. It rasped like chalk on a blackboard.

  He said: “Dumbhead. You know what you got for brains? You got crap for brains. Every time you try to get smart you get dumber and dumber.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really, you stupid bastard. You think I order a hit for the hell of it? Anybody kills for nothing is stupid. Those snatch-and-grab boys got hit because they crossed me. Somebody crosses you, you have to hit him. They came to me and asked a hundred grand for a batch of jewels. I paid their price and they tried to cut and run. No jewels for me. So they got hit and the dough came back where it belonged.”

  “What about the girl?”

  He looked at me. “Alicia?”

  I nodded.

  He laughed and his big shoulders shook. “Dumber and dumber,” he said. “We never hit the girl. Why hit her?”

  “Because she double-crossed you.”

  “That broad crossed everybody,” he said. “She was in line for a hit. But why cool her before I got the briefcase from her? The hell, I didn’t even know where she was hiding out. She disappeared fast.”

  “Then how did you know I had the briefcase? If you didn’t know where she lived, you didn’t see me coming out of her apartment. So how did you spot me?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You had a tail on me last night,” I said. “I sent him home with his head in a sling. How did he pick me up?”

  “You’re in the wrong world, London. I didn’t have you tailed.”

  I remembered a little mousy man with glasses. “A little guy. He picked me up at the Ruskin, where Armin is staying. And then——”

  His smile spread around some more. “Is that where he’s staying?”

  “You already knew that, Bannister.”

  “I guess I know it now. Thanks.”

  I shifted gears again. It was cuter than hell—the more I knew, the more things got jumbled up all over again. “You didn’t spot me with Alicia’s body,” I said. “But you figured I had the briefcase. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then——”

  My ignorance had him so happy I thought he was going to start giggling any minute. “So goddamn dumb,” he said. “I got a phone call. You learn a lot of things over a phone. I learned you had the briefcase. And you did. So?”

  “Who called you?”

  “A little bird. You ask a lot of questions, you know that? What do you care about answers? I shoot you and you’re dead. You believe there’s a thing like heaven?”

  “No.”

  He nodded swiftly. “Good. Neither do I. So you’re dead, and when you’re dead it’s all over. In an hour or so you get stiff. Your hands and feet turn white. Powder white, fishbelly white. A couple days after that you start to rot. And whatever you got going for you in your head, whatever your brains are loaded with, it rots too. The questions and the answers—they rot. Why ask?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “It killed a lot of cats, London.”

  I took very careful aim with the Beretta. He was right but his reasons were all wrong. I didn’t need any more questions and answers. I had all the answers that mattered. There were a few questions left here and there but Bannister wasn’t going to be able to answer them.

  Everything was coming into focus now. Everything was taking shape and working itself out.

  I didn’t need Clay Bannister any more.

  “Dead,” he was saying now. “Didn’t have to kill you before. No point. Hell, you did me a favor. I take the briefcase and toss you out. What can you do to me? Nothing. You don’t have a story to take to the cops and you’re too small to give me a hard time on your own. I brush you away like a horse brushes flies.”

  “You can still do that.”

  He shook his big head. “Uh-uh,” he grunted. “You killed one of my boys.”

  “Ralph killed him.”

  “Uh-uh. You killed him. So now it’s your turn for some of the same. You still sure you don’t believe in heaven? You want to squeeze in a round of last-minute praying?”

  He could have gone on that way for another half hour. His voice was ugly but he liked the sound of it, liked the way his neo-Nietzschean crap rolled off his tongue. He might still be talking now. But I was sick of listening to him, sick of staring into the muzzle of his gun.

  I steadied the Beretta and squeezed the trigger.

  For a little gun it made one hell of a noise. Bannister’s face started to change expression from satisfaction to horror. He got halfway there and wound up wearing a silly half-smile. I wondered how long it would take the undertaker to wipe it off his face.

  I was aiming for his face but the bullet came in low. It took him in the neck, right in the center of the throat, and he fell in slow motion, the gun in his hand all the way to the floor. When he was on his knees he squeezed the trigger in a death grip and a bullet plowed a furrow in the thick carpet.

  He fell the rest of the way, then stopped moving. A river of blood flowed from the hole in his throat. The thick carpet sopped up most but not all of it.

  I felt a little like Lady Macbeth. “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” But the little lady was swimming in guilt, and I couldn’t feel anything but numb satisfaction no matter how hard I tried. Nobody ever deser
ved death more thoroughly. Nobody’s death ever came in a more appropriate manner.

  Just for the record I took his pulse. He turned out to be just as dead as he looked. Then I walked over to Billy, grabbed hold of his wrist, and found out he was as dead as his boss. I glanced at Ralph—he didn’t seem to be breathing, and when I looked for a pulse I couldn’t find one. Maybe he had a heart attack. Maybe I scared him to death.

  Then I saw beads of blood in both his ears and figured out what happened. The fall with Billy on top of him had been a healthy one. He fractured his skull and he was dead.

  Which meant there were three of them. Three dead men on a thick carpet in an ugly living room. Three bodies cooling off under a beamed ceiling in a Long Island manor house. Three gunshots in ten minutes.

  And one worn-out detective who needed a drink. Badly.

  And all at once I remembered another picture. A picture of an apartment where a dead and nearly nude blonde lay still and silent in the center of an immaculate room. The scene I was in now was just as surrealistic. Maybe it was Death itself that was surrealistic. Maybe the rest was just the frame for the picture.

  I got out of there in a hurry. I wiped off everything I could have touched in one way or another—a doorknob here, a chair there. I wiped off three hands and wrists while I tried to remember whether it was possible to get a print from a dead man’s skin. I took a final look at the three of them and remembered they had been alive just a few minutes ago, all three of them, and that I was responsible for their deaths.

  I wasn’t sorry.

  I remembered the beating they had handed me and the search they had given my apartment. I thought about all the people they had managed to mess up in one way or another in the course of their lives. So I wasn’t sorry at all. They had it coming.

  I picked up the briefcase. It was beginning to feel like an old friend. I carried it out of the house, wiped the brass doorknob and closed the carved oak door. The bullet in Bannister’s throat was my only souvenir. And ballistics wouldn’t be able to do a thing with it. Peter Armin wouldn’t own a traceable gun.

  From the front seat of the Chevy I looked out at the house again. Bannister’s house, his estate. The sun was still shining and I blinked at it. I’d been expecting dark clouds and gloomy weather. But the real world doesn’t have the artistic balance of a Gothic novel. Bannister’s lawn was still neat, still blindingly green. Birds went on singing in his trees.

  They didn’t seem to miss him at all.

  I pushed the accelerator to the floor and let the Chevy have her head. The top was still down and the rush of very fresh air shook me out of my mood. A few miles down the road I pulled over to the curb to fill a pipe and get it going. There was a small hole in my right-hand jacket pocket, the one the bullet went through. It was black around the edges. The gun in that pocket felt heavier now than before. Actually it was lighter by a bullet. It still felt heavier.

  I goosed the Chevy and we got going again.

  There was one little headache—I’d beaten the brains out of a little guy with glasses, and unless Bannister was lying for the sheer hell of it the guy hadn’t been tailing me at all. But that was something to worry about later. For the time being I had plenty to do. I had answers to all the questions now, values for all the unknowns in my human equation. X and Y and Z had names and shapes and faces. I knew all I had to know.

  I left Suffolk County behind, hurried through Nassau, got done with Queens as quickly as I could. I rode under the East River, felt trapped in the tunnel, then came out in Manhattan again. It felt good. I’m a city boy—I was born here and I like it here, and it’s the only spot that feels like home. Boroughs like Brooklyn and Queens are a waste of time and space, and the rest of Long Island is the country.

  “And the country is a healthy grave.”

  There was a parking space down the block from my building. It was a tight squeeze but the Chevy fit in it. I slipped the briefcase out of sight under the front seat, walked to my door with my right arm draped over the bullethole in my pocket. In my own apartment I got out of the jacket, emptied its pockets and heaved it down the incinerator. It was a shame, because it was kind of a nice jacket, but it had to go. I put on a fresh jacket, put wallet and handkerchief and gun in the right pockets, and poured out a slug of cognac. I sat down in a chair and worked on the cognac while I flipped through the Times at long last.

  I wasn’t exactly killing time. In the first place, I needed the drink. In the second, there was a chance that the Alicia bit was still getting an occasional few lines of printer’s ink, and I wanted to know about it if it was. So I sipped and flipped, in approximately that order. There was nothing about the late Alicia Arden. There was something else.

  I almost missed it. It was on one of those catchall back pages, a short bit most of the way down the fifth column. I noticed it because they had happened to run a picture with it and pictures on the inside back pages are rare. This was a good news photo—a clear and infinitely sad shot of a dead little man propped up against a brick warehouse wall.

  So I read the article. Nothing sensational, nothing spectacularly newsworthy. The sad little man in the photograph had been found in the very small hours of the morning after having been shot twice in the center of his chest. Police found him in the very West Thirties, the warehouse district on the wrong side of Eleventh Avenue. He had been killed elsewhere and dumped where he was found. In addition to the bullets, he’d been beaten around the face.

  There had been no identification yet. He’d had no wallet, no papers. His fingerprints were not on file. He had one identifying mark, a six-digit number tattooed on his right forearm.

  Nothing much at all. But it made me look at the picture again, and it actually took a second look to recognize him. His face had never been the memorable sort and it was less so in a news photo. But I had seen him before.

  He was the tail I’d pounded on Times Square the night before.

  I went back to the car. The briefcase was still on the floor under the seat, right where I had left it. I put it next to me and started the engine. I had a little more trouble getting out of the space than getting in, but the Chevy was in a good mood and we made it.

  It was time to deliver the briefcase and collect my reward.

  THIRTEEN

  THE air was gray, the sun smothered by clouds. Eighth Avenue swam with the human debris of late afternoon. A pair of well-dressed Negro pimps stood like cigar store Indians in front of the Greek movie theater across the street. A Madison Avenue type, his attaché case at his feet, leafed dispassionately and sadly through a bin of pornographic pictures in a bookstore. Taxi drivers honked their horns and pedestrians dodged rush-hour traffic. All over neon signs winked in electric seduction.

  The Chevy was parked on Forty-fifth Street. I left it there and went into the Ruskin with the briefcase tucked under one arm. I found the taproom and had a double cognac. It went down smoothly and made a warm spot in my stomach.

  In the lobby I picked up the house phone and called Peter Armin. He picked up the phone right off the bat.

  “London,” I said. “Busy?”

  He wasn’t.

  “I’ve got a present for you,” I told him. “Okay to bring it right up?”

  A low chuckle came over the phone. “You’re an amazing man, Mr. London. Come right up. I’ll be anxious to see you.”

  I rang off, stuffed tobacco into a pipe and lit it. I walked to the elevator. The operator was a sleepy-eyed kid with a very short brushcut and a wad of gum in his mouth. He chewed it all the way to the eleventh floor, telling me at the same time who was going to win the fight at St. Nick’s that night. I yeahed him along, got out of the car and found Armin’s door. I knocked on it and he opened it.

  “Mr. London,” he said. “Come in. Please come in.”

  We went inside. He closed the door, then turned to me again. I looked at him while he looked at the briefcase I was holding. He was very pleased to see it. His clothes were different aga
in—chocolate slacks, a dark brown silk shirt, a tan cashmere cardigan. I wondered how many changes of clothes he carried around in that suitcase of his.

  “An amazing man,” he said softly. “You and I make a pact. Within twenty-four hours you produce the briefcase. One might almost be tempted to presume you’d had it all along. But I’m sure that’s not the truth.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “May I ask how you took possession of it?”

  I shrugged. “Somebody dropped it in my lap.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Amazing, truly amazing. And Mr. Bannister? Have you any news of Mr. Bannister?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “You killed him?”

  “I think he had a heart attack.”

  He chuckled again. “Marvelous, Mr. London. De mortuis, of course. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Yet I cannot avoid thinking that few men have merited a heart attack more whole-heartedly, if you’ll excuse the play on words. You’re a man of action, Mr. London, and a man of economy as well. You waste neither time nor words. A rare and enviable combination in these perilous times.”

  He stopped, reached into a pocket of the cardigan and dragged out his Turkish cigarettes. He offered me one, as usual. I passed it up, as usual. He took one himself and lit it.

  “Now,” he said. “If I might have the briefcase?”

  “One thing first.”

  “Oh?”

  “A matter of money,” I said. “Something like five thousand.”

  He was all apologies. He scurried over to the dresser, opened the bottom drawer, drew out a small gray steel lockbox with a combination lock. He spun dials mysteriously and the box opened. There was an envelope inside it. He took it out and presented it solemnly to me.

  “Five thousand,” he said. “The bills are perfectly good and perfectly untraceable. If you’d like to count them——”

  “I’ll trust you,” I said. I stuffed the envelope in my inside jacket pocket.