Coward's Kiss Read online

  He paused for breath. “Each of us was just right for the other, Ed. It was almost chemical. A chemical reaction. She was a footloose thing who never knew what was going to happen next to her. She’d been a prostitute and a marijuana smoker and a con-man’s partner and everything else under the sun. She told me stories that made my hair curl. She was excitement for me; I wasn’t in a rut any more.”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t know. I had to make one big break, one stab in the right direction. With the money from the jewels we could make a whole new life for ourselves. It looked too good to be true.”

  “How long before the new life turned into a rut?”

  “It wouldn’t have happened,” he said doggedly.

  “Sure.”

  “Ed, we loved each other.”

  “Sure. You loved Kaye once, didn’t you?”

  He sighed. “That was different. I was a different man, a younger man. It was a different sort of love. I loved Alicia very much.”

  “So you killed her.”

  He stared at me. He started to say something but I didn’t give him a chance. I held up a hand to shut him up.

  I said: “You killed her. You and Wallstein both loved her and both of you killed her. You set her up for him. If you weren’t in the picture, she and Wallstein would have pulled off their swindle. They’d have wound up safe in Canada. You made her cross him and he killed her. He was a braver man than you, Jack. He killed her with a sword. You killed her with a kiss.”

  After a very long moment he gave me a slow nod. I waited for him to say something.

  “You ought to kill me,” he said finally.

  “Probably.”

  “You should.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve killed too many men today,” I told him. “Four of them. Can you believe it? Four men, and you’re worse than any of them. But I’m sick of killing and sicker of playing God. I couldn’t kill you.”

  “What . . . what are you going to do with me?”

  “I can’t turn you over to the cops,” I said. “And it would be silly as hell even if I could. I’d be hurting Kaye and the girls more than you. And I can’t even beat you up—I haven’t got the stomach for it. You’re a rotten son of a bitch and I can’t do a thing to you.”

  He stood there and didn’t say a word.

  I said: “Get out of here. Get out, get away from me, stay away from me. I don’t want to see you again or speak to you again. Go home to Kaye and pretend you’re a husband. She needs you. I don’t know how in hell anybody could need somebody like you, but she needs you. She can have you.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Damn you, get out!”

  He turned and walked to the door. He opened it and left, closed it behind him. I heard him go down the stairs and leave the building.

  I went over to the window. It was raining now, big heavy drops that soaked the pavement. I opened the window to let some fresh air into the place.

  FIFTEEN

  SHE sat across from me with one elbow on the table and her forehead resting in the palm of her hand. With her other hand she held a spoon and stirred a cup of black coffee. Her eyes were focused on the coffee. She wore a pale green sweater over a simple white blouse and she looked beautiful.

  I wondered what it would be like to sit across a table from her two or three times a day. I could think of worse ways to spend a day. Or a week, or a lifetime.

  She said: “Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.”

  “You don’t get it?”

  She shook her head. “No, that’s not it. I understand what happened and everything. But the people are confusing.”

  “I know.”

  “That Peter Armin. I suppose I should call him Wallstein, shouldn’t I? But I can’t think of him that way. He . . . didn’t seem like a Nazi. I just can’t picture him sticking out his hand and screaming ‘Heil Hitler.’ It’s not consistent.”

  “He wasn’t exactly a storm trooper, Maddy.”

  “Hardly. He was more like . . . oh, who was the one? The propaganda one. You know who I mean.”

  “Goebbels,” I said. “Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda. Hitler’s brain. I think you’re right. Wallstein was that kind of guy.”

  She screwed up her face. “I liked Armin, Ed. Isn’t that silly? I actually liked the man.”

  “I liked him myself.”

  “And Enright turned out to be such a bastard. And he doesn’t get punished.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I am?”

  I nodded. “There’s a balance here. It’s pretty neat. Death was the worst punishment for Bannister and his boys. And for Wallstein. And life is the worst punishment for Jack Enright.”

  She sat back and thought it over. “Uh-huh,” she said finally. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. I see what you mean.”

  She got up to get the pot and pour us each another cup of coffee. I took a sip. It was a little too hot and I set it down to cool. I liked the way she made coffee. I liked the way she cooked.

  “She must have been quite a girl,” she said suddenly.

  “Alicia?”

  “Uh-huh. Or Sheila. Everybody has two names. Did you notice that? It makes it hard to talk straight. Oh, you know what I mean. She must have been . . . interesting.”

  “Because of what she did?”

  “Not that so much. Because of the effect she had on men. Wallstein and Enright both fell in love with her. And the two of them were so completely different.”

  “Maybe they each saw a different girl.”

  “Maybe.”

  I tried the coffee again. “They were different men,” I said. “That’s what had me spinning around all the time. Wallstein was a pro and Enright was a total amateur. Each of them acted differently and lied differently. As soon as I caught onto that much everything got a hell of a lot simpler.

  “Wallstein used misdirection. He was a pro and he lied like a pro. Enright didn’t know how to lie. Hell, he couldn’t tell me a thing about Alicia without tipping his hand. In his place Wallstein would have invented a whole background for the gal to throw me off the trail. All Jack did was play it dumb and tell me he didn’t know anything about her.”

  “He said she was in the theater——”

  “Uh-huh. He picked that one out of the air. She must have mentioned the party she went to with Bannister back when she was setting up the deal. He tossed me that one to make me happy, handed it to me for the hell of it.”

  She was nodding. “And the same goes for the apartment and everything about it.”

  “Right. He had his way of lying and so did Wallstein. They must have had separate ways to love her. And to kill her.”

  I took her hand and rubbed my fingers across the back of it. I looked down at the top of her head. Her hair was clean and fresh. I listened to the rain outside, smelled fresh coffee, thought about things.

  “Ed? I just thought of something. The police will investigate, won’t they?”

  “Hell, they ought to. They’ll find three corpses in Avalon and a fourth in the Ruskin. If they don’t investigate they’ve got rocks in their heads.”

  “Won’t they tie you in?”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “Wallstein will go as an obvious suicide. They won’t even dust for prints and they won’t turn mine up even if they do. I left his Beretta there—if they run a ballistics check on it they can award him posthumously with Bannister’s murder, call it triple murder and suicide. It’s nutty that way but it closes their file for them.”

  She nodded. “How about the money?”

  I looked at her.

  “The five thousand dollars you took from Armin.”

  “I’m keeping it.”

  “But——”

  “Hell,” I said, “there’s nothing else to do with it. He doesn’t have any heirs. And I can use five grand, Maddy. I’ve got as much right to it as anybody else.”

  She thought it over. “You’re right,” she said. “I guess. What
about the jewels.”

  “Those I don’t keep. I can rationalize five thousand bucks but not half a million. And I wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of money. One way or another it would make a slave out of me.”

  “So what do you do with them?”

  “I already did it,” I said. “I put the right keys in an envelope along with an anonymous covering letter with all the details. I sent them to the Israeli embassy. Hell, the original owners are probably dead. And they’d probably have wanted the jewels to go to Israel. They’ve got more right to them than anybody else I can think of.”

  “I see.”

  “Oh, to hell with it,” I said. “It’s just a way to get rid of them, to tell you the truth. I don’t care what they do with those jewels. They can irrigate the goddam Negev or buy guns to shoot poor barefoot Arabs with. I don’t give a damn what happens to the jewels. Just so I’m rid of them.”

  She didn’t answer. We drifted off into one of those long silences that come over you when you run out of the subject of a conversation. I looked at her and tried to figure out whether she agreed with the decisions I had made, and then I started wondering why in hell I should care what she thought about it.

  I thought that maybe I loved her—whatever that meant—and I thought about two other men in love and what love had done to them, what it had made them do.

  It was still raining outside. I had taken a cab to her apartment, leaving the Chevy in the garage, and I knew what was going to happen next. The two of us would manage to decide that it was raining pitchforks out there, by God, that I’d have a hell of a time catching a cab, that I might as well stay the night. And we would sit quietly together and listen to quiet music, both of us trying to be properly nonchalant until it was a decent time to crawl into bed.

  I knew this was going to happen and I wasn’t ready to complain about it. Why? I didn’t know was what was going to happen next. In another day or another week or another month.

  I broke the silence. “The audition,” I said. “You were going to tell me.”

  She clapped her hands like a happy child. “Oh, God! I forgot completely. Your news upstaged mine. Ed, I read that part and he loved me. He positively loved me.”

  “You got the part?”

  “He wants me to read again, or at least he said so.

  But while I was waiting for you I got a call from Maury and he said it’s in the bag. Kaspar thought I was the greatest thing since vaudeville and I couldn’t miss. The reading’s some kind of formality.”

  I told her it sounded great.

  “More than great,” she said. “It’s marvelous and magnificent and delirious and delovely and everything.” Her face went serious again. “This could be that break we were talking about, Ed. Kaspar has a hell of a reputation and the play is beautiful. Really beautiful. And the critics will eat it up. They always go nuts over Lorca revivals—there was one a year and a half ago, just a short run, and I saw it and it was the most amateurish mess with a terrible cast and rotten direction. And they got rave reviews.”

  She paused and breathed again. “It could be a tremendous break,” she said.

  “When do you go into rehearsal?”

  “Maury wasn’t sure. Kaspar didn’t say a word on the subject, of course. He never says anything. But Maury said Kaspar was talking about rehearsing upstate and opening out of town first. He’s done that before. We’ll probably leave New York around the middle of the month and spend the summer in some hole upstate, then open in New Haven or Boston at the start of the season. That’s a guess, anyhow.”

  She smiled at me. “Will you miss me, Ed?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Will you?”

  “Uh-huh. Especially at night.”

  And then, while we talked about other things, all in preparation for the inevitable trip to the bedroom which we both wanted and needed very much, I thought about some other things that had been going through my mind. Thoughts about how she looked in the morning, how she would be to come home to. How the name Maddy London sounded.

  That kind of thing.

  Those thoughts seemed sort of silly now. Adolescent. In a week or two she’d be clearing out of town for a few months. She’d go without a thought, and by that time I’d watch her go without a thought myself. Maybe something would happen with us when she came back in the fall.

  And maybe not.

  We carried our cups of coffee into the living room. She put soft music on the record player and we sat on the couch and listened to it. I had a little brandy. She relaxed against the arm I put around her.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “You like it here?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s easy to unwind here.”

  She smiled softly, and when she spoke there was a little extra emotion behind the words. “You should like it,” she said. “After all, you’ve been here before.

  A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR

  Early in my writing career, I was a curious sort of marksman. The only way I could hit a target was by aiming below it.

  The first book published under my name was a Gold Medal Books crime novel, Grifter’s Game. (Mona was the title a publisher hung on it, to fit a piece of mediocre cover art he had on hand; its original title has since been restored.) The manuscript started out to be a soft-core erotic novel, but a few chapters in I got more ambitious for it, and my agent sent it to Fawcett, where it landed.

  I tried to come up with an idea for a second book for Gold Medal, but couldn’t. This had to do, I’m sure, with murky issues of self-esteem, and if this were a therapy session we could delve into them more deeply—but it’s not, so the hell with it.

  Then my agent came along with an assignment, and I agreed to write a tie-in novel for a paperback publisher called Belmont. Belmont Books is long gone—and no great loss, I shouldn’t think—but TV tie-ins still exist, and my friend Lee Goldberg does some excellent ones based on Monk. The idea, then as now, was that fans of a popular series would want to read new adventures of their favorite characters, which the novelist would spin out to 60,000 words or so.

  Belmont wanted a tie-in novel based on Markham, a private-eye series starring Ray Milland that ran for the 1959–60 season. It seemed to me Roy Markham smoked a pipe, and I’m pretty sure he drove a Renault Dauphine, a choice he made in deference to the show’s sponsor. Now that I think about it, I may have made up the pipe. The Renault, I assure you, was not my idea.

  So I wrote the book, and it turned out pretty well. By the time I got to the end of it I decided it was too good to be a one thousand dollar tie-in novel, and my agent agreed and sent it to Knox Burger at Gold Medal Books, who’d bought and published Grifter’s Game. Knox liked it enough to buy it, and we decided to work out a new name for the lead character.

  I thought London would be a good surname for him, perhaps as a nod to Ray Milland’s background, and Knox thought London was probably OK. I said Roy seemed all right, and Knox said the name Roy sounded to him like all the shit-kicking hillbilly sergeants who gave him a hard time in basic training. Oh, I said. How about Ed? He said Ed was OK.

  He had a plot point or two as well, and I went home—I was living on West Sixty-ninth Street at the time—and tweaked the book enough to make everybody happy. I called it Coward’s Kiss. When it came out it bore the title Death Pulls a Doublecross. You call that a title? Phooey, I say.

  So I’d sold twice to Gold Medal by aiming at lower markets. My second book was about a private eye, and if a private eye can be in one book he can be in a dozen, can’t he? Anthony Boucher (yes, the Anthony Boucher) gave Death Pulls a Doublecross a decent review in the New York Times Book Review. (Yes, the NYTBR.) Not a screaming rave, but an OK review. So the next thing to do was write another book about Ed London, right?

  I never did.

  You know, I just now learned that Ray Milland wasn’t English after all. He was Welsh, born in the town of Neath. If I’d known that, Ed London might have been Ed Cardiff instead. Do you suppo
se that would have made it easier for me to write a second book?

  Probably not.

  God knows I tried. I wrote a few chapters of something I was going to call Dusty Death, but nothing happened. I made another attempt. And on three occasions I wrote magazine novelettes starring Ed London, published in one of the man’s magazines. Not of the Playboy ilk, but Argosy or True magazine wannabes. Those novelettes got collected just a few years ago as The Lost Cases of Ed London, published by the small press of Crippen & Landru, and were later folded into the HarperCollins volume, One Night Stands and Lost Weekends.

  But before I wrote the novelettes, before I wrote anything else, I had to write that book for Belmont.

  But that’s another story, and you can read about it in the afterword for the book in question, You Could Call It Murder. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoyed Coward’s Kiss, but not so much that you’ll be disappointed if I never write a sequel.

  —Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  Lawrence Block ([email protected]) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

  A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK

  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.