Coward's Kiss Read online

  “Go ahead,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Ed . . .”

  He said my name and let it hang there. He didn’t even manage to close his mouth. I found a bottle of cognac and poured three fingers of it into an Old Fashioned glass. I gave it to him and he looked at it vacantly. I don’t think he saw it.

  “Drink it, Jack.”

  “It’s not four o’clock,” he said stupidly. “A gentleman never drinks before four o’clock. And it’s——”

  “It’s four o’clock somewhere,” I told him. “Go ahead and drink it, Jack.”

  He emptied the glass in a single swallow and I’m sure he never tasted it at all. Then he put down the glass and looked at me through empty eyes.

  “Is something wrong with Kaye?”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “She’s your wife and my sister. Why else would you come to me?”

  “Kaye’s fine,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with Kaye.”

  I waited.

  “I’m the one who needs some help, Ed. Badly.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  He looked away. “I suppose so,” he said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  The drink was helping but it had its work cut out for it. It unnerved me to see a steady guy like Jack Enright that badly shaken up. He’s a doctor—a very good one—a very successful one. He’s got a wife who loves him and two daughters who adore him. I’d always thought of him as a strong man, a Rock-of-Gibraltar type, for my not-too-strong sister to lean on. Now he was ready to fall apart at the seams.

  “Let’s have it, Jack.”

  He said: “You’ve got to help me.”

  “I have to hear about it first.”

  He sighed, nodded, reached for a cigarette. His hands were shaking but he managed to get it lit. He drew a lot of smoke into his lungs and blew it out in a long thin column. I watched his eyes narrow to focus on the end of the cigarette.

  “Fifty-first Street,” he said. “111 East Fifty-first Street. An apartment on the fourth floor.”

  I waited.

  “There’s a girl in there, Ed. A dead girl. Somebody shot her in the . . . in the face. At close range, I think. Most of her . . . most of her face is missing. Blown off.”

  He shuddered.

  “You didn’t——”

  “No!” His eyes screamed at me. “No, of course not. I didn’t kill her. That’s what you were going to ask, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. Why the hell else would you be so jumpy? You’re a doctor. You’ve seen death before.”

  “Not like this.”

  I picked up my pipe and crammed tobacco into the bowl. I took my time lighting up while he got ready to talk some more. By the time the pipe was lit he was off again.

  “I didn’t kill her, Ed. I discovered the body. It was . . . a shock. Opening the door. Walking inside. Looking around, not seeing her at first. She was on the floor, Ed. How often do you look at the floor when you walk into a room. I almost . . . almost fell on her. I looked down and there she was. She was lying on her back. I looked at her and saw her and she had a hole where her face was supposed to be.”

  I poured more brandy into his glass. He looked at it for a second or two. Then he tossed it off.

  “You called the police?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  I looked hard at him. “All right,” I said evenly. “You can stumble around for the next half hour and it won’t do either of us any good. Get to the point, Jack.”

  He looked at the rug. It’s a Bokhara, a much better oriental than the length of rug in the hallway. But Jack Enright isn’t especially interested in oriental rugs.

  He found this one fascinating now.

  “Who was she?”

  “Sheila Kane.”

  “And—?”

  “And I’ve been paying her rent for the past three months now,” he said. He was still looking at the rug. His voice was steady, the tone slightly defiant. “I’ve been paying her rent, and I’ve been buying her clothes and I’ve been giving her spending money. I’ve been keeping her, Ed. And now she’s dead.”

  He stopped talking. We both sat there and listened to the silence.

  He laughed. His laughter had no humor to it. “It happens to other men,” he said. “You’ve got a perfectly good marriage; you love your wife and she loves you. Then you listen to the song of the sirens. You meet a beautiful blonde. Why are they always blondes, Ed?”

  “Sheila Kane was a blonde?”

  “Sort of a dirty blonde originally. She tinted it. Her hair was all yellow-gold. She wore it long and it would cascade over her bare shoulders and——”

  He stopped for another sigh. “I didn’t kill her, Ed. God, I couldn’t kill anybody. I’m not a killer. And I don’t even own a damn gun. But I can’t call the police. Christ, you know what would happen. They’d have me on the carpet for hours with the bright lights in my eyes and the questions coming over and over. They’d work me six ways and backwards. They’d rake me over the coals.”

  “And then they’d let you go.”

  “And so would Kaye.” His eyes turned meek, helpless. “Your sister’s a wonderful woman, Ed. I love her. I don’t want to lose her.”

  “If you love her so much——”

  “Then why did I play around? I don’t know, Ed. God knows I don’t make a habit of it.”

  “Did you love this Sheila?”

  “No. Yes. Maybe . . . I don’t know.”

  That was a big help. “How did it start?”

  He hung his head. “I don’t know that either. It just happened, damn it. She came to my office one day. Just wandered in off the street, picked my name out of the yellow pages. She thought she was pregnant, wanted me to examine her.”

  “Was she?”

  “No. She’d missed a period or two and she was worried. Hell, it happens all the time. Just worrying can make a girl miss. I gave her an examination and told her she was all right. She wanted to be sure, asked me to run a test. I took a urine sample and told her I’d run it through the lab and give her a call. She said she didn’t have a phone, she’d be back in two days.”

  “And?”

  “And that was that. For the time being, anyway. The test went to the lab. It was negative, of course. She wasn’t pregnant. That’s what I told her when she came back.”

  I told him it was a funny way to start an affair.

  “I suppose so,” he said. He was getting steadier now, pulling himself back together again. It seemed to me that his adultery was nagging him more than the simple fact of the girl’s death. Now that it was out in the open, now that he’d let his hair down in front of me, he could start to relax a little.

  “She was broke, Ed. Couldn’t pay me. I told her the hell with it, she could pay me when she got the chance. Or not at all. I’ve got a rich practice. East Side clientele. I can afford to miss out on an occasional fifteen-dollar fee. But she seemed so bothered about it that I felt sorry for her. I took her to a decent restaurant and bought her a lunch. She was a kid in a candy store, Ed. She said she’d been eating all her meals in cafeterias.”

  I grimaced appropriately.

  “So that’s how it started, Ed. Silly, isn’t it? Affairs aren’t supposed to start with a pelvic examination.”

  “They can end with one,” I suggested.

  He didn’t laugh. “I guess I was just in the right mood for it, if you know what I mean. I was in a rut. The girls are growing up, Kaye has her women’s groups, my practice is so safe and secure that it’s duller than dishwater. I’ve got a good life and a good marriage and that’s that. So I decided I was missing something. Why do men climb mountains? Because they’re there. That’s the way I heard it.”

  “And that’s why you climbed Sheila Kane?”

  “Just about.” He lit another cigarette while I knocked the dottle out of my pipe. “I was a different person when I was with her, Ed. I was young and fresh and alive. I wasn’t the old man in a rut
. Hell, she had me pegged as some sort of romantic figure. I took her to a matinee or two on Broadway. I gave her books to read and records to listen to. This made me a God.”

  He drew on the cigarette. “It’s nice, being a God. Your sister sees me as I am. That’s the way a marriage has to be—firm understanding, genuine acceptance, all of that. But . . . oh, the hell with it. I’m a damned fool, Ed.”

  “You went with her for three months. Then what happened?”

  He looked at me.

  “Did she start angling for marriage?”

  “Oh,” he said. “No, nothing like that. I was coldblooded about it, Ed. I made up my mind that one word from her about marriage would mean it was time to walk out on her. You’ve got to understand that—I never stopped loving Kaye, never thought about a divorce. But Sheila was the perfect paramour, happy to sit in the shade and be there when I wanted her. It was almost terrifying, having that kind of hold over a person.”

  I nodded. “And now she’s dead.”

  “Now she’s dead.” He made the word sound colder than dry ice.

  “And you won’t call the police.”

  “Ed . . .”

  “Anonymously,” I suggested. “So they can look for the killer.”

  He was shaking his head so hard I thought he’d lose it. “I paid her rent,” he said. “I gave her checks; I spent plenty of time up at her apartment. Her neighbors would remember me and her landlord would recognize my name.”

  He was sweating now. He wiped sweat from his forehead with one hand. His eyes were angry and frightened at once.

  “So the police will find me, Ed. They’ll find me and they’ll drag me in. And then they’ll be sure I did it. That I killed her, that I found a gun somewhere and got rid of it somewhere. Isn’t that what they’ll say?”

  “Probably.”

  “And Kaye will find out,” he finished. “And you know what that will do to her.”

  I knew damn well what it would do to her. The marriage that seemed like a rut to Jack was Kaye’s whole life. She lived in a sweet little world where the sun was always shining, where charge accounts bloomed on every bush, where the worst peril was going down two doubled in an afternoon bridge session. Where her husband loved her, and loved her faithfully, and where God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

  “What do I do, Ed?”

  “Let’s turn that one around. What am I supposed to do for you, Jack?”

  “Help me.”

  “How?”

  He avoided my eyes. “Suppose I were a client,” he said. “Suppose I came to you and——”

  “I’d throw you out on your ear. Or call the cops. Or both.”

  “But I’m not a client. I’m you’re brother-in-law.”

  He went on talking but I wasn’t listening any more. Hell, if he was a client I had no problems. I turned him in and avoided being an accessory after the fact to murder. Because if I didn’t know him, if he weren’t my brother-in-law, I would have to figure him for the killer. He didn’t have a gun? A hundred dollars buys you an unregistered gun in half the pawnshops in New York. On every street corner there’s a sewer to toss it into when you’re done with it. So he didn’t have much of a case at all. A good prosecutor would tie him in Gordian knots.

  “She can’t be found at the apartment,” I said slowly. “Or they’ll connect the two of you. That’s how it boils down.”

  He blinked, then nodded.

  “Which means they can’t identify her at all,” I went on. “If they do, they trace her to the apartment. Then they trace her to you, all of which makes things difficult. Was she from New York?”

  He shook his head.

  “Know many people in town?”

  “Hardly anybody. But . . .”

  “Go on.”

  “I was just going to say that I wasn’t with her all the time. She could have had some other interests. We didn’t talk much about the time we spent apart.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know, Ed. I think she was trying to get into the theater. She never had a part, never talked about it. But I got the idea somewhere. She might know . . . might have known some theater people.”

  I said it was possible. “Still, the police would have a tough time making a positive identification. Not if she didn’t wind up in her own apartment. Her fingerprints probably aren’t on file anywhere. If she were found, say, in Central Park, she’d go as an unidentified victim. They might never find out her name, let alone yours. At any rate it would give you time to stall. Your checks would clear the bank and the landlord would forget your name.”

  “And the real killer——”

  “Would go scot free,” I finished for him. “Not necessarily. In the first place, you’re the real killer. No, hold on—I know you didn’t do it. But the police would stop looking once they hit you. They’d have enough circumstantial evidence to get an indictment without looking any farther. Meanwhile, the killer would cover his tracks.”

  I paused for breath. “This way they won’t have you on hand as a convenient dummy. They’ll have to start from scratch and they just might come up with the real killer.”

  He brightened visibly.

  “That’s not all. I’ll know things they won’t know. I’ll be able to run my own check on Sheila Kane. Maybe somebody had a damn good reason to shoot a hole in her head. I can look around, see what I can find out.”

  “Do you think——”

  “I don’t think much of anything, to tell you the truth. I don’t want your marriage to fall in. I don’t want Kaye to get hurt and I don’t want to see you tried for murder. So it looks as though I’ll have to move a body for you.”

  He got up from the chair and started to pace the floor. I watched him ball one hand into a fist and smack it into the palm of the other hand. He was still a collection of loose nerves but they were starting to tighten up again.

  I looked at him and tried to hate him. He married my sister and cheated on her and that ought to be cause for hatred. It didn’t work out that way. You can’t coin an ersatz double standard and apply it to brothers-in-law.

  He fell on his face for a pretty blonde; hell, I’d taken a few falls for the same type of thing myself. He was married and I wasn’t, but the state of matrimony doesn’t alter body chemistry. He was a guy in a jam and I had to help him.

  “Can I do anything, Ed?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll do it alone,” I told him. “Not now. Later this evening when it’s dark and the streets are empty. It’s chancey but I’ll take the chance. I’ll need a key, if you’ve got one handy.”

  He fished in a pocket and came up with a set of keys. I took them from him and set them on the coffee table.

  “Go on home,” I said. “Try to relax.”

  He nodded but I don’t think he heard me. “The hard part comes later,” he said. “When I realize that she’s really dead. Now she’s part of a mess that I’ve gotten myself into. But in a few hours she’ll turn back into a person. A person I knew well and cared a great deal about. And then it’s going to be tough. I’ll think about you picking her body up like a sack of flour and dumping her in the park and . . . I’m sorry. I’m going on and on like a damned fool.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “This’ll sound silly as hell, Ed. But ... be gentle with her, will you? She was a very nice person. You would have liked her, I think.”

  “Jack . . .”

  He brushed my hand away. “Hell with it,” he said. “I’m all right. Look, give me a ring tomorrow at the office if you get the chance. And be careful.”

  I walked him to the door. Then I went to the front window and watched him walk a few doors down the block to his big black Buick. He sat in it for a moment, then started the motor and drove away. I looked up at the clouds and watched them get darker.

  The cognac was gone. I filled the glass again and listened to words that went through my mind. ‘Be gentle with her, will you?’ Gentle. Roll her gen
tly in a rug and toss her gently in a car and drop her gently in the wet grass. And leave her there.

  It was a mess. A private detective doesn’t solve a crime by suppressing evidence. He doesn’t launch a murder investigation by transporting a body illegally. Instead he plays ball with the police, keeps his nose clean and collects his fees. That way he can pay too much rent for a floor-through apartment loaded with heavy furniture and Victorian charm. He can drive a convertible and smoke expensive tobacco and drink expensive cognac.

  I like my apartment and my car and my tobacco and my cognac. So I make a point of playing ball with cops and keeping a clean nose.

  Most of the time.

  But now I had a brother-in-law instead of a client and a mess instead of a case. That shot the rule book out the window. It gave me a dirty nose.

  I looked at my watch. It was four in the morning. And at four a gentleman can drink. It’s nice to be a gentleman. It puts you at peace with the world. And, although my glass was empty, there was plenty of cognac left in the bottle.

  When it was empty I went to sleep.

  THREE

  DAWN was a gray lady with red eyes and a cigarette cough. She shook me awake by the eyelids and hauled me out of bed. I called her nasty names, stumbled into the kitchen to boil water for coffee. I washed up, brushed my teeth and shaved. I spooned instant coffee into a cup and poured boiling water over it, then lit a cigarette and tried to convince myself that I was really awake.

  It was a hard selling-job. My mind was overflowing with blondes and they were all dead. There was a blonde with her face shot away, another blonde in stockings and garter belt in a surrealistic living room, a third blonde bundled snug as a corpse in a rug, a fourth blonde sprawled headlong in Central Park’s wet grass.

  I scalded my mouth with coffee, anesthetized it with cigarette smoke. It was time to start turning over flat rocks to find a killer and I didn’t know where the rocks were. Sheila Kane was dead and I had been her undertaker, but that was all I knew about the girl. She was blonde, she was dead, she had been Jack Enright’s mistress. Nothing more.