Coward's Kiss (2 page)

The rain had eased up, but the night was as dark as ever. Streetlights tried to brighten things and failed. I carried the rug through the gloom to the car. It went in the back seat. I went in the front seat and the car went to Fifth Avenue, then uptown to Central Park. Traffic was even thinner now. I checked the mirror now and then to make sure nobody was following me. Nobody was.

Central Park is an oasis in a desert or a wilderness in the middle of a jungle, depending on how you look at it. I drove through it, left the wide roads for the twisting lanes, let the Chevy follow its nose. I found a spot and pulled off onto the grass at the side of the road. I killed the engine and climbed out onto grass that was soft and wet from all that rain. The air was so fresh and clean that it didn’t seem like New York at all.

That much was good. If she had to lie dead, at least she should do so in a fresh clean spot. But it was a shame about the rain. There was something very indecent about spilling her out nude and dead in the dampness. There was something. . . .

I opened the back door and picked up the rug again, and by this time I was beginning to feel like an Armenian delivery boy. I held onto one end of the rug and let it spill out. The rug unwound neatly and what was left of Sheila Kane hit the ground, rolled over twice and came to rest face down on the grass.

There was a flashlight in the Chevy’s glove compartment. I got it; took a last look at the girl. The bullet hadn’t lodged in her head. There was a small and neatly rounded hole in the back of her head where it had made its exit. I thought about modern police methods and scientific laboratory techniques and decided they would figure out that she had been killed by a white male between thirty and thirty-two years of age, wearing a blue pea jacket and favoring his right foot when he walked. Science is wonderful. All I could tell from the hole was that the killer had picked up the bullet from the apartment, and I’d guessed that all along.

I turned off the flashlight. I rolled up the damned rug and tossed it back in the car, feeling very sick of rugs and corpses, of the smell of Central Park and of the smell of death. I thought about Sheila Kane, shrouded in darkness in tall wet grass. I thought about Newton’s law of inertia. Bodies at rest were supposed to remain at rest, but the dead girl had broken that law. She wasn’t supposed to be moving around. And how long would it be—before they let her rest? A quick ride to the morgue. An autopsy. And then another ride, slow and sedate, and a final home under the ground.

I got back into the Chevy, put it in low and got the hell out of Central Park. I dropped the rug at my apartment—there was no point shoving it in the garage kid’s nose—and ran the car back to the garage. I turned it over to Adenoids and Pimples.

“Crazy night,” he told me.

“Crazy?”

“That’s where it’s at.” He shifted a wad of gum from one side of his mouth to the other, knocked ashes off a filter-tipped cigarette. He gave me a grin that he could have kept to himself.

“A night to get killed on,” he said. “That type night.”

I didn’t have an answer handy.

“Spooky-kooky, what I mean. Me, I’m happy. I live right, Mr. London. I don’t cut work until the sun comes up. Midnight to dawn, that’s my scene. I wouldn’t walk around on a night like this. I couldn’t make it.”

“I’m walking home.”

“Take a hack,” he told me. “You live far?”

“Not far.”

“You could get hit on the head. Knifed, even. How far do you live?”

“Around the corner,” I said. “I think I’ll chance it.”

“Ruck, anyway.”

I looked at him.

“Rotsa Ruck. Like they say in China.”

They don’t, but I wasn’t going to argue with him. I left him there and walked back to the apartment. Nobody knifed me and nobody hit me over the head, which wasn’t much of a surprise. I put my rug back in the hall where it belonged and sponged a few drops of caked blood from it. There were probably traces of blood in the thing but I wasn’t going to stay up nights worrying about them. Nobody would come to look at my rug. Because nobody would connect me with Sheila Kane. Because there was no connection.

Now it was time to relax, time to unwind. I found a pipe and stuffed tobacco into it. I lit it evenly all around and smoked. I poured cognac into a glass and sipped it. It was smooth and it went all the way down and left a pleasant glow in its path.

It was time to relax, but I couldn’t manage it. There was a picture that stayed in my mind—a picture of a nude blonde, dead and cold, all dolled up in stockings and garter belt, with her face shot up and her hair bloody, lying in the very middle of a room that was the essence of neatness and order.

An ugly picture. A hard one to forget and a hard one to think about.

But I managed to think about something else, finally. I managed to think about my sister, whose name is Kaye. A very nice person, my sister. A lovely woman. A sweet woman.

I thought about her for a few minutes. Then I thought about her husband. His name is Jack Enright.

TWO

HE had leaned on my doorbell around three that afternoon. I had been doing the Times crossword puzzle. I stopped trying to think of a twelve-letter word for ‘Son of Jocasta,’ put down the paper and went to answer the door. I pushed the buzzer to unlock the downstairs door, then waited in the hallway while he worked his way up a flight of stairs. He climbed quickly and he was panting before he hit the top.

Jack Enright. My sister’s husband. A tall man, forty-two or forty-three, with a reddish complexion and a little too much weight on a broad frame. A good handball player and a fair hand at squash, even though he didn’t look the part. Now he didn’t look the part at all.

His shoulders sagged like an antique mattress. His face was drawn, his eyes hollow. His tie was loose and his jacket was unbuttoned. He looked like hell.

He said: “I have to talk to you, Ed.”

“Something the matter?”

“Everything. I have to talk to you. I’m in trouble.”

I motioned him inside. He followed me into the living room like a domesticated zombie. I found a chair for him and he sat down heavily in it.

“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.”