Coward's Kiss (3 page)

“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 gently 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.

So Jack was the logical place to start. There were things I had to know and he could fill me in. I wondered how much he had left out, how much he had lied, how much he had forgotten.

And how much he had never known in the first place.

I turned the burner on under the water and dumped more instant coffee into the cup. The water boiled and I made more coffee. I was stirring it when the phone rang.

It was Jack.

“Did you—?”

“Everything’s all right,” I told him. “You can relax now. It’s all taken care of.”

His breath came like a tire blowing out. His words followed it just as fast. “I don’t know how to thank you, Ed. You sure as hell saved my bacon. We’ll have to get together. . .”

“That’s an understatement.”

He hesitated and I knew why. In the Age of the Wiretap the telephone’s an instrument of torture. It’s like talking with an extra person in the room. I looked around for a better way to phrase things.

“I’ve been having trouble with my back,” I said. “Been planning to drop by. Think you can fit me in sometime this afternoon?”

“Just a minute.”

I waited. He came back, his tone easy, his manner professional now. “I’m all booked up but I can squeeze you in, Ed. Make it around two-thirty. Good enough?”

I looked at the clock. It was a few minutes after ten. I’d be seeing him in four and a half hours.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll see you then. Take it easy, Jack.”

He told me he would, mumbled something pleasant, and rang off. I stood there for a second or two with the phone in my hand, looking at the receiver and waiting for it to start talking all by itself.

Then I cradled it and went back to my coffee.

The
Times
had what story there was but you had to look hard to find it. In New York they don’t stick an unidentified corpse on the front page. There are too many bodies floating around for them to do that. The tabloids might have found room for Shelia on page three or four, but the
Times
was too high-minded. They printed the full texts of speeches by Khrushchev and Castro and Adenauer and my blonde didn’t even make the first section. I found her on the second page from the end under two decks of sedate eighteen-point type.

GIRL FOUND DEAD
IN CENTRAL PARK

It went on from there, straight and cold and to the point. The body of a young woman in her late teens or early twenties had been found partially nude and shot to death on the eastern edge of Central Park near 91st Street. A preliminary medical examination disclosed that the girl had not been sexually attacked and that the fatal shot had been fired at relatively close range. The slug had not been recovered, but police guessed it had come from a .32 or .38-calibre handgun. Police theorized the victim had been killed elsewhere and then transported to the park, where she was found by a night laborer on his way home from work.

There were a few more lines but they didn’t have anything vital to say. I killed time thumbing through the rest of the paper, reading the world news and the national news and the local news, filling myself with vital information. Asian cholera was at epidemic strength in northern India. Reform Democrats were pushing for the overthrow of Tammany Hall. A military junta had ousted the government of El Salvador; Jersey Standard was off an eighth of a point; Telephone was up three-eighths, Polaroid down five and a half. An obscure play by Strindberg had been exhumed for presentation off-Broadway and the critics had cremated it.

At ten-thirty I folded the paper and stuck it in a wastebasket. I took a shower and got dressed. This made me officially awake, so I filled a pipe with tobacco and fit it.

And the phone rang.

I picked up the receiver and said hello to the mouthpiece. That was all I had a chance to say. The voice that bounced back at me was low and raspy. It was thick heavy New York with echoes of Brownsville or Mulberry Street beneath it.

“This London? Listen good. You got the stuff and we want it. We’re not playing games.”

I asked him what the hell he was talking about.

His laugh was short and unpleasant. “Play it anyway you want, London. I know where you been and what you picked up. If you got a price, fine. It’s reasonable and we pay it.”

“Who is this, anyway?”

No laughter this time. “Don’t play hard to get, London. You got a reputation as a smart boy so be smart. You’re just a private eye, smart or stupid. You’re on your own. We got an organization. We can find things out and we can get things done. We know you were at the broad’s apartment. We know you picked her up and dumped her. Jesus, you think you’re playing tag with amateurs? We can go hard or soft, baby. You don’t want to be too cute. You can get paid nice or you can get hit in the head. Anyway you want it, it’s up to you.”