Coward's Kiss (5 page)

“It’s a hard sight to forget.”

“That’s what I mean. When I read the paper . . . but I couldn’t believe you stripped her, not really. I didn’t think you would do something like that. It’s sort of sacrilegious, taking the clothes from a dead body.” He paused for breath. “Then I thought some sex fiend found her in the park before the police got there. Or that the papers were trying to make livelier copy out of it. Hell, I wasn’t sure what to think. But if she was nude when you found her——”

I finished the sentence for him. “Then somebody got there after you left and before I arrived. That’s what happened. Some clown cleaned her apartment from floor to ceiling, took off her clothes and sneaked off into the night.”

“But why?”

I couldn’t answer that one.

“It’s senseless,” he exploded. “Nothing makes any sense. Killing Sheila didn’t make any sense and neither does any of the rest of it. It’s crazy.”

He looked ready to blow up. I said: “Physician, heal thyself,” and pointed to the bottle of Courvoisier. He poured us each a shot of brandy and we drank it.

I got out of there as fast as I could, but first I made him give me the only picture he had of the dead girl. I wanted to show it to Maddy. I put it in my wallet, said something cheerful to him, and left him to his patients.

The sallow little man peered myopically at me over his ‘New Yorker,’ the expectant mother put her magazine on her ample belly, and all of them looked happy as hell to see me. I said good-bye to the starched receptionist and walked out of the building.

The sun was shining and the air was clear and clean enough to breathe. I filled my lungs and headed for home. It was walking weather and I was glad—I was sick of sitting around waiting for things to happen. The walk gave me something to do, anyway. I winked at pretty girls and one or two of them even smiled back.

I didn’t notice anybody following me. But that may have been because I didn’t look.

Maybe I should have.

I didn’t hear the bullet until it passed me.

I was in my building, on the way up the stairs. When I was a few steps from the landing there was a loud noise behind me. I was already falling on my face when the bullet buried itself in the wall. Plaster flew at my face.

Instinct said: Stay still, don’t move. Instinct gave bad advice. Whoever he was, he was behind me and he was shooting at me and I made a hell of a good target.

But instinct’s got a compelling voice. By the time I managed to spin around—it’s tricky when you’re on your hands and knees on a staircase—he was gone. A door closed behind him and I looked at nothing.

“Mr. London?”

I looked up. Mrs. Glendower was leaning a gray head over the railing. Her expression was mildly puzzled.

“That wasn’t a gunshot, was it? Or didn’t you hear the noise?”

I got straightened out on my feet and tried to look sheepish. “Just a truck backfiring,” I told her.

“It frightened me, Mr. London.”

I managed to grin. “You’re not the only one, Mrs. Glendower. It startled me so badly I nearly fell over. I’ve been nervous lately.”

That was the perfect explanation as far as Mrs. Glendower was concerned. She smiled vaguely and pleasantly. Then she went away.

I went into my apartment and had a shot of cognac, then I went back into the hallway and looked at the hole in the wall. When I sighted from the bullet hole to the doorway I knew the gunman hadn’t been trying to kill me at all. The bullet was way out of line. He must have missed me by five feet.

He could have been a lousy shot. But he didn’t even make a second try—just one shot and away he went.

So it was a warning. A little message from the guy on the phone, the one with the raspy voice.

Fine.

I found a can of spackling paste in a drawer and patched up the hole in the wall, giving the bullet a permanent home. I let the paste dry, which didn’t take long, and dabbed a little paint over it. It wasn’t a perfect match but I didn’t figure everybody in the world was going to come staring at my wall.

Then I went back inside and sat down.

It was an algebraic equation with too many unknowns. X was the killer, the voice on the phone. He shot the girl, searched the apartment and ran. Then Jack came in, looked around and ran. Then somebody else came, rearranged things, stripped the girl and ran. Then I came, carted off the body—and now everything was happening.

It didn’t add up. And, like an algebraic equation, it wouldn’t add up. Not until I knew all the unknowns.

In the meantime I had nothing to do, no place to go. There was a bullet in the wall outside my door and it wasn’t worth the trouble to dig it out. What the hell was it going to prove? It might be a .32 or .38 slug. So what? I couldn’t find out anything one way or the other, not that way.

So to hell with it.

I took a book from the bookcase and sat down with it. I read three pages, looked up suddenly and realized I didn’t remember a word that I’d read. I put the book back on the shelf and poured more cognac. Nothing was working out.

And I was tied in deep. Jack was clear—I’d seen to that, rushing around like a goddam hero. But I was hanging by my thumbs. The bastard who shot a hole in Sheila knew who I was and where I lived and I didn’t know a thing about him. And he had some damn fool idea that I had a package that he wanted. I was supposed to sell it to him.

There was only one catch. I didn’t have it. I didn’t even know what the hell it was.

Which complicated things. Jack was free and clear—he could go back to his wife, back to my sister. He could pretend that everything was all right with the world.

I couldn’t.

I put music on the hi-fi and tried to listen to it. I hauled out my wallet and found the picture of Sheila Kane that Jack had given me. It was just a snapshot, probably taken with a box camera. The background—trees and open space—was out of focus. But the background wasn’t important when you saw the girl.

Her long blonde hair was caught up in a pony tail. Her head was thrown back, her eyes bright. She was laughing. She wore a bulky turtle-neck sweater and a loose plaid skirt and she looked like the queen of the homecoming game.

I studied the picture and remembered everything Jack Enright had told me about her. I tried to imagine the kind of girl she must have been, tried to mesh that image with the image I got from the photograph. I came up with a person.

Poor Sheila, I kept thinking. Poor, poor Sheila.

“Poor Ed.”

I looked across the table at Maddy Parson’s pretty face. She was grinning at me over the brim of her second Daiquiri. Her eyes were sparkling. The two drinks had her high as a Chinese kite.

“Poor Ed,” she said again. “You didn’t know you’d get stuck for a dinner like this one. This is going to run you twenty dollars before we get out of here.”

“It’s worth it.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I hope you have some darn good questions to ask.”

“I hope you know the answers.”

We were at McGraw’s on Forty-fifth near Third. There are girls who prefer the haute cuisine of French cookery; there are girls who will go anyplace to eat as long as it’s fashionable; there are girls who like to sample out-of-the-way restaurants where not even the waiter can understand the menu. And there are still other girls—a few of them, anyhow—who like lean red meat and plenty of it with a big baked potato on the side. Maddy Parson belonged in the last group and that explains our presence at McGraw’s.

McGraw’s is a steakhouse. Which is a little like saying that the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground. It’s true enough but it doesn’t tell the whole story. McGraw’s is an institution.

The front window facing out on Forty-fifth Street opens on a cold room where hunks of steak hang and ripen. In the dining room the decor is unobtrusive nineteenth-century American male—heavy oak panelling, a thick wine-red carpet, massive leather chairs. They don’t have a menu. All you do is tell your white-haired waiter how you want your sirloin and what you’re drinking with it. If you don’t order your meat rare he looks unhappy. We didn’t disappoint the old gentleman.

“It’s been a long time,” Madeleine Parson was saying. “Almost too long. I don’t know where to start talking.”

“Start with yourself.”

She rolled her eyes. “An actor’s lot is not a happy one. Nor is an actress’. I almost took a job, Ed. Can you imagine that? Not even a semi-theatrical job that lets you kid yourself along. All the girls do that. They sell tickets in a box office or follow a producer around and sharpen his pencils for him and think they’re learning the business from the ground up. But I almost took a job selling hats. Can you imagine that? I thought to myself how easy it would be, just sell hats and earn a steady $72.50 a week before taxes and move up gradually, maybe be a buyer in time, and——”

She saw the expression on my face. Her eyes danced and she laughed. “Then my agent called me and told me Schwerner was auditioning for ‘Love Among The Falling Stars’ and I stuffed my mental hats into a mental hatbox and went away singing. I didn’t get the part. I read miserably and it wasn’t right for me to begin with. But I forgot all about selling hats.”

“You’ll get your break, Maddy.”

“Of course I will. And I’ll need it, Ed. I came to New York ready to take Broadway by storm. I was the best damn actress in the country and it was only a question of time before the rest of the world figured it out for themselves. And I was lousy, Ed. I’m not too good even now. Hayes and Cornell have nothing to worry about.”

Her eyes were challenging. “And suppose I don’t get that damn break, Ed? Then what do I do? Sell hats?”

I shook my head. “Meet some lucky guy and marry him. Live in a house and make babies. It’s better than selling hats.”

“Uh-huh.” A smile that was not altogether happy spread slowly over her face. “It’s funny, Ed. I had an offer not long ago.”

“That’s not funny. You should get lots of offers.”

“This one was different. He wasn’t a jerk or a square or a Philistine. He was a hell of a nice guy. Thirty-six years old, associate editor at a properly respectable publishing house, with a yen to buy one of those wonderful stone houses in Bucks County and fill it with children. He was a good talker and a good listener and good in bed. God, I’m talking like a successful actress, telling one man what another one’s like in bed. I hate me when I talk like that. But you know what I’m driving at, Ed. He was nice. I think you would have liked him—I know I did, and he wanted me to marry him.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Nope.”

“How come?”

She closed her eyes. “I thought about being married,” she said softly. “And I thought about waking up every single morning with somebody else in bed with me. And I thought maybe one day I’d want to take a trip somewhere, or maybe I’d get sick of the house and want to live someplace else, or I’d meet some guy and get an itch to go out with him and find out what he was like. And I thought that I’d have to pass up all these things, and how it would be, being tied to one man and one home and one way of life that you live with until you die. So much freedom out the window, so much responsibility around your neck like the albatross in that poem everybody had to read in the tenth grade. And I thought, God, you’d have to love somebody a hell of a lot to put up with such a load of crap. And I just didn’t love him that much. I loved him, but not enough.”

I didn’t say anything. The oval face was a mask now. The eyes were opaque. A good actress can conceal emotions, just as she can portray them.

“So here I am,” she said. “Free and white and twenty-seven. That’s not so young any more, Ed. Pretty soon some other nice guy’ll ask me to follow him to the nearest altar and I won’t love him enough either and it won’t be so important any more and I’ll say yes. I’m a tragic figure, Ed. Too old to play games and too young to admit it. It’s a hell of a thing.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “Here come the steaks,” she said. “Now we can stop talking.”

The steaks came and we stopped talking. Conversation is the wrong accompaniment to a meal at McGraw’s. The meat has to be approached quietly, reverently. Talk comes later. We attacked the steaks like tigers. They were black with charcoal on the outside and raw in the middle and nothing ever tasted better.

Afterward she had Drambuie and I had cognac. I leaned forward to light her cigarette, then put the match to my pipe. I watched her draw the smoke deep into her lungs and let it escape slowly between slightly parted lips. She used very little lipstick. Her shade was a very dark red.

“What time is it, Ed?”

“A few minutes past nine.”

“God! That late?”

“I didn’t pick you up until quarter of seven. It took us another fifteen minutes to get out of your apartment. We had to wait for a table. Two drinks before dinner, a leisurely meal——”

“The time flew.” She sighed. “Well, I suppose it’s time for the business side of things. You have questions to ask me, sir. Want to ask them here or go elsewhere?”

“Elsewhere sounds good,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”

“Obviously a very exclusive and most expensive cafe in the east Fifties, of course. That’s what I should suggest. But I’m going to be a considerate young lady and a forward wench at the same time. Let’s go back to my apartment.”

“Fine.”

“After all,” she said, “you’ve been there before.”

She lived in a third-floor loft on West Twenty-fourth just east of Eighth. Her building had been condemned years ago and it wasn’t legal to live there, but Maddy and the landlord had taken care of all that. According to the lease, she used the loft to give acting lessons and didn’t live there at all. The landlord paid the trustworthy firemen so much a month and everybody was happy. Maddy would go on living there until the building came down around her little ears.

A rusty machine shop took up the ground floor of the old brick building. An ancient palmist and crystal-gazer named Madame Sindra held court on the second floor. We climbed to the third floor on an unlit and shaky wooden staircase. I stood by while Maddy unlocked the door.

The apartment inside looked as though it belonged in a different building in a different part of town. The living room was huge, with a false fireplace along one wall and a massive studio couch on the other. All the furniture was expensive-looking, but Maddy had picked it up, a little at a time, at the University Place auction houses and she made a few dollars go a long way. There were a few bookcases, all of them crammed with paperbacks and covered with Moselle bottles topped with candle-drippings.