Coward's Kiss

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.”

  “What do I get if I sell?”

  “More than you get anywhere else.” He chuckled. “We can hand you a better deal. We got——”

  “An organization,” I said, tired of the game. “I know all about it. You told me.”

  He toughened up. “We hit the broad,” he said, his voice grating. “We can hit you the same way. It gets messy. You might as well be smart about it.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “We’ll be in touch, London. You know how they say it: Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

  The phone clicked in my ear.

  I was getting pretty damned sick of holding a dead phone in my hand. I put it down hard, stuck my pipe in my mouth. It had gone dead. I scratched a match for it and found a chair to sit in.

  Things were taking their own kind of shape. I had to know a motive and I had to know a killer, and in a cockeyed way I now knew both. The motive was whatever my mystery man wanted me to hand over to him. The killer was my mystery man. All I had to do was fill in the blanks.

  What the hell was the stuff? Something worth money, but something you needed the right connections to handle properly. It could be dope or it could be spy secrets or it could be blackmail information or it could be. . . .

  To hell with it. It could be anything.

  There was no way to get a line on the package, no way to figure out why Sheila Kane had a hole in her head. There was no way to dope out the name and face that went with the raspy voice I’d talked to, no way to figure out how he’d connected me with Sheila. I might get something from Enright, but I wasn’t seeing him until two- thirty and I had a few hours to kill. The only open avenue of approach was Sheila herself . . . what had Jack told me about her?

  Damned little. She wasn’t from New York, and if she knew a soul in town Jack didn’t know about it. But she might have had something to do with the theater. Maybe.

  And that much would fit in with the young-and-almost-innocent small-town girl on the loose in the big city. That type is drawn to the grease paint circuit like moths to a flame.

  Not Broadway, not the way I saw it. Not the bright lights and the high-priced tickets. Sheila would have been more likely to have made her small inroads on the off-Broadway scene, where Equity minimum is a hot $45 a week and the ars comes gratis artist.

  Which meant I should call Maddy Parson.

  I had to look her number up in my notebook—it had been a long time. Then I picked up the damned phone again and dialed a Chelsea number. While the phone rang three times I thought about Madeleine Parson, a small and slender brunette with the kind of oval face and long neck that Modigliani would have loved to paint. Not a pretty girl by Hollywood’s silly standards. A very beautiful one by mine.

  An actress. An undiscovered thing who earned her forty-five bucks a week when she was lucky enough to catch a part and who prayed that whatever turkey she was in would run twenty weeks to put her in line for unemployment insurance when it finally gave up the ghost and folded. A girl who loved the theater with a capital T; a girl who waited for the one big break and who had fun while she waited. Not a Bohemian; not a fraud. An actress.

  She answered midway through the fourth ring. Her hello was heartbreakingly hopef
ul.

  “Relax,” I told her. “Not an agent, not a producer, not a director. Just a dilettante.”

  “Ed! Ed London!” She sounded delighted. But that’s the trouble with theater people. They’re on stage twenty-four hours a day. It’s hard to tell what’s real.

  “Are you working these days, Maddy?”

  “Are you dreaming, Ed? I’ve had nibbles. Grinnell was going to cast me for the Agatha part in ‘A Sound of Distant Drums’ but the angel decided that oil stocks looked better than off-Broadway ventures. Then I ran second in the last three auditions. But they don’t pay off for second place.”

  “Then you’re free tonight?”

  “As the air we breathe. Why?”

  “I’d like to see you. I’ll buy you a dinner and we’ll talk far into the night. Sound good?”

  “Sounds too good,” she said. “So good there’s a catch in it somewhere. Is this purely pleasure or is there some business on the agenda?”

  I found myself smiling. “A little business, Maddy. We’ll play questions and answers.”

  “I thought we would.”

  “No good?”

  I could see her faking a pout into the telephone. “Well,” she said, “I’d like to think you want to see me for my charm and beauty alone. But I don’t really mind. I’ll make you pay dearly for my company, sirrah. I’ll force you to buy me a very expensive steak with at least two cocktails beforehand. To teach you a lesson.”

  “It’s deductible. Seven o’clock all right?”

  “I’ll be too hungry by then! Make it six-thirty?”

  We made it six-thirty. I told her I’d pick her up, then hung up and got out of the apartment. All that talk about steak had me hungry. I went down the block for a belated breakfast.

  The air was warm outside and the waitress at the little restaurant was cheerful. I had shirred eggs and chicken livers with two cups of coffee. Real coffee, not instant. It was so good I almost forgot about the dead girl I’d dropped in Central Park and the raspy-voiced man who wanted to kill me.

  Jack Enright’s office was on Park Avenue at the corner of Eighty-eighth. A towering brick building. The liveried doorman opened my cab door, then hurried to yank open the building door for me. I walked straight to Jack’s office on the first floor in the rear. I knew the way.

  The receptionist looked as though someone had starched her to match her bright white uniform. She smiled at me without showing a single tooth and asked me who I was. I told her.

  She repeated my name twice to commit it to memory. Then she got up from a blonde free-form desk and vanished through a heavy windowless door. I stood by her desk and studied the glut of patients waiting for the doctor. A sallow little man squinted through bifocals at the ‘New Yorker.’ Appropriately, a pregnant young woman had her nose buried in ‘Parent’s Magazine.’ Four or five others sat around in the overstuffed chairs and stared at each other and at me. Their stares were pure envy when the woman in white came back and announced that the great man would see me.

  I went through the door she pointed at, walked down a little hallway to Jack’s private office. He was sitting behind a massive leather-topped wooden desk. Bookshelves which held medical texts and a smattering of classics lined the walls. There was a set of Trollope bound in morocco and a good Dickens in buckram.

  A chair waited for me at the side of the desk. A pony of brandy was on the desk-top in front of the chair.

  He said: “Courvoisier. Is it all right?”

  It was more than all right. I took a sip and felt the taste buds on my tongue enjoying themselves.

  “Well?”

  I set down the glass and shrugged. “You’re pretty well out of it,” I said. “For the time being they’ve got nothing to tie you in.”

  “Thank God.”

  “But not completely out of it. As long as the killer’s free, there’s a chance that you’ll get dragged into the picture. The police won’t let go of it for awhile. The papers are playing with it. I saw a copy of the Post on the way over. The early edition. A sex angle, a pretty girl, a shooting-and-dumping. It makes nice copy.”

  He nodded. “And you’re going to look for the murderer?”

  “I have to.” I started to tell him I’d spoken to the killer, then changed my mind. “I came here to ask you some questions, Jack. I need a lot of answers.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything you know. Everything, whether it seems important to you or not. People she knew, places she went to, anything she ever mentioned or did that’ll give me a place to start digging. Whatever it is, I want to know about it.”

  I fished a pipe out of one pocket and a tobacco pouch from another. While I filled and lit the pipe he sat at his desk and thought. He ran the fingers of one hand through his dark hair. He drummed the leather desk-top with the fingers of the other hand. I shook out my match and dropped it into a heavy brass ashtray. He looked down at the match, then back at me.

  “There’s not a hell of a lot to tell, Ed. I’ve been trying to figure out how I could have been so damned close to a girl and know so little about her. She was from some little town in the sticks. Pennsylvania, I think. Maybe Ohio. I don’t remember. She never mentioned her parents. If she had any brothers or sisters I never heard about them.”

  “Anything about the town?”

  “Not a thing. That’s how it went, Ed . . . when she was with me she was a girl without a past. She acted as if . . . as if she hadn’t existed until we met.”

  I looked at him. “Isn’t that a little romantic?”

  “You know what I mean. She never mentioned anything that happened before we started our . . . affair. Here’s an example—she came to me thinking she was pregnant. But she never mentioned any other man, or that there had been other men. Sometimes I felt I was only seeing a small part of her.”

  “The part she wanted you to see?”

  “Maybe. She was like an iceberg. I saw the part above the water line.”

  I drew on the pipe, sipped more of the cognac. “Then let’s forget her past,” I said. “She’s what you said. A girl without a past.”

  “And without a future. Ed——”

  He was loosening up. “Steady,” I said. “Let’s take it from another angle. She must have had some friends in town, a guy or a girl she saw when you weren’t around. And she couldn’t have spent twenty-four hours a day in the apartment.”

  “You’re probably right, but——”

  “You mentioned something about show business. Was she looking for a part in a play? Hungry for bright lights?”

  “I don’t think so.” He paused. “It was just an impression I got, Ed. Something in the way she talked and acted. Nothing concrete, nothing you could put your finger on. Just a vague notion, that’s all.”

  “Then she didn’t talk about it?”

  “Not directly.”

  I was getting tired of it. “Damn it, what in hell did you talk about? You didn’t discuss past or present or future. You didn’t talk about her friends or her family or anything at all. Did you spend every damn minute in the hay?”

  His mouth fell open and his face turned redder than blood. He looked as though he’d been kicked in the stomach.

  “I’m sorry,” I said honestly. “It came out wrong.”

  He nodded very slowly. “We talked,” he said. “We talked about art and literature and the state of the universe. We had deep philosophical discussions that would have fit in perfectly in a Village coffee house. I could tell you a lot about her, Ed. She’s an interesting person. Was an interesting person. It’s hard to keep the tenses straight, hard to remember that she’s dead.”

  He got up and came out from behind the desk. He started walking around the office, clenching and unclenching his fingers, pacing like a lion in a tiny cage. I didn’t say anything.

  “She preferred Brahms to Wagner and Mozart to Haydn. She didn’t like stereo because you have to sit in one spot to listen to it and she likes—liked—to mov
e around. She wasn’t religious exactly but she believed in God. A vague God who created the universe and then let it run by itself. She preferred long novels to short ones because once she got interested in a set of characters she wanted to spend some time with them.”

  He put out one cigarette and lit another. “She liked the color red,” he went on. “One time I bought her a loud red-plaid bathrobe and she loved to lounge around the apartment in it. She liked good food—she was a hopeless cook but she liked to fool around in the kitchen. One night she broiled steaks for the two of us and we opened a bottle of ’57 Beaujolais and ate by candlelight. I can tell you a million things like that, Ed. Nothing about her past, nothing about what she did or who she did it with. But I could fill volumes with the sort of person she was.”

  There was nothing to say because he couldn’t have heard me. He was wrapped up in memories of a girl he would never see again, a girl he had loved. I wondered how he could be the kind of person he was, able to turn emotions on and off so easily. From Devoted Husband to Ardent Lover in nothing flat, and back again. He said he loved Kaye and I believed him. And I believed he loved Sheila.

  “Let’s try another angle,” I suggested. “I know you don’t want to hash over it. But let’s so back to the apartment. Yesterday, when you found the body.”

  “She was dead.” His voice was empty. “That’s all . . . she was dead.”

  “I mean——”

  A long sigh. “I know what you mean. Hell, what’s the point? You saw everything I saw. You were there, weren’t you? What more is there to say?”

  “We saw it through different eyes. You may have caught something that I missed.”

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t see much of anything, Ed. Just her, dead. Everything was a mess and she was in the middle of it. I looked at the apartment and wondered what cyclone had hit it. I looked at her and I felt sick. I ran like a bat out of hell and went straight to you and . . . what’s the matter?”

  “The apartment,” I snapped at him. “You said it was messy.”

  He looked at me strangely. “Sure,” he said. “Hell, you saw it. Chairs knocked over, papers all over the floor—either she put up a fight or the bastard who killed her turned the place upside-down. You must have . . . what’s wrong? Why are you staring like that?”