Coward's Kiss

by Lawrence Block

  “Why?”

  “Because I think I can pry a little more out of him. The girl must have been nervous as all hell just after she pulled the rug out from under Bannister. She may have dropped a hint or two about the briefcase.”

  “But he said——”

  “I know what he said. Memory’s a tricky proposition. I’m going to try him on Armin’s theory about the apartment, then on the briefcase. He may be able to remember a little more now. His big concern now is keeping himself in the clear and preserving the harmony of his happy home. His memory might work better now that he’s had a day or two to cool off.”

  She took my pipe from my mouth and placed it in an ashtray. “Speaking of which,” she cooed, “it’s time for you to cool yourself off. You’ve been through the wringer today, Ed. Drink up your brandy and we’ll go to bed.”

  I leered lecherously.

  “To sleep,” she said. “Not to bed. To sleep.”

  I finished the brandy.

  Her bed was soft and welcome, the sheets cool and clean. I let my head sink into the pillow and opened my eyes to look at darkness. Water was running in the bathroom. I pictured her washing her face, brushing her teeth, drying herself with a towel.

  Pretty pictures.

  The bedroom door opened inward. The light was behind her and I saw her slender body silhouetted in the door frame. She touched a switch and the light died. She came into the room, closed the door behind her. I could barely see her in the darkness.

  “Ed?”

  I didn’t answer her.

  I heard a nightgown rustle. She lifted the covers on her side of the bed and slid under them. “Goodnight, Ed,” she whispered. “Sleep well. I’ll make breakfast for you in the morning, Ed.”

  I still didn’t say anything. I heard her breathing beside me, sensed the sweet warmth of her body. I remembered that body, remembered the night before.

  I reached for her.

  For an instant she gasped, surprised. Then my mouth found hers and we kissed. I took her shoulders in my hands and felt her body begin to tremble.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Ed. Ed, we can’t, not tonight, Ed. You’re all tired and all hurt and we can’t. Ed——”

  I ran a hand over her body, all clean and soft and warm through the sheer nightgown.

  “We can’t, Ed. Ed, darling, we can’t, I want to, I want to but we can’t.”

  I put my face to her cheek and breathed the fragrance of her hair. I kissed her again and heard her sigh.

  “We can’t,” she said. “We can’t we can’t we can’t we can’t—”

  I drew her body very close to mine. I whispered softly into her ear.

  “We can,” I said. “And we will.”

  We did.

  She amazed me in the morning. She scrambled eggs and fried bacon and toasted rye bread, and she didn’t even try to talk to me until I was working on my second cup of strong black coffee. I had never known a woman could behave so magnificently in the morning, or look so lovely. I told her this and she beamed at me.

  “The phone,” she said. “You were going to call Enright.”

  I picked up the receiver and dialed his number. A female voice found out who I was and told me to hold the line. I did. Then Jack picked up the phone.

  “Ed, Jack. I’ve got to talk to you. Important.”

  He said: “Oh, Christ.” Then he didn’t say anything for a minute or two. A juvenile voice wailed unhappily in the background. “I’m busy as all hell right now, Ed. You at home? I’ll call you as soon as I get a free moment.”

  I told him where I was and he took down the number. “Stay there,” he said. “I may be a while. Bye, Ed.”

  I told Maddy he’d be calling back. We cleared off the table. She washed the dishes and I dried them. Then we sat around waiting for the phone to ring, with the whole scene so damned domestic that I couldn’t stand it. Finally the phone came through for me and I stood up to answer it.

  “It might be for me,” she said. “I’ll take it.”

  I was already at the phone.

  “Please,” she said. “You’ll compromise me.”

  “You’ve already been compromised. And after the way you kept saying we couldn’t. You were wrong.”

  “So you’re Superman. Now . . . hey, let go of me, you oaf! It’s the middle of the murky morning and the phone’s ringing. Let go!”

  I got out of the way. She answered the phone while I stood by, waiting for her to hand it to me when Jack identified himself. This didn’t happen.

  The phone was for her and I listened while she talked to somebody named Maury. She spent most of her time listening, tossing in an occasional uh-huh. Then she made scribbling motions in the air until I brought her a scrap of paper and a pencil. She took them and began jotting down mysterious information. This went on for a few minutes, until finally she said: Thanks, sweetie at least four times and kissed the telephone mouthpiece twice. Then she hung up and turned to me, her eyes bright.

  “It was Maury,” she said.

  “Thanks. Who’s Maury?”

  “My agent. And Lon Kaspar’s auditioning for the lead in ‘The House of Bernardo Alba,’ it’s the Lorca play and they’re doing a revival over on Second Avenue and it’s this afternoon and Maury thinks I’ve got a great chance and——”

  She ran out of breath before she ran out of words. I asked her when she had to be at the theater.

  “Eleven-thirty, if I can. What time is it?”

  “Quarter to eleven.”

  “What!”

  “We slept late and ate slowly and graciously. You better hurry, Maddy. But don’t you get to study the part?”

  “It’s just a reading today. Oh, God, I’ve got to rush. God, I have to hurry. It’s all the way across town, dammit. You wait here for your phone call, Ed. The door locks by itself when you close it. I have to rush.”

  I kissed her. She held onto me for a minute, then pulled away. “Dammit to hell,” she said. “I wanted to stay with you today. I thought we could hunt the killer together. Then this came up.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you come along.”

  “You couldn’t have stopped me. But one little call from Maury . . . damn.”

  I grinned. “Is it a good part?”

  “It’s a beautiful part,” she said. “Simply beautiful. And Maury thinks I can get it. He says Kaspar knows me and likes my work. I’ve got to run, Ed. One call on the old phone and away goes Maddy. I’ll be home sometime this afternoon, I think. Call me.”

  She was still talking on her way out the door, still bubbling and babbling as she went down the stairs. From the front window I watched her hail a cab. My smile followed her down the street.

  A sweet kid.

  I poured a third cup of coffee and sweetened it with a taste of cognac. I lit a cigarette to go with it.

  A hell of a sweet kid.

  I thought about Jack Enright. I thought about Kaye, his wife and my sister. Evenings at their place, the three of us plus whatever girl Kaye was tying to fix me up with at the time. “You ought to get married, Ed London. It’s no life for a man, being a bachelor. You should meet a nice girl and settle down.”

  And I thought about Maddy, and how sweet she was in the morning, and how sweet she was at night. And Kaye’s words made more sense than they ever had before.

  Which scared me.

  The phone rang half an hour after Maddy left. I answered it. It was Jack.

  “Sorry I had to hang up on you,” he said. “I was up to my neck in work and I didn’t want to talk on that phone of mine. I’m on a pay phone now. Is your line safe?”

  I told him it was.

  “Did you see the paper. Ed? They had a bit about Sheila. That she was involved with some gangsters and they killed her.”

  I wondered where they got that. “They’re right,” I said.

  “Then why not let it go? You know how those men operate. Fly a killer in from the other side of the country, then fly him away when he’s done.
You can’t solve a crime like that. Why knock yourself out trying? Why waste time?”

  “You all worried about my time, Jack?”

  A sigh. “All right,” he said. “Okay, I’m scared. If you come up with anything you’ll have to give it all to the police. Then everything’s out in the open. I’m scared, Ed. I’ve got a lot of things to be scared about. A family and a practice. I don’t want them to blow up in my face.”

  “I can keep you out of it.”

  “Can you?”

  “Uh-huh. And I couldn’t let go even if I wanted to, Jack. Two heavies handed me a beating yesterday. Another guy was tailing me. Somebody else missed me with a bullet a while back. I’ve been on one end or the other of enough handguns to win the West ten times over. So I can’t leave it alone.”

  “God,” he said. “They’re trying to scare you?”

  “They’re trying to get a briefcase from me. I don’t have it.”

  “Who does?”

  “I don’t know. Jack, didn’t Sheila ever mention anything about a briefcase? Anything about jewels or criminals?”

  “No. Never. Let me think.” I let him think. “Never,” he said flatly. “I told you what she talked about. There was never anything about a briefcase or jewels or crooks.”

  I let go of it. “About the apartment,” I said, shifting. “When you found Sheila. Maybe you were mistaken, maybe the apartment was neat and Sheila was naked and your mind did a little dance with itself. You were under a strain, Jack. You might not have seen things the way they were. Hell, you’re a doctor. You know how the human mind can react to shock.”

  I listened to heavy breathing. Then: “You think you and I saw the apartment the same way.”

  “That’s right.”

  He hesitated. “That’s been bothering me,” he said finally. “I almost called you last night. I wanted to tell you about it.”

  “Want to tell me now?”

  “It’s just a feeling I had.”

  “Go on.”

  He said: “I was thinking about the murder. The way I found the body. I went over it in my mind and it didn’t seem to mesh together properly. Do you know what I mean? I had a certain distinct memory—a dead girl, Sheila, and a messed-up apartment, and all that. But somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea that it wasn’t that way at all. There was a conflicting picture that hadn’t been there before. A picture of Sheila nude and dead in the middle of a neat apartment. I don’t know if the second picture is real or if it stuck in my mind when you described it to me. It could be either way.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m not sold on it one way or the other,” he went on. “But if you’ve got a hunch I was seeing things, well, I’ll go along with you. It makes sense to me.”

  I said something innocuous. He told me again that he hoped I’d keep him out of it and I said I’d do my best. We spent a few seconds looking around for something to say to each other, then settled on “So long” and ended the conversation. I held onto the receiver and studied it, trying to think clearly. Then I put it down and poured the last of Maddy’s coffee into my cup.

  The conversation with Jack hadn’t proved anything one way or the other. He was too busy trying to forget forever the fact that he had managed to commit adultery and get mixed up in a murder. Now all he cared about was staying in the clear and smelling like a rose. Anything he said or did was going to be colored by that desire. He’d go along with any theory I came up with just to keep things simple.

  I finished the coffee, washed out my cup and put it away. I found a broom and gave the apartment a quick sweeping. I wrote Maddy a note, then read it over and decided it was painfully cute. I tore it up and wrote her a blander one, put it on the rickety kitchen table and set the brandy bottle on top of it.

  At the door I turned to take a last look at the apartment and think pleasant thoughts about the girl who lived in it. Then I went down two flights, passing Madame Sindra and the machine shop, and out onto the street.

  The sun was high in the sky and the air was hot. I managed to snag a cab on Eight Avenue. I sat back and gave my home address to the driver, letting him fight the traffic.

  A few points bothered me. Both Armin and Bannister knew I went to the girl’s apartment. They sure as hell didn’t pool information between them. Which meant both of them had seen me.

  How?

  They couldn’t both have kept the apartment under surveillance at the same time. They both knew I went there, but neither one knew I didn’t come out with the briefcase.

  Why?

  I tossed it around and didn’t get anywhere with it. I lit my pipe while the cab clawed its way through the beginnings of the noon rush hour. My cabby inched his way north on Eighth Avenue, jockeying for position with Puerto Rican boys pushing hand trucks of ladies’ dresses, I sat and smoked.

  The city was getting hotter as the day rolled along. Maddy was reading for a good part; I was chasing a briefcase and a killer. A good day.

  When we hit Forty-second Street I started wondering about my own apartment. I lost the thought when we passed the Ruskin and Peter Armin came back to mind. I got back to it a few blocks along the line and wondered what sort of a job Cora Johnson had been able to do. And how much of the damage was permanent.

  And how well five grand would compensate for it.

  My stomach-ache wasn’t bothering me. Ralph and Billy still were, though. I sat there and remembered. And hated them.

  I reached into my pocket. The Beretta was still there, small and sleek and deadly. I stroked cool metal and thought about Ralph and Billy.

  I climbed stairs to my apartment, lifted a corner of my Welcome mat—which says Go Away, incidentally—and picked up my key. This was one of Cora’s less logical habits; she couldn’t believe I had two keys to my own apartment and always left the damned key precisely where I had left it for her. This always gave me a bad moment. I couldn’t be sure whether she’d been there or not until I opened the door.

  I bent over again, scooped up the Times. I straightened up, stuck key in lock, held my breath, and pushed. She had been there.

  I thanked her silently. The place looked livable again. Hell, it looked great—each book was back in the bookcase, the rugs were clean, the furniture polished. I closed the door and tossed my newspaper on a chair. There would be time to read it later on. Now it was more fun to look around.

  Some of the books were still ruined, of course. A bookmaker could patch up most of them as soon as I had time to run them in. And the chair cushions were still slit open. But Cora had done one beautiful hell of a job. I took a deep breath, feeling very pleased with the world in general and with Cora Johnson in particular.

  Only one thing was out of whack. I looked at it and the room started to spin around. I stood there with my mouth wide open and my stupid face hanging out.

  There was a tan cowhide briefcase on the coffee table and it had never been there before.

  ELEVEN

  I WENT to the shelf and poured a little cognac in one of the glasses. I drank it off and turned around.

  The briefcase was still there.

  One of the slick mags had a feature running a few years back under the title “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” The pitch was quietly mindless—a Mona Lisa frowning on a wall, a man with two left hands, a face without eyebrows. The reader was supposed to puzzle it out, figure out what was wrong.

  Hell, it was easy. The briefcase was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be there at all, and there it was.

  It should have been funny as hell. By the time I finally managed to sell Armin on the idea that I never had the case to begin with, wham—there it was. For a crazy second or two I wondered if it had been there all along, if Cora had unearthed it for me while she straightened up. That little piece of insanity didn’t last long. Somebody had brought the briefcase there while I was out. Somebody had given me a present.

  Why?

  I wasn’t going to worry about whys just then. I went to the door, lo
cked it and slid the bolt home. I took the briefcase from the coffee table and sat down in a chair to examine it. I turned it over and over in my hands like a little kid with a Christmas present trying to guess what was inside. I shook it to see if it would rattle. It didn’t.

  It was well-made and it was expensive. The leather was top-grain quality, the stitching neat and precise. It looked like an English job, which fit Armin’s little story about Canadian jewel thieves. But since most of the better briefcases sold in the States are English ones, it really didn’t mean too much one way or the other. So there was nothing to do but open the thing. So I opened it.

  The inside had more things going for it. There was a long and detailed letter typed flawlessly on plain white bond. It bore no date, no return address, no signature. It led off with a simple “Dear Sir” and went on from there.

  The instructions were complicated. Two keys were supposed to be in the briefcase. One, according to the letter, would fit a small locker in Central Terminal in Buffalo, New York. There was a strongbox in that locker, and the second key would open the strongbox. The box itself contained still another key, this one fitting a locker located in a station of the Toronto subway system. That locker, finally, held the Wallstein jewels.

  The nameless person who wrote the letter apologized very carefully for the complexity of the directions. He was sure, he said, that the reader would appreciate them. By use of two lockers plus a strongbox, a man with keys but without instructions would be lost. So would any outsider who happened to break into the Buffalo locker—he’d find a meaningless key. If somebody was lucky enough to break into the Toronto locker he’d get the jewels, but nobody would know which Toronto locker to open unless he had the instructions in the first place and the key in the second—the key from the Buffalo locker.

  I had to read the damned thing three times through before I could figure out which key was which and what the hell it was all about. By the time it made sense I had to admire whoever figured it all out. Nothing was left to chance. And there was another advantage—in the time it took to follow all the directions, the thieves would be out of town. And safe.