Coward's Kiss Read Online Free Page A

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