Лоуренс Блок - Death Pulls a Doublecross [= Cowards Kiss]

I laughed again. “Maybe I will,” I said. “Soon.”

“You’ve got a girl?”

“Dozens of them. But there’s one who’s been getting important. I’ll tell you all about it one of these days. Look, put your husband on, will you?”

She said something sweet, and I said something sweet, and then she put her husband on.

And I talked to him.

After that I took a fast shower and a faster shave. The shave was a little too fast — I wound up slicing off part of my face. I couldn’t stop the bleeding with a styptic pencil so I slapped a Band-Aid on the gash and grinned at myself in the mirror. Just everybody in New York had swung at me or shoved a gun in my face in the past few days, and the only way I could get hurt was by cutting myself with my own razor. Hell, maybe it would leave an interesting scar.

I went back to the living room. Then I sat down in one of the leather chairs and waited for him.

He knocked at the door. When I told him it was open he came in, a little out of breath, his hair poorly combed and his face redder than usual. His tie was loose and his face was weak with the same fear I’d seen there before.

“I got here as soon as I could,” he said. “Hope I didn’t keep you waiting, Ed. Something the matter?”

I took a step toward him. I threw the briefcase at him and he raised his hands instinctively to block it. It bounced off his hands and landed on the floor.

“This is yours,” I said. “You forgot it last time you were here.”

“For God’s sake, Ed!”

“You son of a bitch,” I said. “You rotten bastard.”

I hit him in the face. He backed off, his hands up to cover his face, and I belted him in the middle. When he folded up I hit him in the face and he went to the floor. He started to get up.

I said: “Stay there, Jack. If you get up I’ll knock the crap out of you.”

He stayed there.

“I never suspected you,” I told him. “Never. Hell, I didn’t want to suspect you. You were Kaye’s husband, I was doing you a favor to begin with. And you played me for a sucker from the word go. You’re a rotten son of a bitch, Jack.”

He opened his mouth. I waited for him to say something but he changed his mind. He bit his lip, closed his mouth. He looked away from me.

“How did you meet Alicia?”

“I told you. She came to my office.”

“Was that part true?”

He nodded.

“Then that’s where the truth stopped. You met her and the two of you wound up in the hay. You were mannered and polished and socially acceptable and she was warm and blonde and good in bed. So the two of you hit it off fine.

“She was also talkative. She told you all about Wallstein and Bannister and a half-million bucks worth of stolen jewels.”

“Ed—”

“Shut up. This didn’t happen on East Fifty-first Street. It happened in her apartment in the Village. Because the apartment and the alias came later. She never thought of them. They were your ideas. The whole double-cross gimmick was your idea all the way, wasn’t it?”

“It just happened,” he said.

“Happened?”

“You know what I mean. We were talking about... the jewels. And we both thought—”

“I think it was your idea, Jack.”

He didn’t say anything.

I said: “She was a floater all the way, took things as they came. Her life wasn’t easy but she knew how to get by. She was Wallstein’s mistress and he idolized her. And he was going to have enough money to keep her happy as soon as his deal went through. No, I don’t think she could have thought of the double cross. That had to be your idea.”

I looked at him and saw how weak and gutless he was. I was hoping he would get up so I could knock him down again. I remembered Wallstein telling me I wasn’t a violent man. But now I felt violent.

“So you rented an apartment for her,” I went on. “And gave her a phony name. And just to be safe you took the briefcase away from her. Why? Didn’t you trust her?”

“Of course I did. Damn it, I loved her!”

“Then why did you take the briefcase? Why not let her hold onto it? Because you had the case all along, Jack. That’s why Wallstein didn’t find it when he killed her. It wasn’t there. Why take it if you trusted her?”

“I thought it would be safer with me.”

“Safer from whom?”

“Wallstein, Bannister. Everybody.”

“Then you didn’t think she was very safe, did you?” He looked up, puzzled. “Even with the new apartment and the alias, you knew somebody might get to her. And if they did, you wanted to make sure you had the briefcase. She wasn’t so important. But the jewels were.”

“That’s a lie!”

“Is it?”

He looked at the floor again. “She was all that mattered,” he said brokenly. “I didn’t care about the jewels. I didn’t give a damn about them. I was in love with her.”

I let it go. “You had it all set up with her,” I said. “You doped out a way to cross Wallstein and Bannister both at once. Then you and Alicia would lie low for a while. I suppose after that you were going to skip the country. Where were you going to go?”

“Brazil. I don’t know.”

“And live happily ever after. But Wallstein got to her first. He loved her, too — everybody loved that girl, Jack. He loved her enough to kill her after she crossed him up. And Wallstein wasn’t the sort of man who killed if he could avoid it.”

“He was a crook.” His eyes flared. “He was a rotten Nazi.”

“He was also a better man than you are. He killed her and he went through that apartment from floor to ceiling looking for a briefcase that wasn’t there. Because you had it.

“She was already dead when you got there. And you fell apart, Jack. Suddenly the whole world was falling in on you. Hell, you were scared green. That’s when you stripped her.”

His mouth fell open.

“Yeah, you stripped her. That’s the only way it adds up. She was wearing something that could be traced to you. Or you thought it could. I can even guess what it was. You told me once how she liked to sit around the house in that man’s bathrobe you bought her. Was that what she was wearing?”

He nodded slowly.

“Maybe the stockings and garter belt were underneath the robe. Maybe she was nude and you started to dress her, got as far as the belt and the stockings and panicked. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. Either way, this girl you loved so much was dead as a lox and you were busy staying in the clear. You were noble as hell, Jack.”

He closed his eyes. “I couldn’t think straight,” he mumbled. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“That’s an understatement. You were blundering around like a kid in a cathouse. By the time you got out of there you realized that you could burn all the bathrobes in the world without getting clear. You had to get the body out of that apartment or it would be traced to you. But you didn’t have the guts to do your own dirty work. You came running to me with a scrambled story, confessed to cheating on Kaye in order to cover up all the rest of it. And you fooled me, damn it. I moved the girl’s body and got you out of it.”

I lit my pipe. “Remember what you told me a few minutes ago? The briefcase wasn’t important to you. The girl was all that mattered. You said so, right?”

He nodded.

“And you lied. You had that briefcase and you weren’t going to give it up no matter how dead Alicia was. You never thought of telling me about it.”

“I didn’t want to... complicate things.”

“You didn’t want to pass up a fortune. That’s more like it. By the time I moved the body you were making a deal of your own with Bannister. You called him up, ready to sell him the briefcase and make a quick profit for yourself. With Alicia dead there wasn’t any point to running for Brazil. But you could still use a hundred grand tax free. You called Bannister and tried to work a deal. He wanted to know who you were. And you got scared.”