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

“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 hopeful.

“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.”