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

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 move 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?”

I told him why I was staring at him. I told him just how the apartment had looked, just how neat it had been. I watched him while I talked. His eyes were open wide and his mouth was open wider. My description of neatness was as jarring to him as his talk of disorder was to me.

“God,” he said finally. “Then you didn’t strip her.”

I just looked at him.

“In the papers,” he said. “I read that she was... half-naked when they found her. I thought you stripped her to keep them from identifying her from her clothes.”

“I didn’t have to. She wasn’t wearing any.”

He shook his head. “She was fully dressed when I found her, Ed. A sweater and a skirt, I think. I don’t remember too well, my mind was swimming all over the place. But I would have remembered if she had been naked, wouldn’t I?”

“It’s a hard sight to forget.”

“That’s what I mean. When I read the paper... but I couldn’t believe you stripped her, not really. I didn’t think you would do something like that. It’s sort of sacrilegious, taking the clothes from a dead body.” He paused for breath. “Then I thought some sex fiend found her in the park before the police got there. Or that the papers were trying to make livelier copy out of it. Hell, I wasn’t sure what to think. But if she was nude when you found her—”

I finished the sentence for him. “Then somebody got there after you left and before I arrived. That’s what happened. Some clown cleaned her apartment from floor to ceiling, took off her clothes and sneaked off into the night.”

“But why?”

I couldn’t answer that one.

“It’s senseless,” he exploded. “Nothing makes any sense. Killing Sheila didn’t make any sense and neither does any of the rest of it. It’s crazy.”

He looked ready to blow up. I said: “Physician, heal thyself,” and pointed to the bottle of Courvoisier. He poured us each a shot of brandy and we drank it.