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

I got out of there as fast as I could, but first I made him give me the only picture he had of the dead girl. I wanted to show it to Maddy. I put it in my wallet, said something cheerful to him, and left him to his patients.

The sallow little man peered myopically at me over his ‘New Yorker,’ the expectant mother put her magazine on her ample belly, and all of them looked happy as hell to see me. I said good-bye to the starched receptionist and walked out of the building.

The sun was shining and the air was clear and clean enough to breathe. I filled my lungs and headed for home. It was walking weather and I was glad — I was sick of sitting around waiting for things to happen. The walk gave me something to do, anyway. I winked at pretty girls and one or two of them even smiled back.

I didn’t notice anybody following me. But that may have been because I didn’t look.

Maybe I should have.

I didn’t hear the bullet until it passed me.

I was in my building, on the way up the stairs. When I was a few steps from the landing there was a loud noise behind me. I was already falling on my face when the bullet buried itself in the wall. Plaster flew at my face.

Instinct said: Stay still, don’t move. Instinct gave bad advice. Whoever he was, he was behind me and he was shooting at me and I made a hell of a good target.

But instinct’s got a compelling voice. By the time I managed to spin around — it’s tricky when you’re on your hands and knees on a staircase — he was gone. A door closed behind him and I looked at nothing.

“Mr. London?”

I looked up. Mrs. Glendower was leaning a gray head over the railing. Her expression was mildly puzzled.

“That wasn’t a gunshot, was it? Or didn’t you hear the noise?”

I got straightened out on my feet and tried to look sheepish. “Just a truck backfiring,” I told her.

“It frightened me, Mr. London.”

I managed to grin. “You’re not the only one, Mrs. Glendower. It startled me so badly I nearly fell over. I’ve been nervous lately.”

That was the perfect explanation as far as Mrs. Glendower was concerned. She smiled vaguely and pleasantly. Then she went away.

I went into my apartment and had a shot of cognac, then I went back into the hallway and looked at the hole in the wall. When I sighted from the bullet hole to the doorway I knew the gunman hadn’t been trying to kill me at all. The bullet was way out of line. He must have missed me by five feet.

He could have been a lousy shot. But he didn’t even make a second try — just one shot and away he went.

So it was a warning. A little message from the guy on the phone, the one with the raspy voice.

Fine.

I found a can of spackling paste in a drawer and patched up the hole in the wall, giving the bullet a permanent home. I let the paste dry, which didn’t take long, and dabbed a little paint over it. It wasn’t a perfect match but I didn’t figure everybody in the world was going to come staring at my wall.

Then I went back inside and sat down.

It was an algebraic equation with too many unknowns. X was the killer, the voice on the phone. He shot the girl, searched the apartment and ran. Then Jack came in, looked around and ran. Then somebody else came, rearranged things, stripped the girl and ran. Then I came, carted off the body — and now everything was happening.

It didn’t add up. And, like an algebraic equation, it wouldn’t add up. Not until I knew all the unknowns.

In the meantime I had nothing to do, no place to go. There was a bullet in the wall outside my door and it wasn’t worth the trouble to dig it out. What the hell was it going to prove? It might be a .32 or .38 slug. So what? I couldn’t find out anything one way or the other, not that way.

So to hell with it.

I took a book from the bookcase and sat down with it. I read three pages, looked up suddenly and realized I didn’t remember a word that I’d read. I put the book back on the shelf and poured more cognac. Nothing was working out.

And I was tied in deep. Jack was clear — I’d seen to that, rushing around like a goddam hero. But I was hanging by my thumbs. The bastard who shot a hole in Sheila knew who I was and where I lived and I didn’t know a thing about him. And he had some damn fool idea that I had a package that he wanted. I was supposed to sell it to him.

There was only one catch. I didn’t have it. I didn’t even know what the hell it was.

Which complicated things. Jack was free and clear — he could go back to his wife, back to my sister. He could pretend that everything was all right with the world.

I couldn’t.

I put music on the hi-fi and tried to listen to it. I hauled out my wallet and found the picture of Sheila Kane that Jack had given me. It was just a snapshot, probably taken with a box camera. The background — trees and open space — was out of focus. But the background wasn’t important when you saw the girl.

Her long blonde hair was caught up in a pony tail. Her head was thrown back, her eyes bright. She was laughing. She wore a bulky turtle-neck sweater and a loose plaid skirt and she looked like the queen of the homecoming game.

I studied the picture and remembered everything Jack Enright had told me about her. I tried to imagine the kind of girl she must have been, tried to mesh that image with the image I got from the photograph. I came up with a person.

Poor Sheila, I kept thinking. Poor, poor Sheila.

“Poor Ed.”

I looked across the table at Maddy Parson’s pretty face. She was grinning at me over the brim of her second Daiquiri. Her eyes were sparkling. The two drinks had her high as a Chinese kite.

“Poor Ed,” she said again. “You didn’t know you’d get stuck for a dinner like this one. This is going to run you twenty dollars before we get out of here.”

“It’s worth it.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I hope you have some darn good questions to ask.”

“I hope you know the answers.”

We were at McGraw’s on Forty-fifth near Third. There are girls who prefer the haute cuisine of French cookery; there are girls who will go anyplace to eat as long as it’s fashionable; there are girls who like to sample out-of-the-way restaurants where not even the waiter can understand the menu. And there are still other girls — a few of them, anyhow — who like lean red meat and plenty of it with a big baked potato on the side. Maddy Parson belonged in the last group and that explains our presence at McGraw’s.

McGraw’s is a steakhouse. Which is a little like saying that the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground. It’s true enough but it doesn’t tell the whole story. McGraw’s is an institution.

The front window facing out on Forty-fifth Street opens on a cold room where hunks of steak hang and ripen. In the dining room the decor is unobtrusive nineteenth-century American male — heavy oak panelling, a thick wine-red carpet, massive leather chairs. They don’t have a menu. All you do is tell your white-haired waiter how you want your sirloin and what you’re drinking with it. If you don’t order your meat rare he looks unhappy. We didn’t disappoint the old gentleman.

“It’s been a long time,” Madeleine Parson was saying. “Almost too long. I don’t know where to start talking.”

“Start with yourself.”

She rolled her eyes. “An actor’s lot is not a happy one. Nor is an actress’. I almost took a job, Ed. Can you imagine that? Not even a semi-theatrical job that lets you kid yourself along. All the girls do that. They sell tickets in a box office or follow a producer around and sharpen his pencils for him and think they’re learning the business from the ground up. But I almost took a job selling hats. Can you imagine that? I thought to myself how easy it would be, just sell hats and earn a steady $72.50 a week before taxes and move up gradually, maybe be a buyer in time, and—”