Canvas Coffin Read Free

You promised Sally you would, this trip.”
    “Now would be a time for that,” I said. “Get it for me, huh, Max? It’s in the small grip.”
    He stared at me.
    “Please,” I said. “I’m still a little weak from last night.” He smiled. “Oh? You’re beginning to remember?”
    “From the fight,
the fight,”
I explained. “All right, I’ll get the book myself.” I made a motion toward rising.
    “Never mind,” he said. “Relax.” He got up and went through the door.
    When he came back, he tossed me the book. “I’m going out to see if anybody’s wearing their sun suits. That sun starts to burn, get out of it.”
    I nodded, and winked at him.
    For Whom the Bell Tolls,
a new one to me. I was a little behind in my reading, and Sally would quiz me on it. I read the quotation in the front and wondered if I sent to ask for Patsy Giani, would the bell toll for me?
    Traffic hummed and the sun worked and I read. Traffic hummed and the sun went away for a while and I read on.
    A chime sounded and I came out of the Hemingway world to this one.
    It was a telegram from Sally. She’d be here around seven.
    I was on the way back to the patio when the door opened and Max came in. His face was pale; he stared at me with horror and some wonder in his brown eyes. He had a newspaper in his hand.
    “What’s wrong, Max? You sick?”
    “I’m sick. We’re in trouble, kid.” He waved the paper at me. “Nobody’s been here — no — cops?”
    “Hell, no. What is it, what’s the story?”
    He looked past me. “The clerk, damn it — ” He turned toward the door. “I’ll be back.” He threw me the paper. “Read that, and ask if we’re in trouble.” The door slammed behind him.
    There was a picture of a girl on the front page, a girl with a badly battered face. She was wearing a negligee from which one breast was about to emerge. She was sprawled awkwardly on what seemed to be a studio couch, her puffed mouth hanging open, her dead eyes staring.
    The headline read:
Model Found Slain.
The story under the headline identified her as former B girl who had recently enjoyed exceptional success as a photographer’s model and had been offered a contract by a small producer.
    It was a Hearst paper and the writer called this
the promise of a new and fabulous career cut short by the brutal hand of a lustful and vicious killer.
    The girl’s name was Mary Kostanic.
    But her professional name was Brenda Vane.

Chapter II
    T HIS WAS THE GIRL I’d left the party with. I stared at the battered face, but there was no memory stir, no recognition in my mind at all.
    Behind me the door opened, and I turned to see Max standing there.
    “He’s not on now,” Max said. “He won’t be on until six tonight.”
    “Who?”
    “The desk clerk. The man I got our key from last night.”
    “Why do you want him?”
    “I want to tell him you and I came home together. I want to find out if he remembers that.”
    “No, Max,” I said. “We aren’t buying anybody. We’re going into this clean. This is murder, Max.”
    “You’re telling me this is murder. How stupid can you get, Luke? You going to tell the cops you were with her, but you don’t know where, or how long? You going to tell ‘em you can’t remember how you left her? That’s some story, isn’t it? They’ll buy that.”
    “It’s the truth.”
    “Is it? How do you know you were with her? Maybe I lied to you. Maybe I killed her and I was trying to cover, this morning. Did you think of that?”
    “Simmer down, Max,” I said wearily. “You’re no killer.”
    “And neither are you. And there’ll be two guys swearing you came home with me; me and the desk clerk. I’ll do the thinking. Just leave it up to me, kid.”
    I thought about the sports writers’ comments. Last night I’d looked like the old Luke Pilgrim, the killer. Last night,
after
that seventh-round haymaker of Charley’s.
    “What beats me,” Max said, “is why the law hasn’t been here