Coward's Kiss Read Free

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    Jack Enright. My sister’s husband. A tall man, forty-two or forty-three, with a reddish complexion and a little too much weight on a broad frame. A good handball player and a fair hand at squash, even though he didn’t look the part. Now he didn’t look the part at all.
    His shoulders sagged like an antique mattress. His face was drawn, his eyes hollow. His tie was loose and his jacket was unbuttoned. He looked like hell.
    He said: “I have to talk to you, Ed.”
    “Something the matter?”
    “Everything. I have to talk to you. I’m in trouble.”
    I motioned him inside. He followed me into the living room like a domesticated zombie. I found a chair for him and he sat down heavily in it.
    “Go ahead,” I said. “What’s up?”
    “Ed . . .”
    He said my name and let it hang there. He didn’t even manage to close his mouth. I found a bottle of cognac and poured three fingers of it into an Old Fashioned glass. I gave it to him and he looked at it vacantly. I don’t think he saw it.
    “Drink it, Jack.”
    “It’s not four o’clock,” he said stupidly. “A gentleman never drinks before four o’clock. And it’s——”
    “It’s four o’clock somewhere,” I told him. “Go ahead and drink it, Jack.”
    He emptied the glass in a single swallow and I’m sure he never tasted it at all. Then he put down the glass and looked at me through empty eyes.
    “Is something wrong with Kaye?”
    “Why?”
    I shrugged. “She’s your wife and my sister. Why else would you come to me?”
    “Kaye’s fine,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with Kaye.”
    I waited.
    “I’m the one who needs some help, Ed. Badly.”
    “Want to tell me about it?”
    He looked away. “I suppose so,” he said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
    The drink was helping but it had its work cut out for it. It unnerved me to see a steady guy like Jack Enright that badly shaken up. He’s a doctor—a very good one—a very successful one. He’s got a wife who loves him and two daughters who adore him. I’d always thought of him as a strong man, a Rock-of-Gibraltar type, for my not-too-strong sister to lean on. Now he was ready to fall apart at the seams.
    “Let’s have it, Jack.”
    He said: “You’ve got to help me.”
    “I have to hear about it first.”
    He sighed, nodded, reached for a cigarette. His hands were shaking but he managed to get it lit. He drew a lot of smoke into his lungs and blew it out in a long thin column. I watched his eyes narrow to focus on the end of the cigarette.
    “Fifty-first Street,” he said. “111 East Fifty-first Street. An apartment on the fourth floor.”
    I waited.
    “There’s a girl in there, Ed. A dead girl. Somebody shot her in the . . . in the face. At close range, I think. Most of her . . . most of her face is missing. Blown off.”
    He shuddered.
    “You didn’t——”
    “No!” His eyes screamed at me. “No, of course not. I didn’t kill her. That’s what you were going to ask, isn’t it?”
    “I suppose so. Why the hell else would you be so jumpy? You’re a doctor. You’ve seen death before.”
    “Not like this.”
    I picked up my pipe and crammed tobacco into the bowl. I took my time lighting up while he got ready to talk some more. By the time the pipe was lit he was off again.
    “I didn’t kill her, Ed. I discovered the body. It was . . . a shock. Opening the door. Walking inside. Looking around, not seeing her at first. She was on the floor, Ed. How often do you look at the floor when you walk into a room. I almost . . . almost fell on her. I looked down and there she was. She was lying on her back. I looked at her and saw her and she had a hole where her face was supposed to be.”
    I poured more brandy into his glass. He looked at it for a second or two. Then he tossed it off.
    “You called the police?”
    “I couldn’t.”
    I looked hard at him. “All right,” I said evenly. “You can stumble around for the next half hour and it won’t