Read Online Coward's Kiss by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online Page A

the fireplace and animated figures of X, Y and Z danced in crackling flames. The man called Clay shuffled into the room with a girl on his arm. He wore a Broadway suit and a snap-brim hat. There was a cigar in the corner of his mouth and pale green smoke drifted from it to the-ceiling. He did not have any eyes.
    I looked from him to the girl. I saw she was a skeleton with long blonde hair. She wore only a pair of nylon stockings and a garter belt. She did a stripper’s bump-and-grind, tossing loins of bone at me.
    I turned and saw Bannister. He was built along the lines of an anthropoid ape. His arms were longer than his legs. He had a length of lead pipe in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. “The briefcase,” he rasped. “The briefcase the briefcase the briefcase the briefcase.”
    I looked down. There was a briefcase on my lap. It smelled of good leather and death. I clutched it in both hands and hugged it to my chest.
    When I looked up again Bannister had turned into Peter Armin. He was pointing a Beretta at the man called Clay, whose face had changed to Jack Enright’s. “Help me, Ed,” Jack was saying. And “Help me,” chorused X, Y and Z. They were still dancing in the fireplace, skipping gaily in the flames.
    Armin turned, pointed the Beretta at me. “I, Mr. London, am a reasonable man,” he said. “And you, Mr. London, are a reasonable man. We are not men of violence.”
    Then he shot me.
    I looked up at the skeleton. Her hair was black now and her face was Maddy Parson’s face. She screamed a shrill, piercing scream. She stopped, then shrieked again.
    The third scream wasn’t a scream at all. It was the telephone ringing, ringing viciously, and it brought back reality in bits and pieces. I got oriented again—I was in bed, it was early morning, and the phone was going full blast. I picked up the receiver and growled at it.
    “Ed? This is Jack, Ed.”
    I asked him what time it was. It was the first thing I thought of.
    “Time? Eight or so, a few minutes after. Ed, I’m calling from a pay phone. Can we talk?”
    “Yes,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
    “They’ve identified her.”
    “They?”
    “The police.”
    “They identified Sheila Kane?”
    “That’s right.”
    It didn’t seem possible. I figured they might tag her eventually if they worked on it long enough, but it would be a few weeks, even with luck—not overnight.
    “Do you have a newspaper handy, Ed?”
    “I’ll read it later,” I told him. “Jack, you’re in trouble. If they’ve got her labeled they’ll have you in nothing flat. You better beat them to the punch. Get in touch with Homicide, tell them you’re surrendering voluntarily, you didn’t kill her, you’re just guilty of withholding evidence. That way——”
    “Ed.”
    I stopped.
    “Ed, do you get the Times ?”
    “Sure, but——”
    “It can explain better than I can. I’ll hold the line. Get your newspaper and read the story. Check page 34—that’s the second page of the second section. Go on—read it. Then you’ll see what I mean.”
    I was too foggy to argue with him. I managed to get out of bed, found a robe on a hook in the closet, slipped it on. I padded barefoot from the bedroom through the living room to the door, opened the door and picked up the paper. I carried it inside, shut the door and got rid of the first section on the way back to the phone. I ran my eyes over page 34 until I came to the right story. The headline said:
    POLICE IDENTIFY CORPSE
FOUND IN CENTRAL PARK

    The article ran seven paragraphs but the kicker was right there at the top in paragraph one. They had a make on the dead blonde, all right, but that was no reason for Jack to hand himself in at headquarters.
    Not at all.
    Because they had identified her as Alicia Arden, twenty-five, of 87 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. The identification was a pretty simple matter, too. Somebody sent her prints to the FBI’s Washington office. Her prints were on file