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

there—Alicia Arden had a record. She’d been arrested in Santa Monica four years back on a disorderly conduct charge, had drawn a suspended sentence and had vanished from the area—at least as far as the police records show.
    The story ran downhill from there on to the finish. The possible identity of the killer was unknown. Clues were conspicuously absent. Miss Arden had no friends or relatives. Her Village apartment was one room plus a bath, and nobody in her building knew the first thing about her.
    The police were pursuing all angles of the case thoroughly, according to the Times reporter. I read between the lines and saw that they were getting ready to write the murder off as unsolvable. A detective sergeant named Leon Taubler was quoted as saying that, although the girl hadn’t been sexually molested, “It looks like a sex crime.”
    All the unsolved murders in Manhattan look like sex crimes. It helps the police and the tabloids at the same time. One hand washes the other.
    I picked up the phone again. Jack’s voice was hoarse. “You read the story? You see what I mean?”
    I answered yes to both questions.
    “I can’t believe it,” he said heavily. “They must have made a mistake.”
    “No mistake.”
    “But—”
    “Fingerprints don’t make mistakes,” I said. “And even if they did, it’s a little too much to expect both gals to be missing at the same time. There’s no mistake, Jack.”
    “It doesn’t seem possible.”
    “It does to me. Sheila—Alicia—was living two lives at once. I more or less figured that much last night. A girl I know recognized her picture, met her once at a party. She was using the Alicia name at the time. So the newspaper story wasn’t as much of a shock to me as it was to you.”
    “Why would she give me a wrong name?”
    “She went to you because she thought she was pregnant,” I improvised. “She handed you a phony name automatically. Then she stayed with it. It was easier than admitting a lie.”
    There was a long pause. “What’s disorderly conduct, Ed? What does it mean?”
    “All things to all people. It’s like vagrancy—a handy catch-all for the police. The New York cops use it for prostitutes. Easier to prove. God knows what it means in Santa Monica. Anything from keeping bad company to walking the streets in a tight skirt.”
    “You heard me talk about her. About the type of person she was. Did she sound like that newspaper story?”
    “No.”
    “That just wasn’t her, Ed. Maybe I didn’t know who she was or where she came from, but I certainly knew the sort of girl she was. And, damn it, she wasn’t a tramp!”
    “Not when she was with you,” I said.
    “She was still the same person, wasn’t she?”
    “Not necessarily.” I got a cigarette going and talked through a mouthful of smoke. “Look at it this way. She was living two lives. Part of the time she was Bank Street’s Alicia Arden and the rest of the time she was your girl Sheila. She probably had two personalities, one to go with each name. You must have represented a better way of life to her, Jack. You told me about the first time you took her to lunch, how she stood there like a kid with her nose against a candy-store window. It wasn’t the luxury that excited her. It was the respectability.”
    “Is it so damned respectable to be a mistress?”
    “It is if you used to be a prostitute.”
    “Ed——”
    “Hang on a minute. You were a cushion, Jack. A security blanket. A nice decent guy with a nice clean safe apartment in the fabulous Fifties. She was a little girl up j to her neck in trouble with a batch of very unpleasant | people. Hell, she was in over her head—that’s why she j was killed. But when she was with you she could pin her hair up and relax. She could be calm and cool and cultured. She was in a very lovely dream world and life was j good to her. Naturally she was a different person in that world. You made her that way.”
    “She seemed so honest,