Coward's Kiss Read Online Free PDF

she said, “I’d like to think you want to see me for my charm and beauty alone. But I don’t really mind. I’ll make you pay dearly for my company, sirrah. I’ll force you to buy me a very expensive steak with at least two cocktails beforehand. To teach you a lesson.”
    “It’s deductible. Seven o’clock all right?”
    “I’ll be too hungry by then! Make it six-thirty?”
    We made it six-thirty. I told her I’d pick her up, then hung up and got out of the apartment. All that talk about steak had me hungry. I went down the block for a belated breakfast.
    The air was warm outside and the waitress at the little restaurant was cheerful. I had shirred eggs and chicken livers with two cups of coffee. Real coffee, not instant. It was so good I almost forgot about the dead girl I’d dropped in Central Park and the raspy-voiced man who wanted to kill me.
    Jack Enright’s office was on Park Avenue at the corner of Eighty-eighth. A towering brick building. The liveried doorman opened my cab door, then hurried to yank open the building door for me. I walked straight to Jack’s office on the first floor in the rear. I knew the way.
    The receptionist looked as though someone had starched her to match her bright white uniform. She smiled at me without showing a single tooth and asked me who I was. I told her.
    She repeated my name twice to commit it to memory. Then she got up from a blonde free-form desk and vanished through a heavy windowless door. I stood by her desk and studied the glut of patients waiting for the doctor. A sallow little man squinted through bifocals at the ‘New Yorker.’ Appropriately, a pregnant young woman had her nose buried in ‘Parent’s Magazine.’ Four or five others sat around in the overstuffed chairs and stared at each other and at me. Their stares were pure envy when the woman in white came back and announced that the great man would see me.
    I went through the door she pointed at, walked down a little hallway to Jack’s private office. He was sitting behind a massive leather-topped wooden desk. Bookshelves which held medical texts and a smattering of classics lined the walls. There was a set of Trollope bound in morocco and a good Dickens in buckram.
    A chair waited for me at the side of the desk. A pony of brandy was on the desk-top in front of the chair.
    He said: “Courvoisier. Is it all right?”
    It was more than all right. I took a sip and felt the taste buds on my tongue enjoying themselves.
    “Well?”
    I set down the glass and shrugged. “You’re pretty well out of it,” I said. “For the time being they’ve got nothing to tie you in.”
    “Thank God.”
    “But not completely out of it. As long as the killer’s free, there’s a chance that you’ll get dragged into the picture. The police won’t let go of it for awhile. The papers are playing with it. I saw a copy of the Post on the way over. The early edition. A sex angle, a pretty girl, a shooting-and-dumping. It makes nice copy.”
    He nodded. “And you’re going to look for the murderer?”
    “I have to.” I started to tell him I’d spoken to the killer, then changed my mind. “I came here to ask you some questions, Jack. I need a lot of answers.”
    “What do you want to know?”
    “Everything you know. Everything, whether it seems important to you or not. People she knew, places she went to, anything she ever mentioned or did that’ll give me a place to start digging. Whatever it is, I want to know about it.”
    I fished a pipe out of one pocket and a tobacco pouch from another. While I filled and lit the pipe he sat at his desk and thought. He ran the fingers of one hand through his dark hair. He drummed the leather desk-top with the fingers of the other hand. I shook out my match and dropped it into a heavy brass ashtray. He looked down at the match, then back at me.
    “There’s not a hell of a lot to tell, Ed. I’ve been trying to figure out how I could have been so damned close to a girl and