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

before.”
    She lived in a third-floor loft on West Twenty-fourth just east of Eighth. Her building had been condemned years ago and it wasn’t legal to live there, but Maddy and the landlord had taken care of all that. According to the lease, she used the loft to give acting lessons and didn’t live there at all. The landlord paid the trustworthy firemen so much a month and everybody was happy. Maddy would go on living there until the building came down around her little ears.
    A rusty machine shop took up the ground floor of the old brick building. An ancient palmist and crystal-gazer named Madame Sindra held court on the second floor. We climbed to the third floor on an unlit and shaky wooden staircase. I stood by while Maddy unlocked the door.
    The apartment inside looked as though it belonged in a different building in a different part of town. The living room was huge, with a false fireplace along one wall and a massive studio couch on the other. All the furniture was expensive-looking, but Maddy had picked it up, a little at a time, at the University Place auction houses and she made a few dollars go a long way. There were a few bookcases, all of them crammed with paperbacks and covered with Moselle bottles topped with candle-drippings.
    Now she waved small hands at everything. “Be it ever so affected, there’s no place like home. Sit down, Ed. Relax. I don’t have a thing to drink, but relax anyway.”
    I sat down on the couch. She kicked off her shoes and curled up next to me with her legs tucked neatly under her pretty little behind. “Now,” she said. “Fire away, Mr. London, sir. Be a devastatingly direct detective and detect like mad. I’ll oblige with all my heart.”
    I took Sheila’s picture from my wallet. I looked at it and she peered over my shoulder.
    “Who’s she?”
    “Her name’s Sheila Kane. Does it ring a bell?”
    “I don’t think so. Should it?”
    “Just a hunch,” I said. “Somebody thought she might be a show biz nut one way or another.”
    “An actress?”
    “Maybe. Or some outsider in the theatrical in-group. Or the guy who told me this has rocks in his head, which isn’t impossible. I had an idea you might have run into her somewhere.”
    “The name doesn’t sound familiar.” She tossed her head. “But then one meets so many exciting people in this mad and wonderful life——”
    I laughed. “Give it a good look,” I suggested. “You might have met her without an introduction. Make sure.”
    She craned her neck to look more closely over my shoulder and her soft black hair brushed my face. I could smell the sweetness of her. She wore no perfume, only the healthy vibrance of a well-scrubbed young woman. Which was enough.
    “No pony tail,” she said suddenly. “Her hair loose and flowing. And this must have been taken awhile ago, if it’s the same gal. She didn’t look so damned Betty Co-ed when I saw her. And her name wasn’t Sheila Kane.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Almost. Gosh, you’re excited, aren’t you? It’s nice to see a real detective in action.”
    I growled at her. “Talk.”
    “Not much to talk about.” She shrugged her pretty shoulders. “I don’t know much. I met her only once and that was about . . . oh, say six or seven weeks ago. I could find out the exact date easily enough. It was the night ‘Hungry Wedding’ opened. Did you see it?”
    I hadn’t.
    “You didn’t have much chance. It closed after five performances, to the surprise of practically no one and to the delight of many. It was a gold-plated turkey.”
    “You weren’t in it, were you?”
    “No such luck. That’s usually the kind of show I wind up in, the type that fights to last a week. But I missed this one. Anyway, I was tight with a few kids in the cast and I got an invite to the cast party. It was sort of a wake. Everybody in the show knew they were going to get a roasting. But no actor passes up a party with free drinks. We all got quietly loaded.”
    “And