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 do either of us any good. Get to the point, Jack.”
He looked at the rug. It’s a Bokhara, a much better oriental than the length of rug in the hallway. But Jack Enright isn’t especially interested in oriental rugs.
He found this one fascinating now.
“Who was she?”
“Sheila Kane.”
“And—?”
“And I’ve been paying her rent for the past three months now,” he said. He was still looking at the rug. His voice was steady, the tone slightly defiant. “I’ve been paying her rent, and I’ve been buying her clothes and I’ve been giving her spending money. I’ve been keeping her, Ed. And now she’s dead.”
He stopped talking. We both sat there and listened to the silence.
He laughed. His laughter had no humor to it. “It happens to other men,” he said. “You’ve got a perfectly good marriage; you love your wife and she loves you. Then you listen to the song of the sirens. You meet a beautiful blonde. Why are they always blondes, Ed?”
“Sheila Kane was a blonde?”
“Sort of a dirty blonde originally. She tinted it. Her hair was all yellow-gold. She wore it long and it would cascade over her bare shoulders and—”
He stopped for another sigh. “I didn’t kill her, Ed. God, I couldn’t kill anybody. I’m not a killer. And I don’t even own a damn gun. But I can’t call the police. Christ, you know what would happen. They’d have me on the carpet for hours with the bright lights in my eyes and the questions coming over and over. They’d work me six ways and backwards. They’d rake me over the coals.”
“And then they’d let you go.”
“And so would Kaye.” His eyes turned meek, helpless. “Your sister’s a wonderful woman, Ed. I love her. I don’t want to lose her.”
“If you love her so much—”
“Then why did I play around? I don’t know, Ed. God knows I don’t make a habit of it.”
“Did you love this Sheila?”
“No. Yes. Maybe... I don’t know.”
That was a big help. “How did it start?”
He hung his head. “I don’t know that either. It just happened, damn it. She came to my office one day. Just wandered in off the street, picked my name out of the yellow pages. She thought she was pregnant, wanted me to examine her.”
“Was she?”
“No. She’d missed a period or two and she was worried. Hell, it happens all the time. Just worrying can make a girl miss. I gave her an examination and told her she was all right. She wanted to be sure, asked me to run a test. I took a urine sample and told her I’d run it through the lab and give her a call. She said she didn’t have a phone, she’d be back in two days.”
“And?”
“And that was that. For the time being, anyway. The test went to the lab. It was negative, of course. She wasn’t pregnant. That’s what I told her when she came back.”
I told him it was a funny way to start an affair.
“I suppose so,” he said. He was getting steadier now, pulling himself back together again. It seemed to me that his adultery was nagging him more than the simple fact of the girl’s death. Now that it was out in the open, now that he’d let his hair down in front of me, he could start to relax a little.
“She was broke, Ed. Couldn’t pay me. I told her the hell with it, she could pay me when she got the chance. Or not at all. I’ve got a rich practice. East Side clientele. I can afford to miss out on an occasional fifteen-dollar fee. But she seemed so bothered about it that I felt sorry for her. I took her to a decent restaurant and bought her a lunch. She was a kid in a candy store, Ed. She said she’d been eating all her meals in cafeterias.”
I grimaced appropriately.