Kisses of Death. Henry Kane
you blame her?” said Willie.
“No,” said Marla. “She’s outside in the library.”
“But Peter is inside here.”
“Give him the file.”
“Are we about to breach a confidence?”
“We are about to trust a fellow worker.”
“Well said, dearly beloved,” said Willie as he gave me the portfolio.
It contained sixty-six full-sized photos, in color yet. It was a peep-show for a pornographer, in glossy color yet. It was no wonder that Marla Trent knew Valerie Kiss and Valerie Kiss did not know Marla Trent. Valerie Kiss had never before seen Marla Trent but Marla Trent had seen all of Valerie Kiss, and in superb action. Valerie Kiss was a beautiful woman who had passed the paramount screen test: she was more beautiful unclad than clad. There were long shots, close shots, high angle shots, and very low angle shots: sexual intercourse in all its aberrations and ungraceful positions was graphically delineated in sharp, stark, sweaty, ungrained, excellent focus.
I looked at the pictures and Willie and Marla looked with me. We made comments but our comments were rigidly clinical. An amateur might have been titillated but we were professionals. We had seen many such pictures; lamentably, we had made many such pictures throughout our careers; somebody has to scrape the sewers, somebody has to mash the garbage, somebody has to clean the purple refuse in the bloody slop-pans of an operating room. There are private detectives who boast that they do not practice in divorce. They are either silly dilettantes with private incomes, or they are hypocrites giving out with the big lie. Divorce work is the backbone of the business. Sly, dirty, disgusting but perfunctory, it is the bread and butter of the profession. Ninety percent is matrimonial work, five percent is even worse, and the remainder is the glamor that the writers write about. What else would writers write about: snapping dirty pictures of dirty people at fun and games, working to prevent the alimony or aggrandize the alimony, tapping telephones, tailing miscreants, unearthing forgotten filth, digging to find where a political body is buried?
There were sixty-six photographs and the further we proceeded the more dour we became, and then silent. We were experienced professionals unremittingly exposed to the nether side of the good, gay, simple life, and our temporary silence was the loud language of our permanent shame: for Valerie, for her partner, for ourselves, for you. “Who’s the guy?” I said.
“Richard Robinson Jackson known as Ritchie,” said Wee Willie Winkle.
“Like how old?” I said.
“Forty-one.”
“How old is the husband?”
“Forty-two.”
“The husband is ugly?”
“The husband is quite as beautiful as the paramour,” said Marla. “Similar type, as a matter of fact, except for the interesting color of the hair.”
The hair was white. Richard Robinson Jackson known as Ritchie was tall, long-legged, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, straight-nosed, and youthful, with an imperious well-shaped head of prematurely white hair worn close, crew-cut. Except for the neat narrow scar of an appendectomy, the body was clean, lean, long, muscular, and hairless.
I moved away from the pictures. Willie put them back into the portfolio. Marla lit a cigarette. I refused to let the silence happen again. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s not get melancholy again. What’s the story here?”
Now Willie lit a cigarette and smiled. “Same old story. A married gal, an unmarried guy. The gal has dough, the guy has nothing. Two pretty people with a lot of sex going for them.”
“What kind of guy?” I said.
“A nothing. A bartender.”
“There are bartenders that aren’t nothing.”
“This guy was nothing.”
“How do you know?”
“Preliminary research. Upon that basis, the guy was nothing. Handsome, worldly, and stupid.”
“That’s a lot to get out of a little preliminary research.”
Willie turned down the corners of his smile to lugubrious. “Peter,” he said evenly, “I need your criticisms like I need a hole in the head.”
“Willie,” I said, “don’t go superior on me.”
“Marla,” said Willie, “with your permission I’ll throw this oaf the hell out of here. Bodily.”
“Oafully nice of you,” I said, “but big as you are, I don’t think you can make it.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Marla, “Saturday morning is always rough. Let’s try to hang on to our tempers and temperaments.”
“Well, he . . .” said Willie.
“Well, he . . .” I said.
“See?” said Marla.
We laughed, all of us, uncomfortably.
“Saturday morning with the sun shining is not exactly propitious for pornography,” said Marla, “especially when the lady is sitting outside in the library worried about blackmail with no idea of what we actually have in here.”
“I apologize, Mr. Chambers,” said Willie. “Acrimony is frequently nothing more than the rattling of guilt.”
“I apologize in return, Mr. Winkle,” I said. “Okay, we’ve rattled. So how do you know the guy is stupid?”
“In the line of my duty I listened to the tapes. The intellectual badinage was suffocating.”
“What do you expect in the dialogue of lovers? Wit, wisdom, and the profundities of Plato?”
“Hear, hear,” said Marla applauding by tapping out her cigarette.
Willie shrugged. “I should have stood in bed, huh? This is not my day. Once more I apologize and this time also to the handsome bartender in absentia.”
“I’m still stuck with the preliminary research,” I said.
“You’re not stuck with anything,” said Marla. “The preliminary research was practically nil. Jonathan Kiss came here in January with a feeling that his wife was cheating. A spouse rarely misses on that sort of feeling. I questioned him but he had no idea of the possible lover. The best he could come up with was the bartender. Seems last summer the Kisses vacationed up near Darien, Connecticut. Mrs. Kiss seemed to cotton to a bartender in a tavern called the Pink Poodle and the bartender in the Pink Poodle seemed to cotton to Mrs. Kiss. The palpable flirtation had annoyed Mr. Kiss but he had no proof that it had been anything more than a summer flirtation. In the fall the Kisses went home and that was that until the feeling of cheating crept up on friend husband.”
“I’m still stuck with the preliminary research.”
“The preliminary research was exactly this.” Marla snapped fire to a new cigarette. “In January, the day after we were retained, I went up to Darien to the Pink Poodle. The husband had described the bartender as a good-looking guy with a white crew-cut. There was no such bartender but there had been. His name was Richard Robinson Jackson, known as Ritchie. He was a big boozer when he wasn’t working. He was a hip character who was a bear with the women and he had quit the job in October. Period.”
“So where did you get the line on him?”
“Willie got the line.”
“Routine,” said Willie. “I tailed the dame. Ritchie now had a sweet little apartment at 222 East Sixty-second Street, discreet with no doorman, and his name as big as life downstairs in the bell-bracket.”
Marla took it up. “Routine established that she saw him afternoons, Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, and on sporadic evenings. She would come over at about