Read Coward's Kiss for Free Online Page B

found the picture of Sheila Kane that Jack had given me. It was just a snapshot, probably taken with a box camera. The background—trees and open space—was out of focus. But the background wasn’t important when you saw the girl.
    Her long blonde hair was caught up in a pony tail. Her head was thrown back, her eyes bright. She was laughing. She wore a bulky turtle-neck sweater and a loose plaid skirt and she looked like the queen of the homecoming game.
    I studied the picture and remembered everything Jack Enright had told me about her. I tried to imagine the kind of girl she must have been, tried to mesh that image with the image I got from the photograph. I came up with a person.
    Poor Sheila, I kept thinking. Poor, poor Sheila.
    “Poor Ed.”
    I looked across the table at Maddy Parson’s pretty face. She was grinning at me over the brim of her second Daiquiri. Her eyes were sparkling. The two drinks had her high as a Chinese kite.
    “Poor Ed,” she said again. “You didn’t know you’d get stuck for a dinner like this one. This is going to run you twenty dollars before we get out of here.”
    “It’s worth it.”
    “I hope so,” she said. “I hope you have some darn good questions to ask.”
    “I hope you know the answers.”
    We were at McGraw’s on Forty-fifth near Third. There are girls who prefer the haute cuisine of French cookery; there are girls who will go anyplace to eat as long as it’s fashionable; there are girls who like to sample out-of-the-way restaurants where not even the waiter can understand the menu. And there are still other girls—a few of them, anyhow—who like lean red meat and plenty of it with a big baked potato on the side. Maddy Parson belonged in the last group and that explains our presence at McGraw’s.
    McGraw’s is a steakhouse. Which is a little like saying that the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground. It’s true enough but it doesn’t tell the whole story. McGraw’s is an institution.
    The front window facing out on Forty-fifth Street opens on a cold room where hunks of steak hang and ripen. In the dining room the decor is unobtrusive nineteenth-century American male—heavy oak panelling, a thick wine-red carpet, massive leather chairs. They don’t have a menu. All you do is tell your white-haired waiter how you want your sirloin and what you’re drinking with it. If you don’t order your meat rare he looks unhappy. We didn’t disappoint the old gentleman.
    “It’s been a long time,” Madeleine Parson was saying. “Almost too long. I don’t know where to start talking.”
    “Start with yourself.”
    She rolled her eyes. “An actor’s lot is not a happy one. Nor is an actress’. I almost took a job, Ed. Can you imagine that? Not even a semi-theatrical job that lets you kid yourself along. All the girls do that. They sell tickets in a box office or follow a producer around and sharpen his pencils for him and think they’re learning the business from the ground up. But I almost took a job selling hats. Can you imagine that? I thought to myself how easy it would be, just sell hats and earn a steady $72.50 a week before taxes and move up gradually, maybe be a buyer in time, and——”
    She saw the expression on my face. Her eyes danced and she laughed. “Then my agent called me and told me Schwerner was auditioning for ‘Love Among The Falling Stars’ and I stuffed my mental hats into a mental hatbox and went away singing. I didn’t get the part. I read miserably and it wasn’t right for me to begin with. But I forgot all about selling hats.”
    “You’ll get your break, Maddy.”
    “Of course I will. And I’ll need it, Ed. I came to New York ready to take Broadway by storm. I was the best damn actress in the country and it was only a question of time before the rest of the world figured it out for themselves. And I was lousy, Ed. I’m not too good even now. Hayes and Cornell have nothing to worry about.”
    Her eyes were challenging. “And