To Kiss, Or Kill

© Phocion Publishing 2019, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

To Kiss, or Kill

By

DAY KEENE

To Kiss, or Kill was originally published in 1951 as a Gold Medal Book by Fawcett Publications, Inc., New York.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

CHAPTER ONE 5

CHAPTER TWO 10

CHAPTER THREE 16

CHAPTER FOUR 22

CHAPTER FIVE 27

CHAPTER SIX 32

CHAPTER SEVEN 38

CHAPTER EIGHT 44

CHAPTER NINE 50

CHAPTER TEN 54

CHAPTER ELEVEN 60

CHAPTER TWELVE 66

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 73

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 80

CHAPTER FIFTEEN 88

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 95

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 101

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 107

CHAPTER NINETEEN 115

CHAPTER TWENTY 122

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 126

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 133

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 139

CHAPTER ONE

YOU never can tell what a big, tough Polish boy will do when he finds a nude blonde in his bathroom. Especially if he is a heavyweight fighter who was born back of the yards, is married to a million dollars, and has a psychiatric record.

He might do a number of things. He might tell her to get out. He might yell for his wife. He might blow what’s left of his top. He might even do what Barney Mandell did, come to his addled senses.

It really happened, in Chicago. It happened to Barney Mandell on the afternoon of the day he was released from the asylum as cured, because he hadn’t wrung a parrot’s neck in two years.

Oh, yes. The nude blonde was dead.

• • •

Barney held down a bar stool that afternoon. It was fall. It was cold. At five o’clock it began to rain. Outside the bar, the street lights and the neon signs came on.

At five minutes after five, Barney pushed his glass across the bar for the sixteenth time. Let’s try another.

The barman filled his glass. Where do you put it, Barney?

In my left leg, Mandell confided.

He sipped the whisky, wondering why it didn’t warm him. He still felt cold, as cold as the rain streaking the window. He was sad. Maybe he’d never feel warm again. A big, blond youth, with the flattened nose of his trade, his spatulate fingers dwarfing the shot glass, he considered running an ad in the Personals column of the Chicago Tribune. He could word it: Come home, Gale. Please come home, baby. I need you.

But where was home? Where was Gale? Where did society go, when it was too cold for Pinehurst and too early for Palm Beach?

A brunette wearing an imitation Persian-lamb coat came into the bar, brushing raindrops from her hair. Lighting a cigarette, she sat a few stools down the bar from Mandell and bought her own first drink as an investment.

Mandell stopped looking at his glass and looked at her. She wasn’t bad. A little young but willing. If he bought her a drink, she’d let him take her to dinner. She’d laugh with him and act the fool. She’d let him buy her a lot of drinks. She’d come to his hotel room. As long as his money held out, she wouldn’t look at his heels. She wouldn’t care if he was fresh out of a snake pit.

The brunette saw him looking at her and smiled over the rim of her glass.

Mandell tried to smile back and couldn’t. The cold crept up to his lips. He doubted that waltzing the brunette out of the bar would be any more profitable than leaving with the little blonde had been. Before they reached his room, he’d change his mind. He didn’t want a woman. He wanted Gale.

Mandell rapped his glass on the wood again. Go again.

The barman shook his head. Not in here.

Why not?

Because you’ve had plenty.

Who says so?

I do, the barman said.

Mandell’s shoulders bunched under his coat. He started to argue and changed his mind. It could be the barman was right. The chances were that the barman had never been in an asylum.

Just as you say, he said.

No hard feelings?

Mandell shook his head. No hard feelings. He picked his change from the bar, stuffed it into his pocket, and walked, slightly unsteadily, over to where his two-hundred-dollar, three-year-old topcoat was hanging against the wall. As he put it on, he heard the brunette ask the barman:

Who’s the good-looking wolf with the load?

Barney Mandell, he told her. The guy Ezzard Charles should have fought instead of Wolcott. Only Barney couldn’t make it. On account of he’s been in a fish bowl for two years. They just left him out this morning.

Oh, the brunette ohed. She looked at Mandell with new respect. So he’s the guy who married the Ebbling money.

Outside, in the rain, Mandell stood in front of the bar looking at the marquees of the movie houses on Randolph Street. He could see Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward in Rawhide. Or Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in Meet the Invisible Man. Or The Thing. He could grab a cab and go out and see Ma. He could go to another bar. He could go to his hotel.

He decided to go to his hotel on the chance that Gale had phoned or written. He walked west on Randolph Street, enjoying the rain on his face. On the corner of Dearborn Street, he paused to look furtively in the plate-glass window of a restaurant. He hoped the psychiatrist was right. He didn’t look crazy. He never had. Still, they said a man couldn’t tell when he was walking on his heels.

There was a crowd under the metal marquee of his hotel, waiting for the rain to stop; an even larger crowd in the lobby. A fight promoter he knew stopped him on his way to the desk and insisted on shaking hands.

Hi, there, Barney. It’s good to see you, fellow.

Mandell said, It’s good to see you, and walked on.

The room clerk gave him a phone slip with his key. For a moment he thought it must be from Gale. It wasn’t. A Mr. John Curtis had called and would call again, but he hadn’t left his phone number. Mandell rode up in the elevator trying to place the name.

He unlocked the door of the room and walked in. It’s about time, Mandell, the man sitting on the bed in the unlighted room said.

Mandell closed the door and leaned against it. His heart pounded. He was frightened, not physically, but mentally. He wished he knew if the man were real. He had to know if the man were real. He reached for the light switch by the door and the man stood up.

Hold it right there, Mandell.

Mandell lowered his hand. Relief drenched his body with sweat. The man was real. He wasn’t hearing or seeing things again. He asked, What’s the big idea?

The man said, Empty your pockets on the bed.

Why should I?

The man took a step in the dark. Come on, now. Don’t give me no trouble, punchy.

Don’t call me that, Mandell said.

The man took another step and swung the gun in his hand. Mandell ducked. But sixteen straight ryes and two years of inactivity slowed him. The other man was both fast and sober. There was a burst of pain as the gun struck his head. Then all was dark and silent.

When Mandell came to, he was lying on the floor, between the door and the bed. He sat up and felt for his wallet. It was gone, and with it the last of his money except for the bills and change in his pants pocket.

He got to his feet and, turning on the ceiling lights, looked at his reflection in the dresser mirror. The man with the gun knew his business. He’d made a lump the size of a walnut, but he hadn’t broken the skin.

Breathing through his mouth, Mandell looked from the lump on his temple to his bloodshot eyes. He didn’t look much like the leading heavyweight contender. A few more days of this horsing around and they’d put him back in the fish bowl, for the long count this time. So Gale had walked out on him? So she hadn’t kept her promise? What could he expect after the dirty things he’d thought about her?

He slipped out of his rain-sodden topcoat and jacket and threw them over a chair. Then, still looking at his reflection, he opened the top drawer of the dresser and drained what the maid had left of a partly filled pint of whisky.

He was acting like a heel. He knew it. He hadn’t even called Ma or Rosemary. Whatever happened to him he deserved. But he had to square away with Gale before he could make any plans.

He started for the bathroom to wash his hands and picked the phone from its cradle instead.

Switchboard, a girl’s voice trilled.

At the sound of her voice, Mandell changed his mind about reporting that he’d been robbed. The house detective would call the police. The police would come to the hotel. Reporters would come with the police. And they would ask questions he couldn’t answer. He could hear the conversation now:

How does it feel to be out of the fish bowl, Barney?

It feels fine.

When is Mrs. Mandell going to join you?

I wish I knew.

Are you going to try to get back in condition and have a shot at Wolcott, or is Attorney Ebbling going to set you up in business of some kind?

That’s something you have to ask Mr. Ebbling.

The switchboard operator said impatiently, Yes? May I help you?

Mandell counted the crumpled bills in his pants pocket. Send up a boy with a pint of rye. Old Overholt.

He cradled the phone and sat on the bed. Then he lay back on it, thinking that if his brief set-to with the hood was a sample of what he had left, he was washed up as a fighter. He was just another meatball.

The radiator under the window thumped with an annoying persistence. It was hot in the room. His tie was tight. He loosened it, then took it off and dropped it on the floor. He hoped the boy would hurry with the pint. He wished he’d laid in a good stock of whisky before he’d been robbed. He wished he had five hundred of the thousands of dollars he’d thrown and given away when he’d been up there with the white lights beating down on him and the shouting of the fight mob in his ears:

Kill him, Barney!...Knock him out of the ring!...That’s it…. Oh, you great big beautiful Polack!

His mouth was dry. He wanted a drink of water, but was suddenly too tired to walk into the bathroom and get one. He kicked off his shoes and curled his toes in his wet socks.

It had been two years since he had had a woman. He wanted Gale so badly he could smell the perfume she used. But that was over, too. Mandell loosened his belt a notch. Gale had only pretended to be in love with him. She’d always had everything she’d wanted. Since she’d been a little girl. And Gale had wanted him, before he’d blown his top and started walking on his heels.

It hadn’t been important that he had been born back of the Yards. Not with the sports pages whooping it up for him. Not while he’d had an unbroken string of forty-two knockouts and had been breathing down Ezzard Charles’s ebony neck. He’d been sex in purple boxing trunks and a pair of six-ounce gloves. Sir Barney of the squared ring. A punk from the wrong side of the tracks made boudoir-presentable by limelight.

He began to sweat again. He sat up and took off his shirt. Where was the boy with the whisky? How much did they think a man could take?

He sat on the edge of the bed and held his face in his hands, thinking of what the psychiatrist had said when they had discharged him this morning.

You’ve been sick, Barney. You’ve been a very sick man. Well men don’t see or hear the things you’ve seen and heard. Well men don’t do the things you’ve done. You’ve lived too fast, too intensely. You’ve burned too many candles. You’ve taken too many punches. Now we’re dismissing you as cured. But no more fights. No more excitement. No more late hours. The next time you come back here, you’ll stay.

He got up and paced the floor, wiping the sweat from the hair on his chest with his palms. Then he thought of taking a shower. He took off his pants and shorts and socks and padded barefooted into the bathroom.

He was reaching for the shower faucet when he saw her. His mouth gaped open. His eyes bugged slightly. The doctors were wrong in assuming he was cured. The hallucinations were beginning again. He could swear there was a nude girl in his bathroom. She was lying on her back on the tile, one leg straight, one white knee raised, her pink-tipped breasts pointing upward. More, she was the little blond with whom he’d walked out of Johnny’s Bar that afternoon.

And she was dead.

Mandell backed as far from her as he could. His chest hurt as he tried to breathe. She couldn’t be dead in his bathroom. He’d changed his mind, once they were outside the bar. They hadn’t come to his room. Or had they? Sweat blinded him. He grabbed a towel from the rack and wiped his eyes. Then he forced himself to kneel on the tile beside the girl. He thrust a shaking hand forward and his hand slapped down and froze on the girl’s cold breast, as someone rapped sharply on the hall door of his room.

Room service.

CHAPTER TWO

MANDELL got to his feet and wrapped a bath towel around his loins. Just a minute.

The towel slipped and fell on top of the girl. He snatched another towel from the rack and padded across the room. Almost to the door he looked back. He’d left the bathroom door open and the dead girl’s bare foot and leg showed plainly.

He walked back and closed the bathroom door. He had to have time to think. Had he come to the room with the girl, or hadn’t he? And after that, what had happened?

The room-service waiter was a middle-aged man with