Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  Besides, Duelle wouldn’t have the faintest notion that any such tie even existed.

  But still, Guinness kept turning his faceless successor over in his mind, wondering what he would be like, what sort of man Kathleen would have married the second time around. He knew next to nothing, which wasn’t terribly surprising, since from Washington’s point of view Dr. Duelle was strictly a side issue. Guinness wasn’t down there to solve anyone’s domestic problems but to kill a Flycatcher; nothing they could have told him about Duelle would have been very useful in that direction.

  Still, you might have expected a word here and there.

  Unless, of course, there were boxes within boxes about this thing that nobody had felt it necessary to mention. Or perhaps they were simply being mysterious out of force of habit. Secrecy became a cast of mind in certain corners of the intelligence establishment; that was something he had learned from working for the British. Or perhaps they just wanted him to dope out everything for himself, his mind uncluttered by the screwy theories of operations clerks who might as well never have been outside the walls of their offices. He imagined he would find out sooner or later.

  The walk across the university grounds was very pleasant if you made allowances for the heat, which had been building steadily since midmorning. It was a pretty campus with huge stretches of lawn along the northern edge, the ground rising slowly but steadily until you came to a little knoll where the statue of Thomas G. Clemson was seated like the local nature god, except that someone had painted him purple, presumably as a joke. All around there were gray stone buildings that looked as if humane and worthwhile things were done inside, not like the raw brick fortresses of Guinness’s own college. But these were probably the oldest buildings, and they were always the nicest.

  Still, the place made a good impression—not anything like what he had been led to expect. “Some dreadful cow college,” Tuttle had called it, “very big on football and ROTC, that sort of thing. I’d never heard of it before all this blew up.” But Tuttle, if memory served, was a Cornell man and inclined, doubtless, to be a bit of a snob in such questions.

  Guinness, on the other hand, had a wider, more tolerant frame of reference: a B.A. from Ohio State and graduate work at the University of London and UCLA, topped off with six grinding years of teaching in the California state college system. He didn’t know; he wasn’t throwing any rocks at Clemson.

  In the middle of a little patio, enclosed on three sides by the outside stairwells of a couple of laboratory buildings, there was a huge, free swinging pendulum, a brass plumb at the end of about fifty feet of steel cable, that was supposed to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. Guinness had seen one like it, only bigger, at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco; there had been little wooden pegs all around the circumference of its swing line, and it would knock one over every seven or eight minutes. It gave you the willies, as if any second you might spin right off into the darkness. There didn’t seem to be any pegs around the base of this one, so Guinness watched it for a while, taking his bearings and checking to see whether or not he had picked up a tail. He hadn’t, but the day was still young.

  On his right as he walked along was a reflecting pool, drained dry and with the pipes for the fountains exposed like bleached bones. At its southern end was the library, white and monolithic with bands of tinted window glass running the full three or four stories from top to bottom; it might have been a concert hall or, even grander, an insurance building. He would have to take a peek inside to see if they really kept anything as vulgar as a book in there.

  And to the right of the library, on the other side, was the Rhodes Engineering Research Building, built on foundations that ran deep into the ground so that it wouldn’t be affected by earth tremors. Like the library, it was white and seamless, but there didn’t seem to be any windows, or very few, and only on the upper stories. Apparently the people who labored inside were too high minded to think of anything as pedestrian as the view. This was where Professor Duelle had his office.

  The secretary at the front desk was a desiccated old crone with a scowl like a librarian. Anyone might have thought they were guarding Final Secret somewhere up on the fourth floor; here was the lobby and there behind it was a little alcove with a door on one side and an elevator on the other, and blocking the passage between, so you would practically have to turn sideways to get past, was the tragedy queen, shaking her tightly curled little black bangs at you like Medea presiding over the murder of her children.

  “May Ah he’p you?” It was at once a question and a challenge, and Guinness answered with his most winning, boyish smile.

  “Yes, if you could just tell me the office number of a Dr. Holman Duelle?” The implication was, of course, that if she’d just supply him with that little piece of information he could find his own way and never bother her again, thank you very much. He kept up the smile a few seconds longer, but apparently it wasn’t that lady’s day for winning, boyish smiles—Guinness entertained a doubt that it ever was. You could almost feel the resistance hardening.

  “Do y’ have an appointment?”

  “Actually, no.” He shook his head and frowned penitently, having decided that it might be fun to find out what her Seven Against Thebes routine would be like. There were some people whom it was a positive pleasure to irritate. “But if you’ll tell him a Mr. McAffee is here I’m sure he’ll see me.” The smile came back, deadly in its insolence.

  She picked up the phone and dialed four digits—apparently the operation wasn’t quite grand enough to merit touch tone—and they waited together in mutual asperity.

  “Doctah Duelle? Thea’s a gen’leman hea. . .” Her eyes positively glittered as she listened to his answer at the other end of the line, and toward the end she cast a glance of triumph in Guinness’s direction. “He says he doesn’t know any Mistah McAffee,” she whispered gleefully, cupping her hand over the mouthpiece as if she didn’t want her Dr. Duelle hearing anything so shameful.

  “Have you an envelope?”

  “Pa’don?”

  “An envelope. Do you have an envelope?” Guinness was about to break the word down into syllables for her when she scowled her librarian scowl at him again as she took the very thing out of a drawer and slapped it down in front of him on the shiny, wood veneer finish of the desk. He noticed that it wasn’t a legal size envelope but one of the smaller ones.

  Ernie Tuttle had thoughtfully supplied some business cards made out to Peter McAffee of the FBI’s Atlanta office, and Guinness extracted one from the little pouch behind the identity card in his badge case, putting it in the envelope and licking the envelope closed. This last seemed to infuriate Her Nibs—as well it should, since he was the one Dr. Duelle had never heard of.

  “Would you please have this taken up to him?”

  If looks could kill, Guinness figured he would have been dead years before; so he wasn’t too troubled by the way her nostrils flared as she explained the situation into the phone. Having set the receiver back down on its cradle, she stepped to the door behind her, opened it a crack, and whispered something unintelligible to someone apparently just on the other side, beyond Guinness’s field of vision. His envelope was held tightly, like the ear of a child being dragged to the principal’s office, between the first and second fingers of her right hand.

  Almost immediately, a dark-haired girl of astonishing prettiness—a wild guess would have put her age at about nineteen—came out through the door, took the envelope without a word, and touched the button summoning the elevator. As soon as she was gone, Guinness’s pet dragon returned to her desk and began straightening stacks of paper, while she awaited the issue of their little struggle for the heart and soul of the engineering department.

  When the elevator door opened again, it wasn’t the pretty, dark haired girl who stepped off, but Duelle himself. His walk was almost a run as he covered the fifteen or so feet between himself and his visitor, and his hand was already out to be shaken be
fore he had covered a third of it.

  As soon as Guinness took the offered hand he felt himself being propelled, almost dragged, into the waiting elevator.

  “Mr. McAffee, I am so sorry about this little mix-up. I hope you haven’t been kept waiting long.”

  “No, not long.”

  Guinness shot the dragon a quick wink before allowing himself to be overwhelmed by the harried husband of his own fair Kathleen.

  An hour and a half later he was in his car, driving the twenty miles of uncluttered road between Clemson and Anderson, where he thought he might see if he couldn’t do a little window shopping—the trade name for seeing if he hadn’t picked up a tail—and perhaps examine the charms of the town square until it was time for dinner.

  The kid behind the desk at the Holiday Inn had said there was a pretty fair Mennonite restaurant in Anderson, where you could get pan fried chicken and enough apple fritters at the buffet table to last you a lifetime.

  And there was plenty of time; Flycatcher wasn’t going to do anything rash. Guinness had seen to it that his mind would be put at rest.

  “We want you to pull your head in a while. Put your house on the market, stay away from work. We’ll smooth everything over with the university when this matter is cleared up. Just stay home and act like they’ve scared you off. In a week or so, if it’s still necessary, we’ll have you and your family moved out, but I don’t think it’ll come to that.”

  Duelle had listened to all this with the air of a priest hearing confession. Sitting back in his chair, with his chin resting on his thumb and his index finger pressed against the bridge of his nose, he was as impassive as a plaster saint. Except that what saint ever wore red and white checkered trousers held up by a white patent leather belt?

  Guinness didn’t care for him, and he rather thought he wouldn’t have cared for him even if he hadn’t been married to Kathleen. Duelle just wasn’t his type.

  He had known a few like him before—the guy who just sits around in his department office all day, buffing his nails on his shirtfront and waiting to be elected president of the college. And, hell, half the time it works. Aside from an impressive self-assurance, Guinness had never noticed that the general run of administrators showed any marked evidence of genius.

  Duelle had his eye out for something—one could practically hear him panting. He was so polite, so very deferential, and not the way a man is when he’s scared shitless and clings to you like a lost soul at the edge of a cliff because he just doesn’t want to be alone when he goes over. No, this boy was thinking about the report Inspector McAffee of the all powerful FBI would write about his meeting with subject Duelle, and about who would read it and how subject Duelle would come across. He was thinking about grant money and promotion and how he could play it so that this business with his wife’s bratty daughter might help him up the ladder. All of his anxieties were for his own sweet ass.

  “Well, I’m sure you gentlemen know what you’re about,” he had said, smiling as if to express his confidence in that great law enforcement agency to which Guinness was presumed to have the honor of belonging. There was just the faintest trace of a mellifluous, southern accent in his voice, as if to suggest the aristocrat by virtue of profession who has seen more of the world than simply the backside of Georgia but who is still solidly and respectably a son of this red soil. The kind of man you could count on to exemplify the traditional values of country, motherhood, apple pie, and obedience to the slightest whim of the authorities, even if it meant risking his step kid’s neck. Yes, Guinness was just in love with the honorable, upright, squeaky clean Dr. Duelle.

  “I haven’t had much experience with things of that sort.”

  This last punctuated with a short little laugh.

  Kathleen’s second line of defense was indeed a few years older than Guinness; was probably, indeed, late into his forties. But he was still giving it a game try, for all that his gut billowed out over his belt like a sail. The sideburns were long and slanted at a rakish angle, and what was on top had been combed carefully forward, perhaps to cover a hairline in retreat.

  It was not, in any case, a face to inspire confidence. The eyes glittered uncertainly, even in the fluorescent light shining softly down from the ceiling (the venetian blinds, for some reason, were drawn tight), and on the earlobes and high up on the cheeks, just under the surface, were networks of little red veins. You noticed the eyes, and the unhealthily red cheeks, and the unconscious way he kept touching the edge of his desk with his free hand, the one that wasn’t keeping his chin from falling into his lap. Guinness noticed the big color photograph of Kathleen on his desk, pointing out into the room for the benefit of visitors. She was smiling like an idiot and her hands were folded over the railing of a picket fence. It was a studio portrait, so probably the fence was only a prop. It looked like a prop.

  “How’s your wife taking all this?”

  Duelle seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, fine,” he said brightly, only about half a beat behind. “At least, as well as can be expected, under the circumstances. It’s a terrible strain, of course. You know how women are.”

  No, Guinness couldn’t even begin to guess.

  . . . . .

  About five miles outside of town, set well back from the road, was a building with two enormous plastic bulls standing on the roof, on either side of the word (or words, depending upon how you looked at it) BI-LO. It wasn’t the sort of thing you saw every day, even if you were a professional assassin with opportunities for travel. It even beat the 500 pound cow carved entirely out of creamery butter that Guinness remembered having seen once at the Ohio State Fair while he was a college boy in Columbus. He pulled in and drove across a gravel parking lot that seemed to go on forever, and parked where there were plenty of other cars. It was a shopping center. The BI-LO was a supermarket, but it was flanked on one side by a five-and-ten and a pharmacy, and on the other by a hardware store cum auto supply center.

  Guinness went into the supermarket first, but there didn’t seem to be a public phone inside so he only stayed long enough to admire the guard who was posted on a raised platform at one end of the line of cashiers, along with the shotgun that was clipped ostentatiously to the wall behind him, and to wonder how many innocent bystanders he would be likely to blow away in the event that anybody did try to stick the place up.

  He had better luck in the pharmacy. He bought a Mounds bar to get some change and then dropped a quarter in the slot, and within a few seconds he was listening to the warm, middle aged voice of the Company’s den mother.

  “A dark blue Dodge with South Carolina plates AGA 472. The driver has dark brown or black hair that covers his ears, and a moustache. I haven’t been able to get close enough for a good look, but from what I can judge of him seen through a car window, he isn’t very tall—maybe five seven or eight. I’d put his age in the middle thirties.”

  “That isn’t much to go on.”

  Guinness stared at the magazine racks and wrinkled his nose. It was never much to go on, not if you had anything less than a photograph and a full set of prints. He wondered whether Grandma had any notion of how these things went in the field.

  “So it isn’t much to go on. Do your best and I’ll call again in three quarters of an hour. Ciao.”

  He would wait until Anderson, where presumably there would be plenty of opportunity. Maybe he would treat the little punk to a movie and lose him in the flickering darkness—just long enough to place a call from the men’s room. Something would turn up.

  Guinness was feeling pretty good, the way he always felt good once an operation had really started. And now he could think about something else besides what a schmuck his ex-wife had married and how she hadn’t really been very glad to see her old Ray again. If nothing else worked out, at least the job was clicking along all right. It’s always a promising sign when you’ve found that you’re being tailed.

  5

  The Dodge turned out to be registered to one
Willie Trowbridge, a very trivial menace to the public peace whose only known contacts with the world of big time crime came from his occasional work as a delivery boy for the narcotics traffic of which Greenville was the center. He had done some time for the armed robbery of a filling station in 1973, and an assault charge filed by a lady friend in ‘77 had been dropped. None of the spook shops had ever heard of him, and the spook shops live or die by the thoroughness of their filing systems; so it was a safe bet he was new to the cloak and dagger business.

  As if that wasn’t obvious enough. Willie’s present description matched point for point that of the man Guinness had seen waiting in his car in the BI-LO parking lot, and you had to be both inexperienced and stupid to use your own wheels on a tailing job.

  The address given was 12757 Wade Hampton Boulevard, a spectacularly ugly apartment building, set back only a dozen or so yards from a noisy street. Apparently the minor leagues of gangsterism weren’t making Willie rich.

  Still, from Guinness’s point of view it was very nearly perfect, a motel style structure on two levels and all the doors opening to the front. There would be no security system, no doormen to outwit, nothing like that. Only a superintendent, who at this time of night would probably be occupied with watching reruns of “Star Trek.” In such places nobody paid much attention to the comings and goings in other people’s apartments, not the way they did in buildings where there might be only three or four doors along one corridor; so it wasn’t even worthwhile to break in the back way. That they might notice.

  Guinness simply parked his own car half a block up the street and walked back, checking to make sure the Dodge wasn’t parked anywhere near its assigned slot before he ascended the stairs and made his way to apartment number 34. Bold as brass, he took a piece of plastic disguised as a credit card out of his wallet and used it to spring the lock; in the darkness anyone would have thought he was using a key. Inside, he closed the door behind him and flicked on the light, just long enough to see how the front room was laid out. Afterwards he would have no trouble finding his way around in the dark.