Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  There wasn’t much to see. Cheap furniture, Discount House Modern in style (it had probably been put in four or five tenants before Willie), a litter of magazines and empty beer cans and full ashtrays on the table in front of the sofa, a television set with rabbit ears on a metal cabinet supposed to look like blond wood, no paintings or prints on the walls.

  In short, a dump.

  The kitchen was small and uninteresting, affording an extensive view of a back alley through the window over the sink. In the refrigerator Guinness found a plate of butter, half a loaf of Wonder Bread—helps build strong bodies eight ways—two open packages of luncheon meat, a pizza that should have been kept frozen but was too big for the freezer, a bottle of catsup, three Bermuda onions, and a quart bottle of beer with about four inches left in it.

  He took out the beer bottle, took a small hard leather case out of his jacket pocket, took a vial of clear fluid from the case and emptied it into the beer, swirling it around in the bottle a little so everything would mix. Then he put the bottle back into the refrigerator and closed the door; there was no telling when Willie would decide to come home, and the stuff was supposed to work better if it was kept cold.

  Guinness decided he would wait in the bedroom. It was only in the movies that you lurked behind a door and held your breath for the guy to come through so you could tap him delicately on the back of the head; in real life you gave yourself room to maneuver, or you learned very quickly that you had better take up another line of work. Willie Trowbridge probably wasn’t much, but it didn’t seem wise simply to assume that he was enough of a moron not to be a little cagey about how he walked into dark apartments, even his own.

  The bed was unmade, which was nice—Willie probably wasn’t expecting company. It would get a trifle tight if he brought a woman home with him, but someone would have to be really tacky to expect any woman to sleep with him in his unmade bed.

  The only other piece of furniture in the room was a dresser with a piece of glass over the top. The dresser was pitted and marked with cigarette burns, even under the glass. Guinness went through the drawers, merely out of a sense of form, but there was nothing you wouldn’t expect to find in every man’s dresser. There was nothing in the closet either. If Willie owned a weapon, and in this state that was a pretty safe bet, then he was carrying it on him; Guinness would keep that fact in mind.

  It isn’t necessarily true that one can tell a lot about people from the contents of their homes; some people don’t really live in their homes, but in their cars or their offices or the streets or the interior of their minds. Some people don’t really live at all. But if Willie Trowbridge’s digs suggested anything about him, it was that he was only camping out in this wild world, occupying airspace for a given number of years before he died. He was a man of value to no one but himself. What was there in these barren little rooms to suggest a personality or an inner life? Did Willie Trowbridge love anyone, or collect stamps, or believe in the Loch Ness monster? Was he a member of the Republican party? Did he have nightmares about his 2½ years in the jug? Did he like Tuesday Weld movies? Did he like anything?

  Sitting in the dark, on the edge of Willie’s bed, Guinness tried to convince himself that the answer to all of the above was “probably not,” because, of course, Willie wasn’t going to make it until the next morning. By then he would be bedded down in the county sheriff’s morgue.

  Of course, it would be necessary to kill Willie. Guinness needed to know a few things that Willie could tell him, and afterwards it would prove inconvenient to leave him wandering loose. So he would have to die. Sometime in the very near future his downstairs neighbors would notice the water running down their plaster wall, and they would notify the super and the super would come up and unlock Willie’s apartment with his master key and find his hoodlum tenant floating face down in the bathtub, with a large bruise on his left temple and the little finger of his right hand broken, as if he had tried to break his fall. The assumption would be that he had slipped while getting ready to take a bath, had been knocked unconscious, and had drowned.

  The broken finger would lend a nice touch of verisimilitude, just the sort of thing to make an overworked coroner feel right about listing the cause of death as “misadventure.” It was a trick he had picked up from one of his trainers at MI-6’s School of Alarming Arts up in the wilds of Caledonia. They had stressed the details up there, the little touches that might help keep you alive through one more job.

  Of course the real cause of death would be poison. Probably Willie actually would drown; the stuff took about three quarters of an hour before it slowed down the respiration enough to kill you, but once it was in your system there was no turning back. And it left no traces, not unless a very savvy pathologist knew exactly what he was looking for. It was the latest wrinkle, a byproduct, so he had been told, of government sponsored research at one of the country’s leading universities, and Guinness was one of a select few to be trusted with it.

  So, Willie was to be the victim of modern technology and Guinness’s necessity. He doubtless was no loss to anyone and he would be dying in a good cause, but probably neither of these facts would strike him as particularly consoling—every little slob wants to live as long as he can.

  It had been a long time since the act of murder had made Guinness feel anything except slightly ashamed of himself, a very long time since he had stopped experiencing that surge of adrenaline associated with the hunting instinct. Now, instead of thinking he was ten feet tall and the toughest thing going, when it came time to drop the hammer on some poor clown he simply tried not to think at all. It was better to regard the business as nothing more than a technical procedure of the sort that, by now, he could do on automatic pilot, with no intrusions either of sympathy or malice.

  What the hell—Willie Trowbridge had no special claims. What was coming to him was nothing more than what was coming to them all, one of these times. What was coming to Flycatcher if things worked out as planned; what was coming, eventually, to Guinness. Death in some frowzy little room, at the hands of a stranger. An end at once violent, sordid, and lonely. Unless you were smart, like Ernie Tuttle, and landed yourself a desk job while your skin was still intact, it was only a matter of time before one day you got careless, or unlucky, and that was that. It was the universal fate of fieldmen. You might have a pension plan, but you were a damned fool if you thought for one moment that you would live long enough to collect. It didn’t work that way.

  These gloomy meditations were ended abruptly at a few minutes after eight, by the sound of a key being inserted into the lock on the front door. The lord and master of apartment 34 was coming home, and Guinness took up his position flush against the bedroom wall, right next to the light switch.

  Willie came in whistling an almost unrecognizable version of the theme from the The Godfather, carrying a brown paper shopping bag cradled in his right arm. He went directly into the kitchen—God, Guinness hoped to hell he wasn’t thirsty—but only stayed long enough to set the bag down on the tiny Formica breakfast table, upon which also rested the dirty dishes from some previous meal. There was no sound of the refrigerator door being opened or closed.

  Still whistling, he walked across the living room toward the bedroom door, which was about a quarter open. Guinness couldn’t see him, but the sound of his footsteps was quick and unsuspecting. He pushed open the door, simultaneously reaching for the light switch, but Guinness had him by the forearm before his fingers had come to rest on the plate.

  A quick, sharp pull, a straight punch, just under the rib cage, a crack on the back of the neck, and Willie Trowbridge was curled up on the carpet, sleeping like a baby.

  Guinness patted him down, finding a .32 caliber revolver in the inevitable shoulder holster, and flipped on the light so that he could have a better look at his prize.

  There wasn’t much that could be said for the wardrobe—a canary yellow sport jacket and trousers of a shade between brown and purple. Guinness picked
up his hat, a cocoa-colored straw with a wide white band, and placed it on the bed. Miami Sicilian. Poor little Willie probably thought he was going to grow up to be Joey Gallo.

  Well, it didn’t seem very likely he’d grow up at all now. Guinness grabbed the yellow sport jacket by the back of the collar and dragged poor little Willie into the front room, where there was more space and therefore less likelihood that when he woke up Willie would get any ideas about jumping anybody.

  After about five minutes, Willie started to come round.

  With truly painful deliberation, as if any minute he might break into splinters, he turned himself over until he could see both Guinness, sitting on the couch, and the revolver Guinness had taken from him. It was placed neatly on the table between them, with the five cartridges it had contained lined up in a little row.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked thickly, still supporting the upper half of his body on his hands. Guinness took his own gun from his coat pocket, cocked the hammer, and aimed it at a spot about half an inch below Trowbridge’s left eye.

  “I’m the man who’s going to kill you, Willie, right here and now, if you ask me another dumb question like that. You know perfectly well who I am; you spent a good part of the afternoon following me around.”

  The hair was, in fact, dark brown rather than black, and at the moment in need of some shampoo; it fell limply in front of eyes that went shiny with fear as Willie Trowbridge tried to decide whether or not he dared to move, or even to breathe. Even with the Fu Manchu moustache, it wasn’t a strong face; this wasn’t a man who thought there was anything more terrible than dying. Guinness knew, with the knowledge born of experience, that Willie would tell everything he knew, however much or little that might be, if only he were pushed a little.

  “One more time, Willie. Why was it I kept seeing you through my rearview mirror?”

  A tongue, surprisingly pink, came out to moisten the dry lips, one of those unconscious acts by which men betray themselves. Guinness wondered which of the more obvious lies he was about to hear.

  “Okay. Maybe I should just ice you right now.”

  “No, man—please!” Willie dropped his face back down to the floor, burying it in the curve of his right elbow. “Honest, man, they jus’ tol’ me to keep an eye on you while they tossed your room. That was all. I didn’t do nothin’ except what they tol’ me. Please, man!”

  Provided, of course, that you weren’t stupid enough to think that it could never happen to you, it was always a mortifying experience to watch a man begging for his life, especially knowing that, no matter what he did, you were going to kill him anyway. It was cheating, in a way. Implying a bargain, information in exchange for the privilege of a few more heartbeats, when there wasn’t a way in the world you were going to keep to your part of the deal.

  Willie apparently still thought he was going to get his, right then and there, because he kept on trying to crawl under his arm, whimpering all the time in a way that made you want to kick him. Guinness couldn’t even make out what the words were with which he thought he might beg back his life.

  “Come on, Willie. Just tell me who it was, and we can get all this over with. Who was it who told you to bird dog me?”

  This somehow seemed to make him feel better, because he rocked himself up into a sitting position and, his eyes still locked on the muzzle of Guinness’s gun, started feeling for something in the pocket of his shirt. Abruptly, however, he remembered how you can get killed doing that sort of thing, and his hand froze.

  “C-C’n I have a cigarette?”

  “No, you can’t have a cigarette. Not now. Just tell me what I want to know, Willie, before I lose my patience.”

  The hand dropped back to his lap and he stared down at it as if he had never seen it before. You could hear his breathing as he shook his head slowly back and forth, as he considered his terrible dilemma.

  “Oh, go ahead and have the damned cigarette! What do I care?”

  But Willie had forgotten all about wanting a cigarette. It seemed that all he could think about was the choice in front of him.

  “Oh, man, those ain’t very nice guys. I mean, they are really bad, heavy people; they’ll waste me f’r sure if I fink on ’em. Man, I can’t. They’ll kill me if I do.”

  “And I’ll kill you if you don’t, Willie. And I’m right here in the room with you. I’d think about that if I were you.”

  And he did think about it. The pink tongue came out again and traced a line over the lower lip, as Willie Trowbridge tried to figure out some way to stay alive.

  “Listen, man,” he said finally, his voice trembling and eager. “You’re the Feds, right? I mean, they said that. You are the Feds, ain’t you?”

  Guinness nodded. Yes, he was the Feds—and he was, too. It wasn’t a lie, even if Willie didn’t quite understand the way in which it was the truth. Even if his not understanding made him a dead man. But he was a dead man anyway, so it didn’t matter.

  “Just don’t lie to me, Willie. I may work for Uncle Sam, but I’m no Prince Charming. I’ll kill you just as dead as your friends will if you lie to me.”

  “Man, I wouldn’t lie t’ you.” He raised his hands up in front of his face, showing the palms, and the fear came back into his eyes. “I jus’ want you to protect me if I tell. You can do that, can’t you? You guys do that kind o’ stuff all the time, don’t you? You can do that for me. I jus’ want a deal, a chance t’ keep my ass. I swear I’ll tell you ever’thing I know.”

  It was time. One final little lie, supplying the carrot that was supposed to go with the stick, and it would all be over. But, then, this didn’t seem to be a world in which anybody ever told the whole truth, not unless they had everything to lose. Sometimes not even then.

  “Okay, you’ve got a deal. Name the right names, and I’ll see to it that none of them will ever have a chance to do you any harm.”

  Willie liked that. You could see him relax as he stopped getting ready to die within the next three or four minutes. After all, he had his guarantee, and if you couldn’t trust the FBI who the hell could you trust? What kind of a world would that be?

  So Guinness got his little shreds of information. Nobody was going to be dumb enough to trust a crumb like Willie Trowbridge with any of the big secrets. After listening to him for a few minutes, Guinness decided that Flycatcher, as usual, was working from behind a screen of locally recruited people; Willie obviously had never seen him, didn’t even seem to know that such a man existed. But there was enough. A few names, a general impression that these were not men likely to move without being sure of their direction, that they were not simply random terrorists bent on nothing more specific than scaring the shit out of everyone.

  Willie didn’t know much, but that little might do.

  “This guy Healy, you say he manages the movie house? Which one? I saw three of them in town.”

  He seemed to think that Guinness’s question was funny. Under the moustache you could see his lips drawing away from the discolored teeth in a cunning, ratlike smile. Obviously, Willie was a man who could be depended upon to appreciate the little incidental ironies.

  “Man, what else?” The three words were almost slurred together in a short, ugly laugh. “You know th’ one that’s the real dump? All the college kids go there. It’s like a fuckin’ loony bin every night o’ the whole goddamn week, with the noise and the junk they throw at each other. Healy, he knows what they like—one week it’s Kung Fu flicks and the nex’ some broad gettin’ her tits bit off by an alligator. God, I was in there one night, and some guy was up there on the screen cuttin’ the arms and legs offa people with a chain saw. The little fuckheads loved it.” He laughed again at the bestial entertainments of the “college kids” and folded his hands together in his lap, as if to pray.

  “Anyway, when he wants us we go there. Up in the projection booth. It’s perfect; shit, ever’body goes t’ the movies and a guy could shout his lungs out up there and nobody’d hear.”
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br />   There wasn’t going to be any more. Trowbridge stared at his hands for a minute, seemingly trying to press them down and out of sight into the space between his legs. It was pretty clear that he had run dry and was casting around for embellishments. Anything more he would say was likely to be uncheckable and probably untrue, so there was no point in going on. Guinness put his gun back into his jacket pocket, cupped one hand inside the other as a sign that the inquisition was over, and smiled.

  “That’s fine,” he said, his voice reassuring and gentle. “That’s very good. You did just fine, Willie; have a cigarette. I’ll even get you something to drink with it.” He got up from the couch—slowly, as if his knees were stiff—and went into the kitchen. He didn’t have to worry about watching Willie now. Willie needed him now and wasn’t going to run off. Willie had burned his bridges and would require a friend to shelter him from the wrath of certain parties who doubtless took a dim view of finks. Not having any choice, he would be as trusting and docile as a little woolly lamb.

  “Where do you keep your liquor?” Guinness shouted back as he made a noisy production of opening and closing cupboard doors. “There doesn’t seem to be anything in here except beer—will that do?”

  . . . . .

  Forty minutes later he was already as far as the southern edge of the city, into a section that doubtless the Greenville elders would just as soon forget existed. The houses were frequently not much more than shanties, and in the porch lights you could see where here and there a sheet of plywood had been nailed over the exterior wall to keep out the wind. Once in a while you’d see a store, sometimes standing right next to some other building that looked as if it might have been bombed out but probably had only been abandoned and allowed to fall into ruins, allowed to collapse under the weight of neglect.