Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

But all that sort of thing would have to wait. Whether he murdered half the Company’s personnel or contented himself merely with resigning, small matters of personal destiny had to yield to the vastly more significant question of his daughter’s safety. Once he got Kathleen and the child away from here, then there would be time enough. He might even decide to go after Flycatcher then—what the hell, making threats against the lives of nine year old girls wasn’t the sort of thing anyone wanted to encourage—but first things first.

  He checked his watch. One more hour would make it one fifteen, plenty of time for his ex-wife to have made her arrangements.

  Poor Tuttle, it wasn’t his fault. He was just trying to hang on to his desk job so he wouldn’t have to risk that precious ass of his anymore. It was understandable, something you didn’t have to admire but didn’t have any business resenting.

  A few years ago, so the story went, somebody had left him under a bridge in a suburb of Vienna, just about chopped in half. Most of the clip from a machine pistol, apparently, had been emptied at fairly close range into his legs and groin, and if the bullets hadn’t been copper-jacketed Tuttle would never have made it. For four months they weren’t sure he was ever going to walk again.

  The recovery had been complete, but you don’t ever forget a thing like that. You lose forever the conviction that you’re immortal, and from the day he was discharged from the hospital all Ernest Tuttle could think about was if there wasn’t some way he could avoid having to go back out into the field. So if once in a while he had to stick it to his friends to keep the key to that office on G Street, so be it.

  Guinness had never been shot up really badly—they said it almost always made you turn into jelly afterward—so he wouldn’t pass judgment. Tuttle would stay his friend. It wasn’t a profession in which you asked too much of your friends.

  The sun was shining directly through the narrow glass telephone booth, and when Guinness opened the folding door and stepped outside it wasn’t any cooler. Not a degree under eighty-five, and the air was heavy with humidity and the smell of the asphalt parking lot. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and across the street the attendant at the filling station stood with his shirt open all the way down the front as he pumped gas into a green Datsun. It was going to be a mean afternoon.

  Guinness wondered if there wasn’t something he could do to keep friend Duelle happy and occupied and away from his house, while Kathleen put the finishing touches on her escape. It wouldn’t do to have him come home to lunch and find her with her suitcase half full. One never knew—he didn’t look like the type to get physical, but there was no saying how a man might react to a thing like that, not in this heat. Especially not when he would be feeling guilty and scared and would interpret his wife’s defection as evidence that she, at least, had found him out. It just wouldn’t do. Guinness stepped back inside the telephone booth and dialed the number for Duelle’s office. The good doctor was in.

  “Hello?” His voice sounded as if it expected anything. Twenty seconds later it was all settled. They would meet for lunch. At the Study Hall Bar—yes, Guinness knew where it was. Duelle thought it best if the meeting seemed accidental. Fifteen minutes was plenty of time. Duelle was obviously too scared to refuse; he would have agreed to anything. Guinness replaced the receiver with a profound feeling of disgust.

  Still, he supposed it was necessary—if only to keep the little man under control. And he might be able to turn it to account.

  He waited across the street from the restaurant, his back to the window of a jewelry shop where they sold class rings and fraternity pins and bracelets decorated with tiger medallions, his mind occupied by the technical problems of acting like a cop for the next hour or so. He didn’t think nature had suited him for it—like everyone in his line of work, Guinness divided his feelings toward police between hatred and contempt—but fortunately it was a role you couldn’t really overplay. Just find a middle ground between Jack Webb and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and things would pretty much take care of themselves. Doubtless he had had more experience of police than Holman Duelle.

  It was bound to be an uncomfortable encounter, though. For both of them, although probably Duelle would hardly notice. No doubt the past several days his life had been continuously uncomfortable, a kind of perpetual alert during which everything, every word, every gesture, every absence or sudden arrival, became subject to endless interpretation. It was the private purgatory of the amateur conspirator.

  From where he was standing he could see the campus of the university, with its green drilling fields and beyond them the upper halves of a few brick buildings—the scene of Holman Duelle’s last stand, that for which he seemed prepared to sacrifice all loyalties to wife and country, not to mention to a certain nine year old with an undisclosed genetic connection to the man he was meeting for lunch. The statue of Thomas Clemson was hidden from view, but he could see the line of trees behind which it was concealed, the local deity in his sacred grove.

  Ernie Tuttle’s acquiescence to this most recent of their employer’s little whims was an intelligible weakness. And after all, wasn’t it better this way, with himself in play instead of some clown who might be perfectly willing (as willing as he would have been had it been somebody else’s bratty kid) to use Rocky as bait for his hook?

  About a year after his marriage to Kathleen, Duelle had been denied tenure at the University of North Carolina. Kathleen speculated, with the bitterness of reflection, that perhaps one of the important reasons for his marrying her at all had been to shore up his crumbling position in the engineering department there—the southerner’s touching faith in the power of a pretty, well to do wife, a hereditary insider who would know how to entertain. But if that had been the case, it hadn’t worked. So Duelle had come down to Clemson, on the cheap no doubt, with perhaps the hint of a grievance against this woman who had failed to save him and, doubtless, every intention of making the most of his diminished chances. It was an old story. Guinness had seen it dozens of times, among the friends he had made in graduate school and, oh, legions of the English faculty at Belmont State. You found yourself a safe spot—not what you had wanted, of course, but tolerable—and you dug in.

  And who could say? Maybe it wasn’t so unreasonable that Holman Duelle should harbor certain feelings of ill will. Was the woman who had spent the morning pouring out her bitterness really the type to help her husband handle a thing like that? She was no little cup of sunshine, their Kathleen, and perhaps whatever had happened to make her that way had happened before she had even met Holman Duelle. Maybe the whole dreary tangle had been rendered inevitable by certain events taking place in London in the summer of 1970.

  Guinness shrugged slightly, as if made restless by the heat, and glanced at his watch. Duelle was already a little over two minutes late and could well afford to take the rap himself. These feelings of cosmic responsibility were beginning to lose their charm.

  On the other side of the street, perhaps a block closer to the campus but still no more than thirty-five or forty feet from where he was standing, a Dannon Yogurt truck was parked with its sliding rear gate up. Two young men, one of them with his hair tied behind him in a ponytail and a blondish beard that made him look like an Anglo-Saxon Ho Chi Minh, were unloading stacked trays of the stuff and carrying them down through a cellar door into what seemed to be some sort of natural foods place, perhaps a little restaurant, perhaps just a store. The number of trays involved, so far as many as one man could carry and still be able to see over the top, suggested that this might be the Clemson area’s total weekly supply. Why the hell not? How many people could be freaky about yogurt in such a dump?

  The other man, whose white company coveralls identified him as the driver, pulled the gate of his truck back down with a sharp, metallic clatter, and Guinness turned his head a few degrees to see Holman Duelle coming down the campus lawn, his jacket carried over his shoulder like a seaman’s duffel and his arms bare, in a white short-sleeve shirt. Even at such
a distance, Guinness could tell that he was damp and uncomfortable in his checkered polyester trousers-perfect torture if the temperature ever got above eighty, and it was well above.

  Aside from a furtive glance that would have given him away to anyone who might have been taking the trouble to watch, he didn’t acknowledge Guinness’s presence as he slid past behind the Dannon truck, crossed the mouth of a blind alley, and went up the stairs to the Study Hall lunch line. It made you wonder what the production was for, if he was trying to be convincing as the threatened husband and father, or if he really might be afraid of the people into whose hands he had put himself.

  Guinness allowed him about twenty seconds lead time and then followed him through the restaurant door.

  As it had been yesterday, the second story was as dim as the inside of a cave. He took his place in line, separated from Duelle (who had been unable to restrain himself from looking behind him to see who was arriving) by two other men who had entered together and were talking in richly modulated accents about basketball. He took a tray and ordered a hot roast beef sandwich and a beer.

  Duelle seemed genuinely alarmed when Guinness sat down at the same table with him. Perhaps he had expected that they would sit back to back and whisper over the shoulder confidences. He started to say something, but Guinness dismissed it with a patting motion of his free hand, smiling with an all wise cop smile.

  “Relax, nobody’s following us. These things don’t work that way.”

  Duelle was silenced but unconvinced as he stared down glumly at the sausage pizza he had taken, as if wondering whether after all it might not be too much, or whether perhaps it might have been a mistake in the first place.

  Apparently prey to no such anxieties, Guinness picked up his knife and fork and carved a small corner from his sandwich.

  “Have you been followed?” he asked, without looking up. Duelle shook his head, still frowning in disappointment.

  “No, not so far as I can tell.”

  “How about your wife? Has she said anything? Seen anything she thought looked suspicious?” It occurred to Guinness how hopeless he would be if he really were a cop—the questions all sounded so stupid in his mouth. But information gathering wasn’t what they paid him to do.

  Duelle shook his head. The conversation lapsed while Guinness concentrated on keeping his tie from getting spattered with beef juice. In the dark like this, it required a certain manual dexterity just to find the plate without turning it over into your lap.

  “What about your wife, does she seem as concerned as you think she ought to be?” He was careful to keep on working at his sandwich as he asked, as if that were the real center of his interest, but he could feel the change in atmosphere anyway. Duelle was considering whether or not to become insulted.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” His tone suggested that he hadn’t yet made up his mind, that he would wait to see what was expected of him.

  Guinness looked up and smiled. Man to man.

  “Well, you know how women are.” His smile broadened a little and Duelle nodded slightly, perhaps unconsciously. They both, of course, knew just exactly how women were. Guinness picked up his glass of beer and tasted it for the first time, his mouth contracting with its bitterness.

  “It’s something that happens more often than you might think, so we always have to consider the possibility. You never know—maybe she thinks you’ve been neglecting her.” He returned to the logistics of his roast beef sandwich while he gave Duelle time to mull it over.

  “You’re implying that she might have sent that photograph?”

  “I’m not implying anything,” Guinness answered, fixing the other man with a steely, coplike stare. “I’m simply asking you if you think it’s possible. She’s your wife—do you think it’s possible?”

  Duelle shook his head. Nutty wives were bad for your standing in the power structure. It was then that Guinness noticed that he hadn’t touched his pizza yet. And judging from his waistline, this was a man who liked his three squares.

  “Eat your pizza,” he said, pointing with his knife. “It’ll get cold.” Duelle picked up his fork and looked at it for a second, as if he had never seen anything like it before.

  Eventually he remembered.

  “She wouldn’t have done that,” he said, his cheek filled with a wad of pizza dough. “If you knew her you’d know that she could never have done a thing like that.”

  Guinness couldn’t suppress a smile.

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  But Duelle was right, of course. Kathleen’s imagination simply wasn’t of the type to have compassed so complicated a revenge, certainly not for spending too much time at the office. But Kathleen really wasn’t the point anymore; with any luck at all, Kathleen was probably half the distance to Atlanta by now. Probably neither of them in their whole lives would ever set eyes on her again—of that kind of revenge she was more than capable.

  Guinness allowed the conversation to drift away from Kathleen, for which Duelle seemed almost grateful. They talked for a long time; when both of them had finished lunch, they walked back across the campus together to Duelle’s office building, the immovable object, and very gradually Guinness began to suggest that he knew that all was not as it should be, that something about this matter had a decidedly fishy smell.

  “Do you have any enemies that you know of,” he asked, picking up a leaf from where it had settled on top of one of the shrubs surrounding Thomas Clemson’s sacred grove—odd to have leaves falling this time of year—“anyone who would have it in for you enough to pull a stunt like this just to give you a jolt? Anyone in the way of whose career you’re standing? Anything like that?”

  Duelle said no, but his eyes glittered like pieces of rock candy in his damp face, and he cleared his throat and allowed his stride to become a shade more rigid, as if to offer visible evidence of his veracity and rectitude.

  Guinness was reasonably certain he had hit a nerve.

  What the hell, Duelle wasn’t an idiot. Guinness had spent too much of his life on university faculties to believe that a Ph.D. was any guarantee that a man didn’t have ivory between his ears, but Duelle struck him as reasonably alert. A building wouldn’t have to fall on him before he got the message that Inspector McAffee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation thought there was something less than genuine about this threat against the good doctor’s house and hearth. It would be interesting to see which way he jumped now that he knew that the “higher authorities” weren’t buying.

  They took their leave of each other, shaking hands in front of the university library. Guinness watched the subject of the morning’s exercise moving off with a bumpy and complicated gait toward the engineering building and wondered why Professor Duelle seemed so much more edgy today than he had yesterday. True, he had pressed him a trifle harder, but Duelle had been sweating from the first moment.

  Odd. But then, that was one more thing he would be free to sort out at his leisure now that Kathleen and their daughter were gone.

  There was a large reflecting pool in front of the library. You stood on a kind of deck, a long, level space in the discontinuous staircase that went up the rising ground, past building after building, until it flattened permanently in front of a row of antique structures housing laboratories and God knew what else, and you looked down at the white concrete under the water—they had filled the pool since yesterday—covered over here and there by strands of algae attaching themselves to the pipes of the fountains. At the moment the fountains were quiet.

  Guinness paused to notice the sunlight trembling on the surface, and he felt peculiarly desolate. He would have liked to see Rocky once more. It occurred to him that not once had he ever heard her voice; she had been too young to be very chatty when Kathleen had left him. It wouldn’t have hurt anything if he had had a chance to say hello and feel her small hand inside his own. Needless to say, he wouldn’t have done anything to give the show away, but there was no good reas
on why a man couldn’t get to know his own kid a little.

  And to Kathleen, for once, it would have been nice to have said a proper good bye. So much besides just “good bye” had been left unsaid between them.

  Guinness was not a romantic; passion had never had much appeal for him, certainly not as the road to a more elevated existence. The Greeks had thought that romantic love was a disease of the spirit, a curse that drove otherwise reasonable people to all manner of disgrace, to suicide and unspeakable crime. They might have been right for all Guinness knew—his was not a constitution much prone to that kind of excess. He was aware that he could, simply by allowing himself to dwell on it, still be very much in love with Kathleen. But what would that buy him, except a lot of trouble he didn’t need? He didn’t really fancy himself in the role of the heartsick swain. To hell with Kathleen; he would never see her again, and that was just as well for the both of them. He would put her out of his mind.

  He turned away from the reflecting pool to look at the library, trying to decide whether or not to go inside and kill a little time with the latest issue of Critical Inquiry—to see if Wayne Booth had thought to delight the learned world with another savaging of the deconstructionists—but then decided against it. He wasn’t really in the mood.

  The infallible instinct that redirects the smarting soul back to what it can take seriously led Guinness to a phone booth in the student union, as ugly and tomblike a structure as it was possible to imagine. He flipped through the local phone book—it couldn’t have been more than half an inch thick—trying to find a listing for Healy.

  There wasn’t one—could it be that our boy Willie went to his Maker with a lie upon his conscience? It didn’t seem likely; Willie wasn’t the type to let his judgment be clouded by team spirit.

  Then it occurred to Guinness that there was no compelling reason why Healy would have to live in Clemson. He flipped to the cover of the directory, trying to recall the names of the closest towns. It was no use, he would have to check them all.