Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  Not that he had even the faintest idea of pulling a fast one. He would walk right into Duelle’s office, as innocent as a little woolly lamb, and let them have him—for a while.

  But that didn’t mean he had to go in the front way.

  At the back of the building, set into the face of the hill and adjoining a short stretch of pavement to accommodate the garbage trucks, was a rear entrance. It was locked, of course, but with one of those massive and uncomplicated mechanisms designed only to keep the undergraduates from raiding their professors’ files the night before an exam. If you knew how, you could open it with a hairpin.

  Guinness had more than a hairpin; in the flat leather case the company issued to all field agents there were enough straight picks and hooked picks and little gizmos that looked like miniature dinner forks to spring open a bank vault. Cracking locks had always been one of the things he was better at, and the back door of the engineering building took him just slightly under fifteen seconds. He turned the knob with a steady, slow motion and pushed his way inside. There wasn’t a soul.

  The basement was as dark as the center of a pyramid. Guinness flicked on the light just long enough to find the entrance to the stairwell and make sure there weren’t any trash barrels to stumble over. Duelle’s office was five flights up, quite a distance through a pitch black passage, when you couldn’t dare make a sound. It took him three and a half minutes, more or less, before he was pressing his nose against the little window, latticed with chicken wire, in the upper quadrant of the fifth floor door, trying to discover if anyone was watching the elevators just across the hallway. No one was.

  Outside, since they had pointedly neglected to turn on the overheads, the passage was almost as dark as the stairwell. The only light came from Duelle’s office, around the corner, and he must have had his door three quarters closed. Guinness slipped around in the opposite direction, hoping he wouldn’t collide with any ashtray stands and grateful that he had remembered to wear his rubber soled shoes.

  The office door opened inward; all he could see was an edge of the bookcase that covered one wall and a narrow wedge of flat, exhausted light, the color of fired clay, on the hall floor. He could hear voices, though. One voice, from well inside the room, low but perfectly distinct.

  “What’s the trouble, Duelle, you getting nervous?” He seemed to be over by the window. At least, that was where Guinness saw him in his mind. “Just follow directions and everything will be fine. Stay cool.”

  It was a youngish voice; at least it sounded young. Guinness would have put the man at about thirty-one or two, no more. The tone was casually contemptuous, almost priggish, as if to remind his listener that he disapproved of him. Hoods these days must subscribe to very lofty principles.

  Were there only the two of them inside? Guinness strained to listen, hoping for another voice or a footfall in another part of the room. It would be better to plan on dealing with three, if you could even count Duelle, than to assume two and be wrong. Numbers didn’t matter much, provided you knew about them in advance. In a tiny little box like that, one man with his back to the wall could hold his own against an army.

  No, there was no one else; just the two of them. Duelle was behind his desk—you could hear him nervously tapping a pencil against the leather blotter—and the other man was presumably still at the window. Anyone else in there was so quiet he would have to have been dead.

  Well, it figured. You didn’t need an army to mousetrap just one man as he walked into a room. All you needed was the bait and one other guy to close the gate behind him; any more would just get in the way.

  For perhaps the twentieth time Guinness tried to convince himself of the merits of simply waltzing in there, gun in hand, and scooping them up. It would be easy, so easy, like swatting flies. Was there some sort of rule that you had to put your ass in hazard every damn time something like this had to be cleaned up?

  Unfortunately, there was. Who was there to scoop up?—just Duelle and some dumb Neanderthal with a blackjack. He could squeeze the pair of them until he knew everything they had ever found out after the second grade, and where would it get him? No, the only chance was that they might take him to Flycatcher before they got around to putting his lights out. It wasn’t much of a chance; Flycatcher was probably a thousand miles away. But there wasn’t much left except the long shots.

  So be it. Guinness crept back to the elevators and pressed the up button. The door sprang open at once with a little pinging sound, and he let it close again before he started walking toward Duelle’s office with the heavy, obvious footsteps of a man with nothing to hide.

  Once he had made it to the office door—it was a common experience, the product doubtless of a heightened sensitivity compounded unequally of exhilaration and fear—everything started to happen as if in slow motion. Nothing passed so quickly that he didn’t have time to subject it to meticulous examination; as if fragments of seconds were like tissue samples, frozen sections of experience to be mounted on a slide and analyzed in painstaking detail.

  The door was opened wider now. Guinness had allowed them plenty of time to set their little scene, and they had taken advantage of it—God knows, he wouldn’t have wanted to catch them unprepared. Duelle was seated behind his desk and, as Guinness began to curl his fingers around the doorknob, the professor rose up, seeming to lever himself out of the chair with his arms, swaying forward a little as the knuckles, pressed against the desktop, went white with strain. He smiled, and seemed to be debating with himself whether or not he should put out his hand to shake.

  The smile, Guinness noted quite dispassionately, was a mistake. Why should he smile? Why should he be glad to see Inspector McAffee? Unquestionably he thought a smile would be reassuring, but what need would Inspector McAffee have to be reassured? It was out of character.

  What the hell, he had as much as announced his desire to confess everything, to confirm all of McAffee’s darkest suspicions, and throw himself on the Bureau’s mercy. It was hardly a moment for smiling. That was the problem with the amateur, he could never keep track at any given moment of which role he was supposed to be playing.

  The room, of course, was empty—except for Duelle. Apparently Guinness wasn’t expected to remember that the other sides of half open doors don’t face onto oblivion.

  Of course he didn’t need anything as arcane as logic to figure out that the other man was back there; he could see the reflection of his coat sleeve in the window. He tried not to look—they really must be green if they hadn’t remembered to draw the shades—but he almost couldn’t help himself. The arm in the coat sleeve pumped up and down slightly, as if measuring the weight of whatever was held in its hand, whatever it was that would be bending over the back of Guinness’s skull in a few seconds. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Once again, he considered changing his plan. It was unnerving and dangerous to put yourself so completely in the hands of such unprofessional clods; at least an experienced goon wasn’t likely to kill you by accident.

  All he would have to do was suddenly to throw his weight against the door, and he would have them both. Hell, nobody hid behind a door! It was the first thing you learned—people who hide behind doors usually end up being trapped there like a slab of ham between two slices of bread. It was just dumb, evidence of having learned one’s trade craft from watching “The Hardy Boys” on TV.

  But no. Guinness set his teeth and took the next step into the room, even swinging the door closed behind him to give the clown with the billy club more room. Sometimes you had to take your licking like a man.

  By then Duelle had made up his mind, and Guinness took the offered hand. He forced himself not to look at anything except Duelle’s face; he didn’t want to see what was happening in the window. But he could see it all anyway. In the horror in Duelle’s eyes, who was suddenly no longer even pretending to do anything except stare, with the paralyzed terror of a moral coward, at what was about to happen.

  Guinnes
s didn’t even feel the blow when it came. And then, after what seemed like hours, the room began to fill with a white light that blanked out everything else, and he started to sink to his knees, at first very slowly and then faster and faster, until he seemed to be falling from an enormous height.

  Jesus! Whoever he was, he played rough. Guinness promised himself to make payment in kind, but it was almost the last articulate thought that passed through his brain.

  On the way down, the edge of the desk caught him across the cheekbone—when he hit the floor he could feel the blood pouring into his eye socket from a long, very straight, very deep wound. And then everything was silence.

  13

  “My God! Oh, God, you’ve killed him! God, look at him! Oh, God, God! What’re we gonna do? You’ve killed him!”

  “Shut up, Duelle! Just—just shut your yap!”

  At first Guinness couldn’t be sure what it was, whether just some vague noise, like the humming of machinery, loud but diffuse, or part of the vivid pain in his head that was gradually beginning to sort itself out into front and back and was starting to attack his eyes and brain as if through some coordinated strategy. No, it was just noise; it sounded as if it were coming from the other side of the building—if he was still in a building; he might be on one of the moons of Uranus for all he could tell at that moment—or, really, nowhere in particular at all.

  Then, finally, he was able, through what seemed the most subtle of deductive procedures, to establish that the noise was a fusion of voices. An argument, apparently about whether or not he was dead.

  Well, that was nice. If he could figure that out, it must mean that he was still alive after all. Perhaps not for very long, but for the moment at least.

  As if trying to settle the point, Guinness attempted to open his right eye. The attempt was a failure, the eyelid seemed to be stuck, so he tried again with the left. That was a little better.

  There were two men looking down at him. Beyond their faces he could see a ceiling, so he must still be in Duelle’s office. He moved his gaze around until it settled on the overhead light, but that was too much of a good thing. Jesus! For a second he almost thought someone had hit him again, but it was only the glare. So he closed his eye again. It was better with the eyelid closed. More restful.

  Who the hell were these two clowns? With an inward shrug of resignation, he decided he would probably have to know sooner or later. He opened his left eye again.

  Duelle he knew—he seemed almost ready to lick Guinness’s face he was so grateful to him for not having died after all. The other one was a total stranger, and just a shade out of his line of vision. Guinness turned his head slightly, more than a little amazed that it didn’t keep right on rolling until it hit the wall, and he took a closer look.

  He was huge. At least he looked huge, but most people do when seen from the floor. His face appeared craggy and unsympathetic, the sort of face you would expect to belong to a man who went around pounding on people’s skulls.

  “You feelin’ better, sport?” he asked. Guinness didn’t have much conviction that it was a sensitive issue with him. “Think maybe you’re ready to stop playin’ dead?”

  Guinness put out an arm, trying to reach the edge of the desk to help himself up, but Duelle grabbed it first and started lifting him to his feet. He would never have made it except that the filing cabinet gave him something to lean against. He threw an elbow over the top for support, and after that all he had to do was to keep his knees locked—they kept wanting to collapse under him—and he was fine. He could stay on the vertical forever. He was great.

  Viewed from eye level, Duelle’s friend didn’t look nearly so tough. And not even so very old as his voice had suggested, not much more than in his middle twenties. But he sure was having a wonderful time playing Sam Spade.

  “And just who might you be, sport?” he asked, holding out at arm’s length the cards from Guinness’s wallet. He was holding a gun in the other hand, a standard issue .38 police special, but he didn’t bother much about keeping it aimed at Guinness. He didn’t even bother to look at Guinness, he was much too busy checking through his cards. He was that sure of himself.

  Guinness, for his own part, didn’t bother with looking for his own revolver; he could see the bulge it made in the other man’s jacket pocket. He took a handkerchief out of the pocket of his trousers, wet one end of it with the tip of his tongue, and tried to wipe away the blood that had crusted over his right eyelid. After a few seconds he was able to get the eyelid open again, at least a little. The whole side of his face was blown up like a balloon, and he wondered if perhaps his cheekbone might not be broken, a possibility that worried him one hell of a lot more than some kid playing at cowboys and Indians.

  “I asked you a question, sport. I think you better answer it.”

  He really was young. Obviously he wasn’t interested much in advertising the fact, but his face lacked the immobility that hoods developed very early in their careers. Something was always moving, either his eyebrows or the corners of his mouth; for all his Humphrey Bogart routine he was nervous. People who make their livings cracking other people over the head learn in short order that they have to look relaxed if they’re going to scare you. They learn to look like the idols on Easter Island.

  Before he answered, Guinness gave himself plenty of time to study this boy wonder, allowing himself to be almost arrogant about it. It doesn’t do to let people think you can be frightened; it tends to make them pushy. He didn’t want Junior getting pushy, at least not yet. Not while Duelle was around. Not until he was perfectly ready to take his little cap pistol away from him and make him eat it, one piece at a time. That could wait until it was just the two of them, all alone.

  And here was another tall one, even taller than Flycatcher. Perhaps Guinness was out of touch; perhaps long thin spooks were the current fad—this one was close to six four. Not quite as elegantly slender as Flycatcher, but working on it.

  For the rest: tan trousers and a brown sport jacket that was supposed to look like hop sacking but was probably some sort of double knit; the hair darkish blond and the face clean shaven (not even any sideburns; hell, everybody wore sideburns); a good tan; the mouth a little soft, but the eyes cold and steady.

  He wasn’t afraid, at least. He was nervous, maybe, but he wasn’t afraid. And he wasn’t pushing his advantage any further than the conventions of the gangster movie allowed. He hadn’t used the muzzle of his gun to break any teeth at the first excuse. He might not be such a bad sort. Guinness was prepared to wait upon events, however, before passing out any gold stars. Given time, he could turn out to be a real shit.

  Guinness put his handkerchief away and scowled.

  “You can read, can’t you?” he answered finally. “You have any idea how much time you can get for assaulting a federal officer?”

  He thought he would just throw that in; he didn’t have any illusions that anyone was going to apologize, help him dust off his trousers, and offer him a lift home, but it sounded like the sort of thing an Inspector McAffee would say. What the hell, you had to keep your hand in.

  Junior didn’t seem terribly impressed. He simply smiled and let Guinness’s cards slip through his fingers to the floor, one at a time.

  “I got a friend that works in the Bureau’s personnel department,” he said slowly, as if the matter were perfectly indifferent. “Right there in Washington, right where you’re supposed to be such a wheel. She pulled your sheet for me, just as a little favor, and did some phoning around, and she couldn’t find a soul who’d ever heard of a Pete McAffee, in or out of that monkey cage they got there. Except on paper, she said, you don’t even exist. She swears up and down you’re a ringer and—you know what?—I kind of think she’s right.”

  For a long moment Guinness and the other man simply looked at each other in silence, as if the understanding between them were so complete that further discussion was unnecessary.

  Duelle, who had backed himself up
into his bookcase, had his arms crossed over his stomach in a manner suggesting that he expected almost immediately to be sick. There was unmediated horror in his eyes; probably by then he had guessed that this wasn’t a stage performance, that his playmate meant business, and he didn’t seem to like it.

  But to hell with Duelle. Duelle no longer mattered. The game was entirely out of his hands.

  “So wonderful. So you’re Charlie Chan. What are you planning to do about it?” Guinness already knew what, in all probability, he was planning to do about it; the question was only intended to hurry things along. Junior smiled again and, by way of answer, pulled back the hammer of his .38. It made a very ugly sound.

  “I give you one guess, sport.”

  That was a shade more than Duelle could handle. He began shaking his head mechanically back and forth and then his hands went up to his mouth, as if to keep everything still.

  “You can’t do that,” he said in a choked voice. “Oh, my God, you can’t do that! I never thought—you never said anything about killing anyone!” They both regarded him with a certain impatience.

  “Relax, Duelle.” Guinness pushed himself a little away from the filing cabinet, disdaining the suggestion of weakness. “He’s just posturing; he isn’t planning to do it here.” He turned his head back to his captor and grinned. “Are you, pal. You wouldn’t care to risk getting blood all over the good doctor’s lecture notes, now would you?”

  Junior wasn’t too bad—at least he wasn’t the type to rile easily. He just eased the hammer back down and looked unpleasant.

  “I still haven’t had an answer to my question,” he said calmly. “Tell me who you are and what the hell you’re trying to pull, and maybe I won’t blow your head off after all.” He raised his eyebrow in a way which suggested that the last remark had been strictly for Duelle’s benefit.