Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  “See these scratches along the brow ridge?” he said at last. “And these nicks in the cheek muscles? I think our perpetrator was using some sort of knife, something with a point. It would be tough to get under the skin and cut it away from the supporting tissue with a straight razor. Maybe a surgeon’s scalpel—something with a blade two or three inches long. I assume the detached portions of our friend here are nowhere around.”

  “We haven’t found them.” Carlson continued to stand here, staring at nothing. He wasn’t having a good time.

  “I don’t suppose you will,” Pratt answered, nodding to himself. “Why go to all this trouble if you didn’t plan to keep a few souvenirs?”

  He stood up, locking his knees and putting a hand out to steady himself against the wall. He was more tired than he realized.

  “Have they done the bathroom yet?”

  “Sure.” Carlson looked him straight in the eyes while he answered, as if he felt the need to assert himself. “Lots of prints—Mrs. Daniels doesn’t do much more than change the bed between guests. We sent the towels off to the state lab. Seems like somebody took a shower.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  Pratt checked his watch. It was just three minutes shy of 9:00 a.m.

  “My guess is he’s been dead about twelve hours. He smells like twelve hours.”

  “You finished in here?” Carlson asked, with evident distaste. “My boys ‘d like to finish up before the coroner arrives.”

  “Sure.”

  Outside the heat was building fast, but at least the air didn’t carry the smell of death. Pratt took a couple of deep breaths to clear his lungs and decided he was thirsty. But he was a lot of other things too, and they would all have to wait.

  Carlson let his gaze drift back to the cabin doorway as if he wondered whether he ought not to go have another look.

  “You think that’s the guy in your picture?” he asked.

  “It’s a working assumption.” Pratt took the photograph out of his jacket pocket again, glanced at it and handed it to Carlson. “We’ve wired the FBI for his prints, so we’ll know by this afternoon. I think it’s him. His name is Billinger, Stephen W. Billinger. The ‘W’ stands for ‘Wentworth’. The address is 2343 Standish Road—it’s in one of those new developments up by Shiloh.”

  “Any family?”

  “A wife and two small sons, all deceased as of about two-thirty this morning.”

  “Jesus.”

  Carlson returned the photograph to Pratt, who put it back in his pocket without looking at it.

  “Somebody phoned, said they’d heard shots. We sent over a squad car and they found the front door wide open. Mrs. Billinger was at the foot of the stairs in her bathrobe. She must have heard something and come down to investigate—maybe she thought hubby had finally found his way home. She got a hollow-point bullet in the face at close range. It damn near took her head off. The two boys were in their beds upstairs, each shot through the top of the skull. From their positions it was evident they had died in their sleep.

  “It’s one of those little box houses on a small lot, and as far as we can tell the neighbors slept right through everything.” Pratt went on, looking at nothing as he spoke. “You know what? I don’t think anybody heard anything. I think whoever did it got in with Billinger’s house key and then used a silencer. I think the report was phoned in by our perpetrator. I think somebody wanted us to hurry up and find the key to bungalow Number Seven in Mrs. Billinger’s dead hand.”

  “And that’s why you’re out here?”

  “And that’s why I’m out here.”

  “So somebody killed Billinger here, sliced him up, drove into Dayton to do his family, and then phoned the cops. And maybe if Billinger hadn’t been catting around last night his wife and kids would still be alive.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Jesus.”

  Pratt turned to watch the county coroner’s wagon pull into the driveway and stop in front of cabin 7. The man who got out on the passenger’s side was about sixty, ponderously heavy and dressed in a dark suit that was in obvious need of cleaning and looked half a size too small. He ran the palm of his hand across his bald head and wiped it on the lapels of his coat. Then he looked over toward Pratt and Carlson and executed a cheery little wave, the circular lenses of his eyeglasses twinkling in the sunlight. He had lost interest and turned away even before they had a chance to return the greeting.

  “One of the worst things about getting murdered in this county would be having Big Jimmy Lipson handle your corpse,” Carlson said under his breath. “I’ll bet he’s sorry Billinger’s girlfriend isn’t in there. I think he gets off on this sort of thing.”

  Lieutenant Pratt, Dayton Homicide, didn’t say anything. Carlson worked for the state, but coroners were elected in Montgomery County and after six consecutive terms in office Jimmy Lipson, M.D. was a figure of some importance in local politics. Of course that didn’t mean he wasn’t a creep.

  “Where do you guess we’re gonna find her?”

  “Well, wherever it is, I think she’ll be safe enough from Big Jimmy.”

  “Huh?”

  Pratt looked back toward the doorway of bungalow 7. How many bedrooms just like it had he seen over his career? In the thousands, probably. The cheap furniture and the worn nylon rugs, the cigarette burns and the faded wallpaper and the bloodstains—it was enough to make you think that nobody ever died in good hotels.

  There was a room on Wayne Avenue, three flights of stairs above a Chinese restaurant, where five years ago a prostitute named Amelia Terlecki had tried to kill her pimp, one Georgie “Iron Dong” Davis, known for giving his women a bad time. She had waited for him to climb up on the bed with her and then, after offering enough of the preliminaries to get him good and up, she had reached under her pillow for a straight razor and sliced him right off at the root. The poor son-of-a-bitch had lived to press charges.

  It was a woman’s trick to shave a man off like that. It took a woman’s deep sexual hatred. Pratt had seen a lot of homosexual homicides, and a lot of them had been pretty nasty, but he had never known of a case in which one man mutilated another in that particular way.

  And Billinger had been lying on his side when his throat was cut, his back turned as the murderer either crouched or lay beside him. One imagined he was expecting something much more pleasant.

  It all fit together. Probably by now someone had tracked down the telephone operator who had taken the call on the Billinger case, and it seemed a good bet she would report that the caller had been a woman, probably fairly young.

  “A pretty woman,” Mrs. Daniels had said. “Small, fair-haired. Elegant. Not the usual sort at all.” That was for sure.

  “I mean, if you find her it won’t be half naked in some cornfield after the birds have been at her,” Pratt answered finally. “None of us have to worry about that, because she did it. She’s our murderer.”

  2

  “You okay, Dad?”

  As he stood in the bedroom doorway James Kinkaid’s hand felt for the light switch. He would wait maybe ten seconds. If he didn’t hear an answer or, failing that, the slight snore that would mean his father had fallen peacefully back to sleep, he would flip it on.

  “Is that you, Jimmy?”

  The lamp on the nightstand went on with a little ping, making it unnecessary to answer. The man in the bed was sitting up, with three massive pillows propped behind his back, the folded top of the sheet making a neat line just below the second button on his elegant striped silk pajamas. He would stay that way all night, awake or asleep, hardly moving. It was a habit he had fallen into since his heart began giving him trouble.

  He did not look sick tonight. Sometimes, when his angina was acting up, his skin would turn as yellow as candle wax, but tonight he seemed fine. In daylight the perfect whiteness of his hair and his smooth, saddle-leather tan made him look like one of those youthful old men who play tennis for an hour every morning, seem to have learned nothing
from life and still find it amusing to flirt with young women.

  It was only around the eyes that he showed the strain—eyes, pale blue and restless, that peeked hopelessly out from beneath their puffy lids like an actor parting the curtain a little to count the house.

  But that was not his heart condition. That was just life.

  When James saw at once there was no immediate danger, that this was to be a purely social occasion, he took a chair from beside the wall and carried it over to the bed.

  “Did I wake you, son?”

  “No. I was reading.” It was a lie. They both knew it was a lie, but it spared the old man from imagining himself a nuisance. He wasn’t a nuisance. “Do you want one of your pills? I’ll get some water.”

  Mr. Kinkaid Senior, whose surname was also “James,” as had been his father’s and grandfather’s, smiled and shook his head. “I was having a bad dream,” he said. “I don’t remember anything about it, except that it was bad. Too much pot roast, I guess.”

  “We had pot roast last night,” his son answered. “Tonight was vegetable lasagna, although with Julia’s cooking it’s not an unnatural mistake.”

  “We ought to fire her before she poisons us.”

  “On the contrary, I’m convinced that Julia’s vegetable lasagna has remarkable preservative powers. I always finish dinner feeling like I’ve been embalmed.”

  The father allowed himself one syllable of laughter, a sound that came out as a restrained and judicious “hmmm.” Their housekeeper’s cooking had been a standing joke between them for twenty years, a joke to be enjoyed only in their most private moments because neither of them would have dreamed of offending her.

  “What were you reading?”

  James Kinkaid IV paused for just a fraction of a second and then remembered what he was supposed to have been doing when a sound from his father’s room had awakened him.

  “The Abelson brief,” he said, with a slight shrug. The case folder was, in fact, open on his night table.

  “The abuse of trust?”

  “Yes. I go in to Karskadon and Henderson on Thursday.”

  “Are they buying the champagne?”

  The son nodded. The question was his father’s time-honored formula for inquiring if the opposition was prepared to settle.

  “Oh yes. They know they’ll get their brains beaten out if we ever go to trial. I expect them to come down for eighty per cent of the amount listed in the suit.”

  “Then you must have really thrown a scare into them.” Mr. Kinkaid Senior swelled visibly. He could not, even if he had wanted to, disguise his pride in his son’s growing reputation, now sufficient to strike terror into the hearts even of Karskadon and Henderson. “But the nabobs don’t like to be reminded that they’re only human. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt you in the long run if you let them down lightly.”

  “Be a gentleman?”

  “Something like that.”

  James the son raised one shoulder in an almost imperceptible shrug, a gesture he had painstakingly acquired from his father almost before he was in grade school.

  “I remember somebody who used to tell me, never be a gentleman with the client’s money,” he said, smiling thinly. “Besides, Abelson was screwed over good. The man comes down with leukemia and while he’s at home knowing that he’s probably going to die, most of the time so nauseated from the chemotherapy he almost wishes that he would die, he gets his business liquidated out from under him because he was stupid enough to trust his good friend and partner.”

  “So you’re going to strip the friend and partner naked.”

  “I’m going to make him give back most of what he stole. But don’t worry. The condo in Redondo Beach is in his wife’s name, so he won’t have to sleep in the street. And a year from now he’ll probably still be alive, which is more than Abelson can say.”

  James the father laughed again, this time allowing it to sound like laughter. “They should make you a judge, Jimmy—even better, a prosecuting attorney. How are you ever going to get ahead in this sleazy racket with all that moral fervor weighing you down?”

  “You were never sleazy.”

  The sad eyes registered this assessment with a faint narrowing, as if trying to focus on some distant object.

  “I was also never in your league.” With the tip of his right middle finger, the old man smoothed down his moustache which, like his hair, was bone white and perfectly trimmed. His son read this as a gesture of embarrassment. “A small-town lawyer isn’t required to make so many unpleasant choices. In fact, very little is required of him except discretion.”

  “To be the keeper of everyone’s secrets and yet never even to appear conscious that there are any secrets to be kept.”

  The father smiled at hearing himself quoted.

  “It’s good advice,” he answered. “For four generations now we’ve practiced law in the same town. We have to live among these people, and it makes the client nervous to have you across the table from him at a friendly dinner party when you look as if you’re remembering the property settlement his wife forced on him after catching him with the au pair girl or how he’s cut his grandchildren out of his will. I’ve always found it best to cultivate amnesia. Don’t remember anything until you have to.

  “But by God, Jimmy, nobody ever had to remind you about discretion. You’re uncharted territory, even to me.”

  For just a moment James Kinkaid IV regarded his father with that studied impenetrability which had seemed to grow on him with manhood, and he thought, I am what you made me.

  But he did not for an instant dispute the criticism, if as such it had been intended. He merely wondered how he had wounded the old man’s feelings, how he had tempted him into striking back thus. In the end he merely shrugged and looked away.

  “I never meant to be,” he said, instantly regretting that he had said anything at all.

  “I wasn’t faulting you for it.”

  Mr. Kinkaid Senior picked up his glasses from where they were resting on the night table beside his bed and put them on. It was a diversionary tactic, a piece of stage business, for they were the half-lens type, used only for reading, and he continued to study his son over the tops of the frames.

  “Why should I lay claim to understanding you? You take after your mother—you’re smarter than I am.” He knitted his fingers together over the linen sheet that covered his belly and then let the pads of his thumbs separate and then drop back together, as if to forestall any quarreling with the obvious. “I just muddled through at NYU and you finished Yale at the top of your class and editor of the Law Review. I was glad to go in with my father—the practice suited me and, anyway, it saved a lot of embarrassment. But I think you’ve always looked upon it as something of a trap.”

  “Dad, what is this about?”

  “It isn’t about anything. I just didn’t want you to imagine I hadn’t noticed, that’s all.”

  There followed an uncomfortable silence, lasting perhaps ten seconds, during which the two men carefully avoided meeting each other’s eyes. James Kinkaid IV, known as “Jimmy” nowhere except within these four walls, ransacked his memory for something with which to distract his father, in whom these rare bouts of quarrelsomeness, whether as symptom or cause, were usually the harbinger of some further loosening of his tenuous hold on life—first an argument about nothing, then, when he was heated up sufficiently, stabbing chest pains that radiated down the left arm, then nitroglycerine tablets succeeded quickly by an Inderol chaser, all ending in a night under the oxygen tent at New Gilead Memorial as slowly, inexorably, the walls of his heart died.

  “I never felt trapped,” the son announced at last, trying to smile. “When I was little I used to sneak into your office and sit in your chair.”

  Mr. Kinkaid Senior appeared to consider this for a moment and then nodded.

  “I know. That’s the way you felt—when you were nine years old. Then you grew up and figured out there was more in heaven and earth than Kinkaid &
Kinkaid. Would you have stayed in New Gilead doing real estate contracts and setting up trust funds for debutantes if I hadn’t gotten sick? You don’t have to answer. I know the answer.”

  The old man regarded his son with a weary resignation, which, in its way, was something of a relief. There was not going to be a quarrel, so probably there was not going to be a trip to the hospital and tomorrow morning everyone would wake up feeling fine. Still, James Kinkaid IV did not like to think that his father was obliged to carry the burden of having stood in his way. It was strange how one could be made to feel guilty for having sacrificed something.

  Then James Kinkaid III closed his eyes for a moment and ran both hands over his hair, as if to smooth it into place.

  “I think I’m too tired to sleep,” he said finally. “I think I’ll follow your excellent example and read for a while. Have we got anything in the house more exciting than the Abelson brief?”

  “You’ve got a pile of mail on your desk—you shouldn’t have any trouble finding half a dozen scandals in there. Do you want me to go get it?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  Without turning on the light, James Kinkaid IV made his way down the darkened stairway. He knew without counting that the first landing was seventeen steps down and that the third step from the bottom would creak under his weight with a sound like a nail being pulled loose. He could have laid his hand upon the cedar balustrade and, without searching, found the small rounded dents he had left on the railing at age six, when someone had been foolish enough to make him a wooden sword out of some discarded builder’s lathe. He did not need his eyes to move with perfect confidence within these walls. He had lived in this house all his life so that he knew it as well as his own body. His grandfather had been born, and doubtless conceived, as he himself had been, on the very bed where his father now rested, waiting for something to read.

  The stairway ended in a tiny waiting room—two wooden chairs, an upholstered bench and a newspaper rack—just inside the great double doors that were the front entrance to the house. To the right, closed off behind an Oriental screen, was a parlor which was hardly ever used and to the right was an antechamber guarded during the day by an ancient secretary behind an oak desk but now standing dark and vacant. Beyond were the law offices themselves.