Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  His father’s was the larger of the two and occupied the front corner of the building. A collection of law books, the most recent of which dated from 1948, the year James Kinkaid III passed his bar exam, stood neatly arranged in cases the glass doors of which protected them not only from dust but from intrusion, as James Kinkaid IV had learned when, in his teens, he began to take an interest in them. The keys, it seemed, had long since disappeared.

  The walls were wood-paneled and decorated with framed diplomas and photographs. There was also a photograph on the desk, of the late Mrs. Kinkaid, who had died when her son was only five and was thus a shadowy figure in his memory.

  The day’s mail was arranged in three neat stacks on the desk’s green felt blotter. There were magazines, four of them, business correspondence and then personal correspondence. Without stopping to examine them he gathered up the personal letters and slipped them into the pocket of his bathrobe. The business stack contained but two items, both from a property development company in Stamford. James knew these would only bore and weary his father, so he left them. Tomorrow morning he would carry them into his own office, which was reached through a door almost hidden by the wood paneling.

  He had been in and out of “the Front Office” as it was called probably three or four times a day almost every day of the five years since he had finished law school. Like the rest of the house, it had been familiar to him since childhood, so that for a long time he had hardly noticed it. Yet recently, in the seven months since his father had suffered his second heart attack, the room had begun to have a peculiar effect on him, leaving him depressed and inexplicably anxious.

  The theory he had formed for himself was that it had become an emblem for the trap into which his father’s illness had led him. The first heart attack had come a month before his graduation and he had entered the family practice, which was stiflingly routine, because he felt sure the old man would be dead in a year if he did not.

  He could have taken a job in Manhattan and commuted—even Karskadon and Henderson had made him an offer—yet he understood enough about the workload expected of first-year lawyers in the big firms to know that, as far as his father was concerned, he might just as well pack his bags and move to Chicago. Compromise was impossible, would in fact have been betrayal. It had to be Kinkaid & Kinkaid.

  So it had been Kinkaid & Kinkaid for five long, mind-numbing years—and after another five he probably wouldn’t be fit for anything else.

  Hence the dilemma: the only possible escape lay in his father’s death, which gave even the desire for it a strong taste of disloyalty. There was no solace in the thought that he genuinely loved his father, that he scrupulously concealed his disappointment, that he had been a careful and attentive nurse. All he had to do was to go into the Front Office, look at the rows of out-of-date law books behind their glass doors, and the words I hate this would come unbidden into his mind, followed almost at once by a twinge of remorse, as if the thought itself had been a kind of murder.

  That was how he explained to himself the effect his father’s office had begun to have on him, and yet the explanation somehow did not entirely satisfy. It was perfectly true and yet it was not the whole truth. There was too much it left in shadow.

  It did not explain, for instance, the sense of something hidden. James could not remember when he had begun to experience a certain feeling of exclusion—a sense that the room was keeping something back from him. Perhaps the feeling had always been there.

  Yet there was a kind of justice even in this. Was he not keeping a secret of his own? Even if it was only that he had not found perfect contentment as the junior partner of Kinkaid & Kinkaid.

  “Here’s your fan mail,” he said, handing his father the letters. “There’s one in there from Gloria Steinem. She’s seen the error of her ways and now only wants to be your slave.”

  James Kinkaid III held a brown, legal-sized envelope up to his nose and closed his eyes as he appeared to enjoy its perfume. The return address read Field and Stream.

  “Perhaps she plots to kill me with kindness.”

  “You never know.”

  . . . . .

  He would never know what woke him. His digital alarm clock on the dresser said 5:52 and no hint of dawn had yet filtered through the curtains. He sat up and threw his legs down over the edge of the bed, feeling his way into his slippers and listening, but there was nothing to hear. He took his bathrobe from the hook on the closet door and stepped out into the corridor. His father’s door was closed, but there was a sliver of light showing beneath it. He understood what had happened even before he touched the knob.

  “Dad?”

  The lamp on the night table was lit, the three-way bulb on the lowest setting, exactly as it had been four hours earlier when James Kinkaid IV had left his father amusing himself with a letter from someone he had known in prep school. The figure on the bed was in the same posture, although the smile on his lips had vanished and his reading glasses were now lying on the floor. His right hand was concealed beneath the blankets and his eyes were half open; otherwise you might have imagined he was asleep. Kinkaid crouched beside him and, just to be sure, felt the side of his throat. The skin did not feel particularly cold, but there was no pulse.

  “Oh, Dad . . .” Kinkaid murmured. If he had meant to say anything else it was lost in the deep sob that seemed to crack his breast.

  It was several minutes before he was conscious of anything except his own grief, but in the end one remembers that death can never remain an isolated event. In half an hour the housekeeper would be moving around in their kitchen, preparing a breakfast of toast, stewed fruit and coffee for a man who was no longer alive to eat it. She would have to be told, of course, and then there would be the doctor and the undertaker and the whole rigmarole. Not only was his father dead, but very soon his corpse would be turned into an object of inspection. How James Kinkaid III, that private and patrician man who couldn’t step outside his own door without adjusting his tie, would have hated it.

  The last service his son could perform for him was to keep the intrusion to a tolerable minimum.

  He picked the eyeglasses up from the floor and slipped them back into their case, which still rested on the night table. Then he closed his father’s eyes.

  It was impossible to tell, just looking at his face, whether he had died in much pain. Perhaps the final heart attack had come in one big wave that killed him before he knew what was happening to him. Certainly it must have been quick, because he hadn’t had time even to open the drawer where he kept his pills. That was something, at least.

  It occurred to Kinkaid that his father would not want anyone else to see him like this, sitting up like a stuffed monkey, so he pulled away the blanket, slipped his arms under the corpse’s back and legs, and shifted it down in the bed until it was lying on its back. Then he brought the sheet up to cover the face.

  An envelope drifted to the floor. Kinkaid picked up and read the return address: “Four Star Clipping Service, 3rd Floor, 282 West 42nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10036.” The envelope was empty.

  There were seven other envelopes on the bed. Four of them had been opened and the rest were still sealed.

  James Kinkaid III had been a man of careful and unvarying habit, and mail was something to be treated with respect. He would read personal correspondence or a subscription notice from Ladies Home Journal with precisely the same attention and then slip the item back into its envelope and set it aside, even if it was destined for the wastepaper basket.

  Thus it followed that, since the envelope was empty, he must have died almost immediately after seeing what it had contained.

  So where was the clipping?

  He found it, crumpled into a tight little ball, under the night table. It seemed that his father, in those last few seconds of life, had done his best to hide it.

  The article, cut out of the Dayton Tribune, was two columns wide and dated from Wednesday of the week before. The headline was in
the best tradition: “Motel Murder Linked to Shiloh Massacre.”

  3

  The law offices of Karskadon and Henderson occupied the fifteenth and sixteenth floors of Building Number Three of the World Trade Center. The lobby was circular and full of maroon upholstered benches screened off from one another by forbidding looking plants with leaves like saber blades growing out of unglazed pottery tubs that seemed scattered around at random. There were no magazines and no ashtrays—it was a room designed to be uncomfortable, to turn one’s thoughts inward, to stimulate a sense of defenselessness.

  James Kinkaid had been here before, so he decided to ignore it and read the copy of The New Gilead Register he had bought at the train station. He wondered if perhaps they didn’t have another lobby for clients.

  His appointment had been for ten in the morning, which is the New York Bar’s equivalent of the crack of dawn, but it was already twenty past. This he knew was also simply more of the psychological gamesmanship that is part of every litigation. Both sides knew that this sort of thing would make no difference whatever to the outcome, but the forms had to be observed. He had been ten minutes late himself.

  Thus it came as an actual surprise when the frosted glass double doors to the counsels’ chambers opened and he saw Bob Festmacher marching toward him, his face already set in the obligatory lodge brother smile.

  “How are you, Jim?” he asked, taking his hand while simultaneously moving in to clap him on the upper arm. Festmacher, who was about Kinkaid’s age and had played football for Dartmouth, was blessed with blond hair and a brick red complexion, which made the elegant English tailoring of his black pinstriped suit look faintly like a disguise. “How was the train?”

  Probably not much different from the one you took down from Greenwich, Kinkaid thought to himself, before mumbling something that sounded like “great.”

  The smile instantly collapsed. “Listen, I read about your father . . .”

  Kinkaid managed his own thin smile and a dismissive gesture. The funeral had been only two days before and already he was thoroughly sick of the condolences of strangers. He simply did not understand how everyone on the Eastern Seaboard seemed to know—and, worse yet, seemed to feel bound to express an opinion—about the death of James Kinkaid III.

  “Well then. Shall we proceed to business?” Having apparently taken the hint, Festmacher, who had never surrendered his hold on Kinkaid’s arm, adroitly wheeled him about and began steering him back through the frosted glass doors. “I hope you don’t mind, but one of the partners asked if he could sit in on our little discussion . . .”

  The office was at the end of a wood-paneled corridor. One wall was all window from about the waist up, and the carpet was wine red and thick enough to trip the unwary. The furniture was restrained modern—all dark wood but apparently designed for speed. Kinkaid was invited to take one end of a gigantic sofa upholstered in black leather.

  “Coffee?”

  Festmacher was poised beside his desk, and he seemed genuinely disappointed when the answer was a negative. He frowned and pressed the button on his intercom.

  “Doris, advise Mr. Tollison that Mr. Kinkaid is here.”

  The name was familiar, although Kinkaid could not immediately place it. Certainly it did not belong to anyone who had appeared so far in the paperwork. He wondered if perhaps they were trying to throw him off his stride right at the end by introducing a new player, but then he decided that was just paranoia.

  Instead of occupying the other end of the sofa, which one might have expected, Festmacher dropped into a chair just opposite. He unbuttoned his jacket and smoothed down his tie with the flat of his hand. On the coffee table in front of him was a thick manila folder which presumably held his case papers on the Abelson suit, but he didn’t open it or even glance at it. Instead, he subjected his wrist watch to a careful inspection, giving the impression he suspected it might have stopped running.

  “I suppose I should make a note of the time,” he said. “We’re billing this client by the hour.”

  In what is usually called a significant glance, he turned his eyes to Kinkaid who, without looking up from the open briefcase on his knees, acknowledged the point with a nod. As his father had never tired of reminding him, all litigation revolves around only one significant point, which is to discover a means by which all the lawyers get paid.

  “I hope you haven’t let him fall behind.”

  It took a split second for the other man to realize he was being guyed, but that was long enough. Before he could organize a reply his office door opened and he sprang to his feet, as if he had just received the signal he had been waiting for all his life.

  The smile on Festmacher’s face was positively radiant.

  “Jim, I’d like you to meet Eric Tollison,” he said, rushing past to take the hand of a spare man of about sixty in a medium gray suit.

  Kinkaid stood up. He remembered now. Six years ago, while he was in his last year at law school and before his father’s first heart attack, he had applied to Karskadon and Henderson for a job. Eric Tollison had been present at the interview.

  “We’ve met,” Tollison announced, with the tone of someone covering an awkward fact. He was a commanding presence, with a rather pointed face that made you think of a predatory animal. He hadn’t spoken three complete sentences at the interview, and yet Kinkaid had ended almost everything he said with a glance in his direction.

  The two men shook hands, quickly and warily, like prizefighters touching gloves before the opening bell.

  When everyone had sat down again it was Tollison who occupied the other end of the black leather sofa.

  Bob Festmacher resumed his chair, leaned forward to open the manila folder on the coffee table, glanced at the first page and closed it again. Kinkaid’s briefcase was already snapped shut. One had to give the impression that one had done one’s homework.

  “I have informed Mr. Abelson that he is in a position to file criminal charges against your client,” Kinkaid began. “He liked hearing that. He liked hearing that a lot. I think, when you report to your client on the results of this discussion, you had better point out to him that having to give back the money isn’t the worst thing that could happen to him. Ask him how he would enjoy prison.”

  Festmacher shook his head and laughed, as if he relished the joke.

  “First of all, there isn’t all that much money to give back . . .”

  “I know—Gelson has stashed most of it in his wife’s name.” Kinkaid raised his eyebrows and smiled, if only to show that he could appreciate a good piece of villainy as much as the next man. “If she wants to keep him at home she’ll just have to return the swag. And if she doesn’t, there’s always room for her name on the indictment.”

  “You aren’t kidding, are you.”

  “No. I’m not kidding.”

  “You’ll never get an indictment against the wife.”

  “I’ll get an indictment. I may not get a conviction, but I have enough to insist on an indictment. Explain to Mrs. Gelson how much defending a criminal prosecution costs by the time a jury gets the case. When we reach the end of that road—and after she’s flat broke—the best she can hope for is to have avoided joining her husband in the slammer.”

  An hour and a half later they had reached a settlement: within three weeks Mr. Joshua Abelson would receive a cashier’s check for $200,000, to be followed before the end of the year by the balance. The total would come to precisely eighty-five per cent of the $900,000 stipulated in the suit, which would leave Mr. Harry Gelson enough to pay his tab with Karskadon and Henderson and maybe bus fare back to Redondo Beach, where he and the Mrs. could try living on their social security.

  The firm invited Kinkaid to lunch—or, rather, Eric Tollison, breaking the impenetrable silence he had maintained during the negotiations, invited him. Festmacher mumbled something about a prior commitment and mysteriously faded from sight somewhere on the way to the elevator.

  Tollison took
him by the arm and guided him out of the building and into a side street to one of those places that never advertise in the restaurant guides. It occupied a large upstairs room containing no more than a dozen or so tables with almost as many waiters. The linen was so white it hurt your eyes. The maître d’ was as solemn as a funeral director and carried his tassled menus in the crook of his arm as if they were made of stone and he was afraid they might break.

  “Six months ago I would have said you were wasting your time on this Abelson thing,” Tollison announced while he watched his water goblet being filled. “I thought Gelson was home free, the nasty little crook. You really did your homework.”

  There was nothing Kinkaid could say without sounding like a pompous jerk, so he pretended he hadn’t heard.

  “How much, if one is permitted to ask, are you retaining as your fee?”

  “Twenty per cent.”

  At first Tollison didn’t react. He observed as the waiter drifted off with swanlike dignity and then he studied the walls, which were blank.

  “Twenty per cent? Is that the going rate in rural Connecticut?” He smiled languidly, as if to extingush any possibility of offense. “In the civilized world the lawyer keeps a third.”

  “The Abelsons are family friends. What with his illness they’ve had heavy expenses and there are more to come—dying isn’t cheap these days. As it is, I don’t think Annette will be left with more than four hundred thousand.”

  Tollison executed an almost imperceptible shrug, as if he found such considerations unintelligible and, in any case, slightly vulgar. The two men observed a decorous silence for the minute or two until the waiter brought their salads.

  “Your scruples do you credit, I suppose. But they would be out of place in a firm like ours.” Tollison turned over a leaf of romaine lettuce with his fork as if he expected to find something unpleasant underneath. “Our overhead is killing and, besides, most of our clients don’t tempt one to generosity. I was surprised when you turned down our offer five years ago.”