“Maybe I decided you were out of my league.”
“Our league as defined by Bob Festmacher?” He seemed to consider the possibility for an instant and then shook his head. “You beat his brains out.”
“I had the stronger case.”
“No—you made the stronger case. There’s a difference.”
Having decided, apparently, that his salad wasn’t actually dangerous, Tollison seemed to lose interest and set his fork down.
“Festmacher is presently billing at a hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour. He was our second draft choice, right after you. I think if your father hadn’t had that heart attack you’d be up to three fifty today.”
He smiled again. Nothing remained a mystery to this boy.
“We don’t get stood up very often. When it happens we like to know why.”
“And so you found out.”
“And so we found out.”
. . . . .
Once you stepped off the train, the air in the Times Square subway station was thick with noise and a peculiar humidity that smelled like motor oil. On the platform an emaciated black man wearing a knitted beret was playing a ragged, bluesy solo on a saxophone—entirely for his own pleasure it would seem, since he did not appear to be soliciting money and, in any case, the crowd of passengers swirled around him as indifferently as if he had been a support post.
At street level the sunlight was almost painful. Half the movie houses seemed to be closed and everyone looked angry, or perhaps only desperate, as if each of those hundreds of souls walked around enveloped in their own little cloud of misery. If, another time, Kinkaid had closed his eyes and thought of 42nd Street he would have imagined it at night, the way he had seen it as a college boy coming down from Yale for a razzle with his friends. Maybe it really did look more cheerful at night, but somehow that was hard to believe.
Did the big fish of Karskadon and Henderson ever come near Times Square? Did any of them take the subway to work? If they did, would they ever talk about it? That too was hard to believe.
Tollison had offered him a job, so maybe he would find out.
“We do a fair amount of billing in Connecticut, most of it involved with real estate. We can work out some sort of arrangement about continuing your present practice—perhaps, for a while, you could be in the city for half the week. It’s not something you have to make a decision about right away.”
He had listened very politely and said almost nothing, because Tollison’s instinct was right. He didn’t want to make a decision right away. Two days after his father’s funeral he didn’t even want to think about it, although it was impossible not to. He didn’t want to complicate his feelings any more than they were already.
He could feel the outline of the empty envelope in his inside coat pocket just as if it were sewn to his skin. The clipping itself was safely locked away in his desk drawer, but he had been carrying the envelope around with him ever since he had found it. He had not been sure until this moment whether he really wanted to solve this puzzle.
“If I don’t find out I will feel like I never knew him,” he whispered to himself. “And then I will lose even his memory.”
None of the buildings on the other side of six lanes of traffic seemed to bear a number, as if in this neighborhood it was considered prudent to keep even the addresses secret. When the light changed Kinkaid joined three or four other wary pedestrians hurrying across Broadway and found that the plate glass door of a coffee shop carried the numerals “86”.
The Four Star Clipping Service was just east of Ninth Avenue. The first-floor storefronts housed a pizza place and a window full of video rentals, most of them pornographic. The building had no elevator. The only door on the second floor bore a small gilt sign, “Foxy Club”—it was slightly ajar and heavy metal music poured out onto the landing. On the third floor the door was emphatically locked and there was no sign. Kinkaid tapped with his knuckle, waited about thirty seconds and then knocked louder.
There was the sound of a bolt sliding back and a rattling of chains and the door opened about two inches.
“Yeah?”
The voice was so raspy it was impossible to be sure whether it belonged to a man or a woman, but it was a woman’s face that peered out at Kinkaid with manifest suspicion, as if anyone who showed up here in a business suit was obviously up to no good. The hair, pulled straight back, was blond going to white, and the pale brown eyes rested in a fantastic network of wrinkles, although she did not otherwise appear to be particularly old. There was a cigarette hanging precariously from the corner of her mouth.
“Is this the newspaper service?”
“Who wants to know?”
He took out his wallet and produced a business card, which he then held up for her inspection.
“I’m not here to serve you with anything,” he said, being careful not to smile—he sensed that she would not trust a smile. “I only want to make an inquiry.”
“James Kinkaid IV,” she read. “Attorney at Law. New Gilead, Connecticut.”
She seemed to consider his credentials for a moment, and then she nodded.
“You’re a subscriber. I recognize the name. Yeah—come on in.”
The door closed, there was more rattling of chains, and then it reopened. The room was perhaps twenty feet by thirty and, except for a wall of filing cabinets and a single table and chair, unfurnished. There were stacks of newspapers everywhere, some of them almost up to the ceiling.
The woman walked over to the filing cabinets. She was tall enough to lean against them, resting her arm on the top. Beside her elbow was a glass ashtray the size of a soup bowl, into which she dropped her cigarette. It had plenty of company.
“Actually, I think my father was the subscriber,” Kinkaid began, glancing around the room as if he might be interested in renting it himself. “You sent him a clipping . . .”
The woman’s eyes narrowed.
“Then it ain’t any of your business, is it.”
“He died a few days ago.”
If he had been appealing to her sympathy he realized at once that the attempt had failed. She said nothing and her eyes remained narrow, suspicious and calculating.
“He was not only my father but my law partner,” Kinkaid went on. “I’ll be taking over his clients, so I might or might not be interested in continuing the subscription. We’ll have to see.”
This elicited a flicker of interest. The woman took a half-empty pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of her shapeless trousers and lit one from a book of paper matches that rested beside the ashtray. She took a long drag, as if she had been perishing for a smoke all week.
“Our rates are a hundred and fifty a month.”
She was trying of gouge him, but that was just as well. Kinkaid knew he stood a better chance of finding out what was going on if he let this woman think she was getting away with something.
“That sounds a little high,” he said, looking at the newspaper lying open on the room’s only table—it was a copy of the Los Angeles Times, dated three days back. “What were you checking up on for him?”
“I’ll have to look into that.”
She reached out and tugged on the handle of the top drawer of the filing cabinet closest to her. Without taking her eyes from Kinkaid’s face she reached in with one hand and pulled out a folder, letting it drop open in her grasp.
“Just names,” she announced, glancing at the single sheet of paper. “Nobody famous. We’ve only been able to find something on two of them—one a while back and the piece I sent out last week.”
“Do you have a copy of the earlier clipping?”
“No.”
“Do you happen to remember what it was about?”
“No.” The woman shook her head the way she might have if he had asked to borrow ten dollars. “Why should I remember? It was nearly two years ago. You have any idea how much newsprint I’ve read since then?”
He must have looked very disappointed, becaus
e she glanced down at the sheet of paper again and then closed the folder with a snap.
“It was from the Philadelphia Inquirer, dated September 12, Section B, page 3. They’ll have it on microfilm at the library.”
Her cigarette dropped an ash on the top of the filing cabinet and she brushed it over the edge with the side of her hand.
“You gonna renew the subscription?” she asked. “Its only paid up until the fifteenth.”
“If I can copy out that list of names I’ll write you a check for three months.”
. . . . .
Kinkaid just made the first peak hour train leaving Grand Central. He walked all the way to the front car to find a place by the window and hoped nobody would slide in next to him before the train pulled out. Nobody did, so he had the seat to himself. He had a morbid suspicion that it might be the last piece of luck he would ever enjoy in this life.
The woman had been right—they were just names. They might have been taken out of the phone book at random. None of them rang any bells.
But the clipping, which he had had photocopied at the 42nd Street Library, was bizarre.
Up until the afternoon of August the 27th, 1992, Terry Vogel had been a demonstrator of computer software for a company in Princeton, New Jersey. He was divorced, lived alone, and traveled a good deal in connection with his job. He had money in the bank and no known bad habits. Nobody could understand what could have possessed him to go to a second-floor apartment in East Philadelphia, lie down on the bed, press the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun against the underside of his chin, and pull both triggers. The whole front half of his head had been blown away.
It had taken exactly two weeks for the Philadelphia police to get a fingerprint report from Washington, and so the body hadn’t been identified until the 11th of September. The next day the Inquirer had published the story and three days later the woman at the Four Star Clipping Service had posted a copy of the article to her client. Kinkaid knew from experience that mail from New York City generally took about two days to reach New Gilead.
On the 17th of September, 1992, James Kinkaid III had been unusually quiet and preoccupied during dinner, had excused himself before dessert, something he had never been known to do before, and had collapsed on the stairs while trying to reach his bedroom. He had nearly died before his son could get him to the emergency room at New Gilead Memorial.
4
George Tipton pulled into one of the reserved slots in the employee parking area of the Peachtree Shopping Center. It was only 8:30 in the morning, but he hated to open the door and get out. The single ramp leading to the underground garage took you down about twenty feet into this concrete cavern where there was no ventilation and hardly any light and you could taste the exhaust fumes every time you opened your mouth. And it trapped the heat like the inside of an oven.
His house had a wall unit in the bedroom and after a night in his garage the car stayed tolerably cool as long as he didn’t open the windows, but the second he stepped outside he would run smack into the humidity like it was a wall. The staff entrance was a hundred feet away and by the time he reached it, and the safety of the shopping center’s air-conditioning system that kept even the stock rooms feeling like they were refrigerated, he would have sweated through his shirt.
Eight-thirty and he already knew what the day was going to be like. Lucille had started chipping at him almost before he stepped out of the shower and by breakfast they had been shouting at each other loud enough to wake the baby, who was only eleven weeks old but took after her mother and could scream the house down.
Lucille wanted him to look for another job that paid a higher salary. She said she also wanted to go live with her mother and George had told her fine, go ahead, because lately he never got anything for dinner except take-out food and, besides, they hadn’t fucked since three months before the baby was born. Except for the quiet, which would be a relief, he wouldn’t even notice she was gone.
But Lucille wasn’t going anywhere. She couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her mother for more than about half an hour at a time. All she wanted was for him to bring home more money to feed her credit cards with—Lucille couldn’t even go to the laundromat without it costing fifty bucks.
Southern girls. He had moved down to Atlanta four years ago because one time somebody had told him it never snowed there—you grow up in Darkest Michigan and you learn to hate snow—and two weeks after he got off the bus he had met Lucille at a disco in the Underground. There she was, up against the wall with some girlfriend, wearing one of those white, off-the-shoulder blouses you can practically see through, all smiles and long black hair, just like she had been waiting for him all her life.
But it was the accent that got him, that sleepy, flirtatious southern drawl that makes a woman sound like she just can’t wait to smother you with it even if she’s just reading out the address on a mailing label. Don’t listen to the words, Baby, because it’s the tune that matters. God Almighty, if he hadn’t gotten a hard on just standing there under the colored lights listening to her talk about how if you weren’t careful the bartender would short you on your change.
Well, not everything lives up to its advertising.
He opened the car door and stepped out, scraping the soles of his shoes on the gritty cement as he took a deep breath of the hot, sticky, gasoline scented air. There was no point in putting it off. He took his sports jacket from the back seat and dropped his keys into the pocket. It was unnecessary to lock up. His car had been three years old when he bought it and thieves had better taste.
When he pushed open the employee’s entrance the temperature seemed to drop about fifty degrees. He went to the men’s room and washed his face in cold water, which made him feel better. It was still going to be a lousy day.
George sometimes wondered if in marrying Lucille he had gone through a civil ceremony or simply fallen under a curse, because that one misjudgment had seemed to taint his entire existence. Even when he was out of the house, out of reach, safe, Lucille seemed to dog him. If they had a fight over breakfast he could count on a string of disasters throughout the day—one time, when she had gotten mad enough to throw a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes at his head, he hadn’t been at work more than twenty minutes when Mr. Jenkins had told him, with obvious pleasure, that he was being passed over for the job of assistant manager at the downtown store. Over the lunch break a pickpocket had bumped into him and lifted his wallet.
But there hadn’t been any actual violence this morning. It hadn’t been anything more than a shouting match, so maybe he wouldn’t actually get fired.
The Jock Shop was a regional sporting-goods chain with fifty-six stores stretching from Amarillo, Texas to Spartanburg, South Carolina. There were three of them in Atlanta, but the one in the Peachtree Shopping Center, with a staff of eight, was the biggest.
George was in informal charge of the Running Gear and Cycling Departments; he knew the stock and read the magazines enough to have become fluent in the jargon and he was thin, so customers tended to assume he was an enthusiast, which was good for business. Actually, he hated exercise.
Like everyone else except the manager, he worked on straight salary—the store did not have a commission system—but like everyone else he had to move a weekly average of two thousand dollars in merchandise just to keep his job. Sometimes, and particularly now in the summer, when people just wanted to huddle in front of their air conditioners, making the quota was a squeeze.
He reached the store just as Mr. Jenkins finished cranking up the chain link curtain that sealed off the entrance and the display windows after hours. Raising the curtain was a little ceremony, like running up the flag and, as one of his pet tyrannies, the store manager liked his staff to be there while he did it, witnesses to the start of a new workday as they stood at something like attention. If there had been a company song he would probably have insisted they all sing it.
They made an odd little group in the vast empt
iness of the shopping center. Not even the security guards were around. George could hear the splash of water, which meant someone had turned on the fountain in the central plaza—that and the metallic creaking of Jenkins’ crank handle as it turned in its slot were just about the only sounds.
Mr. Jenkins was almost bald and what little was left of his hair he plastered down against his glossy scalp as if he wanted to be quite sure it would still be there when next he checked. He was small, strengthless and round-shouldered. He was the sort of man whose childhood must have been a catalogue of athletic humiliations, an impression confirmed by the mean, bottle-brown eyes behind his heavy wire frame glasses. How he could possibly have ended up in the sporting-goods business was anybody’s guess.
He merely glanced at George as he stepped over the store threshold and flipped on the overhead lights, but that glance was enough. A manager can turn your life into a misery if he feels like it.
“Um, um—better have a lawyer handy while you fill out your swindle sheets,” Sally Bronowski murmured seductively up into George’s ear. She was about twenty and red-haired and did a lot of swimming, so it was a great pity that she had only been married about three months and appeared to be still in love with her husband. “The Potato Bug ‘s got it in for you today.”
The name fit. They watched him disappear insectlike through the door to the stock room. It was no insignificant mercy that Jenkins hardly ever showed himself on the sales floor.
“He’s got it in for me any day. Why don’t you go back there and seduce him so I can catch the two of you together? No? Where’s your team spirit?”
“No thank you. Not the Bug. Besides, I think there’s something wrong with him. He doesn’t even look.”
“Well I look, so I must be healthy.”
This made Sally laugh. She was a nice kind of girl. You could flirt with her.
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