Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  But as he sat in his dining room, quite alone, it was the father of his childhood he missed, his hero and friend, with whom anything seemed possible.

  And now even the hope of regaining that early intimacy had vanished forever.

  He had no idea how he got through dinner. He had no appetite but simply ate mechanically, exchanging small talk with Julia as she carried things back and forth. When it was finally over, he went back to his office.

  Within five minutes of opening Edward Tipton’s file, Kinkaid had found the link he sought.

  Clipped together with a xerox copy of the lease agreement on the lighting store were three pages of notes, written out in longhand and dated August, 1981, from a juvenile court hearing designated as “Tipton vs. the State of Connecticut.” August was when Molly spent her annual two weeks of vacation rummaging through the antique stores of Southern New Hampshire, which explained why she didn’t remember the case.

  The defendant had been stopped for speeding on Route 106 and could not produce a driver’s license. Hardly surprising, since he had been fifteen years old at the time. The arresting officer smelled marijuana smoke in the car and, upon making a search, discovered four joints in the glove compartment.

  The presiding magistrate was designated simply as “Harry,” which suggested that he was probably some old crony of Kinkaid’s father, which was probably the only way Tipton fils had ended up with probation rather than a ticket to juvenile hall.

  There were no other references to the young offender anywhere in the file, not even in his father’s will. Perhaps Edward Tipton had suffered other disappointments in his son, whose name was George.

  6

  Kinkaid was already in his first year of law school before he discovered running. He liked it because it was challenging without being competitive and because it was solitary.

  He was not athletic. He believed himself to be naturally awkward, which he was not, and shrank from displaying his imagined inadequacies. He had never tried out for a team, either in high school or college. At his father’s insistence he had expended considerable effort to become merely average at tennis, but he did not enjoy the game and had not played since the elder Kinkaid suffered his first heart attack.

  The truth was that, on a purely personal level, he lacked the necessary aggressiveness. In his professional life he could be ferocious enough, but that was because winning there mattered. The legal issues of a case were important as they supported the law itself as an idea—for Kinkaid believed in the law as a kind of secular religion—and his clients deserved his best because they had put their trust in him. But to triumph over an opponent in something as trivial as a tennis game struck him as almost rude.

  Running, however, was another matter. At six in the morning, when he slipped out of the house and started down the street at a slow jog, New Gilead was still asleep, bathed in gray light and quiet enough that usually the only sound he heard was the soft clop, clop, clop of his Nike Airs against the asphalt. There were no cars and the traffic lights pulsed yellow and red like the slow beating of a heart. Sometimes he would meet another runner and they might wave at one another and smile and pass on, but for the rest he was alone and unobserved. His mind was free and he seemed to turn inward upon himself. It was a sustaining experience.

  The nice part was when he got outside of town, away from the expensive, cookie-cutter houses that fed the commuter trains, on the road out to Silverbridge or some other narrow asphalt track that snaked along beside an open field or one of the endless stone walls that some 18th Century farmer had probably spent the best part of his life piling up. As he got into a rhythm, Kinkaid would begin to pick up a little speed, and after about half an hour it became effortless. He would begin to feel as if his legs were on automatic pilot and all he had to do was keep from falling over to go on running forever.

  He would go out five or six miles and then loop back.

  About half a mile outside the central business district he would begin to slow down, then he always walked the last three or four hundred yards through town so he would have stopped sweating by the time he got home and could take his shower. Besides, by a quarter to eight or so people were beginning to stir. Kinkaid didn’t care to make a spectacle of himself streaking along Putnam Avenue, dodging in and out among the minivans rushing for the 7:48 to Grand Central.

  At that hour the only reason for a business to be open was the commuter traffic. The antique stores and the dress shops could stay dark for another few hours, but Mr. Wiseman’s grocery, which somehow the new Food Emporium had failed to drive out of business, might sell a bottle of milk to a woman on her way home from dropping hubby at the train depot. And of course by 9:00 a.m. the service stations had all sold enough gas to meet half their daily running expenses.

  The Exxon dealership across Cedar Road from the public library wasn’t two hundred feet from Kinkaid’s front door. It was where Charlie Flaxman worked. That particular morning he was outside, refilling an oil can rack.

  For all that the census figures might show, New Gilead—the real New Gilead, not the town of the housing developers—was actually a small place. A lot of people lived there because their companies had transferred them from places like Cincinnati, but the natives were still essentially tribal in their outlook. They had all had the same kindergarten teachers, watched the same Fourth of July parades, learned to swim in the same YMCA pool and bought their first full-price tickets at the same movie theater. They all knew one another’s personal histories, both real and imagined. They had watched each other grow up. Thus the personal relations among them involved a certain intimacy which existed alongside and in some ways transcended everything else. They might be friends or sworn enemies, but the one thing they could never be was strangers.

  In school Charlie Flaxman had been two classes behind Kinkaid and they had not moved in the same circles, but their lives had overlapped enough that they could take each other for granted. Had Charlie been even two years younger he might have addressed the man who approached him in gym shorts and a sweat-soaked tee shirt as “Mr. Kinkaid,” but he didn’t. It wouldn’t have occurred to him.

  “Morning, Jim,” he said instead. “Staying in shape?”

  He smiled, not very benevolently. Charlie Flaxman was about three inches taller than Kinkaid and a good fifty pounds heavier and still carried himself like the eighteen-year-old kid who had been first-string guard on the high school football team. It was as if that one distinction had left him with nothing else to prove in this life.

  Kinkaid walked over to the garage—the bay doors were still closed; no one else had come to work yet—and took a long drink of water from the hose that was used to fill radiators. When he was finished he let the water run over his face for a few seconds. It felt marvelous.

  “I try,” he answered, smiling a little wanly. He was pleasantly tired after his run and, besides, he didn’t want to start trading insults. “How’s business?”

  “Not bad.” Charlie looked around at the station, frowning as if it had somehow disappointed him. He had a one-third interest in the place, bought in part with money he had borrowed from his wife’s parents, so he was entitled to care. “The tourist trade’s been good this month—city people driving up for the day ’cause we’re so quaint.”

  The remark was vintage Charlie. Bite the hand that feeds you, particularly if belongs to somebody who wasn’t born here, or wasn’t a high school sports hero, or—God forbid—might imagine he was as good or better than the one third owner of New Gilead Exxon. With anyone else you might have said maybe he felt disappointed by life, but Charlie had been just the same at ten years old.

  “How ‘s the law, now you ain’t got your daddy to do your thinking for you?”

  Charlie’s eyes narrowed as he waited for the thrust to hit home. He was a malignant bastard who was always goading people and got into one or another kind of serious trouble about every other year. Only last autumn Kinkaid had had to drive down to Stamford to bail
him out of an aggravated assault charge, for which he was still on probation. Lots of people in town wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

  But he was disappointed this time. Kinkaid seemed not even to have heard the question.

  “You happen to remember a kid named George Tipton?” The lawyer let his gaze rest on the front door of the library across the street. Somehow it had always reminded him of a bank vault. “He would have been a contemporary of yours, I think. Did you know him?”

  “Yeah, I knew him. Yeah, he was a contemporary, I guess.”

  Charlie seemed to taste the word, rolling it around on his tongue, and then he shook his head. These dumb-ass, wimp college boys . . .

  “Did you keep in touch with him? Do you know where he lives?”

  “He doesn’t live anywhere.” When Kinkaid looked puzzled, Charlie Flaxman grinned, as if that had been the idea all along. “Man, he’s been dead three years.”

  . . . . .

  The story, as Charlie told it, had a certain inevitability.

  “George was always a crazy bastard that never cared about nothing but racking up touchdowns and pussy. That and getting high. Quit school in his senior year, as soon as football season was over, but by then his old man was ready to throw him out anyway. Joined the Marines right after. Had an idea Reagan was gonna start World War III down in Guatamala or some damn place. Didn’t want to miss it.”

  Leaning against one of the gas pumps, he let his gaze slide along Cedar Road toward the center of town as if estimating the probability that a car in need of a fill-up would pop out of the empty asphalt and pull in. Not today, it looked like.

  “When he got out of the Corps he drifted around for a couple of years. He came back here for a while, about four years ago. We went out and had a few beers together, but by that time he wasn’t much fun to be around. Finally he got into a big shindee with his family and disappeared again. The next thing I heard he’d piled up his car someplace over in Jersey. I drove over for the funeral—Jesus, the guy was twenty-five years old and looked about forty. So much for the fast life.”

  “So you saw the body?”

  “Oh yeah.” Charlie looked at him a trifle strangely, as if he considered the question not quite decent. “They’d laid on the paint pretty thick—seems like he was really messed up in the crash—but it was him.”

  At nine fifteen that morning, sitting behind his desk with his hair combed and the jacket of his business suit hanging from a peg behind his chair, Kinkaid phoned the New Jersey State Police, Traffic Division, to see if they had a file on George Tipton.

  “It’s in reference to an estate settlement,” he told the officer with whom he was eventually connected. “We’d like to be sure it is the same George Tipton and, assuming that it is, we’d appreciate any information you could provide concerning the circumstances of his death.”

  “And who might you be, sir?” The voice at the other end of the line sounded like it belonged to a man in late middle age—not suspicious precisely, but careful.

  Kinkaid gave his name, address and telephone number. “I’m the attorney of record for Edward Tipton, now deceased. He was the father of George Tipton.”

  “I’ll have to call you back on this, sir.”

  “Perhaps I could just give you my fax number. Since the case is only a few years old it should still be in your database. When you finish your inquiries could you send me the relevant information?”

  “I could do that, sir.”

  It was a technique Kinkaid had used before with title companies, the Motor Vehicles Department and half a dozen different tax agencies, if not actually with the police. Your average clerk doesn’t like to go sifting through a computer printout trying to decide what the “relevant information” might be—it is easier simply to push a button and send it all on its way. And a fax machine is a wonderfully impersonal device which somehow frees people from the natural bureaucratic suspicion that they might be giving away the keys to the kingdom. After all, they haven’t actually said anything, and nothing has physically left the office. The result is that you tend to get more than you actually requested, sometimes a lot more.

  Besides, this way Kinkaid didn’t have to ask the New Jersey State Police if there was anything to suggest that George Tipton’s death had not been just another accident statistic, and they didn’t have to ask him why he wanted to know.

  Two hours later the little icon appeared on his computer screen to let him know that something was coming over the wires. After about ten minutes he turned on his trusty LaserJet and slightly curled sheets of bond paper began to come out. He had hit pay dirt. It looked as if they were sending him damn near the whole case file.

  Fax transmissions take forever to print and paper was still staggering out when Kinkaid returned from lunch. He told Molly to hold his calls and started reading.

  It was apparent that the police had also found George Tipton interesting, but not because they suspected he had met with foul play. By the time of his death he seemed to have been into drugs in a big way. His rap sheet showed four arrests on narcotics charges in the last six months before the accident. The officers at the scene had found a couple of vials of crack on the car floor and the autopsy report confirmed the presence of cocaine in his system. It was all perfectly straightforward: another doper cooks his brains in a louch pipe and the pink alligators on the back seat chase him into a bridge support at eighty miles an hour. There had been no murder investigation because there had been no murder. In a way it was kind of a relief—George Tipton had died of his own bad habits.

  There was an interrogation report on a Helen Grier (age, 32; hair, brown; weight, 105; arrest record, extensive) who was listed primly as Tipton’s “live-in companion”. The police believed that George had died on his way home from a drug buy and they wanted to know the name of his supplier. Helen couldn’t tell them. Helen, one gathered, shared George’s recreational tastes and probably had a lot of trouble remembering how to put her shoes on.

  But, since there were no subsequent cross references to other police reports, whatever future horrors might have awaited Helen Grier, at least she hadn’t ended up with a hole in her face like Mrs. Billinger.

  Kinkaid gathered up the hundred some odd sheets of paper, stuffed them into an unmarked manila envelope and dropped the envelope into the bottom drawer of his desk.

  “Okay, Dad,” he whispered to himself, “where does all this leave us?” Nowhere, apparently. Three out of the ten names had been accounted for by a mass murder, an apparent suicide and a traffic accident, but that didn’t count for much in the way of progress.

  “Mr. Kinkaid, I’ll be leaving now.”

  He glanced up and saw Molly standing in his office doorway. He must have looked surprised.

  “You’ll remember I told you I had a dental appointment this afternoon.”

  “Right.” He smiled encouragingly. “You go on ahead. I hope you have a good report.”

  “It’s only a cleaning,” she answered, with the tone of someone answering an accusation. “I left your phone messages on my desk.”

  After he had seen Molly to the door, Kinkaid went into his father’s office and sat down behind the big desk. He had an idea—really more of an instinct, since it was hardly articulated as a rational proposition—that this was the place to come to terms with his father’s secrets.

  What is this about, Dad? A million years ago you defended a kid in juvenile court. How does any of this touch us?

  After a few minutes he found himself staring at the glass case within which slumbered a handsomely bound collection of out-of-date law books. He had no idea what had attracted his attention to them, since he had never looked into any of them, had never even opened the case. The key . . .

  It hit him just like that. He rose and went upstairs.

  The bedroom had not been altered since the morning of his father’s death. After the ambulance left, Julia went upstairs and made up the bed with clean sheets, closing the door behind he
r. No one had been inside since.

  Kinkaid had not been present while the ambulance crew, with practiced efficiency, hoisted his father’s corpse up by the wrists and ankles and dropped it into the black plastic body bag that lay open on a stretcher. He had witnessed the stretcher coming down the stairs and had noted its burden, but apparently he had not accepted the obvious inference because he was still surprised to find the bedroom empty.

  But it was. The air was damp and lifeless, as if the room itself resented his intrusion.

  He’s dead, he thought to himself. You saw him in his casket an hour before they put him into the ground. What were you expecting?

  He went over to the dresser, slid open the top drawer and took out a handkerchief box covered in scuffed brown leather. Inside he found what he had expected to find: his father’s pocket watch.

  Like the clock in the dining room it did not run, although a few drops of oil would probably have set it right. James Kinkaid III would not have felt himself fully dressed without his pocket watch, but the point lay more in the display of gold chain looped through the button hole of his vest than in any use he made of it as a timepiece. Sometimes, if he needed a few seconds to think—or he wished to call attention to the lateness of the hour—he would take the thing out, pop the cover and take a long look at the dial face, but he had been born just one generation too late for that to be anything more than a mannerism. So it didn’t matter whether the watch kept time or not.

  Still, he had always carried it, in case he needed it for a bit of stage business. “The little old ladies just love that sort of thing. It makes them think they’re dealing with Oliver Wendell Holmes.” And then he would smile, just to show that he wasn’t joking. “You always have to remember, Jimmy, that about thirty per cent of lawyering is pure theater. That’s your one weakness—you seem to think you have to believe everything you say.”

  It was a beautiful watch, made in London before the turn of the century and acquired by the first James Kinkaid, according to family legend, as a gift from a grateful client rescued from a well-deserved prison sentence. But it was not the watch itself which interested his great-grandson.