Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  Looking back on it, Frank was always a little surprised they hadn’t found any trace of the camera.

  But one was there. Two weeks later he got a call from his lawyer.

  “Come down here. I’ve got something to show you.”

  “What—now? Sid, the timing is terrible . . .”

  “Now, if you want to stay out of court.”

  The minute he walked into his office Sid Lubash put a tape cassette in the VCR and Frank got to watch himself arguing with Velma Gray. When she started to scream Sid turned the sound off.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It came Federal Express this morning. The return address listed is the county lockup.”

  “Very funny.”

  By the time the tape was finished Sid was mopping his bald head with a handkerchief. You’d think it was him up there wiping the blood from his fingers.

  “It was in the closet,” Frank announced. The whole thing had revealed itself to him in that instant. “She had a closet in her bedroom, with a full length mirror on the door. That’s where the camera was hidden—you can tell from the angle. The bitch set me up.”

  “Too bad you didn’t give her time enough to say something.”

  Frank glared at his lawyer, until he realized the dumb fuck wasn’t kidding. Sid was really in a bad way. He just didn’t have the nerves for this kind of thing.

  The film was a good half-hour long and included everything—the shower curtain, the call to Charlie, everything. Finally the sound broke off and the television screen went grainy.

  “Was there anything else?”

  Sid pulled the cassette out of the VCR and handed it to him. Written across the label, in a tight woman’s hand, was “I’ll be in touch.”

  “I don’t have to tell you what happens if the cops get this.”

  “They won’t get it,” Frank said. “Somebody wants to deal.”

  An hour later Frank was in his car, in a parking lot along Fisherman’s Wharf, talking to Charlie Accardo.

  “What did you do with Velma?”

  Charlie was the placid type, for whom life held few surprises. So he didn’t ask any of the obvious questions. He just sat there with his huge hands folded over his belly seeming to consider the question, as if making a choice among possible answers.

  “She’s fertilizing a field of brussel sprouts down the coast.”

  “Well, maybe you better go down there and dig her up. Maybe you could take her fishing and use her for bait.”

  Then Frank told him about the film.

  “What are you gonna do about it?”

  “First we find out who, then we decide. In the meantime, you take care of Velma.”

  But it was too late. That evening Charlie called from a gas station in Half Moon Bay. “She ain’t there.”

  “Okay.” Frank glanced over at the living-room sofa, where his wife was watching a rerun of L.A. Law. But it wasn’t because of her that he decided he wouldn’t pursue this interesting subject. He was having a lot of trouble with the Feds just then and there was at least a fair chance that his phone was tapped. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  He hung up the phone and sat down on the sofa. When the station break was over, Stella Brittletits was involved in a class-action suit against a crooked cupcake manufacturer.

  “You shoulda been a lawyer, Frank,” his wife said. “They lead such interesting lives.”

  The next morning Charlie was waiting for him in the office of the building supply company he used as a front.

  “She’s gone—that’s all there is to it,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as if this sort of thing was bound to happen.

  “Maybe you dug up the wrong hole.”

  “Not likely. Besides I found the shower curtain.”

  “Then somebody must ’ve spotted you.”

  “Come on”

  “Well, Velma didn’t just climb out and walk away.”

  Charlie Accardo looked on the verge of taking serious offense, and he had a point. Charlie just wasn’t the careless type.

  “Nobody saw me, Frank. Nobody came anywhere near. I even replanted the brussel sprouts. You could look right at the spot in broad daylight and never think there was a body down there.”

  Except maybe if somebody knew that Velma was dead, knew that Frank Rizza would have to get the body out of her apartment and planted in a field somewhere, and then just tagged along at a discreet distance while Charlie drove out to Half Moon Bay.

  And that, apparently, was what somebody did—the somebody who was sitting across the patio table from Frank, smiling at him tauntingly.

  “What makes you think anyone gave it to me?”

  That smile. If a leopard could smile, it would smile just like that. It seemed to measure the possibilities. What were the chances that Frank Rizza might be amusing in the sack? Maybe someday, the smile suggested, maybe just before I put him on Death Row, I’ll find out.

  The first time he had met Miss Alicia Preston, when she had given him the word that from now on his life was something she carried around with her like the loose change in her purse, she had smiled at him like that. And after she dismissed him he had driven down to a whorehouse on Filmore Street, found himself a blonde with big hooters, and fucked himself silly. Until there wasn’t anything left inside him but fear.

  Somehow just the fear alone was easier to take than the fear mixed with a cringing, humiliating lust.

  The glass of club soda on the table beside her was sweating heavily. There were no lipstick smears on the rim. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched. Frank wondered if she even knew it was there. He would have liked to see her take a sip, just to prove she was human.

  “You mean you were the one who set me up?”

  “With a little help from Miss Gray,” she answered, after an almost indetectable pause. “I had a use for a reliable thug. We were only looking for some hold—just something to make you afraid of going to prison for a few years. It worked out better than I could have hoped, although not of course for Miss Gray.”

  “What did she want out of it?”

  “Money. And probably revenge.”

  The smile never changed. Still, he could see that she was someone who knew all about revenge.

  A reliable thug. The half dozen or so times she had asked him to do something for her she had always insisted on paying him. Fifteen thousand bucks once just to hire an out-of-state detective and find out if some guy up in Spokane had any bad habits. She could have had his chain pulled for five—Frank did lots of little favors like that for people who needed a reliable thug.

  So why go to all this trouble? Maybe she felt she couldn’t trust any man she didn’t own.

  “Money and revenge, was it?” He had to agree, that sounded just like Velma. “Well she didn’t get either, did she.”

  But Miss Preston had turned away again, had become absorbed once more in that mysterious object out on the shore which only she could see. Had switched him off as if he were a light.

  After a moment she reached into a wicker bag that was resting on the ground beside her chair and took out a white, legal-sized envelope with a rubber band around it to keep it closed. It was almost an inch and a half thick. She tossed it across the table to Frank, who stuffed it into the inside pocket of his coat.

  “Who do you want me to kill?” he asked, without actually joking.

  12

  Angel knew it was folly. She should wait until Rizza was finished with his little job—she knew better than anyone the dangers of yielding to impulse, but as she approached the end of her long exile, the pull of old associations became stronger and stronger.

  She had planned a trip, scouting a location for the meeting with her next old acquaintance. She had her bag packed, and the ticket in her purse listed Florida as the destination. Even in her car, crossing over the Golden Gate Bridge, she really believed that was where she was going.

  At the San Francisco airport she cancelled her reservation with Delta and
bought a first-class ticket on Pan Am Flight 423 to New York, leaving in twenty minutes—that was the wonderful thing about first class; there were nearly always seats.

  She wasn’t sure when she realized that was what she would do. It was as if the decision had made itself.

  The plane landed at Kennedy just before two in the afternoon and she rented a car. At that hour traffic was light, so the drive to Connecticut took only slightly more than an hour.

  She drove straight to Five Miles.

  The gate was padlocked. Somehow she hadn’t expected that. It came as a mild shock to be thus reminded that the house was empty.

  The lock wasn’t the sort you could pick, so she parked the car in a grove of trees a few hundred yards away and walked around the wall until she found the spot where it could be climbed. George Tipton had come over the wall just here—and Steve Billinger and Charlie Flaxman. All of them. Even Jim.

  Her shoes were flimsy little things with one-inch heels, so she took them off and threw them over the wall. She would ruin her nylons on the stones, but at least she was wearing trousers.

  In patches the lawn was infested with rye grass, which was lighter in color than ordinary grass, had a broader leaf and grew faster. It was almost impossible to control and would eventually require that the whole lawn be killed off and reseeded, but in Grandmother’s time the grass had been an unblemished dark green. Angel walked through it now, carrying her shoes, feeling the ankle-deep stubble brushing against her feet, resenting it as she might have the intrusion of some stranger.

  Pieces of mulch clung to her laddered stockings, as if bearing witness that the lawn had been cut recently. Somehow she had imagined herself wading through waist-high fields of weeds to reach a derelict house, but she was disappointed. Rye grass notwithstanding, the firm of Kinkaid & Kinkaid had scrupulously fulfilled its trust.

  The front of the house faced slightly away from the gate, as if disdaining any approach. While keeping well beyond it, Angel’s path followed the general curve of the driveway, so that the house seemed to turn to meet her.

  Had her mind been capable of that sort of speculation, the last of the Wymans probably would have believed that houses had as much claim as people to being thought of as endowed with souls. Certainly the house at Five Miles seemed to her an animate object. It was her grandmother’s house and embodied, as she had, all that had been thought and felt by all the Wymans for all the history of the world, which had begun and would end with them. And so now the windows seemed to stare down at her, watching her with silent disapproval. You have been away too long, they said to her. And now you claim an inheritance that is yours only because it is no one else’s.

  But the reproach was somehow more cruel because the house was now warmed by no life except memory. Angel stood for a long moment on the gravel in front of the main entrance, waiting for the house to speak again, yet it would not. She knew where there was a key hidden in the base of one of the wooden pillars, but she found she was reluctant to fetch it. She did not want to step within the house’s shadow until she felt herself becoming once more a part of it.

  So she went around to the back, where, among other things, there was a garden.

  Grandmother had been fond of roses. Angel had a theory that it was not the color or the scent or the shape of the flower that had attracted the old woman, but the thorns. Even if it was not true, the theory had a certain appropriateness. As you walked down the straight, symmetrical paths of the garden you had to be careful that the rose bushes didn’t catch at you.

  Some distance off, as the ground began to slope away, was what looked at first like a fragment of ruined wall but was in fact the gardener’s cottage, deliberately allowed to become so overgrown with vines that its real identity was obscured. The Wymans did not like to admit that they shared their premises with anyone.

  There was a padlock on the door and the windows were caked over with years of dust, so that they might as well have been made out of sheet metal. Angel had no particular curiosity about the inside. She doubted the cottage had been occupied since her time—Grandmother would have been very careful about that—and her memories were perfectly clear as to its contents. She would have liked to know what became of Dominic, however. Doubtless he was somewhere no one would ever, ever find him.

  She turned away and strolled over to the garden, where she sat down on one of the benches and studied the smooth carpet of lawn at her feet. Even the rose beds were grass. Most of the rose gardens Angel had seen, even the ones in Paris, had gravel around the plants, but Grandmother had believed gravel was the invention of the devil—a rose garden required grass. Perhaps the garden was still under her special protection because the rye infestation had not reached its precincts.

  The garden had been designed as a retreat, both from the oppressive Connecticut summers and from the propriety of the house. There were wide marble benches beneath arbors covered over with flowering vines that provided plenty of shade and a good measure of privacy. It was a perfect place for lovers’ trysts, as Angel had good reason to know. A stranger might have called it a romantic place, except that romance was not something one associated with the Wymans.

  Had she felt romantic when she brought Jim here? She couldn’t remember. She remembered everything about Jim and the time she had spent in his company except the way it had made her feel. She suspected she had felt very little, and she couldn’t bring herself to regret this. She had the impression that strong feelings were for the most part painful and she regarded her own immunity from them as an asset.

  But love did not have to be passionate to be real. Angel believed rather than felt that she had loved Jim Kinkaid. She had no idea whether she still loved him—this was something she would have to wait to find out.

  It would be useful to love him. She was a Wyman and there was the preservation of the line to be thought of. She wanted to have a child, sooner or later, and Jim would do very well for that.

  If everything worked out they could live at Five Miles together and she would help him to make a figure in the world, as befitted a Wyman. But if it didn’t he could join the others.

  Angel thought it would be her little joke that all the boys would end up here in the rose garden, where they had entered and left her life. She had been collecting souvenirs, bits and pieces, and they could all go towards nourishing Grandmother’s rose bushes.

  There was room for Jim if he turned out to present a problem.

  When she grew tired of amusing herself with the idea she got up and decided it was time to face the house.

  Sure enough, even after ten years, the spare key that nobody had known about but she and Grandmother was still behind the little piece of wood that fitted so precisely into the end pillar that you would never have guessed it slipped out—as a matter of fact Angel had to use her little pocket knife to work it loose because it had acquired a couple of coats of paint without anyone noticing its existence.

  Inside, what she noticed first were the footprints on the dusty carpet. This too she had not expected.

  They were fairly fresh, still sharp in their outlines, and there were two sets: a woman in narrow heels and a man. The man’s footprints are large and revealed a long stride. Since the door had not been forced, Angel concluded that the man was probably Jim—as the family lawyer and the executor of the estate he would have a key. Who then was the woman?

  The footprints clustered in the middle of the foyer and then lead off into the main reception room. She followed them, keeping well away to avoid crossing their trail with her own. At no time did the two sets parallel each other closely enough that it seemed likely the man and woman were touching. And then the woman appeared to have broken off to the left and gone back outside.

  She was nobody—a realtor maybe. Angel couldn’t disguise from herself the fact that she was relieved. She didn’t like the idea that Jim might have brought a woman to this house for any personal reason.

  And he had been here, standing in this very room
, probably only a few weeks ago. Perhaps even in the last few days.

  Angel glanced at the sheet over Grandfather’s chair and noticed that the evenness of the dust coating had been disturbed. Jim must have raised it to look underneath. It had to have been him. No one would come into a deserted house and lift up the dust cloth over a chair unless he had personal memories of the place.

  She also observed that the woman’s footprints appeared nowhere except in the foyer and this room, and her smaller tracks leading to the front door were unaccompanied. She must have come in, looked around a bit, and then gone back outside, leaving Jim here alone.

  He didn’t seem to have stayed long in the reception room—at least he hadn’t moved around much. His footprints led to the stairway and then up to the second floor. He had stopped for a moment on a landing, apparently looking to the front, toward Grandmother’s room, but he had not approached it. Apparently there was nothing there which interested him.

  Then what did he do? It was not difficult to follow his progress. He stopped and opened the doors to three bedrooms along the left-hand corridor, but there were no footprints more than a yard beyond the thresholds. This was not surprising. The rooms were impersonally furnished, fitted out for the guests who, in Angel’s brief experience of the house, were never invited and therefore did not come.

  One of these had been her own, and she observed with no small bitterness that all trace of her occupancy had been removed.

  The fourth room along that corridor had belonged to her Uncle Christopher, and she was surprised that she found the door slightly ajar. It had always been locked in her time.

  She went inside. On one of the drawers of the desk she saw a set of finger marks. She looked inside and found nothing except some old books. There was no other trace of Jim’s presence.

  In the last room along that corridor, the one that occupied a corner of the building and therefore had more light than any of the others, the one that had belonged to Angel’s mother, she felt sure she understood what he had been looking for.