Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  When he had put down the phone, Kinkaid looked out his office window and noticed a gleam of light reflected off the board fence his neighbors had put around their back yard to keep the dog at home. That meant the street lamps had been turned on, which in turn meant it was after 8:00 p.m. It was Julia’s day off and he had forgotten to do anything about dinner. He wondered where he had put Lisa Milano’s telephone number.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Just finished,” she answered. “Budget Gourmet Lasagna and a diet cream soda.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it.”

  “No you’re not. But if you come over now I can provide you with scrambled eggs and various other physical comforts.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. No, make it fifteen.”

  . . . . .

  George Tipton, deceased, had led a troubled youth. The New Gilead Police Department’s file on him was half an inch thick and concerned only juvenile offenses, since by his eighteenth birthday he had already left town forever.

  The record started when he was thirteen years old and was arrested for trespassing and malicious mischief after throwing a brick through Mrs. Vivian Thompson’s plate-glass window on Halloween. The charge had been dropped the next afternoon, so probably George’s father had paid to have the window replaced.

  At fifteen he was found drunk and disorderly during a Sunday afternoon matinee at the Palace movie theatre and received three months probation.

  Then came the traffic tickets, eight within a single year, half of them for speeding. He had finally had his license suspended, but was cited twice more for driving without it.

  But from James Kinkaid’s perspective, ten years after the fact, the only item of real interest was the last. It was another arrest for trespassing, this time in company with Andrew Castlesmith, with the complainant listed as Mrs. Isabelle Wyman.

  The two boys had been apprehended coming back over the wall at Five Miles, and the arresting officer had been Marshal Cheffins himself. The matter had been serious, especially since Castlesmith was eighteen and thus could be charged as an adult.

  Three days later charges were again dropped, which was a little strange—old Mrs. Wyman had not been the type to be bought off at the price of a plate-glass window. It was more than a little strange.

  But George Tipton and Mrs. Wyman were both dead, and Andrew Castlesmith could be anywhere—certainly he wasn’t in New Gilead—so there was only person left who might know something about this particular piece of ancient history, even if it was only that there was nothing to know.

  Every day he was on duty, and some when he was not, Marshal Cheffins ate lunch at the diner across the street from the police station. Many evenings he was there for dinner as well. It was a habit that dated from his wife’s death, some fifteen years ago, and everyone in town knew about it. If you wanted a quiet off-the-record word with the Marshal, you went to Curly’s at one o’clock.

  Curly’s was a dark tunnel of a place, its walls lined with ten or twelve booths of the old-fashioned kind that were like little wooden rooms. It had changed hands several times over the years and was now owned and run by a Vietnamese couple named Ng. Mr. Ng, who had appeared in the late Eighties, was now universally referred to as “Curly” and his wife was “Mrs. Curly”, but the name was purely honorific, as Mr. Ng’s hair was thin, straight and carefully plastered to his skull. If you owned Curly’s, you were Curly. In fact no one seemed to remember the first Curly, but he seemed to have left his mark. Nothing about the place ever varied, not even the menu.

  The marshal always occupied the back booth, nearest the kitchen. When Kinkaid sat down across the table from him he was just finishing a dessert which had probably been some sort of cobbler.

  “How are you, Jim Boy? I see you brought young Tipton back. You want some coffee?”

  “No thanks, Bill,” Kinkaid answered, smiling and pushing the manila folder across the table. Bill Cheffins was a good deal more than twice his age, but he liked to be called by his first name for the same reason he liked eating at Curly’s. He liked being an institution. “I just wondered if there was anything you could tell me that isn’t in here.”

  The marshal raised his eyebrows in something that seemed like a mingling of astonishment and disapproval. He was a large man, with a deeply creased face and grizzled hair. He knew how to look intimidating, even if you had known him all your life—perhaps especially then.

  “Like what exactly?”

  “Like the time you busted him up at Five Miles. What was that about?”

  Cheffins’ suspicion evaporated instantly. He threw back his head and laughed, as if someone had reminded him of a favorite joke.

  “Sure, I remember that,” he said shaking his head and laughing all over again. “The stupid little squirt had left his old Chevy in the trees—I’d tagged that car so many times I knew right away it was George’s. All I had to do was pull in behind and wait. I watched him and his buddy climb back over the wall. They were laughing and making jokes, as pleased with themselves as jaybirds with a picnic basket. They practically walked into my arms.”

  “Did Mrs. Wyman call you?”

  “Her very own self. Called me in the middle of the night, said there were intruders—‘intruders,’ that was what she called ‘em. Said I should come out right away. She was pissed as hell.”

  “But you didn’t go up to the house?”

  “Nah. As soon as I saw that damn Chevy I knew there wasn’t nothing to worry about. George Tipton had a little too much hell in him, but he wasn’t gonna burn the place down. I called Mrs. Wyman from my car and said not to worry, that it was only kids and that she should tell her gardener to chase ‘em out, that I’d be there waiting for ‘em.”

  “Why did she drop charges, do you think?”

  “Oh, Jimmy, I don’t think. I know.” The marshal’s voice dropped and he leaned a little forward, lighting a cigarette. “You ever meet that young girl Mrs. Wyman had kicking around the house for a while? Those boys was invited.”

  He slumped back, his head wrapped in a cloud of cigarette smoke, in a state of purely physical satisfaction that appeared to make him forgetful of anything else. He smiled faintly and to himself, but not in recollection. It was as if he had forgotten there was any past to remember, or anyone to share it with if there was.

  Perhaps, or perhaps not. It was just possible that somehow he knew that young Jimmy Kinkaid had also climbed the wall at Five Miles, or perhaps no one knew.

  “Yes, I met her once,” Kinkaid said, keeping his voice empty of emotion. “I wonder what ever became of her.”

  “Do you?”

  Cheffins shook himself out of whatever dream had enveloped him. He flicked an ash onto his empty dessert dish and, seeming just then to have noticed Kinkaid’s presence, frowned slightly.

  “I would’ve thought your Daddy’d told you,” he said, making it sound like a reproach. “Now why do you suppose he didn’t?”

  . . . . .

  It was the sort of story one reads in the newspapers every day, the story of a young life gone suddenly and inexplicably smash. Except, of course, that this particular story never made into the newspapers. There had been a crime, and there had been punishment, but because it was Wyman family business it was not deemed the proper concern of the press—or, for that matter, even the law. And thus for ten years it had remained the exclusive possession of some half-dozen people.

  “I got the call on a Thursday evening,” Marshal Cheffins explained. “I know it was a Thursday because that used to be my lodge night and I got fined a bottle of Jack Daniels because I missed the meeting. I’d just finished my dinner when the phone rang. It was your daddy.”

  The marshal was instructed—instructed, that was the word he used—to come to Five Miles, alone and driving an unmarked car. And because it was Mrs. Wyman’s lawyer who was calling, and because Bill Cheffins would never have become town marshal without the help of old Judge Wyman, he did as he was told.

&n
bsp; “Mrs. Wyman wasn’t anywhere to be seen when I got there,” he went on. “Your daddy met me at the door. We didn’t even go inside. He just led me around to the back. The gardener’s cottage was behind the garage, and the door was open. There weren’t any lights on inside, but the door was standing wide open. It seemed peculiar.

  “The cottage was just a little two-room stone hut, not much bigger than a tool shed, and the bedroom was in the back. That’s where he was.

  “You probably never met Dominic Franco, did you, Jimmy?” The marshal smiled, not very nicely. “Not exactly the type who ends up going to Yale. A nice-looking kid, though, when he wasn’t shit-faced drunk. And a perfect terror with the girls. I’d had a run-in or two with him. The sort you just know is gonna die young.

  “And he did. He was lying on the bed, his face smashed in so bad his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. There was a shovel on the floor, the short kind with a hand grip, but a good heavy blade, enough to do the job. It was smeared with blood, so I didn’t have to think too hard about what had been the murder weapon.

  “He’d been drinking—there was a half-empty whiskey bottle on his night table—and he must have been out cold. He didn’t look like he’d put up any kind of a struggle. I figure he’d probably been dead about two hours.

  “‘She killed him,’ your daddy said. ‘Angela. She just went wild.’

  “‘Any idea why?’ I asked him, but he just shook his head. ‘Where is she now?’

  “‘Up in her room. She hasn’t said a word—it’s like she’s in some sort of trance. Mrs. Wyman is with her.’

  “He was pretty upset and I couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t like I’d never seen a killing before, ‘cause even in New Gilead we get a killing every once in a while. But this wasn’t like some guy goes ballistic and plugs his honey. Young Dom was a real mess. The whole front of his skull was crushed in so bad his head looked like a plate full of strawberry preserves.

  “We went back to the house and had a look at the young lady who had done all this, and she really was in a trance. She was wearing a white, sleeveless dress that was spattered with blood, and she sat on her bed, her legs drawn up beneath her, her head a little bowed, staring at nothing. I remember thinking how pretty she was, as if that could matter anymore. Mrs. Wyman was on a chair beside the door, as if to guard the way out, and I remember there were tears in her eyes. They were both perfectly silent.

  “Your daddy and I went down to the old Judge’s study, where we both knew there was a bar behind one of the bookcases, and I made us each a stiff drink.

  “‘Her mind has snapped,’ he said to me. ‘No matter what you decide to do about this, the end result will be the same—Angela’s going into the nut house for the rest of her life.’

  “I must not have been thinking too clearly, because it was only then that I realized what they wanted from me. I was having a quiet drink with the family lawyer while the old lady’s granddaughter was crouched upstairs, out of her head, and never coming back, and there was a dead body in the gardener’s hut, and I was supposed to clean up the mess.

  “Well, it wasn’t something I had to study real hard. In this county, when the Wymans want something done it gets done. The Judge had put me in this job and his Missus could take me out of it anytime she felt so inclined. If I wanted to stay marshal I had to solve this little problem for her.

  “‘You’d better call a doctor for the girl,’ I answered. ‘But get her cleaned up first, and burn that dress.’

  “I finished my drink and went back out to the gardener’s cottage, where I wrapped Dominic Franco up in a plastic tarp and put him and everything I could find that he had bled on in the trunk of my car.

  “There’s an old farm off of Route 6 the town picked up for delinquent property taxes back in the Seventies and then, when even the developers weren’t interested, just forgot about. It seemed as good a place as any. I put Dom to rest in an abandoned well shaft and he hasn’t caused any trouble since.”

  Marshal Cheffins crushed out his cigarette in one of the heavy glass ashtrays that showed as conclusively as anything could how far behind the times Curly’s diner had remained. He sighed heavily, not in remembrance of past sins but out of an animal contentment—from the remaining evidence it had been a heavy lunch.

  “And I’ve never said a word about any of this to a living soul,” he went on. “Not in ten years. Now just you and I know, Jimmy.”

  . . . . .

  Somehow James Kinkaid IV made it back to his car which, thank God, was parked out of sight of the street. He climbed inside, but he couldn’t have driven it anywhere. He kept dropping the keys. Finally he just left them where they had fallen on the floor and began pounding on the dashboard with his fists.

  “Damn, damn, damn, damn!” he found himself shouting within the enclosed space of the car. His eyes were burning with unspent tears and felt as if his chest were being crushed beneath someone’s foot. “Oh God Damn . . .”

  It was all so horribly clear now. Marshal Cheffins was out a bottle of Jack Daniels because it was a Thursday evening that Dominic Franco died, which meant he had only been dead about twenty-four hours when young Jimmy went storming up to Five Miles to have it out with Mrs. Wyman.

  “You may actually be in love,” she had told him. “If that is the case, then I pity you.”

  And she had said it with the full authority of her patrician New England disdain for emotional excess, and her granddaughter by then would have been spending the first night of the rest of her life in a mental ward. The old woman must have been made of iron.

  Her granddaughter. Miss Wyman, the mysterious young relative from a convent school in Paris, was her granddaughter, a fact Bill Cheffins mentioned so casually that he obviously supposed Young Jimmy knew as much already. Obviously Young Jimmy was and always had been pretty dense.

  But not dense enough not to understand why the marshal had no qualms about telling him such a chronicle of indictable offenses—simply because he had known he could get away with it. Just as he had known he could get away with dropping Dominic Franco down a well shaft. Because he knew he had nothing to fear from anybody except Mrs. Wyman, who was safely dead now. Because he knew there was nothing Jimmy Kinkaid could or would do about conspiracy, misprison of a felony, and accessory to murder. Because if Bill Cheffins was guilty so was James Kinkaid Senior.

  And his father would never have been party to such a thing, not even for the Wymans, if Mrs. Wyman hadn’t had just the right weapon to use against him.

  She had been in her grave for years, but he could hear her voice as clearly as if she were there in the car with him: “Don’t imagine you have nothing to lose. You have your son to lose—your son, so full of promise. My granddaughter’s life may be over, but if you insist on dragging our family’s name through the mud I’ll see that at least some of it sticks to your boy. If everything comes out, who will believe in his innocence? Who will want to believe in it?”

  “From what I hear, she’s been fucked by every guy on the football team.”

  And in all the years since, to the very hour of his death, he had said nothing. He had kept his secret, letting its poison slowly seep into their relationship.

  But all of this, his father’s complicity, his even more terrible silence, was as nothing against the image of Angela Wyman, her white dress spattered with blood, her mind mute, broken and unreachable. It was like losing her all over again—only worse this time, because now he had lost even the idea of her.

  What had made her kill the gardener? “The whole front of his skull was crushed in.” Had he been her lover too, like George Tipton and Andrew Castlesmith? “Those boys was invited.”

  The chronology was clear. On Sunday evening Kinkaid had talked to his father before going back to New Haven. Sometime between Sunday and Thursday his father talked to Mrs. Wyman. On Thursday Angela beat Dominic Franco to death and almost immediately thereafter slipped into madness. By Friday, when Kinkaid drove to Five Miles, she w
as gone, as if she had stepped off the face of the Earth. “You won’t see her,” Mrs. Wyman had said. “She isn’t here.”

  She isn’t here.

  Mrs. Wyman had implied, without perhaps actually saying so, that she had sent Angela away because of him. “I know you will not believe me, young man, but I have acted more for your sake than for hers.” Clearly this was not true in any literal sense, but it was somehow impossible to believe that on some level the old woman had not been telling the truth.

  Then she must have spoken to her granddaughter about the purpose of his father’s visit. Was that what had pushed Angela over into the abyss? Was it really possible to believe anything else?

  It was as if he had just discovered that he had destroyed her. He had fallen in love—that was his only offense. And yet he felt the burden of his inadvertent guilt. One can be innocent and still feel the despair of shame.

  What had become of Angela? It became suddenly necessary to know, yet how would he ever know?

  The keys in his father’s strong box, the strong box that contained thirty years of Wyman family files—files through which he had searched and searched and found nothing. Perhaps the point had never been the files themselves, but the keys.

  Five Miles stood undisturbed. Except for the dust cloths over the furniture, everything was still exactly the way it had been the night of Mrs. Wyman’s death.

  The keys. That was his father’s secret bequest to him, access to the truth.

  Half an hour later he was standing in front of the massive front door, trying to keep his hands steady as he inserted the key into the lock. By now he even knew where to look.

  Mrs. Wyman room, the room in which she had died, would contain a writing desk such as a woman of her generation and class would have considered as necessary as her bed. Everything that really mattered to her, any scrap of paper that touched upon her inner life, would be in that desk.

  As he walked across the empty reception hall, as he mounted the stairway to the second floor, he felt the dead as a real presence. It was almost as if he could almost hear the old woman’s ghost screaming at him to turn back.